Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

they fought the dogs, and killed the cats...

This has been a bit of a rodent week; a few days ago, the semi-animate pyjama case that lives upstairs upped the ante on her hunting skills by bringing in a mouse. As with most of her 'kills' presumably she brought it in and let it go, because when discovered it was frantically zooming about and providing a great deal more entertainment than the frogs do (they just lie there and hope she'll go away, proving that frogs have a better insight into the feline psyche than most humans).

After a while the mouse inserted itself under the fridge, and normality resumed. The next day, the rodent was discovered swimming in the downstairs toilet and duly retrieved and liberated. The cat, however, has a new hobby, which goes nicely with her principle outdoor activity; staring at the bush that frogs come from, she has now added staring at the fridge to her repertoire.

For the last few weeks I have been helping an old school friend to demolish and reconstruct his house, and the other day I was blamelessly varnishing the doorframe when the local magpies started making a terrible racket. I ignored it for ages, until it eventually dawned on me that they were doing whatever they were doing just the other side of the garden wall from where I was working. I opened the gate and peered into the street to discover that they were squabbling over the corpse of a very small rat. It is reputed that in London you are never more than a few feet from a rat, but it is uncommon to see them in daylight (unless they happen to be dead, of course). A couple of days later, back at my friends house, I went outside to take a phone call, and was somewhat surprised to have another much bigger rat saunter past me, entirely unconcerned, and disappear into the pile of rubble sacks that litter the outdoor area.

This reminded me of another daytime rat encounter, one time when I was visiting the Park Royal branch of ASDA; as I walked along through the carpark towards the automatic doors I was bemused to notice that I had a little grey companion running along the side of the building parallel to me. The rat, which was quite a large one, got to the entrance lobby before I did, and as you can imagine, caused considerable excitement among the more observant shoppers who were trying to pick up their baskets. Fortunately there was another set of doors into the shop itself, and a rather nervous looking security guard to boot, I shouted at him to keep the doors closed and attempted to shoo the rat back out into the great outdoors. The rodent was being quite co-operative, but the automatic doors were proving to be a problem, as they kept opening and closing, confusing the poor beast, which eventually panicked and managed to insert itself into the space between the door and the glass outer wall. Consequently, every time the doors opened, it was being slid back and forth as if on a ghastly sort of bacon slicer. I got the guard to lock the doors open, and after a bit of hinting, the creature squeezed out of the gap, and shot off into the carpark, apparently unharmed.

My final rodent reminiscence dates back to the mid-80's, when I used to work at Riverside Studios, in Hammersmith. In a rare moment of creative energy, the management had decided to put on a play (normally Riverside was just a receiving house, not a producing one). They had chosen a new work by Gregory Motton, called 'Chicken' I can't remember much about the piece, although I seem to recollect that it covered the usual themes of urban desolation and deprivation that were obligatory in the Thatcher years. There was, however, a moment, one that I imagine the author had intended to be a 'coup de theatre', when a bin bag of rubbish was emptied out onto the stage and proved to be full of twenty to thirty dead rats. This caused us no end of problems in rehearsal, stuffed rats were way too expensive and bounced rather unconvincingly during testing. Rubber squeaky rats didn't even make it to the testing (although I did introduce one onto the toy train that used to trundle round the auditorium at Starlight Express, on which my partner of the time was working).

Someone, and I can't remember who, had a brainwave, and managed to blag thirty fresh, dead laboratory rats. The first snag was that they were white, so we had to dye them grey; it is not easy to find hair dye to make things go grey, mostly the operation is intended to work the other way round. Consequently we ended up mixing up a thin grey emulsion paint and hand painting them. The second problem was that the play was scheduled to run for a month, and with the best will in the world we couldn't keep the rats fresh for that long. Some genius rang up Walls, and managed to borrow an ice-cream freezer, so, every night the rats were popped back into the freezer.

For me, the dramatic moment, when the bin bag was emptied out, and the rats tipped onto the stage was somewhat compromised, as the rats were still hard frozen when they made their appearance, and tended to slide about, like furry ice-cubes. Not only that, but they made a strange clonking sound when they hit the ground, and, having been thawed and then refrozen the night before, they had often adopted weird contorted positions. The worst thing of all, for me, was their tails, as the thinnest part of the rat, these would thaw out the quickest in the forty minutes or so that they were under the lights. As often as not, one of the frozen rats would have ended up with its tail pointing straight up in the air, and slowly, gently, and with a ghastly inevitability the tail would descend towards the horizontal. It was only ever a tiny movement,and a tinier sound, but for me, it was more rivetting than anything else that happened on that stage. At the end of the run, the freezer was returned to Walls, without any mention of what it had been used for, think on that next time you have an ice-cream.

posted by Lampy @ 8/25/2005 09:19:00 am