‘I know, but this is temporary. You need to make yourself the priority now.’
Her feet come to a stop and I realise there are tears in her eyes.
‘Oh, come here, you,’ I say, beckoning her in for the most careful of hugs, which she accepts. She squeezes me briefly, then, conscious that we’re blocking the corridor, pulls away and sniffs. We start walking again.
‘Have you spoken to HR about how long they’ll let you stay off?’
‘I’m allowed up to six months on full pay but by the time I added my holiday entitlement, it’s more. They’ll have to bring someone in to cover, which I don’t like the sound of.’
‘Why not?’
‘What if my replacement is terrible? Or – worse –really good?’
‘They won’t be as good as you. You are too hard an act to follow.’
We step outside into the first decent phone reception since we arrived and a blaze of notifications appear on my screen. One of which is a voicemail from my mother, who was picking Jacob up from school in my absence. I bypass her message – it usually takes several minutes and an update about something she’s just read in theDaily Mailbefore she gets to the point – and call her mobile instead.
But it’s Jacob who answers.
‘Mum!’ he gasps breathlessly. ‘You won’tbelievewhat’s happened!’
Like all 10-year-olds, it doesn’t take much to excite him. He once called me in the middle of a Content Bundling workshop I was leading to tell me that they’d started selling a new flavour of Prime in the newsagent at the end of our road.
‘What is it, sweetie?’
‘Alan has given birth!’
Blood drains from my face like sand from an egg timer.
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No, it’s real!’ he giggles excitedly. ‘Grandma let us in to the house and I ran over to Alan’s cage and found the hamster babies. All nine of them.’
Chapter 2
Morning all! Just a quick one to say there are only a handful of tickets left for the PTA Wine Quiz. Drop me a line to snap one up before they all go – it should be a fabulous night! Also, a quick follow-up to my earlier messages to see if there is anyone else who might be interested in a hamster? They are free to a loving home, easy to look after and very cute! Eight have been rehomed so there’s now only one left. Let me know!
I press send on my WhatsApp message and wonder if the exclamation marks are a dead giveaway for how desperate I am. It already feels like a miracle that I’ve managed to get rid of eight of them within three weeks of their birth. Apparently, if you leave hamsters together any longer than that, they start killing each other or, worse, reproducing.
Obviously, the pet shop where Alan was purchased was uninterested in our plight and, although Brendan said he was horrified and would immediately ask around to see if anyone wanted one, I haven’t heard a peep from him since. So I was forced into the hard sell to anyone with a child, touting my wares at the school gates, Scouts, work, on social media and, in one case, to my neighbour’s acupuncturist. In another life, I could have been a used-car salesman.
Only now the end is in sight – with only a single baby currently homeless – I am completely out of ideas. I even texted my hairdresser, who responded with, No thanks Lisa and don’t try and tip me with one after I’ve done your lowlights! x
Unless I can get rid of it, I’m going to have to buy a second cage tonight after work. Which I really, really don’t want to do. Yet I’m horribly aware that, even now, they could be multiplying; every time I open the front door, I live in fear of being confronted by a scene straight out ofGremlins.
‘Why couldn’t we have just kept them?’ asks Jacob, as I straighten his school tie in the hallway.
‘Because I think 10 pets is too many, even for an animal lover like you.’
‘I’d have looked after them,’ he protests.
I kiss him on the head and push a bit of his fringe that refuses to stay down. He’s got light brown hair, the same shade as his father, but that’s where the resemblance to Brendan ends. Despite being 10, Jacob still has the same lovely squidgy cheeks that he had as a baby, and huge blue, puppyish eyes that occasionally mean he can wrap me round his little finger. But not about pets. On this, I am not changing my view.
‘When you leave 10 hamsters together for longer than a couple of weeks . . . how can I put this?Bad things happen.’
‘What sort of things?’
I wonder what I should break to him first – the cannibalism or the incest.
