241 Pizza

I will have to hire a freezer and freeze all my books. I will have to wash all my clothes at the hottest temperature, and those I can’t, I will have to freeze or tumble dry or chuck. I might have to cover my gappy floorboards with laminate flooring or a carpet. I sit scratching and weeping in the lounge as he sprays this stuff that smells like my NYC cockroach-laden childhood. It’s got the same ingredient in it as the roach killer spray: a Proustian moment, just like Mom used to kill.

As it happens, Piper does have to come back a second time, but not a third. He tells me that at first he thought it was the influx of Eastern Europeans who may have brought bedbugs back to England, but now, “It may be that we used to kill roaches with a broad-spectrum insecticide, but now we use a gel that only roaches eat, allowing bedbugs to flourish.”

Piper keeps bees for a hobby, and most of his non-London call-outs in the South East are for wasp and bee problems. His van is decorated with giant wasps, because this doesn’t freak people out as much as if he were to have pictures of roaches or fleas on it. I hop into the waspmobile and we go to visit another traumatised bedbug victim. This is her third call-out. She has laminate floors, not much stuff and is immaculate. She is not a “worst-case scenario”.

Her flat looks like mine did a few months ago: everything upended, her clothes all in black binliners. She has the slightly tearful demeanour of the sleep-deprived, and has been spending most nights at friends’ houses. “They are terrified that I will bring the bedbugs to their places, so I have to undress in the hallway and stick all my clothes into a binliner and put them in the washing machine.” I resist the temptation to ask if that is really a bedbug thing or a seeing-your-friend-naked thing, because she adds, “I am so, so tired. I can’t relax. I don’t feel at home any more. I had a beautiful goose down duvet and pillows which had to go. I got rid of my mattress, which was expensive. I’m either at work or the launderette or freezing things one by one. People don’t understand how time consuming it is. And I am so itchy!” Piper is foxed because they really should be dead by now, but he gives the room a third treatment, which he thinks should kill the last ones.

My brush with disaster

Traps, poison and pest control couldn’t do it. So how did our correspondent get rid of his dirty rat?

The next call-out is to a multi-occupancy (by people and vermin) terraced house. The man who lives there has rats, mice and cockroaches. Piper moves the fridge away from the wall and a dozen or so roaches scuttle for cover. He puts the cockroach poison gel around the floor and tells the man not to sweep up the dead ones: roaches are cannibals and they will eat their poisoned brothers. Then he lays something that looks like Blu Tack in a hole in the floor that a rat has gnawed through. We go up to the loft and he pours loads of blue pellets down the cracks in the floorboards. The mice will eat this and die, but nobody will eat them. They will, what, rot and smell? The house owner just wants them dead. He can’t sleep for all their scuttling and scratching about. That is the peculiar torture of infestation: the lack of sleep.

Back in the van, I wonder how Piper handles bee call-outs. After all, honey bees are his thing. Surely he doesn’t like to kill them. Well, no, he doesn’t. What he does do is put them all in a big box, drive out to the countryside and free them.

All pest control technicians get requests from time to time to kill the vermin “nicely”, or to just trap them and set them free. Oliver Madge says, “We get requests for live traps, so they think we will trap the mouse, take it somewhere else and let it go free. But if you take mice from an urban setting and put them into a country setting, they will probably starve because they are used to a diet of junk, so it’s not that kind after all. He needs a burger.”

He tells a funny story about a woman who believed she was infested with mice, but it turned out to be the same mouse, which she would trap in a humane trap, set free in the garden, and then the mouse would run straight back into the house.

Rodney Mock, a pest control technician for Rentokil, says the people who want pests killed humanely are the exception not the rule. “Most of them just say, ‘Do whatever you have to do to get rid of them.’”

Do they say this in an hysterical high-pitched voice?

“I wouldn’t exactly say hysterical; I’d say concerned. Though you do get some who are hysterical and people get very upset about simple things like ants and fleas. They ask me, ‘Why have I got this pest, where does it come from?’”

And do you ever think, “Because you live like pigs?”

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