Needlemouse

by Jane O'Connor

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ he said.

  I looked myself up and down pointedly. ‘Nope. Still here, Kamal.’

  ‘You could make it a bit less obvious, you know,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied, although I did suspect I hadn’t covered up my negative feelings towards Crystal quite as well as usual during the evening, given the fact that I really didn’t want to be there.

  Kamal pointed to the montage of photos of his daughter that covered the hall wall. There was Crystal opening her birthday presents aged six, beaming a big, gappy smile; there she was again, on the back of a pony, aged ten, scared but thrilled with Kamal holding the reins; one of her messily eating an ice cream as a toddler, and the one of Millie cradling her as a newborn that still made me tremble with emotion. ‘She’s just a kid, Sylvia. Nothing is her fault.’

  He waited for me to respond, which I didn’t. Instead I pulled myself up tall and gave him an unpleasant, scornful look. I really do struggle to recall what I ever thought was attractive about him. He sighed impatiently and we scowled at each other through narrowed eyes until Millie bustled back in through the kitchen. ‘Here we go, darling. Can’t have you catching a chill, can we? Safe journey home.’ She kissed me on both cheeks as Kamal disappeared upstairs.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful how we all get on so well as a family?’ she mused as she helped me on with my wrap.

  ‘Yes, Millie, it’s totally wonderful,’ I replied, mystified as ever by my sister’s unshakeable childlike commitment to seeing life as a thoroughly warm and fun experience for everyone. ‘Thank you for a super evening,’ I said as I stepped out into the balmy evening air and headed towards the bus stop.

  Saturday 12 September

  I went to the hedgehog sanctuary as usual this morning. I volunteer there on Tuesdays after work as well as at the weekends. It gives me an excuse not to help out in Millie and Kamal’s deli, and it is at least something to talk about when colleagues ask the de rigueur questions about what I did last night or at the weekend. The other advantage is that volunteering there makes people think I’m a nicer person than I actually am, which can come in useful. For example, last December Charlotte from accounts was criticising me behind my back for not buying any of the ghastly Christmas cards she was selling to support a wildlife hospital she’d visited on holiday. Two or three colleagues apparently jumped to my defence in the staffroom saying how I give up lots of my time working at a hedgehog rescue centre and couldn’t reasonably be expected to contribute to any other animal charity.

  This was reported to me by Margaret, as I try to avoid the staffroom at all costs. If I do ever venture down there, it’s out of sheer boredom or to check my pigeonhole. It’s surprising how interested people are in hedgehogs – an interest that generally demonstrates itself to be both intense, yet extremely short-lived, which suits me fine. I have stock answers to the most common hedgehog questions (Do they all have fleas? Why do they always get run over? Where do they go when they hibernate?) and that tends to permanently satisfy their Erinaceus curiosity. Millie was the same when I first started there, but I don’t think I have ever discussed hedgehogs with her since. She knows vaguely that that’s what I do when I’m not at work and approves of my community spirit – and that’s as far as it goes. I’ve never mentioned it to Prof, although I don’t know why. I like to exude an aura of sensual mystery, I suppose, and don’t want him to conjure an image in his head of me in my wellies cleaning out hedgehog pens in a back street in Sydenham.

  Old Jonas who runs it is a sad sack of a man, keeping his wife Paula’s memory alive by carrying on with her beloved sanctuary. A cardigan in human form is the best way to describe him, with his jumble of woollies and pockets full of handkerchiefs and toffees. He wears bicycle clips around his trousers for reasons I have yet to fathom and, on chilly days, he pulls a brown woolly hat right down over his ears. He has curly grey hair and a matching beard, ancient thick-rimmed specs held together with masking tape, and the rotund figure of a man who enjoys too much cake. He smells of earth and animals and tea and is about as harmless a person as you could ever hope to meet.

  His house, a crumbling post-war semi covered in greying pebble dash, has been frozen in time since Paula died. It’s clean and homely inside, but everything’s faded and nothing is ever replaced. The television and phone are huge and old-fashioned, the carpets are worn, the kitchen appliances all show signs of DIY repairs, and Jonas must be the only person in London to still have a VHS recorder and a cassette player. The bottom half of the back door is covered in dog scratches and peeling paint. It opens straight on to a little patio with a bench along the outside wall of the house where Jonas likes to sit and have his breakfast, come rain or shine. His garden is a muddle of sheds, plant pots and hutches, with a patch of lawn in the middle and overflowing flower beds and vegetable plots round the outside. Coming here is like being transported back to the 1940s, with the tin watering cans and runner beans tied up with string, the push-along mower and patched-up fences, and Jonas himself, of course, usually bent double over a spade as if he’s digging for victory.

  Jonas and Paula brought up their three daughters here, Harriet, Katie and Carrie, and surrounded by all those women for so many years, Jonas always had a male dog as a pet, ‘to even things out a bit’, as he explains it. He has kept up this tradition, even though it is just him on his own now, and his current companion, Igor, is a Jack Russell–spaniel crossbreed that he got from Battersea dog’s home when his beloved collie Jake died last summer. Igor is an odd-looking animal, covered in an explosion of brown and white splodges with the sharp mouth of a Jack and the stockiness of a spaniel. But his fierce appearance belies a soppy pup who adores Jonas and follows him everywhere he goes either physically, or if he is too comfy lying in his basket or in the sunshine, with his soulful brown eyes.

  The garage where the hedgehogs are kept is on the far left of the garden, away from the house, and is quite cosy with all the cages along one side and an electric fire, sink and wooden table and chairs on the other. Any spare wall space is covered with posters and pictures of hedgehogs that Jonas has acquired over the years and various hedgehog ornaments and knick-knacks are lined up along the window ledge. The hogs come to us with all sorts of injuries and illnesses and Jonas does his best to nurse them back to health. There are heat pads in the cages for those who are really young or poorly and some hutches on the patio for the ones who are nearly ready to be released back into the wild, so they can get used to the weather and the smells of outside again.

  An ancient crab-apple tree sits between the garage and the toolshed, its low-hanging branches laden with bird feeders surrounded by the constant flutter of blue tits and chaffinches. The actual bird table has been colonised by next door’s cats who seem to be on a rota system, taking it in turns to curl up on the wooden perch, blinking in the sun or sheltering from the rain, tormenting Igor by being just out of his reach. Jack and Jill, an unwanted rabbit and guinea pig pair who were left in a box on Jonas’s doorstep one frosty morning two or three years ago, enjoy a custom-made hutch and run that take up a good third of the lawn. Jill’s high-pitched squeaks fascinate Igor and he spends hours with his nose pressed against the wire netting, watching her chew manically on dandelion leaves, her ginger fur sticking up from her head in tufts. Jack, in contrast, is a calm, sleek creature who looks like he’s been carved out of mahogany by a master craftsman. He sits, statuesque in the corner of the run, plotting his escape, so Jonas says, but I think he’s quite happy just taking it all in, really.

  It’s not cheap, keeping it going and feeding all the animals, and what with the vet’s bills for the hedgehogs and having the garage constantly heated, it adds up to quite a sum each month. Jonas pours far too much of his own money into the place, although he thinks I don’t know that. We have a collection box on the counter in the newsagent’s on the corner, and the local Women’s Institute do a cake sale for us once a year but, apart from the occasio
nal gift left in the wills of Paula’s friends as they shuffle off, that is the extent of the sanctuary’s financial resources.

  Jonas wrote a lovely, quirky little booklet called The Hedgehog Year a while back, containing lots of useful and interesting information about hedgehogs. I typed it up for him from his handwritten jottings and made some copies at work. We put them out for our occasional visitors to purchase for a suggested donation of fifty pence in a bid to boost funds. They haven’t been a roaring success, to be honest, and most remain in a yellowing pile on the garage table. I have reassured Jonas several times that poor returns are no reflection of quality – I know this from the disappointing sales of Prof’s last book, which is actually quite brilliant. But Jonas doesn’t seem bothered one way or another about whether anyone buys his leaflets and says he just wanted to put it all down on paper.

  There used to be quite a crowd of us volunteers, but the others have either died (the old ones) or lost interest (the young ones) so it’s mainly just Jonas and me these days. Jonas is hoping one of his three daughters or their children will take over at some point, and I humour him with that, although I think it’s unlikely. Having said that, his second youngest granddaughter, Sophie, seemed to love the hogs when she visited this morning.

  ‘Why is that one curled up in a ball?’ she asked Jonas, pointing at a young sow who had been found weak and hungry in someone’s garden shed.

  ‘Because she’s frightened, lass,’ explained Jonas, in his rolling Yorkshire accent that has never faded despite decades spent living in London. ‘She feels protected like that, surrounded by her spikes. No one can get to her soft vulnerable parts. Nothing can hurt her when she’s balled up like that.’

  ‘Why don’t they stay like that all the time then, if it’s nice and safe for them?’ asked Sophie, with the logic of a five-year-old, looking round at the variety of injured hedgehogs with concern.

  ‘Because they have to move about, lass. They have to find food and mates and make a nest for themselves and their babies.’

  ‘They have to live, don’t they, Grandad?’ she said, nodding her head wisely.

  ‘Aye lass. They have to live,’ Jonas replied, smiling proudly at Sophie and patting her blonde head as if she had just uncovered some profound mystery. I rolled my eyes at Igor as I swept the floor.

  Her next question was more pragmatic. ‘How can you tell which hedgehogs are boys and which are girls?’ she asked innocently.

  Jonas delighted in demonstrating to her what we call the ‘casserole technique’ of gender identification, whereby the hog is placed on a Pyrex dish and held up, enabling its important parts to be examined, prickle free, from underneath. Sophie naturally thought that was hilarious and carried on giggling as Jonas shambled off to make the tea. Before he got back, Sophie’s mother, Katie, flung open the garage door and smiled at her daughter indulgently.

  ‘There you are,’ she said, taking Sophie’s hand. ‘I’ve been looking all over the house for you. We only popped in to collect Grandad’s washing. We’ll be late for Isabel’s party if we don’t get a move on. Hello and goodbye, Sylvia!’

  Jonas was quite subdued when he got back with the tea and found Sophie was gone.

  ‘She was late for a party. She wanted to stay,’ I assured him as we sat with our tea looking at the three Bakewell tarts he had put out on the plate.

  I attempted to shift the mood by starting a conversation about current educational issues, which I thought would interest him as he is, after all, a retired English teacher.

  ‘Did you realise, Jonas, that fifty-five per cent of white working-class boys finish compulsory education without basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic?’

  ‘Is that so?’ he replied reaching for a tart.

  ‘Yes. My professor has been leading a research project examining the reasons for this. It’s really quite fascinating what he has found out,’ I said proudly. (I call Prof ‘my professor’ when I talk to Jonas, out of respect, really, and also because I don’t want Jonas to know how I feel about him.)

  ‘I dare say,’ said Jonas, chewing absently.

  ‘There are inherent problems in the way these children are taught, according to my professor. Teachers simply don’t connect with these boys on their level and so they feel alienated and then they can’t learn. Did you realise that when you were teaching?’ I knew I was being provocative, but his indifference to Prof’s research was making my hackles rise. I have lost count of the number of times I have generously tried to share Prof’s findings, theories and insights with Jonas only to be met with mild interest at best, or stony unresponsiveness at worst. It seems to me that people like Prof go through blood, sweat and tears to try and make this world a better place, whilst people like Jonas sit idly with pastry crumbs on their beards, not caring one way or another.

  After a long silence, during which I wondered if he was going to answer me at all, Jonas sighed and said, ‘Sometimes kids just don’t want to learn what they’re being taught, Sylvia. That’s their choice at the end of the day.’ Then he got up to check the thermometer and I stared furiously at his back. He really is the most exasperating thickie.

  Thank the Lord I get to spend my working week with someone as erudite, cultured and intelligent as Prof. He enriches me beyond words and I can’t wait to get back to him after the weekend. Mondays are far and away the best day of the week for me. Last Monday, though, Prof was at a conference in Cardiff so I had to tolerate an extra day of separation. I always offer to accompany him to these events, saying, ‘Would it be helpful if I came with you to Brussels/Manchester/Chicago?’ or wherever he is off to (the international ones are the worst as he can be away for days at a time). But he always says something like, ‘It would be great to have you there, Sylvia, but the budget won’t cover it’ or ‘We need you here holding the fort’ or ‘Perhaps next time we can organise that’ and I say, ‘Fine.’ It is hard for me to keep asking, but the pain of him being away is worse than the short amount of time I feel embarrassed for suggesting it, so I have worked out that it’s better to ask just in case he agrees one day. And I make it such a professional thing by saying, ‘Will you be needing administrative support whilst you are away?’ or ‘Will you need help organising your symposium?’ so it’s not like he is rejecting me in any personal way. He never says he has missed me when he gets back, but I know that he has. I do wish he would say it though, just once.

  Anyway, poor Prof had only just got back from Cardiff on the Tuesday after a pig of a journey, when Yvonne Gilbert came bursting into the office in tears wanting to see him. I told her that she would have to email and make an appointment like everyone else and emphasised that Professor Lomax is an extremely busy man. She begged and pleaded and made such a fuss that Prof came out of his sanctum and asked what was going on. Seeing her chance she started on about not being ready for her PhD viva voce examination the next day, and did he think her project was perfectly useless and could he help her go through some practice questions and please and please and please? He gave in, of course. He’s too nice, that’s his problem, and to add insult to injury he even gave me a slightly disapproving look. Not because I had let the girl come and bother him, but because I hadn’t let her go straight in. How did that happen? How did I become the baddie in that situation? I seethed with anger all the while she was in there, my mood made even worse by Margaret’s patronising advice regarding the importance of empathising with students’ emotional needs. ‘It’s not only the practical issues they need help with, Sylvia. We have to recognise the stress that many of our young people experience when they are at university. It was all on that course that I went on about student well-being.’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Margaret, you don’t know anything about it,’ I snapped, craning my neck to see into Prof’s office.

  I couldn’t do any work and sat fuming at my desk as Yvonne got his full attention and I was left out in the cold. When she was still in with Prof after ten minutes and it became clear that she wasn’t
to be dismissed quickly, I pulled up her electronic file to see what I could find out. Pleasingly, I discovered that she had a few hundred pounds in unpaid tuition fees outstanding on her account. A brief call to the student finance department soon put that right, and as I was putting the phone down she came out of Prof’s office and gave me a horribly smug smile. I smiled back with genuine pleasure and wished her luck with her viva tomorrow, which wouldn’t go ahead now anyway if she didn’t pay her fees in full. That would be a nice panic for her later in the day. I envisaged the desperate phone calls to the bank, perhaps to her parents, the sleepless night agonising over whether the funds had gone through.

  ‘Hope it all goes well,’ I added brightly and she gave me a puzzled little backward glance. Margaret opened her mouth to speak but the glacial look I gave her stopped her in her tracks and she turned back to her work, tutting loudly.

  This is what I do. I assist Prof by always being on his side and supporting him in any way I can. If other people have to be pricked and prodded out of his way, then so be it. Prof’s well-being is my ultimate concern, not theirs. He needs time to focus on his writing and his research. That’s what’s important. That’s where he makes the difference and that’s where his genius lies. Not in helping doe-eyed girls with their dissertations or sorting out arguments about office size among middle-aged academics who should have better things to worry about. He appreciates me, I know he does, and I have a very important place in his life. It works both ways, though, and Prof ensures that I am made to feel special and that everyone else knows that I am his indispensable right-hand woman.

  There’s all the little things that show that he cares, not just the annual birthday lunch. For example, he always brings me a treat back from any meeting that he attends – a pack of biscuits, perhaps, or a mini muffin (he doesn’t know I don’t eat them and I wouldn’t dream of hurting his feelings). I remember one day when I was sniffing and sneezing at my desk he came back from a senior management meeting with a ginger and lemon teabag in a paper envelope. He put it on my desk as he walked past saying, ‘Here you go, Sylvia, this might help your cold.’ I was so touched by his thoughtfulness. I just stared at the teabag and before I could say thank you, he was gone into his office. I know it’s silly and sentimental, but I still have that teabag. I have never opened it. I keep it in my bedside table drawer and sometimes, if I have had a particularly difficult day, I find it calming to take it out and breathe in its aroma before I go to sleep.