A shadow caught my eye while I was at the computer. I looked across but there was nothing there. Perhaps there never was. It’s not that unusual for me to catch a glimpse of something that, upon closer inspection, doesn’t exist.
It could just be my old Glaswegian paranoia manifesting itself.
Movement again, I was quicker this time and caught sight of a small brown blur hurtling under the couch.
I looked around for my canine protectors but they were both downstairs sleeping off left over chicken.
“Susy!”
My wife came up the stairs.
“I know what’s been making that noise under the kitchen cupboards,” I said smugly. “Watch this!”
I flipped the couch over.
A brown rat shot out, scurried along the skirting board and vanished under a radiator.
“Bastard!” she shouted as she ran down the stairs. That’s me she was addressing by the way, not the rat. She’s a sweet talking gal.
Five minutes later, maybe less, I got on to a pest control specialist who arrived, miraculously, inside an hour.
“Bastard rats,” he grumbled. “I fucking hate ‘em.”
“Well, you’re in the right job then.”
Kitchen valances were ripped off, poison was cunningly deployed and the woodwork went back on.
“That’ll do it,” he promised me. “Dead in 10 minutes after eating that shit.”
We spent some time discussing motorcycles. He was long time biker and had seen mine in the driveway. He left with an air of confidence in his work.
Two days later, he came back. As did the rat.
Ratman added another trap, this one was a long wire cage with bait at one end and a spring loaded door at the other. I didn’t need an explanation of how this contraption works but I got one anyway. In depth. Along with the life cycle of Rattus norvegicus.
I gave him some chocolate to prime it with and escorted him to the door.
Borrowing an air pistol from a friend, I spent half the night lying in wait to shoot the rat. But there was no sign of it.
Not a whisker.
It must have been down below partying in the kitchen all night because both dogs were lying on the couch in the morning looking knackered and they’d both shat the living room carpet. I spent an hour cleaning it up.
Serves me right for getting a labrafuckingdoodle that can lay two pounders with nary a whimper.
Another two days later, Ratman returned. I’d taken the liberty of managing the situation remotely and my father in law dealt with him this time.
“Well, he brought another device,” he observed.
I nodded sagely and went to see the new, new trap. It was a classic neck snapper a la Tom & Jerry. A little larger and a lot more vicious as I found out first hand when loading it with peanut butter. No harm done. I have another nine fingers after all.
I called in a joiner and asked him to fill in all the holes under all the radiators.
This must have pissed the rat off. While standing in the studio, we could hear the little bastard scrabbling away in the ceiling above us.
At this point my son started shouting from the study above about it sounding like there was a rat in the room. I apologised and explained that it was trapped in the walls and floors. He didn’t look convinced but he went back to playing his game. I should have thought at the time that it must have been seriously fucking loud for him to hear it through his headphones ramped up to tinnitus inducing levels.
But I didn’t.
Next day, I checked the study. Everything was calm, quiet. Serene even. I approached my computer chair, a big fat La-Z-Boy recliner my lovely wife bought for me a decade and a half ago. They weigh a ton. I know this because I had to shift the fucking thing out the way to see the extent of rat damaged carpet behind it.
I peered under the radiator.
There was a nice neat circular entry wound in the new plasterboard.
The rat had been in the room, probably under the sofa, when Ian, the joiner, who is shit scared of vermin (he’d have a fit if I told him), had blocked up its hole. It tore up the carpet trying to get out before we all went to bed thinking it under the floorboards. At this point, with the room now vacant, it punched a hole in the wall and fucked off downstairs to eat all the sodding chocolate in the traps.
The sneaky little bastard! He must have had a close one though, because the neck snapper had gone off. Although it hadn’t even caught fur.
The noise of the trap springing must have woken the dogs again because they’d both shat the floor. Aitken the notlongforthisfuckinglifelabradoodle excelled himself, producing a shite the scale and consistency of which would impress a morbidly obese elephant suffering from a particularly virulent stomach bug. Though cold, when disturbed it choked me so badly I had to bolt for the toilet lest I added my own puke to the mix.
I must have run through something else on the way because the combination of wet socks and strong smell of dog urine in the confines of the under stair loo suggested that neither of the bastarding mongrels would need their morning walk at all. Or ever again for that matter!
This fucking rat was really beginning to boil my piss!
I found out where the furry little bastard was getting in and out. It must have been a Friday lunchtime when the brickie was laying the concrete blocks that support the house because there was a hole between two of them you could drive a fucking Harley through.
Thinking myself a smart arse, I borrowed an infra-red wildlife camera and set it up to cover the hole. Sure as shit, at three am, out comes the rat.
I swear it paused to wave.
I took the wire cage trap out, loaded it with chocolate and covered the hole with it. One way in, one way out, motherfucker.
It ate the smegging chocolate. The trap didn’t go off.
I got the neck snapper and asked Susy to get me a chunk of chocolate. I’d run out but there was some upstairs in the low table beside my desk. I’d been keeping it for her if she was ever down or feeling under the weather.
A kilo bar of Galaxy will cure all that ails you.
She arrived with a shredded wrapper and half the bar.
It had eaten half a kilo of chocolate. Half a kilo! There were tooth marks on the other half.
Taking a blood pressure pill, I baited the neck snapper, placed it in the wire trap, put the wire trap against the hole and topped it with bricks. This thing might be big enough to move the whole ensemble by now. I congratulated myself on completing all this without losing a finger, even in the dark and, just for completeness, I turned on the wildlife monitor.
By morning the chocolate had gone. Both traps were intact and ready to go off at the slightest vibration or touch. I can attest to this.
Susy suggested that it may be climbing the inside of the trap and making its way across the wire roof Mission Impossible style, rappelling by its tail to retrieve its dinner before fucking off back inside.
I thought she may be stretching the imagination a little but the wildlife camera would prove it. Or it would if, in the dark, I hadn’t set it to ‘test’ instead of PIR.
Wild? I’m fucking livid!
Ratman is due tomorrow and, if he survives the five minute tirade I’ve stored up for a week, I’m sure he’ll have another whiz-bang plan. Problem is, I think the rodent is smarter than him. Hell, I’m worried the furry little fucker is smarter than both of us!
To date, I’ve tried to shoot it, poison it, trap it, snap it and crush it with my bare hands (I missed it by an inch when I ripped the valance off the kitchen cupboards in a murderous rage last night).
I’m out about a grand’s worth of carpets (£500 to the rat and £500 to the dogs), a portion of wall, a chunk of skirting board, a shed load of chocolate, two sets of wages (Ratman and Ian), most of my sanity and all of my pride.
If anyone out there in Interweb land has a sure fire method of catching or killing this bastard animal, please PM me.
I’m beginning to seriously sympathise with Wile E. Coyote :(
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
This is no. 1 in a series of 5. It gets worse :( Next episode here: https://steemit.com/story/@johnkingwriter/ratbastard-ii