The Possum Man

Summer at our place is a hateful time of year, in which the only relief from the heat may be found in the lounge room, where the small, theoretically portable, and very loud, air conditioner is. This device makes watching TV or having a conversation a chore, as you need to compete with its mechanical rumble, but it’s the best solution for two people renting an old house which is falling down around them and their small menagerie of pets.

Only our big dog Domino can be easily heard over the air conditioner, when she vocalises a kind of whiney moan which has been known to go on for hours, increasing in intensity if hunger is present – and Domino is pretty much always hungry.

On the vilest Sydney summer days, sauna hot and lacking even the merest breeze for the illusion of comfort, the temperature remains high all night long. Even the lows are high, and then the sun comes out, early, and it begins to warm up all over again. On days like this the air conditioner doesn’t help much, and it was on one of these days that our story took place.

 

The suburb where we live, a place where we couldn’t possibly afford to buy, is leafy and sedate and has a profusion of brushtail possums, which like to eat foliage and lovingly tended flowers, and take advantage of the shelter afforded by large houses, with their eaves and roof spaces and other vacant areas roomy enough to accommodate a marsupial. At first you may hear the noise a possum makes – it’s a kind of roar, a surprisingly accurate way to describe the sound – or you may notice branches and greenery and hollowed out fruit begin to appear, scattered on the ground. Both indicate possums are around. But it’s the countless tiny, football-shaped pellets of shit, which may be walked into your carpets unawares, that tell you you’ve got a boarder.

A few possums have lived with us over the years. There was the one which scratched and called, very noisily, provoking ineffectual barks from our dogs in response. My partner Laetitia drove it away by turning the volume on the TV up to a deafening level one morning and leaving the appliance on for several hours. The animal was within a boarded up fireplace, where they always end up at our house, and therefore just on the other side of the wall. They desire a dry, safe place to sleep during the day, which means that their activities, their eating and pooing sorties, and the sounds they make, are nocturnal.

Another was found dead under the hydrangea in our front yard one rainy Saturday. It was my job to remove the body in a plastic garbage bag, an unpleasant job but still relatively comfortable work for me. Seen up close it’s always striking how handsome these animals are. They have a beautiful coat and piercing eyes and it’s tragic that an untimely end can result from their life in the human world.

And a third also made its home in the boarded up fireplace. When the sounds of activity went quiet and a smell came from that corner of the room it seemed reasonable to surmise that the creature had passed away. Fortunately it was winter then and this helped prevent the odour becoming unbearable.

 

On this summer day, though, the fragrance of decomposition which had been wafting from the direction of the fireplace picked up intensity until it could be smelled strongly throughout the house. It was overpowering to be near and it was almost impossible to spend any time in the lounge room.

A note of panic entered Laetitia’s voice: “What are we going to do?” She had already sprayed the special disinfectant spray which deodorises by destroying the particles of bad smell, a product we have found useful at times with our four cats. Laetitia sprayed more and then talked about using some tape around the outside of the board which had been fixed to the front of the fireplace. One of these strategies was about getting to the smell and neutralising it while the other was about preventing it from coming into the room – but the contradiction didn’t matter. We had to try something else.

I bought the only wide tape which was locally available. It wasn’t the best quality fabric tape which you can just rip off, but it wasn’t too bad, and I hurried home and started taping. It wouldn’t all stick down. Partly that was the tape, and partly it was that I was trying to stick it to surfaces wet with the spray.

While all this was going on, Laetitia picked up her friend, who had planned to spend the day with us. It was too unpleasant to invite her into the house, and so we decided to go to the local shopping centre, to get cool and make a plan about what to do next. It reminded me of when the principal characters all go to the Plaza Hotel in The Great Gatsby for no good reason:

“But it’s so hot,” insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears. “And everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!”

It is also the case that when I’m not coping very well in a situation one of my mental refuges is to think of a similar character or scene from literature as a way to not think about whatever horrid thing is actually happening.

Laetitia called a possum removing professional and made it clear that our problem was behind a wall, albeit a temporary one. The man spoke of methods to reduce the smell but made it clear that these are not terribly reliable.

He said he would come straight over and we drove home to meet him there.

We’d seen him before. He had removed a possum which had entered our dining room via another fireplace, this one unblocked, and become electrocuted when it crawled under the shade of an old standard lamp we had bought in a junk shop. I went into this room to pour a drink, and found myself face to face with a native animal, sitting perfectly still, but looking across the room at me. It seemed to move, very slightly, although I couldn’t be sure, and this meant several abortive attempts to dispose of the body, as I ran from the room, slamming the door, and yelping, “I think it’s alive!”

On his first visit, the possum man had smiled his big mad smile and stomped into the room and told us about the damage he’d seen possums do when pursued through domestic interiors. Then he focused on our problem. “It’s dead,” he said, walking over to it without a hint of fear. “Rigor mortis has started. You can smell it.” I felt silly for missing something so obvious but it didn’t matter: someone who knew what he was doing had taken charge.

In fact it wasn’t dead. It was stunned and squirmed a bit once I had helped the man put it into an old cat cage. The man wrapped it in a blanket first and said he would release it very humanely in a park near where he lived.

 

It didn’t matter that the man had been wrong then. He was confident and experienced and solved our problem, which was exactly what we needed now, in this stinking room, on this stinking hot day.

He took charge, removing the board from the outside of the fireplace, without asking, and I found myself holding open a garbage bag to take outside the skeleton and the more recently deceased body he found in the cramped space beneath the grate. When I returned he was hammering the board back into place with the butt of his heavy torch and a sense of calm started to return, like a drug entering your system.

It was all so quick.

We turned on fans in the room to dissipate the smell and went back to the shopping centre.

For some of us after the calm comes the doubt, as the anxious mind searches for the next possibility of drama. I hadn’t checked the nailing in of the fireplace board and couldn’t shake the idea that our cats might somehow escape from through this possible weakness in the wall. So I walked home in the heat to find out.

But of course it was secure. The possum man can do anything.