The Mouse Catcher
“I saw the mouse again last night.”
“There’s no mouse.”
“Yes there is. I saw him.”
“If there was a mouse it would be eating food and scratching at the walls and it would stink.”
“Just get some traps.”
“Fine. But there’s no mouse.”
Sally overreacts. She can never be calm about anything.
“There is a mouse and when are you going to get the traps?”
“Tomorrow” I say.
We’re sitting at the table tonight, instead of in the living room with the TV. Dinner is grilled, wild salmon, with organic asparagus and boiled new potatoes. No butter, no sauce, no salt. Sally has been on this whole health kick recently. I make up for it by getting a breakfast role from the Centra down the road on the way to work in the mornings. She doesn’t know about that though.
I wish I had remembered it was tonight. I’m on the back foot now. Sally went to a lot of trouble with the dinner, and she’s wearing her nice dress and her fancy earrings. I’m sitting here in a pair of torn up old jeans and work boots. I feel ridiculous. It’s a special night. The big One Zero.
We’re using the good plates too, the ones we got from Sally’s mother for a wedding present. We sit in silence carefully loading up fork-full’s of bland, dry food. Sally making little yummy noises every now and then. She’s not fooling anyone though, I know she’s not enjoying it any more than me. She raises her fork half way to her mouth and freezes. Bits of potato skin are stuck to her teeth. A flake of salmon slides off and lands back on her plate with a quiet snap.
“Shhh,” she hisses.
“What?”
“Shhhhhhh!”
My chair creaks as I turn to look around the kitchen. “What is it?”
“Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That scratching.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“It’s the mouse. I’m telling you it’s the mouse.”
“There’s no mouse.”
“Just listen.”
So I listen. I hold my breath and sit completely still. I can hear a pigeon’s fluttering wings outside as the bird jumped off the roof and takes flight. Mrs. Grant from next door is watching a repeat of The X-Factor with the volume way up because of her hearing aid. A car drives past the house.
“I don’t hear anything,” I say.
“It’s stopped now.”
“Yeah. Ok.”
Sally slams her fork down on the table, rattling the plates and cutlery.
“There is a fucking mouse, Tom. A big, dirty, hairy mouse and he’s in our kitchen. You always do this.” She’s standing up now, slapping both hands down on the table to punctuate her frustration. Fat bulges out from underneath the arms of her dress. It’s her Special Occasion dress.
“What, Sally? What do I always do?”
“You just…jesus. Just get the fucking traps. I’m going to bed.”
She leaves the kitchen, taking off her earrings as she goes and slams the door behind her. She stamps up the stairs, shaking the whole house, and slams the bedroom door too. I stay at the table, staring at the half finished meal, the candles and the flowers, and take another sip of wine. I pick up my fork. The house is silent.
Then I hear it, small and slow and quiet. Well fuck, maybe she’s right. There’s a quiet sobbing coming from upstairs. I will get the traps tomorrow.
Catching a mouse is not a simple matter. You have lots of choices to make: Do you want traditional snap traps, or do you want catch and release traps, or do you want poison? Each has its pros and cons: Snaps are messy, catch and release are a hassle, and poison could mean that you have a dead, rotting mouse corpse in your wall. It could stay there for weeks, stinking up the place and festering with disease. Then there’s all the prevention you have to do. The best way to stop mouse infestation, says the internet, is to “build them out”. They can squeeze through a gap the size of a pencil. They must have soft, flexible little bones to squeeze through a gap like that. So you stuff a bunch of steel wool into the hole, and then you fill it up with caulking, or that expanding foam stuff.
Up at the B&Q, I wander around the aisles for a while, trying to find all the stuff I need. I don’t know why they make those places so big and confusing. It feels like a maze. I’ve decided to use those little wooden spring traps. It seems like the least cruel way to do it, but I can’t find them anywhere. After a while, I find someone wearing one of those horrible orange shirts, wandering around looking aimless and bored. She looks about sixteen at a guess, and has purple tips in her blonde hair.
“Excuse me,” I say, “where are the mouse traps?”
“What?” She says it like I’ve just woken her up.
“Mouse traps?”
“Eh, yeah?”
“Do you have any?”
“Like, in the store?”
“….yes.”
She sighs. “This way.”
She turns like she’s about to fall over backwards, hands shoved in her pockets. I follow behind. She’s wearing tight blue jeans that cling to the curve of her arse. You could almost pretend she’s not wearing anything.
She walks down an aisle and stops, waiting for me to catch up. As she turns, she catches me looking at her and sneers.
“Mouse traps,” she says.
“Um, thanks.”
“You should use the catch and release ones. The other ones are cruel.”
“Yeah, I think I’m just going to go the traditional route.”
“Pfft. I bet you eat meat too.” The teenage look of disgust on her face is magnificent.
“Actually, I’m a vegetarian.”
“Whatever.”
She walks back down the aisle, leaving me in a cloud of vanilla perfume. I watch her swagger away, graceful and belligerent like a house cat. At the end of the aisle, she turns and catches me staring again. A middle finger flips out of her pocket and she’s gone.
I pick out the traps I want, and go to gather the rest of the things I need. Then I get a bunch of lilacs from the garden centre and head to the checkout. Beside the tills there’s a display full of greeting cards. I get one that says “Happy Anniversary,” and think about getting an “I’m Sorry”, but it’s too expensive to get both.
“Did you get the traps?”
“Yes.”
“Ok, what you have to do is set them up close to the wall…”
“…where the mouse usually runs?”
“Oh. You know what to do then?”
“Yes. It’s not that complicated.”
“I just thought that…”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“You need to find how they’re getting in too.”
“I know.” I put the shopping bag down on the kitchen table and take out the supplies one by one. Steel wool, a tube of caulking, traps, peanut butter and chocolate. I left the card and the flowers locked up in the boot of the car.
“What’s the chocolate and peanut butter for?”
“See, you don’t know anything. It’s bait.”
“I got cheese for bait.”
“Well if you’d done any research you’d know that the cheese thing is a myth.”
She looks at me, just like the girl at the shop. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Talk to me like I’m an idiot.”
“That’s exactly what you just…never mind.”
“No, what is it? Come on, say it.”
“I’m going to set the traps.” I turn back to the table and start unwrapping the traps from their plastic packaging.
“Fine.” She pulls a chair out from the table, sits down, and starts flipping through her copy of Heat magazine.
“I just know what I’m doing is all,” I say.
“I know.”
“Good then.”
“Um hmm.”
I’m not expecting the traps to work very quickly. All the sites I’ve researched on say you have to wait for a couple of days before you get anything. They’re night animals, mice, so the best time to set up traps is right before you go to bed. It’s late, probably about two in the morning and I’m in the living room, watching the Adult Channel with the volume down. Sally went to bed right after dinner again so I didn’t get a chance to give her her present. It’ll just have to be one more day late. I hear a quiet snap in the kitchen, like a chicken bone being broken in two. I pull myself up off the couch and rearrange my erection so it won’t be so uncomfortable.
The lights are off in the kitchen and the door squeaks as I open it. Grey moonlight shines in through the window. I barely catch a glimpse of a tiny little brown mouse scurry away, and climb up into the gap under the oven. Just under it in the floor, one of the traps has sprung. Tiny dots of thin, opaque blood stain the linoleum. I stare at the trap, and in the stillness hear a scrabbling noise and a pathetic, distressed little squeak. A second mouse is caught in the trap, its back legs crushed, but the rest unharmed. It’s still alive.
I crouch down beside the mouse and watch him squirm for a minute. He’s in so much pain, eyes wide with terror and agony. His little jaw works and chews at the air. His paws claw desperately at the floor, trying to run away from the terror behind him, his little mouse brain unable to comprehend what has happened. He’s already managed to drag the trap a couple of inches away from where it had sprung.
Poor mouse. I can’t leave him like that. I researched how to catch a mouse, but I hadn’t come across anything like this. I don’t know what to do. Do I just leave him like that and let him die slowly? Maybe I could fill the sink with water and hold him under. I think about feeling his wriggling little body in my hand fighting to get to the surface, his movements getting slower and slower until his lungs fill with water and the life just diffuses out of him. I don’t think I could do that.
There’s a meat cleaver on a magnetic strip on the wall. Sally bought the set from Ikea when we moved in to the house. We only ever use one of the knives, but she says it makes the place look more like a kitchen, where real people cook real food and talk to each other. I snatch the cleaver off the wall, and get a chopping board from the dishwasher. It’s still dirty with tomato juice and black, withered salad leaves.
The mouse squirms and wriggles as I pick up the trap, fighting even more. It squeaks and squeals in tiny, high pitched notes. It’s so loud. I put the trap down on the board and line up the cleaver on the mouse’s neck. It has to be quick. With one hand holding the knife handle, and the other placed flat on the top of the blade, I lean in to it and push down as hard as I can.
There’s a crunch and the squealing stops. I hadn’t expected the crunch. Bright pink fluid oozes out from under the blade, staining the wood. This is what had to happen. The damage had already been done. This was the only way. It’s not my fault.
The door opens and Sally comes into the kitchen wearing a horrible frilly pink dressing gown that her mother gave her last Christmas. She switches on the light. Under the fluorescent bulbs the blood looks dark, almost black.
“What’s going on? What’s all the noise?”
“It was…”
“What are you doing with that knife? Is that my good chopping board?”
“The mouse was hurt.”
“Well good. Did you get it?”
“I had to. It would have been cruel to leave him.”
“Oh, that’s disgusting. Put it in the bin and disinfect that chopping board.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Jesus Tom. You’re shaking. It’s just a mouse.”
“I didn’t know what to do.”
“It’s dead now.”
“I thought I could just…”
“Just what?”
“It shouldn’t have been this hard.”
She looks at me, eyes narrowed with confusion. I imagine her taking off the dressing gown, her smooth, milky skin prickling in the cold. I imagine stroking the hair away from her face and feeling her look at me with desire. I imagine making love with her again.
I gather up the pieces and put them in a ziplock bag before throwing it in the bin. It’s a humiliating end.
My breath mists in the night air as I unlock the car to get the lilacs. They’re frozen solid, the petals brittle and cracked with frost. I walk away from the house. There are no cars around, so I walk along the white line in the middle of the road. I don’t know where to go. Maybe I can find a 24 hour garage to buy some cigarettes. I keep thinking about the mouse, and his last little squeak before the knife crushed his neck. Did he know it was coming? Did he even know he’d been trapped? Could his tiny little brain comprehend what was happening to him? Perhaps, if he’d recognised the trap for what it was, he wouldn’t have been caught. And even in the end, when there was no hope, he was still trying to run away, scrabbling desperately at the floor.
Headlights flood the road in front of me and a car screeches to a halt. The driver leans on the horn as I turned around, shielding my eyes from the glare. I stumble to one side, and the car’s engine roars as it speeds off into the dark, two glowing red lights getting smaller and smaller. I put the flowers and the card down in the middle of the road, like I’m putting them on a grave. Maybe they’ll be gone when I come back. Maybe they’ll get run over by a car and explode into a million tiny pieces. Maybe mice don’t feel pain like we do.
I hear a quiet snap. There is nobody here but me.
