Year of the rat

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

ON TUESDAY, my neighbour threw pellets of rat poison around our common garbage bin space like he was pelting rice at his daughter’s wedding. Rats do well when humans do well because they live off what we throw away, like immigrants, and, when garbage started piling up three years ago, under the Democratic Labour Party government (which lost the 2018 general election (0-30), our rats grew rich.

Boomtown firetrucking rats.

They burrowed into our flower bed, my vain attempt to beautify (or at least less-uglify) the bins area, making it the rat equivalent of One Woodbrook Place, with the rat equivalent of PriceSmart on its doorstep. Seven different tunnels led to a massive nest below my bromeliads.

When I put a plastic container to catch the drips from a leak in the nearby mains water supply pipe, our rats got a swimming pool!

Rat Westmoorings, rat Phillipine, rat St Clair.

They threw their weight around like big shots, coming out to steal in broad daylight, like our governments.

Yesterday, though, I saw a dead rat stretched out under the water connection pipe. Next to him, more round-shouldered, a trifle darker, a bit smaller, entirely still, was another rat I took to be his dead mate.

I moved a rock to have a closer look at this rat Romeo and Juliet and the smaller rat spun around and vanished down the nearby hole.

She was alive, then.

But what had me think she was dead?

I went inside for the golf club I walk with, against dogs.

Rats do well when we do well but they also do us in.

My sarobhai survived leptospirosis contracted from rat urine around his own swimming pool. Under covid19 lockdown, you can’t be making masks from coffee filters and old T-shirts, only to step in rat pee.

When I got back, Juliet was pressed close against her dead Romeo.

I saw, then, what I must have picked up in my peripheral vision before that made me think she was dead: flies were landing on her, carelessly, like teenagers taunting police commissioners. It looked like she was wearing a black shawl on her grey shoulders.

Alerted by my looming shadow, flies rose en masse.

She didn’t move.

I put the golf club down. There would be no hunt.

I picked up the rock.

One hard blow to the head and it’s over, but you mustn’t flinch. You want to end the suffering, not prolong it.

The Steel Pulse song Tightrope floated up into my head as I brought the rock down on hers: As long as Babylon is my foe/ I will have hope in my soul…/ Deliver me, oh, my father, set me free.

With plastic bag gloves, I picked the rats up by their tails and crossed our playing field, empty as the streets of New York City, to toss their cadavers into the cane.

Rats do well when we do well.

But they do even better when we do badly.

Covid19 eats us away from the inside, lungs first, then on to other organs. Two months ago, coronavirus went for the old; now no one is safe.

We’re learning about the virus agonisingly slowly but it’s learning about us astonishingly fast.

Only cough and your heart turns to ice.

The Steel Pulse chorus: Got me walking, walking on a tightrope.

We know that we’ll come out of this and enter the new normal, whatever that will be.

But suppose we don’t?

In the Ecuadorean city, Guayquil, corpses pile up in the streets because the morgues are filled. Mass graves and bulldozer hearses are a fact in Iran.

Imagine every human in the world, dead.

The rats will have a field day.

Is it a genetic memory that tells us to come in out of the rain and not to provoke snakes? I know everyone in this part of the world is still conditioned by the plantations that no longer exist.

As the dead rats sail through the air into the cane, I wonder, could this benefit me down the road?

Maybe, some time from now, some descendant of these two will at least wait until I’m dead before it begins eating me.

Of course, they’ll probably also remember that they have to get the jump on the flies.

BC Pires would let imagination run free, if it didn’t take sanity with it. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com or on Facebook