Andrietti shouted, louder than any of the others. I hid my head in shame at her volume, but she couldn’t care less. After all, she sang opposite Di Stefano and Björling and everybody knew that. I joined in with my own effort. My voice was breaking and it sounded like the croaking of a small frog next to a mighty train siren.
First, some quick gossip: On the stage my ‘mother’ was too tall. Italian shorties had to look up to her when singing “Ich liebe dich” or “T’amore”. The result was that some crowds just could not be persuaded to believe in love. When she kissed the operatic suitors, people in the crowd booed the tenors and called out things like: “Find a ladder!” I think she was then sidelined a bit. She married Merby without fuss when he proposed after throwing roses on the stage in La Scala. Still, her voice and status would never change.
Now here she was, coaching Milky, my little white suckling pig, a sow, who could hardly miss this kind of encouragement as she progressed in her lane, crowd or no crowd. She knew that voice from the singing sessions. Yes, Mother’s voice did the trick. It was Milky who passed the ribbon first. It was she who received the pink laurel of victory and got a kiss from Mother, right on her snout, as she lay in a big towel on her lap.
A few months later, Milky was mated with a suitable spouse. She weighed fifty kilograms already, which, by averages, promised a better milk supply for Shuna than Stella could. It was she who lay comfortably with her eight piglets, and now also a strange-looking spotted orphan.
Yes, that was where Mother put Shuna three times a day. First, the piglets were all taken out and placed into a separate basket cage overnight. Then one or two were brought back to Milky. As soon as they started drinking, Shuna was held against a teat on the far side, all under supervision, lest Milky might roll on her in the way mother pigs sometimes do.
Even though this provided a temporary solution, Mother felt the cub was still not getting enough. She took a plane to an airport in the Lowveld, hired a car and promptly went to see Lindy, a doctor who was dedicated to saving injured wild animals as they ended up in her wildlife clinic, a bush hospital. She told Mother she had raised three leopard cubs herself. At last, things started moving in the right direction for Shuna.
“My son carries her inside his shirt,” Mother told Lindy.
“That’s good,” Lindy assured her. “Now, I have this supplement,” and she showed her some industrially packed supplies. “I receive international support from wildlife organisations. You could mix it with cows’ or goats’ milk.”
“She’s drinking from a sow at the moment and it has worked so far. We won’t milk the pig, of course.”
She laughed. “Let her enjoy that as long as it lasts, but add the supplement to other milk. Then, you have to wipe her tail rather frequently till she practises the normal cat hygiene. At two months you could start with little pieces of meat, or perhaps even sooner if you find she is growing too slowly.” Mince, she assured Mother, was likely to work even better.
“Seevie is determined she’ll sleep with him in his bed when she’s bigger. Merby has told him to insure his nipples,” said Mother, laughing heartily, and then they had tea together.
This insult only reached me later. Things like these, said in my absence where I could not defend myself, were rather disturbing. I already had stonies, and Mother knew it.
“Does your son have a girlfriend?” Lindy asked. “Someone phoned about a leopard cub her boyfriend had saved.”
“Yes, and it was she who told me about you. They are obsessed with finding a grave on a huge postvolcanic mountain, but that’s a long story. Come visit us one weekend.”
Lindy sent Merby and me photographs of her and the clinic, and Mother came back on the next flight, stocked with some of that precious supplement.
At home, all cages were spotlessly clean. Guess why: It was my job to see to the piggery over weekends when the staff were off. It was also my privilege to take Shuna over from Mother as a kind of midwife whenever I was around.
That woman, Lindy, on the photograph kept haunting me. A doctor! She looked so young and she was pretty … Mother would chide me regularly when I fell in love with older girls. How she always caught on is another matter, and all I did was pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. Then, suddenly, the girl was a matter of the past and life went on. For a while this Lindy kept coming back in my thoughts and I vowed to myself Mother would not know about it.
Spotted Boarder
When all the piglets had been weaned, Shuna still visited the Milky pub, but quite soon a drought set in. She turned rough and hurt Milky as she climbed on top of her. The supplement arrived just in time. We gave it to Shuna with dairy milk. Minced meat completed the diet.
Soon, Shuna started causing trouble. A special friendship had developed between her and Stella, whom she kept regarding as her mother and with whom she often slept. Stella taught her all about mice and other rodents as soon as the other kittens had left.
Later, Shuna began looking for something more substantial. Her first victim was a piglet from another farrow, one that strayed into her domestic territory, and thereafter the security of the cages needed stepping up. Whenever a piglet broke out, she was onto it within seconds and there went someone else’s dinner.
When I was away at boarding school, Mother kept the cub cosy in Stella’s box among some rugs. She was growing as tough as nails, but with Stella, however, she was gentle enough. When she “meowed”, it sounded like a door creaking open, but it called Stella to her very quickly.
Despite some terrible smells and the destruction from her explorations, like climbing up my curtains when no one was around, I let Shuna sleep with me in my bed. In time, she turned into a house cat, knowing where the window was and how to get back. The holidays started, with her and Cram playing morning, noon and night.
She disappeared one evening, but I knew she had to be somewhere and I didn’t give it much thought as I had more troubling things on my mind at the time. I reasoned that she would get inside in her own way and the logical thing for me was to fall asleep.
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