La Vie En Roach

Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Roaches make people cry.

It is a terrible thing to never be quite at ease inside one’s own home, to be hyper-vigilant, alert but not alarmed. To constantly scan the walls and the crevices, to anticipate and expect an unwanted guest or ten. Anything could be one of THEM: a clump of hair, a chip of paint, a soft, scuttling feeling against the back of my hand. They are cockroaches. Always cockroaches.

Sydney has as many cockroaches as it has tourists sighing over the Opera House. The climate is ideal – moist, warm, never punishingly cold enough to stop them proliferating, spreading, and affluent enough that there will always be food in our bins and our houses.

How I hate their ancient armor, crazed, erratic movements, constant perseverance and resistance against bottled poisons. How I fear we are building up their immunity against roach-spray – we might be raising an army of super-bugs who cannot be killed. Nothing could surprise me – I imagine I will one day walk into my loungeroom to see a roach the size of Kafka’s nightmares, all tickly legs and drooling mouth. How it will laugh at the slipper in my hand.

One time I thought there was a near-ideal solution. In a move worthy of Jonathan Swift, we would eat the cockroaches. We would stuff ourselves full of them like champion cockroach-eater Edward Archbold. Then if we spotted them inside our homes we would pick them off the wall and down them as if there were no more than gummi bears. The thing about Archbold, though, is that he died after his epic roach-eating feat during which he downed dozens of them, gigantic ones to boot. An autopsy found this wasn’t from a kind of anaphylactic shock. No, insect parts had managed to suffocate him. Cripes. Even if you do your best to defeat them, even if you manage to masticate unfeasibly great numbers of them, in the end, the roaches always win.