It is now thirteen days since my last update and world events have flowed in the typical fashion. Lovers entwine, lovers disconnect. The leaves turn a funny colour and fall onto the cold, wet earth, and crumble into the soil to feed the trees of the future. Amazon packages are picked, labelled, dispatched from the fulfilment centre in large vans, delivered to the doors of unknown people. Sometimes these items are returned due to the customer finding them dissatisfactory, and are subsequently returned to the fulfilment centre for the process to begin again. The wicked are born, and the wicked do pass. And far away, beyond our eyes, meteors fly through an endless black vacuum and collide with raging stars.

Last Saturday I was in the hot tub somewhere nice in Shropshire and failed to follow the repeated advice of my brother to take my phone out of the water, thinking in the back of my mind that phones are surely waterproof by now, and what’s the worst that can happen? I can live without a phone, homosapiens have been around for three hundred thousand years without a single app and got on just fine. 

Fast forward 12 hours and I had been driving for 3 hours on the M5 past an endless Birmingham towards Worcester, with no payment method, and an infernally red fuel gage. I was thinking thoughts such as, ‘am I going to have to borrow some randomer’s phone at the service station to call my Dad?’ and knowing that if that came to pass then it would be the end of at least one of us. Love you Dad. 

I stopped at a service station and thankfully a large man sitting alone and eating lots of different food items was able to scrawl a simple and helpful diagram on the back of a Greggs bag showing which roads to take. I followed the directions and got back to Nottingham after approximately four hours of one of life’s most intense sanity examinations. I passed, achieving a grade C at best.

In the weeks prior I was becoming a familiar customer to the ruthless killers at PCHQ. A few times me and the rat lads had laughed merrily about the rat in the flat, discussing our strategy, reflecting on the constitution of our ever-cunning target. We bonded when they sent Ratman down, whose role was not the surveyor but the ‘dispatcher’.  Ratman requested I leave a key for them so they could come in and I left it in a tree at the front of the drive. He video-called me and it took a long time for me to direct the young man to the tree in question, and when he reached it, it became apparent the key had fallen into the shrubs below. He got in eventually, I presumed, as when I returned home the fridge had moved forward slightly. I got in touch with him later and he confirmed he had been in and laid the traps. It was now a case of waiting for Ratman to come over one day and confirm that he had found the body and disposed of it, or the less favourable scenario; waiting for a particularly putrid smell to come from the kitchen…

I endured Sunday- Wednesday with no phone.  I had seen or heard nothing of Rattus for a while now, as I was leaving no food out, and no longer using the wildlife camera. He was out of sight and out of mind, but this was soon to change. 

In the middle of the Wednesday night, as many of us do, I got up to go to the bathroom. I was terrified as a thing scurried across the kitchen floor towards the bathroom with all the speed of a curling stone. I swore loudly, as this is not the sort of thing one expects to experience when undergoing such a trivial task. The thing hid where I thought was behind the freezer next to the bathroom, but then as I moved to the toilet it became clear it was in the bathroom with me as it torpedoed behind the chest of drawers by the sink. I did what I needed to do, very tentatively, then left, making sure I closed the door on Rattus. By doing this I had taken my first opportunity to control this lawless rodent’s behaviour, which was a welcome change from it controlling mine.  I then went to bed, my heart beating rapidly, adrenaline coursing through my blood vessels from the shock, thinking deeply about the rat, my worklife, my character as a human being, then progressed to great mysteries like- has there ever been a truly supernatural event that can be backed up by evidence? And what happened to Martin Platt in Coronation Street? 

The next day I got on my laptop, onto Instagram chat and promptly employed my brother as an intermediary with Ratman, providing him with his number so he could forward the following message; 

please can you text rt man say he’s locked in the bathroom if theres any chance he could come in today please

And the next day, Ratman came back.