‘You do know about the cockroaches?” I’ve forgotten most things people said to me in the 80s, but never that. It was said by one of the occupants of the student house in Longsight, Manchester, that I had signed up to live in the following year. When the landlord had shown me and my future housemates the property, the tenants had been out. He told us they were third years doing their finals and must not be disturbed under any circumstances. (What can I say? We were gullible back then.) Days before summer term ended though, I’d knocked on the door to show a friend where I’d be living. Instead, I learned that the house was infested.
The weird thing is, we moved in anyway. In truth, although I understood this was very bad news, I didn’t quite realise what a cockroach was. There was no internet, so I would have had to go to a library to know what I know now: their march, their canter, their crunch if you step on one. Their soft, sweet, sour smell (uric acid which they store in their fat, apparently). Sometimes, in the back of a shop, or a restaurant loo, I catch that scent and I know what it is.
I also know that they are indestructible. Just two German cockroaches left in one cosy crevice behind the fridge can be two million cockroaches in a couple of years. They are reproductive machines, and eat anything – rubbish, rot, dead skin, sleeping humans, each other. They can survive for days without heads! You’ll never win. A pest controller in a hazmat suit came regularly to spray white powder everywhere. The only benefit was that the chemicals on the carpet eradicated my housemate’s verruca, which she had been trying to get rid of for three years.
My first sighting has always stayed with me. We had just moved in. One of my housemates was sitting in a big armchair, telling us about her summer, when a cockroach appeared behind her shoulder like a pantomime villain. We pointed and screamed while it lumbered over the back of the chair towards us – enormous, glossy, greasy, antenna waving, taking its time. (They’re excellent climbers, by the way.) This happened in broad daylight, even though this is meant to suppress their movement. Cockroaches prefer to wait quietly for darkness before coming out to party – a daytime sighting indicates a serious overcrowding issue where all their normal spaces are full. And so it turned out to be.
To this day, we wonder why we didn’t move out – or even explore the possibility of leaving. By the end of that year though, we had all stood each leg of our beds in saucepans of water so that any cockroach attempting to join us while we slept would surely drown. Although I now know they can close off their breathing valves and survive submerged for 30 minutes.
I still dream about them sometimes. I have a lifelong cockroach phobia – or katsaridaphobia – which seems entirely sensible to me. But it’s also made me tougher. Mice? Head lice? Threadworms? Scabies? I’ve raised a family since then and have known all of those closeup, but the bottom line is always: “At least it’s not cockroaches.” If it isn’t waxy and crunchy, if there’s no antenna, no oily shine and sickly scent, if it doesn’t march and scuttle and canter and climb on to my pillow at night … I’ll cope.
