Let’s go back in time a little. The rats arrived first. A month or so later, we were asked to take in a female cat that had fallen on hard times. A risky proposition. If cats and birds don’t mix, then why would cats and rats? No, no, no. We couldn’t get a cat. I put my foot down.

Three days later, we got Candy. I was the proud owner of a cat with the same name as a 22-year-old Las Vegas stripper.

When it comes to the pre-programmed savagery of feline predatory instincts, Candy turned out to be the exception that proves the rule. We introduced the two species to each other gradually. As a test we placed their cage, with the rats safely sealed inside, in the middle of the living room. We were curious to see how Candy would react. If I knew cats at all, I thought, she’ll be making a noise like a rapidly deflating bagpipe, and shaking her ass like J-Lo. Apparently I don’t know cats. Candy gently and calmly sniffed at the cage and then strode off to the kitchen for a shit.

As time went on we got braver. We’d take the rats out of their cage, each in turn, hold them tight, and let Candy sniff them. Again, indifference. Eventually, after a few months, we felt confident enough to let Candy and the rats roam freely around the living room together. All under our supervision, of course. I’ve seen Grizzly Man. If you don’t tread well with nature and instincts, you or your dependants end up like Timothy Treadwell.  As cool and un-cat-like Candy seemed to be in the presence of the rats, we didn’t want to come home from work one day to find Candy with Ben, Jerry and Merlin lying disembowelled at her feet: “Good news, humans, I’ve finally worked out what I was supposed to be doing with these guys. HIGH PAW!”

The rats treated Candy like a giant one-of-them, padding around the room after her as she fast-walked away from them, with a look frozen on her face that was somewhere between pissed-off and startled. Incredibly, we discovered that it was the cat that had to work through her fear of rats, not the other way round.

Candy and Jerry were the most affectionate and happy together, which was nice, because Jerry was the last rat standing and being able to play with Candy meant that he was never truly alone. They loved each other, in their own strange way, and became inseparable: always cuddling, competing for treats, darting about, toy wrestling. I’d paired a rat and a cat, and I felt unstoppable. I was ready to phone Tony Blair to ask him to give me a crack at Israel and Palestine.

One night, my girlfriend and I were snuggled up on the couch under our duvet watching the Tom Cruise film ‘Oblivion’. Jerry and Candy were next to us, sniffing each other and begging for treats. They followed that with a play and a chase across the floor, which ended with Candy on her back, and Jerry climbing over her stomach and face. Candy playfully kicked out with her back legs, and padded and pawed at the little rat, her claws safely retracted, a benign look of amusement on her face. And then a strange thing happened…

Candy killed Jerry.

There was nothing in the way of guts, blood, or savagery. Jerry was perched on Candy’s stomach, and as she flopped on to her side, she took Jerry with him, causing him to thud down on to the cold floor. He fell only an inch or two, and the motion was slow, but even still the movement was of sufficient suddenness to cause Jerry to spasm, shake, then expire. Right there on the floor. All within seconds. Gone. In one swift wrestling move gone awry, Jerry ended his life like a little rat version of Bret the Hitman Hart.

I sprang to my feet and tried to stop my mouth from becoming wide enough to swallow a fridge. A laugh jumped from my throat. The moment was so surprising, the death contained within it so sudden, that my subconscious had labelled it ‘blackly tragi-comic’ before my conscious mind had a chance to evaluate my true feelings. I stood like an idiot for another bunch of seconds, a crushing guilt bearing down upon my shoulders. My brain entered judgement mode: ‘Oh my God, your negligence has caused the death of another living creature,’ it said. ‘Oh my God, this is all your fault. All. Your. Fault!’ But I knew it wasn’t. Not really.

It was the fucking cat’s fault, the murdering bastard.

Intellectually, I knew Jerry’s death had been a tragic accident, and no more the cat’s fault than mine. But those guilty feelings were there, and I angrily transferred them onto the cat, who by this time had taken on the dimensions of an evil serial killer.

“Look what you’ve done!” I bellowed. Futile, really, as the cat possesses no real concept of life and death, much less the legal rulings ‘culpable homicide’, ‘manslaughter’ and ‘accidental death.’ We tried to force Candy to smell the freshly-dead body of her once-spry wrestling partner, to help her come to terms with the gravity and finality of the accident, but she misinterpreted our intentions and just thought we were about to give her another treat. After a short while, she strode off into the kitchen for a shit.

I’m generally regarded as a man prone to optimism and unemotional, rational thought, so I was perfectly equipped to soothe my girlfriend’s worries and raw feelings in her time of grief and trauma…

“We’re fucking killers,” I told her. “If that was our child we’d be going to jail. We’re the McCanns. Jesus, that makes our rat Jerry McCann, so the universe knows, the universe knows what we fucking did! We’re going to rot in hell for all eternity.”

Wracked with grief, we watched the end of ‘Oblivion.’

We placed little Jerry upon his hammock, and closed him inside the cage one last time. He could have been curled up and sleeping, like a hundred other nights, but the truth of his death stabbed me like a needle in the heart each time I walked through the room. Why is it when you’re teetering on the edge of emotion you do things that you know will push you over? I hunkered down next to his cage, and spoke softly to him: “I’m so sorry, little guy. You just have a good sleep in… (sniff) your wee… (sniff) bed…and everything’s going to be okay, right?”

Jerry was the last of the rats, and so his demise marked the end of an era. This wasn’t just a goodbye to Jerry, but a goodbye to all of them. Over the next few days we removed from the house all proofs of the rats’ existence: the hammocks, their hidey-tube, the bags of food, their dishes, the cage itself… all gradually boxed up, thrown out or put in storage. The flat seemed empty and silent without them in it, and we in turn felt empty. But life always moves quickly to cement over the cracks left behind by death, and things went back to ‘normal’, as I guess they always do. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you bequeath to the world an empty cage, a string of movies or a stone statue: you’ll always be forgotten, or remembered only in abstract by strangers not yet born.

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Again, we’ve no pictures of Ben, so here’s a complete stranger’s rat who looks vaguely similar.

Ben was ‘the quiet one,’ which I suppose is a stupid way to differentiate between three creatures that weren’t really that noisy to begin with. But somehow he was. Quiet. The quiet rat. Like the Ian Duncan Smith of rats, except my rat wasn’t a goof-faced, poor-hating cunt. He had a face that spoke of nobility, meditation and contemplation (the rat, not Ian Duncan Smith), even if the only thoughts in his tiny head were of ball-licking and eating rat nuggets (that could be Ian Duncan Smith, mind you). He was ‘sweet’. I don’t know how to qualify that: he just was.

Ben suffered through a short illness, which struck him not long after Merlin’s death. He never got as sick as Merlin, but he definitely became sluggish, and somehow even quieter. He too showed some improvement in his condition, only to die the next week. We never witnessed his final moments. At night he was alive, in the morning he was dead.

My girlfriend and I had read lots of articles about how rats will gladly scoff the bodies of their fallen friends and family. Maybe that’s just wild rats. In any case, Jerry never once attacked Ben during his illness, and certainly made no move to devour him once he was deceased. That made us realise that Ben and Jerry just hadn’t liked Merlin very much, the fat, food-stealing son of a bitch.

On the morning we made our discovery, Ben was curled up at one side of the cage, and Jerry was curled up at the opposite side, in a heart-breaking act of spatial symmetry. It was as if Jerry couldn’t bear to be near the body of his wee pal, or hoped that if he just gave Ben enough space he’d be up and about and scurrying all over the place again. Maybe I was anthropomorphising, but I swear I’d never seen Jerry looking so meek, sad and confused. It was harrowing; I felt like someone had punched me in the ventricles.

So, it was back to the burial site, and time for another arm-ripping bout of digging through old tree roots and clay.

“Maybe we could put this one in the bin?” I thought, but wisely didn’t say out loud. That was just the unfitness talking.

Any more animals die, I’m calling this guy.

I must say, though, it does feel good to bury things, and not just in a ‘I’m one pissed bed and a head trauma away from becoming a serial killer’ kind of way. I’ll elaborate. Few of my pursuits could comfortably be described as macho, save for a terrible hatred of cooking and a propensity to get so drunk I become both argumentative and incommunicable at the same time. I couldn’t care less about football, I don’t get excited about cars, gadgets or machinery, and I don’t play sports. If a barbecue needs manned, I’m not your man. But you want me to bury something? No problem. Wait till I’ve finished scratching my cock and spitting on the ground, then I’ll swagger off and fetch a spade. Phwoar, crackin’ tits, sweetaht, you eva posed for page fwee?

Digging a grave – stabbing a spade into the hard earth, working until the sweat blinds your eyes and your shoulders turn to granite tortoise-shells beneath your skin – is the unbeatable top trumps card in the macho deck. Well, so long as you’re not digging your own grave as two Italian guys with suits stand beside you with guns trained on your back.

I now realise that Mafioso force their victims to dig their own graves not because it adds an extra layer of psychological torture to the eventual murder, but because digging is really, really shit. You should only do it for your pets, or if you’re getting paid.

PS: I deserve credit for avoiding mention of the Michael Jackson song, Ben, which is about a rat.

PPS: But not now that I’ve mentioned it.

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We lost all of our pictures of the rats, so this isn’t Merlin, but it’s a pretty good approximation. Ladies and gents, I give you… a fat albino rat!

Merlin was a big, fat, albino rat with blood-red eyes that made him look like he’d just had his picture taken with a strong flash. He came from a different litter to the other two rats, and was older and twice the size. If I was to sum up Merlin’s personality in one word, that word would be greed. He’d stockpile any morsel of food that entered the cage, leaving his cage-mates with the equivalent of basic rations. He wouldn’t even eat the majority of his hoard: he just didn’t want the other cunts having it. If you pushed your finger between the bars to stroke him, Merlin would invite your digit into his mouth like it was a delicious Richmond sausage. He once stole a giant cube of cheese from our living- room table, and loped off along the skirting boards with it, exhibiting all the bent and lopsided grace of a Shih Tzu with a safe in its mouth.

One day he got sick. Real sick. Lost his appetite, and zest for food theft. We had to hand feed him mushed-up fruit, and coax him into drinking water. The other rats sensed his weakness, and routinely attacked him, perhaps also partly in revenge for all the stolen food. We googled lots of articles about rat behaviour, and discovered a theory that said rats in the wild will often kill a sick or dying rat because their sickness-tinged pheromones act like the olfactory equivalent of a klaxon for nearby predators. True or not, I guess there’s no word for ‘hospice’ in the rat dictionary.

We had to give Merlin his own cage, which we had to transport with us whenever we visited family, so we could provide round-the-clock care. After months of convalescence, he started getting better. Much better. He was eating, and jogging around again. And then, with little warning, he died. But not before a harrowing series of gymnastic fits and strokes, which left him stunned, frightened and inert. We knew he was finished, and – after a few soft kisses on his head and back – were forced to leave him quietly dying as we both went to work. It hurt, I didn’t want to leave him, but somehow a dying rat didn’t seem like justification enough for compassionate leave from work. Besides, the poor love was probably dead the minute we turned our back on him. In any case, is there a sliding scale of acceptable work-based pet grief?

‘I’m terribly sorry, boss, but I can’t come in today. My stick insect has died.’

I suggested taking him to the vet, but apparently all the vet does is jab the dying rat’s heart with a needle, subject it to further agony, and then charge you seventy quid for the privilege. By lunchtime, poor Merlin was dead; by tea-time, he was inside a shoe-box coffin.

We buried him in my mum’s back garden. My step-dad directed me to a burial spot in a wild, untended part of the garden that was resplendent with tree roots. You’d be surprised how long and arduous a task it is to bury a shoe-box deep in the ground when you’ve got to hack and slice through hard earth that’s snaked with the tentacles of fifty-year-old trees. The sweat was pissing from me, and my shoulders ached, but it felt right.

I wanted to bury little Merlin because a) I loved the wee bastard, and b) I wanted to teach my six-year-old niece something about the cycle of life and death. My step-sister is of the opinion that ‘Dogs and cats get cremated, but rodents they go in the bin.’ Whatever your take on that funereal stance, it’s an undeniably catchy mantra. I can see it being turned into a Mary Poppins-esque musical number:

“Dogs and cats get cremated, but rodents they go in the bin,

We’re setting a fire under Rover, and flaming away all his sin.

Aroofawoofwoofity, roofywoofwoof, we’re shoving dead rats in the bin!”

“I’m just Poppins down the pet cemetery, me old China!”

Although there’s a voice in my head that whispers, ‘My step-sister’s right, it’s just a rat,’ there’s a louder, sterner voice that counters: ‘But he was family: one of us.’ Any semi-sentient creature you care enough about to let share your home and your existence – however briefly – deserves the dignity of a burial unshared by half-eaten apples, rotten kebabs and empty crisp wrappers. If granny doesn’t get wheeled out to the kerb on a Friday morning, then neither does ratty.

Not that I’m saying a dead rat is worth cup for cup the same amount of tears you’d weep for a deceased family member. Anthropomorphism is something in which all pet owners indulge – even if it’s just a little thing like putting a hat on a dog, or jamming a lit cigarette in a horse’s mouth – but for the sake of sanity it should have its limits. Or should it? What if the family member was an arsehole? Who’s more deserving of your grief: Adolf Hitler, or some innocent hamster that never did any harm except for a little light gnawing on the free-view box cable?

Innocence might be the key: losing a pet is tough because a pet is perpetually child-like in its dependence and naivety, something that doesn’t really change between its birth and death. There’s a maturation process, sure, but nothing even vaguely approximating the changes that occur in ‘higher’ animals like us. For instance, I’ve never witnessed a dog flicking through old photo albums and saying: ‘Is that really me looking all dorky there with that stick in my mouth? Oh my God, I’m so embarrassed! Take me to the vet and put me down, put me down now! LOL!’

My niece went down to Merlin’s grave and sprinkled some seeds beneath the stick we’d used to mark the site. The seeds were for Merlin, she said, so he’d have something to eat when he came above ground. Her interpretation of events told me two things: 1), my niece has a budding, heartbreaking capacity for compassion; and, 2) that death is too large and final a concept for a six year old fully to comprehend. That’s why I told her, ‘That’s a really nice and thoughtful thing you did for Merlin’, rather than, ‘Don’t be fucking stupid, he’s never coming back. His half-eaten body will be a wasted, rotting husk by now.’

Perhaps, though – and this might be a long shot – my niece knows something that we don’t: that Jesus is coming back as a rat this time. That would be a twist and a half, wouldn’t it? A Catholic CSI team dispatched to my mum’s back garden armed with the Vatican’s equivalent of Egon Spengler’s PKE meter. All the prayers would have to be altered. ‘Give us this day our daily cheese, and forgive us for taking a shit behind the bookcase, as we forgive you for not cleaning out our cage every week.’ In my view, rats will only deserve their own religion once their species has evolved the requisite sentience and intelligence to be able to come up with something as fucking stupid as the Bible for themselves.

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Rats: cuter critters than you suspected.

I’d never had pet rats before. I wasn’t against it; it’s just that owning them was outside my realm of experience. My girlfriend put forward a convincing case, though: “We’re fucking getting them.”

And so it came to pass that Merlin, Ben and Jerry arrived in our home. Ben and Jerry got their names from the famous brand of ice-cream, of course; Merlin got his name because he was… like… a… wizard? Em… Yeah. (Actually, because Merlin was an albino, I named him after an albino rabbit my step-dad fondly remembers from his youth, but that doesn’t clarify things, it only serves to raise the question: ‘Yeah, but why the fuck was the rabbit called Merlin?’ I don’t know. Ask him.)

Originally, we were only going to get two rats (I wanted to call them ‘Rathbone’ and ‘Gulliver’, get them tiny monocles and top hats, but apparently that was ‘ridiculous’), but the fiendishly camp store guy at ‘Pets at Home’ manipulated us into taking the rat hat-trick. Ben, Jerry and Merlin all shared a cage in the pet store, and the man heavily hinted that were we to take only Ben and Jerry, leaving Merlin behind, then it wouldn’t be long before a heavily depressed Merlin would take a sharpened rat-nugget shank to his little wrists. What the hell, we thought. We’ll take him. After all, we’re decent human beings. Plus, rats are only six quid a pop. Cheaper than a packet of fags.

In the weeks that followed I discovered that rats are amazing little creatures, and certainly more entertaining than a 20-deck of Lambert and Butler. Were it not for the fact that I now know I’m incredibly allergic to rats, I’d be content to share my home with an endless supply of the furry blighters.

A little after the rats and cat (more on her later) arrived I started suffering from the most horrendous chest infections I’ve ever experienced. I thought I had COPD, or third-stage lung cancer. This is not hyperbole, prone as I’ve been in the past to catastrophising when it comes to my health. On the one hand, there’s a regular chest infection, which makes you cough, and feel all chesty and tight; on the other hand, there’s a severe allergic reaction, which forces you to collapse in agony and exhaustion after walking up a small flight of stairs, because your lungs feel like they’ve been filled with razor blades and hot tapioca. I would cough – painfully and disgustingly – for forty-five minutes at a time, to the point where agony and blood replaced sleep (so much for curing my tendency towards hyperbole). It got so bad that I was referred to the hospital for a chest X-ray. I had the lung-rattling, chest-kicking, abdomen-heaving cough of a 70-year-old man who slept down a coal-mine in an asbestos sleeping bag.

No cancer. I was almost disappointed. A few blood tests later, and my locum doctor held a piece of paper that proclaimed my many allergies: rats, cats and dust mites topping the list. The locum shook her head:

‘You have these animals? You must get rid of them immediately.’

Steady on, they’re not a stamp collection, love: they’re living creatures. If you had an allergy to your own children you wouldn’t strap on a face mask, load them in the boot and drive them down to your local orphanage. So I insisted on tablets and inhalers, which greatly reduced my allergic reactions. The good news? The rats could stay. The great news? The doctor deemed it too risky for me to clean out their cage ever again. Hoorah! Any time I watched my poor girlfriend boaking over a beshitted rat cage, I consoled her with the thought that it was not me she was angry at, but science.

Allergies aside, I can’t understand how any human being could dislike or fear a domestic rat. I can’t bear it when some pampered, half-witted ‘celebrity’ on that jungle-reality wank-fest ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’ screams their lungs out because a huddle of sweet, innocent, and harmless little rodents have been released into their Perspex coffin. Why are you screaming, asshole? If anything, it’s the rats who should be upset. ‘I’m not in here with you… you’re in here… WITH ME!’ Honestly, celebrities, do you think the producers would be allowed to subject you to a platoon of disease-ridden creatures that could kill you, however much they might wish to visit that nightmare upon your hideous, botoxed arse of a face? Domestic rats are as safe as they are adorable. What next?

“No, oh please, God NO, I BEG you! DO NOT release the KITTENS!”

Like cats and dogs, rats have very distinct personalities (for instance, Merlin was argumentative at parties and liked soft jazz, whereas Ben and Jerry were always the life and soul of a party, and favoured industrial garage techno). Rats will give you endless hours of pleasure and amusement as they scurry, waddle, leap and bumble about your house; they’ll happily sit and peek out from your dressing-gown pocket as you’re doing the dishes; and they’ll snuggle up in your lap, or cradle under your chin, as you’re watching a movie. Sweet, cute, cuddly and affectionate.

And then they’ll fucking die. Just like that. They’ve a shorter life-span than a pair of two-pound Tesco trousers. Just as you’ve assimilated them into your life, and grown to adore them, BAM. They’re dead.

Did I mention they’re only six quid, though?

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