The Hairy Iceberg – by Kylie Moppert
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
Until a year ago, I lived in an apartment above a shop front in a leafy inner suburb. After decades of living in the outer suburbs, I’d flipped a coin and leased an abandoned restaurant with rooms upstairs. There were restaurants on either side, elm trees in the street’s central garden strip, and Victorian terraces boasting ironwork fences. I renovated downstairs into an artisan bakery and immersed myself in unrelenting hours of slow-ferment, wild-yeast sourdough.
My working weeks began on Sunday evenings, when I’d feed my starter five kilos of well-hydrated flour. When water is added to wheaten flour, gluten is formed. A strong, elastic protein, it creates a stretchy membrane which captures the gas produced by yeast. It will also form a tough leathery shield around dry flour. So, I used my hands to mix, squeezing the dry flour between my fingers until no sneaky lumps remained. My mind would wander as dough caked my hands and flour crept up my forearms. I’d think of the week ahead, the doughs to mix, prove and shape tomorrow, the fruit buns to roll, the seeds that needed soaking. I’d think of the first loaves emerging on Tuesday morning. This was my first year in the bakery. I was still working far too hard.
Outside, people gathered at the neighbouring restaurants. Tables were claimed. Friends shared kisses and bright smiles. Stemmed glasses with coloured drinks were raised. I worked in half-light, enjoying my shadowed privacy while I squelched flour and water to a homogenous goo. One evening, in my dreamy state, I noticed a fluttering under the shelving at my front window. Was it a tiny bird? Unlikely. Perhaps a moth? Could it be a microbat?
When you constantly wash dough from hands, scrapers and benches, you run the risk of clogging drains with flour sludge. Wary of blocking hundred-year-old ceramic pipes, I habitually scraped as much dough from my hands as possible. Then I washed my hands in a bucket. Once settled, the clear water would go down the drain, the sludge into the bin. By the time my hands were clean that evening, I understood what was dancing in my window. I used a broom to move it on. Like a bouncer who doesn’t want a drunk hanging around outside a nightclub, I didn’t want a mouse performing in my display window. Until then, I’d naively believed mice would choose my neighbours’ protein-stocked kitchens over my simple fare.
Weeks passed. I studied mouse behaviour. I set traps. I rearranged my flour store, balancing planks on buckets to elevate the sacks. Mice jump, but I reasoned that any discouragement would work in my favour. I moved furniture to expose and clean away their toilets. I was determined to disrupt their homemaking and make my bakery as unwelcoming as possible. The mice didn’t overwhelm me, but nor did I eliminate them. Thankfully, there’d been no signs in my upstairs abode. The dancer in the shop window had declared war, but no sentry had been despatched to gain new territory.
But one evening, as I lay on my couch reading, something flickered at the edge of my vision. I paused, removed my spectacles and studied the skirting board beside the fridge. Nothing. I returned to my book. The fourth flicker paused. He watched me while my eyes focused. A mouse! How had it got here? Surely not hopping the twenty-four stairs. Did I carry it in an armful of linen brought up to wash? Whatever the route, I needed more traps.
My first upstairs trapping gave me a satisfaction akin to unclogging a shower drain. In my naivety the second offended me, like a surprise question on an exam. I battened down: set five traps, locked all food in jars, left no crumbs overnight. I trapped three more mice. The flickering stopped. I’d won. I walked tall. Nay, I swaggered. I bragged success to my friend: ‘I reckon I’m winning the mouse challenge.’
Ernie threw his head back and laughed. ‘That’s gold,’ he said, shaking his head. I gave him an indignant scowl. His eyebrows shot high, disbelieving my naivety. ‘You’re serious,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re wrong. What you’re catching is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of them running around your neighbourhood.’ Recently, after months of escalating numbers, the rats running the picture rails while he lay in bed had led him to concede to poison.
I slid down my pedestal and cowed my way home. As I dropped my sixth trapped mouse in the bin I swore I could smell the furry grey iceberg floating behind me, the chorus of squeaks as they teemed over each other, leaping to windows sills, high-fiving each other in triumph.
To my east, two sash windows overlooked the shop awning to the village. Street lamps glowed orange at night, casting the elm trees gold. On warm evenings I’d sit on the open window ledge, watching people walk their dogs, chatting quietly. I habitually locked these windows overnight. The awning is easily climbed and I didn’t want intruders while I slept. A smaller window facing west had a less appealing view of fences, air-conditioning units and commercial kitchen flues. Southerly cool changes were caught by my neighbours’ wall and redirected to glide through this window, scattering papers from my sideboard. The iron bars, installed to prevent all but skinny chimney sweep burglars, had encouraged me to keep this window open. But now I imagined smaller, four-legged thieves leaping from the dreaded iceberg.
A little-known detail of mice behaviour is the trails they deposit. Sticky brown smears wherever they’ve scurried. Who hasn’t picked up an extension cord and wondered why it has a thick coating of dark scum? That’s mouse grease. A friendly intergenerational service to those following: Hey guys! Follow me. This place is cool! You’re welcome. The tradition of scrubbing and scouring marble doorsteps to gleaming white is more than an indicator of cleanliness-next-to-godliness: it’s a practical defence against the army of house invaders who follow the trails of long-gone ancestors.
A brick wall separated my property from my neighbour’s. From head height at the lane, the wall climbed to my upstairs window. Double brick, with a convex cement cap. If not for my window’s iron bars I could lean out and touch it. I examined the sill. It was grimy. Thick, dark, mouse grease. The mice don’t need an iceberg: the fence was a convenient mouse highway, strategically marked by those who’d gone before. Grease ridges coated the white paint of the window frame, a smear ran along the skirting board, a film stained the corner of the buffet where it abutted the wall. More at the edge of the door jamb, and on all electrical leads. No more was the window left open overnight. Grime I had barely noticed became intolerable. Wherever I suspected mouse grease, I cleaned, like a dentist attacking plaque-encrusted teeth.
Mice disappeared and reappeared over the six years I lived above my bakery. After hearing them scurrying in the roof I discovered holes in the plaster walls. Ominous smudges around crumbling white plaster. Any flicker at the edge of my vision was reliably a mouse, despite my efforts to eliminate them. Ernie’s iceberg theory stood.
Then, tired of the baker’s life, I flipped another coin, sold my bakery and searched for a home where mice were unlikely to visit. My new abode is on the fourth floor behind a 1920’s art deco façade. The eighty-plus stairs in the fire escape reveal no grease marks. My fruit remains un-gnawed, my pantry boxes intact, and my butter shows no footprints. Any flittering shadows here can’t be mice. But the façade, it turns out, is that of the once popular Merri Palais de Danse. And so I choose to interpret any flickers at the edge of my vision as not something to be reviled, trapped and destroyed, but dance-hall spirits, whose company I welcome as I read on my couch. ▼
Image: modified detail from a sketch by Jean Bernard, c.1800s
If you liked this piece, please share it. And please consider donating or subscribing so that we can keep supporting writers and artists.