No maggot lonely, he'd think in that post-moving-into-the-room period.
Finally I am in the belly of the maggot in the mind of the universe. I'm not offended.
The room was an attic. Half of the ceiling sloped. So it could be a garret, so he could make a dub about a man in a room on top of a house subdivided it was into seven including the basement of these shithole-romantic bedsits. The haunted inkbottle. 32 Cutpurse. M16. The date: September 1980 in his heart.
Magpies. Maggot-pies. Maggies. Every day, as soon as the sun came up, a rowdy few gathered on the roof, feet on the tiles, yacks aloud enough to shake him out of his sleep.
Should buy a rifle, he'd howl to himself.
A tiny window, specks of mould growing over the sill, looked out to the garden-garden. In dripping winter, when this one chestnut tree went bare, the top of that grill part of Beetham Tower peeped a few inches over the roof of a house behind in Albion Road. Seeing the red light flash above the tower, the man in the room felt good. He put an old pillow on the sill to soak up the damp and he'd sit of an evening, looking from the small window, undisturbed by the yackering maggies and he'd not observe but there would be the back of the petrol station across the road from the laundret with the white letters of the green sign and there the tree with sometimes a squirrel jumping from one bough to another or climbing the trunk. The whale blows where it will, and you can hear its sound, but you don’t know where it goes or where it has come from. A voice wafting in the air was of SUBWAY, the sugary not-bread on the blowing wind. And thru that 24-hours-a-day-open window the roar of thousands would float east when United played at home. The other window was in the roof. So it gave a sight of clouds, Mancunian greyness, on average one day a week of azure, a TV aerial, a chimney pot, the old stars, the night his friend.
Soul in repose, said the novel he was reading while lying on the settee.
He paused to think about those words and daydreaming he looked at the floor.
A rat walked into the room.
Brown and not too big it stood for a second, not a mouse, a rat near the door, sniffing the musty carpet, sniffing the man whose heart banged as he watched it walk or more like toddle thru the hallway into the dark of the kitchen. The man lay stiff, thinking: If I corner the fucker will it jump and bite my adam's apple?
Up he burst off the settee. Treading into a pair of adidas he grabbed a FOUR FOUR TWO, a magazine he rolled into a baton as he stood in the hall before the kitchen. The door was open. The light off. So bending his wrist, he reached for the switch and only when the bulb came on (illuminated) did he step further and he hissed. He kicked the fridge. He hissed again, kicking a cupboard. But it'd gone. He knew where. Below the waterboiler stood a cabinet made of four drawers. Days after moving into the bedsit he'd gripped the edge of this worktop and swayed the whole unit a little side to side. Flimsy shit could've collapsed. It wasn't screwed down and he discovered under the bottom drawer a hole in the floor. A missing floorboard. Also: nearly asleep in bed a few nights ago he heared in the wall a rodent, something scurrying, in the pocket dividing the bricks of the house and the plasterboard, in the wall of his room. The week before, as well, he'd dropped raw chicken into the wastebin and three or four mild days passed without emptying the trash. Naturally this slither of breast rotted.
Poured a tasty death-of-flesh into at least one rat's nostrils.
He shuffled the cabinet across the floor until it stood in middle of the kitchen.
Dark inside, the hole's perimeter was about twenty by six. Inches. And he placed the magazine sideways, flat over the hole but a biggish gap remained. From a pile in his room of other mags he got a FACE and he set that over the hole, next to the football mag so they touched spine to spine and then he realised he needed a cig. So he made one and took a few drags while looking for a pair of scissors which he found in a shoebox of shit in his room along with a roll of masking tape. After finishing his smoke at the kitchen sink he knelt among cobwebs and dust, which he brushed down the hole using his fingers and he grabbed the spool of tape again, started unfurling lengths, cutting strips and sticking down the four edges of each magazine to the wooden floor.
When he had sealed this burrow's entrance, he realised the magazines had a joint in the middle. Less than a hairline of space. But if air could pass thru it, a rat could too. So he sealed it.
The amount of tape stuck down, it'd take even the sharpest teeth all night to chew.
He pushed the cabinet back into the corner thinking: Thank god I didn't see that fucker's slimy tail.
Then washing his hands he shouted: Fuck!
Gone midnight but he didn't care and stomped thru the hall to his bed.
Fuck, he said.
A centimetre gap was visible between the carpet and the skirting board. A gap along the wall adjacent to the bed, next to where he'd heard the rodent walking that night. A long gap. Which a rat'll squeeze in easily he said and slid his bedside table to the centre of the room and he pulled the bed out and squatted by the wall, inserting four fingertips into this gap. Over a centimetre. When he lifted his hand a dead woodlice had stuck to one of his fingernails. Half of the body was missing. Like rat-chewed. He flicked it away, wiping the debris onto his leg and he fetched from the kitchen: scissors, masking tape. An hour later the potential rat-concourse under the bed was blocked with a layer of the blue SCOTCH masking. Cutting. Sticking. Almost all of it. The spool had four layers left. And he explored all the walls in the room, crawling on his arse, poking any crevice he could find in the hall too and around the toilet and the pipes under both bathroom and kitchen sink. If he could picture a rat burrowing through the space he ripped pages from a magazine, stuffed it in solid. Covered it with a bit of tape.
A rat came in my living room, the man said on the phone the following day to the landlord.
Mm, said Mr Doily. You sure not a mouse?
It was a rat.
Maybe a big mouse no?
Pissed-off, the man in the room said: I had mice as pets and they run, this walked like a rat. The cowboys you paid to renovate left a hole in the floor.
Call the council, pest control.
That should be your job, the man said.
Over the next five minutes they argued about the hole in the floor and the man in the room suggested Mr Doily cover it with wood but Mr Doily ignored him and went blah-blah-blah or something like that and this angered the man in the room so he shouted and threatened to publicise the fact he let rooms with rats and this angered Mr Doily cos he suggested his tenant had mental health problems and in the background Mrs Doily said that when the contract ended the man would have to leave the room.
He rang Pest Control Services at Manchester City Council.
The number was 0161 234 4928, dialled on his landline, a banal fact thru which he heard a woman say: Pest Control.
I've got a rat problem.
Commerical of domestic?
Well I live alone so.
Domestic.
Yes.
Can you provide me with your name and address?
No maggot lonely, he thought. The Haunted Inkbottle.
Ending the memory of the three minute phone call the woman said: They're actually very clean as animals go, but I understand, we call them terrorists, in this office. We call them little terrorists like an in-joke: hehe.
And he felt good for half a second, arranging a pest control visit to his room, 1pm next day. He grabbed his trainers from the hallway. Perched on the bed he put them on and as tying the laces he asked what the fuck am I doing with my life. I dunno, he said and stood, wiped a few flecks of crust from both eyes, put his coat on. Keys, cigs, MAZE cashcard, he said in the middle of the room when for a moment his eyes mapped the patch of carpet near the door where the trauma had walked with the dirt and plague of its paws and the translucent hairs of its ringed tail sliding over the floor: germs a metre from my sleeping lips, he said. And he lugged his racingbike down the stairs which creaked and another sturdier set below and he was breathless dropping the bike on the groundfloor where the fumes of worn socks and boiled cabbage and like hundreds of gussets of the sweaty and morbidly-obese and housebound seemed to clog his windpipe so he opened the front door fast, blinking at the mailbox, not wretching but on the cusp of needing clean air.
U-u-urgh, he coughed and then said: How you doing.
A guy in a neighbouring driveway said hi and the way he stood alone, the tips of four fingers resting on his top lip, seemed like he was about to march into a room and reveal something important. Like: It was me who stole your money. Like: The dog's been run over. Like we've got a rat infestation, thought the man from the room as he pedalled around that bend on Withington Road near the bus-stop which takes you to Chorlton and the school where you go to vote and he hopped the kerb and steered right off the main for a long quiet street of 1930s-style suburbia, houses painted white, rosebushes, net curtains, past which he rode no-handed and the the greyness in the sky and the greyness of the tarmac and the greyness back in my room is deep and rich and textured, he thought.
Breathing, getting that rush he smiled and sang.
Keep feeling fascination
Passion burning
Love so strong
Keep feeling fascination
Looking, learning
Moving on.
To Chorlton has a crossroads with its four set of traffic lights, a commercial bank on each corner. NATWEST. The X of HALIFAX. The bird of BARCLAYS. The bust of RBS, he didn't think as his fingers fished from one of his coat pockets a MAZE cashcard that he inserted into an ATM's mouth that sucked the plastic from his fingers and something whirred and the screen asked for 2666, the pin he pressed on the spat-upon buttons. A dirty bastard had wretched from the depths of their throat a thick greeny and flobbed onto the cashpoint buttons, all the numbers like 1-2-3 splashed in the baghead's saliva and-or snot and the button indicating OK that our man pressed and waited for 30 quid to be dispensed, that also was streaked in dry fluid.
There's nowhere to wash my hands, he considered when without realising what he was doing he stuffed 3 tenners wrapped around the MAZE cashcard into his front jeans pocket. The dried goss of strangers on my fingers.
So you got rats, said a man in his 60s behind the counter in Hardware for Homes.
I've got rats yeah.
Do you want advice or?
Anything that'll get rid of them for good.
The shopkeeper turned a key in the cash register, said he'll show the man and led along the right aisle of wallpaper tubes and pots of emulsion in dozens of shades of white-beige to a rear shelf of boxes of mouse and rat traps and a row stacked up, saying CATCHMASTER Glue Trap, with a photo of a cute-looking rat and a rectangular stickpad and the man from the room looked at the pricetag and compared it to the humane rat traps, clear plastic cages which'd be too big anyway, for 25 quid. The sticky pads cost 1.99. The shopkeeper wore a browny-grey lumberjack shirt.
Poisons here, he said.
Bottles, sachets, big tubs of rat-killing nectar had their own shelf, a handwritten sign: Rat Poison. But the man from the room pointed at the CATCHMASTER and said: These are pretty cheap, what they like?
Well it binds the rat's paws to the surface obviously and to be honest, if you want to deal with a rat that's still alive, bearing in mind most rats sooner try chewing off its legs to get unstuck, then yes it's a cheap option.
Nah don't wanna deal with that mess.
No you don't want to deal with that mess at all.
A plastic container the man picked up, fondled in both hands, shook to hear pellets bouncing within, was labelled: PEST STOP, Super Rat and Mouse Killer. It was 4.99. So he said I'll have this. And the shopkeeper walked back to the till with neither the sadness of selling a 1.99 CATCHMASTER or the happiness of selling a humane cage, the man in the room thought and put the container in the shopkeeper's hand which scanned the plastic container's barcode.
The shopkeeper said: Just sprinkle a few piles around where they congregate, daily for about a week, you'll be fine.
I'll be back to buy more if not!
Both kind of half laughed and the shopkeeper said: Do you need a carrier-bag?
Err yeah go on then.
And they exchanged their shit: poison for the money it cost to be ratless.
Good luck bud, said the shopkeeper.
The man biked back to his room. In fact no. First he visited OXFAM. To look for books by or about Joyce-Beckett, a writer he liked to read cos they were cool, he liked the styles, the choice of words and kind of cos they inspired the music in his head. Flipping thru a Comic Gamut, before buying it, his belly moaned loud and hollow so after paying he went in GREGGS for a tuna baguette and sausage roll, a free bag of WALKERS crisps. Then he biked to the room and ate the food with a mug of green tea, watching half of a 1981 followed by about ten minutes of a 1982 episode of the Top of the Pops. On the couch. TOTP. In his room. Then he yawned, dusted flakes from his jumper onto the carpet. From the bathroom sink he grabbed the scissors and went in the kitchen where he shifted the cabinet and underneath lay a copy of Four Four Two and The Face. On the football cover was Patrice Evra, Macaulay Culkin on the other. The man in the room stood gormless, mouth open, eyes looking at nowhere, thinking what he had to do. The edges, the magazine spines were stuck together, stuck to the floor with tape and finally he crouched and pointing the tip of the scissors into where the tape covered a magazine spine he slit. A minute later he lifted the magazines to uncover the rat hole.
Dozens of droppings, like rolled blimps of hash, were visible in the dim light of this crawlspace is it?
You can't crawl in here, he thought.
Each magazine he checked for scratches, toothmarks, any gnawings. Nothing. He got from the room-room, from the bottom of the bed where he'd dumped it, the Hardware for Homes carrier. Inside was the book on Beckett, the Super Rat and Mouse Killer. The canister lid was fiddly, you gotta grip the rim and twist and after undoing it he took twenty seconds to regain his normal breathing before he stooped over the shitty hole and he sprinkled millions of these tiny grey pellets of a hard substance and made four little piles. Death-heaps. In the hole. And then he stood and had a think. Then covered the burrow with the magazines only this time he put them cover-down so Evra and Culkin would be facing the rats, hopefully scare them with the face of man and he picked up the spool of masking and he picked up the scissors and for the next fifteen minutes he stuck down strip after strip after strip until he realised he might have to undo it all again to replenish the poison.
Put some in the garden, he said. Win this war.
Such is how these things pan out, how life with a capital L can be a kosmic irritant, how shit flows from one event to deal with to the next is: he stretched out on the settee. Around midnight. He was reading a novel. Telly off. No music, no radio played. The room was quiet and he web-deep into Watt. A voice spoke in the wall. It was a person talking on TV with the intonation of a narrator on some 1970s BBC documentary. It said: Wum-wum, wum, wum-wum, wum-wum-wum. Then it paused. Then it repeated: Wum-wum-wum-wum-wum-wum-wum-wum, long sentences of explanation in tone. And it was like he had heard this voice every night since moving into this room, almost a month previous. September 1980. And it was like he hadn't heard it until this evening, it'd been silent until now at the end of every sentence the voice in the wall spoke it pecked as far as his eardrum, into the space between his eyes and Watt's word. So he couldn't flow, unable to read. So he sat thinking, pictured a phalanx of them dying, decomposing rats in the wall stinking the room into next summer. He got up for the kitchen. He lifted his arm towards the kettle, until hold on, he said. Resting his elbows on top of the cabinet, pinning his hearing towards the bottom drawer, he was sure a rustling came from under the floor and a rat was feasting on the deadly pellets. But where will it go to die?
Cuppa anyway, he felt and as he dropped a red teabag into a mug he said: I need a Jack Russell.
But it costs. To have pets. Like it costs to have rats. In time and stress and Euros. A rat is a unit of currency. The next day, the transaction between the man in the room and Manchester Pest Control Unit was free: gratis: fuck all though for a grey-hair to drive a Transit, listen to the radio and fart on the way to Cutpurse, climb four sets of stairs, carting his toolbox of killing equipment. He hit the door buzzer at 1:05pm. Pest control, he said via an intercom that was crap cos the man in the room had to go downstairs. He opened the front door and both said hello etcetera. Kitted out in blue overalls, the pest controller followed up the many stairs and he commented on the high amount of many stairs. Into the kitchen on the left.
He dumped the toolbox on the main worktop. Clapped his hands, rubbed his palms together.
So it's rats!
Yeah one come into the living room and err, I've put a load of poison down and some outside near the drains.
How'd it get in?
Sorry would you like a cup of tea, no, coffee?
I'm alright ta.
You sure?
No I'm alright thank you.
There's a hole under these drawers, which I've boarded up now.
He slid the cabinet forward enough to show the pest control the magazines taped to the floorboards.
Okay, said pest control. Don't take this the wrong way, but are sure it wasn't a mouse?
No chance, it was a rat.
I mean one of these new urban rats'll chew a great hole through that in 5 minutes.
Why don't you believe us?
I beg your pardon?
Why don't you think a rat?
People get confused.
It was this big, said the man with the rats and he flattened both hands 15 centimetres apart, which although trying to indicate the length of the rat it didn't take in the tail.
Well if you've already put this in the hole, it'll be pointless of us to erm. It's good stuff this.
Squinting, the pest controller held the cannister of poison. He read the ingredients. His lips moved and the skin at the side of his eyes changed into crowsfeet. If an antique clock had been in the kitchen the ticking of its parts'd be audible, the man in the room thought as he watched the exterminator reading words like brod-i-fa-coum until a decade later when he put the cannister on top of the fridge.
They're gonna die under the floorboards, said our man. It'll stink.
Pest control said: Something in the poison is designed to make them thirsty, so they'll go outside looking for water.
He grabbed his toolbox by the handle adding: I'll pop two or three poison traps in the backyard. I'd drop more but erm, anyway.
Are magpies classed as pests? asked the man in the room.
Pets, he said as if not wanting to change the subject. I'll put these traps down and if you see any changes for the worse in the next give it three weeks, give us a call.
No maggot lonely, thought the man.
