Day 11
General Status Update
Hair:
no change and, because I’m afraid to brush it, looking pretty ratty.
Nausea Demon: Increasingly
cross. Claims the powerful and disabling cocktail of anti-nausea drugs he is now
being administered every day is breaching his Inhuman Rights. Threatening to
take me to an employment tribunal.
Heightened sense of smell: should
you come within 10 yards of me on the street eating KFC or a kebab, I WILL KILL
YOU.
Anxiety level (1-10):
but enough about me – how anxious are YOU now feeling, after reading all this? I
bet you’re checking yourself for strange lumps on a much more regular basis now,
aren’t you?
State of mind: best
observed through a glass, darkly.
The first I knew of the North Yorkshire Rat Apocalypse
was a few weeks ago, on one of the coldest, darkest and stormiest nights of the
year, the night 2 months’ worth of rain fell on the north of England during the
space of a few hours.
The phone rang, and on the other end was Big Sis Fo,
babbling:
‘They’re outside, they’re outside’ she cried ‘they’re
BANGING ON THE WALLS, and they’re TRYING TO GET INSIDE THE HOUSE!’
After pausing for an instant to draw breath, she continued:
‘And the
internet has gone off and it’s been raining non-stop for 24 hours and the beck
is going to overflow any minute and then we’ll be flooded and then we’ll never
be able to sell this house again NEVER NEVER NEVER, and we will have to live
here FOREVER!’
‘But I thought you loved the house so much that you
never want to move again, and intend to be carried out of there in a box, feet
first?’
‘That, Caroline’ replied my sister, a touch tersely, ‘is
BESIDE THE FUCKING POINT’.
I made soothing noises, and suggested that she pour
herself a Weapons Grade gin and tonic, for medicinal purposes, and tell me exactly
what was going on.
At this point I should
give you a little background info on Big Sis Fo, the oldest of the Fo Sisters -
there are five of us in all, including my two lovely step-sisters (who are not
genetically Fos and therefore much saner, generally nicer and incomparably better-mannered
than the rest of us). We are like the Bennet sisters, only middle-aged and with
iPhones. And without the lovely frocks. I like to think of myself as Elizabeth
(delusional, much?) and my younger sister, aka L’il Sis Fo, to whom you have
yet to be introduced, is Lydia. Very Definitely Lydia.
Big Sis Fo is thus, obviously,
Jane.
Like Jane Bennet, Big Sis
Fo found a Happy Ending with her true love (only in her case, second time
round), and they live together, with a truly demented Hungarian Visla called
Hank (think Scooby Doo on crystal meth), in an exquisitely restored 18th
century farmhouse (pure property porn, it’s even been featured in one of THOSE
magazines), with a stream (in local parlance ‘beck’) running through the
grounds, in a small hamlet on the north Yorkshire plain, on the edge of the
Howardian Hills (the geological significance of this location will become
apparent later).
By the way, as always with
stories of Fo family members, please be assured that I am not making anything
up (a friend suggested me to me recently that the Fo family motto should be ‘Ultra
parodiam’ i.e. ‘Beyond parody’, and I think he may well be right).
So, Big Sis Fo lives a truly enviable life in her
rural idyll with a man who
a) is utterly devoted to her,
b) is 13 years younger than her,
c) earns a quite ridiculous amount of money as a partner in one
of the big management consulting firms (so let’s call him the MC from now, for ease
of reference),
d) not only insists on doing all the cooking, but does
so to pretty much restaurant quality standards (his pink grapefruit granita is
to die for),
e) has converted the stables into a wine cellar to
house his ever-growing collection of rare and precious vintages, including a
world class selection of vintage champagne, and finally –
and this is the one which is going to make women everywhere want to
HUNT DOWN AND KILL my sister
f) insists on doing absolutely everything related to Christmas.
I will repeat that, the MC does Christmas.
Every single bit of it.
Christmas is his
hobby, for goodness sake; he takes two weeks leave every year in December to
devote himself to the whole enterprise, from presents to decorations (I’ll
leave you to imagine the Christmas tree) to the seven course Christmas lunch
extravaganza, accompanied by the kinds of wines that the likes of you or me are
highly unlikely to get to drink in this lifetime (unless we happen to be
related to him, that is, which happily I am).
You’re beginning to hate Big Sis Fo now, aren’t you? I
don’t blame you – it’s almost impossible not to. The rest of it you could just
about take, but the Christmas thing is the absolute
killer. I keep thinking she must have done something amazingly wonderful, in
karmic terms, in a previous life, to deserve the one she has now. Maybe she was
Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Teresa. She’s very fond of curry, come to think of it
– but no matter, you’re going to start feeling a whole lot more sympathetic
towards her when we get to the full horror of the Rat Apocalypse, which will be
very, very soon.
Rats apart, the only other less than optimal feature of
my sister’s fabulous existence is that the MC, who likes to go shooting and
salmon-fishing when off-duty, has landed her with the daily care and
maintenance of his dog Hank, a Hungarian hunting dog with major behavioural problems, despite having being sent away for
training at the gun dog equivalent of Eton. Although, to be fair, his education
was cut short, rather abruptly, after
he urinated all over the dog trainer’s feet, in an attempt to assert his
dominance, something which no other trainee gun dog had ever had the balls to do.
Hank’s balls, by the way, are enormous, and the fact that they are still
attached to him is a continuing bone of contention between Big Sis Fo and her
partner… but I digress. We will return to Hank and his humongous balls another
day.
Where was I? The night of the storm, and my sister on
the phone, swigging back almost neat Bombay Sapphire on ice to calm herself as
she began to tell me how she and the MC had, a few days previously, become
aware that they might have a problem with vermin.
When you live in a big house, especially a very old
and very cold one in the bracing
climate of north Yorkshire, you inevitably end up spending most of your time in
one or two favourite rooms; such is the case with Big Sis Fo and the MC who, of
an evening, are usually to be found in a tiny little room off the kitchen known,
inevitably, as ‘The Snug’; this little den has barely enough room to hold a small
sofa, an armchair and the 42” plasma TV the MC had installed above the
fireplace, the better to watch the Cooking Channel non-stop from a horizontal
position when he is not out at work, or otherwise engaged.
One evening a few weeks ago Big Sis Fo, the MC and
Hank were all sitting in front of the fire, watching Yotam Ottolenghi disassemble
a large squid, when they became aware of noises coming from – underneath them. Hank
immediately began to run round in circles, quite difficult for a dog his size
in a room that small, barking his head off. The MC muted Yotam for a moment,
and they all continued to listen. Yes, something – or rather a number of
somethings – was moving around under the floorboards. Stomping in fact. Quite loudly.
It was evident that there was a party going on down below to which the official
occupants of the house had definitely not been invited.
‘OMG’ said my sister ‘we’ve got mice. I’d better get
some traps’
‘I dunno,’ said the MC ‘it sounds a bit loud for mice.
Maybe it’s badgers.’
‘I don’t think they sell badger traps,’ replied Big
Sis Fo ‘and aren’t they protected? If it’s badgers, they won’t let us touch
them. It’s like bats. Hell’s teeth, we may end up being forced to run a badger
sanctuary.’
The next day my sister put down mouse traps. The
noises from below continued, however, and grew louder, as the new occupants
started asking their friends to drop by; by the end of the week they decided
that there nothing else for it but to call in the council Pest Control man.
When the Pest Control man walked into the snug, he
just sniffed the air and said ‘’Ey up*, love, you’ve got rats. I can smell ’em’.
Big Sis Fo was mortified to hear that her house stank of rats, but the Pest Control
man hastened to assure her that in his line of work he had developed a
heightened sensitivity to the very faintest traces of rat odour, quite
undetectable by the average person.
After examining the exterior of the house, the Pest
Control man found the hole where the rats had tunnelled through the base of the
wall under the bay window in the snug. He laid poisoned bait in various places
around the exterior of the house, assuring Big Sis Fo that, once poisoned, the
rats would head out from under the house to seek water, as poison makes them very
thirsty. As my sister stood at the open door waving him off, she heard a noise
and looked down. A large black rat was sitting just in front of the doorstep, looking
up at her, as if waiting for admittance.
(picture posed by model -
that is not the actual rat). .
The wall through which the rats had tunnelled inside
was repointed; within a few days they had eaten their way through the new
mortar, and were back inside, continuing to party. The new breed of Giant
Mutant Ninja Rats - and these ones are particularly
hard, coming from Yorkshire - just love mortar with a side of rat poison. And the
reason they were continuing to invade the house, as on the night of the storm,
when my sister could hear them scrabbling around just outside, banging on the
wall, trying to get in, was - the weather.
The massive rainfall experienced this year has meant
that the Yorkshire plain is SODDEN; black rats have a particular aversion to getting
their feet wet, so have been coming out of the fields and hedges looking for
warm, dry places of refuge. North Yorkshire and, for all I know, the rest of
the country, is genuinely facing a plague of black rats, a lot of whom found
their way chez Big Sis Fo.
In the end, the ONE THING that prevented any more rats
getting in was, strangely, Brillo Pads. Rats will eat anything, up to and
including actual walls, but they won’t eat Brillo Pads. The texture and taste of
wire wool covered in caustic detergent doesn’t agree with them, apparently.
Please note this useful tip for future reference in case the Rat Apocalypse
moves into your neighbourhood next.
So, things were looking up: the rats had either been
poisoned, or couldn’t get inside any more, and gradually the noises underfoot
stopped. Problem solved.
A few days later, the smell started.
My sister, when asked to describe what the corpse of a
dead rat decomposing under your floorboards smells like, was both clear and concise:
‘It smells like
liquid death – SWEET liquid death. It is unspeakably vile and even just
thinking about it makes me want to vomit.’
So the carpenter came, to take up the floorboards in
the snug, now rendered uninhabitable by the awful, terrible-beyond-imagining
smell that was wafting up from below; the Brillo pads, of course, had not only prevented
more rats from getting in - they also stopped the poisoned rats from getting out. Underneath the floorboards they
found the decomposing corpse of one recently deceased rat, and one mummified rat;
problem solved.
But a few days later the smell reappeared, first in
the dining room and then, bafflingly, in the snug. And so it went on. By the
end of last week all the floorboards in the entire ground floor of the house
had been taken up, and a total of 4 fresh rat corpses, and 3 mummified ones,
removed. The carpenter insists that there are no longer any decomposing corpses
in situ, but my sister swears he is
wrong – she thinks there is at least one left, somewhere inside the old, thick
stone walls, which cannot be got at.
‘I know the smell of dead rat by now’ she said, darkly
‘I’ve lived with it long enough, and there’s still at least one there. I KNOW
THERE IS.’
Christmas is coming, the highlight of the MC’s year,
and there will be a number of guests around the dining room table for his
command performance. All Big Sis Fo can do is hope that the smell will finally
have dissipated by next week – but she isn’t holding her breath. Although she
will be on Christmas Day, quite possibly.
She’s asked me to give her a flame thrower for
Christmas.
So that, my friends, is the true story of the North
Yorkshire Rat Apocalypse.
On the whole, I’d prefer to have the chemo.
*People do actually still use this expression in Yorkshire dialect, it is not a comic myth - it comes from Old Norse. I have heard it myself.
