This went on for some time. We gave up on using our trash bag as an emergency supply, since Mikey seemed to be keeping well ahead of us, and evading detection. (He was called Mikey after the signal the lookouts at the 2nd Street dope spot used to shout when cops were approaching – ‘Mikey! Mikey!’ – scattering everyone on-line to the winds.) Finally, one day, I happened to open up one of the old PDP-11 computers mounted in the equipment rack. On the surface of an unused portion of the backplane, there was Mikey’s nest. This little guy wasn’t commuting from the living room anymore – having found happiness in the closet trash bag, he had settled in the office, alone. His little nest consisted of the basic rat essentials: a floor made up of chewed-up toilet paper; a pile of food pellets, collected from what we used to pour out onto the floor for the rat mob, who made a sound like that of hail on a tin roof while eating it up; a single bar of soap(?); assorted chewed-up bits of cardboard collected from around the house; and, most alarmingly, a neat stack of Monopoly money – totally untouched by rodential teeth, in pristine condition! He knew better than to chew up the cash.
I realized then that Mikey was indeed a self-sufficient fellow. Obviously, aware that the finite scrapings in the trash bag were diminishing faster than we were replenishing them, he gathered up a supply of cash for the day when he’d have to go out and cop on his own. Oh, the Great ‘G of J’ (God of Junk), as Zoë used to exclaim so often. He tends to all creatures great and small.
‘Mikey’s Tale’, 1997
Bridget O’Connor
Heavy Petting
for Tiny and Twinkle
I COME FROM a long line of pet deaths. Bunny and Clyde . . . Tiny and Twinkle. Sid and Nancy. Mungo . . .
But it’s Godfrey who haunts me.
At night, when the cistern gurgles, it’s like he’s back with a splash.
Majella hooped him at a fairground and brought him home, dangling from her thumb, gulping mist in a plastic bag. He wasn’t expected to live for long. She plopped him in the dead terrapin’s tank: watched him loop. Blessed his tank. Named him after her ex-fiancé, the paratrooper: the one who’d chucked her out on the street, howling. Godfrey.
Godfrey was like Godfrey: he was quick, ginger, flash, but he was never mean.
He was so bright in our dingy house. He blew air kisses all day, puffed out silvery smoke rings . . . link chains. A stray sunbeam hit his glossy water and he sparkled. Round and round, an endless U-ie . . . At first, Majella blew him kisses back, showered him with presents from the pet shop: bright coral-gravels, a pagoda, a stone-coloured hide’n’seek boot, as fluorescent pink plastic hanging garden . . . and sieved him out, with the tea strainer, for long transatlantic journeys in the bath – and then she turned. She turned to clubbing, drugging and a bloke called either Mr Ecstasy or Marv. Or both. Majella, my sister, went rave mad.
One day Majella was a laughter-line in a nightie, spitting on an iron, singeing a pleat down her navy work skirt, and next, she was this gum-snapping stranger pacing up our hall: wearing tight T-shirts with daisies on them, calling cabs at midnight; hipped out, with her belly button sticking out of flab. (Later, she had it pierced: it went septic. Septicaemia . . . She got gangrene. She had to go to hospital. It went the size of a yeasty currant bun. But that was much later.)
Majella really loved Godfrey but, after she hit the clubbing scene, got, as she called it, ‘loved up’, she hated him.
I didn’t think pretty Godfrey could live for long.
‘Mum?’ I said. ‘Look!’ I’d airlifted him out from the hellhole of Majella’s bedroom: blown away his sky of talcum powder, reeled out a foot of Majella’s tan-coloured, scummy tights, and set him down by the scummy cooker in the kitchen. Though he was thin, a red bone in a white sock – he was, I thought, all the light in our house boiled down.
In the hot kitchen Godfrey blinked his gold. ‘Look, Mum,’ I said, ‘isn’t he sweeeet?’
Mum looked down: her cheeks steamed, flushed like two rubbed spots. Her eyes, under her sweaty eyebrows, gleamed. I looked from her to the brown sudsy cooking pots, back to Godfrey, back to Mum.
I thought: Poor Godfrey, he won’t last for long. Out of the fire, into the pan.
Mum had gone . . . funny in the head. That’s what Majella yelled, tapping her temple: ‘You’re funny-in-the-head,’ as though Mum’s head had been stacked (when we weren’t looking) with comic books, sitcoms . . . I couldn’t think of a better explanation myself.
Outside, our other pets howled on the lawns, sang like exiles, made a heady high white noise, scribbled their nibbled light-pink legs in the sheds, kicked up for dinner time. The toy poodles shook their pale dreadlocks. Our albino rabbits stretched their dirty jaws. Across the neighbourhood, strays joined in: cats caterwauled. Mum stirred away in the kitchen. She boomed a silent radar: her animal attraction. The pets on the lawns crackled, eared up and somersaulted back. Or they’d bounce and pose above the grassy gore, suspended for a moment, hunched like fridge magnets.
In his tank Godfrey (plumped up), beaming bright, would pause. He’d leap above the pagoda, hang out in the hanging garden. Dirty strobe light smacked his back. His tail thumped. He swam on.
We had to ring for take a ways. At night, when the cat songs got too much, I’d lob our leftover cartons of chicken tikka, the chewy rinds from our takeaway pizzas, salty chip rejects, up out and into the long splattered grass. Shrieks! A scrummage. A feral pet race. The air filled with clods of earth: back-kicked peas. Tree-high stalks shook. As I noted in my red notepads, only the very fast survived.
Doctor Trang upped Mum’s medication. The side effects, he said (zombie-ism, intense communion with small dumb animals), were a small price to pay, believe him. I did. I’d already noted the symptoms: synchronicity: in the hot kitchen, when Mum paused, holding a ladle, Godfrey paused too; when one stirred, the other whizzed rapidly round.
In the kitchen Godfrey’s light drew me to him. He surfed the surface; flayed gold . . . green . . . red. His tank bubbled like a miniature jacuzzi: full of air and spinning fat globes. He’d flip on his side, fin a zippy sidestroke, blow a little link kiss at Mum as she sipped, with deep concentration, at her wooden spoon. Mum looked down at Godfrey and blew him a crumb, a grape, a rubber fish face. They were one.
At least, I knew, with Mum around, Godfrey was safe.
At night, our other pets sat in line on the black grass: ruby-red-eyed. They were the lifers: all born to us, given to us, at a time when we must have seemed, no, we were exactly like a photograph happily framed: there was Mum in rose-tinted C&A blouse; Dad, roastily tanned in his crisp blue cotton overalls; Majella and me in our steam-ironed bottle-green school uniforms (Majella’s big hands on my little shoulders), showing our heavy-metal orthodontistry. Behind us surged a thunderous studio sky. Around us hopped the albino rabbits, the tortoise. The mongrels. The cats. Poodles . . . they all began to die.
Majella started clubbing it once a week, then twice . . . thrice . . . Mr Marv was a light voice on the line (a ‘Yeah’, a ‘She in?’). He was a slice of shadow, a stripe of Adidas in the crack of a cab. Majella came home shiny, she sniffed, snapped her chewing gum at Godfrey. (Her luminous inks flowered first in the choke of the hall.) In the kitchen she drank tap water, spat green tubes of it through gaps in her teeth at me, at my homework; stared in at Godfrey as he flashed to and fro in his tank. Her face greyed, grew stone. She hovered over his tank, dribbled strands of her long beige hair in, eyes set wide apart: black-pooled, scary, like a shark’s. Godfrey cowered in his hide’n’seek boot. I cowered too. ‘Godfrey,’ Majella chanted, ‘I’m going to get you. What am I going to do Godfrey? Get you.’ I didn’t think Godfrey could survive for long.
Outside on the lawns, all the pets cried.
In my trainee notepads, I noted, sipping a Lemsip, ‘We’re all on medication now.’ Mum had little white pills. Majella had her little white pills. Even Dad, who I was in love with, took massive painkillers. He had migraine. He’d come home from the railways
like a train. Light stabbed him. Coffee killed him. Pineapple juice made him cry. He had migraine so bad he had to inject himself in the bathroom, using his leather belt as a tourniquet. (His injection kit was a toy briefcase, deadly black; inside, chrome cylinders, needles so think they made your skin lock.) He had blinders. He’d charge home honking noise, smoking rust, with one eye spinning like a shot blue marble, the other scrunching up his forehead, his bobble hat thick with dust. I don’t think he noticed the litter under his boots, or chicken tikka again for tea. I stood in the kitchen sipping blackcurrant Lemsip, studying my books, peeping in at Godfrey as he swam round . . . round.
Godfrey swam. He swam in brackish oily water and then, it seemed, he was deep in soup. He paddled past florets of cauliflower, dived under broccoli bombs, breasted logs of carrots, stinking shreds of chicken and lamb. He moved not in water but in stuff he really had to fin through. Gazpacho. The air flowered with stock. Godfrey gave little shivery, fastidious leaps. Mum, stirring, leaped too. Leaning, trying to talk sense into Mum, one day, yelling above the radio blah-blah of LBC, I saw Godfrey take a leap at the edge. But the walls of the terrapin tank were too high. He leapt but a stray calamaro ringed his neck, winched it back, cut his arrow-like route to the floor. My heart flipped. Godfrey’s battered, swollen, mottled, white-veined mouth glugged each time, sank to blank – down among the greasy olives, baggy purple prunes, hairy anchovies swishing by like unshaved legs: the assorted mucus beneath the murk. I’d mumble above his surface: ‘Leeds . . . Aberystwyth . . . Godfrey, you hang on.’ I changed Godfrey’s water but Mum souped it straight back up. I tried putting Godfrey in my bedroom near my computer and neat stacks of homework but Mum kept bringing him down, sloshing, bashing his delicate lips brown. I tried to keep Godfrey on the up.
But I failed. I failed my mocks. An (unpredicted) D, D, E. When I told Godfrey he flickered away. I looked for him in the grey TV screen of his tank. ‘I’m sorry, Godfrey,’ I said. I turned to Mum. She stirred away.
I tried to stay focused, stay head-down, but . . .
I thought Majella was now heavily into the drug scene, was like a suburban drug queen, and I was worried.
I saw adverts in the papers for people to appear and confess personal family information on Esther or on Vanessa and I was thinking of appearing. I’d snitch Majella up for her own good. I’d get her into rehab. Write to her from my tidy room. I circled the adverts with red biro and left them on Majella’s littered grey bed, as a warning, a hint for her to pull herself together. I tapped Mum’s arm in the kitchen. ‘Mum?’ Godfrey paused. ‘Godfrey?’ I said. ‘Newcastle Polytechnic? Brighton FE?’ Godfrey swam away.
Majella started clubbing it four times a week, five. She’d come home at around four o’clock in the morning, with Mr Marv. (She’d sleep maybe two hours, then speed off to work. Her eyes were like slots.) I’d wait up, reassuring Godfrey there’d be no game-playing tonight whatsoever, watching as his sides bulged at the scrape of a key . . . Mr Marv swung in first: smirked, picked up a dirty fork, toyed with its crusty prong, slid it up his sleeve. Majella doubled behind him: they were thin, shiny, daisy-topped. They’d sloppy-kiss, edge to the tank; rub each other up, but I was on guard, stayed solid, watched for the sudden lunge, the stabbing fork. They’d kiss out. Then, without warning, double back, crash into the kitchen tooled up to play, in between licks and despite my protestations, the Get Godfrey Game. They forked but Godfrey dived under the blue pagoda. They stabbed but Godfrey ducked into the hide’n’seek boot. He whizzed rapidly around a roast spud. Watching his dive I felt the full surge of his life force: he’d leap back from a death wish; got firmly back into the swim; he swam away. Majella and Marv forked up sodden Cocoa-Pops, fried clumps of wire wool, crumbless stiff blue fingers of fish. Godfrey lived to flicker away. Godfrey survived all through Majella’s Marv stage, her Darren & speed stage, her LSD-plus-E stage. His stroke became really butch, determined. His nose grew blunt from speeding U-ies against the glass. Majella went clubbing six times a week. She looked thin-skinned. I could see the blood network through her face. She’d come home haggard in her NatWest uniform looking forty years old and emerge from her room, hours later, remarkably refreshed; showing tight arse-cleavage, her cheeks sparkly like two just-peeled spuds, her hair with a wide road of centre-parting, looking just eleven years old. In a rare burst of sisterhood, once, she showed me the three moves I’d need should I ever give up being a ‘snitchy-bitch’ and take up clubbing instead:
You put your fingers in the air and stab as though you’re telling someone to piss off a lot.
You dance like snakes would.
You maintain an ironic hipster pose at all times.
Our other pets went funny, funnier, in the head: showed acute symptoms of distress, neuroses, when they heard the squeal of a taxi. They bounced up and down on the grass, paced two steps forward, two steps back.
Summer was awful. I failed my A levels and then I failed my resits (Fs). Tiny died in the sheds (she was all loose inside, really awful, like a bag of curds), and then Twinkle got run over. The tortoise fell into a coma and died. Suzi developed some kind of tumour on her neck and started going for Dad as he stepped in through the door from work. Really for his neck. Like flying through the air, like hiding under the stairs or crouched in the airing cupboard like Patience on a stack of dank sheets . . . the vet said a tumour-removal operation would cost about forty pounds. One day I came in from signing on and Suzi wasn’t there. Dad said she’d gone: ‘Doggone.’ He’d probably let her loose on the motorway, the bastard.
So we only had Godfrey left.
And Godfrey was getting bigger. He lived on juicy blue flies that fell from the ceiling and cod in butter sauce. He really liked chips. If you plopped a chip in the tank Godfrey gobbled it down in one, like a piranha. Godfrey was so fat now he could barely turn around in his tank. He swam on though. He only paused in his heavy front crawl to listen to Mum’s long radio monologues or watch her manic hands chop the air. He still blew her kiss and kiss kiss. Mum gleamed. She poured old cups of sugary sun-warmed tea on his back to keep his water level up, pulled a few rubbery fish faces; flipped in chips. With each look-in Godfrey swam with extra verve; blew out kiss and . . . kiss and . . . kiss. Sometimes, Mum kissed back. As the kitchen boiled up, Godfrey’s tank became just like another steaming bowl of soup: he smelt, sometimes, really tasty.
I wasn’t so happy then. I tried to keep my spirits up by writing an epic novel slowly by computer in the morning and swimming slowly in the swimming pool down the road in the afternoon. I was quite good at breaststroke and, as I breasted the clear blue water, I thought about Godfrey: his immense powers of endurance, his selflessness. I admired the sheer purity of his direction. His staying power. I would, I told myself, now eschew all Lemsips and paracetamol. I would be as Godfrey, and simply endure.
Dad started coming home late, becalmed, with rust marks like vicious love bites on his neck. I noted his clothes no longer billowed their usual bluey-grey cloud of concrete dust. Had he shaken it elsewhere? I thought: Yes. (I imagined a bottle-blonde in a nylon cream cardigan donned like a cloak . . . I drew a picture of her in my notebook, stabbed big juicy blackheads into her chin.) His boots also had new bootlaces on them. I swam and listed clues like that. I was even more worried about Majella. I could smell her rotting flesh. It smelt light green. I’d be up guarding Godfrey, watching late-night Hindu films on the telly, waiting for dawn to crack light across the old chicken tikka cartons on the still black lawns: I’d wait for Majella to come home. Majella staggered from her cab. I’d smell her first: rot. She’d come up daisies in the hall, push straight through me, sneer, throw the drug literature I’d got from Dr Trang back in my face, push me off. Her forehead and temples were glossed with sweat; above her hipsters the belly button rose from its punctured hood like a lump of red, still-cooking, bread. ‘Majella?’ I called. I had Dettol on hand, TCP ready. Majella staggered past me, zigzagged up the stairs, shook the light fittings, and sla
mmed a heavy screen of dust from her door frame.
Godfrey swam in his tank. Gulped, slowly, round.
Mum’s medications went haywire. She was talking more or less out loud: answering all the voices chanting in her head. Under Dr Trang’s direction she had to swallow his pills and lift her flabby grey tongue for his inspection. Mum swallowed. The muscles in her throat rippled. Dr Trang shook his head perplexed, and wrinkled his nose.
Mum talked back to LBC on the radio, nodded vigorously at whichever other airwave was tuning her in . . . fuzzing her out. A new pet-fan squeaked from the bread bin: a pet mouse. The mouse begged at her heels as she stirred the soup. Or it climbed on to the beige stubble plains of her worn-out carpet slippers, shiny pink mouse marigolds signing up supplications; squeak plaintive. Mum stirred the soup. The mouse scampered up her leg, her sleeve, her muscled arm, on to her shoulder, turned somersaults, squivelled, squeaked for attention, its cute black persistent eyes gleaming. Mum stirred on. The mouse cut a squeak through her airways. Godfrey, in his tank, splished up distraction: whacked up prawns, corn on the cob . . . splashed. The mouse tricked on. Wandering into the kitchen one hot afternoon, chewing my hand, I heard a different squeak. Human: ‘A carrot is essential, mango chut . . .’ The mouse was poised up on Mum’s thumb, paws in beg mode, raised so its whiskers could tickle her own. Mum was squeaking, in a squeaky Nice-Aunty voice, the secret of her secret-recipe soups. She roared: ‘Vanilla essence obviously, stupid mouse, ha, ha, ha, fluff! One cornflake, leather thong . . .’