mouse

We have a mouse living in our walls.

We don't quite know what to do about it. We heard it scuffling around between the bedrooms at 4am, but we don't know how or where it got in. We don't know where we would put a trap, or who would deal with a trap full of dead mouse. Between us we have most things covered - we can get rid of spiders and slugs, do most bits of incidental DIY, and deal with any potentially awkward legal issues that might come up, but present us with a dead rodent and we really are a house full of girls.

"Why don't you just get one of those traps you can throw out?"
"Why did you think we were going to manhandle a dead mouse just because we'd caught it in a reusable trap?"
"Does anyone know any men?"
"Nope, none of us know any men. Not a one."
"I know a man, but he's in Canada."

In the meantime, the mouse is in the walls. And once, possibly in my bedroom. There was squeaking and scurrying and things rolling out from under my bed one night last week, and now I'm sleeping with the light on until I can work out how it got in and find a way to make it stop doing that.

My brain, being the jerk it occasionally is, has observed that a) there is most definitely a mouse and b) the mouse has been able to get into my room, and twisted this until EVERY SINGLE SOUND made when I'm trying to go to sleep is somehow mouse-related. I heard a noise. There was definitely a noise. OK, now there's no noise. No noise no noise no noise OH GOD A NOISE I heard it again there's definitely a mouse in here and then I have to remind myself that mice don't actually work that way, Jen. The mouse isn't trying to sneak its way into the room, playing The Pink Panther in its head, standing on its tiptoes and pressing its back up against the wall. If it was in here, it would be running around and squeaking and disturbing everything, like that time when there actually was a mouse. And then it's hard to sleep because I'm preoccupied with feeling like a dumbass.

It feels like the kind of thing that shouldn't bother me. In most ways I'm a semi-competent adult these days. I can cook, I can clean a toilet, I can fix minor problems with my laptop, I can handle even the most stone mental of landlords. I'm not lacking in life skills. A small pest should not be a problem, and it usually isn't. But when it is, I turn into an avoidant child. A few years ago my friend and I went to Mexico and found the most enormous cockroach in our hotel bathroom. Rather than get rid of it, we just named it Bob and spent the next week taking very nervous showers and ordering it to stay away (until one night I woke up to find it had got out of the bathroom and was crawling over my duvet, at which point I scooped it up on a book and flung it out through the patio doors. Too far, Bob. Too far).

Part of me feels like I should declare war on the mouse, get over my own silliness and get rid of it. But it's entirely possible that, since we're about to move out, the mouse will get rid of us rather than the other way round. Maybe I should name it.