Various Pets Alive and Dead

by Lewycka, Marina

  ‘You’re good at it. You have the organiser’s touch.’

  ‘Like you have the touch of death.’

  ‘Sheesh! You’re not still going on about that icky hamster! Get over it!’

  ‘It’s not the hamster, Soz. It’s your total refusal to accept responsibility for … Oh!’

  She jabs her phone off, and takes several deep calming breaths.

  Whatever they start off talking about, it always seems to come back to Fizzy. Thinking of him (or her) makes her choke up with remorse, even after all these years, and she doesn’t know whether to feel more upset at Serge for killing him, or at her parents for letting it happen.

  Fizzy was her class’s pet hamster when she was at primary school in Campsall. He (or possibly she) lived in a cage on the nature table. Fizzy was named after Bucks Fizz, then number one in the hit parade. He was unbelievably cute, like Hamlet, with ginger fur and a white tummy, pink paws, and a little black spot that looked like an ink splodge on the tip of his nose. On Fridays the kids took turns to take Fizzy home and look after him for the weekend. Clara was the lucky one who got to have him for a whole week at spring half term. Doro collected her from school, helped her carry the cage home, and set it in a corner of the sitting room.

  Fizzy was a champion carrot-chomper; he whizzed round on his hamster wheel like a boy racer; and when she took him out of the cage, he sat in the palm of her hand twitching his whiskers and looking around with bright beady eyes. Serge, who hadn’t started school yet, was mad with envy.

  ‘I want a go!’ He made a grab.

  ‘Gerroff! He’s mine!’ Clara closed her hand around the hamster, feeling its little frame squirming between her fingers.

  ‘I just want to hold it!’

  ‘You can’t, so there!’

  ‘Don’t grab, Serge,’ said Marcus, who was sitting on the sofa trying to read a newspaper.

  ‘Darling, just let him hold it for a moment,’ said Doro.

  ‘No,’ said Clara.

  ‘Doro says I can.’

  ‘You can’t because you’re too little and you’ll kill it.’

  ‘I’m not little. I just want to hold it.’

  ‘Clara, don’t be selfish,’ said Doro.

  ‘You can’t make me,’ said Clara, squeezing him tight.

  ‘Yes, I can.’ Serge lunged and prised the little creature out of her hands. He held it up in the air like a plane and ran around the room yelling, ‘Ner-ner! Ner-ner!’

  ‘Give it back!’

  Clara ran after him and grappled it out of his hand, pressing it against her chest. Then she noticed something odd. Actually, it wasn’t just odd, it was horrible. The hamster wasn’t squirming any more.

  ‘Aaaaw! He’s dead!’

  She opened her hands and stared at the limp furry scrap. One of its eyeballs seemed to have popped out.

  ‘Put it back in its cage,’ said Doro. ‘It’s probably just frightened.’

  They put Fizzy back in his cage, and Clara poked him every few minutes. But he didn’t move.

  ‘He killed ’im!’ she sobbed.

  Marcus looked up from his newspaper. ‘That’s what happens when you fight over possessions. Now go and play outside! Scarper!’

  ‘What’ll I say, when I have to take ’im back to school?’ Clara wailed.

  ‘We’ll find another one,’ said Doro.

  On Saturday, Nick Holliday drove them into Doncaster to scour the pet shops. There were only two, so it was a quick scour. The first shop had one hamster, an albino, fat and white with pink eyes. The other shop had four hamsters, very cute, with brown-grey stripes, but they obviously weren’t Fizzy. Clara started to sob again.

  ‘There might be a pet shop in Rotherham,’ said Nick.

  But the Rotherham hamsters were only babies.

  Undeterred, they set out for Sheffield, Clara and Serge squabbling on the back seat of the car, with the empty hamster cage between them. She wanted Serge to admit he’d killed Fizzy and apologise, but he wouldn’t even admit the hamster was dead. He kept reaching across and hitting her, so she had to hit him back.

  At one point Nick, who was generally an even-tempered kind of guy, pulled over in a lay-by and screamed, ‘If you don’t stop this minute, you can both get out and walk home!’

  In Sheffield, they eventually found a hamster which was the same gingery colour as Fizzy, even the same size, with the same white fur on its tummy. Only it didn’t have a black splodge on its nose.

  ‘It’s no good!’ she howled, stamping her feet.

  Nick said, ‘Nobody’ll notice the difference. You’ll see.’

  Fizzy was buried in a paper bag in the garden.

  When no one was looking, Clara went and dug him up – to check whether he’d gone to heaven yet. She’d learned at school that you went to heaven if you’d been good. But he was still there.

  This made her howl even more.

  On the Monday after half term, she took the new hamster in its cage back to school, and handed it to the teacher, who put it on the nature table with barely a glance. None of the kids seemed interested. She breathed a sigh of relief. Then the girl who had preceded her on the hamster rota put her hand up.

  ‘Please, miss, it’s t’ wrong ’amster.’

  She was a skinny freckled girl from an extended family of loudmouth aunties, tough uncles and mean-looking cousins who all lived in the Prospects, a warren of crumbling terraces not far from the school.

  ‘No it in’t!’ Clara retorted. ‘You can’t even tell the difference.’

  ‘Yes I can, cos t’other one were a bit black on’t nose,’ said the girl.

  Next day, three of the girl’s cousins were lying in wait for Clara after school. They called her a murderer, thumped her about, pulled her hair, and stole her red star hairclips that Moira had made for her. Jen, who was late picking them up from school, didn’t see a thing. Next morning the girl turned up in class with her mousy hair pinned back in the red star hairclips, instead of her usual pink daisy hairclips. Clara spotted them immediately, but didn’t tell.

  No one else noticed.

  SERGE: Chicken

  ‘Who is old woman you meeting today, Sergei?’ asks Maroushka, sidling up to his desk.

  ‘What old woman?’

  ‘In Café Rouge. I have seen you!’

  ‘That was … just a friend … a friendly dentist.’ (Sorry, Mum!)

  ‘Hey, you know wired people.’

  ‘Yeah. What were you doing out there, anyway, babe? Let me guess – an assignation with your secret lover?’

  ‘You have very amusing idea, Sergei. Ssh! Here comes Chicken!’

  She raises a scarlet-tipped finger and, turning to follow the direction of her eyes, he sees that their boss has just appeared in the entrance to the trading floor.

  Despite his nickname, FATCA’s senior partner Ken Porter is a handsome, muscular man who looks more like a Dobermann than a chicken, a mature hunting dog with sharp white teeth, glossy black hair and quick shiny eyes. Although at fiftyish he must be past his prime, he still exudes a sort of testosterone-charged animal vigour which, according to the gossip, makes him irresistible to women. His office is a leather-and-mahogany shrine of golfing trophies, shag-pile rugs and investment art, in the style of a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club, up on the top floor of the steel-and-glass FATCA tower, where the senior partners entertain clients so important they’re only referred to by their initials or an account number.

  Serge has only been up there once, the day he was interviewed for his job. It was more a seduction than an interview: Chicken’s offer – ‘cutting-edge research; opportunity to apply your skills in a dynamic international environment; money, lots of it, more than you’ll know what to do with’ – against the lonely satisfaction of his still-unfinished PhD, the monk-like cell in a medieval college, the miserable £9k bursary.

  While he hesitated, Chicken had jabbed his finger at the FATCA logo on a company report – a globe encircled with the words AUDA
CES FORTUNA IUVAT.

  ‘You’re a scholar, Free. Know what that means? Fortune favours the bold.’

  Then he’d reached out, gripped Serge’s hand, and shaken it up and down like a killer dog trying to break the neck of some little creature it’s just caught.

  Most days Chicken takes a stroll along the trading floor, walking with a slight wide-legged roll, like he’s got a permanent hard-on. Or he drops into the morning meetings, just to spread a bit more testosterone around. You can smell it on the air, or maybe it’s just his aftershave, a pungent musky smell that brings up in Serge’s mind a faint whiff of his childhood.

  He pauses by Serge’s desk, leaning to examine his screens. ‘All right, Freebie?’

  ‘All good, Chief Ken.’

  ‘Freebie’ is Serge’s nickname at FATCA. Everyone here has a nickname (apart from Maroushka, which is already a nickname for something ordinary, like Mary). It’s meant to foster an informal and creative atmosphere. Ken Porter thinks his own nickname is Chief Ken, but it didn’t take long for some wag on the trading floor to abbreviate it to Chi-Ken, and from thence to Chicken. Despite his nickname, he’s undoubtedly the top dog in the pack, and you have to feel some admiration for a guy who’s made it so big-time, and wears the suits to prove it.

  ‘I see your ABS fund is coming in at just over two million, Freebie.’

  The ABS is an algorithm-based investment strategy which Serge created in March to capitalise on the downward spiral in the US housing market, when the whole international banking system was thrown into turmoil by the uncertainty surrounding their multibillion investments in US sub-prime. But where there’s uncertainty, there’s risk: and risk is the godfather of serious money. And this year he’s been making it in shedloads for FATCA.

  ‘That’s what we want; the best and brightest of your generation working for us.’ Chicken grasps his hand and pumps up and down.

  Serge glows, winces and tries to maintain eye contact, all at the same time. Out of the hundreds of employees at FATCA, it’s kind of cool that Chicken has noticed his contribution. Suddenly Chicken drops his hand. The smile freezes over, the teeth are still bared.

  ‘I need to know how you got your information, Freebie.’

  ‘I didn’t have information.’ A rush of alarm. ‘I … er … worked out a better way of hedging the risk so we could boost the yield. It’s … it’s an extension of Itoˉ’s Lemma.’ He is gratified to see a glimmer of respect light up in the bright doggy eyes.

  ‘The Lemma, eh?’

  Chicken, he guesses, is somewhat out of his depth with the new maths. He belongs to the previous generation of bankers – the barrow boys, as they were called – hard, hungry men who were recruited in droves into City jobs in the late 1980s to replace the bowler-hatted toffs whose gentlemanly protocol was thought to be too fuzzy for the post-Big Bang trading conditions. What you needed to make money in that newly deregulated environment were aggression and cunning, and Chief Ken has bucketloads of those. But nowadays, the newest intake to the City tend to be geeky people, maths and physics nerds like himself, who were initially a tad uncomfortable in the purlieus of money, though it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to eighty plus k a year.

  ‘Risk-free risk. Limited downside. That’s what we pay you for, Freebie. Have you shared it with the team?’

  He thinks there’s a whiz-bang numerical trick to take the risk out of investment, like a key-code à la Dan Brown that will unlock the steel-reinforced door leading to a glittering chamber of infinite wealth.

  ‘It’s complex, Chief Ken.’

  ‘Good. The more complex the better – harder for some other sneak-geek to steal or copy. ‘

  Chicken smiles, and Serge feels the radiance light on him like sunshine. He could add that it also makes it much harder for anybody to keep track of what was in the original investment bundle, so in the end nobody knows what anyone is worth, apart from the quants like himself who put the packages together. And they’ve mostly forgotten, or got bored and moved on to something else.

  But that’s not what Chicken wants to hear, so he says, ‘I’ll bring it up in the quants’ meeting tomorrow, Ken.’

  ‘Good man. I’ll go and tell Maroushka.’

  He advances towards Maroushka’s desk, the gym-toned muscles flexing beneath the expensive cloth of his bespoke suit. One day, the thought slips into Serge’s head, I’ll wear a suit like that.

  DORO: Groucho Marxist

  ‘I really shouldn’t have shouted at that pink-legged woman. It achieved nothing, embarrassed Serge and left me in a foul mood,’ thinks Doro, watching her reflection in the train window floating across the mile after mile of dispiriting countryside as she heads back north on Tuesday evening. London is less than an hour and a half away from Doncaster, yet it seems like a different country in a different era. She can’t understand how anyone can put up with it – such a crush of traffic, the streets filthy, the people ignorant. It was just the same when she and Marcus lived there, forty years ago. She’s glad to get away.

  Glad to get away from Serge too, who seemed not himself today – tense and manic, rattling on about incomprehensible things. Just listening to him is exhausting. If only he’d settle down and finish off his PhD, which has been hanging over him for aeons. Clara too seems preoccupied with the minutiae of her job. She wishes she could talk to her children in a friendly, open way; she wishes they wouldn’t always patronise her and humour her, treating her like some relic whose life is in the past. The bold, radical and outrageous values of her generation are regarded by her children as quaint lifestyle whims on a par with tie-dyes and loon pants, which make them keel over with laughter.

  She’s tried to explain about solidarity and class consciousness, but the words have no meaning for them. The language itself has changed. ‘Revolutionary’ is what you call the latest mobile phone technology. ‘Struggle’ is trying to get home on the bus with your bags of shopping. They think listening to indie music is what makes you a rebel. They think they invented sex. She was the same at their age, of course, and that’s the worst thing about it – they make her feel old.

  She remembers her own parents with a mixture of fondness and guilt: how she’d loved their non-judgemental Quaker kindness, and appreciated their cash bailouts when times were hard; how she’d mocked their bourgeois conformity and outdated sexual hang-ups as she’d plunged headlong into the student movement of 1968.

  ‘A young woman really should wear a brassiere,’ her mother had admonished (she pronounced it ‘brazeer’) when Doro had binned her bra, whose tight cotton straps (those were the pre-Lycra days) cut red welts into her shoulders.

  ‘It’s a symbol of patriarchy, Mother.’

  ‘I’m sure if the patriarchs had had bosoms, they wouldn’t have let them bounce around, Dorothy.’

  She has never quite forgiven her mother for christening her Dorothy.

  ‘Why should women constrict themselves in bras in order to please men?’ she’d sneered. ‘It’s false consciousness. Adopting the values and beliefs of the oppressor.’

  Bras and false consciousness had been a subject of intense discussion in her women’s consciousness-raising group in 1968, when she and six women from university, including Moira Lafferty (then still Moira McLeod), had met every Wednesday evening to pour out their feelings about their bodies, their boyfriends, their families and their hopes for themselves. That was when she’d dumped Dorothy, along with her bra, and started calling herself Doro, which sounded interesting and powerful. Moira, who was both Doro’s oldest friend and her most long-standing rival, was a bit flaky on the ideological front and prone to false consciousness, even then. Moira was the one who argued that since men screw around, women would become liberated by doing the same, and the others nodded, lacking the confidence to dispute something about which they knew so little. Moira was the one who clung on to her bra when the rest of them binned theirs in solidarity with their sisters in the USA, chortling about the myth of bra-burning.
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  Now Oolie hates to have her overgenerous bouncy breasts restrained, and Doro’s the one who insists.

  ‘Which oppressor?’ her mother had scoffed.

  ‘Well, Daddy, I suppose.’

  Which made them both laugh, for it was hard to imagine anyone less suited to the role of oppressor than her gentle, diffident historian father.

  ‘Don’t be silly, darling. It’s not about men, it’s about gravity.’

  Doro shared a flat in Islington with two other girls from her course, Moira McLeod and Julia Chance. Julia, a thin Celtic beauty from Wallasey, was engaged to Pete Lafferty, her childhood sweetheart, who spent most weekends at their flat. Within six months, Julia and Pete had split up and Julia had gone back to Merseyside with a broken heart and a fistful of Moira’s auburn hair.

  Observing this, Doro was reluctant at first to bring Marcus Lerner back to the flat. She’d met him only a few months ago, when he’d pulled her out of a hedge in Grosvenor Square where she was cowering, terrified by a rearing police horse, on an anti-Vietnam War demo in March 1968. Out of the turmoil of flailing batons and horses’ hooves, he reached out his hand and gripped hers.

  ‘You all right, sister?’ He had blazing blue eyes and wild curly brown hair; he wore a black leather jacket and a red bandana around his forehead like a real revolutionary.

  ‘Fine, thanks, comrade,’ she said, dreading the moment he would realise she was just a third-year sociology student, and not a revolutionary at all.

  ‘Let’s get you out of here.’

  He sat her on the back of his scooter, and she thought he was going to take her home, but instead he whisked her off to his room in a house near Hampstead Heath. It was a small attic room with a mattress on the floor, bookshelves made out of old floorboards supported by bricks, and a wooden door balanced on four columns of bricks for a desk, on which were spread the handwritten notes of Marcus’s PhD. The curtain was an unwashed pink sheet with a lung-shaped stain in the centre. Doro found it all deliciously romantic. When he told her in a deep serious voice about the revolutionary movement in Paris, from whence he’d just returned, and the struggle of the masses for freedom and dignity, she eagerly offered up her virginity to the cause.