21st-Century Yokel

family, several of my best and oldest friends, returned to the county of my previous home and felt deep regret that I wasn’t able to do it all more often. In the days I’d been away, late autumn’s dimmer switch had been turned. The lawn had had its last mow of the year and paths and roads were overspattered with marauding leaf mess. The granite on houses and churches was getting that inky rain-lashed look again that is synonymous with shorter days and pinched light. I was back alone in a house that I’d initially found for two people, still raw from my recent decision to end that partnership. Before I’d embarked on my trip I’d noticed a troubling smell in the small room where I keep most of my book collection but had not had time to properly investigate its source, and now I noticed that the smell was getting the opposite of better. I called a cat over for a cuddle, told it how much I’d missed it. It ignored me and headed for the garden, slamming the cat flap on its way out.

If you live in the countryside and have cats what you’re essentially saying is, ‘I permit narcissists to hide dead things in my house.’ Cats are ardent creatures of habit but they also do not like to get in a rut. Cats only sleep regularly in one place for a month. After that, by law they must move or they stop being cats. They select and switch their abbatoirs with similar fastidiousness. For a spell the dining room had served as the killing floor for my two most bloodthirsty cats, Ralph and Shipley, then the bathroom, but recently they had preferred the book room. The chief problem had been rabbits. I’d managed to save a few, thanks to my advanced tackling skills. One had escaped and hidden behind the freezer, and I’d managed to lure it out, in cartoon fashion with an old carrot, then plonk it below a hedge. But I had a life to lead. I couldn’t be constantly sitting at home on a state of high alert with a carrot in my hand. Inevitably, there were casualties. A couple of weeks previously I’d cleaned up a particularly messy headless rabbit corpse on the floor of the book room. I don’t have the greatest sense of smell but, even though I scrubbed the carpet no less assiduously than a nineteenth-century saloon owner would have scrubbed a stain left from a gunfight, I could not subsequently convince myself I’d entirely got rid of the waft.

I’m very fond of the book room. It’s full of books, after all, but it’s a cold room with no curtains or double glazing and not somewhere where I spend a lot of time in winter, which is another reason I’d been slow in clocking the strength of this latest smell and only begun to properly investigate it now.

I made a couple of attempts to stop buying books in the distant past but I’ve since realised it’s an absurd denial of who I am as a person. The fact is, books have always been very kind to me, and I can’t stand to see them sitting alone in shops, unloved. One day I’ll probably trap myself behind a book wall for ever, but the way I look at it is that I’ll be reading as I starve to death, so it will be OK. My to-read pile at this point spilt far beyond the shelves themselves and far beyond sense, teetering in higgledy-piggledy piles on tables. Moving the books to shift the shelving units and get behind them – which, I assumed, was where the smell was coming from, having ruled out everywhere else in the room – was a major operation. My initial forensic work uncovered, not too surprisingly, the remains of two dead voles, long since rotted away, but I sensed I was in the middle of a bigger story here, and upon moving the fifth and final bookcase I reached its awful climactic scene.

It was a rabbit, I could discern that immediately. But what it resembled more accurately was a charcoal illustration of a rabbit ghost, drawn by an artist with a bent towards satanism. I felt like I’d stepped inside the missing one of Fiver’s nightmares in Watership Down that got cut for being too adult. If I blinked, would it vanish? I tried to think of someone close to me who might come and briefly hold me in a tender way, then leave. Parents? Hundreds of miles away. My mate Seventies Pat? No. He lived in Dudley. The corpse’s edges were indistinct, as if surrounded by an evil vapour. I saw maggots writhing where its brain once had been. An impossible black ooze welded it to the wall and oozed with more determined malevolence as I attempted to move it. The smell was intolerable, like a monolithic forecast of every small awfulness you’ve ever worried would come true. As I went back in for a third time with every bit of cleaning equipment I could find in the house, I genuinely began to wonder what would be easier: carrying on with my attempt to save the carpet or quickly packing a couple of bags and moving to India.

I headed off briskly to the supermarket and returned with more cleaning materials and odour-eliminating paraphernalia suggested by friends and my mum: bicarb of soda, coloured biological washing liquid, Febreze. After four hours I had rid the room of the dark spectre and its innumerable attendant maggots but it had taken out a mortgage on my part-working nose. From above me, a papier-mâché hare, made by my friend Mary for my birthday four and half years earlier and now pinned to the wall, gazed mordantly down at my work.

This is the stuff that’s so rarely factored into the time management of a rural self-employed life with cats: the twenty minutes you will fritter away looking for a vole