Things that go bump in the night

I am not a tidy person. I am not a dirty person either, mind you, but I am not tidy. I seem to have inherited Pop’s “but I might need this for a rainy day” attitude and his penchant for organised chaos.

There’s something about a family of mice taking up residence in one’s bedroom to make you seriously reconsider your standards of tidiness.

Yesterday I was lying in bed, working on an assignment on my laptop, when a movement by the door caught my eye. I looked up in time to see the tail-end of a mouse dive under the ottoman that sits outside my door. “Daaaaaaaaaaaddddddddd!!!!!” I called, in a totally undignified manner, “there’s a mouse in the house!” Dad came strolling into the back room with a grin on his face. He didn’t have to speak; I could read his mind.

We moved the ottoman and were greeted with a small pile of mouse poo in the corner. This was not a good sign. Suddenly, the mouse ran sideways behind a row of three bookshelves. Dad went into the kitchen and returned armed with two plastic bags, a roll of paper towel and an eggflip. I rolled my eyes. We stuffed the paper towel between the wall and the shelf and the moved the middle of three shelves out. After shining a torch behind the remaining two and ascertaining the mouse’s whereabouts, we formed a barricade and then moved the (extremely heavy) bookshelf. The mouse was hiding in a little cavern underneath the bottom shelf. “I have an idea”, Dad said, stepping over piece of wood of the barricade. He returned with the vacuum cleaner. He gunned the vacuum and poked it into the cavern. It soon became apparent that the mouse was no longer there, so we looked around the family room; I was half expecting him to jump out at me at any second.

We soon gave up and put the bookshelves back in their places against the wall; Dad returned to the computer, I cleaned my room.

If the story ended there, it would have been a good story. But this, my friends, is more than that. This morning I was lying in a half-asleep stupor, debating whether to get up and say hello to Sister, who had come home to spend the day with us, when I heard the now familiar pitter-patter of little feet across the carpet. I got out of bed and groggily greeted my family: “the little fucker is back”. We set up a trap (Dad had gone out and bought a half dozen that morning) with a piece of cabanossi (which is infinitely more aromatic than cheese) and I helped Sister with something on her computer. I went back into my room for a piece of paper and checked the trap. It was empty. It seemed I was dealing with an above-average mouse, so Dad suggested I use peanut butter, a bait that has never failed him before. I asked him why he didn’t suggest this in the first place instead of cabanossi but he said that was beside the point. Five minutes later I went back into the room get something and saw, to my absolute delight, the dead and mangled body of the mouse in the trap.

Now, if the story ended here, it would have been a great story. But this, my friends, is more than that. Confident that my rodent problem was eradicated, I went about my day with not a care in the world. Tonight, as I lay down to read a novel before bed, I heard that haunting sound. Somewhere, a mouse was walking in my room. I lay there concentrating on the sound, trying to work out where it was coming from. I realised, with growing hysteria, that it was from under my bed. I heard a tearing noise and felt the bed shudder ever so slightly. This is a big problem because the base of the ensemble already has a huge tear in it, so this meant that the mouse was quite literally in my bed. “If the little fucker wakes me up with this thing,” I told Dad as he loaded a mousetrap for me, “I will not be impressed”.

While reading, I tend to lay very still, so soon I heard the pitter patter sound. I was waiting with growing impatience for the clack sound that traps make when they go off but it never came. I heard it walking, I heard it rustling, I even heard it squeak a few times, but no clack. As I lay there, I would constantly see shadows move and jump. (As a side note to the story, I have good reason to believe that I am the jumpiest in existance. I jump at everything. I even jump when I’m expecting the thing for which I am jumping.) I felt a funny sensation on my neck, a kind of tickling, followed by a small, sharp poking. Then I saw a movement in front of me. Thinking, quite naturally, that the mouse had bit my neck and ran away, I shouted at the top of my lungs and flung my limbs around in blind panic, entangling myself in the sheets and pulling a muscle in my right calf.

After having a cigarette, and smoking it very quickly at that, I decided to sit down and write this post in an effort to let the adrenaline dissipate before retiring for the evening in Sister’s bed.

Tomorrow I will tear this room apart until I find every last mouse or, at the very least, remove any nooks and crannies in which said mice may choose to nest.