Chum nibbled on a cherry that the Giant had left in the cage. It was a good juicy cherry. Before the Giant had left the room, her large hand, several times larger than Chum herself, had been lowered into the cage. First, it had scattered seeds among the sawdust on the floor. Then it had added a cabbage stalk. Finally, it had put a dandelion leaf just in front of Chum’s nose.
Being a hamster – which Chum was – she never knew when the next meal would be. Better safe than sorry. If in doubt, pouch it. Chum had hastily gobbled as much of the food as possible into her cheek pouches – seeds, the stalk, the leaf, the cherry. Now she was alone, and safe, she could de-pouch, and eat the food at her leisure. She started with the cherry, sitting upright on her haunches and holding the cherry in her small pink paws.
Through the bars of the cage, she could see the big room that the Giant called the kitchen.
Chum’s cage was on a ledge. She could see the door to the larder where they kept most of their dry food. She could see the fridge. She could see the large dresser where they kept her bag of straw, her sawdust and her seeds.
As she ate the cherry, and stared into the middle-distance, she heard voices.
They weren’t voices like the Giant’s and her friends’. In fact, they weren’t human voices at all.
The first voice said, ‘Are they gorn ven?’
And the other said, ‘The little oom-varmint said as ow she ad to go ter school.’
‘School, eh – that’s a larf. Ow abart the grownups?’
‘The oom-fella – e went out a long time ago.’
‘How about the oom-woman?’
‘She took the varmint to school.’
‘So what’s it going to be then? Biscuits, anyone?’
Chum found this conversation very puzzling and very interesting. Clearly there were some creatures on the other side of the room, who had been following the movements of the Giant and her mum and dad. Chum wondered if the creatures had noticed her. She didn’t wonder for long, since she heard a voice from behind her packet of seeds.
‘If you’re going past the furball’s seeds nab a handful for Junior.’
‘They feed that furball too much in stir.’
‘Did you see what the brat just give ’er – a cherry – a leaf – seeds – I don’t know – I really don’t.’
‘It doesn’t seem right giving all that to a furball.’
Chum felt indignant. She realized that by ‘furball’ they meant herself.
‘Mind you,’ said one of the voices, ‘I wouldn’t swap er life for ours – not I. Locked in stir. Fussed over by them brats. Only let out when one of them oomans wants to squeeze er. No ooman’s gonna squeeze me. You wouldn’t see me letting myself be turned into a pet.’
The voice said this last word with real disgust.
Chum was just taking in what the creatures were saying about her when, out of the very top of her packet of seeds on the dresser – her packet – there appeared, first a sharp pink nose, then a pale grey, grubby little face, then a pair of greyish-pink little ears, and finally the whole skinny body – greyish-black, dusty and sly – of a London house mouse.
‘They’re dry, these seeds,’ it was saying, ‘too dry.’
‘Chuck us down some all the same,’ said another.
The first mouse spat a few seeds at another mouse who had come round the side of the dresser.
‘This ain’t dry,’ said the second mouse.
‘Only cos I spit it.’
Chum wondered if they had asked permission to eat from her seedbox and decided they had not. She was still rather angry that they had called her ‘furball’, and thought it was pathetic that the mice either could not, or would not pouch the seeds, like a well-brought-up hamster. Instead, they put seeds in their mouths and spat.
‘Good old furball,’ laughed the mouse at the top of Chum’s seed packet. This cheeky mouse either lost its balance at this point, or it was dancing on top of Chum’s packet. But – oh no! – the energetic scuttering of the mouse caused the seed packet on the dresser to fall over. Down on to the floor fell a shower of seeds, straw and sawdust.
‘That’s more like it,’ said one mouse.
‘Ta, Furball – great seeds,’ laughed another.
A rain of Chum’s seeds cascaded from the dresser to the kitchen floor.
‘I am not,’ said Chum, ‘called Furball.’
She had not intended to say the words out loud. She often said things out loud to herself – it was her way of thinking. So it was a bit of a shock when she heard a high, rather menacing little voice imitating what she had just said.
‘Oh! Listen to er – Ai am not called Furball.’
There was high excited laughter among the mice.
‘You oughta get outta that cage, mate – help yourself to food – and not wait till the oomans feel like dishing up.’
‘I wouldn’t take no food from oomans,’ said another mouse. ‘Ooms kill us. They’ll kill you one day, Furball.’
Chum listened with indignant astonishment. Then she said, through the bars of her cage, ‘But they look after me.’
‘They look ah-fta me…’ Another imitation of her voice by the mice. It was not a very good imitation.
‘They done the other furball in,’ said one of the mice.
‘What other furball – I mean, hamster?’ asked Chum.
She was looking across the kitchen at the mouse who had just spoken, the one who was looking up at her. She was an agile little mouse. She scuttered across the kitchen and managed to climb up the cupboard door and on to the ledge so that her pointed little grey face was looking closely at Chum’s.
The mouse peered at Chum. Always hungry, the keen, clever, little grey mouse saw how plump the hamster was. Chum was clever as hamsters go but she had never had to use her cleverness for survival. If the mouse stopped being clever for an instant she would be in danger. Yet though the mouse was grey and thin and darting, while Chum was a light sandy-brown with clean pampered fur and a snowy-white chest and well-fed body, they were both little rodents who had more in common with one another than they did with the human race – the oomans or ooms as the mice called humans.
‘There was another hamster?’ asked Chum.
‘Before you,’ said the mouse. ‘Murphy, they called im. Nice old bleeder. E’d call out cheerio to us now and then – known what I mean. Sometimes warn us if there were trouble aloft.’
‘Trouble aloft?’ asked Chum.
‘If there was ooms coming. E’d keep us informed like. Tell us if they’d had pie ’n that.’
‘Pie?’
The mice on the other side of the kitchen could hear the word pie and seven or eight of them now came from behind the dresser in hungry anticipation.
‘Pie? Where’s the pie?’
‘Furball says there’s pie.’
‘Where – where –’
‘Chicken pies they were. Very tasty,’ said the main mouse, the one who was talking to Chum through the bars of her cage.
‘Pies! Pies!’ called the mice.
‘We’re just talking about a pie, stoopid,’ said the main mouse. ‘There ain’t no pie.’
‘But,’ said Chum, ‘Murphy, the other hamster…?’
It was true. She had heard the Giant talking about Murphy, and the Giant’s dad sometimes called her – Chum! – Murphy by mistake.
‘Oh,’ said the mouse, ‘they done Murphy in.’
‘What’s done him in?’
‘Fixed him.’
‘Fixed?’ Chum knew that the mouse was talking of something unpleasant, but she didn’t understand the words. Done him in? What had they done to Murphy, the human beings? And in what had they done him?
‘Killed him,’ said the mouse simply.
‘Dug an ole in the garden – dropped him in it, like. Threw earth over im.’
‘And filled it up with earth?’ Chum could not easily believe her ears. What she heard was beyond her experience. She had no knowledge of death. She had never seen a dead animal. She didn’t know that she herself would die.
‘Filled it up. Buried old Murph. Cleaned out iz cage. Few days later, you come. It’ll be your turn next, my friend. They’ve probably dug the ole fer yer already.’
‘Are you sure?’
But as Chum asked the question, the mouse froze. They could hear the noise of a front door opening. The chief mouse called to the others, ‘Scarper.’
Chum watched with admiration as the little group of mice disappeared under the dresser. Some of them squeezed through the quite tiny crevices between the top of the skirting board and the wall.
‘I’m Moke – Mokey Moke,’ said the chief mouse as she left Chum.
‘I’m Chum,’ was what she wanted to say but she found herself silent. Chum was what they called her – the ooms, the ones who had buried the last hamster in the garden. How could he breathe, with all that earth on top of him? She liked to burrow herself. She liked making her way through the plastic tubes that the Giant had put in her cage to amuse her and exercise her. And she liked playing with the straw and newspaper and making tunnels for herself beneath them. But to be buried – in heavy, damp, garden mud – was horrible, really horrible. Could it be true?
She watched Mokey scutter head first down the cupboard door and disappear.
A few minutes later, the giant’s dad entered. He turned on the music box in the corner and clattered for a long time – first lowering plates and pans into some soapy water, then taking the cloth things which giants wear over their bodies, placing them on a narrow table and rubbing them up and down with a hot shiny thing which made a steamy, clothy smell. After a while, a long while, the Giant’s dad found a little brush and swept up the seeds on the floor – but not every single one. For, when he had touched the music box and stopped the sound, and left the room, Chum heard a scuttling, scuttering sound under the cupboard. And out came Mokey Moke – quick as a flash. She ran across the floor, grabbed the few remaining seeds in her mouth and turned.
‘Watcha, Furb!’ she squeaked before disappearing behind the dresser.