I Smell a Rat

Like, literally.

So here’s how it all started. On the very last day of radiation treatment (#25 of 25), which was Friday, July 27, I was home puttering around in preparation for our trip to the States the next day and I popped outside (the British are always popping here and there to do things and this has thoroughly infected my speech patterns by this point so deal with it) to put the trash out.

After closing the lid of the rubbish bin (that’s trash barrel for you die-hard Americans) I caught something out of the corner of my left eye on my way back in the door. I directed my gaze down the precipitous steps leading to the basement.

And there it was, looking back at me. A rat. The size of the animal and the length of its tail betrayed immediately that it was no mouse.

I didn’t think much of it, though. I figured, it likes the trash. We live in the city. Until I went out and returned several hours later and saw it (or one of its pals) again in the same place. That did not seem like a good sign. And it had the nerve to peer up at me again before it slunk out of sight.

At the bottom of the aforementioned steps there is a water pipe/drain that leads into the house. It occurred to me that they might have found a way into the basement via that or other similar means. So I reentered the house and went into the basement from the inside on a recon mission. I saw right away that something (here’s a hint: it was a rat) had chewed up one of the tiles of the drop ceiling (you know those tiles in unfinished basements made of some sort of cardboard-like substance) and the debris from this gnaw fest was deposited below. Ew.

So on the eve of our departure I discovered that there were rats in the house, or at least in the basement, which still counts as “in the house” in my book.

Crap, I thought. Via my pal, Susan, I got in touch with the pest control dude, whom we had had out to the house to investigate whether we had mice in the basement only a few weeks prior. This was after my husband found a dead mouse down there (which I now suspect was not a dead mouse but a dead baby rat) and I had heard some scrabbling in the floor near the base of the main staircase. Nothing had been found.

In my absence, Susan and our nanny, Agnieszka, met the pest dude at the house a few days later. He placed some bait in the basement and checked for possible points of ingress, of which he identified two, one in each of the adjoining houses on either side of our house. “Don’t worry,” he reassured the ladies after placing the bait, “they won’t die in the house because they will go out looking for water.”

This statement was later revised by the dude to something like “they are very unlikely to die in the house.” Oh sure.

There are other points on which the pest dude was severely lacking. How about for starters that I questioned him long and hard when we returned from our trip about whether the rats could somehow gain entry through the water pipe or any holes near it where I had repeatedly seen the culprit(s). He said unequivocally no. But then the contractor who was working on the house next door and who knows this house like the back of his hand informed me this was total BS and of course the rats could get in that way and he even poked around and observed that there were holes around that drainage area. HELLO? I could go on… In fact I will, later. Read on.

Some days after the initial baiting, Agnieszka met the dude at the house. It hit them hard as soon as they opened the front door. The unmistakable stench of decomposition.

The dude descended into the basement but could not find the body. He told Agnieszka to light some scented candles and that everything would be fine and dandy. Just wait it out, he advised.

Horrified, Agnieszka scrubbed the floors and opened doors and windows trying to air the house and abate the stank. She purchased room freshener and a scented candle. All this while I was across an ocean, blissfully unaware for a couple more hours that our house had become a rat graveyard where a rat can’t get a proper burial.

Then I got the email from Susan. “Brace yourself,” it warned, “this is a stinker.” I read on. The pest dude sent a message about the fact that a rat had died in the house. The long and short of it was that this sometimes happens and that it isn’t nice but it is better than having rats running around down there.

I called him up and ruffled his feathers about his claim that the rat wouldn’t die in the house. He was somewhat unnerved by my American directness via pointed questions, though they did not rise to the level of accusations, my being a reasonable person and all.

From that morning I got the news I began to prepare myself. Tried to swallow that after all the shit we’d just been through, what would greet us upon our return to the Old Country was the reek of decomposing rodent in our home. For some reason, even though I was told that it would soon pass, this really bothered me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

An impending sense of horror insinuated its way into my consciousness. I would be distracted momentarily, but then something would jerk me back into thinking about the dead rat smell that awaited us. And the possibility of more rats in the house.

Our flight home was uneventful. When we opened the front door, we smelled it for sure. But it was not as bad as I had anticipated. It probably couldn’t have been considering how mental I had gotten about it. I thought to myself, “this is gross but I can deal with it.” We got settled, went out to dinner and came home and went to bed. We could not smell the rat from our bedrooms.

The next day, my husband went down to the basement to investigate, the real point of which being to determine whether any rodent activity had fouled his latest batch of home brew, which lay in waiting in the tiny finished room adjacent to the basement. He popped (there it is again) upstairs and informed me that he had heard a noise in the ceiling near the stairwell that sounded like an animal breathing or snoring. I thought he was kidding. But he persisted.

So I accompanied him back downstairs. We stopped. We listened. And by George, there it was. A sort of low, soft, exhale somewhere between a growl and a snore. We exchanged a look. I acknowledged that I could hear it. And at that moment we started to fear the worst. That there was not only a dead rat in the house but live rats as well.

As it turns out, we never did discover the source of that guttural sound. But it was enough to prompt a call to the pest dude to demand that he come out forthwith and deal with the problem in case any rats were still in the house. After some initial resistance, he agreed to come out. And it was during this meeting he informed me the rats couldn’t have come in at the base of the stairs where I had initially spotted them.

I began to lose confidence in him at that point and what made it worse was that he was, to put it mildly, rather verbose, or as a friend once aptly put it about his own loquaciousness, intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity. My first clue should have been that when I offered him a parking permit and asked how long he thought he would be at the house that day, he rejected the half hour card in favour of an hour-long one.

The second inkling was that every time I asked him something that I believed to be relatively cut and dried (you know, straightforward questions), he looked pensive, hemmed and hawed, and said “let’s start at the beginning.”

Good Lord, I thought. We might end up needing an exterminator for our exterminator at this rate.

Shortly after his deficiencies became apparent to us, our estate agent hired another company and informed the pest dude of our transfer of affections to said company. He really had lost me when I suggested we plug an obvious rat-sized hole in the ceiling of the “beer room” and he said not to bother because for every hole you plug there are ten more where they can get in. And that hole led to the main part of the house! Why don’t I just roll out the red carpet, for fuck’s sake, and line it with biscuits and chocolate.

The next day I had an epiphany. Maybe the reason that the dead rat had perturbed me so — aside from the obvious “oh we have just been through so much and now we have to contend with a smelly dead rat woe is me nonsense” was the following:

You discover when you least expect it that a nasty, potentially harmful and most certainly unwelcome presence has invaded your home.

You do not know and may never know how it got there and whether it has friends and if so where the friends are and how many there are.

You set about finding out as much as possible about this unwanted visitor, and formulate a plan of attack based on the information available.

You poison the intruder.

Then you set about trying to prevent a similar intruder from returning.

You succeed in killing it.

The execution, however, is a highly unpleasant messy business with unforeseen consequences. The whole thing is rather an ordeal.

After the killing, there is a terrible stench. Everyone tells you that it will fade over time. You want to believe this but it is difficult to imagine because for so long you have smelled it, breathed it, lived it.

Sometimes you think that the smell is gone but then you catch a whiff and you know that the carcass will always be there, albeit out of reach. A reminder of your ordeal.

To tell you the truth I don’t care where the bloody skeleton is as long as it is dead as a fucking doornail. The smell is already a lot better. It will indeed go away eventually. But I will never forget it. I will always know that smell.

The really good news is that the beer was undisturbed. And is damn good.

It’s the little things in life.

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