A Cockroach’s Life

I know a bloke. 

His name is Phil.

Phil’s a good bloke.

Phil’s also a cockroach. One of the hardy species that will survive the approaching nuclear holocaust, and will dance on humanity’s ashes and bones when the fallout dust clears. The eventual and ultimate winner of Darwin’s Race Of Natural Selection. Ready set go, humans make it to the 21^st century more or less in one piece, then vote for some unaccountable psychopath one time too many and it’s boom and the mushroom cloud. Like the old song says “boom goes London, boom Paris, more room for you more room for me”. Last ones standing will be Phil and his mates, rubbing their scaly forelegs in glee at the prospect of ruling the radioactive desert that will be all that’s left of planet Earth.

Phil is an enterprising fella. He used to live under the fridge at the house of a mate of mine, with his five thousand brothers, sisters, uncles, aunties, nieces, nephews, and unacknowledged illegitimate kids. He gets around. But he looked around one day and found his horizon too small and limited, cramping his style, curtailing his natural drive for expansion. He was thirsting for exposure to The Wide Open World, novel experiences, other species to meet, new and different things to shit on. So one beautiful dark, cold and windy night, unbeknownst to my mate, Phil sneaked out from his hidey hole, scuttled unseen across the kitchen floor, launched and latched himself onto the back of my mate’s sandals, and got himself carried out of the front door and into the car. Once there he wasted no time vanishing under a seat, and proceeded to gnaw on, gobble up and shit on various bits and pieces of random food stuffs that he found stuck under there, such as old socks, a beanie, surf wax and an old broken legrope.

The car bounced, bolted and bucked down the night time road, deserted by all except the most foolhardy, insane, deluded and mistaken, and before too long rattled to a standstill in an empty carpark. Doors slammed, coughs were expulsed, throats were scraped. There was the muffled sound of conversation and laughter, followed by unidentifiable sounds seemingly associated with moving long clunky things around. Phil stuck his head out from underneath the seat, thoughtfully chewing on a piece of banana peel absentmindedly abandoned there six months previous. He scratched his nose, turned the bit he was eating over in his claws, and shat on it. Nothing like a bit of condiment on his tucker, he reckoned.

He was curious about his surroundings. He couldn’t really see anything, so he wormed his way out from under the seat, over the floor pan, and through the crack between the door and the car frame, a crack indiscernible to the naked human eye but as wide as a six lane super highway for Phil and his ilk. He wiggled his arse, and dropped out of the car, bouncing gently on his hairy legs and flapping his wings a bit for good measure. Something swung past him at just-above head height, so on an impulse he lunged up and out, grabbed hold of whatever it was, and held on for billy-o. Cockroaches are champions at holding on. Their mandibles are, pound for pound and relatively, three times more powerful than the jaws of saltwater crocodiles, and smell twice as bad.

Phil had no idea where he was going, but he was having the time of his life so far, and was pretty sure it could only get better from here on. The thing he was hanging onto flapped around, bounced up and down, then become taut and tight. Phil held on. He was pretty sure he was about to boldly go where no cockroach had ever gone before.

Sure enough, next thing he knew he went splash, and was up to over his antennae in water. He opened his mouth, gulped up a bit, and tasted it thoughtfully. Hmm. Salt water. On average and upon rough estimation, about 30,000 part per million salt to water, he reckoned. It’s a little known odd and unusual fact of nature that cockroaches are possessed of sophisticated innate environmental assessment abilities. Not many people know that.

Being a bit too wet for his liking he decided to explore further afield, and moved up along the long thin bendy thing he had been holding onto, until he reached a surface that seemed hard, flat, and cold, so therefore very comfortable by cockroach standards. There was a bit of a gooey softish substance stuck onto the surface. It tasted all right. A complex compound taste sensation of bees’ excrement, coconut oil and toe jam. Phil nodded approvingly. Right up his alley.

The surface seemed to be moving up and down, bobbing along in the water, without apparently really going anywhere. Phil looked up. The night sky was big, wide and black, strewn through with the gazillion stars of the Milky Way. Over to his left he could see the Southern Cross, perched up there quietly minding its own business. In front, hanging high and mighty over an expanse of black shimmering water, which Phil had to admit looked pretty awe-inspiring and just a little bit terrifying, sat a big fat silver moon, apparently (Phil’s natural senses of environmental assessment informed him) three days after being full. Plenty of light, he reflected, as he rubbed his hairy legs and groomed his wings, while chewing on a bit of toenail he had found poking out of the gooey substance on the hard surface. It was always important to chew things like toenail thoroughly he had found over the years, otherwise they gave his arse hell when they came back out again at the other side.

Phil angled his head slightly sideways, assessing the exact positioning of the various celestial bodies above him. The cogs, wheels, electrodes and circuits in his brain whizzed and whirred, and almost instantly delivered the desired reply: about 3.45 am. No wonder it was quiet and dark. Phil shook his head. Humans do the weirdest things. They just don’t get it. The basic division of labour is so simple. Humans spend the daytime, when the sun is out, dropping, distributing and spilling various more or less edible substances generically and preferably generously around the place. Then, when they go to bed at night, the roaches come out and feast, party and dance. It’s not that hard to get. Phil blamed their lack of education. Standards surely were slipping.

Somewhere up ahead in front of him conversation was taking place. Two humans appeared to be discussing wind, waves and water movement. Buggered if he knew why. Whenever he felt like moving his water he never considered it worthy of discussion.

Phil was lost in pondering the foolishness of human endeavour, there beneath the stars and the moon on the pitch black water, and was not paying attention to his surroundings very much, when all of a sudden a roaring sound came upon him, as if from out of nowhere. He swivelled his compound eyes around towards it, and had just enough time to see a massive wall of towering black water stand up in front of him and bear down on him like the fabled Thong Of Death often whispered about in hushed tones at cockroach funerals. It was all he could do not to shit out the toenail, which, he distinctly felt, could do with at least another five minutes or so of digestion.

Phil’s mandibles dropped in terror. He had no idea what to do or how to cope with these sort of dramatic emergencies, which had never ever been mentioned in The Great Cockroach Manual For Life And Shitting On Things, handed down through the generations from father to egg to larvae. He saw his life flash past him in a split second, leaving him with a lingering sense of regret at having passed up a second serving of that thong sole at the barbie last week.

Before he knew it he was picked up, holding on to the hard surface for dear life, digging his mandibles into the layer of goo for all he was worth, and he went hurtling away at breakneck speed. All around him water came crashing down, cascading in impenetrable curtains of white foam, frothing and flying on top of his head, thoroughly drenching him right down to the anal cercus, and, hanging on by his mouth, he was sucked away with his legs flapping in the breeze behind him. After half an eternity of abject horror the avalanches of water seemed to subside, his back was no longer pounded by hammers of seawater, and, shaking his head from side to side, he carefully peeled open one eye.

What he saw took his breath away.

Above him, the stars, the Milky way, the moon shining silver and bright. Below him, an inscrutable glass-like expanse of coal black water. And in front of him, stretching out luxuriously and gloriously like a freshly-stumbled-upon vegemite sandwich that someone forgot under a couch three months ago, a wall of water with a bend and a curve in it. The curve moved and changed and twisted and reshaped itself as he, the thing he was on, and the human who seemed to be steering it flew down a million miles an hour, and right there in front of the nose of the big flat thing lay a shimmering track of moonlight, illuminating the way, lighting up a sealane pathway for the flat thing to shoot down on.

Phil had to admit it, he was impressed. Maybe these humans weren’t so stupid after all, if they got up to stuff like this at night.

Then, just when he was getting comfortable and started to settle in for the ride, a horrible sound emanated from somewhere up above. It pierced his ears, rattled his brain, melted his eyeballs, curdled his icecold blood and made him lose the half-digested toenail right there and then. He watched it blow away behind him with regret.

“Ooooooooaaaaaaaarrrrrrwoooohoooooooowuwuwuwuwuwuwueeeeeeeeeeerggggghhh”

If it was supposed to be language it certainly wasn’t one he’d ever been exposed to before. It sounded a bit like those cows at the abattoir where he’d lived for a while, just before they got their throats cut. A howl of deep and dismal agony. Frozen in shock he stared upwards, towards where the noise seemed to come from. It was hard to be sure, but it looked like it might be emanating from the human now standing on its hind legs on the flat thing, knuckles dragging through the water. Phil wouldn’t exactly call himself an expert on the human species, but he had the distinct impression that in the case of this particular one a bit of inter-species crossbreeding might have taken place somewhere along the line, possibly with a baboon. He looked up above him. A massive arse swayed dangerously with the rocking and bouncing movement of the flat thing. Phil nodded decisively to himself. Definitely baboon.

Eventually the thing slowed down and stalled in the water. Phil noticed with surprise that he regretted it, and realised that he had quite enjoyed the experience and wouldn’t have minded if it had kept going a bit longer. The flat thing started sinking, and the baboon-cross-human fell over backwards, landing gracelessly in the water with a sound like diarrhea hitting the toilet bowl with urgency and near-terminal velocity. Phil licked his chops at the happy memory.

The semi-human clambered back onto the flat thing, heaving and snorting and farting and spitting out salt water, and they started moving again, but much slower this time. Phil looked around. They appeared to be going back to where they had come from.

And they did.

And then the same thing repeated itself, death-rattle shriek and all, over and over again.

After a while Phil started to doze off. The rhythm of the moving of the flat thing was comfortable and soothing. In between catapulting away over the water the thing would bob up and down quietly for a spell, and the humans would engage in conversation. There were three of them now. They appeared to have names, too. One seemed to be referred to as The Uncle. A second one apparently was known as The Snake Catcher. Phil recognised him now as his pet human, the one who had been living in his house for the last six months or so, and kind donor of and contributor to the many late night revelries on shoe polish, pizza crusts and dirty hankies that Phil and his extended relatives had been indulging in for quite some time now. He was the one he had hitched a ride over here with. The third human, Phil was not at all surprised to learn, appeared indeed to be a baboon, and was addressed as such by the other two. Phil shook his head in wonder. Human names were weird. They really had no idea.

Lulled and rocked by the gentle swaying of the sea, alternated and punctuated by bursts of speed into moonlight accompanied by the teeth-shattering marrow-pulverising wailing of the baboon-like creature, Phil fell asleep. He woke up once to see the human known as The Uncle take his leave. Phil looked around. It was still the middle of the night. He vaguely wondered where that human might be off to, and if he, perhaps, was acquainted with a stash of mouldy cheese underneath a kitchen sink somewhere. Drowsy and sleepy-eyed he heard the remaining two humans, or, possibly, one human and one semi-human, discuss time and weather. It seemed that they were getting cold in the south-westerly that was blowing increasingly strongly over the water, making it choppy and bumpy, and, Phil noticed with the sharp eye of the keen observer of things, making the baboon creature fall off a lot more on the rides on the water. It seemed the humans were freezing their arses off and were waiting for the sun to come up so they could leave. Phil sighed in exasperation. They clearly didn’t understand common, basic, 101 cockroach etiquette: leave before sunrise. They had it all arse-about. Obviously there was no hope.

They did stick it out.

The sun came up and, of course, as is their wont, heaps more humans appeared on the water, all on those long flat things.

As soon as they appeared Phil’s two pet humans, as he fondly thought of them now, pulled the pin on their enterprise and moved their flat things back to dry land.

On the spur of the moment Phil decided to stick with the semi-baboon creature. He was sure there would be a plentiful supply of old banana skins at his house, and, truth be told, he was looking forward to making the acquaintance of the new and fresh-faced female cockroach population that was bound to be dwelling there, and, Phil felt, would not be pestering him for alimony and support sustenance for some time to come at least.

Phil dropped out of the car at the new house, scuttled under the fridge and made himself comfortable. This adventure was going well.

Upon ripe and careful reflection, Phil thought, and all things considered, he would adopt these humans. They would make good honorary cockroaches.