The White Guinea Pig

by Ursula Dubosarksy

  Violetta took her seat on the bus, full of tea and sugar, her stomach sloshing like a samovar, and she watched the lights of the harbour on one side and houses on the other speed by. When she came home, she found her father sitting in the kitchen, plucking idly at his guitar, his hair falling over his face. He smiled at her, stopped playing, and took her hand. ‘You’re late, aren’t you?’ he said, tenderly.

  Violetta sat down at the table next to him.

  ‘My poor Violet,’ said her father.

  The sight of her father shot all thoughts of Marcus and his peculiar parents from her mind. She wanted to take him by the shoulder and shake him and say, ‘What’s going on, what are we going to do, what’s happening? Are you going to get another job, start a new business, sell the house, have an operation, go overseas?’ But, ‘How’s your ulcer?’ was all she asked.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, and ran his fingers up and down the neck of the guitar. He broke off, suddenly disenchanted. ‘Oh God,’ he said, and stood up and looked out the window to the garden.

  The glass was dirty from grease and steam. There was something cooking on the stove—it smelt like cabbage. Cabbage and potatoes. One of the dishes her father had learnt to cook from his mother, and which seemed to have an inexhaustible sentimental attraction for him. You got used to the smell, Violetta supposed. She had got used to it herself. Perhaps when she grew up, she would find herself also yearning for these tasteless salty stews.

  ‘Oh, Violetta!’ her father whispered, though he was not looking at her. They had named her after a girl in an opera; someone sick, pale and passionate who comes to a sticky end. Violetta hoped she had too much intelligence to follow that path. She hoped, but she wasn’t confident.

  ‘Violetta!’ He stiffened and grimaced. ‘Come over here!’

  Violetta went to stand next to him. ‘What is it?’

  Her father pressed his nose against the moist window, blocking out the reflection from the kitchen light with his hands.

  ‘I saw something …’ he said, squinting.

  Violetta stared. He saw something? What did he mean, something? An intruder? A UFO? She waited for enlightenment.

  ‘Something …’ Her father’s eyes were almost bright, brighter than they’d been for days. ‘Do you see anything?’

  Violetta looked. The garden was black and bare—bare of anything out of the ordinary, that is. There was the lemon tree, the olive tree, the row of shrubs. There was Geraldine’s tyre-swing hanging from its branch like a noose. There was the guinea-pig cage. Nothing else. Nothing that shouldn’t be there.

  ‘Nothing special,’ she replied. ‘I mean, what sort of thing are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ He let his hand drop and turned on his toes. ‘Something … white.’ He smiled down at her serious face. ‘Very strange.’

  Something white. Violetta was suddenly visited by the horrible fear that her father was having a nervous breakdown. Not that she knew what a nervous breakdown was, but she’d seen a man on television once, a man just like her father, about his age, with a wife and children, describing his nervous breakdown, and how he had started seeing and hearing things, and no one could get any sense out of him. What if that were happening to her father? He looked so odd, his eyes so suddenly alive. He saw something white?

  Her father laughed, and sat down again at the kitchen table, taking up his guitar.

  ‘I must be going mad,’ he said, strumming again. ‘Quite mad.’

  7 · Visitors

  To Geraldine’s relief, it seemed that none of her family had noticed the extra guinea-pig that had suddenly appeared and then so utterly disappeared. She had confronted Ezra about it at the bus-stop the next morning. Violetta, luckily, was not there, having gone in on the six-twenty for a before-school chemistry lesson.

  Ezra denied everything. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he said, breathing out puffs of mist. ‘Why would I do that? An animal like that couldn’t survive out of captivity.’

  Geraldine reflected that Ezra didn’t know all that much about animals, whatever he’d read in books. A night’s sleep was all she needed to remind her that one look at Alberta told anyone that an animal like her would survive anywhere, from the shrinking Sahara to the North Pole.

  ‘Well, it’s very strange,’ she said, ‘that she should disappear just the day after I showed you and you said all those awful things. She couldn’t have got out by herself, you know.’

  ‘She could, actually. You’d be surprised what an animal can do when it wants to,’ Ezra replied firmly, looking down the street, hoping to see the bus. ‘She probably crawled her way up the wire and out the open door. You left it open, you know.’ He paused. Geraldine would not look at him.

  ‘So what are you going to tell your friend?’ he said, nastily.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she muttered. ‘I could say she died, I suppose. But she’d probably want to see the body. Or want a lock of her hair or something. I don’t know.’

  The bus appeared, wheezing and rattling as the door swung open. Geraldine stepped up inside, very low at heart. Perhaps he really hadn’t let Alberta out. She almost believed him. Alberta had climbed out the open door. It was her fault. He was right. How on earth was she going to break the news to Alma?

  She wished she could talk to her mother about it. Maybe she could think up a way of luring Alberta back inside the cage. Her mother was so clever, like Violetta. She taught philosophy at the university. Geraldine had always imagined the study of philosophy to be a peaceful, almost soporific business, involving a lot of sitting in a garden and staring at the sky while terrifying cosmic thoughts formed themselves in your head. Rather like being a nun, she had thought. But perhaps she was wrong about nuns, too, because her mother was anything but peaceful. She was always zooming off to the library or a tutorial or a wine-and-cheese night or to a lecture or to write an article. She had fair fluffy hair, and was full of schemes and ideas and solutions to just about everything. Her mother would have been able to think of something.

  But that was before. That was how her mother used to be. Her mother had changed since their father’s problems began. She still zoomed about, but she was different. She’d started to braid her hair into a tight plait with a rubber band at the end and now when she spoke it was largely practical matters that seemed to slip out of her mouth automatically, about clean shirts or how much milk was left in the fridge and would she mind running to the shop to get some more? She was always worried, thinking about something else, sitting and staring at pieces of paper with numbers all over them.

  Even so, Geraldine might have told her mother. She might have caught her watering the garden one night, or waiting for the kettle to boil. While she was standing still, perhaps she could have told her. But then, that Saturday they had a visitor. And after that particular visitor, Geraldine lost all courage to tell anyone anything.

  Visitors were not as unusual at Geraldine’s house as at Ezra’s, but this one was. He arrived in a light-green limousine, with a chauffeur who stayed in the car outside reading the newspaper.

  ‘Look at that car!’ said Violetta to Geraldine as they came home from their usual Saturday trip to the local library. ‘Like a wedding.’

  A pretty revolting wedding, thought Geraldine scornfully as she followed Violetta indoors, but was quickly distracted by her surroundings. While they’d been out, their parents had been cleaning the house. All the stray bits of paper and toys had disappeared, and the crimson walls of the livin-groom gleamed as if they had been polished. But no one polishes walls, thought Geraldine. Do they? Perhaps it was one of those mysterious tasks people’s mothers find themselves doing in moments of deepest despair, like ironing sheets.

  ‘I wonder what happened to all the toys,’ Geraldine said to Violetta. ‘It doesn’t seem like our house without the toys.’

  She found out when she went to put her books in her ro
om. There were the toys—all of them. On her bookshelves, her chest of drawers, her desk. Her parents must have thrust them there in their hurry to clean up, like sweeping dirt under the carpet. They huddled together, like in pictures she’d seen of refugees from war, staring at her with dead hopeless eyes; a strange collection of dolls, soldiers, dogs and bears, and the occasional windup clown. She felt as if she were being assessed by them, even condemned, they sat so still and silent. She thought of throwing a blanket over them, but somehow it seemed wrong, like covering a dead body.

  Geraldine left her room and found Violetta in the corridor, a finger to her lips. Their father was laughing in the living-room, but it didn’t sound like a happy laugh. Violetta pushed Geraldine forward a little, and they moved tentatively together around the corner.

  Their father, grinning, stood at the window, pointing at the backyard; their mother, not grinning, was leaning against one wall as if she were terribly tired. And their visitor, in a dark suit and with blue-rimmed glasses and a tumbler of alcohol in his hands, stood in the centre.

  Neither Geraldine nor Violetta had ever seen him before. His hair was partly grey, partly brown, and he looked very rich. Geraldine’s father was not poor—at least, she supposed, not until he became bankrupt—but he had never looked as rich as this man, who gave the impression of being the sort of person who would light his cigarettes with a roll of American hundred-dollar bills. Of course, the car outside added to his general mystique, but to Geraldine it was not really him, but how their parents were behaving that made this man’s wealth obvious and somehow sinister. Her father, for all his laughter, seemed frightened. She was used to him being tired or sad or exuberant or irritating. She was not used to him being frightened.

  ‘Girls!’ he cried out with relief as he saw them. ‘My daughters, Violetta and Geraldine.’

  The visitor smiled non-committally. He was staring straight ahead, with a peculiarly concentrated focus, through his bright blue-rimmed glasses.

  Violetta pulled Geraldine’s sleeve. ‘Let’s get something to eat,’ she murmured. She sensed that they were not welcome, and the man made her feel embarrassed. She longed for a cup of tea, to sit at her desk with a nice fat textbook, to make some comforting chemical calculations. She dragged an unwilling Geraldine, who had nothing comparable to attract her to her room and rarely suffered from social discomfort, into the kitchen.

  ‘Who is he?’ whispered Geraldine. ‘He must be here to buy the house. Did Dad tell you?’

  ‘Hmmm.’ Violetta shrugged. She felt slightly sick. Her mother looked terrible—what was going on? She wanted to leave the house, to get away from that man, but she didn’t want to desert her parents. Who was he?

  ‘Look!’ said Geraldine, pointing out the side window. ‘Ezra’s parents must be having a party.’

  Violetta looked out. A party? Surely not. But cars were rolling up outside, and people heading up Ezra’s front path to the open door. They didn’t exactly look dressed for a party, and they were a rather odd collection in age and certainly in appearance, but they all seemed to know each other.

  ‘Must be relatives,’ was Violetta’s verdict, pressing her face against the glass. But she quickly retreated when one of them, a boy about her age, noticed her interest and gave her a friendly wave as if to invite her in as well.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Geraldine.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Violetta replied, but she thought the boy had a rather nice face.

  Ezra’s guests, of course, were not relatives at all, but members of Animal Liberation arriving for their monthly meeting. In the event, it proved impossible for Ezra’s parents to ‘keep out of the way’, as his mother had suggested, because the members were desperately friendly and keen to make them join in and feel one of the gang.

  Ezra’s father escaped into the garden during the preliminary proceedings, only to be pursued by the two pale-haired elderly ladies who, as it turned out, were not terribly interested in the preliminary proceedings either. But they were very interested in Ezra’s father’s cactus garden and wandered about, poking back overgrown ferns and advising him on soil nutrients.

  Then they discovered a large spider web, and Ezra’s father happened to mention that he had a soft spot for spiders, and could never bear to kill them. Well, nothing could have been more endearing; they immediately felt he was a most humane friend of their bosom, and all sat themselves down on the rather tatty garden furniture for a ‘good old chat’.

  This meant that things inside, where Ezra’s mother was trapped, went much more smoothly than usual, without interruptions and arguments. ‘Business’ was over and done with quickly, and after that, people felt somehow much more inclined to talk about nothing in particular than they normally were, while Ezra supplied cups of tea from their very large teapot, a rarely used gift from a rarely seen cousin. Ezra’s mother made conversation.

  ‘And what are you studying at the moment?’ she asked Simon brightly, sitting on a stool as she handed him a cup. A fairly safe sort of question, one might have thought, but Simon began one of his long, long, distressed monologues about medieval Nordic languages that Ezra was so familiar with. Still, his mother didn’t seem to mind—she made no attempt to escape, although that might have been the mesmeric effect of Simon’s waterfall of words, like a mouse under the hypnotic stare of a snake.

  In the end, when everyone else had sidled out, nodding and smiling, and got back into their cars or walked off towards the bus, Simon was still trying to explain himself to Ezra’s mother, and continued to do so as she and Ezra cleared away the dishes and washed everything up. But, at last, while Ezra’s mother was down on the kitchen floor sweeping up the pieces of a teacup that Simon had dropped while trying to balance it on top of another three, Simon suddenly looked stricken and said, ‘What happened to my aunts?’

  ‘Your aunts?’ Ezra had never heard of Simon’s aunts, let alone knew what had happened to them.

  ‘You know,’ said Simon, in a panic. ‘Those two old ladies with the white hair that drive everybody crazy.’

  ‘Oh!’ They were Simon’s aunts? ‘I didn’t know they were your aunts,’ said Ezra.

  ‘No, well, we don’t look all that alike,’ agreed Simon. ‘They’re my grandmother’s sisters. But they always give me a lift home!’

  ‘I think they’re still out there talking to my husband,’ said Ezra’s mother, peering out the window.

  Simon joined her at the window with a sigh of relief. ‘Otherwise I’d have to get the bus,’ he said.

  Ezra wondered if his father might have fallen asleep with his eyes open. He went out the back door to have a closer look, followed by Simon.

  ‘Thought you’d shot through, aunties!’ said Simon cheerfully, and Ezra’s father jumped in his seat. ‘I’ve just been doing the washing up.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said one of the aunties, drily.

  ‘We’ve been having a lovely chat out here,’ said the other aunty, giving Ezra’s father’s arm a little pat. ‘Why haven’t you been bringing your father to our meetings, Ezra?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Ezra in surprise. ‘I never thought of it.’

  Ezra’s father gave him a look as if to say, ‘Well, don’t start thinking about it,’ and stood up, shaking the splinters of the wooden chair from his trousers. ‘It’s getting late,’ he mentioned meaningfully, waving an arm in the general direction of the sunset, which was spreading across Geraldine’s back lawn in a mysterious red glow. Simon’s aunts followed this gesture with their eyes.

  ‘Just look at that citrus!’ said one, eyeing the lemon tree.

  ‘The lawn’s a little ragged, though, I must say,’ said the other. ‘I mean, I know it’s winter …’

  ‘Oh!’ Her sister shrieked—not dramatically, but like someone stepping on something soft and wet as they walk barefoot along the beach. ‘What was that?’

  ‘What?’ asked Simon,
squinting forward.

  ‘Did you see that … that …?’ said his aunt. ‘Over there, under the tree?’

  Simon stepped across the back patio to the fence. ‘What are you talking about?’

  His aunt was staring fiercely into Geraldine’s backyard, puzzled. ‘It doesn’t seem to be there now,’ she muttered. ‘But I’m sure I saw something. White. Peculiar,’ she added, thinking about it.

  ‘A cat?’ suggested Ezra’s father.

  ‘Oh no, not a cat!’ she said, almost contemptuous, but she covered it up with a sweet smile. ‘If you’d seen it, you wouldn’t think for a moment it was a cat. It was so big, for one thing. And it looked … well … almost feral, you know. Rather nasty. Like a rat.’

  ‘Not that we divide animals into the nasty and nice, of course,’ said her sister quickly. ‘Just a manner of speaking, you know.’ This was addressed to Ezra’s father, who nodded without understanding. He was quite happy to divide animals into the nasty and nice.

  ‘Where was it?’ asked Ezra, stepping forward, curious. Simon’s aunt pointed over to the tree where Geraldine’s tyre swung, round and black, back and forward in the wind. The guinea-pig cage stood on one side, the quivering blue blanket just visible in the growing dark. Ezra frowned. He felt his shoulders jolt for a moment. Was that something? He focused more intently.

  ‘I …’ he said. ‘Something white …’

  ‘Yes!’ Simon’s aunt nodded encouragingly. ‘That’s just how I’d describe it. See! He saw it! Something white!’

  ‘Well, that could be a paper bag,’ Simon pointed out, rather peeved at being unable to make out anything himself.