Do you know how bedbugs mate? I’ll tell you. The male bug pierces the abdomen of the female before injecting her with sperm. Sometimes it kills her, which is not ideal from an evolutionary perspective, but still, they persist. It’s by no means the most violent or shocking mating practice (I think fairly often about male angler fish, who sink their teeth into the female, living as a parasite on her body until the two fuse, the male becoming completely absorbed leaving only his testes, which she keeps for when she’s ready to reproduce), but I think you’ll agree it’s up there. I’m thinking about bedbugs because, you see, I have just been to Paris. I returned to London to one question, asked regularly with a smirk and vague little fear. I knew, suddenly, how tall people must feel upon being asked repeatedly how the weather was up there. “Bring back any bedbugs?” said every single person at least once. And while I’m yet to discover whether I have transported them back on my clothes, I know for certain they’re on my mind.
I hadn’t realised bedbugs had a smell. Did you know they had a smell? Some describe it as desperately sweet, berrylike, others say bedbugs smell like coriander. Perhaps I’ve read too much, it’s possible I’ve read too much. They roam across the skin of their victims (originally believed to be bats, did you know that?) looking for a blood vessel with their antennae. They grip the skin with their tiny legs, before plunging their beak into the flesh. The beak, incidentally, has rows of sharp little teeth at its tip, allowing it to stab and dig until it finds blood. They start the meal flat, like a seed, but end it round and red. Some words just crawl across the page, don’t they? I have shaken out my laptop.
Holding up a vial of bedbugs in the National Assembly at the beginning of October, MP Mathilde Panot said: “These little insects are spreading despair in our country. Do we need to wait for Matignon [the official residence of the prime minister] to become infested before you act?” The tone suggested a level of despair beyond simply bedbugs. Although, one funny thing about these bugs is how much horror and disgust they excite in us, especially when compared to other insects whose attacks can do far more damage. Ticks can cause Lyme disease and mosquitoes malaria – bedbugs simply itch.
Partly their horror comes from the suggestion that they bite when we’re sleeping, like tiny nightmares. And partly, for some, it’s about what they seem to stand for. During a debate on the infestation in Paris, TV host Pascal Praud asked a pest-control specialist if the infestation was linked to his perceived rise in immigration. “These are people who don’t have the same hygiene conditions, who are now on French soil,” he said. “Could it be linked to that?” It feels more than coincidental that everywhere, people like Praud (or Suella Braverman) are forgetting to use symbols like this as dog whistles, and saying that quiet bit out loud.
For hundreds of years, the dirtiness associated with insects has been a sign of shame and the language used slides easily from animal to human, dehumanising immigrants by likening them to parasites, or talking about invasions or “floods”. In her cultural history of vermin, author Lisa Sarasohn traces the disgust of bedbugs back to the 18th century, when wealthy people with intricately carved bedsteads found them living in the cracks. The first professional pest exterminator, in 1730, promised to rid any home of bedbugs with a recipe he’d learned about from “an ex-slave in Jamaica”. In the 20th century, Nazis equipped their gas chambers with Zyklon B, a lice-killing insecticide, used here to kill humans. In her research, Sarasohn “repeatedly found vermin used to justify classism, xenophobia, racism and antisemitism – a pattern that endures”.
I have a news alert on for bedbug stories, and as I type, my computer is jumping every second minute. A GP is urging anyone returning from France “to ask a family member to put two large bin bags, one ziplock bag, and a towel in front of their house” for them to undress into. Luton council is receiving “an alarming number of calls” about bedbugs, French families are dumping mattresses in the street in a “bedbug plague”; the tone of each story is pitched just slightly higher than the squalid squeal of a faulty strimmer. And the interesting thing is, these stories, in their mass and hysteria, have started, I realise, to change how I feel about the bedbugs themselves.
I have come to have great respect for them. The bedbug survives. It survives poisons, it survives contempt, it survives extreme heat and cold, it survives being rolled out as a metaphor whenever a politician is feeling salty, and it survives without food for months. Their resilience is admirable. I can only hope, as darkness falls and the goodnight-sleep-tight rhyme crawls across my tongue, any lurking Parisian bugs read this eulogy, and decide to respectfully move on.
• This article was amended on 22 October 2023. Matignon is the official residence of the French prime minister, not the president.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
