A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam Read Free Book Online Page A

of reproducing itself, the natty idea of containing the future empursed within, cannot allow destruction to obtain, will not short-change us. You know that, by placing your gravid body between the light of ugly fact and the undefended of the race, you can cut out the glare. I knew, because I had been pregnant before, that it is a fleeting sense of beneficent glowing power, preceding almost invariably a certainty that all shadows are black and all breaths our last, a time during which tears – selfish tears of easy altruism – are never far away, and the newspapers are sopping before their finer print is even begun. I was at the first stage, though, when Bet brought a box into my bedroom, where I stood, squiffy with optimism, showering benevolence upon the bare trees through my window, and on the birds within them – those organised pheasants and the less well-bred members of the parliament of fowls. My turbine of confidence and virtuous energy was capable of anything. I could have illuminated a city with the touch of my finger. I was equal to anything; after all, what could, in this good world, harm me, who contained the point of it all? I could see clearly that, since there was no argument for destruction, there would be no destruction. This dangerous drunken clarity is the closest I have been to escaping the omnipresence of the end. Painting and music remind me, the greater they are, the more of death.
    I was hailing the broad day when Bet came in with her box.
    ‘I’ve got a guinea-pig. It’s for John. Seeing as my husband breeds them for show, this one won’t do. It was a guinea-pig, you see.’
    ‘Was?’
    ‘It is a guinea-pig, but it was a guinea-pig. In a sense. I mean, we were trying something. A bit different.’
    A mutant. Swivelling off its balanced golden axis, my mind went to the beasts we cannot ignore, the footless shrikes and tubeless snakes, the eyeless cats of a poisoned nature, post-war fauna of our future.
    A minute before, I had known all that would never be, and now the word – mutant – had discharged me from my oasis into a desert where war was inevitable and sin weighed as little as good. Pregnancy; is it by definition an hysterical state?
    ‘Bet, is this guinea-pig anything to do with me?’
    ‘My husband says we can’t show it and we wondered if John would like it.’
    Could I accept a possibly bald or tripod or varicose playmate for my lovely boy?
    ‘It is kind of you, Betty, but . . .’
    She ate the inside of her mouth. Lipstick bloodshot the slack skin around it. Her earrings, dependent from fatty lobes, appeared disposable, tatty.
    ‘. . . but let me see,’ I finished.
    Its whorls were too vehement for the strict rules of the guinea-pig fanciers, that was all. It was a fat cadpig with a square head like the heel of a snowboot. It was chinchilla grey, with wet eyes and coiffed with frosty rosettes. Its hands looked intelligent, as though they might have known what to do with a cigarette.
    ‘It’s got a nice nature. Well, it sleeps all day. If you say the word, I’ll get the husband and my sons to bring up its equipment.’
    Bar-bells, bookcase, Mouli?
    ‘It needs a thorough combing, so I’ve got it this nice brush – a babe’s brush, really. Basil’s said he’ll get a pen.’
    ‘A pen?’ In old-fashioned girls’ stories, the helpless offspring of jungle creatures were always fed with a Waterman bulb. So the same was true of guinea-pigs.
    ‘You know, for it to run around in.’
    ‘Of course. Basil probably doesn’t know his nibs.’
    Bet looked at me without concern. I was increasingly conscious that only I heard the lower layers of my own remarks. She smiled, and I was back on the planet euphoria, all refugees food to my egocentric charity. Let it rain guinea-pigs.
    ‘Bet, John will be so pleased. How can I thank you enough?’
    ‘There’ll come a time,’ said Bet.
    She took the animal downstairs. I did not know its name or sex, but I was committed to it.
    I