So, the mouse

Promised, and delivered after long delay: the story of the mouse and the toaster.

Well, we had a mouse in the house. I blame the arrival of a cat next door, perhaps a good example of a negative externality: the road’s mice migrating as each house gained a cat. Our mouse was a tricky, wry fellow, waiting until dusk to wander around the ground floor, popping his head round corners, getting a little annoyed if I was sitting at the computer late, waiting a minute, looking round again, “Oh, you’re still here, aren’t you getting sleepy, human?”

Attempts to murder him failed; cheese-filled traps were left untouched. Then, very late one night, I was downstairs, hungry, jet-lagged from America, in search of toast. I slung two slices in the toaster and turned it on. I sat down at the kitchen table, and realised that the toaster was rustling, shaking. It’s quite a large, silvery toaster, with four slots.

I assumed some of the bread’s plastic bag had got caught in the toaster’s grids, and was melting. I peered into the toaster, and something was moving inside it, running back and forth. It was of course, the mouse.

At first, I thought - die, rodent, die! Then I thought - torturing a mouse to death by fire is surely cruel and abhorrent. So I unplugged the toaster.

The mouse was silent. I figured I would carry the toaster out of the house, and leave it outside, so the mouse would be ejected and forced to move to a different address, but then I had a vision of the mouse running out of the toaster and up my arms. Although I’ve travelled through fairly dangerous parts of the world, I’m still an enormous physical coward.

So I took a kitchen knife in one hand, and a wooden spoon in the other, and started rattling on the toaster, ready to get the mouse when it emerged. But there was silence, and I guessed that the mouse had long sinced escaped.

Obviously, in the morning, my mother was not happy with the story, nor was she happy that I’d had a chance to kill the mouse and had let it live (mercy being a virtue confined to the male half of the human species). We put the toaster away, unsure how we could clean it.

About a week passed. My dad gave the toaster a scrub, and we put it back into active service. I made myself a waffle early one morning, smelt a wave of an odd odour, and guessed it was mouse piss somewhere in the kitchen. I ate my waffle.

Later I came downstairs again and discovered that my brother had discovered the truth. The toaster was crawling with maggots. Little white bobbing things - they were spilling out of the toaster’s crumb-catching tray and on to the kitchen surface.

The toaster was cleaned, the maggots killed, and the toaster was put on the desk with the house computer, awaiting its return to John Lewis. Then, later, as I was writing an email, I looked down at the desk, and saw another maggot making its way out of the toaster, bobbing across the wood of the desk. I picked it up and swallowed it down - sorry, just joking - I scooped it up with a tissue and threw it in the bin. When I sat down again, another maggot was on the move.

My dad, my brother and I took the toaster out to the back patio, and he unscrewed it from the bottom. Lodged in one of the side sections, next to a mass of wiring, was the mouse. It had clearly tried to escape the killing heat that night, only to be electrocuted. My dad, not a physical coward like me, extracted the mouse with metal prongs, and its corpse had a big hole in its side, where the maggots continued to crawl out from. Lovely.

Strangely, no one gave me sufficient praise for killing the mouse in the first place.

NB I should point out that my mother keeps the family’s house very clean and tidy, as well as running two or three businesses of her own, and this story reflects nothing bad on her (she sometimes reads this blog). Love you mum.

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Daniel