There Is A Mouse In My Flat

There is a mouse in my flat.

Little body, brown fur, no bigger than my fist. Smaller than my heart, most definitely.

Its eyes are the hugest thing about it. I wonder what it must be like to have eyes bigger than your hands, to hold more in a gaze than ever in your own palms. I wonder if it sees me, beholds me. It must do, because it runs as soon as I see it, skittering from the base of the staircase I’m walking down to the kitchen and behind the washing machine. I am not afraid of mice, but I sit on the step and hold my head in my hands. 

There is a mouse in my flat. 

My housemate Alfie hasn’t seen anything. He is cooking. He is lost in the precision of adjusting the gas flame to medium heat. 

‘There is a mouse in the flat,’ I announce.

Though his face portrays alarm, I wonder if he believes me.

I behold, with my eyes smaller than my hands, our flat. 19 Muriel Way is one room, really. One room that is both a kitchen, toilet, doorway, staircase and living room. One room leading to three bedrooms and one dining room pretending to be a fourth, fixed with a bed and wardrobe, and a bathroom. If I hold my hand in front of me, it obscures the kitchen from view. Only one of us can be in it at once. We are each one palm wide. 

I behold, with my eyes smaller than my width, the cartons and boxes and mish-mash of shelves we set up in every corner – under the stairs and table functioning as its own shelf. There is not enough space in this place for the amount that each of us occupy. We are overspilling the realms of our one room. 

There is pasta and nuts and seeds and rice and every spice imaginable stored near the floor, because there is nowhere else to put it other than our stomachs. 

There is a mouse in this one room, and I’m not afraid, but my head is in my hands.

When I was five, there was a mouse in my grandma‘s kitchen. Maybe there was a mouse in the whole house, but my world felt only as big as whatever room I was in then. The mouse was in the kitchen. 

There was no mouse in my room – my room shared with Mama and Daddy and the too little cot that held my too big baby brother. I felt so close to them all. Arm to arm and heart to heart. In my room that was our room with the tiny box TV Daddy called mine. At night before bed I was allowed to watch Winx Club and dream about magic all tucked in together. 

And in the day I watched for the mouse. We had never been dirty people. Maybe the mouse wanted a friend. Maybe there were too many holes in the heart of our home. Maybe then, too, we were overspilling the realm of our vessel. Squeezing too many Aunts and Mothers and Grandma and me into her kitchen built for one. It, too, was one palm width. 

In my Grandmother’s house there was no dining table. Mealtimes for me would occur in one of two ways. My preferred system was in the garden. My cousin and I would race up and down a faded plastic slide while my Grandma waited at the bottom to scoop spoons of groundnut soup or tuna pasta or rice and butter into our giddy mouths. If not this way, then I would sit in a tiny red plastic chair with a plate balanced on a placemat set on an adult-sized stool, eyes on a rerun of Dora the Explorer.

 When the mouse appeared, my daytime TV became the kitchen. I would sit in that red chair and wait. The kitchen was a long, thin tube leading to the back garden. Rice and stew were always cooking, ginger and bright orange scotch bonnets always spicing the air, like most palm-sized houses in South London. The ones I knew, anyway. In this chair I would sit. The kitchen was lowered by a step or two. In the doorway I would sit. In this chair. With eyes just about bigger than my hands, I would watch and wait.

The mouse, if I was quite impatient enough, which usually I was, would come peeking, drawn by the rich aroma of palm oil,  just as I always was. I would behold it –  little body, brown fur, bigger than my fist, maybe bigger than my heart – as it ran back and forth from under the cupboards and through the valley of that kitchen. And the mouse would behold me being fed cassava leaf, wincing as my auntie primed my hair to be braided with blue magic, chattering with my cousin who often set up post beside me, tucked together and blocking the doorway. 

Now there is a mouse in my flat. 

And I cannot help but imagine a mouse, on its own little red chair, watching me somewhere.

I call the landlord.