My son’s guinea pig is dying. He is coping with the vet’s prognosis by making the necessary arrangements for a burial in our back garden. To him death is still an unexperienced concept, just a word, something he sees in movies, on the news. He is ten-years-old.

I gaze into the little bed in the hutch — now centre stage in the living room — hoping for another performance of its previous twitch and snuffle of life. Instead I see only a creature as still as the cushions my son has laid her on, save for her little chest rising softly, falling.

I am forty-four. I don’t even like rodents. This one has been with us since my son  heard a rustling coming from a plastic bag dumped behind the pedal bin in the toilet block at Mallawa sports ground. That year he was playing junior soccer and it was an at-home match. The next year, his sport of choice was tennis. I think now if the order had been reversed this guinea-pig would not be lying here, dying. She would probably have died inside that plastic bag four years ago.

She is the colour of brown velvet, and as soft. In this natural unnatural order of things, I see my boy trying to be brave, trying to tough it out. Apart from feeling for my son, I wonder why I have become emotionally attached to this animal. I have never allowed it to sit or sleep in my lap;  it doesn’t fetch and we have never taken it for a walk or a swim. Many a night I have tip-toed into my son’s room to find it cuddled into his neck, both of them snuffling. I could swear the guinea-pig was smiling, small and smug, with its head on the pillow next to my son’s, so close I could not distinguish whose hair was which.

A satisfactory answer as to why I am feeling like this evades me. But in its sherry eyes I see, or think I see, the panic before acceptance. I’ve seen that before in other eyes, and ... never mind. Just know that I have become caregiver to a rodent that I never liked, for it only gave me another chore; daily hutch-cleaning and feeding.

Every day now I place its favourite carrot tops into one bowl and fresh water into another, both of which I position so it can eat and drink with minimal movement. Sometimes she tries to lift her head to lap the water but misses. Other than that she doesn’t move, but there is little I can do.

‘Come on, eat something! Please!’ I say until I remember that I am pleading with a guinea-pig. Then come flashbacks of having said these very same words before, with similar emphasis. Only they were associated with tins of Ensure –  chocolate and vanilla –  bought by the case years ago in the deluded belief that they could magically protect a loved one against cancer.
Come on! Eat something! Please! Your body needs to be strong!

All those cans of Ensure, returned to the nursing service, unopened by the six-pack, by the case. Too painful to even keep in the house once their purpose had passed.

Now about this stupid rodent. She is known formally as Mallawa the Guinea-Pig after the sportsground where Andrew found her. That Saturday morning, four years ago, I tried to impress upon him that I didn’t like guinea-pigs, in fact I was probably allergic to them just as I was to cats, that I was sure we could advertise and sell it or take it to the vet’s and they would look after it but Andrew assured me neither the guinea-pig nor he could go on living without each other. I tried to impress upon him the many responsibilities of pet ownership: feeding the animal; cleaning out the hutch; giving it attention, daily. But Andrew was six and besotted and besides he had saved the animal’s life, so the animal belonged to him, he said. His kindness was something I was proud of and it would have been churlish of me to reward his open-heart with the abandonment of a creature to God knows what fate. Especially after its traumatic start. And Andrew said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, please I want this guinea-pig, please, yes I will look after it, yes.’ Which is what I finally said after being shamed by Andrew’s offer to use his life savings, about $7, to buy its life from me.

So, the three of us—myself, Andrew and his little brother Tim – went to the pet store, spent more than playing soccer for a whole term on a hutch, a water tray, food pellets, flea powder, shampoo and a grooming brush and when we got home we tucked the little guinea-pig up in a warm towel and let Andrew cuddle it with his face taut with excitement and love, and worry.    

And so our life with Mallawa began and, as all children do, my son either overwhelmed her with his attention or totally ignored her when other far more exciting things beckoned. My role was to choose some ill-timed moment—the last minute scramble to get to sports on Saturday or in the rush to get to some schoolfriend’s birthday party on time—to call out: ‘Has anyone remembered to feed Mallawa?’

Every morning now, I tap on the frame of her hutch, hoping this might initiate that little bright-eyed scurry towards me. I, after all was the main provisioner. I poke raw vegetables at her, carrot tops—I’ve saved the best—but all these green and orange bits of sustenance do not even make her raise her head anymore. I think of the hot sugary lemon drinks and buttered toast my mother would serve me when I stayed home from school and how I wanted her reassurance  that she would always be there. Kids think like that.

Many years later, I tried to repay the favour when my mother became sick, really sick. Have some tea, I would say, just a sip. A bite of toast. Some soup. Icecream? Have some Ensure. Chocolate? Vanilla? But she wouldn’t. She would try to smile, shake her head and look away with that look past panic. She was fifty-seven.

I look now at the vegetables clumped around the guinea-pig, my face so hard up against the wire of the hutch I know there will be cross-hatched indentations pressed into my skin. ‘Eat!’ I say sharply, harshly, startling myself.  I lower my voice but not my tone. ‘Eat, you stupid guinea-pig,’ I hiss quietly, ‘Eat!’

It was the same with my father last year in the hospice. At his bedside measuring his in-breaths, hoping against all the evidence that he would wake up again and ask for a ham and English mustard sandwich and a good cup of tea, or even a glass of water. A glass of water would have pleased me no end.

His appetite was hearty, once. He loved stews and dumplings with lots of gravy, steak and kidney puddings, fish pie. He had a deliberate way of spreading butter on his toast, thick and slow.

A sip of water, Dad? Just one? He was  three days past turning seventy-one.

I, too, have watched from the other side of the cage. In a hospital bed and in my own, so sick from chemotherapy and radiation that the very thought of a carrot top or a sip of water would make me gag. And here would come my best friend, setting down a tray of tea and toast, gently encouraging me to eat because he didn’t know what else to say, other than that he loves me. Just as I had said to my mother and father.

Often the tea and toast would grow cold before I could touch them. But I would take a bite, then a sip, and another bite, and another sip.

Now this stupid guinea-pig. In its own world, but a part of mine. I start to hum; Brahm’s lullaby. I used to hum it to my boys when they were feeling ill—teething, or croup as babies—and when they were older as I sat beside their bed, stroking their foreheads  into sleep when they had the chicken-pox or a cold.

So I hum. All the while Mallawa the Guinea-Pig remains as still as porcelain. Stupid guinea-pig. Stupid, beautiful guinea-pig.

***

About the Author

Sue Pearson grew up in Fiji and Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe, where she worked in journalism, and later in events and conference organisation ,copywriting and film script-writing for the National Tourist Board. It was purely coincidental that tourist numbers plummeted while she was at her post. She moved to Botswana, England and The Gambia before immigrating to Australia one grey and gale-ridden winter. She nearly headed back again but gradually defrosted. Now that she has moved north she is much warmer.

Her first poem was published at the age of 10--she found it carefully wrapped in the bottom of her mum's blanket box after she cleared her mother's house after her death. That was a real 'wow' moment—and it makes up for all the times her mum grounded her as well as packing her off to the nuns for those many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years! Well, come to think of it, the kept poem doesn't really make up for all those years at all! She still tries to look up Jesus' skirt when she goes to Church for baptisms and weddings. Sue has won awards and is published in anthologies and in literary ezines and websites. But it is the writing which is her main motivation, not so much the being published, which is a lovely fillip, and of course a cheque is always good. She cashes them very quickly before the judges change their minds. She is completing Honours in creative writing at Griffith University under Nigel Krauth.

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