‘That’s enough!’ screamed Miss Grogney, and she pointed her finger at me. ‘You. Wait.’
I stood in my self-imposed darkness and watched them huddle together and whisper. I heard them say, ‘Interesting’. I heard them say, ‘Great idea’. But what I didn’t hear them say was Mary or Joseph.
That night, my mother carried in her favourite casserole dish and placed it, steaming, onto the table. The kitchen was dark and candles flickered on every surface.
My mother lifted the lid. Rich dark smells of meat and onion and wine.
‘I wish we could dine like this every night,’ my brother said.
Dine was his new word. Fine dining would come next.
‘Maybe we could have a séance later?’ said Nancy, and my mother quickly looked at her – a look I’d seen so often – a look that said, Bad idea, Nancy, and you’d know that if you had children.
‘You’re quiet, Elly. Everything OK?’ asked my mother.
I nodded. If I spoke I felt tears would tumble out onto the backs of my words. I stood up instead, mumbled something about ‘forgetting to feed him’ and went towards the back door. My brother handed me a torch, and with two carrots in my pocket I slipped out into the cold night.
It felt late but it wasn’t; the darkness of our house made it feel late. The climbing frame cut a weird skeleton in the dusk like a spine bending backwards. It would be demolished the coming spring and used for firewood. I walked down the path towards the hutch. God was already straining at the wire; his nose was twitching, picking up the scent of my sadness as determinedly as a dog. I flicked the catch and he bundled towards me. Wisps of blue and green fur stood out in the torchlight; a good idea left over from a bored weekend when Nancy and my brother dyed his pelt and took pictures of him balanced on their heads. God loved performing as much as Nancy. I pulled him onto my lap. He felt good, he felt warm. I bent down and kissed him.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, in his strangled little voice. ‘It’ll all come good in the end. Always does.’
‘OK,’ I said calmly; unperturbed that it was actually the first time I’d ever heard him speak.
I saw the long striding shape of Nancy come down the path towards me. She had a cup in her hand, steam spiralling into the chill November sky.
‘So tell me,’ said Nancy, crouching down, ‘how did it go?’
My mouth made a kind of shape, but I was too distraught to speak, so I had to whisper it instead.
‘What?’ she said, leaning towards me.
I cupped my hand around her ear and whispered it again.
‘The innkeeper?’ she said. ‘The bloody innkeeper?’
I shook my head, convulsions racking my body. I looked up at her and said, ‘The blind innkeeper.’
It was the day of the performance, and she crept out of the backstage shadows like a giant tarantula rather than the octopus she was supposed to be, and when Miss Grogney saw her, she screamed as if her throat had been cut by the devil himself. There was no time to get Jenny Penny out of that costume and into the camel one, and so Miss Grogney told her to remain in the darkest, furthermost reach of the stage, and should she even see the flicker of a tentacle, she would suffocate her with a large plastic bag. Baby Jesus started to cry. Miss Grogney told him to shut up and called him a wet blanket.
I quickly peaked through the curtain and scanned the audience to see if my mother and Nancy were there. It was a good turnout, almost full; better than the harvest festival that had clashed so disastrously with a local football fixture, when only twenty people turned up to give thanks for what they were about to receive, which at the time ran to two dozen cans of baked beans, ten loaves and a box of windfall apples.
Nancy saw me and winked, just before Miss Grogney’s firm hand landed on my shoulder and pulled me back into Christian times.
‘You’ll spoil the magic if you keep looking out,’ she said to me.
I thought, I’m going to spoil it anyway, and my stomach knotted.
‘Where are the camels?’ Miss Grogney shouted.
‘They’ve got the hump with you,’ said Mr Gulliver, the new teacher, and we all laughed.
‘Not funny, Mr Gulliver,’ she said as she wandered off the stage and caught her toe on a sandbag.
‘Good luck,’ I whispered to Jenny Penny as she waddled over to the manger, casting an eerie shadow on the back wall. She turned round and gave me a huge smile. She’d even blacked out a couple of her teeth.
The lights dimmed. I felt sick. Music crackled into the auditorium. I wiped my hands on my red tunic and they left a sweaty smear. I put on my sunglasses. In the darkness I was blind. I poked one of the sheep up the arse with my white stick and he started to cry. I apologised to Miss Grogney and said I couldn’t see what I was doing and she said, ‘God fortunately wasn’t so blind,’ and I felt a shiver run down my back.
The straw in the manger smelt strong. I’d brought it from home and even though it wasn’t clean, it was authentic. Michael Jacobs, who was playing Baby Jesus, had been scratching himself ever since he’d been placed in the oversized manger, and under the lighting his heavy-set features, together with a smudge of dirt, made him look as if he had a full beard. I tapped my stick and felt my way into position.
The scene with the Angel Gabriel seemed to go well and I heard the audience exclaim and clap when Maria Disponera, a new Greek girl, forgot her lines and simply said, ‘You there, Mary. You having baby. Go to Bef-lem.’ She’d got such an important part because her parents owned a Greek restaurant and Miss Grogney was allowed to visit as much as she wanted, until she smashed plates one night when no one else was smashing plates.
The shepherds were a dozy lot and pointed in the opposite direction to the star, and as they wandered off, they appeared truculent and bored as if it was a ferret that was entering the world and not the Son of God. It looked more hopeful when the Three Kings entered, until, that is, one of them dropped his box of frankincense, which was actually a porcelain tea caddy with earl grey inside. A gasp rose up from the auditorium as his mother reached for a handkerchief and silently wept at the loss of a treasured family heirloom. He hadn’t told her he was taking it. Like he didn’t tell her he smoked her cigarettes. And in between her quiet sobs, a lone sheep, slow to leave the stage, emitted a sudden scream and collapsed onto its stomach as a sharp piece of broken china embedded itself into its bony knee. The Three Kings stepped over him to exit. Only Miss Grogney had the foresight to creep onto the stage in the scene change and drag the child off like some cumbersome, skinned pelt.
I was in position behind my fake door. Suddenly, I heard a knock.
‘Yeees?’ I said, the way Nancy had told me to say it and I opened the door and quickly stepped forward into Mary’s light. The audience gasped. Nancy said I looked like a cross between Roy Orbison and the dwarf in Don’t Look Now. I knew who neither was.
‘I am Mary and this is Joseph. We have nowhere to stay. Do you have room in your inn?’
My heart thumped; my tongue felt thick and heavy. Say it, go on, say it.
‘You need a room?’ I said, suddenly veering away from the script.
I saw Mary and Joseph look at each other. Miss Grogney peered from the wings at me, holding up her script and pointing to it.
‘Let me think,’ I said.
The silence in the theatre was thick, clawing with anticipation. My heart was beating hard, my throat tight. Say it, I said to myself, say it. And then I did.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I have a room, with a lovely view at an excellent rate. Come this way, please,’ and with my white stick tapping ahead, two thousand years of Christianity was instantly challenged as I led Mary (now crying) and Joseph towards a double en-suite with TV and mini bar.
And as the curtain closed for an early interval, the bearded Jesus was left forgotten in the large bassinet in the corner of the stage, looking around at all that could have been. Suddenly panicked by Jenny Penny’s arachnid shadow creeping towards him, he attempted to climb f
rom the manger, but caught his foot in his swaddling clothes and unfortunately fell forwards onto a papier-mâché rock, that Miss Grogney later told the police ‘had set much harder than anyone could have imagined’.
His screams sent shudders around the auditorium, and as Jenny Penny tried to lead the audience in the opening verse of ‘Joy to the World!’ the first of the ambulance and police sirens could just be heard above the chords.
BABY JESUS IN COMA
That was the early headline. There was no picture of Michael Jacobs, only a picture of a weeping king, who wasn’t weeping because of the accident but because his mother was telling him off for stealing. One witness commented that it was the end of Christmas for the community, but my brother said we shouldn’t go that far and that Jesus would rise again. Not until Easter, said Jenny Penny, crying into a pillow.
Of course it was Miss Grogney who blamed both Jenny and me for the whole tragedy, and told the police as much, but they were having none of it. It was a Safety Issue, and as she was supervising the whole palaver (they actually used that word), the blame should lay fairly and squarely on her round shoulders. She would resign before the inquest, treating the whole incident as a question of faith. She’d renounce modern life and do good deeds. She’d move to Blackpool.
My mother had tried to contact Mrs Penny throughout the day and eventually she contacted my mother and said that she was in Southend-on-Sea eating cockles, and could my mother look after Jenny for the night. Of course, my mother said, and promptly told her all that had happened.
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ said Mrs Penny. ‘Tomorrow OK?’ And then like a dingo scenting blood, she added a little too eagerly, ‘When’s the funeral?’
‘He’s not dead yet,’ said my mother sharply, albeit a little carelessly.
BABY JESUS DEAD
That was the late headline. My father’s Evening News was handed around in a quiet daze. All vital signs were missing and so his atheist family had agreed to turn off the life-support machine.
‘Christ, that was quick,’ said Nancy. ‘What were they doing? Saving electricity?’
‘Not funny, Nancy,’ said my mother, hiding her face. ‘Not funny at all.’
But even I saw my father laugh, and my brother, and Jenny Penny swore that she saw my mother laugh as she looked up from her hot chocolate. She loved moments like that. The inclusiveness of family. I guess because she had none.
Jenny Penny’s mother was as different from mine as any mother could be; a woman who was in fact a child herself, in constant need of the gilded approbation of a peer group, no matter how young it happened to be. ‘How do I look, girls?’ ‘Do my hair, girls.’ ‘Am I pretty, girls?’
It was fun at first – like having a rather large doll to play with – but then her expectations and demands would override all, and her fierce resentment would hang in the room like a gaudy light fitting, exposing the youth she no longer had.
‘“Mrs Penny” sounds so old, Elly. We’re friends. Call me Hayley. Or Hayles.’
‘OK, Mrs Penny, I will next time,’ I said. But I couldn’t.
Her everyday existence was secretive. She didn’t have a job but was rarely at home, and Jenny Penny had few clues to her mother’s lifestyle, except that she loved having boyfriends and loved developing various hobbies that were conducive to her lifestyle as a ‘gypsy’.
‘What’s a gypsy?’ I asked.
‘People who travel from place to place,’ said Jenny Penny.
‘Have you done that a lot?’
‘Quite a lot,’ she said.
‘Is it fun?’ I asked.
‘Not always,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because people chase us.’
‘Who?’
‘Women.’
They lived in a temporary world of temporary men; a world that could be broken up and reassembled as easily and as quickly as Lego. Fabric hung from most walls in staggered strips, and around the doorframe was a pattern of flowered handprints in pinks and reds, which in the dingy light looked like the bloodied hands of a crime scene searching for an exit. Rugs were strewn around the floor and in the corner perched on a Book of Nudes was a lamp with a shade made of magenta silk. It threw a brothel-like hue into the room – not that I knew about brothels at that time – but it was red and eerie and suffocating, and made me feel ashamed.
I rarely went upstairs because the current boyfriend would so often be asleep, having in common with all the others a nocturnal existence of late shifts and even later drinking. But I used to hear the footsteps above, the toilet flush, the worried look on Jenny’s face.
‘Shh,’ she said. ‘We have to be quiet.’
And it was because of this restriction that we seldom played in her room – not that there was much to play with – but she had a hammock that caught my eye, which was suspended above a flattened poster of a calm, blue sea.
‘I look down, rock and dream,’ she said to me proudly. ‘The Lost City of Atlantis is somewhere below me. An adventure waiting for me.’
‘Have you ever seen the sea before?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she said, turning away, wiping off a small handprint that had smeared the centre of a mirror.
‘Not even at Southend?’ I said.
‘Tide was out,’ she said.
‘It comes back, you know.’
‘My mum was too bored to wait for it to come back. I could smell it, though. I think I’d like the sea, Elly. Know I would.’
Only once did I see a boyfriend. I’d gone upstairs to use the toilet and, being alone and inquisitive, I crept into Mrs Penny’s room, which was warm and musty with a large mirror at the foot of the bed. I saw his back only. A naked lump of a back that was as uncouth in sleep as it probably was in wakefulness. Even the mirror didn’t reveal his face, it only revealed mine as I stood hypnotised by the wall to my left, where Mrs Penny had written in lipstick ‘I am me’ over and over again, until the multicoloured cursive shapes merged into a tangled mess of expression that hauntingly said, ‘Am I me’.
I was transfixed by the possibility of imagination within this home, no matter how strange it appeared to be. This wasn’t the quiet symmetry of my everyday: the rows of terraced houses with their rectangular gardens and the routines as reliable as sturdy chairs. This wasn’t the world in which things matched, or even went with. This was a world devoid of harmony. This was a world of drama, where comedy and tragedy fought for space.
‘There are givers and takers,’ said Mrs Penny as we sat down to sweets and squash. ‘I’m a giver. What are you, Elly?’
‘She’s a giver, Mum,’ said Jenny Penny protectively.
‘Women are givers, men are takers.’ So said the oracle.
‘My dad gives a lot,’ I said. ‘Gives all the time, in fact.’
‘Then he’s a rare bird,’ she said, and quickly changed the subject to something that no one could contradict. When Jenny Penny left the room her mother reached for my hand and asked if I’d ever had my palm read. She was highly skilled at reading palms, she said, tarot cards and tea leaves too. She could read anything; it was her gypsy blood.
‘Books?’ I asked naïvely.
And she blushed and laughed, and her laugh sounded angry.
‘Come on, girls,’ she said as Jenny reappeared. ‘I’ve had enough of your boring games, I’m taking you out.’
‘Where to?’ asked Jenny Penny.
‘Surprise,’ her mother said, in that awful singsong way of hers. ‘You like surprises, don’t you, Elly?’
‘Um,’ I said, not really sure that in her hands I did.
‘Here – coats!’ she said, and threw ours at us as she stormed towards the front door.
She drove badly and erratically, and used her horn as a battering ram to push in and around wherever it was necessary. The dented trailer clattered behind us and swung dangerously around corners, riding up on the pavement, missing pedestrians’ feet by inches.
‘Why don’t
we take it off?’ I’d suggested at the start.
‘Can’t,’ she said, revving into first. ‘It’s attached. Soldered on. Where I go, it goes. Like my girl,’ and she laughed loudly.
Jenny Penny looked down at her shoes. I looked down at mine too. I saw a floor cluttered with Coca-Cola cans and tissues and sweet wrappers and something odd that looked like a flaccid balloon.
We saw the church up ahead and, without signalling, turned sharply into the car park. Horns blared. Fists were threatening.
‘Fuck off!’ shouted Mrs Penny as she parked badly behind the hearse: a gaudy expression of life, mocking the transport of the departed. She was asked to move. She did it begrudgingly.
‘House of God,’ she said. ‘What does He care?’
‘He doesn’t,’ said the funeral director. ‘But we can’t get the coffin out.’
We walked into church, Mrs Penny between us, holding our hands, her body bent forwards in an embodiment of sadness. She ushered us into the pew and handed round tissues. Looked up and smiled gently at the truly bereaved. She marked down the corners of the hymn book in preparation for song and threw down the hassock, on which she knelt in prayer. Her actions were fluid and graceful – professional, even? – and from her mouth came a strange whispered reverie, unstoppable even on the intake of breath, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked as if she truly belonged.
As the church slowly filled up, Jenny Penny pulled me towards her and motioned me to follow. We slipped out and crept along the side wall until we came to a heavy wooden door that said: Choir Room. We entered. It was empty and felt airtight. Uncomfortable.
‘Have you done this before?’ I asked. ‘Been to a funeral, I mean?’
‘Once,’ she said, not that interested. ‘Look!’ She wandered over to the piano.
When God Was a Rabbit Page 4