Sam and Chester

by Jo Bailey

  It was time for the children to say goodbye to Chester and return to the CAIRB. Sam insisted on chaperoning Mya to the waiting cars. As they walked back across the sun-dappled lawn, he put his arm around her – it was Sam’s way of showing Mya he cared. I couldn’t have wished for a more perfect day. I needn’t have spent all that energy worrying about Sam, he’d more than coped – in fact, he’d shone.

  The beautiful weather lasted into the evening. My plan was to bath the boys and then sit with a drink on the decking and watch the sun go down. Chester’s good behaviour was also going the distance. Even though the doors to the garden were wide open, he was far more interested in seeing what Sam was up to. The pair had spent the best part of the time since he’d come back from school camped underneath the dining-room table.

  ‘Will, Sam, bath time!’ I called up the stairs. I’d filled the tub half full with water and bubbles. I heard the familiar sound of the boys’ feet thumping down the stairs, followed by the slightly lighter noise of Chester’s trotters.

  ‘No, he’s not allowed in the bath with you!’ I announced before they had a chance to ask. I had to draw the line somewhere.

  Chester looked longingly at Sam and Will as they plunged into the soapy suds. He really had mastered that wistful look. I guess he was probably remembering back to that day when they had all got in the paddling pool together; pigs have excellent memories.

  ‘Right, who wants their hair washed first?’ I asked, turning my back on the pig and noisily squeezing a blob of shampoo on to my palm. As I massaged it into my sons’ hair, I noted how their locks, which had started off blond, were now turning dark brown: their Spanish roots were coming through. It was a reminder they were growing up: Sam would turn seven that coming winter while Will would be five at the end of the summer.

  As I staggered to my feet to reach for the shower head to rinse them off, what did I see out of the corner of my eye? A flash of ginger running past the bathroom window! I craned my neck to follow where Chester was heading.

  ‘Oh, you little . . .’ I muttered under my breath.

  Chester was using his nose to lever a hole in the fence I’d painstakingly built.

  ‘Don’t move!’ I told the boys and then dropped everything I was doing to catch Chester in time.

  He saw me coming. He was looking over his shoulder, oinking, scooping the fence up a bit more with his nose, and then looking back again to check how close I was getting to him.

  ‘Come here, Chester!’ I called. He’d been so obedient with Sam earlier – surely our well-behaved pig was going to listen to me?

  But Chester had other ideas. He flattened his body and wriggled through the opening he’d gouged out. No prizes for guessing where he was heading! Off he went, across the bridge, through the gate, past the ducks and the apple trees to Neil and Brenda’s chickens.

  Now it was my turn to check over my shoulder as I darted across my neighbours’ garden, praying they wouldn’t see me. There had been so much bad feeling over the chicken feed, another disagreement was the last thing I needed.

  Chester and I played our usual game of cat and mouse – which entailed Chester stuffing his face and then running off just when I got close to grabbing him. Miraculously, the chase ended by one of the henhouses instead of the trampoline this time. He screamed in protest as I carried him home. I need to get back to the boys, I thought, I don’t have time for this! Goodness knows how much he stole that time but Chester was still munching through the food when I locked him inside the house.

  ‘I’m very angry at you, Chester!’ I said, sharing my feelings.

  He looked back at me innocently, munching away.

  I rushed back down to the boys. I was now a hot, sweaty mess, with perspiration running from my brow.

  I pushed open the bathroom door and was hit by a tidal wave of soapy suds. There was water everywhere. The boys had been play fighting while I was chasing after Chester, having a whale of a time, and had completely flooded the bathroom floor.

  They both stared back at me, blinking, like butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

  I waved goodbye to my relaxing evening as I traipsed back up the stairs to fetch the mop and bucket.

  But such naughty behaviour from my three charges wasn’t the only problem I had to deal with. We soon had a new challenge on our hands – Chester just wouldn’t stop growing.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Porker

  PENNYWELL FARM HAD said that our micro pig would only reach the size of a Cocker Spaniel. What’s more, they had good reason to think that such proportions would be accurate – Mr Murray had shown me what Chester’s dad and mum looked like.

  But the farm’s assertions were sounding more like fiction by the day as by the end of August 2009 Chester was looking more like a Saint Bernard than a Spaniel! He was easily five times the size he’d been when we’d brought him home in the spring. In fact, it would be fair to say that he was now looking more like a regular-sized pig than a miniature pig.

  It was my mum who was the first to say something. She had finally made the move over from Spain and was living at our house; the original plan had been for her to find a place of her own, but she had really struggled to find anywhere decent. As Darren and I didn’t want her to delay the move any longer, we’d suggested she take our guest bedroom until something suitable for her came on the market. And, of course, it would be easier for her to research houses while actually living in Devon. It was a treat for the boys to have Grandma living with us and naturally I was delighted to have Mum close by again. In turn, Mum was over the moon to be living with the boys and me, but I also think Chester had a lot to do with it – she loved that pig to bits. Yet, as she pointed out to me one day, he was hardly the cute little thing we’d picked up from the farm any more.

  ‘Jo, love, I think there’s something not right here,’ she said as she looked at Chester, who was lying outstretched on the sofa having a siesta. I scratched my head as she spoke, wondering how he’d gone from taking up a quarter to three-quarters of the sofa. He’d had some serious growth spurts in July and August and was now about a metre long.

  ‘I’m sure he won’t get any bigger than this,’ I said, in an attempt to reassure both my mum and myself.

  But my mum wasn’t the only person to notice Chester’s increasing size; the neighbours had a thing or two to say about it too.

  ‘BIG PIG,’ commented Henry, who lived in the main farmhouse, signalling with his arms outstretched as he walked past our garden one morning. I let out a nervous chuckle.

  The boys didn’t mind in the slightest, though – a bigger pig meant there was more of him to hug. It wasn’t as if he behaved any differently for being larger. He still wanted to follow Sam everywhere, tried to jump on the boys’ beds at night, leapt on to the sofa, lay by the fire and hid under the dining-room table with Sam. Chester acted as if he thought he was still miniature, which would have been endearing – if it weren’t for the fact that it led to a whole new set of problems.

  ‘Big pig’ thinking he was micro meant the slow decline of my favourite Habitat sofa – the bottom collapsed under his weight so it dipped like a hammock. If we all wanted to watch TV in the snug, one of us would have to sit on the floor cushions, as Chester needed the whole sofa to himself. Sometimes, though, it did work out well for us as he would lie on the floor at our feet and then we would use his big belly as a footrest (we’d tickle his huge tummy with back scratchers too). Chester just loved any attention, in whatever form. A favourite trick of his was to back up to me while I was hanging out the washing and rub his rump against my calves, as though I was a tree trunk and he was having a good scratch. He did it to Sam too, using the top bit of Sam’s wellies, which were made of a slightly harder rubber and gave Chester immense pleasure. He’d scratch and scratch until the pressure of his bottom made Sam topple over, at which point my son would roar with laughter and encourage Chester to do it again!

  Our pig’s growth spurt also meant that any mi
schief he made tended to cause greater damage – he now had the strength to turn over more than just the dog bowl. I’ll never forget the day I walked into the living room to find two of the landlord’s beautifully upholstered leather chairs knocked over on their sides, and Chester sniffing the freshly unearthed section of rug for crumbs.

  ‘Chester!’ I said in my most stern voice, truly cross with him. But Chester didn’t seem to register the tone of my voice – he was just happy to see me and started grunting and wagging his tail.

  ‘Outside, now!’ I pointed to the door.

  He looked at the garden, and then back at me, clearly weighing up his options. He wasn’t going to throw away his chance of finding food, however, so he turned a blind eye to my evident displeasure and carried on smelling the rug for anything he could find. That pig . . .

  But it was extremely hard to stay angry at Chester: one look at his happy face made you forget whatever bad day you were having.

  Lynda Russell had also been affected by Chester’s smile. It had been the missing piece in a puzzle she had wanted to solve to help Sam.

  One of Lynda’s initial objectives had been to teach Sam how to read emotions. Although Sam was now showing clear signs of having empathy, he was still struggling with reading whether someone was happy or sad. Lynda had come up with a brilliant idea to help him with this particular challenge – to use Chester’s face to illustrate to Sam what happy looked like: the starting point of a photo book she put together for him featuring several different facial expressions such as sad, scared, surprised, angry and tired. The first picture was of Chester, with his big smiley face, and written underneath was the word ‘happy’. It made me happy just opening the book and seeing a gorgeous picture of our grinning not-so-micro pig. It may have been a little unconventional, but it worked. Because Sam loved Chester, he remembered what his smile meant, and whenever I started laughing, he’d shout, ‘Mummy, you’re happy!’ – which, to be honest, wasn’t that often once Chester started to turn the furniture over . . . ‘Angry and exasperated’ face was a more common look by then.

  Things quickly came to a head. Chester had grown so big that he couldn’t get up on to the decking, or lumber up and down the internal stairs any more. His body was too large for his trotters, so by two-thirds of the way up the stairs, his centre of gravity would shift and he’d roll backwards. It was the same if he was going downstairs – towards the bottom, his weight would take over and he would roly-poly down the last few steps. It was heartbreaking to watch – he was so desperate to follow Sam that he would keep trying, and tumbling, and trying again. He was both stubborn and clever, so not only could he not be persuaded to give up but he also tried every trick in the book to make it up those stairs. He even tried a run-up towards them. He would give the impression of just nonchalantly wandering about downstairs when, suddenly, he would turn sharply and belt down the corridor, grunting as he ran. The sound of his trotters hitting the terracotta tiles echoed through the house as he charged at the stairs with such velocity that the hall curtains flapped with the turbulence as he ran by.

  ‘Come on, Chester!’ The boys would be shouting and jumping up and down on the landing, cheering him over the finish line.

  There is one time in particular that I remember when he tried this technique. He hurtled down his ‘runway’ and pounded up the stairs, going for gold. For a moment, I thought he was going to make it.

  But he came crashing down with a thud and, without properly thinking things through, I threw myself between Chester’s backside and the bottom steps as he fell.

  Smack!

  I felt his full weight as I cushioned Chester’s landing. If his larger appearance hadn’t been a wake-up call for me, feeling the difference in his weight certainly was. It didn’t hurt, but I was well and truly squashed.

  Even as I was dusting myself off and sweeping my messed-up hair from my eyes, Chester was preparing to launch himself again. His determination to beat the laws of gravity knew no bounds and he charged again and, once again, was thwarted. It was very sad to watch and I couldn’t let this go on a second longer; it wasn’t fair on Chester or the boys to see him suffer so.

  The only thing I had to hand that was big enough to block the stairs was a mirror from one of the downstairs bedrooms. I quickly put it in place. Part of me also thought that seeing his reflection might keep Chester amused while I worked out a more long-term solution – that’s how ridiculous things had got. Thankfully, it worked and we had no more instances of the pig who flew.

  Mum was deeply concerned for Chester’s wellbeing now he could no longer get upstairs. So much so, she suggested that he sleep outside her bedroom. It did seem like the perfect solution. Mum’s guest room was on ground level with the other bedrooms, but it was attached to the main barn by a square atrium, off which was the front door, which led on to the patio. This atrium, adjacent to Mum’s room, was where Chester would sleep. It meant Chester could be on the ground floor and get in and out of the house easily whenever he needed to go to the loo, plus he would have my mum for company.

  That night, the boys helped me move his toys and his dog basket (we were on to his third dog basket now, as he’d chewed through the first two . . .) and Mum fussed over her new neighbour, scratching behind his ears and rubbing his belly.

  Chester seemed happy in his new home. Even though he wasn’t next to Sam’s room (and we shut the atrium off from the rest of the main house by using the big mirror that had previously blocked Chester’s route upstairs), he was a lot closer to the family than he had been when he’d slept on the floor above us. Pigs have a keen sense of smell so he probably got a reassuring whiff of his best friend as he lay in his basket at night.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right with him being out here?’ I double-checked with Mum before I took myself off to bed that night. After all, she hadn’t been here to witness the majority of his naughty antics.

  ‘Me? I’m fine. He’s a sweetheart, what’s going to go wrong?’ Mum said, smiling confidently. We both looked over at Chester, who was sitting in his basket, grinning, his typically innocent expression plastered all over his face.

  Mum was right – there was nothing Chester could get under, or over, or into. It was just him, the dog basket and a corridor with glass walls. Of course, he could chew his basket to shreds, but I’d already assumed that we would probably have to buy half a dozen more anyway. It was a small price to pay for the happiness and life-changing magic he brought for Sam.

  ‘Night, Mum.’ I gave her a kiss.

  ‘Night, love. Night, Chester,’ she said, shuffling to her room in her dressing gown and slippers. Chester padded around in his basket, just like a dog would, before settling down and bedding himself in for the night.

  The house quietened. But, for some reason, I couldn’t get to sleep.

  It suddenly dawned on me why. I couldn’t sleep because I was worrying about whether Chester would be able to sleep in his new ‘bedroom’. Would it be too cold down there? Or, conversely, would the sunlight be too bright when it poured through the glass in the morning?

  Yes: I was fussing over a pig.

  But I think I knew why. Ever since Chester had come into our lives, the cloud of depression that had been hanging over my head had slowly lifted. He had injected happiness, laughter and light into our whole family. I felt a happier person having Chester around. He also stressed me out a lot, true, but the good far outweighed the bad. I promised myself that I would make an extra fuss of Chester in the morning to make sure he really knew how much he was loved by all of us.

  I really had grown soft.

  The first thing I did when the alarm went off in the morning, even before making breakfast for the boys, was to check on Chester. I peered over the mirror apprehensively, expecting to see shredded dog basket everywhere and an overturned dog bowl. I couldn’t quite believe it – the hall was immaculate. Chester was patiently waiting by the front door to be let out on to the lawn.

  Mum, however, was
nowhere to be seen and she was normally an early riser. She didn’t appear until 10 a.m., after I’d come back from the school run. As I made us a pot of tea I had a bit of a heart-to-heart with her about her move from Spain, wanting to be sure she was happy given she had left her life there behind. My sister was making plans to move over to the UK soon, to Wiltshire, with her sons and her boyfriend Simon, but Mum would be missing them in the interim, not to mention all her Spanish friends. Then there was the climate: England wasn’t a patch on the balmy heat of the Mediterranean.

  ‘I’m fine, dear,’ she said, stifling a yawn.

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, sensing she was a bit tired. Maybe all the moving had worn her out.

  ‘Stop fussing.’ She waved away my worries and took another slurp of her tea.

  Mum changed the subject to Darren and me. She wanted to know how things were going and, most importantly, if I was happy.

  ‘I’m really happy,’ I confessed with a shy smile, rolling the warm mug between my palms. Everything had always seemed such a struggle in the past, but with Darren it was all so easy. For the first time in my life I had a man who loved me, and my boys, unconditionally.

  The time in Spain now seemed like a distant memory. The only time I was reminded of it was when Jaime called to speak to the boys. There was talk of Will and Sam having a holiday with him and I was glad their relationship was continuing, but my ex-husband was no longer a major part of my life.

  ‘I’m proud of you, love,’ Mum said. Every now and again she liked to remind me of all that I had achieved. If it hadn’t been for my perseverance, I knew Sam wouldn’t be the happy-go-lucky boy he was now turning into.

  ‘And if you don’t mind, I might just have to take myself off to bed again,’ she said, rising from her chair.

  I glanced at my watch. It was 11 a.m. – this wasn’t like Mum.

  I shook off my concern that morning but I couldn’t help noticing Mum was equally tired the next day. By the end of the week, when Darren was due to arrive home from the rig, Mum had noticeable dark rings under her eyes and she was disappearing for naps throughout the day. She kept insisting nothing was wrong but I was really worried about her health. This wasn’t like her at all; she was usually so full of beans.