I did not think anything was amiss when rats no longer
scurried across our living room, their movement only captured by the corner of
the eyes.
This was because the rats tended to disappear, or reduce
in number, from time to time: victims of poison or the stray cats that now and
again made their home under the water tank at our backyard. Perhaps I should
have been alarmed when less and less rats darted away from my headlights as my
car felt its way into its customary parking space beside the large water tank
where the charging units stood, regal, blinking in an electronic symphony. I
was also not alarmed when first the compound and then the house proper was
saturated by the stench of putrefying meat. I was not too bothered and easily
laid the reason for the deaths squarely on a highly efficient poison.
No, I did not apply any poison and my wife, a nutritionist,
who had wanted to be a nurse, abhorred poison of any kind and so could not have
applied them.
I could have asked the neighbours—they occupied the
upper floor of our one storey house—but a week before, Adunni had quarrelled
with the wife. ‘She keeps throwing dirty water on my vegetable garden,’ Adunni
fumed when I asked what the war of words was about. She forbade any of her
brood from speaking to them. Adunni, I confess, has the temperament of a
rattlesnake and can take things very far when she feels she has been ill-treated.
Did I already mention how sharp her tongue could be? So, even though she was
cussing all through the grimy task of seeking for putrid rats in crevices,
cracks, and worst of all, inside her stow-away box, where she stashes all her
favourite special-occasion Georges, Hollandis, Synto-wraps and other party-going
wrappers and blouses, she still persisted on not asking the neighbours what
kind of wonder rodent killer was at work.
For a day and half, we—Adunni, our twin girls and I—struggled
to rid the house of dead rats and their stench. However, by the time we
finished with the house, carrying the little dead things into the collection
bucket my wife had thoughtfully kept in the middle of the parlour, with hands
that were, as per her instructions, wrapped in plastic bags; we discovered that
the stench coming in from the open windows was as strong as the one indoors.
Out into the compound, we went.
Out came the shovel and leather gloves.
It was easy gathering the rats we could find in the
open, however, those in holes and deep crevices – even though they did not
smell as bad as the ones in the open, posed a challenge until I came up with
the idea to seal them up where they lay. We made easy work of the buggers: a
shovel of earth here, a well-mixed lump of cement and sand there.
I noticed my wife getting madder and madder as we worked.
Though she did not say what the matter was; I caught the upstairs neighbour’s
wife peeping from her bedroom window and that gave me enough insight into the
source of her anger.
‘Please don’t let her spoil your mood, you know she sees
this type of work as beneath her,’ I said, trying to calm that storm brewing in
Adunni’s eyes. She had never liked Nneka.
Our neighbour’s wife, according to my wife, was a spoilt
brat, the sort whose parents granted too many concessions to make up for their
lack of parental qualities. I do not know how true her assessment was, but
knowing how annoyed she already was about them not paying attention to the
stench she insisted they caused, I felt it wise not to inflame her more. Adunni
moved away from me. It was as if my words irritated her. I was surprised when
she beckoned me over to the large pit I had dug to bury the dead rats. I
followed her pointing finger, and saw for the first time the bluish secretions
on the nose of first one, then with glowing alarm, on all of the rats I could
see: those not already covered with earth or other rats.
“What is that?”
Reading Virulent for the first time? Read part one here
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