Visitors love my little cottage in Ubud. They like the jungly garden, the ponds, the outdoor kitchen and the view across the ravine to the rice terraces beyond. On sunny afternoons they relax on the porch as butterflies, bees, birds and dragonflies dance between the flowers and Kipper the Pit Bull slumbers across their feet. The Creatures of the Day are attractive, even the occasional snake sunning its sinuous self by the pond.
But when the curtain of darkness falls, Act Two begins. Kipper rises, stretches and stares fixedly into the dark garden as Something rustles in the bushes. A frog begins a tentative song in the pond, and soon a chorus of honks, hoots and croaks necessitates a competing rise in decibels across the dinner table. The cicaks start to nudge their way across the walls and my guests pronounce them charming. But the first appearance of Gordon the Gecko usually produces a muffled scream. He lumbers overhead, prehistoric body swaying, baleful eyes focused on some luckless insect. No, he won't bite. No, he is not interested in getting into bed with you. Yes, those large black splotches on the floor are organic gecko by-products.
The bats usually start zooming through the patio as soon as it is truly dark. They move so fast you can't actually see them, just a blur of darkness where they were a nanosecond ago. Yes, that was a bat. No, they won't get tangled in your hair. They are welcome to the party because eat their weight in mosquitoes every night.
Much less welcome are the spiders. Intellect and instinct diverge sharply when there's a spider in the same room. I know that spiders are our friends. I know they are beneficial to agriculture and good for the environment, but I have never been able to warm to them. My terms are clear spiders can live in the garden (as long as they stay out of my shoes and gardening gloves) or even the porch, but once they enter my territory and come into the house, the truce is considered broken.
There is no sensation quite like sitting on the loo in the middle of the night and glancing down to see a leg extending out from behind the loo brush, a few inches from one's foot. This leg is about 4" long, has several knees and a considerable amount of black hair. One's still-sleeping mind collates this information and concludes that there are 7 other legs just like it, coming together in a large hairy body. It's amazing how quickly one can come to full consciousness in these situations. These adventures never seem to happen in daylight, by the way, or when one has a house guest who is eager to undertake a Live Capture and Release program.
One night I was sitting on the patio with a friend over dinner, when a movement behind his head caught my eye. One of the heavy plastic cords of the bamboo chick blinds actually lifted as a huge spider pushed under it. "Do you mind spiders?" I enquired calmly. "No," he replied, declining even to look up at it. I couldn't take my eyes off the thing. When he left I walked him to the gate and returned to find that Kipper had leapt up, knocked the spider to the floor and was neatly dismembering it. I tried to feel sorry.
Last year I spent a few days at an ashram in Thailand. The toilet near my hut was infested with very large, flat, hairy gray spiders that covered every surface, even the underside of the toilet seat. I could not make myself go in there, no matter how my kidneys begged. There was another loo a long, dark journey at the other end of the property. But since the grounds were cheerfully described as being alive with vipers (harmless of course; these were Buddhist vipers), I made that journey only in daylight. I took the undignified alternative of watering my toes outside my hut in the dark reaches of the night, probably surrounded by laughing spiders.
Then there are the rats. I had only lived in my house a few weeks when I was woken by the thundering of large mammals in the bedeg ceiling. A friend who has the same problem agrees that it sounds exactly like bears dancing on the rafters. My pembantu assured me we had tikus besar. Could a few little rats (and Balinese rats are pretty small, compared to their Singapore cousins) really make so much noise?
A few months ago J, a friend from Singapore, came to stay with me. She admired the house, noted its isolation and asked whether I felt lonely at night. On the first morning she presented herself at the breakfast table with bleary eyes. "I have been awake since 3 o'clock," she reported, quite politely. "There was a rat in my room. I turned on all the lights, chased it out of my suitcase and sat up til dawn." Her sensitive hostess had slept right through the drama. The next evening, I heard a squeal from the loo. A rat had run out from under the washing machine past J as she sat on the throne, squeezed under my specially imported pest-proofing under the door and fled into the night. J went to bed that night wearing her glasses, with all the lights on and windows sealed shut. I assured her that the rodent was unlikely to revisit the scene of the crime and went to bed. Alas, the rat not only returned but played mountaineer in the wardrobe all night. I slept through it. Poor J returned to Singapore singularly unrested.
Now that the rainy season has begun, the rats are getting much too cheeky. They leave evidence of their passing on my books, in the kitchen and - most worrying - in the cupboard where I keep the single malt. Could these be Scottish rats? They leap fearlessly from cupboards and zoom under supposedly rat-proof doors. The other night I found one capering in the carving of my bed. I'm seriously thinking of turning in the pit bull for a terrier, being unfortunately allergic to cats.
The rain also brings a phenomenon I've experienced in Africa. Once a year when the humidity is just right and it's very dark, the earth explodes with millions of fat sausage flies. Their two sets of wings tremble as they dart straight into the nearest light. In Nairobi we used to invite the neighbours round, turn off all the lights, close the windows and light just one candle. Behind the patio doors, we'd sip gin and tonic and watch uncountable insects rise out of the grass, dash themselves against the glass, lose their wings and pile themselves against the walls of the house. In the morning the housemen would sweep them into tall heaps and munch them by the handful.
In Bali they flock to my patio where Kipper leaps to catch them, spitting out the tough wings and devouring the carcasses. They hover in hundreds by the garden lights, and a few are staggering across the keyboard as I type this. The cicaks and geckos are torpidly overfed. Perhaps the larger spiders have dined well, too.
