Guinea Pigs Online
Jennifer Gray & Amanda Swift
Illustrations by Sarah Horne
New York • London
© 2012 by Jennifer Gray and Amanda Swift
Illustrations © 2012 by Sarah Horne
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2013
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e-ISBN: 978-1-62365-038-4
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
For Alice, Dougal, Flora and Kirstin
J.G.
For Debbie and Candy
A.S.
For Helen Mcbee
S.H.
1
Problems in the Kitchen
L
ondon is home to thousands and thousands of guinea pigs.
Fuzzy and Coco were two of them. They lived in a very nice terraced house in Strawberry Park—number 7, Middleton Crescent—with their owners, Mr. Ben and
Mrs. Henrietta Bliss. Fuzzy was Ben’s; Coco belonged to Henrietta.
Ben Bliss ran the Strawberry Park Animal Rescue Centre. When Ben first found Fuzzy, lying on his back with his legs in the air in a rusty old hutch at the bottom of the garden of an empty house, Ben rushed him straight to the nearest vet, who just happened to be
Henrietta. Once they were sure that Fuzzy would be all right, Ben and Henrietta promptly fell in love over the operating table.
Afterward, Ben decided to keep Fuzzy, who was brown and round with a white crest on his forehead, because he brought him luck. “A wife and a pet,” Ben would joke, “all in one afternoon.”
Actually it turned out to be a wife and
two
pets because, by a strange coincidence, Henrietta had mysteriously found a dazed-looking Coco at the bottom of her handbag
only the week before and, when the guinea pig’s real owner didn’t come forward, decided to keep her too.
When the Blisses got married, Fuzzy and Coco were very pleased. Guinea pigs squeak when they are happy, and Fuzzy and Coco squeaked a great deal. As everyone knows, guinea pigs like company.
Coco knew about love, but she wasn’t “in love,” not with Fuzzy, anyway. The guinea pigs were friends . . . well, most of the time. The truth of the matter is, they didn’t always see eye to eye, or even whisker to whisker. For instance, Fuzzy absolutely loved where they lived—especially the small walled garden that backed onto the thicket behind the house—but Coco saw it as a bit of a comedown.
“One
does
miss Buckingham Palace,” she would sigh, gazing at her reflection in the big silvery plant pot that stood beside the hall closet.
(Coco and Fuzzy would let themselves out of their hutch when the Blisses kissed each other goodbye in the morning and rushed off to work, husband and wife each thinking the other one had locked the guinea pigs in for the day.) “The Queen and I used to have such lovely chats. She can talk to anyone, you know. And the harp was always in tune.”
Not that again!
Fuzzy, who, like Ben, was very polite, never actually said this to Coco. He thought it though—a lot. Coco, Fuzzy believed, was making it up.
“How come you’re here then? If you used to live with the Queen?” he would ask as he watched her admire the fluffy rosettes in her caramel fur and her long white whiskers. (Guinea-pig rosettes aren’t the kind you win at shows, they’re pretty patterns of fur that some guinea pigs, like Coco, have.)
“I can’t remember,” Coco would reply sadly. “It’s all a blank. One minute I was at the Palace. The next I was in Henrietta’s handbag. I think I must have bumped my head.”
Fuzzy secretly thought that someone must have
put
Coco in
Henrietta’s handbag at the vet’s because they didn’t want her anymore—like him—but he kept it to himself to keep from hurting her feelings.
Instead of mooching around admiring himself in shiny plant pots all day, Fuzzy liked helping around the house. He especially liked rustling up little treats for Ben and Henrietta while they were out, dragging
the food out of the hutch and leaving it in neat piles on the rug. Secretly he thought if he wasn’t a guinea pig, he would be a chef, with his own TV show, like the beautiful Scarlet Cleaver (whose cooking Ben was keen on). Broccoli à la Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sprouts, Fuzzy’s Spinach Surprise—his head was bursting with ideas for recipes.
The only problem was, a guinea pig’s idea of yummy food is very different from a human’s. Fuzzy quickly discovered that Ben and Henrietta weren’t that keen on grass with carrot
shavings. He watched in dismay as they shoveled his offerings into the garbage or back into his food bowl when they thought he wasn’t looking.
Fuzzy soon decided there was only one thing to do.
He needed some better ingredients.
One afternoon, Coco found him puffing and heaving his way across the wooden floor toward the kitchen counters.
“Give me a hand, Coco,” he panted.
“What are you doing?” Coco asked.
“I’m taking the jump to the kitchen.”
As you probably know, most guinea pigs can’t climb (with notable exceptions, as you will discover later). What you may
not
know is that “the jump” is a clever device all pet guinea pigs use to get up onto things like tables and computer desks when humans aren’t around. It’s a bit like a miniature see-saw with something flat (like a ruler) balanced over something triangular (like a doorstop). It also needs two guinea pigs to operate it, which is why they prefer to live in pairs.
“Bring the squashy cushion,” Fuzzy
ordered. (The squashy cushion was, of course, for the guinea pigs to land on when they jump down.)
“Bring the squashy cushion,
please
,” Coco said huffily.
Luckily the kitchen was only a short distance from the hutch and eventually, with a bit of arguing, they got everything into position.
“Ladies first,” Coco said, standing daintily on one end of the ruler.
Fuzzy puffed out his cheeks. “All right,” he grumbled. He ran forward and crashed down on to the other end of the ruler.
“Wheeee!” Coco shot up into the air and landed on the marble counter.
“Throw something heavy down,” Fuzzy shouted. “But be careful of me.” He held his paws over his head—Coco had terrible aim.
“Like this?” A red-and-white bag hurtled through the air and went splat.
Fuzzy just had time to see the squashy cushion covered in an avalanche of fine white powder as he accelerated upward before he landed next to Coco.
“You’re cleaning that up,” he said, marching over to the blender and
flicking it on and off with his foot. He had seen Scarlet Cleaver use something very similar on TV. “Now, we need to find some ingredients that Ben and Henrietta like.”
“What about one of these?” Coco had opened an odd-shaped box and was eyeing its contents curiously.
“They’re called eggs.” Fuzzy, who was strong for a guinea pig, heaved one out and flung it into the mixer, where it shattered into a sticky mess.
“To-ma-to ke-tch-up,” Coco was reading the label on a big red plastic bottle. “What about that?”
Fuzzy wasn’t sure about the ketchup bit but he thought the tomato would probably be all right. “Squeeze!” he shouted, placing his bottom on the other side of the bottle from Coco.
They both pushed. The bottle made a rude noise as a fountain of gooey red liquid cascaded into the blender.
“And this?” Coco suggested.
Fuzzy lobbed in a bulb of garlic.
“And this?”
The garlic was followed by a lump of butter.
“And this?”
The last thing they added was a squirt of dishwashing liquid.
Fuzzy zapped the button. The blender sprang to life. The mixture bubbled and crackled in a very pleasing way. When they had finished they both agreed their creation looked delicious.
Suddenly they heard a key in the lock. They looked at
each other in horror. It must be Ben, home early from work. Fuzzy jumped down after Coco on to the squashy cushion below and they scurried back to the hutch.
“What on earth . . . ?” Ben stared at the kitchen in dismay. He shook his head. “That’s the only problem with Henrietta,” he said, walking over to say hello to the guinea pigs, who pretended to doze on their soft bed of hay. He squatted down in front of the hutch and made a face. “Don’t tell her I said so,” he whispered, “but she’s the world’s worst cook!”
Laughing, he returned to the kitchen, threw the contents of the blender down the garbage disposal and tidied up the mess on the floor. He didn’t stop to ask himself why there were two guinea-pig-shaped dents in the squashy cushion, and what on earth Henrietta could have wanted
with a ruler and a doorstop, or why that evening, when he took Fuzzy out of the hutch and stroked him, Fuzzy hardly squeaked at all. And he didn’t mention it to Henrietta either.