Cockroaches

Cockroaches are the source of a severe infestation in a student house in Edinburgh. Their removal becomes a prolonged encounter with the effects of poison, shifting them from household pests into the focus of the narrator’s uneasy attention to suffering and response.

Infestation and Pest Control

The house is described as riddled with cockroaches. When a Rentokil worker comes to treat it, the narrator asks how the poison works and learns that it rots the insects’ stomachs. The next day, hundreds lie along the kitchen skirting boards; some still flex their legs, and they take hours to die.

The Narrator’s Response

The sight and duration of the insects’ dying produce a strong physical reaction: the narrator sits in the living room holding her stomach and rocking, distressed by what is happening. Her hatred is directed at the cockroaches for putting her through the experience, even as her account makes their prolonged deaths difficult to disregard.

Insect Pain and Narrative Significance

Elsewhere in the same reflection, the narrator recalls researching whether insects feel pain while deciding what to do about a twitching beetle. She understands the information she found to mean that insects lack a central nervous system and do not experience pain as an emotion, but respond to negative stimuli by reversing, hiding, playing dead, or running. Set beside the hours-long effects of the poison, that distinction does not resolve her discomfort: the cockroaches’ movements remain visible, while the question of what those movements mean remains uncertain.