It is not like people expect. Most people think, as she probably did herself, once, that the moment the green pest control van parks up outside their house, their problems are at an end, and they give over their cupboards, their attics, the backs of their bathroom cabinets, with the same unblinking trust as they would unbutton their trousers for the doctor. Maybe it is the uniform. Or the armoury of traps and poisons, wire wool, gases, neatly packed inside the holdall. They have no idea at allhat it is actually like—the careless, cack-handed, sloppy, don’t-give-a-shit attitude most of the department is ridden with. They are—a favourite phrase of Shaun’s—being kept in the dark.

What surprised her most, in those first few weeks, was the cruelty. It was rife, spreading through all parts of the department, showing itself in their plots and schemes, their nasty little games, always trying to get one over on somebody, as Shaun would say. Derek and Aidan, for instance, were on a two-man mission to put out of business all the Polish shops and restaurants in south London. They were on seven, so far. They had a chart. Each time a Polish place came on to the database they would take it, and they would begin to lay down empty bait boxes, or line the underneath of floorboards with sandwiches and packets of biscuits, slowly rotting fruit, until after a few weeks the infestation would get so bad Derek and Aidan had no choice but to pass the property over to the health and safety boys as “unfit for business.” There were some Poles in the department, and of course they must have known about all this—it wasn’t like Derek and Aidan made an effort to hide the chart—but they never said anything. They just quietly got on with their work. She thinks that is probably the main reason the Poles keep themselves separate, and never play Best Pest.

She wondered sometimes if Derek and Aidan had got into pest control just for that reason, to wage their underhand war against the Polish, or if they had fallen into the job simply by chance, as she had. Of course, her father would tell stories about how she used to be fascinated with the nasties as a child, always in the garden with her nose under a rock, but that was just an invention. In the same way, he said that her brother, an English teacher now, always had his nose in some book or other, but that wasn’t true either. Parents like to make up these stories to convince themselves they know their children. From what she remembered, the only thing her brother ever had his nose in were the porn magazines he kept stashed under a loose piece of his bedroom carpet.

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