Sam and Chester

by Jo Bailey

  I confided my worries to Darren on the car journey home from the airport. Darren agreed it didn’t sound like my mum and said we should push for her to see the doctor.

  ‘It’s been a big adjustment for her moving to England, it’s probably got something to do with that,’ he said, trying to reassure me.

  The problem was, I couldn’t get the thought of something being wrong with Mum out of my mind and by the time we arrived home I was even more worried about her.

  I switched off the ignition and Darren turned to me. He cupped his hand over mine, the way he used to do when I lived in Spain and he could see I was struggling.

  ‘Try not to overthink things,’ he said softly. I was glad Darren was home. He kept me grounded and stopped me from getting too worked up about things.

  ‘I know . . .’ I started, but Darren’s attention had shifted elsewhere. His mouth dropped open and the colour slowly drained from his face.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ he gasped.

  ‘What’s wrong now?’ I panicked.

  He pointed across the yard, to where Sam and Will were hanging off the garden gate, waiting to greet Daddy, and Chester was oinking at their feet.

  ‘Chester’s not a micro pig any more!’ He looked at me in horror.

  ‘Ah, yes, that.’ I grimaced.

  Darren said I should give Pennywell Farm a call and find out if it was normal for their micro pigs to grow so large. Chester was now well over a metre long and 55cm tall. Darren reminded me that Chester was only seven months old, so there was a question over how much bigger he was going to get.

  I shrugged. ‘It’s not like we can do anything about it.’

  Part of me just wanted to ignore the issue of Chester’s size. Large or small, he was the reason Sam was a happier boy. I had no plans to ring Pennywell (and in fact we never did). I was much more concerned about getting inside the barn and checking on Mum.

  As we made our way up the wooden stairs, Darren was still firing questions at me. He was concerned about the practicalities of how we were going to cope if Chester grew any bigger.

  ‘How much are you feeding him?’ he joked, dropping his heavy travel bags on to the living-room floor.

  Just then, we heard a loud chortle coming from the direction of the kitchen; Mum was flicking through the morning’s paper while dunking some biscuits into her tea. We hurried into the kitchen to greet her, and I brought her into the ongoing conversation about our pig.

  ‘Darren is worrying about how we are going to look after Chester if he gets any bigger,’ I told Mum, ‘but he’s been extremely well-behaved since we moved him to the atrium, hasn’t he? He sleeps throughout the night and doesn’t cause any fuss.’

  Mum started coughing.

  ‘Mum, are you all right?’ I asked for the umpteenth time.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said.

  Darren sensed my growing unease as I watched my mother slide her eyes away from mine awkwardly, as though she wasn’t quite telling us the whole truth. He stepped in to help, revealing to my mum that I’d been really worried about her recently. He asked her again if anything was wrong.

  She took a deep breath, and slowly let it out.

  ‘Mum?’

  The tension was unbearable.

  ‘I didn’t want to make a fuss,’ she began.

  My heart dropped through my stomach. This was the moment she would reveal she had some terrible illness.

  ‘What, Mum? You can tell us.’

  ‘I haven’t been getting much sleep because . . .’

  Darren and I were now hanging on her every word.

  ‘Because Chester has been keeping me up.’

  ‘Chester?!’ we both exclaimed.

  That was the last thing I’d been expecting her to say.

  ‘He keeps banging on my door at night wanting attention, and I just don’t know how to say “no” to him.’

  It transpired that Chester had been butting his nose against her bedroom door every half an hour or so and the best way she knew to silence him was by throwing down some pignuts. The problem was, once he had eaten them, he would come back for more.

  ‘This is ridiculous; I can’t have you losing sleep because of Chester,’ I said.

  ‘You could always move him outside. He is a pig, after all,’ Darren suggested.

  Mum and I both looked at him as if he had gone mad. It had never crossed our minds to send Chester out into the cold. He might have grown, but he was still very much like a dog in our eyes. More importantly, how would Sam cope if we moved Chester? Would it cause a setback in his development if he didn’t have his pig in the house all the time?

  ‘I won’t have it.’ Mum shook her head vehemently.

  ‘But I can’t have you losing sleep,’ I reasoned with her.

  Mum and I then entered into an intense conversation about Chester, with Mum insisting we give the pig a while longer to settle into his new environment. She was convinced the door-knocking was a settling-in problem and that he would grow out of it soon.

  Darren shook his head in disbelief as he listened to us talk it over.

  ‘You’d think that pig was a person,’ he remarked wryly.

  But Chester was like a person. He was one of the family.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Pig-Headed

  THE NIGHT SKY exploded with another rainbow of colour.

  It was Guy Fawkes Night and we had the best seats in the house. Every year, the village of Ugborough put on a fireworks display for the locals in the farmer’s field behind our garden. Thanks to our decking area, all we needed to do was step outside our door to watch the show. There was a huge bonfire and we could see everyone’s faces lit up by the roaring flames. There were fireworks of all kinds shooting up into the clear starry night.

  It was an old-fashioned, small-scale community celebration where families could bring their own box of fireworks for the organisers to let off and people stuck foil-wrapped potatoes into the burning embers of the fire to roast them. It reminded me of when I’d been a kid growing up in England.

  When we’d lived in Spain, we’d never celebrated 5 November, so the boys had never seen anything like it before (Mum had taken Will to a public display the year before, but Sam hadn’t wanted to go). Sam was wearing earplugs to protect his sensitive hearing but he was loving the colours which were stimulating his senses in a positive way, just like the spaghetti lights did at school.

  I pulled out a packet of sparklers – the evening wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t use them to write our names in the air. And, after we had finished writing our names, Sam was determined not to leave Chester out of our game. I helped Sam along by encouraging Will, Mum and Darren all to write Chester’s name at the same time. I counted us down: ‘Three, two, one – CHESTER!’

  We all swirled our sparklers in the air to spell out our pet pig’s name.

  As another rocket screamed through the air it occurred to me that I’d better check on Chester again. We’d locked him inside the atrium to protect him from the noise of the display and I’d given him a bowl brimming with food to help distract him. I’d also left the lights on so he wouldn’t feel abandoned while we all had fun upstairs.

  I popped my head around the door.

  ‘Are you OK, Chesty?’

  Chester was more than OK. He was sitting, like a dog would, with his head lifted high, ears pricked up, watching the fireworks. He barely noticed me come in. He’d also eaten every last pignut from his bowl so the noise clearly hadn’t put him off his food.

  I left him to it and took a detour past the kitchen to fetch another round of hot drinks to keep everyone warm. When I emerged on to the decking with a tray full of goodies, I noticed something strange. To access the field in which the fireworks were held, the villagers had to walk down a pathway alongside our house. Usually it just meant a steady trickle of people going by, but those walking past had stopped stock still. Half the village wasn’t watching the fireworks, but peering over the wall into our garden.


  There was a group of about twelve adults and children laughing and pointing. I wondered what everyone was looking at. Then I realised that because I’d left the lights on in the atrium, Chester would have been lit up for everyone to see! Due to the location of the path anyone passing would have got a fantastic view of our not-so-micro pig, sitting proudly right inside our house in his snug dog basket. Never mind the fireworks, Chester now seemed to be the main attraction.

  Knowing full well that Chester was no stranger to showing off, I needed to see this for myself.

  ‘Wait, Mummy!’ Sam said, chasing after me as I ran down the decking stairs to the atrium. He didn’t want to miss out on Chester fun.

  ‘And me, Mummy!’ Will ran after Sam, his bobble hat bouncing up and down in front of his eyes as he ran to keep up with us.

  And there was Chester, lapping up the attention, a big grin plastered all over his face, sitting in exactly the same position as when I’d left him.

  ‘So you’re the ones who have the famous pig!’ an older gentleman in a flat cap said from over the wall.

  I was suddenly filled with pride and realised how Sam must have felt when he showed Chester off to his classmates.

  ‘Yes, that’s our pig!’

  If only his model behaviour had lasted all night. Unfortunately, someone had left the door to the cupboard that housed the boiler open – and Chester seized the opportunity to get inside and have a nibble. In the morning I got up to find he’d had a go at the insulation – there were clumps of glass fibre everywhere.

  This time, he hadn’t just destroyed another bit of our landlord’s property, but he’d also endangered himself. Insulation can be harmful to touch, let alone swallow. It was the final straw. We had to resign ourselves to the fact that Chester was now too big to be in the house. He was causing serious damage to it, he couldn’t get up and down the stairs any more and he was still waking my mum up in the night. She needed a good night’s sleep and we all needed our sanity back.

  It wasn’t an easy decision to make and I was anxious about how Sam would react to the idea of being separated from his best friend. Geographically, a move to the garden wasn’t a big one, but mentally it could cause a huge setback in Sam’s development.

  Chester’s happiness meant everything to him. That’s why he spent hours stroking him, caring for him, washing him, and making sure he had plenty of pignuts. If Chester was moved outside, Sam wouldn’t be able to keep such a close eye on him. Would he lie awake at night worrying about his pig? Would I stay up at night fretting about Chester? I knew I had on countless occasions already.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of Chester spending nights alone in the cold. I could therefore see only one solution – we would have to buy Chester a house of his own.

  ‘Not a real one,’ I explained to Darren. ‘One of those Wendy houses you can buy from the garden centre.’

  Darren was looking at me as if I’d lost my marbles. I didn’t see what the big deal was – it made perfect sense. A home from home. We could put it on the patio just outside the front door and make a little fence to keep him in.

  My job now was to prepare Sam for the news. I thought if I drew up a storybook, along the lines of ‘This is Chester’s new home and this is Chester happy in his new home’, he might be OK with it.

  I called on Lynda Russell for help. She understood more than anyone the importance of getting this right. She’d seen for herself that Chester had become Sam’s way of communicating with the world. She put together a story for me using a close-up of Chester’s smiley face to show how ‘happy’ he was to be living in the garden.

  I chose a quiet moment one evening before dinner to break the news. Mum took Will off downstairs so I could have some time alone with Sam.

  ‘Sam, come here and sit next to Mummy.’ I patted the sofa cushion.

  I could hear the anxiety in my own voice when I spoke. My stomach was all knotted, my body braced for a meltdown from Sam.

  Sam was clutching a Ben 10 figurine in his left hand. It was a soother for him because it fitted nicely into the palm of his hand and had a lovely smooth texture: for Sam, it was like holding on to a security blanket.

  I was glad he had it to hold, because I had no idea how this conversation was going to go.

  I turned the first page of the book and Sam and I were looking at the big smiley close-up of Chester’s face.

  ‘Chester is happy because he is moving into his own house . . .’ the story began.

  Sam tilted his head, as if he was examining the information. He lightly brushed his fingers across the picture of Chester’s face as if he was actually stroking his friend’s fur.

  I looked at him, tentatively. He seemed fine. I turned the page.

  Lynda had gone to town on designing Chester’s house; it even had a chimney with smoke bellowing out and a white picket fence.

  Sam’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Sam, you can help Chester move into his new home.’ I tapped the picture with my forefinger. The thought of helping Chester be happy was just what Sam needed to hear. He started flapping his arms with excitement. A wave of relief flooded through me. It could so easily have gone the other way.

  I was certain that all the work Lynda had been doing on facial expressions had helped. Connecting Chester’s smiley face with him being happy in his new home had in turn brought a smile to Sam’s face.

  Now all we needed to do was to find our pig a house – just like the one in the picture!

  ‘Darren,’ I called out lightly, ‘fancy a trip to the garden centre . . .?’

  We had some house-hunting to do.

  Darren and I thought it best to get the house-buying bit over quickly so that the boys could get on with helping us to move Chester in. Darren was fully on board with the idea; I think he was secretly quite relieved to be moving Chester out of the main house. While Mum looked after the children, the two of us jumped into the Land Rover and headed off to the nearest shopping centre.

  We were both pretty taken aback at the prices of the Wendy houses; some of them reached into the thousands of pounds. It was quite fun checking them all out, though, and there were so many to choose from. There were some that looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie, mini castles, ski lodges . . . some were even stretched out over two floors with slides coming out of the top window.

  There was one particular house that caught our eye, however. It was made out of pine and had the sweetest windows – they were plastic with a green frame and had green petals painted around them. The house also had a smart front door with a green letterbox. It happened to be the cheapest one we saw, although it was still a lot of money at £180.

  Although we’d chosen the house, we weren’t quite done. I was worried Chester would be cold at night – he was used to the warmth of central heating, after all.

  ‘Do you think we should fit the house with a carpet?’ I asked Darren, beckoning him over to the flooring aisle.

  Darren stopped in his tracks.

  ‘You are joking?’

  But, of course, I wasn’t . . .

  We spent a good twenty minutes flicking through the fabric book, and eventually settled on a blue carpet with a rubber underlay. I imagined laying Chester’s basket on top of the carpet, and giving him an extra rug to keep him warm – he’d be as snug as a bug.

  Having chosen the carpet, Darren was keen to get going – he had a Wendy house to put together before dark, after all! Luckily Darren loves anything to do with building or fixing things – it’s his forte. He also loves to include the boys in these kinds of projects. So, as soon as we got home, Darren spread all the different parts of the Wendy house out across the patio and called on Will and Sam to lend a hand. Will was his right-hand man, handing him bolts, nails and screwdrivers on demand. Darren was very sensitive to Sam’s limitations, so he didn’t push him too hard, just let him join in when he felt like it. Sam could barely contain his happiness as Chester’s house was built; he stood over his
brother and Darren, the energy radiating out of him, and would then disappear for a flap to let off steam.

  Meanwhile Chester was keeping a watchful eye on the developments from his base in the atrium. Part of me wondered whether he was eyeing up the house as perfect material to destroy with his razor-sharp teeth. Then I dismissed that idea. Surely even Chester wasn’t that strong?

  As night fell, it was time to introduce Chester to his new home. Sam was keen to do the honours so we all stood back to give him centre stage. He opened up the front door and called Chester over. Sam was the only one in the family who didn’t need to bribe the pig with food – his best friend would have followed him to the ends of the earth just to remain by his side.

  ‘Here, Chester.’ Sam disappeared into the luxuriously carpeted Wendy house. He sat on the floor cross-legged and waited for his friend to join him.

  Chester scurried across the patio and dashed through the front door. Whenever pigs see a door or a hole in something, they will invariably try to get through as they’re such inquisitive creatures. This now worked to our advantage as Chester eagerly explored his new setting. We all took up our various vantage points to watch him at it: Will observed him from the door while Mum, Darren and I peered through the Perspex windows.

  After having a good sniff, Chester climbed into his dog basket bed, which we’d already moved into the house, and then let out a huge grunt as he rolled on to his side. We’re going to have to buy him a bigger bed soon, I thought, seeing Chester’s trotters poking out of each end. Sam unfolded the cream fleece blanket that had been Chester’s since he was a piglet and tucked it around his enormous belly. He might not have been micro any more, but Chester looked just as adorable as the day we’d brought him home, with his ginger face peeping out from under the blanket.