See how they fly .
Jeremy Clarke
My Mum thinks nothing of poisoning animals. 'How can you, as a bornagain Christian, justify poisoning God's creatures?' I ask her, sanctimoniously, as she unpicks the braiding on another kilogram bag of rodent poison. But she just laughs gaily at me. To suggest to my Mum that her moral universe should admit rats and mice is, to her, absurd. Especially if the suggestion is made by someone whose morals, in her estimation, are a mixture of Aleister Crowley's and Coco the Clown's. I slink away, discomfited by her derision and by the self-knowledge that any moral stance I take, on anything, is probably founded on guilt.
So far this year she has poisoned two ants' nests and a mole. (I saw the mole rolling and tumbling around the lawn, frantic with agony.) This time it's mice in the cupboard under the stairs who are going to cop it. She's seen droppings. Having made my moral position clear, I'm refusing to have any part of the business. If she wants to poison small mammals, she can lay the stuff and monitor it herself. Of course I could offer to buy and set traps, or put a ferret in for her, but I'm sulking. I get daily reports, however, whether I like it or not.
The mice consume a cupful of the blue crystals on the first night, two on the second, and two more on the third. She can't understand why the mice don't conveniently die where she can see and count them. 'They've probably crawled away to die of thirst,' I say bitterly. She laughs at me. Then she phones the pest-control officer. He says he's got stuff that'll kill the little bleeders in no time. That afternoon he comes and leaves three little plastic saucers of poison under the stairs and a kilogram bag from which to top them up.
By the end of the week, saucers and kilogram bag are empty and still no corpses. On Sunday she gets a man from the church, an ex-Guardsman, to come and set six mousetraps. The next day he comes back to check them and finds a mouse pinned to a trap by its flattened and bloody nose. He shows it to me. The mouse is a beautiful sandy colour, with a distinct yellow collar and large translucent ears. 'What sort of mouse is it'?' I say. 'Vermin,' says the ex-Guardsman. 'Yes, but what sort is it? It doesn't look like a house mouse.' 'It's vermin,' he says again, this time enunciating the word so that I might mark and learn. After he goes, I look up the mouse in a book and identify it as apodemus flavicalls — a yellow-necked mouse. They are good climbers, says the book, and have been found searching for food as high as 33 feet (10 metres) up in trees.
No more mice are found in the traps after that. The pest-control officer is called in again. He says he can't understand why the bastards ate so much poison. He suggests Mum ups the dose. This time, he leaves two five-kilogram bags, and that evening Mum's shovelling the stuff under the stairs like a fireman on the Mallard.
By now Mum's obsessed. All she's talking about is flaming mice. She's on the phone to her friends day and night about them. Then I come under suspicion. It's me, isn't it? I'm coming downstairs during the night and taking the poison away. Sick to death of hearing about these mice, I think about asking them to shove over and tucking in myself.
A few days later, I come home as a pestcontrol officer is driving away. Mum's in the kitchen. She's exultant. The departing pest-control officer had put his finger on the problem. 'They're flying out of the log pile in the garage, then flying up into the roof,' she says. I'm incredulous. 'Flying out of the log pile?' I say. For a moment I wonder whether these flying mice are a prelude to insanity, to the dreaded Alzheimer's syndrome, perhaps. Was this the sweet, sad moment in our lives when our power relations became reversed; when I became the guardian and Mum the child? Was the battle for moral, intellectual and spiritual ascendancy we'd been fighting all these years finally over? It was a moment to savour. 'Let me get this
straight, Mum,' I say, sarcastically. 'These mice come flying out of the logs, then they fly up into the roof. And that's how they get into the house. They fly in.'
She looks at me coldly. 'What do you keep talking about mice for?' she says. Are you mad? The pest-control officer came to see about the woodworm in the rafters."Sorry, Mum,' I say.
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