Low life | 21 February 2019

To begin with it was mice. The house was overrun with them. She saw them out of the corner of her eye shooting across the room. Then they became bolder. Instead of running away they ran towards her, menacing her. So she set traps and laid poison. I’d come home and open a linen drawer and find a trap set in it or blue granules in a plastic tray. Then a mouse ran up her leg.

Her brother, a farmer turned smallholder, has been waging war on rats and mice all his life. He keeps abreast of the literature and advances in rat-extermination technology. He advised deafening them with plug-in sonic devices. She bought three, whose continual blue flashing aids navigation around the house after dark, saving on light bulbs. That put them off, except for this one enormous rat, who would slip in under her duvet at night and fiddle about at her feet.

Then it was strange people in the house at night, sometimes a crowd of them, who would assemble in her bedroom talking animatedly among themselves yet ignoring her as if she wasn’t there. What were they, we wondered? Some sort of club or association perhaps? She had no idea. But they seemed well acquainted with one another, she said. So what did they look like? That she couldn’t say, because while she strongly felt their presence she couldn’t actually see them.

After their meeting they would all go except one man, who would get into bed with her and go to sleep. Perhaps it was someone who had come a long way. His presence in bed beside her was a nuisance because she was too polite to wake him and had to lie still in the same position all night.