Shuttlecock

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Today I remembered my hamster: my pet hamster, Sammy, a gift for my tenth birthday. It is over twenty years since my tenth birthday, since my hamster came to live in our house, but today I remembered it as if it still existed. I remembered its blond fur, its pink nose, its jet-black eyes which seemed, under certain circumstances, to be about to spill, like drops of ink, from its head. I remembered the sunflower seeds and bits of carrot we fed it and which, out of some primitive, needless instinct, it would cram into its pouches and unload about its cage in never-to-be-eaten piles. I remembered its noiseless feet, its stump of a tail; the way when I took it out of its cage for exercise it would never run across the room but always round the edges, following the skirting-board, in little furtive darts, between which it would freeze, one paw raised, head poised, in apprehension. And I remembered the day when my parents (who had already thrown Sammy’s corpse into the kitchen boiler) said: ‘We’re sorry, there’s something we’ve got to tell you.…’

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