Eeeze No Mouse

One of my favourite childhood anecdotes occurred during a trip to Nassau with my mother. We were out for dinner at some tropical restaurant, and I needed to go to the bathroom. Being the fiercely independent child that I was, I insisted on going alone. I returned with the force of a recently fired cannon ball, shrieking at having seen a gigantic mouse atop the toilet. The waiter, in an attempt to both calm me and to assure the other guests of the cleanliness of his establishment came over and said, “Oh no leetle girl. Eeeze no mouse. Eeeze cock-A-roach!”

Now, it might sound odd, that a grown woman (and a biologist at that) who is fascinated by animal carcasses smeared across road beds and likewise charmed by even the most putrid of slithering animals should be so unreasonably mortified by the existence of cockroaches - but I am. Perhaps my intense phobia stems from the traumatic events of that otherwise blissful island vacation. Or maybe it developed during those long nights spent on the roach-riddled couch at my now-father’s wretched little apartment in Toledo (which, by the way, was the scene of another of my favourite childhood anecdotes which I will save for the occasion when I need to introduce a topic regarding exploding bottles of liquid Styrofoam and the ensuing haircuts required as a result thereof.) I won’t dismiss the possibility that my rigid disregard for the frightful insects matured that night I ate mushrooms at Mike Griffin’s house. Well, a phobia is, by definition, an irrational fear, thus I will squander no further effort on a justification for my emotions. Regardless of the root causes, the fact remains that I am extremely unsettled by the sudden and unexpected sight of a cockroach.

Now, one might make a good argument for the case that seeing a cockroach in Sydney in the summer should not be an unexpected event. Indeed, I myself have made public statements regarding the fact that cockroaches are an undeniable part of the native fauna of Australia, and that they are not necessarily an indicator of squalid poverty or poor domestic hygiene. Nonetheless, whenever I chance upon some shiny brown carapace with wriggly antenna waving at me in eager defiance as it scuttles across the halls of the Blackburn Building and vanishes beneath some misplaced piece of equipment, I cannot resist the impulse to pull my elbows close to my body and flap my hands at the wrists whilst high-stepping through the corridors in a spastic ballet accompanied by some rather unpleasant vocalizations.

Thus, with that background information, I invite you to imagine the turmoil that ensued when I, in a state of gentle repose, relaxing upon my sofa, drinking a cold beer, and watching illegally obtained episodes of South Park, observed a small dark form scurry into my peripheral vision. As my frontal cortex rapidly sorted through possible explanations for this brown blur (lizard, mouse, cock…) the wretched creature crawled across MY FOOT, at which moment my reptilian brainstem reclaimed control over my body with the vengeance of a postal worker that has been passed over for promotion for forty years. With an agility I’d never imagined possible outside of a French circus, my puny muscles launched my awkward frame across the room in a spray of golden bubbles and imaginative curses. It took a full forty-five seconds of sputtering in circles before my cortex regained control of my corpuscles and suggested to my reluctant hands to collect a shoe, but of course, by this time the little bastard had wriggled out of sight.

The situation might not have been so traumatic if Kevin were here to laugh at me, or better yet, to hunt down and kill the beast himself (a duty that I distinctly recall being stated in our wedding vows explicitly), but he is over 2,000 kilometers away in Townsville. So I am left alone, to prance gingerly through the apartment, rounding corners on tip-toe, and jumping at every little shadow that shimmies in the corner of my eye. I will change the sheets and shake out the doona (aka comforter), but I doubt that sleep will fall easily upon my worried mind. I already pity myself for the unavoidable occasion when I am awakened in the middle of the night by the pitter-patter of six sticky feet across my face.

That just may be the day I buy my ticket home.