Wasp
June 12, 2009
The Wasp.
Once, when I still lived Claygate and slept with my door open because I was scared of the dark, a strange thing happened. The smoke alarm was going off in the loft and it woke me and my family up. We all stood on the landing looking puzzled. I have a crippling fear of house fires, so at this moment I reminded my family of the emergency exits. My mum, who isn’t scared of anything, took the Polish axe from beside my bed and nudged open the loft hatch. It’s not strange to have an axe by the bed, it’s a Polish walking stick with an axe head for ‘frightening bears’ and supporting you when you hike. It’s called a Tupaga. The dark chasm indicated that there was no fire burning its way through our house. However, a few wasps buzzed out through the gap and whizzed around our heads. It appeared we had a wasp nest.
Considering it was the middle of the night and there wasn’t a great deal we could do, my mum closed the hatch, mutilated the wasps with a rolled up newspaper and scraped their carcasses into the bin. We all went back to bed. Within seconds I had tucked up in bed and let the darkness lull me back to sleep. It was then that I heard my brother screaming like a banshee in the other room. Scared stiff, I cling tightly to my covers and waited until my parents ran into his room. I slid out of the bed and padded quietly behind them. My brother was leaping around his room, throwing his duvet on the ground and swearing maniacally. We stood there perplexed, a shaft of light illuminating his crazy dance. When he calmed down, we translated his ramblings into a story. It transpired that a wasp had found its way into his bed, so when we all returned to our rooms after the false fire alarm, he had climbed into his bed, pulled his covers around him and made himself comfortable…completely unaware that he had trapped an angry wasp between his cover and his naked skin.
I think we know how this story ends.
Thinking about wasps in the dark still makes me shudder, even though I’m thousands of miles and 10 years away from that day.
And I’m still scared of the dark.
