While I couldn’t spontaneously name them, I feel sure there were good qualities I wanted to pass on to my children. But all I’ve managed to transmit is a violent fear of rodents, and even that, to only one of them. I didn’t realise how successful I’d been until a couple of years ago, when we saw a mouse in my son’s bedroom. I screamed; he screamed. I jumped on the bed; he jumped on a chair – but it was a revolving one, so he started spinning round, screaming, and I screamed more. Mr Z ran in expecting an intruder, though I notice he didn’t bring anything to use as a weapon. As much as I reviled it, I felt a bit sorry for the mouse. It was all so ultra.
Consequent to this very noisy, melodramatic phobia, it pleases my associates to tell me stories about mice and rats, which, generally speaking, aren’t true. My brother-in-law told me that, if they have a rat problem on a building site, they contain all the rats in a zone where the only food source is each other, until finally they have one giant rat, and they shoot it in the head. It stalks my dreams, this mutant rat cannibal, even though it makes no sense. On holiday, my friend told me there was a rat in the kitchen, and while I could recognise this at 50 paces as the title of a popular song, I nevertheless believed that there was also a real rat, in the kitchen.
This is the backdrop to just another Friday night in a pub garden, when a character I didn’t see, as I had my back to him, streaked across some flower pots, almost exactly at the level of our necks. He – rats are only ever male in my neurotic imaginings, mice are only ever female – was as big as a cat, and as fearless as a wolf. This was all described to me in florid detail by those around the table who saw him, who I chose not to believe, as I’ve been fooled so often. The problem with rats is that you can only smell them once they’re dead. It would be much more useful, from an avoidance perspective, to be able to smell them when they’re alive.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
