When Sue nearly died :(
After work on Friday, me and Dan were having a glass of red in front of the woodburner in the kitchen, eating hummus and all that Lidl stuff.
Rita and Sue were in the living room, on the giant plant pot, scurrying backwards and forwards through the cardboard tube to their tank.
I honestly believed our cat, Ruby, loved the gerbils. What wasn’t there to love? From when Dan first bought them for my birthday, I had introduced them to her gently, gradually letting her rub her head on Sue’s each night before I put her back in her cage telling her in a soothing voice.. ‘that’s nice, Ruby. Good girl’. I had searched ‘mouse and cat friends’ on the internet and was convinced that there was enough love for us all. My mum, Pat, had already placed bets on the gerbils being killed by one of our 3 cats. She said they didn’t stand a chance.
That evening, Ruby was in the kitchen sitting by the radiator. Whilst we were thinking about a top up of wine, she was thinking about THEM.
Dan‘s phone went. It was Ian — an unexpected airbnb guest who said he was around the corner and wondered where he could park.
The bedsheets had been drying in the living room. You can guess what happened next.
Dan jumped up to help Ian with the parking. I sprang up to check whether the bedsheets were dry. Ruby saw her opportunity and pounced.
I turned around to see her with a whole gerbil hanging from her mouth. It was Sue.
Bloodcurdlingly, I screamed at Ruby, who flung Sue from her mouth. I scooped her up, got Ruby out of the room, and put both gerbils back in their cage.
I could see that Sue was seriously injured. Her eye was bleeding and she was limping. I had ‘rescued’ enough mice from the cats in the past to recognise that shocked, still look. Despite attempts to keep them alive in various fluffy containers, they were always, always dead by morning.
Rita knew something was wrong. She went over to Sue, who was usually full of life, and sniffed her. She started to groom her gently. All the while, Sue sat in a toilet roll tube, her belly gradually sinking to the floor. As though to leave her in peace, Rita then left Sue and began to make a new nest away from the tube.
Me and Dan cried separately. I drank loads more red wine. He went to bed. We admitted that we had both prayed for Sue to survive though neither of us is religious.
Later that night, when Dan was in bed, I took the dying Sue out of the cage, and put her on my jumper so she would not die alone. We went to sleep together. Well, I passed out.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Dan woke me up.
“Where’s Sue?” he asked.
Drunk and confused I replied, “I don’t know”.
Then I recalled sitting with Sue as she died.
“I think she was sitting on me. I was holding her as she died”.
Dan moved all the cushions from the settee, expecting to find a dead thing. He lifted one of the cushions, and there was Sue! Surprised and alive!
We popped her back in the cage, still doubtful that she would make it until morning.
The next morning. I looked into the cage. No longer sitting by herself in the toilet roll tube, Sue was in a snuggled heap of fur, in Rita’s new nest. She must have crawled over to her friend for comfort in the night. She was still breathing and raised her head to greet me.
I phoned the vets who advised to bring her straight in to be checked over.
Rita went with her and the vet gently looked at her eye and leg.
“She’s a very lucky gerbil,” she said as she drew a line where the teeniest amount of anti-biotics would go to on the syringe.
And she was lucky. 2 months later, Sue is perfectly back to her old self.
Needless to say, Ruby is no longer allowed to give her a goodnight head rub.
