I have rats tap dancing in my roof. It starts off with a few small shuffles and pick ups and, before you know it, it’s the opening number to 42nd Street. God only knows how many are up there, but boy do they like to dance.
They are stuck in the bit of the roof above where I write. In the summer months, they are asleep when I work, but now that the nights have drawn in I get to listen to their warmup numbers just as I finish my day.
Getting to them requires crawling through an incredibly small hatch, but that is not the only reason I have never been into our attic. This house has had some pretty … let’s just say interesting tenants in the past and I have a persistent worry that there is something up there other than rats. On both accounts, I have been putting off the problem of what is above my head.
I have been bitten by a rat in the past. I mistakenly put my hand on one in the chicken coop when looking inside the nest box. It was soft, warm and bit me very hard. In surprise and fear, my response was to squeeze harder. We were locked in this clamp until I came to my senses and whacked it on a nearby tree trunk. That made it really mad and it jumped up and down to let me know.
What was more terrifying, in retrospect, was the injection for rabies and tetanus that I had to get in A&E. It was a Victorian-looking thing with a huge glass vial and, as I remember it, a 10in syringe that they stick in your backside. Oh, rats.
For weeks, I have been going round and round this issue. I could lay snap traps – but when they don’t kill outright, it’s brutal. I will spare you the details. My neighbour Rhian lent me her humane trap. I have used these before, but, quite rightly, the rats don’t take to being trapped and they do that jumping thing, so I don’t fancy trying to get one of those through that tiny hatch in the ceiling. Plus, you have to relocate the rat somewhere suitable; dumping it in the woods beside someone else’s house isn’t exactly playing ball. As their routine starts up again, I flirt with the idea of poison and search for a dancing rat meme to send to my wife at work.
Of course, TikTok has reels and reels of dancing rats – real ones, being held up under their arms and moving to the sound of disco, although I am not sure they are having fun. I suddenly feel sympathy for the rats.
This rabbit hole leads me to a study that found that rats have rhythm – they bop their heads in time to the beat. I watch a lab rat nod along to Lady Gaga and then to a speeded-up version of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust. Just like us, they appreciate music when it is played at 120‑140 beats per minute. The most interesting part of the research, other than the choice of music (it included Maroon 5 and Mozart) is that the rats aren’t exactly anticipating the music, but they are not startled by it, either. It’s not a jerking reaction to fear; they are actually nodding along. This dancing rat thing is stealing hours from my life.
There are two solutions, as I see it. We live with the rats and hope they don’t burn the house down by gnawing through some wires, or we make it someone else’s problem. We could call in a man. Someone else could crawl through the cobwebs and rat droppings and deal with it. But calling in a man is akin to asking for your lesbian membership card to be revoked. “I can do this!” I say to my wife, as we drink tea in bed listening to them start up again. She gives me side-eye and says, unexpectedly, that she will do it, in a hazmat suit and perhaps some goggles and gauntlets.
That was weeks ago. As I write, they are warming up again.
• Alys Fowler is a gardener and freelance writer
