The sock was desperation, not strategy.
He is currently asleep in the breast pocket of my shirt.
This is not how hamsters are meant to travel.
I know that.
I have Googled enough in the last month to qualify for an informal qualification in rodent anxiety management. Every sensible source says travel cages, bedding that smells familiar, quiet environment, minimal disturbance.
None of them mention putting the hamster in your shirt pocket like he’s a Victorian watch.
But Heath likes the pocket.
More accurately, Heath likes being close to my chest, wedged into warm fabric, occasionally twitching his whiskers against me as if I exist solely to provide regulated body heat and transport.
Which, apparently, I now do.
He has not shithimself once.
That feels like success.
Possibly my standards have shifted.
I pull out of London just after six on Friday evening, because I am an optimist and an idiot. Traffic moves in fits and starts, brake lights stretching ahead of me in a red line of collective regret.
At a standstill near the Blackwall Tunnel, I glance down.
Heath stares up at me.
“Don’t start,” I tell him.
He blinks, then tucks himself lower.
Good talk.
It is stupid how calm he is.
The first time Philip brought him to Whitstable, Heath arrived in a state of full biological protest. Cage ruined. Tiny nervous system in pieces.
Now the same hamster is asleep against my heartbeat like this is routine.
Like I am routine.
The thought sits there longer than I want it to.
I look back at the road.
Whitstable is only meant to be a weekend.
A check on the house. Some sea air. Time away from London and the office and the parts of my life that have started feeling too full of things I’m not saying.
That’s what I told myself.
Not that I wanted to come back because I have been thinking about the place too much.
Not that every room in that house still carries Philip in it.
Not that I want to know whether it feels different now.
