I have a friend whose mother lives in an aged care facility in rural Queensland. In her elderly delirium she has begun to secretly feed a rat. Not some fey marsupial – rattus rattus himself. My friend tells me you’re not allowed to feed rats in her facility. Whether or not the authorities thought to write a rule against fostering vermin, they sure-as-hell have a nod-and-wink agreement against the practice. So what’s he to do?
His mum has form in this area. When she was young and free, she fed many pest species; foxes, rabbits, Indian mynas, his sisters. At heart, my friend says, his mum is charitable, and believes Sam Coleridge’s advice that, “he prayeth best, who loveth best all things both great and small”. Good news for an erstwhile villain. Its welfare has become her calling, her mission, her passion. It lives in the courtyard outside her room and she puts food out for the thing and apparently it noses through the shrubbery and nibbles her offerings and makes its gustatory opinions known via whiskery semaphore in the manner of Matt Preston.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
My mate was visiting his mum recently and hidden away behind a photo of himself as a boy dressed in cricket gear swinging cloddishly at a wide, he found a club sandwich as hard as teak.
“Gross, Mum. A mouldy sandwich.” He handed it to a cleaner who’d just come into the room and his mother rose up in bed and snapped “Put that back at once”.
“It’s fossilised,” the cleaner protested.
“Leave it,” she demanded. “It’s for my … for my … birds.” Her lie proved that at some level she realised feeding a rat was beyond the pale, an undercover operation, and that hers was a forbidden love; she was a Capulet with a crush on a scuttling Montague.
“Mum,” my friend said, “I’ve got two words for you … bubonic f—ing plague.”
“Ahh, the Black Death,” she said, smiling. “Didn’t that have the Catholics tugging their bell ropes.”
Befriending a rat might speak to the diminished mental status of the old girl – that is, it might indicate a return to infantilism, in which terrapins and Barbies are confidantes and drink tea from tiny cups filled with air. But it might simply indicate her reduced circumstance. Her old mate Myra Walters is dead, schnoodles are forbidden in her facility, and princes are thin on the ground now – one must make do. The black rat gets a pay rise and is promoted to bestie.
