INFESTATION

of mice and men

I am a woman haunted by mice. They won’t leave me alone. Since I moved to London two years ago, my life has become a project of constantly beating back their invasions in one way or another, and I am on the verge of what I can only describe as breaking point. They are all I think about, and their defeat is my only goal in this world. Everything else falls away when I hear a rustle or see a nose peeking out behind a piece of furniture in the light of my phone torch at some ungodly hour. Dark undereye circles may be the ultimate party girl accessories, but full disclosure: mine are from my very real rodent fixation.

My problem is that I take it personally. I know that it’s ridiculous, bordering on insanity, to take the presence of mice as a personal affront in a city of nine million, where litter is strewn across the streets and bin bags are left on the pavement to be collected. But it feels pretty personal. I’m certain they sniff me out, crave my closeness. I feel as though I can’t escape them, like tiny spectres trying to teach me something I can’t understand. I feel as though I’m going mad, because nothing I do gets rid of them. I feel like I must have done something to deserve them. I feel that way often.

As a child, I had two pet mice, one black, one white, called Charlotte and Dora. The way I remember it, I loved them deeply, obsessed with the tickle of their whiskers and the way they’d crawl up my arms and onto my head. The way my parents remember it, I was terrified of the way their little paws would scrabble at me, and of their small, snuffling snouts in my ear. Still, I was devastated when, a couple of months apart from one another, they both became ill with growths bulging out of their tiny bodies, and went “to live with the vet”. Their sawdust-filled cage was taken away, and Charlotte and Dora were no more.

I would often be compared to a mouse, as in quiet-as, when I was a child. An often silent kid, smaller than the others, and mild-mannered (a memory also countered by my parents). I was inconspicuous, never in anyone’s way, never causing any trouble. Mouse-like by nature and looks. I was always told to describe my hair- light, fair- as ‘mousy’. Nowadays people tell me I’m blonde, or even dirty blonde, which is at least a fun way to put it, and quite possibly the polar opposite to mousy. Scavenging burrowing crumb-stealing mousy. But back then, that’s what it was, down like a small rodent you might find in a field. I learned to embody the mouse head to toe, inside out, and was rewarded for it.

I’m less of a mouse now, you understand. Antithetical, in many ways. I’m loud, filling every silence, and often saying the wrong thing at that. I want to dazzle, I want to charm, I want to be remembered. Even if I often leave the party throwing down various sentences I tossed out onto the dissection table, to cut them open and hold their organs up to the light. At least I said them, is the conclusion I come to at least some of the time. At least I say things now.

But recently I’ve been feeling twitchy. The mice are back. Mice are everywhere in the city, everyone knows that. It’s just a case of waiting for them to find you. They’re on the tube platforms, in the streets, even in my office. I’m not a squeamish person, not easily disgusted. If anything, I think they’re sweet. Except for the way that they followed me home.

Last winter was a horror story. No matter how clean the surfaces or how much poison we put down, we couldn’t get rid. They’d run across the worktop behind the stove while we cooked, or over my bare feet when I grabbed my laundry. There was no escape. Once, fuelled by a stray grain of something stimulating that had managed to fall in between my floorboards, they terrorised me for a night, running around the perimeter of my room and under my bed squeaking until the early hours. When I woke up in the morning, I found they’d chewed through huge chunks of the skirting board and corners of the carpet, leaving piles of fluff and dust as large as them in their wake. Every study about every substance known to man has been done on mice first, so it was easy to figure out what had happened. Increased locomotive and cranial activity, motor-oriented behaviour as opposed to outcome-focus, rapid dendritic growth.

‘I think I might have accidentally turned them into super-mice,’ I told my flatmate, apologetically.

I’d have nightmares about them most nights. In one, a chocolate chip covered in teeny tiny teeth marks rolled out from under the microwave. Or maybe it’s a really hazy memory. Either way, they’re in every corner of my psyche, chewing on my wires. I am told that dreams about mice represent chaos, anxiety, contamination. What other kinds of dreams are there? We learned to turn our hatred of the mice into a joke. Named them all after the same sleazy TV celebrity to make our cries of annoyance funnier, spelled out ‘fuck you’s to them in magnets on our fridge. I started to shout into the kitchen before I turned the light on and stepped inside, now it’s degraded into loudly singing anything that comes into my head so they know I’m coming. I give them chance to scurry out of the way so I don’t have to see them. 

At least it’s not rats, everyone says. If you had rats, you’d really be in trouble.

It looked like we might be free of them as the weather melted, as spring rolled into summer, but now it’s getting cold again. Everything’s turning burnt orange and everyone’s wearing tights and scarves and drinking cinnamon lattes and breathing deep, contented sighs as they prepare to let the changing leaves float onto a new path, and I am gearing up for battle. The mice are back with a vengeance. And I can feel my nerves fraying. Like my skin is tightening over my face. Like a bulb that’s having too much energy syphoned into it until the glass smashes and sparks fly.

How are you doing? people ask me. Fine, I say, other than the mice. How are the mice? people ask me. I don’t want to talk about it, I say. I’m convinced pest controllers are trained to make you as scared as possible so they can secure you as a repeat customer. Every time I meet one they tell me that mice can jump six feet, have 800 babies in a year, and wriggle through centimetre-wide holes to penetrate your cupboards and eat through your food. The poison they put down doesn’t work, though. The mice outsource their dinner, so they don’t need to touch ours. It’s that they’ve made their home here, drawn to our aura. Maybe I should take it as a compliment.

I can’t help but feel- and forgive me if this seems tenuous, but I can’t help but feel- as though I’ve been here before. Random act of chaos plastered onto something that’s supposed to be home. It could happen to anyone, but the fact it’s happened to me makes me feel as though it means something. I do what I can to control it, and when that’s futile, I tighten my grip on the things I can control instead, white-knuckled until they shatter. I think about the way that men speak to me in bars, on the street, online, and the way that every time I think I’ve figured out the code to avoid it, they come back, and their return can always be traced back to something I’ve done, some way I wasn’t careful enough. I think about how places that are supposed to be comforting and safe to me have become spaces where I’ve had to push away advances and ward off those who’d chosen me as that night’s victim. The parallels come to me like visions. The two blur together. The red string between the sleeplessness, the shame. The jumpiness I take on, always looking over my shoulder. Is that a shadow or a threat?

Your home is the place that you have ownership of, claim to. Where you feel safe. Where you can expand out to every corner and embody your own fullness. That’s my physical home, that I share with a loved one, that I open up to the people I care about. That’s the things and spaces that I care about, the realms of my life where I’m the most myself. I want to protect them from infiltration, I don’t want them to be cheapened. I don’t want to be reminded that if someone wants to come into those spaces, if someone wants to cause me harm, there’s little I can do to stop it. That’s my body, that, though it’s sometimes easier to think of as the vessel, the playground where my soul is having a human experience, I like to feel connected to. I know what it is to be out of your body, to telescope out, for your mind to turn itself inside out and slip between one of your synapses until you’re not sure if anything’s real. So I want to feel every pulse of my heartbeat in my fingertips, I want to feel every breeze against my cheeks, I want to feel every kiss planted on them, I want to feel the pain in my forehead when I focus too hard or in my body when I move too forcefully or in my chest when it proves I’m alive. I don’t want to feel phantom rodents scampering across my limbs several times a day until I’m on high alert. I don’t want to feel my stomach lurch when I hear a phone ringing. I don’t want to feel the fizzing that spreads through my veins when something happens that can’t be taken back. You know the feeling when you step into a house that’s supposed to be empty and you can tell, for whatever reason, that it’s not? I don’t want to feel that.

In the middle of the night, I hear them in my room. They are scratching at every surface. They are circling me, they are crawling around the framed photo of my mum holding a pigtailed me (when I was the age where mice were just whimsical additions to the family) that I keep propped against my wall and they are leaving their fur and their scent all over her young smiling face. I text my flatmate and she dutifully comes, though it’s 1am and she should definitely sleep. She helps me identify that they’ve slipped behind my chest of drawers and hands me the small bottle of peppermint oil that I’ve been told can keep them at bay. I drench my bedsheets in it like a magic circle and put earplugs in so that I can’t hear them rustling. My eyes sting with the smell of peppermint heavy in the air, and it makes me cough just a little, but the more overpowering it is, the safer I feel. I jump at the slightest sound, I near enough snap my neck turning my head to inspect shadows. I walk into a room to see a person I love and jump, because any movement could be one of them. Something tickles the back of my throat, my skin is ready to crawl from me, my hairs live on end. I can feel them darting around inside my skull, making a mess of the grey matter, scraping away at it. I can feel them looking out of my eyes.

At least it’s not rats, everyone says.

In the morning I try to mouse-proof the spaces I think they’re sneaking through, stuffing wire wool into every corner. I worry there’s a special procedure to it that I’m not aware of, but I can do this on my own, I tell myself. Shards of silver threaten to get stuck in my fingertips. Should I be using gloves? I take a preparative deep breath in and inhale a cloud of steel dust. Oh well. Small price to pay. I picture that nose venturing out from the back of the drawers last night, a tiny triangle in the dark, and I don’t care how much metal scratches my insides. I leave strips of it along the wall and douse it in yet more peppermint oil, like petrol I’m about to set fire to, for good measure. In cleaning up the debris I leave behind, I accidentally hoover up a friendship bracelet. Cross-legged on the floor with dust getting in my nose as I wrangle with the dinosaur vacuum cleaner to pull out the slightly worse-for-wear pink and gold beads, my name spelled out next to hearts and angel numbers. An amulet.

I go out. I chat and laugh and immerse myself in everything that’s light and colourful and safe. I stay out until I’m far too cold. On the tube home, I count blessings. I can’t count very high. It smells sweet in here, like the blue pouring from the can those girls dropped on the floor, rolling towards my feet as we’re thrown around the carriage. I stare at my thigh where there’s a hole in my tights. Then I push at its taut corners until it’s bigger and bigger. Pale flesh is always so ugly in the light of day. When it’s mine, when it’s me looking. I don’t want to go home to them. I don’t want to sleep in that room, I don’t want to sleep alone, I don’t want to hear that they’re there. You know, the name for a group of mice is a mischief. You don’t need to tell me why.

A phrase that’s been thrown at me a lot recently is ‘victim complex’. Reassuringly, it’s only been by strangers online, whose opinions on what kind of person I am mean fuck all. But it has me thinking about how much you can and should ever leave things behind. Sure, defining yourself by something bad that happened to you probably isn’t going to help you that much. But if you don’t get to choose whether something happens to you, or becomes part of you, it feels good to take control of the narrative. To bring things into the foreground and maybe even turn them into something with a bit more shine than the original act. There’s something in channelling fear into art. Sewing your terror into your every word so that it sees the light of day, and maybe even shrivels a bit.

It’s not a victim complex I have by any means. An individuality complex, maybe. Years ago, I uncovered a new way that I could be hurt, and have the places that I felt safe invaded- my relationships, my home, up to and including the edges of my own imagination, the black space behind my closed eyelids. Diamonds of speech cut from their context to echo through every day I lived forward. When I realised that there wasn’t a way to undo what had been done, part of how I chose to cope was thinking about how I was different. And it wasn’t like it was bad, or real, like the way other people are hurt. It was just okay enough to deal with, not bad enough to be broken by. The way they managed to get to me, the dark corners they chewed through to reach me, that’s not common. Most people couldn’t even imagine someone could do a thing like they did. I was rare. At first it hurt, that there were no infographics or support groups for what I went through (and I should know, I tried to start one). But then, if I can’t be in good company, I have to be good company. I have to reframe it. I saw an underbelly that I wanted to rub from my eyes, laser from my memories. But if I couldn’t, at least I was privy to something. At least I was in possession of this doomed knowledge. There was a lens to reality that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Surely that makes me stronger?

I sit on the floor of the shower and make the water so hot that my skin prickles. I reach in front of me, rivulets of water dripping down from my face, and scratch my nail at the wall where limescale and clumps of excess grout have always annoyed me. To my surprise, they come away easily. Maybe it’s the change in weather, maybe the water. I get to work, chipping away at metres of tiles until they’re properly white again, and smooth, like veneers grinning out at me. The steam fogs the window and becomes so thick I feel as though I’m breathing in water, but I keep going until I can’t find a speck left to scratch at. My skin is puckered from being in the water so long, my face flushed. When I’m done, I rub the tiles with too much bleach for good measure, and still feel it burn my eyes when I return hours later to brush my teeth. The next day I can still smell it inside my nose, or maybe in my hair. The Internet says my throat could close up any minute, even if it’s been hours since I breathed it all in, and I consider texting someone just in case, but if I don’t die of asphyxiation I’d feel quite stupid for panicking.

I used to think that being hurt was a bit like a vaccination. If you managed to get a dose that didn’t finish you off, you could pretty much handle anything. So why do I feel so weak at even the slightest of threats? Every tiny aggression takes me back to the night that it all shifted. Every shadow that moves could be a mouse. The panicked silence hanging in the air, the dial tone.

It was more like a blow to a pane of glass. Every tremor grows the crack further across its expanse. When I can hear contempt in someone’s words, when I can feel the things they want to say rising like a fist above me, every instance of pain blends together, and they all turn into one flailing mass of hurt. I can’t distinguish between red and blue and green and I can’t distinguish between now and then, between this moment and those years ago. They’re all happening at once, again, and again, and again. I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to put that on someone. Maybe someone should be able to erode a shard of rock without being counted as having contributed to the whole cliff coming down. But then again, maybe not.

So I focus on ways I can feel strong when I don’t feel strong. For better or for worse, I feel strong when I’m kind. When I’m warm and compassionate and open. I feel strong when I’m surprising, when there’s more to me than someone thought there could be. I feel strong when I’m physically strong, when I do something impressive or lift something heavy. The word muscles comes from musculus, literally meaning ‘little mouse’. It was thought that a rippling bicep resembled the twitching scurry of a rodent. I suppose they’re not too dissimilar (I should know). This is true for many linguistic roots- Latin, Ancient Greek, Arabic, Middle English. Infestations everywhere, it seems. Muscle in a horde, muscles as a swarm. Except. Except. Except that in the 14th century, mice meant something small and weak. Something attenuated. So it all circles back, in one way or another.

The men aren’t the mice. The mice aren’t the men, I like to think I’m beyond such an obvious metaphor. The feeling of having a space you think of as safe invaded, time and time again, and having no way to control it, that’s the feeling I can’t shake. The rumination, the mental loops, hearing sounds that didn’t happen, but still strike you in the chest just the same. If it could happen once, it could happen again. You always wanted something bad to happen to you so you could write about it and then it did and you wouldn’t say a word. So what was the point of all that, then? What was the use in thinking you had something special?

I’m tired, and it’s late, and my bedroom feels like it’s pulsing a red light with the door propped open and the dark leaking out into this nice, warm-lit living room. Maybe they’ll stay away tonight, maybe they’ll have found somewhere else to go. I have no choice but to crawl into bed and pray for a miracle. Maybe I’ll find fortune this time and they’ll leave me alone. Maybe I’ll find myself to be braver than before, immune to the fear that’s rising around me. Maybe I’ll sleep in peace. Maybe.

---

thank you so much for reading <3 if you enjoyed this and want to support me to be able to keep writing, you can buy me a coffee here :)