There's A Rat In The Toilet

My mother-in-law had a rat in her toilet.

Not, initially, in the toilet. That distinction would become important later. He was sitting on the floor of the room, apparently quite at home, although presumably as surprised to find himself in Joy's downstairs lavatory as Joy was to find him there.

She did the only sensible thing. She shut the door.

This created the first difficulty, because although the rat was now safely contained, at some point somebody was going to have to open it again.

The family WhatsApp group was informed.

This was Joy's mistake.

A pest controller was suggested. Unfortunately, the available pest controller apparently had no means of actually dealing with a rat, a circumstance roughly equivalent to calling a fireman and discovering he had temporarily run out of water.

Joy declared she no longer wanted to live in her house. Someone suggested she might want to get an estate agent round whilst she was calling on tradespeople.

She didn't find this funny.

Everyone else did.

Then somebody had an idea. Open the lavatory door. Open the front door. Use a broom to usher the rat outside.

There was something rather lovely about the confidence of this plan. It relied entirely upon the assumption that the rat, once released, would understand what was expected of him. Lavatory door, hallway, front door, outside. Thank you very much, sir. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Nobody appeared to have considered that the rat might have his own itinerary.

"Who has a broom?" somebody asked.

"Everyone has a broom," came the baffled response.

"I imagined a witch's broom."

This was the standard of operational planning.

By now the rat had acquired a name: Roland. This was probably inevitable. You cannot have a rat trapped in a downstairs lavatory for this long without somebody naming him.

Meanwhile, in a parallel family group from which Joy was conveniently absent, someone was struggling with an earworm.

There's a rat in my toilet what am I going to do?

Eventually a route was constructed. The front door stood ready. A barricade prevented an inconvenient left turn along the hall. The family prepared for Roland's ceremonial departure from the property.

The lavatory door was opened.

There was no rat.

There was, however, blood. Quite a lot of blood. All over the toilet bowl.

The family response to the photograph was not universally compassionate.

"Did it bite her on the arse?"

"Did she twat it?"

"Whack a mole."

And thus, inevitably: Twat-a-Rat.

It was at this point that a rather less amusing possibility presented itself. Roland might already have been poisoned. If he had eaten rat poison, the bleeding suddenly made sense. So did his strange appearance in the house. He may have been very ill and disorientated when he came up through the drainage system and emerged into Joy's downstairs toilet.

Which raised another question.

Where was he now?

If he had come up the toilet, it seemed reasonable to suppose that, when faced with captivity, brooms and an increasingly agitated household, he had gone back down it.

This was initially reassuring.

Unfortunately, my imagination had by now become fully invested in the problem.

Because Roland might be dying.

And if Roland was dying, there was absolutely no reason to suppose he would nobly press onwards through the drainage system until he reached a location sufficiently distant from Joy's house that his eventual decomposition caused no inconvenience. He might simply expire just around the U-bend.

I found myself contemplating this with considerably more enthusiasm than was decent.

A rat decomposing just beyond a downstairs toilet was not going to smell faintly unpleasant. It was going to smell like the road to hell.

And from there, inevitably, my mind moved on to propulsion.

Someone simply needed to use the toilet. Not delicately. What was required was a bowel movement of sufficient dimensions and velocity to propel Roland onwards towards the main sewer.

A more-than-rat-sized poo.

Unfortunately, my imagination immediately identified the flaw in its own solution.

Nobody was ever going to sit on that toilet again.

There are pieces of information the human mind cannot unlearn, and a rat came up through this toilet is one of them. You could disinfect it. You could bleach it. You could have the drains surveyed, install non-return valves and obtain a signed declaration from the Water Authority confirming that every rat in Britain had been relocated to Belgium.

It wouldn't matter.

You would sit down, look between your knees and think of Roland.

And you would stand up again.

So, in the version of events my imagination had now constructed, Joy was left with a blood-spattered downstairs lavatory, a missing and potentially terminally ill rat, a family whose principal contribution had been to laugh in the alternative WhatsApp group, and the prospect that at any moment the downstairs cloakroom might begin to smell like Satan's wheelie bin.

I did, genuinely, feel sorry for her.

I did.

But from the considerable safety of my own house, the entertainment had been splendid. For an hour or so, nothing else mattered. There was only Joy. And Roland. And somewhere, perhaps just around a U-bend, there remained the faint possibility that the entire crisis could yet be resolved by an exceptionally large turd.

Sometimes you have to take your joy where you find it.

Even when she would very much prefer you did not.