The White Guinea Pig

by Ursula Dubosarksy

  URSULA DUBOSARSKY

  THE WHITE GUINEA-PIG

  About Untapped

  Most Australian books ever written have fallen out of print and become unavailable for purchase or loan from libraries. This includes important local and national histories, biographies and memoirs, beloved children’s titles, and even winners of glittering literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

  Supported by funding from state and territory libraries, philanthropists and the Australian Research Council, Untapped is identifying Australia’s culturally important lost books, digitising them, and promoting them to new generations of readers. As well as providing access to lost books and a new source of revenue for their writers, the Untapped collaboration is supporting new research into the economic value of authors’ reversion rights and book promotion by libraries, and the relationship between library lending and digital book sales. The results will feed into public policy discussions about how we can better support Australian authors, readers and culture.

  See untapped.org.au for more information, including a full list of project partners and rediscovered books.

  Readers are reminded that these books are products of their time. Some may contain language or reflect views that might now be found offensive or inappropriate.

  To dearest Dover Zelig

  Dear Father, hear and bless

  Thy beasts and singing birds

  And guard with tenderness

  Small things that have no words.

  Anonymous prayer

  Contents

  1 · Alberta

  2 · The Pigs

  3 · The Smuggling

  4 · Tory

  5 · The Escape

  6 · Something White

  7 · Visitors

  8 · Strangers

  9 · Simon

  10 · Sisters

  11 · Late At Night

  12 · Good News?

  13 · Invitations

  14 · Discovery

  15 · The Party

  16 · The Strangers Return

  17 · True Love

  18 · Eyes Open

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1 · Alberta

  It was so unfair, the whole business with the white guinea-pig. Geraldine hadn’t wanted another guinea-pig at all. In fact, she was busy plotting how she might get rid of the ones she had—swap them, perhaps, for a few uninvolving rubber plants; sell them at the local market; even let them go in a deserted park to fend for themselves.

  But then a single, sudden unguarded act of sympathy exploded into something difficult and dangerous she’d never intended, like a kiss given to the wrong person.

  It started with a girl at school, Alma—tall and wide with thick white plaits and not even a particular friend of hers—seizing upon her at a vulnerable moment.

  ‘You’ve got guinea-pigs, haven’t you?’ said Alma one morning, standing outside the lockers where Geraldine was trying to wedge her oversized maths textbook through the small grey metal door.

  ‘Mmm.’ Geraldine nodded. She should have lied. But she did have two guinea-pigs, Milly and Martha, and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

  ‘Well, have you got room for another?’ continued Alma, getting straight to the point. ‘Because we’re going away for six weeks and I’ve got to find someone to look after mine.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Geraldine, straightening up.

  ‘Dad said if I didn’t find anywhere he’d put it in a paper bag and drop a brick on it,’ mentioned Alma, adroitly.

  Could there be anyone alive, wondered Geraldine, who could say no after hearing a thing like that?

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  That was enough for Alma. ‘Great,’ she said, producing a pink shoe box from her satchel. ‘I knew you would.’

  She lifted the lid of the box as if to reveal a precious emerald necklace. Geraldine frowned weakly. What had happened in the past fifteen seconds? Had she really landed herself with another guinea-pig? She peered inside the box. It was rather larger than her own two, with long, white hair, like an Abyssinian cat. It twitched its nose and stared at her through pink eyes. Its claws, unseen beneath the wads of fur, made a scratching noise as they shuffled about the cardboard floor of the box.

  ‘It’s fat, isn’t it?’ said Geraldine, uncertainly, strangely nervous of this odd white creature. There must be some way to back out. ‘It’s not pregnant, is it? Is it a boy or a girl?’

  ‘Female,’ admitted Alma. ‘But she can’t be pregnant. I’ve had her since she was a baby, all by herself.’

  ‘Maybe she won’t get on with mine, then,’ said Geraldine, genuinely worried, suddenly imagining ear-piercing shrieks and spurts of blood emerging from the cage in their normally peaceful backyard.

  But Alma waved this aside. ‘She’s as gentle as a lamb,’ she said. ‘She sleeps in my bed.’

  Well, she’s not sleeping in mine, thought Geraldine. ‘What’s her name?’ she asked, knowing she had submitted and would never find the strength to retreat.

  ‘Alberta,’ replied Alma. ‘All the women in my family have names beginning with “A”.’

  The bell rang for the next lesson. Alma tossed back her ribboned plaits. ‘Just for six weeks,’ she called back at Geraldine as she disappeared down the corridor. ‘She won’t be any trouble.’

  Geraldine had no time to answer, no time even to open her mouth. She crouched down next to her locker, shoe box in hand. This must be how people felt when orphaned babies were left in baskets on their doorsteps, this uncomfortable mixture of pity and resentment. She still had the remains of a peanut-butter sandwich she’d been eating for morning tea in her hand, so she gingerly lifted the lid and offered it to her new charge. Alberta snatched the bread greedily with her front claws and gulped it down.

  Six weeks, Geraldine thought, trying to console herself. But six weeks, she was to discover, could change everything.

  2 · The Pigs

  Geraldine’s father always referred to Milly and Martha as ‘the pigs’. This sometimes alarmed visitors, when he would say, ‘Have you seen our pigs out the back?’ or, ‘The lawn’s never been the same since Gerry brought those pigs home.’

  ‘The pigs’ were two small chubby guinea-pigs that looked like a pair of ill-matched, mobile mittens with claws. They were brown and white and black, and, as pets go, rather disappointing.

  Geraldine had a lot of experience with pets. Sometimes it felt as if most of her conscious life had been spent in search of the perfect pet. It started at the age of three, when she’d found half a dead lizard on top of a brick in the back garden—its tail must have been eaten off by a bird.

  It was very small, scarcely the width of one of her own tiny fingers, and already a trail of ants was making a calm and ruthless track towards the carcass.

  Geraldine remembered very clearly the wave of compassion that she’d felt (a new emotion in that young life), as she’d picked it up gently and put it in an empty matchbox with a piece of cotton wool as a pillow. She didn’t realise it was dead, not being at all clear what dead meant anyway, but thought that it just needed a little rest. So she put it in the fridge, in the side box next to the butter.

  Then she forgot about it, of course, becoming quickly preoccupied by the television and lunch and colouring books, until about a week later when her mother found it there and was memorably distressed. Rather as her father had been when Geraldine hid a raw egg under the sofa cushions, hoping it would hatch into a baby chick. She’d forgotten to mention it to anyone, though, so when he plonked himself down to watch televi
sion that night, it had made a challenging sort of mess.

  The years passed, and Geraldine lost interest in reptiles and eggs, and discovered dogs. She began to feel a compulsion to go up to every dog she saw and pat the top of its head and scratch it under its ears, looking into its wet eyes as if to reassure it that she at least loved it and was its eternal friend. Naturally enough, lonely, or perhaps not so lonely but hungry, dogs started to follow her home, which delighted Geraldine but no one else in her family. They would ring up the owner or the council and watch in cold-blooded satisfaction as the poor betrayed creature was dragged off howling. Well, sometimes howling; at other times they seemed quite relieved to go.

  Geraldine’s family were not animal lovers. Despite constant campaigning, she had not yet managed to convince them to let her have a dog of her own. Have a cat, they suggested, perhaps thinking of all those television commercials where the family cat appears silently at meal times, bends its head obediently over a plastic bowl, and then runs off by itself to do more interesting things. But this was precisely why Geraldine did not want a cat. She wanted to feel appreciated. Adored. Worshipped. Dogs did that. Any dog.

  On her ninth birthday, as a kind of compromise, they gave her a bird in a cage, a bright blue budgie called Paul. But Geraldine was frightened by the feelings Paul aroused in her. Chiefly, he irritated her. She wanted him to be happy, but he was not happy. She wanted to love him, but she didn’t. And he definitely didn’t love her. Every time she came near him, whistling and murmuring, his heart began visibly pumping with stress and he shuffled to the furthest end of his perch, as if awaiting an executioner. What terrible things could she be whistling in bird language? she wondered, and so she stopped whistling after a while and stuck to English.

  She decided that he must want to be free, out of the bounds of his nice clean cage, so she tried letting him out to fly around her bedroom. Well, it was not so much a case of letting him out as thrusting him out, and then watching him attach his trembling claws to the curtain rod and refuse to move.

  Then she tried hanging his cage in a tree in the front garden, so at least he could pretend he was free. But he only seemed to grow more and more attached to the little yellow mirror with the bell hanging off it that he spent so much time pathetically trilling at. As a last desperate act of beneficence, she started deliberately leaving his cage door open, so that he might take it into his own head to fly away into liberty. Day after day he ignored it. It drove Geraldine mad.

  Until one afternoon, when she came home from school and found to her great relief that he was gone. The cage hanging from the branch was empty. Her mother tried to comfort her (how little she knew!), saying that perhaps someone had stolen him. Geraldine was inclined to agree—it hardly seemed feasible, given his general disposition, that Paul had spent the last eight months eyeing the open door and then finally taken a plunge into nature.

  No, someone passing by had spied him hanging there and taken him home to live in their nice airy aviary with lots of other birds, and he would at last be happy. Or so she kept reminding herself every time she was visited by visions of his poor blue feathery body quaking in the jaws of a local cat.

  After Paul, she kept fish. She saved up her pocket-money and bought a black one and a gold one from a department-store pet shop, as well as the tank, some plants and three sea-snails who died on the bus on the way home. Well, if Paul had been over-responsive to her advances, this was not the problem with the fish. Did they even know she was alive? Did they wonder where their daily supply of fish-flakes came from? Did they care about anyone else at all? All they did was swim about all day long, opening their mouths in a perfect ‘O’. She used to stare at them, fascinated how anything could be satisfied with a life so relentlessly tranquil.

  Her next-door neighbour, Ezra, however, informed her that she was quite mistaken. Fish lead very stimulating lives, he claimed. They have no memory, so every time they see each other, they are as surprised as if it is the very first time. On learning this, Geraldine quickly revised her judgement. They saw each other a hundred times a day at least, she calculated, swimming round and around, so they must in fact live in a state of almost constant excitement. No wonder they were always saying ‘O’.

  In the end, like all living things, fortunately for Geraldine, they died. She was as unmoved by their deaths as by Paul’s disappearance, apart from the relief she felt knowing she would not have to spend every Saturday morning changing their stagnant and strong-smelling water. She was frightened by their floating bodies, though, and quickly scooped them up in a coffee-strainer and tossed them out the window into a bed of white azaleas. The tiny thud on the earth below made her shiver. ‘Although you’re perfectly happy to eat fish and chips,’ Ezra pointed out, in his usual annoying way. ‘Or don’t you think of that as a dead body?’

  Ezra was eleven, six months younger than Geraldine, and had been her next-door neighbour for three years. It was only in the last year or so that he had become interested in Animal Liberation. Now he was always getting newsletters and reading thin-paged recycled grey booklets on the bus. He was against having pets—he said it was undignified for both parties concerned. He’d been against the fish, and he was strongly opposed to her guinea-pigs, which had become Geraldine’s next venture, also brought home from the pet shop.

  ‘What’s wrong with having guinea-pigs?’ argued Geraldine, just for the sake of conversation, not with any hope of convincing Ezra otherwise. ‘I’ll look after them. I won’t neglect them or anything.’

  ‘But you won’t respect them as sentient beings,’ said Ezra.

  Ezra was always going on about sentient beings—it was one of his things. When he’d first used the expression, Geraldine asked her sixteen-year-old sister, Violetta, what it meant, and Violetta had said it was something that had feelings.

  ‘What sort of feelings?’ asked Geraldine.

  ‘Oh, all sorts, I suppose,’ said Violetta. ‘Pleasure, pain, love, that sort of thing,’ and she sighed, being a rather sentient being herself.

  Ezra was a vegetarian, like the other people in Animal Liberation. He was a particular kind of vegetarian, though, the kind who only ate non-sentient beings, so it was important to know what was and what wasn’t. Ezra said that oysters were not sentient beings, so it was all right to eat them, but snails were, so they were forbidden. Not that Geraldine had ever been tempted to eat either. And how could you tell, she wondered, that a snail felt love and an oyster didn’t? But Ezra would get that impatient look on his face. ‘You don’t understand the principle,’ he’d say. ‘And you say you care about animals. You don’t really care about them at all. You just use them for your own pleasure, if you think they look nice.’

  Geraldine was ashamed then, because she knew it was true. Why had she gone and bought the guinea-pigs in the first place? Certainly not because she respected them as sentient beings, but because they were fluffy and fat and had sweet little wrinkling noses and looked as though they should have a key on their tummies that would play ‘Waltzing Matilda’ when you turned it round. Perhaps that’s what she should have spent her money on—a clockwork koala. Because now that she had got used to poor Milly and Martha, it was true, like all the other pets she had acquired in a fit of sentiment, she was sick of them.

  She looked after them well, she could at least console herself with that. Even Ezra had to agree. Although he disapproved, he took a dedicated interest in their well-being and made periodic inspections of their cage and food supply. Geraldine used to feel like a mother being assessed by a baby health nurse on these occasions, and true to form Ezra usually managed to find some grudging compliment to make about the shine of their fur or the sharpness of their teeth.

  ‘How long do guinea-pigs live?’ she asked him one day, in feigned indifference.

  ‘Three years,’ he replied without hesitation. Ezra knew the life span of everything, even germs. ‘Of course, animals in captiv
ity live a lot longer than in their natural state.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Geraldine. How very depressing. Milly and Martha looked as if they were positively thriving on their captivity. They never appeared sluggish or dull-eyed, or showed any other encouraging signs of approaching death she’d read about in various pet manuals at the library. How much longer would she be burdened with them? Because they were a burden to her. She tried to feel other, more St Francis-like emotions, but failed.

  The truth was, of course, Milly and Martha didn’t care about her any more than the fish had. They wouldn’t care if she lived or died. They didn’t even recognise her as she dutifully plodded out the back every day with a wad of lettuce and a handful of guinea-pig pellets. When they saw her, they huddled together under the blanket in the corner of the cage she’d constructed out of an old kitchen cupboard and some chicken-wire, only creeping out to gobble down the food after she’d gone back inside.

  Not only were Milly and Martha emotionally unsatisfactory, they caused a certain amount of family friction as well. This was because of the lawn. Before Milly and Martha arrived, there had been a pleasant sloping green expanse to look out at from the kitchen window. Now there was only a patchwork of dry yellow oblongs where they had eaten through the chicken-wire at the bottom of their cage. Geraldine, when she made the cage, had imagined them taking an occasional nibble of the fresh stalks as a supplement to their diet of salad and pellets, but she had been sadly ignorant of the eating habits of guinea-pigs. It soon became apparent that Milly and Martha had absolutely no control over their appetites. They ate and they ate and they ate. She moved the cage every day to a new patch of grass, like rotating crops, and every day they ate it down to the dirt. What they saw, they ate. It could have been their family motto.

  And it was the lawn that really worried Geraldine as she carefully carried the shoe box home that afternoon on the ferry and then the bus. Not whether Alberta was pregnant or incompatible with Milly and Martha, but the fact that she hadn’t rung and asked her parents if she could have another one, even for six weeks. She hadn’t, because she knew they would say no.