Death & Deodorant
I was about fifteen, so my brother Jamie must have been seven or eight. Our mum had died sort of when Jamie was too young to really get it, so when Kutuzov died it was probably his first real experience of death. That being said it’s kind of impossible to have a real experience of death without actually dying yourself that is, but I felt that Kutuzov’s death was probably a pretty big deal for little Jamie at that time, and so I wanted to make it all ok for him somehow.
I just had to get that straight, that I had good intentions.
My dad had let us get that hamster on one condition; that we were utterly responsible for him, that we fed him and cleaned him out, wiped his arse, yada yada yada. It was sort of ridiculous that the old man had kicked up so much fuss about us getting a hamster, since once we had him dad never saw him, ever. We even had to pay for his food out of our own pockets, which was part of the deal. I forked out the lion’s share since I had a paper round despite my asthma, and Jamie got his allowance for doing an obscene amount of housework. He had this face that he wore when he was scrubbing the kitchen, like he was pretending not to be thinking about what it would be like to have a mum. So, as you can imagine, we loved little Kutuzov all the more for all the care we took over him. He was a special bond between Jamie and me too. I’ve never really been into sports or anything, so I never took much notice of Jamie’s passion for Chelsea or his being in the primary school footy club. I was more interested in books and music and staying in, which is why we named the Russian Dwarf after the general in War & Peace, but Jamie just thought it was because it sounded cute.
“Kutuzov hasn’t been out of his house today” said Jamie, rather innocently.
“No?” I said, already preparing myself to break the news to Jamie. I’d noticed that Kutuzov had stopped running on his wheel, had been leaving off his food and basically acting like any animal about to die.
“Shall we get him out?”
“Yes, ok. But Jamie, let me lift his house out, huh?”
I detached the wire cage from the plastic base tray, and gently lifted the sleeping house out. I was hoping to see little Kutuzov’s nose come twitching curiously from amongst the cotton wool, but it didn’t. There was something heavy about the little house, and I imagined it to be like a can of spray paint with a large ball bearing rolling around lifelessly inside. When I opened up the lid it was with Jamie’s hands on my shoulder, as we peered in and saw Kutuzov’s body, curled up in the foetal position. He looked warm and cozy, and had obviously died of old age in his sleep.
“Jamie?” I said, without looking at him over my shoulder
“He’s dead” said Jamie, flatly.
“Yeah.”
“What shall we do with him?”
I could see the my dad’s reaction as we told him Kutuzov was dead. He’d say “you didn’t feed him right,” or “sat on `im didjya?” or some other such heartless thing, one eye on the TV and the other staring right through us suspiciously. We’d have to tell dad if we wanted to bury him in the garden, and there was no way of sneaking out of the door, even if we hid him in our jackets he’d be able to tell we were up to something.
“We’ll cremate him” I answered, without thinking much about it
“What’s kree mate?”
“That’s a really special way of burying someone” I said, choosing my words carefully “only instead of putting them in the ground, you release them into the wind. You burn them in a box and scatter their ashes.”
“So no worms can get them?” asked Jamie, eagerly
“That’s right. It’s also, well, more dignified, like a hero’s death. That’s what I want you to do with my body, when I die”
Jamie looked thoughtful. I wasn’t too happy with myself either for reminding him that I’d be dead one day too. Perhaps I should have used dad as an example, but I couldn’t really imagine him dying somehow.
“Lets make a box for him” said Jamie, after some thought
“Ok” I said, tapping him on the shoulder and taking another look at Kutuzov’s peaceful, un-twitching nose.
We used an empty box from one of my inhalers, which was just the right size for a hamster’s coffin. It wasn’t coffin shaped, of course, so to make it look a bit more funeralistic we wrapped some black plastic round it from an unused bin bag. I don’t know where he got it, but Jamie also put a little silver cross in with him, which I thought was a great touch. We used some clean sawdust to pack the box, after we’d put Kutuzov inside. I had the attic room, and directly outside the window was the chimney, and so we both climbed out of the attic window, resting our feet behind the chimney stack, and put the coffin on top of one of the chimneys. It was a beautiful day, a slight breeze and a really nice, powerfully shining sun. I used a lighter and held it under the corner of the coffin, where I’d already stuffed like a little genie of matches. They all lit and soon the coffin was burning away. Jamie and I sat in silence and watched.
After about two minutes and thirty seconds, the fire had gone out. All the sawdust had caught fire and was blowing around in the wind, most of it blowing back into my room and starting little fires on my bed. The top of the box had burned off, and you could see Kutuzov’s body in there, still curled up, with singed fur and his peaceful looking nose replaced with charred lips and bared teeth. Jamie was crying and I was in a total panic. I got back into my room and looked around desperately for something to re-ignite the fire with. I grabbed a can of deodorant and hauled myself back out of the window. Holding the can and a lighter directly at the coffin, I spayed a jet of pressurised fire at the smoking remains of our hamster. There wasn’t much left to catch light, just the moist innards of our favourite pet and a few remaining bits of fur. Jamie wept on, almost silently as I fired the flames. Above the roar of the makeshift flamethrower I could just hear dad’s voice shouting “What the bleeding fuck are ya fuckin’ playing at!?” from my bedroom doorway.
That was Jamie’s first “experience” of death