I always found it difficult to sleep as a child. For up to four hours a night the eldest sister of the kids upstairs would fight a losing (and what seemed an emotionally breaking battle) to keep her siblings in check. Then, just as she was beginning to flag her parents would come back pished as farts from the pub and kick the shit out of each other for a few hours.
Simpler times…
On the nights when the carnage and the domestic violence gave way to psychological torment and unconsciousness, I would usually dose off around eleven. However, just as I was beginning to drift off into slumber, my bedroom door would invariably flash full with light and the behemoth figure of my mother would appear as an arm-raised silhouette in the doorway.
Held aloft in her hands were my dad’s ‘good shoes’ which when he was on the nightshift doubled up as arachnid destroyers. The shoe would be thrust into my hands and I’d plead for a night where I didn’t have to kill something! Maybe I could move in with the domestic abusers upstairs?
But I was never allowed to… I’d gingerly grasp the shoe taking care not to brush my hands against the splattered remains of the previous intruder’s mashed carcass! A gargantuan task given that we lived next door to a dampened wood collector and so spiders were aplenty seemingly destined to be fed to my dad’s shoes…
I’d approach the ‘beast’ which in reality was nowhere close to meeting the claimed dish-size of the spider in my mother’s head. Nonetheless, she would not be satiated until she saw blood on the carpet and guts on the ol’ size nines!
Fast forward to the present day and I find myself faced with a similar quandary. My housemate Simon and I are both of a similar school of thought on small animals; no killing. However, that has all gone out of the window now that there is a cockroach the size of my fucking thumb darting around our kitchen.
It’s 2am… If ever there was a city where you could get pest control products at this hour it would have to be Hong Kong. However, as a certified lazy bastard I’m reluctant to go out and find out.
And so in a full scale shift from my Dr. Dolittle ethos of not harming anything great or small, I find myself maniacally musing over the best way to murder the little bastard. I’ve never been in the scouts but I read that in between beatings and learning to be a lame-ass, they learn to be resourceful with what is around them…
So after a quick sweep of the flat I find that the most homicidal substances available in our flat are (1) Adidas Power Deoderant (2) Mr. Jackson Lemon Pine Toilet Cleaner and (3) Old red wine. In an instantaneous act of cruel thinking, I lay a small pool of bleach on the work surface, rustle up some courage by glugging at the surely mouldy wine and then spray the shit out of the roach with the Adidas Power Deoderant.
Now given that those little bastards can probably survive a nuclear explosion I felt compelled to spray it pretty comprehensively. The plan was to get it pissed on the alcohol before the more deadly repercussions of being doused at close range in body corroding chemicals became apparent.
The roach, possibly sensing the game was up, made a dash for the top of the cupboards and bloody made it too! When I’m as trolleyed as he must’ve been I can barely walk horizontally – but he had a plan to go vertical and what’s more he managed to follow it through. This again is something I couldn’t do if I was that drunk.
And so it all ended in an embarrassing scenario where I broke into a game of catch-out. I found myself salivating wildly as I turned out the lights then moments later turned them on in an auroric flash of anticipation; but the roach never appeared…
He could be dead…
He could be alive… Plotting and planning my demise from the ragged dried cornflake edges of my cereal bowl. As I write he could be amassing an army of cockroach cunts ready to ambush me upon my return home…
And what’s more, he’ll have so much Adidas Power Deoderant on that he’ll not even break a sweat!
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