WE HAVE expanded our social bubble by one. He arrives, pitter patter, late in the evening. I have retired for the night.
There is a loud hiss from downstairs. “Come down now!” says the hiss. I come down. The hiss breaks the news. “There’s a mouse in the kitchen,” he says.
In happier times, I might have sung that old UB40 classic: “What am I gonna do?” – only there was a rat in their kitchen and if that had been the case, I’d be in Cork now. I ring my sister round the corner.
“What time of the night is this to call? I’m in me nightie,” she cries.
“Emergency mousey and I’m not talking my hair,” I tell her.
She zooms round in her car, rings the doorbell and steps away – we’re getting this socially distanced lark about here.
“Good luck!” she cries as I wipe down the doorbell with Dettol.
Her trap is a friendly one – with a tiny arched door that closes when the mouse goes inside. It’s humane. We lace it with peanut butter, de-crumb the kitchen and retire to wait it out.
The next morning – no luck. My sister also leaves us a plug-in thingy that makes a noise that mice can hear but not humans. It’s like the siren they put outside corner shops which can only be heard by teenagers and stops them hanging about with four packs. Our mouse is still hanging about.
We think the mouse has gone up the side of the cooker and we crumple up tin foil to block any holes. I do not ponder out loud on how the mouse got in but it might have to do with me trip-trapping out to the line to bring in the washing.
“I wonder what the mouse is thinking,” I say.
“He’s thinking ‘I wonder would the kind lady who left the back door open, just open it again so I can get out’,” says my husband. Best to stay schtum.
Maeve Binchy used to tell a story about her days editing the food and drink page in The Irish Times. She was featuring a recipe for an autumn stew and was having a hard time finding a photograph. Finally she hit on one of a stew with a knife and a fork sticking out.
It was only when she sat down to watch the late news that evening and a picture flashed up on the screen that the horrible truth hit her. That was no tasty stew, it was a photograph of Christian Barnard’s first heart transplant complete with a few surgical forks.
She rang work and was summoned to the office forthwith. As she dashed out, her father, a lawyer, gave her sound advice.
“Maeve, admit nothing, deny everything,” he cried as she headed out the door.
It’s a phrase that has served me well down the years – a ‘below the radar, let the hare sit’ kind of a phrase.
As far as taking the blame for that new entrant to this social bubble goes, I’m denying anything to do with the back door.
Personally, I tell my husband. I blame the bloody squirrel. He was hoking about in the bird feeder and dropping seed everywhere. It’s the squirrel’s fault.
All this nature on our doorstep is beginning to pall. We’re city folk. It’s hard not to throw open said back door and yell: “Get back to the woods where ye all belong!”
The easing of lockdown is difficult. We took our first walk out the gate last week. Hell is other people – that Jean Paul Sartre knew his onions, I tell my husband.
Social distancing is a myth, I say, throwing myself on to the dual carriageway at the mercy of a Volkswagen Golf to dodge a jogger. I can feel the red mist rising.
The mouse? We were worried about whether one could be two and the subsequent biblical-style begetting and begatting. We did not want to entertain mouse hordes. So, we borrowed old-fashioned traps. Mars Bars are the thing, a friend advised.
“You’re joking. We’ve been in total lockdown for three months and I’d eat my fingers down to the knuckles for a Mars bar,” I told her. Apparently, the mouse would too.
As I write, the dirty deed is done. He has gone to the big mouse hole in the sky. Our social bubble is back to the three of us and, you know, I like it that way.
