Of Mice and Men

Red back spiders hide under toilet seats and bite the bum of unsuspecting visitors. Brown snakes live under houses, ready to pounce on children who foolishly climb under floors to retrieve lost balls. Possums invade attic spaces and drive house owners demented with their scratching and nocturnal lovemaking.

I heard all these stories before moving to Australia and I’m pleased to say that none of this has happened, at least not to me. But I did get my first shock from a wild animal last week and it turned out to be of European origin. It was I’m embarrassed to say, a humble mouse.

In my defence I should point out that I was under a bit of stress at the time. I had just spent the afternoon making a curry paste with various exotic spices. Rather stupidly, in hindsight at least, I managed to get a lot of it on my hands and nature being what it is, it came back to bite me. About two hours after I’d massaged most of the paste into my hands, they started burning like irons that had been left in the fire overnight. I had to resort to immersing them in a bowl of water, which was soothing but not really practical for sleeping or any activity that involved moving around.

When I was a teenager, we would play a trick on friends who had fallen asleep on sofas after a night’s drinking. We would place one of their hands in a bowl of water and through a process of osmosis; this would cause the unfortunate sleeper to wet himself. Oh, how we laughed. I wasn’t about to inflict this trick on myself and in any event, it really only works with one hand. I haven’t mastered the gymnastic requirements of keeping both hands in a bowl of water while sleeping. At least not in such a way that would stop the bowl from spilling during one of my nocturnal twists and turns.

So it was that I found myself in a slightly agitated state in the bathroom around 11pm, when our rodent friend darted across the tiled floor. I’d like to say I shrieked like a little girl, but it was worse than that. My attempted scream was trapped in my throat as though somebody had pressed the pause button on my body. I finally summoned the strength to flee from the bathroom and took sanctuary in the arms of my heavily pregnant wife. Despite her “in utero” condition I implored her to sort the problem out.

She humoured me by heading off to investigate, suspecting, it seems, that I might be hallucinating. Shortly afterwards, I heard a laugh which suggested that the ugly little creature had appeared to her too. There followed a restless night where I dreamed of dipping my hands into molten steel while mice nibbled at my earlobes. I’ve had better night’s sleep on airplanes and that’s saying something.

The following day we laid more traps and poison than you’d find at a bakery that was next door to the town dump. We toyed with the idea of setting humanitarian traps for a second until I remembered that mice aren’t human and if they called the traps ‘miceitarian’ I might be more sympathetic. I appreciate that this might be offensive to some people; particularly those who contribute to donkey charities while three million people starve in East Africa. But I’m not a fan of animals, apart from when it comes to eating them. I considered becoming vegetarian once (like most bad decisions I’ve taken in life, it was done to impress a girl) until I realised that if God didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat.

It took the mouse two days to be tempted by our alluring concoction of peanuts and butter, but early on Tuesday morning we heard a loud snap from the spare bedroom and on investigation we found a mouse who, if he hadn’t been dead, would have benefitted from a good shoulder and neck massage.

They say that when you’ve seen a mouse, you’ve really only seen the one who is scavenging for a family of ten. My dad used to say that he was scared to kill a mouse because two hundred would turn up for the funeral. Both of these statements suggest that mice are communal and our friend is unlikely to have been alone. So we’ve kept the traps and poison set in the event that his family come out of hiding.

This is the first rodent I’ve seen in years, but time is not the explanation for my meekness. The truth is, I’ve had a phobia about rodents since out pet dog killed a family of rats and left them in a neat pile at our backdoor. I thought I’d grown out of this fear in my teenage years until I got a job working in a pub and had the unenviable task of putting the bins out each Sunday night. There were no wheelie bins in those days, just open cardboard boxes with empty bottles, food scraps and cigarette ash (recycling in those days described an occasion when you used your bike twice in one day).

As I balanced a particularly heavy box on my knee, a large mouse popped out the top and after a momentary appraisal of the situation, he figured that the shortest route to ground was to hop onto my knee and scurry down my leg. In my darkest, rodent filled nightmares I can still feel the patter of those tiny feet running down my leg.

So I live in a country of snakes, spiders and crocodiles and I’m surrounded by seas filled with sharks and killer stingrays. Yet none of these particularly bother me. But put me in a room with a tiny mouse and I turn into a quivering wreck. We choose our own devils. The devil doesn’t choose us.