© Jeffrey Coolidge
“Another one! Get it! Quick! Get it!” For us, the sound of summer is not the merry tinkle of the ice-cream van, nor the sizzle of sausage on barbecue: it is the sound of the mother of my children going bananas about the moths. Every summer, these little tan creatures—so delicate they turn to a smudge of dust under the thumb—take complete control of our lives.
The victims of burglaries are always said to feel violated. Being invaded by moths is like being burgled from inside your home—burgled from the very seams of your trousers. Burgled by Gok Wan. Your wardrobe fills with fluttering saboteurs who turn cashmere into crochet. Unfolding clothes is like unfolding those home-made Christmas decorations that become a string of little men doing star-jumps. Surprise!
So you start small. You buy traps—white oblongs of card smeared with something infernally sticky infused with the smell of lady-moths. Wild with lust, male moths flock to these traps and expire. The traps are soon smattered with a membrane of pale brown—half a dozen moths per square inch. They look like tiny Damien Hirst installations. Sometimes the draught from an opening door dislodges one, and it tumbles down and sticks firmly onto your hair, dead moths and all, causing perturbation.
These traps, though, are more a form of entertainment than of eradication. It’s fun to inspect your haul, but for every male moth that meets its end french-kissing a pane of Pritt Stick, there are two whose noses—if they even have noses; I’ve looked quite close up but they’re a bit too small and are usually moving too fast to see—lead them to some hot real female moth action, probably in the pocket of my favourite cardigan. As for mothballs, they are exactly as much use as treating the bubonic plague with a poultice of larks’ tongues, say, or self-regulation in the financial services industry.
It’s not just the clothes. It’s the awful sense that your home has been invaded by a fast-breeding tribe of metaphors. Moths are entropy in action. They take a highly improbable and ordered system—viz a wardrobe full of Christmas jumpers and unloved woollen suits—and move it inexorably, albeit slowly, in the direction of a tenebrous snowdrift of evenly distributed mothshit, the sartorial equivalent of the heat death of the universe.
They are the objective correlative for my creaky knees, my sore ankles, my growing vagueness about the order in which things happened, my ebbing reserves of energy, the frayed and abandoned openings to my unwritten books, the general sense that something persistent, slow, and extremely patient is catching up with me and that no amount of splatting its minions with rolled-up copies of The Oldie will put it off.
Still, you have to fight. So we called the exterminators. This, pals, is what it involves. You have to wash every rag of clothing you own, and stuff all of it into airtight plastic bags. You have to empty your cupboards and wardrobes. You have to pile everything that’s under your beds onto your beds, and get everything that’s on the floor off the floor, to give the exterminator clear access to the carpets.
And then, at 8am, up he turns, the moth genocidaire. You have to leave the house and stay gone for at least five hours (which is how long it takes the moth spray to cease to be toxic to people). A fortnight ago we spent all day circulating North London like refugees—car filled with wife, children and cat, the cat making us particularly unattractive candidates for asylum.
Then you need to leave your clothes in bin bags for the next two weeks, and not vacuum or mop the floor or clean the house in any way. Then the genocidaire comes back to respray the place to wipe out the moths that will have hatched since the last spray. Then you have to wait another two weeks with a filthy house and all your clothes in binliners. Then it’s done.
As I write these words, I am waiting for the second wave of extermination to begin. The doorbell will ring, the moth-man will come, and I will vacate the house. Afterwards I’ll return, tentatively, to repossess my home. In two weeks time, ever so cautious, we’ll start in on the mountain of binbags, the sad heaps of clothes.
Will we have peace of mind? I doubt it. Every day, somewhere in the back of my mind, I’ll be waiting for the first sighting: out of the corner of my eye, somewhere up round the curtain rail, a single moth, a tiny dun fluttering.
But then: if you start thinking like that, the moths will have won.
