I’ve never been afraid of rats. My mother’s mother is afraid of rats. She can pick up a wolf-spider in her bare hands, but rats, mice, or anything of a vaguely similar appearance terrifies her. Bats make her shudder.
When my sister and I kept hamsters she would never go into the same room. For years our dining room was off-limits because of the tiny furry creatures living in cages on top of the piano. Even guinea pigs bother her. She’s getting worse. Just lately, the squirrels in the garden have started to make her twitch.
She won’t call rats and mice, “rats” and “mice”. Instead she calls them longtails, endowing this pitiful stray collection of rodents with some mystical quality to terrify through a magical name. Anthropologists call it totemism or fetishism.
“I tell you what did me,” she has explained to me more than once with a wheeze. “When I was young I walked past the site of a factory that was being torn down. There were longtails everywhere. Dead longtails in piles, and live ones running all over the road as the factory came down. Ever since then I’ve always been funny about them. They’re horrible, dirty things.”
I think rats are quite sweet. I once saw a little girl holding a pet rat. The rat was almost as big as her.
Last week we were eating in a restaurant down by the river. There was a water rat scurrying around in the grass on the bank.
The rat was very paranoid. It was terrified of people.
