Guinea Pigs Online by Jennifer Gray

1
    Problems in the Kitchen
    L ondon is home to thousands and thousands of guinea pigs.
    Fuzzy and Coco were two of them. They lived in a very nice terraced house in Strawberry Park—number 7, Middleton Crescent—with their owners, Mr. Ben andMrs. Henrietta Bliss. Fuzzy was Ben’s; Coco belonged to Henrietta.

    Ben Bliss ran the Strawberry Park Animal Rescue Centre. When Ben first found Fuzzy, lying on his back with his legs in the air in a rusty old hutch at the bottom of the garden of an empty house, Ben rushed him straight to the nearest vet, who just happened to beHenrietta. Once they were sure that Fuzzy would be all right, Ben and Henrietta promptly fell in love over the operating table.
    Afterward, Ben decided to keep Fuzzy, who was brown and round with a white crest on his forehead, because he brought him luck. “A wife and a pet,” Ben would joke, “all in one afternoon.”
    Actually it turned out to be a wife and
two
pets because, by a strange coincidence, Henrietta had mysteriously found a dazed-looking Coco at the bottom of her handbagonly the week before and, when the guinea pig’s real owner didn’t come forward, decided to keep her too.

    When the Blisses got married, Fuzzy and Coco were very pleased. Guinea pigs squeak when they are happy, and Fuzzy and Coco squeaked a great deal. As everyone knows, guinea pigs like company.
    Coco knew about love, but she wasn’t “in love,” not with Fuzzy, anyway. The guinea pigs were friends . . . well, most of the time. The truth of the matter is, they didn’t always see eye to eye, or even whisker to whisker. For instance, Fuzzy absolutely loved where they lived—especially the small walled garden that backed onto the thicket behind the house—but Coco saw it as a bit of a comedown.
    “One
does
miss Buckingham Palace,” she would sigh, gazing at her reflection in the big silvery plant pot that stood beside the hall closet.(Coco and Fuzzy would let themselves out of their hutch when the Blisses kissed each other goodbye in the morning and rushed off to work, husband and wife each thinking the other one had locked the guinea pigs in for the day.) “The Queen and I used to have such lovely chats. She can talk to anyone, you know. And the harp was always in tune.”
    Not that again!
Fuzzy, who, like Ben, was very polite, never actually said this to Coco. He thought it though—a lot. Coco, Fuzzy believed, was making it up.
    “How come you’re here then? If you used to live with the Queen?” he would ask as he watched her admire the fluffy rosettes in her caramel fur and her long white whiskers. (Guinea-pig rosettes aren’t the kind you win at shows, they’re pretty patterns of fur that some guinea pigs, like Coco, have.)
    “I can’t remember,” Coco would reply sadly. “It’s all a blank. One minute I was at the Palace. The next I was in Henrietta’s handbag. I think I must have bumped my head.”
    Fuzzy secretly thought that someone must have
put
Coco inHenrietta’s handbag at the vet’s because they didn’t want her anymore—like him—but he kept it to himself to keep from hurting her feelings.
    Instead of mooching around admiring himself in shiny plant pots all day, Fuzzy liked helping around the house. He especially liked rustling up little treats for Ben and Henrietta while they were out, draggingthe food out of the hutch and leaving it in neat piles on the rug. Secretly he thought if he wasn’t a guinea pig, he would be a chef, with his own TV show, like the beautiful Scarlet Cleaver (whose cooking Ben was keen on). Broccoli à la Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sprouts, Fuzzy’s Spinach Surprise—his head was bursting with ideas for recipes.

    The only problem was, a guinea pig’s idea of yummy food is very different from a human’s. Fuzzy quickly discovered that Ben and Henrietta weren’t that keen on grass with carrotshavings. He watched in dismay as they shoveled his offerings into the garbage or back into his food bowl when they thought he