Diary of a Mrs Dad 6: A Death in the Family
Dudina: Animals are very nature, aren’t they?
Vale, Steve the guinea pig. Five good years of life ... well, four and a half.
I remember the day that Steve the guinea pig came into our lives. Our daughter, three at the time, was constantly hassling for one, but we’d resisted because I didn’t really fancy having another rodent in the house, as our roof is filled with rats and possums scratching and climbing at all hours of the day and night. As the Breadwinner headed off to the shops with Dudina, the last thing I said was, ‘Don’t get a guinea pig.’
My word is law around our place, so, an hour later, they returned with a brown and white blob. No name seemed to stick, so it was just Guinea until a friend looked after it and, under pressure from his kids as to the rodent’s identity, said her name was Steve, and it stuck.
Steve was one fat pig and didn’t convince me that guinea pigs should survive as a species, as she constantly shat in her own water supply. The only reason for these creatures’ existence on this Earth is as a cheap South American food supply. I tolerated the fat rat, though, and didn’t mind feeding her our vegetable scraps, which I used to drop into her cage with a cry of ‘Look out below!’
Dudina: Belly the dog thinks Guinea is a burger.
Steve was one tough rodent chick. Dudina would hold the guinea pig so that Steve appeared to be sitting up and looking at her, even though we told her that guinea pigs don’t really bend in the middle. Whether being dressed in a baby’s bonnet and pushed around in a pram, or swung in a hammock, life was precarious for Steve as the plaything of a three-year-old girl who was barely in control of her own limbs.
Steve was a biting guinea pig, too. I’d only known guinea pigs as passive blobs, but Steve would go any digit near her mouth. The biting may have had something to do with her being dropped on her head from the arms of the three-year-old Dudina. Guinea pigs have short, useless limbs; I know this because when Steve’s head hit the ground, her fall was only broken by her teeth, which, in turn, were promptly broken. The vet, a rodent-teeth specialist, had to file back the lower teeth because guinea pigs’ teeth constantly grow and are worn by the grinding of the top and bottom teeth. If the bottom teeth aren’t ground down, they’ll grow so far as to curl into its nose. For weeks, the Breadwinner fed Steve with an eyedropper and a ridiculous amount of patience. If I had no front teeth, I thought, I don’t think I’d even get a pash.
Dudina: Mum, has Guinea got a gluteus maximus?
The next crisis point in Steve’s life was finding out that lumps on her stomach were breast cancer. Therefore, an expensive operation for the pig was needed, and I didn’t mind, as long as I didn’t have to wear a pink ribbon for a rodent. A mate who had guinea pigs as a kid reckoned that if the gate swung in a high wind and slammed shut, they died of fright; not Steve. Not only is anaesthetic dangerous for small animals but large chunks were removed from her and she still survived.
Dudina: (Listening to Prince) He sounds like a guinea pig!
One day recently, the Breadwinner noticed Steve was dragging her hind legs. Not good, we thought, as this behaviour mirrored the last days of our dog. The Breadwinner took Steve on the back of her bike to the animal hospital and returned with a shiny purple bag. Steve was now an ex guinea pig, but the Breadwinner is big on letting the kids experience a pet dying, so they can deal with the grieving process. Our local vet told us that kids of about the boy’s age take twenty-four hours to get over the death of a pet; our girl, however, took about twenty-four minutes.
When they heard the news, the Dude collapsed dramatically to the ground and Dudina kept eating chips and asked if she could get a rabbit this time. Everyone said their goodbyes to Steve and the kids wanted to know if I was going to pat the guinea pig goodbye. In death, Steve’s nose had turned black and her face had thinned, which made her look just like a rat, so I passed on the opportunity for a last pat. The kids also saw their mum’s grief as an opportunity, the Dude asking to play on the computer and Dudina asking if she could ring her friends and tell them the news.
Unlike our large dog, Steve was buried in the back yard. As the Breadwinner and the kids piled dirt on the purple-clad corpse, I let out a little ‘Look out below.’
Dudina: Marsupials have couches.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which ‘four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts’. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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