People and noise

Martin

Sunday morning. I awoke bright and early, planning to make good use of the day ahead.

Helen stirred. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “That this room smells a bit like the inside of a guinea pig hutch.”

I sniffed, and kind of agreed. We’ve moved to a different house, and I have to admit that I’ve been more than a bit slovenly in my cleaning habits. Oh well, I thought. Better set some time aside to do some tidying soon.

The day drifted on. I relocated to the garden, where I dedicated myself to reading and writing, whereas Helen started to add a bit of decoration to our room, in the form of a plant, and some painted wooden butterflies.

A while later, she emerged. “I think I’ve found the source of the smell,” she said. “There was some poo smeared on the floor.”

Oh dear. Until this point I had always thought it was kinda wonderful to be living in a house where a giant tortoise, who goes by the name of Martin, roamed around the garden, but I began to get an inkling that this might have its dark (and smelly) side. This was reinforced by Helen’s next point.

“It looks like there’s poo on your bag as well.”

And there it was. A drying, greenish lump of tortoise turd clinging around the zip of the front pocket. Euurrgh.

We set about cleaning the poo patches. This might not need stressing, but tortoise poo really smells very bad, and is quite hard to shift from material. Eventually, we emerged triumphant and queasy, and returned to our respective days. A short while later, a disconcerting thought flitted across my mind.

“You know how the room smelled this morning?” I said. “What if we shut the tortoise in with us overnight.”

“That would be terrible,” said Helen.

Around this point, someone rang the doorbell and invited us out for lunch, giving us the perfect opportunity to ignore this distressing possibility, eat some nice food and watch some football (the restaurant was showing the Barcelona – Madrid game, which was somewhat more of a boon for me than it was for Helen). We returned a couple of hours later, full to the brim and keen to enjoy a siesta in one of the hammocks that hang oh so invitingly in the garden.

As a result it was quite a while later when I returned to our room. Of course, it was covered in poo (and a little bit of wee). I began to pull the shoes, and more gingerly, Helen’s dung-smeared rucksack, from beneath our bed, to reveal Martin relaxing at just about the most inaccessible corner of the room.

“The tortoise is under our bed,” I told a housemate. “How do I get him out?” I had previously seen her carrying him out of the house, presumably to ward off a similar poo incident.

“You could use a broom,” she said. “Just don’t damage him.”

I got the broom and looked under the bed again. Martin was facing the far wall, meaning I would have to get him to turn around. I waved the broom in front of his face. With crushing obviousness, he retreated into his shell. I sensed the broom idea wasn’t going to work.

Happily at that point help arrived, in the form of a neighbour named Rosita, who had been asked to come around by our landlady in order to help put up Christmas decorations. Together we moved the bed and exposed the tortoise. Helen swooped in, picked him up and heaved him out to the garden (large tortoises are apparently pretty heavy). Rosita also took control of the cleaning operation for which I might just be eternally grateful.

We’ll never know whether or not we spent the night with a tortoise (us on top, him underneath). To help get rid of the guinea-pig smell, Helen had left the door open, so it’s possible that he managed to sneak in while we were having breakfast or something. In fact, we discovered that he’d spent some time living there before it was converted into a bedroom, so in a way perhaps he was returning home.

What we do know is that he might be unlikely to make a return visit. The evening ended with Martin being taken to live in another house outside of the city, on the road that runs through the jungle. This seemed a bit of an extreme response at the time, but I think ours was the latest in a line of poo incidents inside the house, so maybe it had been on the cards for a while. In fact, now I think about it, it was only a week earlier that he climbed into the hifi cabinet and knocked one of the speakers on the floor. Maybe he’ll be happier out there, roaming around and chewing through the greenery.

Bye Martin, you big old plodding, chomping, stinking charmer, you.

1 Comment »

1. 

   Sounds pretty much like this happens to all Martins at some point in our lives

   Comment by Martin Dunne — March 23, 2010 @ 4:34 am

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