Resident Rat

He looked peaceful. Despite the scrunched claws and glistening grey lips pared back from his jutting yellow teeth, he looked like he was asleep.

But how had he ended up dead in the middle of the trampoline? Had a miscalculated star jump followed by a triple pike caused a severed spine? Had he been dropped by a carrion crow?

We have trouble with the crows who live in the neighbour’s copse. They throw toast down all the chimney pots and peer suspiciously in through the top casements.

Had he been thrown over the garden wall by a passing prankster?

It was too tidy a scene for a haphazard late-night lob. His thick grey tail was too neatly laid out, his whiskers too proud for him to have been thrown.

However, whatever, he was no more.

We have enjoyed much sport with our resident rat during the summer months. He’s been sauntering in and out of the open back door since March.

Late night forays in through the stop pipe gap into the kitchen cupboards, gluttonous feasting on the crumbs beneath the toaster, chewing the carpet in the corners of every downstairs room, even gnawing through the fur and gristle of an ancient stuffed fox in the dining room.

He’s had a fine old time. Trotting back to his subterranean gaff most mornings, ignoring the respectful gaze of The Labradors, skirting the shoe-box-sized plastic rat trap.

He has popped, pooped and pattered. And now he’s gone.

I took a photo of him. Lying there in the sunshine. In the middle of the trampoline.

Gaylord wore a latex milking glove to scoop him up.

And then all of us; Ice Baby, Sister P and The Moomster processed solemnly to the wheelie bin, the grey one where our rat had enjoyed so many industrious hours.

And silently watched as G laid him inside next to an empty Chappie tin.

“Where there’s one rat, there’s always a dozen more,” he announced.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “We’re a One Rat family.”

But it’s what I so love about Gaylord. He’s always right on these occasions.

The kettle had barely boiled when I saw a large furry ball attached to a long grey tail scuttle across the garden path.