El Andalous - Rats, Seventh Night

La Piazza Restaurant, Sahl Hasheesh

I got up the next morning and looked at my bedroom door. The plastic bags hadn’t shifted. I decided that at least my residents had perhaps learned that my bedroom was out of bounds. I went into the lounge. The front door had not been attacked.

It was time to wash and get dressed. I knocked on the bathroom door, just in case, although I knew that the rodents were nocturnal creatures and would be unlikely to be around. I opened it, looked around and spotted a tail and a bit of a furry body sticking out from underneath the cupboard beneath my washbasin. This was exactly where I needed to stand.

It wasn’t moving in any way. I shut the door and wondered what to do. I knocked again on the bathroom door with my crutch, looked again, and the tail and body were still in the same position. It was either dead or in a deep sleep. There was no way I was going to stand there and find out which of the two alternatives applied.

I had to dress without washing and went promptly to security by the front door. At least this time I was pretty confident that the rodent would still be there by the time we got back. The security guy went into the bathroom and said he couldn’t see anything, so I waved my crutch in the general direction. He then immediately fetched housekeeping who prodded it until they could tease the dead body from out of under the cabinet. I watched from a distance.

Part of me felt a bit sorry for it, another part of me was hugely hopeful that maybe this single rodent had got trapped in my flat after the vents had got blocked (hence the attempts to gnaw at my door), and that its death heralded the end of my problems.

I’d dismissed the hypothesis of the lone rodent the day before, when Medhat had suggested that perhaps just one rodent was trapped in the flat, but now the idea suddenly seemed plausible and appealing. The rodent was the same colour as the one that had popped its head up by the fridge and if it had experienced me frightening it away from my bedroom, it would explain why my bedroom had been rodent-free for some nights now.

I felt relief wash over me and spent the day happily on my balcony and the night happily sprawled on my sofa as I watched TV. As a precautionary measure, I left the bedside light on for a few hours, but I even turned that off when I woke up in the middle of the night. My torture was perhaps over.