Last night I lay awake, unable to sleep.
It was not, though you might have thought it would be, because my wife had come home with possibly life changing news - the possibility of a new job for her in a new town and all the upheavals one might anticipate with moving teenagers. No, it wasn't that. It was because the cat hadn't jumped on the bed.
As happens normally about that time of night there came the noise of soft footfalls approaching the foot of the bed. Normally after that sound one of two things happens: Either the foot of the bed is viciously attacked to the sound of claws tearing fabric, or a soft purring thing arrives at my feet suddenly, before padding up the length of my body to deposit a couple of loose hairs under my nose and the back to curl up inconveniently between my knees.
This time, nothing jumped on the bed.
This time, the scratching at the foot of the bed was more tentative, accompanied by a soft, rhythmic, emphesemic panting.
I leaned over the side to look, and by the light of the i-pod in my hand I saw a small round dark shape glide swifly away from the light and under the bed-base. I leaned over more. Aiming the i-pod towards the middle of under-the-bed I peered at the dimly illuminated scene. I could make out the wallpaper on the other side in almost all directions, except for one small orb of darkness directly beneath where my wife lay.
I rolled myself back up. put the i-pod beside the bed and pulled the covers up to my chin.
"What were you doing?" asked my wife.
"Just looking."
"Is there a hedgehog under the bed?"
I didn't reply. She had enough to think about.
"Tell me there isn't a hedgehog under the bed," she said, a hardness coming into her tone.
"I didn't see one," I said carelessly.
This was almost true. And as I said she had enough to think about just now.
My wife works in the finance section of a large co-operative. Just one small corner of the place. She finds this boring and limiting.
One part of her job she enjoys is taking care of the use of a particular piece of software specifically written for finance and banking. In the course of her week she speaks to one or other of the team of four who make up the company that wrote and maintain the software, and gets on with them all very well. And for the longest time she has been proclaiming: I want K***'s job at A****!
Well yesterday she was talking to J*** at A*** who happened to mentions that the guy who was supposed to take K***'s job when she left had never showed and the position was open again. I want that job! she declared, and he said Well you'd better get in quick, G***'s interviewing now.
So she e-mailed G*** and he e-mailed back asking if she could get to Christchurch for an interview.
We're driving up tomorrow.
Now she had every reason to suspect that there would be a hedgehog under the bed because the week before, when I was down at the ED waiting for somebody to get x-rayed because their sibling had slammed their wrist in the door, she sent me a fully disgruntled text message to the effect that she'd just made the bed, hedgehogs were disgusting, and how was she supposed to remove a large mother hedgehog and three baby hedgehogs from under it?
By the time we got home, she and the door-slamming sibling, with the aid of a shovel and a cardboard box had solved the problem. Not wanting to spook the mother into abandoning her babies by covering them with human scent, they had shovelled all four into the box and deposited them outside, and the mother had dutifully, over the next hour or so, picked the little ones up one by one and ferried them off to somewhere else.
Anyway yesterday, while we were sitting in the conservatory discussing the possible ramifications of this interview. (Honestly would anyone expect you to travel nearly four hundred kilometres for an interview if they weren't just a little bit serious about employing you?) While we were discussing this a large hedgehog (they're just not scared of us any more) scurried doggedly across in front of us in the direction of the cat's bowl.
"Is that the mother?" I asked.
"Not big enough, I think," she said. "You know even if the rent up there is double what we pay here we could still..."
Well you get the idea. The next time I thought about the fact that a real hedgehog had walked within six inches of my feet (it no longer excites me, not since they spent a summer crapping on my pantry floor) there was no hedgehog in sight. When we got to a point in our conversation that we realised it was too cold to be outside, we got up and moved into the lounge, shutting the door tightly behind us.
Later, after the dark orb had glided under the bed, I lay thinking about how after about five years of little to no social interaction beyond work, I had finally found a small group of good friends with similar interests who I would sorely miss if we moved; about how the kids had just begun settling at school; about how after a miserable year workwise I have settled in a job which, while not stupendous, I quite like; about how Dunedin is... comfortable; and about how I should really get some sleep.
And that is when the grunting started.
TO BE CONTINUED
