A Brief History of Cockroaches.
Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 10:00PM You know that bit in Wall-E when he rolls over the little apocalypse-friendly cockroach, and Wall-E's horrified because he thinks he’s inadvertently killed his buddy, but then the cockroach pops back up again? Well, I am now in a position to tell you that is not some fanciful sprinkling of Hollywood fairy dust. No suspension of disbelief is required when watching that scene. That shit is real.
The cockroach's name is Hal, which is an in-joke for nerds.Allow me to explain.
Last night, we were up at three (and one and four, also five and two) looking after our son, who has a horrific stomach flu which he has since passed on to us. As I walked back to the bedroom, I trod on something. It felt quite nice, pleasantly crunchy, like a cracker. ‘But hang on,’ I thought to myself, ‘I didn’t have any crackers last night.’ Suspicion bloomed in my mind. I switched on the light.
There lying on the threshold of our bedroom was an enormous stunned cockroach, its legs in the air, its autumnal face agape.
Normally, I like to save helpless creatures. One of my little pleasures in life is when I get to shoo a wasp or spider or some other similarly unloved beastie out of the window, filling my heart with a sense of righting the cosmic balance. But this cockroach elicited no such feelings of sympathy in my breast. It was far too big, far too ugly and far too conspicuously lying on our bedroom floor in the middle of the fucking night.
That is the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana. But the one I saw was at least twice the size and armed.Furthermore, my characteristically sunny disposition was at a low ebb because I’d spent the afternoon of the day before killing pregnant bluebottles. Before you jump to any conclusions about me, this isn’t some kind of sick hobby (of which, rest assured, I do have several), but a necessary response to the fact that twelve big, fat flies took up residence in our kitchen some time after lunch. Evidence of your exemplary house-keeping, Matt, I hear you say. Well, perhaps so. But the fact is that when I swatted one and it waved a sad, reproachful leg at me, I saw that there were maggots crawling out of its bum. The same was true of the next fly I killed. After that I stopped checking; I had become a remorseless killing machine, bent on cleansing our kitchen with the purgative fire of my rolled-up tea-towel.
So, as I looked down on the stunned form of the cockroach, I was already borne down by my guilt over the afternoon’s massacre. At the same time, my cold black heart whispered to me: ‘Matt, you’re so stepped in blood now, surely one more teeny-tiny murder won’t make a difference?’
There's nothing more tragic than a lolcat with murder on his conscience.It is also worth noting, in my defence, that I’ve been led a merry old dance by cockroaches twice in the past. The first encounter saw me trapping a cockroach which had flown into our apartment underneath a plastic bucket. Being a newcomer to the world of cockroach-hunting (I hadn't even known they could fly), I thought that the bucket, which was quite sturdy, would be equal to the task of holding our unwanted visitor. Alas, no: I watched in SILENT TERROR as it lifted up the bucket like an inch-long Atlas and ran off under a book case. Later on, having succeeded in recapturing it, I threw it off the balcony of our old apartment (which was on the fifteenth storey), and – despite having all the nocturnal splendour of Sao Paulo at its feet – the damn thing elected to fly right back into my face. My wife, who is terrified of cockroaches and was standing on the other side of the (closed, locked) French doors, likes to remind me on a roughly bi-weekly basis how seeing me suddenly scream, beat myself in the face and almost fall off the balcony is one of her happiest memories.
New Year's Eve 2010, through a really shit Nikon.The second occasion came when I stumbled into my son’s bedroom at six in the morning to answer his rather insistent demands that someone come and fetch him, and feed him, and generally vindicate his belief that he is the still point of the turning world (which to us, pathetically, he is). I was still sleepy as I wandered around the room, so my first thought on noticing a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye was to dismiss it as a speck of sleep floating on my cornea, or some mental cafard. But no, closer inspection revealed that it was an all-too real cafard: the leaf-shaped wing casings, the bobbing antennae, the low-slung chassis. I gave a silent howl of anguish and went to the kitchen to get a suitable trapping-bowl (my previous experience paying off). As I returned, I was aware of a chill breeze gusting around my nether-parts. Unusually, this failed to arouse me. In fact, on this occasion it sent a stab of ice-cold fear all the way from my bumhole to my racing heart.
I went back into my son’s room and switched on the light, triggering a flurry of movement. The little bastard – who had been lounging on the arm of our rocking chair in a pose which suggested he might well ask me to fetch his pipe and slippers – darted off round the back of the chair. It didn’t like the light, you see. It knew it was safer in the dark. Oh, how I hate their highly evolved survival instinct.
I ventured forwards and gingerly turned the armchair around until it came into view. Taking stock of its situation, and appraising correctly that it was once again exposed in the light, it scurried back off behind the chair. We carried on this charade for some time. Towards the end, I became convinced that the cockroach thought it was on a fairground ride and I was the oil-stained executor of all his dreams. But I wasn’t. It was in my son’s room, and it had to go. So I made a desperate lunge, pinned it (which made me feel bad, because I trapped its feelers) and threw him off the balcony. My son, meanwhile, looked on from his cot with an air of slight, but unmistakable, pity.
All of which brings us up to this morning at 3am with me staring down at our latest houseguest. This particular fellow had obviously reckoned on being able to sneak in whilst we were asleep. What he hadn’t reckoned on was that there would be the parents of a small, sickly toddler in the house – and the fucker would live to rue that oversight. I was in a bloody, life-taking mood.
"Cockroach!"The first thing I did on seeing the stunned cockroach lying at my feet was tell my wife to stay in the bathroom, whence she had retired to take a pee. So what if a torrent of emotion was pouring through my soul, and a different yet equally tempestuous torrent of thought was pouring through my head? I was a man, and I had to behave like a man. My wife has since informed me that, actually, the first thing I did was make a noise which sounded a bit like someone simultanously crying and vomiting. Then it went silent for a bit. And then I told her to stay in the bathroom. Unfortunately, because of the gagging noise, she assumed I’d come down with the rotavirus and shat myself, so she wanted to come out and see if I was OK, and possibly laugh. I explained that, no, I hadn’t shat myself and, yes, I was fine, and no, she shouldn’t come out. ‘Is it a cockroach?’ she asked, her voice going tense. ‘Yes,’ I said. There came the sound of the key being turned in the lock and a towel being wedged under the door. ‘Tell me when it’s dead,’ she said, and switched off the light. I was on my own – which is lucky, because on my own is exactly how I like it. Except when I’m making love, when it’s very much a case of the more the merrier.
The people of Stockport after they heard I was visiting.With the little lady safely tucked away, I walked over to the wardrobe, picked out one of my sensible trainer/shoe hybrids and approached my foe. He lay there, looking up at me. Was that an imploring expression on his face? I don’t know, because in that moment I hit him as hard as I possibly could. In the face.
I know, I know: you should never squash a cockroach, because that can cause the eggs to fan out and cause an infestation. (I know this because I once worked in a hotel where I was taken aside and told, in no uncertain terms, not to squash the cockroaches I saw behind the scenes because the cockroaches out front, who descended en-masse for telemarketing conferences, wedding receptions or the tragic annual piss-up of some appalling local society, would object.) However, I was in mood for caution or lenience. I wanted to end it in one fell swoop.
A meaningless non-sequitur to show I am cool and know how to use google image search.I didn't get my way.
After I hit it, the cockroach lay there and seemed to have a good long think about what had just happened. I, meanwhile, wondered if it was dead. It waved a feeler to reassure me that, no, it wasn’t. So I got a piece of paper to scoop what I supposed to be a pretty well-stunned cockroach off the balcony. It didn’t like that; when I attempted to slide the sheet of paper underneath it, it hopped onto its front and looked at me. Do bear in mind now that I had already stood on it with all my weight and then beaten it savagely with a shoe. Far from dying as a result of these attentions, it now appeared to perk up quite noticeably. Indeed, it ran off up the wall.
I must confess that as it ran off, I panicked. Earlier I had fetched some bleach to clean my foot and my shoe, and now I ran after it, squirting it with the bleach. If being trodden on and savagely beaten had stunned it, concentrated bleach appeared to be just the pick-me-up it needed; soothed by a cloud of delicately refreshing mist, the cockroach turned on a dime and positively danced under the bed, wriggling up against the edge of the duvet as it went. As I lifted up a corner of the duvet, I made a mental note to burn it, the bed, and everything else I’ve ever owned, touched or seen, but I was already too late: the cockroach had disappeared.
It was at this point, my wife informs me, that I went to the bathroom door and demanded that she come out and help. Now, it’s rather painful for me to admit having done this, because my wife is actually pregnant at the moment. Therefore, her staying in the bathroom was by no means self-indulgence: it was a medically expedient means of ensuring that she didn’t go into premature labour from the sight of a cockroach running at her with its antennae waving like a pair of pirate’s cutlasses.
A bloodthirsty pirate.Needless to say, I am not proud of having pressured the heavily pregnant, cockroach-phobic love of my life to come to my assistance. It was not my finest hour. I am even less proud of the fact that, when she refused, I hissed through the door: ‘But it’s its survival instinct: it wants to live more than I do.’
Well, eventually, after beating on the door with my fists and sobbing, I accepted that I would find no help from that direction and returned to the bedroom. The cockroach was nowhere to be seen. Very gently – and very conscious of the time when I was in India and a gigantic spider that I’d been chasing had elected not to hide in my boots or my bag, but under the lip of a table immediately beside my hand, which is where I saw its glittering compound eyes quietly contemplating me, causing me to do a six-foot yogic jump of pure terror to the far side of the room, where I found myself as darkness fell, weeping in the lotus position – bearing all this in mind, and recalling that discretion is the better part of valour, I assumed a strategic distance with plenty of escape routes and peered under the bed. Nothing.
I got closer, searched a little more thoroughly. Still nothing. Then I saw him, scurrying along the opposite wall by the headboard, disappearing behind my wife’s bedside table. Damn. Killing no longer seemed to be an option, mostly because I was too scared. I was going to have to capture him. I went to the kitchen and got a large, lidded Tupperware bowl and returned to the fray.
That's not actually me. But that's at least how happy Tupperware makes me.When I got there, it was apparent that he’d once again gone to ground. For five minutes I hunted him, to no avail. I moved all the furniture away from the walls. I lifted up the corners of the mattress. Nothing. Then I heard him. A rustling noise, as of little legs scurrying around inside a box. I looked for the nearest possible sources of the noise and saw only the bedside table and the bureau which my wife uses for her make-up (on top) and underwear (below). No, surely not. Not there. I went closer. I listened. I waited.
There it was again. That noise. Damn him, he was close now.
Then I saw the monstrous leaf-like shell push its way up and out of a drawer – out of my wife’s knicker drawer, to be precise. Well, I wasn’t having that. Not only was this cockroach a pest, he was also a sex pest. Sensing my wrath, he panicked and fell off the drawer onto the floor. I homed in on him like a Norse God homes in on a bowl of mead. Down came the Tupperware. I slid the lid under his frantically scuttling legs, and he was mine.
I looked at him through the opaque plastic. At that moment, there was just me and him in the universe – me and the cockroach; my rival, my nemesis. But now I had him, what was I to do with him? More specifically, how was I to dispose of him? There’s child-safety netting across all our windows. It’s wide enough to admit a cockroach, but not wide enough to admit a Tupperware bowl containing a cockroach. The only place where there isn’t any netting is the kitchen, but then you’ve got the sink to contend with. There's no way in hell you could pull off a clean lid-removal and ejection with that there – and I knew only too well that a panicked cockroach, thrown badly, likes nothing better than to fly backwards into its captor’s face, there to kiss and snuggle and generally make-up for all the misunderstandings of the previous hour.
I could hear nothing but my beating heart. What to do? How to escape this predicament? I felt like Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls when he sees Moriarty approaching him along the ledge. For a moment, I debated hurling myself out of the window, the Tupperware clutched tightly to my chest. On the way down I would probably scream something poetic, like, ‘And so it ends as it began: the two of us, together!’ But that seemed a bit melodramatic, so in the end I just threw the whole Tupperware bowl out of the window.
As far as I know, the cockroach didn't have a hat on. Otherwise, this is accurate.There was an ominous bonk. It was the sound of the Tupperware hitting the ground. It was not the sound you hear when I make love.
It was over...almost.
I looked around and surveyed the carnage in the bedroom. Someone was going to have clear up this mess. That someone was me. Showing characteristic efficiency, I was done in no time. Afterwards I put on some clothes and informed my wife that it was safe to come out. When she emerged, we looked at each other. There was no use pretending. Something had changed between us. Our lives would never be the same again.
"The cockroach is gone!" "Yeah, he's history!" "Great stuff." "Yeah." "Really great news." "Mmm."I got into the lift and went downstairs. The man I saw looking back at me in the mirror was a stranger. That's not a metaphor; I'd never seen him before. It was pretty unusual to see someone else in the lift at that time of night, so we said hello then ignored each other. I felt relieved I had put clothes on.
I stepped out of the lift. The strung-out buzz of early morning hung over the foyer, like a cheap imitation of Raymond Chandler. Outside, the wind breathed its windy secrets into the palm trees and I could hear the sound of drunken taxi-drivers singing to each other in complex five-part harmonies echo among the empty buildings. Just another Saturday night in São Paulo.
When I got round to the other side of the building, I homed in on the Tupperware like a bloodhound homes in on blood. The first thing I noticed as I approached was that its lid was still on. That meant the cockroach was still in there, and might still be alive. My senses focused to a point as sharp as the tip of an assassin’s stilettoes, or the blade of a really top-class Samurai sword. I picked up the Tupperware and held it to the light.
I could tell immediately that he was dead, gone: an empty shell. His arms were frozen in what might have been a futile plea – futile because gravity doesn’t make special allowances for anyone, not even cockroaches or Sir Isaac Newton, the man who invented gravity.
Man, with legs like that, Newton should have stopped wasting his time on science and auditioned for Britain's Next Top Model.In death, the cockroach was almost beautiful – almost, but actually not at all. In fact, he was still pretty gruesome. And yet, as I cradled the Tupperware in my well-toned forearms, I looked down on that silent little husk with something like sadness. It occurred to me that his curled-up legs would never again scurry through someone’s knicker-drawer, his mandibles would never again slurp at a maggoty carcass, and I would never again have the opportunity of treading on his crunchy little head.
As I walked back upstairs, I couldn’t stop thinking. The question I kept coming back to was whether, after everything we'd been through, it had been the fall which killed him. If it wasn't that, then he must have suffered from vertigo, which seemed a pretty ironic phobia for an animal that spends most of its time crawling up and down walls.
One thought led to another like Russian dolls that have come to life at the command of an insane toy-maker. After a while, I started musing on the nature of fear itself, and it occurred to me that fear is the one emotion which unites all living beings – even stones. Take that cockroach: he was scared of me, and I was scared of him. What did it all mean? Had I made a terrible mistake in deciding that he was my enemy? After all we’d been through, were we really brothers?
‘You’re back,’ she said, flinging herself into my arms, which almost overbalanced me (she’s really quite big now).
‘Yes,’ I said, after a moment’s pause. ‘I’m back now. Back for good.’
And she wept.
THE END….OR IS IT?
Enigmatic: totally my middle name.
Reader Comments (2)
I was searching for an image of a pregnant cockroach (don't ask me why...) and stumbled on your page... and ended up reading the entire post, not because the story of man capturing a cockroach should logically seem as epic has a knight battling ten thousand enemies or gandalf galloping down the slope to face the orcs, but because of how epically your writing made it seem so. I chuckled quite a few times, so thank you for the entertaining read! Plus now, I know I'm not the only one who battles with cockroaches like that!
Thanks, xl, you mysterious wanderer, you. God speed you in your hunting!