El Andalous - Rats, Eighth Night

Il Gusto Restaurant, Sahl Hasheesh

It was wonderful to get a proper night’s sleep.

I had another happy day on my balcony, went in to cook my supper, and then went to watch TV. Suddenly, I heard noises in my bathroom. I heard something fall to the ground. Lots of noises of things moving indicated to me that something was running riot in there. I thought I heard a scraping on a ceramic surface (my basin? my shower?). Within that one second, my good spirits evaporated. I was too petrified to go into the bathroom. But what if I needed to go in at some point? It just wasn’t workable.

It was about 9pm. Jacquie had been advising me to phone Medhat even if it was midnight, so that he could see how disruptive it was. I felt I couldn’t really do this, but 9pm seemed early enough to be bordering on reasonable. Besides, it was a Thursday evening, so Friday was their main day off, meaning that it would probably be worse to contact him the following day than now.

Medhat answered my call and I got the impression he wasn’t too pleased – there was a lot of noise in the background – but I didn’t really care. At that precise moment, I was thinking he had to understand just how stressed I was.

He asked me if I’d seen them, so I said I hadn’t, but I could hear them banging around in the bathroom. He said he’d fetch someone to take a look. Around ten minutes later, Yasser arrived, looking as if he had been hauled out from a peaceful night with his family. I felt a bit bad for him.

He went into the bathroom and prodded around. When it became clear that he wasn’t finding anything, I also poked my head round the door and looked where the dead body had been. He showed me that the cupboard went right to the ground and that there was no gap there for anything to crawl into. My previous occupant had simply squeezed itself up against the cupboard where the door hung down to almost cover it.

Yasser, too, asked me if I’d seen the rodents. I said I hadn’t, so he asked me how I knew that there were rats. I was a bit stressed, so I gesticulated in the air as I said that I could hear them and that stuff was being knocked over and that I knew they were there. I looked around as I said it, but actually I couldn’t see anything that had fallen.

Yasser put in some more glue traps and assured me that there was nothing there for now. He had also moved the shower cubicle to see if anything was under there. After he went, I thought and wondered whether actually they were right. Maybe the noises were from next door. I was just so tensed up and on tenterhooks for anything that might sound like it was a rodent, I hadn’t thought of alternative explanations.

In any case, the rest of the evening was quiet. I left the bedside light on during the night, but was feeling relatively confident now that maybe my rodent problems were actually over and I had just over-reacted. But that shadow of doubt always remains.

Two nights later, and no more incidents, and I have now finally concluded that this nightmare is over. I no longer block my bedroom door, I sleep with the lights off, and I no longer hear things going bump in the night.