Screams in the night

The scene: a darkened bedroom with feeble moonlight filtering blue-grey through the closed shutters. In the double bed are two large, motionless lumps. The peacefully sleeping occupants of the house.

One of the lumps stirs uneasily then half raises its head, revealing tousled blonde hair. This is the wife. She appears to be listening to something. She elbows the lump next to her.

'Wha...?'

'I can hear something.'

'Wharra...?'

'I can hear something moving. Under the bed.'

Her husband sits up, frowning, and listens for a moment but hears nothing, unsurprisingly because he's unlikely to hear anything less than a foraging heffalump. One hand scrabbles on the bedside table to find the emergency mini-torch then he leans over to peer upside-down beneath the bed.

'Can't see anything.' He waves the torch around. 'Probably a lizard. Or a gecko. It'll go away.'

Detectably grumpy from being woken up for the sake of a lizard, husband heads for the bathroom. He has just closed the door when he hears a piercing scream from the bedroom, a prolonged shriek of pure terror. He rushes back, heart thumping, to find his wife clutching her hair.

'It was a mouse! It got tangled!' She's trawling desperately through the locks as though there might be other mice lurking.

'How do you know it was...'

'I saw it!' she cries. 'It ran across the bed and jumped off.'

Husband leaps backwards. He's in bare feet.

Ten minutes later he has found no trace of a mouse under the bed or anywhere else in the bedroom. It must have fled to some safe corner elsewhere. After a fright like that it will probably leave again the way it came in, whatever that was, he tells his wife reassuringly.

In the morning they find fresh mouse droppings on the kitchen worktop.

We recounted this incident to our neighbours Feli and Lali, who laughed uproariously. These are country folk for whom mice are part of life like flies, slugs and politicians. 'If it's still around tomorrow,' Feli said, 'I can lend you a ratonera, a mousetrap.'

The next day we found fresh droppings all around the house. No intention of leaving, then, and keen to get to know its new home. Feli produced his mousetrap, an evil steel device with jagged jaws that could disable a goat. 'Be a bit careful with this,' he warned. 'It's really for rats.'

That evening I placed a cube of cheese on the trigger spike and set the vicious trap very, very cautiously. In the small hours of the morning we were wakened buy a thunderous clunk! as the jaws sprung. I rushed upstairs to find the teeth clamped around nothing at all. Not even the cheese.

This trap was too big, we decided, so we purchased a couple of smaller ones, the classic Tom and Jerry design with a wooden base and a wire loop that snaps shut over the bait. I set both of them with little lumps of cheese and in the morning both had sprung, with the cheese gone but no mouse.

So, a clever little blighter, this one. Over morning coffee in Arturo's cafe we sought opinions about what to try next. Arturo had the answer at once. 'Yellow cheese is no good,' he explained patiently as though to rather slow children. 'No sirve, it won't work. It can just lift it off the spike.' We needed something stickier, like blue cheese, that the mouse would have to tug at.

'Gofio,' suggested his wife Marta from behind the counter. Maize flour. 'A little ball of gofio mixed with honey, that'll do it.' Gomerans have enormous faith in the magical powers of gofio.

One of our fellow customers joined in. 'Mice know all about mousetraps,' he told us. 'They've learned the tricks, you'll never catch it with a mousetrap. The only certain method is a card covered with glue. Put it on the floor with something tasty in the middle - cheese, a piece of apple, gofio with honey, doesn't matter. Mouse walks across the card to reach it, gets stuck fast. Ya está, you've got him.'

Okay, but then we've got a live mouse stuck to a card. What do we do with it?

'Hammer,' chuckled Arturo. 'Bam!'

'Bucket of water,' offered his customer.

'They're vegetarians,' Marta intervened, seeing our expressions. Ah, well, in that case... Heads shook.

'What you could do,' suggested Marta, 'is to put on rubber gloves and pick the mouse off the card with your fingers.'

'You'd leave its feet behind,' said Arturo.

By the time we left the cafe, the favoured solution was an empty paint can with its inner surface coated with oil or grease. Put some bait in the bottom. Mouse jumps in, can't get out again because it's too slippery.

I returned home giving myself a stern talking-to. Look, it's only a mouse. All this fuss, sticky cards, paint cans. Mousetraps must work, they've always worked.

That night I baited the trap with a little ball of honey-flavoured gofio, took a pair of pliers and adjusted the wire trigger to the most extreme sensitivity I dared. A mouse whisker would set it off.

It did. A clean kill.

At the inquest in the morning we viewed the corpse with growing dismay. Guilt. Such a little mouse. And rather sweet, and very pathetic with its legs splayed out and...

Well, enough of that. Feli and Lali consoled us with the observation that if we'd set it free a cat would soon have got it anyway.

Notes for the serious student
A mouse in the house is a rarity - in fact this was the only time, so far. There isn't much to be said about Gomeran mice, which are much like anyone else's, small and greyish or brownish. They can run fast but not always fast enough to escape the local cats, so are most often sighted as chewed remnants deposited outside someone's front door.

Lizards and geckoes are more frequent visitors. Gomeran lizards come in large and small models. The bigger one is the lagarto, about the size of a sausage when fully grown but a dark, murky grey in colour and frankly not very pretty. We've never had one in the house. The lagartija is smaller, attractively striped and thin enough to wriggle under doors. They are also a bit dim, tending to fall off walls and get trapped in post boxes and shower trays, where they will leave behind a thrashing tail when you try to rescue them.

Geckoes are even harder to catch because they have clever little suction-pad paws that can run up the side of a bucket. The Gomeran version - known locally as the pracan, pronounced placan by true Gomerans - is fairly small, quite cute and reassuringly content to pootle about on the ceiling most of the time. However, the babies are as clueless as the lizards and tend to get squashed in closing doorways and shutters, which is perhaps why there are not very many of them.