Chapter 1

The guinea pigs

Aunt Sabine bought me two guinea pigs for my birthday. That’s what got this whole thing started. The lady at the pet shop with the mole on her cheek told us they were boys. I called them Kuifje and Bobbie, you know, from the Tintin comics. Kuifje is the Dutch name for Tintin and Bobbie is his dog. Two weeks after my tenth birthday, I get home from school and instead of having two guinea pigs I suddenly have five. Turns out the lady at the pet shop doesn’t really know how to sex guinea pigs and you’re actually supposed to go to a vet for that and Bobbie is a girl. I know in America they sometimes use Bobbie for a girl’s name so luckily I don’t need to change her name which is a good thing because I think she’s got used to it by now. I just have to figure out a way to hide the babies from my mom.

You see, my mom’s not a particularly big believer in pets and stuff. Nor is Erik, my stepfather. I mean, it’s not like she’s anti-animals or anything. She won’t walk past a cat or a dog on the pavement and just kick it in the face. She’s not like that. But she doesn’t like animals in her home. She says she’s busy enough as it is with her work at the university without dragging a creature into her life with a whole new set of responsibilities. I told her I’d take the responsibilities on myself, but she kissed me on my forehead and told me I was very young for my age, which, I don’t mean to sound obvious, is just a stupid thing to say. How can you be ten and be too young to be ten at the same time? But I didn’t tell her that. Instead I explained to her that new responsibilities were precisely the thing to help me become more mature (Aunt Sabine helped me come up with that one), but she didn’t listen. Mom’s got Erik, Erik’s got Mom, and they’re always ganging up on me. They agree with each other about everything, so they outnumber me. Democracy, they call it. They’re really into big words. I just call it unfair.

So Aunt Sabine shows up here on my birthday to take me out for the day. (Luckily my birthday is on a Saturday this year.) I think Mom and Aunt Sabine have arranged this beforehand and have forgotten to tell me because Mom doesn’t exactly protest. She doesn’t say, “No, Sabine, I want to spend the day with Eefje. Why don’t we do something together?” I’m sure she’s secretly pleased because it means she and Erik will have a child-free day all to themselves and they’ll probably end up kissing and Mom will touch Erik’s bum and he’ll touch her boobs, like they do when they think I’m not looking. But I notice everything, I’m like Tintin that way, a real detective.

To make them feel less guilty about not spending the day with me, Mom says they’ll take me out to La Meute for my birthday dinner tonight like they’ve been doing since I was eight. They say it’s my favourite restaurant but it’s not. I never said that. It’s actually theirs. I’d be happy to go to a McDonalds or a Burger King like the other kids in my class, but they don’t know this about me. They don’t know very much about me at all, if you want to know the truth. They spend a lot of time at work, marking papers and preparing lessons, and they probably don’t think I’m as clever or interesting as their students.

But Aunt Sabine, she knows my favourite places. She’s my mom’s older sister and she’s my godmother at the same time and she likes women instead of men and that’s why she never had babies, so she sees me a little bit like her own daughter. And I don’t mind, if I’m going to be honest. I think it works out fine having a mom and an almost-mom. Mom’s good for things like buying me comics and taking me on hiking trips with her and Erik in the summer holidays or to art museums which I think are boring, but Mom says they’re good for my brain. She also thinks she’s good at school stuff. You know, being strict about homework and always signing my report card. But she’s not as good as she thinks. There’re loads of stuff that happens at school that she hardly pays any attention to.

Aunt Sabine’s the one who’s good for knowing what’s inside me and asking me about my friend situation (I don’t really have any) and buying me two kiddie meals at McDonalds instead of just one and taking me to the comic strip museum in the city centre.

She’s really good at thinking out fun things for us to do. So I know when she takes me out for my birthday we’ll have another one of those days that will leave me feeling all warm and melty that I can run over and over in my brain when I’m lying in my bed at night and can’t fall asleep. (I’m not very good at falling asleep.) And she doesn’t disappoint. The first thing we do is go to this chocolate museum. We live in Brussels, you see, and that’s the capital of Belgium, but also the capital of Europe at the same time. It’s really famous for having the best chocolate and frieten, which are fries, and beer, though I don’t really like beer (I’ve had a sip of my dad’s), which is good because I’m not old enough to drink it anyway.

They speak two languages here, French and Flemish, and they give guided tours at the museum in both languages. We speak Flemish at home, so Aunt Sabine and I have to wait for half an hour until the Flemish tour starts. They tell us all about making chocolate and they show us these rooms on the factory floor with people working in white paper coats and blue hairnets but you have to watch them from behind a glass screen so your germs don’t end up falling in the chocolate. I think that’s quite a good idea, actually. I wouldn’t really want to eat chocolate with other people’s germs in it, so I’m glad they’re so strict about it. After that we have a workshop where we pour melted chocolate into these moulds and then decorate our creations with paint brushes and liquid white chocolate and then take them home. But my birthday’s in June, you see, and it’s a hot day and Aunt Sabine says I should eat the chocolate puppy I made before it melts (minus one ear because it broke off when I was taking it out of the mould and I’d eaten it already). So I do.

Then she takes me to Chez Henri close to her apartment where we always go because they have really good milkshakes made with fresh bananas and she says I can order anything I want from the menu.

“Do I have to take something healthy?” I check, just to be a hundred percent sure, even though I actually already know what her answer’s going to be. (Mom’s always telling me to make healthy choices. I suppose she’s just trying to be a good mom, but sometimes you have to take a break from healthy.)

“It’s your birthday, Eefje,” she says. “We’re not going to mention that word for the rest of the day.”

So I order two desserts. A chocolate mousse for starters and a dame blanche for pudding. Aunt Sabine has a croque monsieur and laughs and says she doesn’t know where I put so much sugar and that I shouldn’t tell Mom. But she knows I won’t. When the dame blanche arrives, it’s got a sparkler sticking up in the middle. She must’ve told the waitress it’s my birthday.

“Make a wish,” she says.

So I do. Except that I make three. Number one: I wish I had a pet. Number two: I wish I had a sister. Number three: I wish Mom and Dad would stop hating each other.

“Are you going to tell me what you wished for?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Then it won’t come true,” I say.

She laughs, “I forgot about that.”

I close my eyes and try to blow out the sparkler, but it doesn’t go out. I hope it won’t affect my three wishes.

Afterwards we start walking back to her apartment. It’s a really slow walk like Aunt Sabine’s good at, you know, dawdling and strolling and talking. We walk past the old-age home, Résidence Prince de Liége, that’s about three blocks from where Aunt Sabine and Emilie live and I wave at the old people I see sitting in the rec room like I always do and two of them wave back. I don’t think it’s much fun living there.

She asks me how it’s going with Miek because Miek’s this really bossy girl in my class and she’s always mean to me and then so are the other kids, but I don’t feel like talking about her on my birthday. Plus it’s June and the summer holidays will be starting soon and I won’t have to think about her for two whole months. Aunt Sabine asks me again to talk to my mom about the situation, but then she lets it go.

By then we’ve reached the pet shop on the corner called Petsochic and I beg her to go inside even though they’re not allowed to sell puppies and kittens anymore because of impulse buying and that’s where we see the guinea pigs. I stand there in front of this big cage with about eight or nine guinea pigs and they’re all scuffling around in the hay and eating little pellets and sleeping while Aunt Sabine chats to the lady in the front.

The next thing, Aunt Sabine’s standing next to me and she’s got her hand on the back of my neck and she says, “Pick one.”

The pet shop lady is standing next to her.

“What?” I ask.

“Pick one.”

“What about Mom and Erik?”

“I’ll deal with them. You’re my niece and I want to do this for you.”

I stare at the guinea pigs for a really long time, trying to decide which one will be the best match for me and there’s this brown stripy one and this beige one and this one with a black patch over its left ear and eye and I just can’t believe one of them is going to be mine and I have to be very, very careful to choose the right one because otherwise I won’t be able to sleep for many nights, thinking about how I’d picked the wrong one. And what if it hates being an only guinea pig and misses all its friends from the pet shop?

“Schatje, doe door,” Aunt Sabine presses me, but I just can’t choose.

“What if she’s lonely?” I ask.

Aunt Sabine sighs. “Fine. Pick two then.”

“Really?”

“I can’t see what harm it’ll do if they’re the same sex.” She looks at the pet shop lady and nods.

So I point to the brown stripy one and the one with the black ear-eye and the lady picks them up and turns them upside down and declares, “Two males.”

“We’ll take them,” says Aunt Sabine.

The lady puts them in a small cardboard box and Aunt Sabine lets me pick out a cage. She says I have to take one of the smaller ones so I choose one with a lime green plastic bottom and thin metal bars. She also gets a bag of straw and some high-quality guinea pig pellets for balanced nutrition (that’s what it says on the bag) and then we leave. We don’t say anything until we get to her apartment block. We’re both thinking about the same thing. My mom. And instead of going upstairs and drinking Moroccan mint tea with Emilie like we usually would, we climb into her car that’s parked out front. (We actually live just three tram stops away from Aunt Sabine so there’s no real reason to take the car, but Aunt Sabine says she doesn’t feel like dragging all this paraphernalia on and off the tram so I just keep quiet about polluting and stuff.) One of my Tintin comics is lying on the passenger seat where I’d forgotten it when Aunt Sabine took me to the doctor last week. I shove it onto the floor so I can make space for me and my new guinea pigs. Aunt Sabine puts the cage and the food on the back seat.

We’re waiting for the traffic light to go green before turning down my street. “What are you going to call them?” Aunt Sabine asks.

“Mom’s never going to let me keep them. I’m not going to choose names yet.”

“If she says no, I’ll take them back to my place and you can come visit them whenever you like,” she says. “Go on, pick names for them.”

I spot the comic book lying at my feet and that’s how I decide on the names Kuifje and Bobbie.

Just like I thought, Mom has a fit when we show up with a box of guinea pigs and a cage and a bag of pellets. Her voice gets higher and higher and she won’t even let us put our toes into the apartment and I think she’s going to make me sleep outside for sure but then at least I’ll have Kuifje and Bobbie for company. But then Aunt Sabine steps forward and Mom is forced to take a step back.

“Let’s at least talk about this inside,” Aunt Sabine says.

Mom turns to me. “Go up to your room.”

As I’m hurrying up the stairs, two at a time, the box clutched close to my chest, I hear her start in on Aunt Sabine. “How dare you assume you can just step into…”

But I try not to hear the end of Mom’s sentence and I hum loudly to the guinea pigs and hope they aren’t going to be disappointed in their new home. I hate fighting and I think Kuifje and Bobbie do too. Mom and Aunt Sabine carry on talking to each other in strict voices for another twenty-four minutes (my Bommi’s given me a new watch for my birthday so I time the argument). I can’t hear what they’re saying because I’ve switched on my TV and turned the volume up really loud and the only thing I hear clearly is when the door slams when Aunt Sabine leaves. She’s forgotten to say goodbye.

Mom appears in my doorway a few minutes later while I’m sitting on the floor with Bobbie on my lap. “I am not cleaning their cage. I am not feeding them. She thinks you’re old enough to do this, then you’d just better prove her right.”

“I will,” I say quietly.

She turns round and storms off.

Mom, Erik and I don’t go to La Meute for supper that night, but I don’t really mind. I stay upstairs playing with Kuifje and Bobbie, getting used to their short, smooth fur under my fingers when I stroke them, thinking that this has almost been my best birthday ever. Aunt Sabine texts me to see if I’m OK and I send her a photo of Kuifje with a little pile of straw on his head. Mom comes back upstairs later and asks if I’ like to go to the frituur and get take-away fries and mayonnaise and bitterballen (we almost never get take-away in my house) but I say I’m still full from my lunch with Aunt Sabine and really, I am. But I also don’t want to go anywhere with her after she was so mean to Aunt Sabine. Sisters shouldn’t fight like that. If I had a sister, I’d never be mean to her.

She says I should come downstairs and watch a movie with them and I can even choose the movie. But I’ll never really be allowed to choose the movie, I know that. She’ll sigh, Erik will roll his eyes and we’ll end up watching a movie they call a compromise and I call boring. So I say no, I’m tired, I want to stay in my room. She crosses the floor to where I’m sitting and bends down and kisses me on the top of my head. It’s nice and I almost say I’ll watch a movie with them but then I decide I’m still too cross.

And now it’s three weeks later and there are five guinea pigs instead of just two and Mom’s never in a million, zillion infinity years going to let me keep them.