Bat Sh*t Crazy

Last night, when I got up to pee for the second time, I paused by the bathroom door to listen to a new sound. I’d heard something distinctive break through the chaos of hundreds of frogs calling for mates. It was a single, clear note, rising at the end like a question mark. There it was again. Hyena.

A lot happens in the darkness here in Zambia. Someone turns off the lights at about 6.30pm every night. It never varies. No sooner have you noticed a glorious sunset than it’s pitch dark. And then a whole new community of mammals, insects, and birds emerge. Nighttime can be an adrenalin–fuelled adventure if you dare to stray from the safety of your mosquito net.

And sometimes, even if you don’t. 

A couple of weeks ago, my sleep was disturbed by the bedside light going on. I rolled over to see my naked husband on his hands and knees. And then I spotted the bat crawling up the bed sheet between us. I moved. Fast.

Like a dumb fly caught in a web, I was immediately tangled in the mosquito net, blindly flailing to escape. The dog that had been sleeping at my feet took this as his cue to panic. Beau has long, impala-like legs, perfect for tearing mosquito nets. The two of us thrashed about until I broke free and stumbled backwards into the darkness of the bedroom. Beau crashed through an enormous hole he’d made in the net, barking furiously because there was clearly an existential crisis.

My husband swore at both of us to stop messing about. He’d calmly followed the bat’s progress up the bed and on to the back wall of the mosquito net, which lay flush against the wall. He was still kneeling, naked, with his hand over the panicking creature, hoping it wouldn’t bite him. Bats can carry rabies and all sorts of other nasties. Right now, shouting at me to get a fucking glass or bowl or something, with his hand pressed on the wall and his balls swinging over his pillow, the LED light casting spooky shadows on his fuming face, my husband looked a bit rabid, I thought. Perhaps the bat should be worried about being bitten.

One of our batty residents

We removed the bat humanely of course, and as we saw it fly off into the night I noted that opening the front door at 1am with the house lights on meant that we let in a whole new set of flying problems. Somehow - and this is the transformation that has taken place in me since I’ve been in Zambia - I crawled back into bed under our now pointless mosquito net and immediately fell asleep.

In the following days we developed a Bat Stations routine. This included the use of a padded glove for handling the bats, strategically placed torches, a procedure for unlocking and unbolting doors at optimum speed, removing the dog to a no-panic zone, and a protocol for turning off ceiling fans and floor fans (no shredded bats, thank you very much). We’ll be eating dinner, or watching TV, and one of us will catch a movement in our peripheral vision, a fleeting shadow on the wall, and shout ‘Bat Stations!’ and we all know the drill.

Sweeping black guano pellets off the bathroom and bedroom floors became a tad annoying. The shower was unusable until it had been swept out. I even found half a dozen pellets in my hair conditioner. How on earth did they manage that?  Were they squatting on the bottle? As the piles of guano got deeper, I wondered if this was how the bats amuse themselves of an evening, with precision shitting. I left a needle by the basin, just to see if they could…

For a couple of weeks I kept saying to my husband at night, ‘Can you hear that?’

‘Hear what?’

‘That noise, that squeaking noise?’

Nope, he’d say, claiming to hear nothing except the cicadas and frogs and maybe a hippo in the distance. I’d turn over in bed and put in my earplugs with a sigh, thinking he’s getting old and deaf.

Then one afternoon I found about 20 bats hanging above the bed. I could clearly hear them congratulating each other on their new five-star roost, but my husband could not hear a thing; their communications were at a pitch too high for my husband’s ears. It’s good to know that at fifty-four years old I can hear at a frequency usually only audible to children and young adults. Perhaps I could add that to my CV?

Bats roosting above our bed, complete with evidence of their bodily functions.

Our Landlady was very good about responding to our SOS. We went away for a few days and she cemented over all the holes she could find between the tin roof and the cement walls. We returned, jubilant that we could sleep peacefully without a squadron of bats overhead.

Within 24 hours, we were manning the Bat Stations again.