FLIES

On the way down the stairs from putting our daughter to bed, my husband is stopped in his tracks by the sight of me. Now, you may understandably think this is because of my arresting yet enigmatic beauty, my dazzling smile or simply the extraordinary air of wonder and creativity my mere presence provides, but I fear I have to disappoint you.
“Do you see now?” he says, waving his hands in despair. “Do you see why EVERYONE thinks...no, everyone KNOWS you’re eccentric?!!”
“What?!!” I ask mystified, because I never have any idea what people mean when they tell me I am eccentric, but maybe that’s the point!
“Look at yourself! What are you doing Woman?!” (calling me “Woman” is an indication of his ultimate exasperation with my behaviour) “How can you not think there’s something at least a bit bizarre about what you’re doing?!”
Now, I ask you, is it really that strange to be creeping around the living room, clad in dressing gown and socks (well, the evenings are getting nippy now,) with my spectacles on my head (I’d been reading), holding a rolled up tv guide in one hand and a can of furniture polish in the other, whilst tiptoeing sideways towards a fly to try and out-wit it? “Shhhh. This one thinks he’s really clever; he’s got a really arrogant buzz?!”
My husband comes down the rest of the stairs, shaking his head in despair; I know it’s despair because he goes off to do something helpful in the kitchen. What he doesn’t know though is that earlier in the day - after a long summer of intolerable levels of taunting by my two-winged enemies - I finally declared war on the multi-eyed little blighters.

At the height of temperatures this summer, the bin men (or ‘Refuse Operatives’, as I understand they now like to be called) in our area decided to go on strike, or, as I prefer to call it, to the beach. To the flies, Christmas had come early and they set about breeding like....well, like flies, until everywhere we turned there were flies and we had no doubts there must have been some sort of maggoty situation inside our wheelie bin. It was utterly revolting. In my quest to rid our house and garden of them, I gradually became a kind of fly-ninja and could usually flatten and kill a fly at the first attempt. To give you an idea of how frequently I had to kill flies, it got to the point where my daughter immediately sensed when I was about to pick up a newspaper to roll up and would giggle and say “Squish it Mummy!” I’m sure both the RSPCA and NSPCC would have something to say about this, but there you go!

Then, a couple of weeks ago - probably partly due to a drop in temperature - they all seemed to disappear. At the end of July I saw a fascinating piece at the White Cube gallery in London which looked like a large piece of black textured rubber hanging on the wall, until closer inspection revealed hundreds - nay, thousands - of flies varnished together in various inelegant positions of “squish”, and I like to think that the flies which resided here thought they could contribute more to life and went off to volunteer for such an art work. So, my ninja skills largely redundant for the last fortnight or so, I readily forgot about flys, maggots and all things insectoid. Then, a few days ago, the biggest, buzziest, stropiest fly you could ever imagine flew in to our sitting room. This one had attitude. This one thought he could easily come and live here, maybe turf us out and have the run of the whole house, invite all his fly friends over for steak tartare. Ha! Not on my watch octo-eyes! I grabbed the arts section of the Guardian, waited until Mr. Buzz settled on the windowsill, and in one mighty thump, splatted him all over the woodwork, much to the delight of my applauding daughter. Feeling a worrying level of satisfaction I sauntered into the kitchen to fetch some kitchen roll with which to clean up the domestic roadkill. I could not have predicted what I would find on my return however. Now, I’m no biologist, but I think I must have killed the Mother of all flies (quite literally) because it seems my swift semi-flattening of this particular fly had released a pregnant belly of mini maggots. The dead mother was being moved around the windowsill by its hundreds of erupting offspring - baby maggots no less, which were approximately 3mm in length - which then proceeded to start eating their host!! I stood rigid, repulsed and yet unable to not look as more and more of these maggots massed from the stomach of the dead fly. I do not understand how there was room for so many in there - flies must be rather like the tardis - and I was racked by the knowledge that I must do something about this situation but also that if I come within three feet of maggots, I vomit due to sheer disgust.

I was reminded of a time when my cousin (who, funnily enough, is a biologist!) and I were teenagers and I arrived at his house on the day he returned from Army Cadet camp. We went to his bedroom to play with his hamster, only to discover it had expired in his absence and now had - how can I put it - squatters! With this in mind, I knew I had to act now before the maggots got too comfortable. That was when I struck upon the idea of spraying them with furniture polish! This would kill them all, I thought, and stop any more surfacing. I sprayed them with the thick solution of ‘Summer Meadow” until they were still, and I went to get more kitchen roll. When I got back though I was stunned to see some of the maggots actually crawling out of the polish! So I quickly sprayed them a bit more and picked them up with the extra thick wad of Bounty in my hand. If furniture polish doesn’t do it, I thought, there was no other option but to drown them, so I threw the kitchen towel containing the maggoty mound, into the sink and turned the tap to wash them away. At this point though not only was I revolted, but started to feel slightly scared as I witnessed the maggots not only surviving what must be a tidal wave to them, but actually swimming! Yes, that’s right, SWIMMING!!!! Maggots can swim! Who knew?!! I was astounded, but this strengthened my resolve and I turned on both taps, the force of which their boneless invertebrate selves could not fight, and off they swirled, down the plughole. Just in case they managed to slink back up and hatch some kind of plan of revenge, I put the plug in. As I started walking away though I imagined them beligerantly standing on each others shoulders (I use the term ‘shoulders’ very loosely here) and pushing the plug out, so I returned and placed a copper based saucepan on top of the plug. Of course, they did get their revenge because I spent the remainder of the day twitching like a nervous eel, supposedly feeling them crawling up the back of my neck or in my ears.

On telling my husband about this incident a pained expression of disgust - partly directed towards the flies, partly directed towards my irrational and compulsive behaviour - revealed itself on his face. Last night, returning downstairs from his relaxing bath, he observed me on my knees, furtively looking under my desk, Sunday supplement rolled up in my hand. “I’ll get the polish.” he said, as he sighed.