A couple of months ago I wrote about my first encounter with Javanese fauna, the musang. This particular musang had taken a liking to the coconut palm trees that shade my pool. A couple of months ago, it took up lodging in my roof. I am assured that this is a good thing, particularly because the only thing the musang likes munching on more than flowers and berries is rats.

Not that the rats are a problem. We've been in the house for nearly six months and I have only seen two – and one of those was hanging from Catty's mouth. They are fearsome creatures: big black beasts with long hairless tails. Not quite Disney or Pixar material. Even street-smart Puss2, my kampung cat, steers clear of them. Ironically, her nemesis, Catty, who is part-Burmese part-kilim rug, is a born rat-killer. If you've ever seen a cat kill something, you'll know it's not pretty. The slightly stupid fluff-ball with oversized paws we call Catty turns into some sort of fluffy version of Vlad the Impaler when he gets his claws on a rat, tossing it around and seeming to revel in its pain.

Having a resident musang is a mixed blessing. Deprived of rats, Catty has reverted to his allotted role of cute fluffy pet (cute is a bit hard to pull off with rat blood streaked down your front). He's even given up pacing the house at night and howling to be let out to fulfil his blood-lust. But the upstairs tenant has taken some getting used to. Far from the soft scratching you would expect from a possum living in your roof, our resident musang is a noisy bugger, scurrying around the roof as if he were in the last minutes of a futsal match.

For the first week or so, I'd lie in bed listening to this beast scurry around, imagining him hitting a weak spot and crashing through into the bedroom. After a while, I stopped noticing. Things seemed to be going okay until something started crapping in my pool. Every morning a pile of coconut husks would appear on the edge of pool. Right next to, was another pile of droppings. The only problem is that next to “the edge of the pool” is “in the pool”. Not quite so easy to clean up. At first I thought it was our new tenant. Not so. Apparently the droppings are left by bats. The gardener assures me that there is no risk of the bats moving in. Not unless they plan on being our tenant’s next meal.