'being Sian' - Too Many Gerbils

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‘Being Sian’ Too Many Gerbils We were over-run with gerbils. At first it started with Dinky, a smooth shiny baby black gerbil. I loved her. Then James persuaded me that it should have ‘a husband’. “Another female would be better” I retaliated. “They’ll just keep breeding otherwise!” “Oh, let them have their fun, they’ll be happier.” He argued, so I gave in. He didn’t seem to care that the babies kept coming every six weeks, and he didn’t bother to separate them once they were old enough to breed. So the parents carried on as usual. Soon we had nearly sixty, and because we were both on the Dole, there was never enough money to survive. Obviously we couldn’t afford more tanks, but clever James had a brilliant idea. “Don’t worry.” He said, calm and blank as usual. “I’ll get some sheets of glass from the window glazer’s downstairs- I know they throw a lot out.” I knew it was true. They wouldn’t care, they knew that Hackney was a poor area, and they wouldn’t say no. “How are you gonna make the tanks though?” I said. “Oh, I’ll buy some of that sealant stuff.” “Yes, but how are you gonna cut the glass?” “Oh… I’ll get a glass cutter.”

3 I knew the idea wasn’t going to work when he got a shitty one for £1.99, meant for flimsy jobs, and of course it didn’t get anywhere near through the inch-thick massive panes he’d brought home. The prospect of paying any more for a better one wasn’t considered. No, the ‘looking after your pets’ notion, begrudgingly awoken from his minimal conscience, was getting too expensive now. We were desperate…. no, actually I was; only I worried about things like this. I had all the anxiety. Instead, James was the expert of makeshift solutions. He decided to sellotape three panes of glass together and balance them against a wall, to create a triangle which would form a good enough tank for now. There were only four corners of the room that we could use. There were more houses to be built for the bloody things… where would I put them all? The flat became more and more ugly, messy and smelly. I had the nasty job of cleaning six makeshift tanks, and four proper ones, once a week, but then James started to complain that all the sawdust and chewed up tissue bedding was making him cough. Yet he offered no solutions, he just sat back and moaned, as if the whole thing was my fault, not his. The asthma provided a brilliant excuse for letting me do all the hard work. One day as I cleaned a makeshift tank, one of the panes fell backwards into my leg, leaving an inch-deep gash. Blood gushed everywhere, but I had no time to worry about my injury, as all the gerbils shot out from the sudden gaps in their home, taking advantage of their sudden freedom. Another time on one of my pet cleaning sprees, one of James’ makeshift tanks collapsed again. This time the heavy glass pane fell inwards, towards the poor gerbil’s themselves. Fortunately a ceramic toy house broke the fall, making the two-inch difference between survival, or five flat squashed pets. One day we were truly embarrassed. We had to have a council worker round to fix the ceiling light fittings, which had cracked and couldn’t hold any bulbs. He came into the living room and sort of stared around at the zoo, then he pretended it was all normal and hid his surprise, probably

4 because he was afraid when he saw that it clearly didn’t bother James, who offered no explanation. His eyes travelled to the words written in my black eye liner pencil, on our white wall: ‘I FANCY THE WHITE BITCH NEXT DOOR’. I had gone mad a few days earlier because the horny brown gerbil from the corner tank had shagged the white one from the next tank. James, not content with the mess we were in for breeding them, thought it was amusing to allow both sexes to run together during their exercise, so I had scrawled these huge words on the corner wall of that brown gerbil’s tank, in a hysterical attempt at humor. The worker stared at the words and looked James in the eye. James smiled and said: “Don’t mind that, she wrote it.” I felt cornered and explained: “It’s because they were breeding and I wanted to make a joke, I thought it was funny at the time.” The worker just raised his eyebrows and tried to smile in agreement, but it didn’t work very well. Soon after that the Manager from the Council paid us a visit about Housing Benefit forms, and when he saw them, frowned and looked very stern. “You’ve got six weeks to find homes for them or rehouse them properly.” He said. James, as ever, didn’t look perturbed in the slightest. Despite appearing to agree with this plan, he did fuck all as usual, even after this warning. We had been threatened with eviction if we failed to comply, but even at this, James’ face remained blank and utterly unworried, totally expressionless. Tonight when I came home from shopping James was in an elated mood from the Speed he’d been taking for the past day and a half with no sleep.

5 He told me he’d been feeding some of his hash to the gerbil babies, and they had started running around like mad, their black fur wet and sticking up in the air. They looked dehydrated like little sacks. He said they have lost weight. I ignored it and laughed along with him. I didn’t want to ‘have a go’ at him and spoil his fun, and make him angry with me. Anyway, he seemed concerned about them now and even sounded regretful that they weren’t well, and put them back in their tank. Then James confessed that two mothers had been fighting when he made them run together on their exercise. They were locked into each other’s necks, when he’d tried to separate them he’d got bitten, and he flung the mother from his hand to release it but she smashed against a wall and died. Others were dying here and there. One allegedly got his leg broken in a fight, and died three days later. “It didn’t heal right.” He explained to me. Another gerbil was running on the floor and got into a cupboard where he ate some ant killer. I was there at the time. It was very sad to see him struggle back into his tank with his last ounce of strength, then collapse, bleeding from the mouth. “Oh, that bitch who lived here before us must have laid the ant killer down…I didn’t know it was there” He said. One baby got trapped under a bit of wood when it got dislodged from the sawdust after they had burrowed into it. When it was lifted the little gerbil was as flat as a sheet of paper. James just looked at it and laughed at how “Look, it was all flat and there was no blood or nothing” and how it was, “All cute and furry even though it was dead”. I wasn’t there to see most of these incidents. James told me himself when I returned home. Once I read a book on psychopaths, and so many of the attributes were like James that my blood had run cold. Then I thought, ‘You need to have more similarities than two or three to really make him a psychopath. I’m just being paranoid.’ One day I had enough. I was sick of it all. I had to get rid of them. None of the pet shops would take them, and I spent hours on bus journeys looking

6 for places to ask, and just grew tired and irritated and miserable. So I decided to give the RSPCA a call. I was mortified explaining my situation. I could never manage to sound like a responsible pet owner, no matter how hard I tried. At best, they were refusing and giving me another branches phone number, where I left a frantic message; at worst, I got threatened with arrest by a particularly rotten bossy bitch, who likewise didn’t like the sound of my voice and was also in a shitty mood. ‘Oh my God’ I thought. I can’t believe this. I’m sitting here calling branches of the RSPCA all over the country, because of his stupid attitude, breeding them in the first place. Then my phone rang. A woman from the RSPCA told me she was willing to take my gerbils. She had some space in her house, she said, so how many did I have? I didn’t want to give her an honest answer, and tried to play it down. She left her address and told me to bring them over. I rang a cab number, mentally arranging the tanks in my head. When James came through the door, I told him about the bit of good luck. James astonished me by behaving like a man for once, offering to carry them down with me. I couldn’t believe it. Even though he was barely polite as he did so, his face hard and unrelenting, I was glad of his help. Yet my heart caved in a little more with each second he detached from me. As we stacked the long glass tanks on top of each other in the back seat of the car, he did so roughly, with a hostile impatience. He didn’t look at me once, and when he was finished he didn’t turn to say goodbye. He showed no interest in where I was going to, or even offer to join me. It struck me that he was glad I was going to disappear for the day, giving him the opportunity to do his own secret activities. I was a bit concerned at the precarious balance of tanks, hoping they wouldn’t topple with each brake the driver made along the way. I also hoped that the Police wouldn’t pass us on the road, or notice how they were stacked so dangerously, blocking the driver’s rear window. I sat beside the driver and looked back at all the sweet little pet’s that had been

7 such a huge part of my life. I felt sad, especially about Mabel, the sweet silver grey mother of many babies, who I’d become attached to the most. She always had a busy, caring aura, pottering about with a mission in mind, scampering over me in her innocent way. She never got nasty or bit me once. Of all the gerbils, losing Mabel broke my heart the most. I suddenly remembered the time when she chewed through the lead of the vacuum cleaner we’d bought for our new flat together. It was a shame, it had been fairly expensive, and we had got it from the accommodation grant that we were awarded from the Dole Office. I remember being anxious to buy the things we needed before James took a huge chunk of it. To him it was like winning a small Lottery; an unexpected free bout of drug money. He had already wasted £200 unnecessarily on a Sky Digital channel box, which became free a month later with the subscription. That seemed like a lot of money wasted, with no possibility for a refund. No-one could have foreseen that offer would be available, but I felt really screwed. I blamed James for that, even though technically he didn’t know either; I resented his stubbornness on the issue that day. I had begged him not to spend it, arguing that we also needed a microwave, and we’d never afford it now on our Dole money alone. He wasn’t bothered, and dismissed it. It never seemed to matter to him whether he ate or not, as long as he had Speed and Cannabis. One day I was vacuuming the flat when I noticed the hole in the lead. “The gerbils have chewed it!” I told him, disappointed. He looked over, unconcerned, and told me to leave it. “I’ll patch it up with tape.” He said. “Is that safe?” I asked, filled with doubt. “It’ll do till I get electrical tape.”

8 True to his nature, of course he never went out and bought any. That was expensive stuff, about four quid, and he could get two Speed tablets for that down Tottenham Court Road. Brown parcel tape is all I got, with his reassuring order: “Don’t touch it, you’ll get fried.” Of course I didn’t let that stop me using it, even though the wires inside the tube were barely connected, after his makeshift job. Every time the lead bent in a different direction the vacuum stopped, and I’d have to switch it off at the mains and push the tape back in place. I was determined to vacuum the floors regardless. Having a clean, tidy flat gave me the illusion of the peace and order that was lacking in my life with him. The vacuum eventually died altogether. When I tried to use it a week later, sparks flew from the gap in the lead, and it blew the lights and the T.V. That seemed to concern James more than the house not being clean; the faulty vacuum interrupted the programme he was watching. “What am I going to do now?” I stormed. “I dunno. Isn’t there electrical shop down the road? Take it there, they might fix it.” He offered. So I took it there, afraid that the cost of repairing the wire would be nearly as high as the vacuum itself. The Asian guy inside was okay though, fortunately. He must have seen how upset I was because he only charged me a fiver. I went home jubilantly, and gloried in the fact that I could now use my vacuum, as good as new, without being afraid of electrocution. It was a great feeling. After weeks of being miserable over a chewed up old wire, I ran the new smooth one through my fingertips with joy. Now it didn’t matter that James was an asshole; he couldn’t stop me cleaning my flat now. I enjoyed it more that now he was gone out of it, unable to spoil my buzz with his sour nasty face.

9 The next day I went out shopping, and returned home to find James had gone out for some hash. That made sense, he’d start to get tetchy when he was running low, even more grumpy than usual. Still, I was surprised, because we didn’t have any money left apart from the six pounds I’d just bought food with. It became clear now though, as I unpacked the shopping and opened the cupboard in the kitchen where we kept the dustpan and brush. The vacuum was gone. Annoyed, I searched the whole flat looking for it, thinking that I must have left it somewhere and forgotten about it. Just then, James came in. “Where’s the vacuum?” I asked him. “Oh, I sold it.” He replied blankly. “When?” “Today.” I was really pissed off, but some tiny thought entered my brain that maybe now at least, we’d have more money to get through the week. “How much did you get for it?” I asked him, curious to find out. I expected him to say ten or fifteen pounds. “A fiver.” He replied, cool and relaxed as he hit the couch suddenly, reaching for his pouch of tobacco to roll another joint. “You didn’t even ask me, I was looking for that vacuum for ages.” I complained. He had lost interest now, staring instead at the T.V as he pointed the remote control at it with glazed, detached eyes. I remembered with resentment all the times he’d complained about me using the dustpan and brush when the vacuum lead was chewed, or we’d run out of dirt bags and couldn’t afford more.

10 “The dust is killing me, it’s making my asthma worse.” He’d moan. “Leave it, we’ll get vacuum bags.” That would never happen, and he’d complain then that all the gerbil’s were creating dust from their tanks as they chewed up paper and shredding their nest bedding: “Creating fibres they’re going straight into my lungs.” He’d explain angrily. I just couldn’t win. I wasn’t allowed to clean the floors, but when I didn’t, it was the animal’s fault. It was actually his fault for breeding them against my wishes in the first place. Poor gerbils, now they are getting punished for his irresponsibility now. We were here now at last. Lost in thought, I hadn’t noticed the journey. I had forgotten I was even inside the cab. As the driver stopped outside the house, the RSPCA woman stood at her front door, waiting anxiously. I felt embarrassed now at all the tanks I actually had for her. Over the phone it was easy to bluff, but not now. She could clearly see how many there were. She got a bit panicky as each one kept on appearing, large, bulky and never ending, from the deceptively small cab seat. “I hope I have enough room for all these.” She said, worried. I started to feel even more guilty inside her house, because it was tiny inside and crammed to the roof with cages, stacked on top of each other and filling every possible corner. Hamsters came out to sniff through bars, and guinea pigs snuggled with rabbits in poky brown hutches. She saw me looking, and said; “I had to bring them home with me, they were going to put them down at work. They didn’t find homes.” I felt an unstoppable wave of rising shame, which refused to leave, so I did instead, as quickly as possible. No words of genuine gratitude would ever compensate for the way I had tricked this poor, kind hearted woman. I

11 started to resent James even more, for causing this problem. It wasn’t him who ended up fixing it, it was me. Yet again; I solved the problems that he constantly created. He reminded me of mould that keeps growing on the damp walls of a house. I am the clean soapy cloth that wipes away the damage, just for it to reappear eventually. In that moment I reached a new planet of thought from deep within me. I actually considered that perhaps we may not be together much longer, that I deserved better than this shit. I felt free thinking it, even though it will probably never happen.

copyright@emmasharn2009