A Stink in the Sink

Several weeks ago I heard something moving about upstairs, at the top of the house, in Richard's study. I was in our bedroom, getting ready for bed, and at first it sounded like scratching on a window pane, as if the holly tree had grown elongated fingers, and was trying to attract my attention.

While Richard was still downstairs, and despite the scratching, I managed to get to sleep. By four o’clock in the morning he was up and ready to do his final ‘early morning’ shift as a relief driver.  (He now leaves the house at the civilised hour of 9:15 a.m. and only once a week). However after he’d gone to work something else disturbed my sleep. I can only describe it as marbles or pin balls being rolled around just above my head, across the bedroom ceiling. 

Then the scratching at the window started again. The finale to this symphony was a rustling, as if someone was upstairs, in Richard’s study, unwrapping sweets.

What could it be? A family of rats watching a film, enjoying a bag of sweets whilst the teenagers had a game of pool and the youngsters played with marbles?

By the time I was properly awake Richard was back, having done part one of his early shift, and eating bacon and eggs downstairs. I related the tale of the possible intruder and said I’d get in touch with ‘the team’ at the council - we both agreed we’d got a little offender scurrying about upstairs. But what? Was it a rat? There was nothing behind the skirting boards, as far as we could tell, and our cat wasn’t sitting, watching or waiting to pounce on some terrified vermin. 

In time 'the team’ came to pay us a visit. As the ‘little offender’ hadn’t returned and the noise was high up in the house it was decided that we’d likely had a visit from a squirrel. Apparently squirrels see a gap under the eaves of a house in the same way as they see a hole in a tree. They run under floor boards and explore someone’s home as if traversing the branches and trunk of an old oak. But they rarely stay or make a nest. They are, apparently, unlikely to be persistent.

Just in case, however, the blighters decided to move in, 'the team’ put down poison, upstairs, in the roof space, just behind the eaves and downstairs under the kitchen sink, behind the cupboards. That way we could tell if any poison had been taken in the unlikely event our ‘little offender' returned. So, that was all all right then.

Or so we thought.

Yesterday there was a rank smell of wet, dirty rags coming from the en-suite bathroom. I had cleaned and bleached all three bathrooms, toilet bowls, sinks and washbasins on Sunday and Tuesday. Yet the smell persisted from Tuesday evening until yesterday, Wednesday night. It was so bad I got a headache and had to sleep with the bedroom windows open. Thankfully temperatures outside have risen. If we’d had windows open overnight last week we’d have been found, days later, frozen in our bed.

I didn’t get chance yesterday, Wednesday, to thoroughly disinfect everything as we were out most of the day and a friend came round in the evening. Thankfully she didn’t need to go near our stinkbomb of an ensuite bathroom.

Finally, late last night, Google provided me with various theories about the ‘great stink’:

1) It could be a lack of water in the U-bend. It appears a layer of water is vital for stopping smells and gases coming up through washbasins. 

2) It could be smells lingering from elsewhere. In order to get rid of that I poured bleach down every sink, washbasin and lavatory in the house (except one.)

3) My theory was that some cleaning rags were past their best and needed to be thrown out. (I did just that. Others were soaked.) I washed over every surface in our bathrooms and re-bleached the kitchen sink. I re-mopped all floors and generally did a very late spring clean.

After all this exertion the ensuite was certainly smelling fragrant rather than foul but I spotted a whiff coming from the plug hole in the shower tray. I re-blasted it with disinfectant and crossed my fingers. Had I managed to shift the smell? Had I stifled the stink and obliterated the odour?

And if I hadn’t was it simply the smell of a rotting corpse? A rodent that had taken some of the poison meant for the squirrel? Or was it indeed an intrepid but silent squirrel that had unwittingly feasted on the deadly pellets? 

Tonight, at bedtime, the aroma in the bathroom was one of air freshener not dirty rags. The stink in the sink had evaporated. Let’s hope it doesn’t return. Or else we’ll have to have ‘the team’ back. The team is one man and his van. I don’t know if he’s the same person that I spoke to when I contacted ‘Pest Control Supervisor’. (And what does a pest supervisor do? Watch the rats at playtime, making sure they don’t get up to mischief? Or walk up and down while they sit, in a line, behind the skirting board, tackling their GCSE exam papers?)

Apparently the council offer a pest identification service. First catch the little offender ... And what if you only hear them at night, just as you’re trying to get to sleep? I don’t relish the thought of traipsing into the roof-space at midnight to take a selfie with a rodent. 

It might bite...