No Story Today
It is unfortunate that I cannot bring you a newsletter this week. All I can do is note the reason: rodents.
I try not to be too precious about where I write, but I do favour small spaces. Once there was a wardrobe that I converted. While living in Yemen I had a box room that had something cave-like about it. The ceiling was supported by mangrove poles that I liked to imagine had come from Zanzibar. I've written stories for The Guardian on planes, in tents and plenty of hotel rooms. I can cope with big distracting views, uncomfortable furniture, hangovers, and the phone ringing mid-sentence. But one thing I can't bear is a wild animal in the room with me.
It happens too often. Once in Malaysia I was attempting to write a novel and had spent a year getting to within a couple of Tigers from the finish - not the stripy type, I mean the wholesome alcoholic beverage that once inspired Anthony Burgess to pen Time for a Tiger, one of his best. It was a hot day. All the doors were open to catch any breeze. I was tapping away at my Amstrad keyboard when there was a flash, an enormous crash and something zipped across the top of my head. I froze. On the floor was a pigeon, its neck broken and a tiny drop of scarlet blood on its bill. In the corner of the room, on the back of the spare chair, was a Japanese Sparrow Hawk staring at me malevolently. I cleared my throat. It sprang towards me. I threw myself off the chair. The hawk hit the window and got stuck between the open slats of glass. In an instant it went from honed predator to clumsy idiot, wings splayed and useless, its neck twisting and awkward, one yellow talon flailing desperately.
I rolled up my manuscript and prodded it until it fell outwards. It landed on the lawn, hopped around a bit, shook itself, and flew off.
When I got back to my story, it had gone through a similar transformation as the hawk. It had gone lame. I never finished it. Recently, clearing out my mother's loft, there it was inside a canvas bag, next to the diver's knife and a frying pan. Despite over 30 years of convalescence, the unfinished novel was still lame. The sparrow hawk had been right.
In that canvas bag was a sheaf of papers, including a handwritten receipt from one Lieutenant Colonel of the Sudanese Army. I had rented a house from him on the edge of Yambio, a small town near the border with what was then Zaire. The house was a grass-roofed mud-walled place with, unusually, two rooms. At the front it had a shady sitting area. Around it was a bare earth ring of five or six metres before the jungle started. "Keep that bare earth clear," said the Lieutenant Colonel, though he did not explain why. I thought he was just house proud. For a time I did make sure it was kept clear, paying someone to use a long-handled mattock to cut off any green shoots. With the wet season, however, the grass shoots became more insistent and my worker came down with malaria. The grass grew into a lawn, then a meadow.
I didn’t mind. When the bishop birds came to perch on the long grass stems, I was happy. There are no colours like those in feathers, and no yellow more vivid than in those bishops. I spent a long time on my veranda trying to capture a decent photo.
I was not writing a novel in those days. All I did was write my diary. Every night by the light of an oil lamp positioned outside my mosquito net, I filled up school exercise books with handwritten notes. There were no electric batteries to be had: supplies from Juba had stopped when the rebels cut the road. I bought kerosene in tiny quantities from a man who sold it in old tin cans. The price was rising, and stocks were obviously going to run out soon. For this reason I kept the lamp trimmed as low as possible, barely able to see what I was writing. I have yet to find those exercise books, but when I do, I fear they might be unintelligible.
One night I had finished writing and turned off the lamp when I heard something. I quickly reached out under the net and lit a match. On the floor, where my feet would naturally land, was a cobra, its head up, swaying gently, tongue flickering as it tasted the air.
Those matches were a special Chinese variety that helped people set fire to themselves. Constructed of the thinnest splinters of wood and tipped with a particularly unpredictable concoction of phosphorous, they would often snap, sometimes sending small fizzing fireballs spinning off in random directions, occasionally exploding. They brought a small frisson of drama to any mundane domestic task, like lighting a lamp in front of a cobra.
Out of habit I had gripped the match near the head. If you did this, the chances of a break were less but you had to be quick before the smell of burning flesh took over from phosphorous. Now, ignoring the agony, I got the lamp lit. The cobra watched. It was close enough for me to see the lamplight in its eyes.
I gently climbed out the bed on the far side. In the corner was the mattock that should have been used to cut the grass, the grass that the snake had slithered across to get under my door. I took the hefty tool in hand and crept around the bed to come behind the snake. He was still there, head up, admiring the lamp, when the mattock connected with his neck.
In the morning the man who was supposed to have cut the grass arrived and identified the dead snake. "That one very bad," he said, "He spits at people and makes them blind."
After this I felt bad. If not for my negligence with the grass, the spitting cobra would be alive. Was it my imagination, or were the mice and rats more numerous afterwards? The cobra was no longer around to eat them. A week later, in the daytime, my writing was once again interrupted. A five-banded mongoose came dashing through the door, ran around the hut and out again. Dropping my notebook I grabbed the camera and ran after the animal. Behind the hut, under its single window, the mongoose was digging with maniacal glee. In seconds it uncovered a hoard of snake eggs which it gobbled up then ran away.
Forty years after these unforgettable incidents, I have let the grass grow around my writing shed. This Friday morning I enter and find mouse crap everywhere. That in itself would not put me off, but the smell is terrible. I get down on my knees - carefully - and inspect the crap. It seems very small, even for a mouse. I reckon this is the product of a pygmy shrew. I have seen them running along the cracks in the flagstones outside: the tiniest little creature you can imagine, weighing less than a postage stamp.
I do not want to kill the pygmy shrews. I fetch the Hoover from the house and clean up the mess, then close the door. There will be no story today.