Monsters

I should have listened more carefully to the last words of my mosquito. I wasn`t really paying attention, you see: I just wanted him dead. In hindsight, it was probably a mistake.

"More..." he whimpered as he died, unsticking himself from the back of my hand. "More.....more.... more...."
"You want more?" I said, and slapped him again.
"More... coming....," he whispered: "there are more...coming," and then he made an "eeeeuuuurgghh" sound and went to a place where the streams are made of blood and the buildings are made of human arms and he can suck himself into a stupor every single day.
"Like hell they are," I said crossly, and went straight out and bought a mosquito repellant for every room in my house.

What I didn`t realise, though, was that he didn`t mean more of him.

The mould came first. Five weeks of rain, and everything I own is growing: my pyjamas, my towels, the insides of my cupboards, my shampoo bottles. Even my Hello Kitty car keyring has been fatally wounded. I`m cleaning like a crazy, mould-obsessed tyrant - scrubbing and spraying and vacuuming when I should really be lying lazily on my bed, reading a book and eating chocolate - but I can`t get rid of it: until the rain stops - which it is showing no sign whatsoever of doing - the mould is just going to keep growing.

The mould, at least, is fairly stationary, and that I can handle. What I can`t handle is what came second, in quick succession: ants. I don`t have a clue where they`re coming from, and I don`t have a clue where they`re going, but coming and going they most certainly are: doing gymnastics that I didn`t think ants were capable of (up and down my curtains, for instance, without any kind of rope). These worry me greatly, because if they`re not actually climbing up my legs and my arms - which they often are - I think they`re climbing up my legs and my arms, and anything that threatens my very unstable grip on the distinction between reality and fiction is extremely dangerous for my mental health.

Third was the dragonflies. Not pretty dragonflies - not the shiny blue and green kind we get in England that everybody treats like butterflies - but dragon dragon flies: scaly and wiry and hundreds of them, whirring through the air with massive, four-wing propelled force into windows and lights and each other (where they make the most of it by quickly mating). These were followed by flies - and nobody likes flies - and spiders: spiders that jump.

"What is it doing?" I shouted to my colleague as one started bouncing around my desk and tried to hide under my work laptop.
"Jumping," he said.
"Why is it jumping?" I cried indignantly.
"Spiders like jumping," he told me.
"British spiders don`t," I told him, rolling my chair to the other side of the room. "They sit perfectly still in their webs and wait for things to come to them."
"They are lazy," my colleague informed me, and caught the efficient and productive spider carefully before smashing him in with the bottom of his mug (I was not happy about this either: I wanted him away, not dead).

Like any good attack, however, the mould, the ants, the flies - both dragon and otherwise - and the spiders were all just wearing me down for the one who would finish me off.

"Jesus - - - - Christ!" I screamed as I was taking my makeup off last night (except I didn`t scream that: I inserted four or five profanities in between the two blasphemies). And then I bolted out of my bathroom quicker than I`ve ever bolted out of anything, shut the door, shut another door, and sat on my bed rubbing my arms and rocking backwards and forwards.

Because - on my ceiling, walking slowly and maliciously and pausing now and then to look at me and wave his long, flexible, arm-like antennas as a kind of warning - was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen in my entire life.

The other monsters I could handle. Mould, ants, flies: you name it, and I can fight it. I don`t like killing things - and I won`t if I can help it - but I`ll do it in self defence (and that is what it is: they`re in my house, on my land, invading my territory). This bastard, however, makes me want to cry and cast aside every bit of independence and femininist pride I have and scream for a big man to come and fight it for me. Quite aside from being massive and shiny and black - nine centremetres without counting his nasty, creepy antennas - he has the air of an indestructible alien: as if he`s in no hurry, and is just surveying his domain with a view to populating it and building some kind of cockroach city. And it is his domain. I haven`t been in that part of my bathroom since.

"There`s a Japanese saying," a colleague said when I informed her of my monster this morning. "If you see one cockroach, it means there are thirty."
"I don`t want to know," I said, shuddering.
"Oh, don`t worry," she told me. "You won`t."

My mosquito`s final warning was his last act of love, I think. That, or a threat of vengeance. Tonight, I will not be fighting imaginary tigers and gremlins. With a entire basket full of poison and insecticide, I am going to take on a house full of monsters, and I`m not going to stop fighting until every single one of them is dead. And - let me tell you - I am not looking forward to it in the slightest.

I`m used to fighting monsters. Big monsters, little monsters, scary monsters, friendly monsters. Dream monsters, internal monsters, past monsters, future monsters.

I`m just not used to fighting real ones.