A giant flesh-crazed centipede viciously assaulted my mother-in-law. Hubster rang in a panic. “An animal like a snake but with plenty of feet” had crawled up her leg while she was gardening. Wielding her trusty machete she’d tried to flick the thing off, but the angry brute sunk its fat fangs gum deep.
I was born in that antipodean vipers’ nest otherwise known as Australia – a pitiless bastion of murderous fauna, where super-smart, venomous, heat-seeking arthropods and plagues of ill-conceived animalia are Hell-bent on relieving you of life and/or limb, or at the very least giving you a nasty bite. Having koalas and baby wombats comes nowhere near to making up for all the hideous shitty creatures we have to put up with. There are people far more qualified than me to give you the lowdown on our creeping pantheon of death. Some people even like them. Steve Irwin could tell you all about it. Oh, wait. He was stabbed in the heart by an ungrateful stingray.
Despite their deadly reputation, Australia’s bugs are generally elegantly built and usually reclusive. They look nice in a Perspex paperweight or the gear knob of a Monaro HT. If you poke ‘em or forget to check your shoes, of course they’ll get you. But with few exceptions they seldom attack unprovoked.
So I’m no fan of insects and shit but if I’m feeling righteous I do save errant bees, earthworms and skinks from the gym pool of a balmy Bodes morning. I’ve hooked a massive rhino beetle out with a stick. I’ve even given an overinflated toad miniature CPR, with my finger wrapped in a leaf. But have you seen those ghastly vinegaroons? Gothic matte-black whip scorpions with stingers like toothpicks and pincers that could drag a baby right out of a tent. I draw the line at these freaks. They can fucken well drown. Oh shit. They can swim.
There are those big black bumbling bees that love the smell of Elnett in the morning. If you’ve seen how high I like my hair you’ll know why I’ve got my own swarm. They have massive stingers but aren’t that smart. You can trick them by waving your arms around and running away.
Here, cockroaches suck the biggest of all. They are the worst. They chase you, or – help me, Jesus – fly at you. Sure they don’t bite, but their scuttling filthiness makes me squeal like a little girl and phone for help from atop the nearest chair. One can of Mortien is never enough for those disgusting bastards.
Although related to lobsters, Cambodian centipedes are not delicious flame-grilled with a lime aioli on the side. I don’t know if you’ve seen one but they’re scary as fuck. Eight inches of red pointy aggression heading straight for you at speed. For once, this is not a good thing. According to Wikipedia, once they’ve stabbed you they ‘cut away at their prey’ with their ‘forcipules’. Fucken hell. This mother was hanging off mum’s leg. She must have been terrified.
She eventually kicked that devil’s spawn to the kerb and made it to the village healer who put a poultice on it. Three hours later she was prostrate in pain and I got the call from my lifemate. This wasn’t at all funny, or even a bit interesting like when they put a tarantula and a scorpion together in an episode of Japanese Bugfight. Mum’s leg had swollen and by the time we got her to a foreign clinic in CharmingVille she was barely conscious in agony.
Don’t you just hate it when you’re at the doctors and they keep you waiting for three hours even though you feel like shit or you’ve broke something and just 10 minutes of their care and some basic medication would fix everything and totally justify their fucking obscene bill at the end of it?
But never mind. I sat trawling the internet and seething loudly while Ma lay shivering in shock. Dr Google prescribed a codeine tablet and an icepack. Which is exactly what the lip-smacking-post-5pm-snack-returnee-cum-intern prescribed for her, two hours and 57 minutes later.
Like everyone, I’ve given crickets a try and sucked the hair off a spider leg for a YouTube video. Sometimes I guess it’s just payback time in bugland. Watch where you put your feet.