I thought it was a person at first. I was walking down the wooden steps of my new apartment with my garbage bag in hand, carefully tiptoeing around the remnants of beer cans and Solo cups littering the curb, crushed from hurried footsteps and throbbing bass beats of the night before.
As I neared the bottom of the stairs, I heard a rustling from the garbage bins at the base of my building. Paper bags brushed against one another and the lid of a bin slammed shut. I smiled readily, eager to meet my new neighbours.
I approached the garbage bins but saw nobody. I frowned, gingerly holding the ties of my black garbage bag as I poked my head around the dark corner sandwiched between two brick walls. My sneaker slipped on the cardboard of an IKEA package, crunching against the concrete. A loud rip disturbed the quiet lull of the August evening.
As soon as I steadied myself, I saw them. Three, one by one, climbing out of the garbage bin, scurrying hurriedly along the base of the brick wall. Their tails curled neatly, their tiny feet flashing as their furry bodies ran past me. Astonished, I took a step back.
I had heard about the rats. As a ripe second year, I had just moved into my Ghetto apartment a few days prior. When I was touring houses in the winter of last year, my upper-year friends had warned me about the Ghetto rodents.
“Get ready for the rats,” one would say with a sly smile.
Another would laugh. “True. You can’t escape them, really. They’re everywhere.”
I would shiver, exchanging a wary glance with my future housemates. But I couldn’t help the way my heartbeat fluttered excitedly. There was something mature about the way my older friends talked about the rats, something so adult. Away from the cramped student residences of first year, upperclassmen had houses. They cooked pasta in tiled kitchens, hosted wine nights in each other’s living rooms, and dodged rats when they took their garbage out.
In August, when I mistakenly took the Ghetto rats for my new neighbours, I felt like I had officially been welcomed into a new community – one where furry bodies bonded fellow McGill students together.
At a housewarming party in early September, I hugged friends I hadn’t seen in months, a warm feeling of comfort permeating the dimly lit room. We talked about our summers before moving to the more pressing topic at hand: “How’s your house?” The question of the hour. I spoke to my peers about their new homes, their Facebook Marketplace furniture, their scuzzy landlords. Each person had unique stories of how they had turned their new spaces into a home.
But the through-line of every conversation was the rats.
“Did you get the notice?” they asked, referring to the slips of paper many of us received under our wooden doors, notifying us of rodents in the neighbourhood.
“I didn’t, but I saw them last night. Ten, I swear, right at the bottom of my apartment,” a friend added. We all nodded together, laughing at the quintessential Ghetto ritual of meeting our rodent neighbours.
As I settled into a new routine over the autumn months, I learned to take my garbage out in the mornings instead of at dusk. The night belonged to the rats, when they nestled between apple cores and egg cartoons, ready to spring from the heavy lids of the garbage bins at any notice. I learned to stomp a little extra loudly on the last step of my stairs, knowing to wait a few moments for the rats to scuttle out of the corners before stepping onto the sidewalk. I knew to be extra cautious when I walked through the Ghetto the night before garbage day, sidestepping rodents buried along open trash bags along the curb. In a bizarre way, rats had come to dictate the structure of my life.
Last week, my friends visited from out of town. It was dark when they arrived, and I led them through the narrow roads to the base of my stairs. I warned them to walk heavily up the steps to prevent rats from scurrying into our apartment, and they shared a look of surprise, exclaiming that they never had rats in their suburban university town. Rats were “so city,” they said.
I laughed out loud as I held open my door, acknowledging the banality of rats in Montreal. But I also felt a strange sense of pride. Rats, with their dirtied fur and coiled tails, had become intertwined with my everyday – familiar little creatures that now gave me a perverse sense of home.
I waited for the last of my friends to enter my doorway before following them inside. As I moved to close the door, I saw a small body hustle against the November wind, rushing into the crevices between the garbage bins. I smiled slightly before I shut the door.