SHORT STORY: The Adventures of Little Bear by Tamara Clelford

To celebrate National Teddy Bear Day, we couldn't resist revisiting the wonderfully disturbing story from Tamara Clelford that inspired the original Harvey Teddy Bear special...

Originally published in Harvey Duckman Presents... Volume 13, June 2023

© Tamara Clelford 2023

“Mummy, what a cute little bear,” said the girl.

Her Mummy looked up to where Stacy was by the rose gardens in the park and saw her pointing to a little brown teddy bear sitting next to a rose bush that was spectacular in full bloom.

‘Cute?’ she thought to herself, ‘I’m not so sure. That bear’s giving me a reight look.’

“Mummy, can we take her home. Please…” continued the little girl.

‘Him.’

Her Mummy sighed and walked towards them, thinking of the scheming look she had perceived on the bear’s face. She started to reason with Stacy.

“We can’t take her home. Someone is missing their bear and will come back and find her.”

‘It’s fine dear, take the bear home.’

“But Mummy, she’s all sad and alone. Pleeeeeeease,” pleaded Stacy.

As Stacy’s Mummy got level with them, she looked down at the bear, and saw its kind, compassionate and loving little face.

‘Oh, that must have been a trick of the light. That bear is adorable, and I can see why she wants to take her home,’ thought the mother. Out loud she clarified, “Well, maybe we should take a picture of it and I’ll post it in the local Facebook group. We can explain there’s a lovely lost bear here in the park waiting for their owner to come and rescue it.” As she was talking, she got her phone out and snapped a picture of the bear.

“No, I think we should take it home and they can come and collect the bear from us. If they’re careless enough to lose such a lovely bear, then they’re not good enough to look after her. What if it starts to rain? She hasn’t got an umbrella,” reasoned Stacy.

As her Mummy turned towards Stacy to try and convince her to leave the bear where it was, anyone looking at the bear instead of the humans would have seen a satisfied smile spread across its face. Mummy lost the argument and Stacy picked up the bear with glee.

“Look, it’s called ‘hug me better’, the poor bear is so sad and lost and I can definitely hug her better,” the little girl said with glee as she got back to her mission of skipping towards the play park.

The little bear had a lovely time in the play park. He got to play on the swings and go down the slide but did end up feeling a little nauseous on the roundabout. He liked kid’s play parks, they were full of all sorts of germs and viruses and were a great place to pick up some new specimens for his collection. He smiled adoringly at Stacy when she was watching him, although was a little concerned that she seemed intent on dressing him up in bows and dresses when he got to their house. The last time he had been put in a dress, it really restricted his access to his storage pouch.

Germs were his passion. He loved spreading disease and making people ill. Just a little bit ill, not too ill, as his reason for living was to comfort the sick. He liked a good cold virus and as he thought about his favourite viruses, he patted his stomach where he had a few samples of his most favourite cold virus ready to go. Today was a good day as he had added a few new specimens from the play park to his collection.

The biggest problem in the little bear’s life was that no one really wanted him to stay with them. It didn’t take very long for households to realise that since he came into their life they’d been permanently ill. Without fail, every time, they fell out of love with him and got rid of him. He remembered that long stint he had done in the back room of the charity shop in a bag, just waiting to be sorted. It was the darkest time of his life. Not only didn’t anyone give him a hug at that point, but all his virus samples died as they don’t last forever without access to suitable refrigeration. His stomach pouch was only suitable for short term transportation.

He was very grateful for his hidden stomach pouch. When he was new, he had been shipped with an informational leaflet that explained he had something called a ‘heaty wheaty’ in his stomach. You could open up the velcro slot in his back, take out the pouch inside and put that in the microwave to warm up, or the freezer to cool down. Sadly, his first owner hadn’t actually read the instructions very well. The instructions were very clear and stated that you needed to take the pouch out and put only this into the microwave to heat up. Under no circumstances should you put the whole bear in the microwave to heat up. The little bear remembers coming to consciousness inside a metal box on a rotating turntable. As he slowly spun round, three of the walls were solid metal, but one was made of metal and glass and had tiny holes in it that he could see a human face through staring at him. He had a funny feeling of all the hairs on his body standing up and a sudden awakening to the world around him that he understood without any effort. He was taken out of the spinning metal box by a kindly looking gentleman and given to a small child to cuddle. He instinctively knew there was something wrong with this child. It had a red runny nose, bleery eyes and he could just tell the child was ill and felt dreadful and the little bear just wanted to make the child feel better. And that is exactly what he did by being the child’s companion. That child spent the next four days cuddling the little bear and slowly got better, then on the fifth day the bear was put aside on the shelf and left alone. The bear was very sad and a bit appalled that his left arm was still covered in the child’s snot.

Days went by and as he watched the family come and go, the little bear got sadder and sadder. He was using the down time well and was building his muscles up. By the end of two weeks he could stand up and walk along the shelf, by the end of four weeks he was able to climb up and down the bookcase and go exploring at night.

His favourite thing to do was to go and look at the humans as they slept. One night he got a bit too close to the older child as he sat on the end of her bed and ended up in a cuddle. He often thinks back to this amazing moment as he had forgotten how good a hug felt. As the child moved around during the night, she grabbed his left arm and started sucking it and wiping her eyes with his hand.

‘That’s a bit gross,’ thought the little bear, but he put up with it in turn for the cuddles.

At the first light of dawn, the little bear was released from the hug of the child as she rolled over. Sadly, it was time for him to go back to his shelf and his lonely existence, but at least he didn’t have any more dried snot on his left arm and it would eventually dry out.

Two days later as the little bear was having an afternoon nap, he was rudely awoken by the man picking him up and putting him in the microwave again. This time, as the little bear spun round, he started to make sense of the noises being made by the humans. They were speaking, just like the thoughts he had in his head, but they used different words for the same things, but he now understood what they were saying.

Daddy took him out of the metal box, now known as the microwave, and took him to Beverly who was lying on the sofa with a runny nose and bleery eyes. The little bear was back in business. Over the next three days on the sofa, the little bear learnt all about how colds are transmitted. The small child was Brian and he had to keep away from Beverly, so he didn’t catch it as well. Her parents kept what distance they could, but Beverly did manage to sneeze straight into her Mum’s face by accident.

“Great, I really could do without catching this cold,” said Mum.

On the fourth day, the little bear swapped from Beverly to Mum, as indeed Mum now was ill and needed his care thanks to the well placed sneeze. But, by the tenth day, the little bear was back on the shelf and had time to think.

‘I now know how people get ill. I just need to give them some snot. So, all I need to do is get as many samples of snot as I can and keep circling them round the humans. I will be cuddled forever!’

This is exactly what happened. For the next six months, the little bear did nightly rounds swapping snot between the humans in the house and found his cuddling powers were greatly in demand. He took some empty fairy dust bottles from Beverly’s bedroom, which were perfect for what he wanted and they were in the bin so wouldn’t be missed. Lovely small bottles with a secure top and perfect for keeping his snot samples safe in his belly pouch.

The little bear was having the most wonderful times, until one day Beverly said, “No, I don’t want that bear. It makes me ill.”

Mum looked carefully at the lovely face of the little bear as she went to put him back on the shelf and replied, “You know, Beverly, I think you’re right. We’ve had a lot of colds since that bear came to live with us.”

For the next few days on the shelf, the little bear got shot a lot of sinister looks from the family. He thought he wouldn’t be kept on the shelf for too long, as he was still doing his nightly rounds, and surely he would be back out cuddling soon. But to his surprise, the next time he was picked up, he was unceremoniously shoved in a bag and taken to the charity shop and according to Mum he was going to be, “Got rid of.”

That was his first stint in a charity shop, and not his last as he turned into a hardened inmate over the years. But, his frequent visits did teach him that the optimum time to spend infecting a family was seven weeks and it was then best for him to move on. If he moved on, he got to choose when and where and had managed to avoid the charity shops.

That’s exactly how Stacy had come to find him propped up by the rose bushes in Cudworth park. His previous family had taken their son to the health centre for the third time that week as little Keith had just seemed to have cold after cold for the last six weeks. Seizing his opportunity, the little bear wriggled out of the bag in the waiting room, jogged round the edge of the room under the chairs and out through the door under the cover of a buggy as it was coming in to the health centre. He then ran across the car park, careful not to be seen, over the grass and under the fence. He headed into the park and settled next to the best looking rose bush to make himself seem even more appealing. His plan, so far, had been fool proof.

When Stacy had finished playing in the park and it was time to go home, the little bear was gently picked up and hugged all the way to the car.

‘This is the life!’ sighed the little bear with a huge grin on his face.

“Oh no!” said Stacy.

“What’s up, love?” said her Mummy.

“What are we going to do with her when we go on holiday?” worried Stacy.

“Oh!” said Mummy. “Well, if we haven’t found her owners by then, she can come on holiday with us to Spain.”

If you had been looking at the inhabitants on the back seat, you would have seen two very happy beings. A little girl called Stacy, who was already infected with a new cold, and a little brown bear who was now very excited about his new family and his soon to be international lifestyle.

‘They will have no resistance to my germs in Spain. What a treat. Mi llamo Germ Bear.’

Tamara, a Harvey regular, is a star trek loving, pukeko obsessed, tap dancing, Queen listening, lord of low frequency and high-priestess of high frequency physics geek who grew up on a heavy diet of sci-fi and thrillers. Having worked in a variety of technical roles, both conventional and clandestine, she is now a consultant working on physics-based problems in radio frequency engineering and signal processing.