On Saturday morning Izzy announced grimly to her father that Caramel had died. “I touched him and he was cold and hard and gone.”
Her father, Iain, frowned at Izzy, regarding her small-for-her-age frame and ladybird hair clips. Then he got up from the dining table, pressing his hands on the edge to lift himself up, and went with Izzy to examine the body. “That’s Caramel, not Toffee?” he asked his daughter. The guinea pig was dead alright; it looked slightly deflated and was wedged up against the side of the hutch, some brown fur poking rudely through the wire mesh. The other guinea pig chewed on the other side of the hutch. Iain fancied there was a triumphant glimmer in the eye of the survivor, but dismissed the thought.
“Daddy, I think I know which guinea pig is which,” said Izzy with the tone of a six-year-old confident that are at least some things that she knows better than her father. “Are we going to stuff Caramel and keep him?”
Iain looked at his daughter quickly. She looked back at him with all seriousness. He wondered at how well she was taking the loss of her pet, and with this comment, her easy familiarity with death. He felt far more uncomfortable with the situation than she seemed to be. Iain pictured for a moment a macabre stuffed Caramel on the mantelpiece, mounted on a bevelled and varnished wooden stand, head turned like a predator. A conversation starter, that’d be for sure.
“I think we’ll bury Caramel in the garden, Izzy.”
Iain, Izzy and her mother, Sally, chose a spot at the end of the garden; it always has to be at the end of the garden. Iain dug a little hole in the lawn, preserving the square of turf to top it off afterwards. Sally had carefully placed Caramel in a shoebox, like a cake into a tin, having to suppress a feeling of dishonouring the dead by doing so. Izzy laid the shoebox in the grave; she was solemn as a court hearing but still eerily composed, Iain mused.
Spontaneously, Izzy said: “You’re life was shorter than it should have been, Caramel. But you have been well-loved. We’ll all miss you.”
Again, Iain was perplexed at just how adult Izzy was being. He sighed, examined the earth under his fingernails and tried to be grateful for the absence of tears and tantrums. He avoided mentioning Caramel’s feeding of the plants now. Izzy looked slowly, with concentration, from one parent to the other then asked her crucial question, voice high with trepidation.
“Will Caramel be in heaven now?”
Iain and Sally looked at each other for a moment. Iain only noticed now that Sally had an apron on; images of gory butchery, filmic in intensity, flashed across his mind. They had spoken of how to deal with this sort of question before, and had agreed then on a shared approach. Yet, now, at the end of the garden rather than comfortable on the sofa with a glass of red wine, it seemed so reductive, so precise and final. Sally mastered the awkwardness first, rationality coming to the fore where it belonged.
“No,” said Sally. “He’s just gone.” Izzy just stared, defeated by the radical honesty of those she really expected, relied upon even, to build up the protective ring-fence of childhood mythology. To tell the falsehoods that would keep her nascent psyche safe. “Oh,” was all she said.
~
That Saturday night, Iain and Sally had two friends come over for dinner. Felicity was a good friend of Sally’s from work, all swooshy hair and assurance of her place in the world. Jock and Iain had come to know one another through their wives. As a result, their friendship was a little more forced. While the women chatted about work, the book club they both attended and other shared interests, the men talked in an ill-informed way about the on-going Wimbledon championship. Jock’s hands were unusually heavy and hard, as if he had once been an oarsman on a quinquereme, although he was a manager in an online marketing company. Iain looked at those hands now as he made some vague comment about the tactical use of serve and volley play.
They sat around the table, Iain pouring wine and Sally serving the starter, a red onion and crème fraiche tart. Felicity said she was starving, at ease in someone else’s home. Iain looked at the dwarfed cutlery in Jock’s hands.
Sally was enjoying herself. She noticed how her coral dress fit comfortably but with a little glamour; she felt her body responding pleasantly to the wine and the food she and her husband had cooked. A thought persisted in invading her harmony, though. Looking fondly at Felicity, she reflected on why most people’s best friends were of the same sex; these were the ones you wanted to spend time with but rarely did. What was with this mad dash across the hall to the other side, usually in your early twenties, to where the other sex await? You committed to a life with someone with whom you couldn’t ever be best friends. Sure, they seemed exotic in their difference at the time, but you doomed yourself to differing interests and hobbies and tastes, incompatible with the shared life.
Jock turned the conversation to their children, one of whom was in the same class as Izzy at school. “We’re trying to decide whether to get a dog. I just hope it wouldn’t be a novelty for them that wears off in a year. Plus, the trauma of their pet dying worries me. I can still remember our family dog dying when I was eight. It’s almost too much for a child, I think.” The advantages of dog ownership were self-evident, apparently.
“Funny you should mention that, Jock,” said Sally. “Izzy’s guinea pig died this morning, but she took it so well.”
“Hmm… Do you think she really understands that she won’t get him back sometime, though?” asked Jock, probing a little unpleasantly.
“I reckon so; she proposed stuffing him!” Iain tried to add a little black humour. “We told her straight up, he’s gone forever, too. I think she grasps it.” It was easy to take credit for this now.
Felicity caught her breath momentarily. “You didn’t tell her the guinea pig is in heaven now?” she half-whispered with the embarrassment of catching her friends at some bad parenting. She felt the way you might feel if you saw a flustered mother grab her toddler’s wrist a little too hard in the supermarket, watching but trying so hard not to judge as she marches on, red-faced, with the tearful child following like a bad past. Felicity could sense the tension as she waited for a response.
“No,” said Sally. Her ordinarily soft features sharpened slightly with conviction. “We don’t believe in telling our child lies. It betrays her trust in us, and she won’t forget later in life.”Iain could see Jock shifting around in his chair. Then he revealed himself in a tirade on the importance of keeping childish beliefs alive. He pontificated on the loss of innocence, on the security afforded by white lies and the heartlessness of dismembering a child’s simple illusions. He used lines that sounded rehearsed, like: “Childhood is the only time you can believe in magic,” and: “Killing a child’s sense of mystery is tantamount to removing their soul.” He spoke with feeling and a degree of regret. Sally, beaten down by the lecture, could only ponder that Jock wished he could return to childhood and live without knowing. The guest continued, speaking of the modern fostering of cynicism in young people from the off; then he went onto the arrogance of atheism. “Who are you to say there is no heaven and there is no god anyway? You’re brainwashing your daughter!” Jock finished, shortly before he and Felicity left, all smiles and shaking hands by then.
~
Iain awoke on Sunday morning with a bitter taste, of wine and of a good night with a left turn. He brushed his teeth in front of the mirror, then scrubbed his tongue so vigorously he sliced its soft edge and gobbed pinkly into the sink. Iain went downstairs in his dressing gown. Sally and Izzy were already up, but not having breakfast as he expected. They were at the end of the garden; he went to join them.
Iain stood beside Izzy. Together, the three formed a little horseshoe around Caramel’s grave, heads bowed. The burial site had been desecrated by a fox or a cat. A pale brown shit, in three pieces of differing sizes, arranged like a witchy symbol, sat provocatively in the centre of the square of turf over the grave. All three goggled at the scene. Iain examined it like an artefact, and sniffed the air.
“Fox,” he pronounced as if that could diffuse the awfulness of the imagery before them.
Izzy was crying now. “Why would a fox do that to Caramel?” she asked.
Neither parent could answer. Sally couldn’t stop thinking about the size of the grave, how the smallest graves always seemed the most tragic. She put her arm around Izzy. Iain was contemplating the sheer improbability of the thing, trying to resist conclusions about malice in nature. Red in tooth and claw, indeed.
“Let’s leave daddy to tidy this up and we can forget all about it,” said Sally to Izzy. She smiled at Iain, feeling this morning like a team with adversity bookending their weekend. She revised her thought process of the night before with an ‘and yet…’
Sally led Izzy by the hand back to the house, noticing her daughter’s dancing, tip-toeing gait as though for the first time.
As they walked, Sally bent down to her daughter and muttered conspiratorially, “I hope that fox rots in hell.”
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