My mother turned towards the sink and wiped her cheek. A tear maybe? I realised it was because my brother had never equated himself with the word happy before.
I put god to bed with his usual late-night snack. His hutch was on the patio now, shielded from the wind by the new fence the neighbours had put up, the neighbours we didn’t know too well, who had moved in after Mr Golan. Sometimes I thought I could still see his old face peering through the fence slats, the pale eyes that had the translucency of the blind.
I sat down on the cold patio slabs and watched god’s movement under the newspaper. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders. The sky was dark and vast and empty and not even a plane disturbed that sullen stillness, not even a star. The emptiness above was now mine within. It was a part of me, like a freckle, like a bruise. Like a middle name no one acknowledged.
I poked my finger through the wire and found his nose. His breath was slight, warm. His tongue insistent.
‘Things pass,’ he said quietly.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘A bit,’ he said, and I pushed a carrot baton through the wire.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Much better.’
I thought it was a fox at first, the snuffling, the sound of dislodged leaves and I reached for an old cricket bat that had been left out since the previous summer. I made my way towards the sound, and as I got near to the back fence I saw her body fall from the shadows, a pink furry heap now prostrate on a bale of straw. She looked up at me, her face smudged with dirt.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said as I helped her up and brushed the leaves and twigs from her favourite dressing gown.
‘I had to get out, they’re arguing again,’ she said. ‘They’re really loud, and Mum threw a lamp at the wall.’
I took her hand and led her back up the path towards the house.
‘Can I stay over tonight?’ she asked.
‘I’ll ask my mum,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she’ll say yes.’ My mother always said yes. We sat down next to the hutch and huddled against the cold.
‘Who were you talking to out here?’ Jenny Penny asked.
‘My rabbit. It speaks, you know. Sounds like Harold Wilson,’ I said.
‘Really? Do you think he’ll talk to me?’
‘Dunno. Try,’ I said.
‘Hey, rabbity rabbit,’ she said, as she prodded him in the stomach with her chunky finger. ‘Say something.’
‘Ouch, you little shit,’ said god. ‘That hurt.’
Jenny Penny waited quietly for a moment. Then looked at me. Waited a moment more.
‘Can’t hear anything,’ she finally said.
‘Maybe he’s just tired.’
‘I had a rabbit once,’ she said. ‘When I was really little, when we lived in a caravan.’
‘What happened to it?’ I asked, already sensing the strange inevitability of it all.
‘They ate it,’ she said, and a lone tear tracked down her muddy cheek to the side of her mouth. ‘They said it had run away, but I knew the truth. Not everything tastes like chicken,’ and she’d hardly finished the sentence before the white skin of her knee was exposed to the cold night air and she ran it viciously across the rough edge of the paving slab. Blood appeared instantly; ran down her plump shin to her ragged ankle sock. I stared at her, both attracted and repulsed by the suddenness of her violence, by the calm now sweeping across her face. The back door opened and my brother walked out.
‘Christ, it’s freezing out here! What are you two doing?’
And before we could answer he looked down at Jenny’s leg and said, ‘Shit.’
‘She tripped,’ I said, not looking at her.
My brother bent down and held her leg up to the shaft of light emanating from the kitchen.
‘Let’s see what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘God, that’s messy. Does it hurt?’ he asked.
‘Not any more,’ she said, stuffing her hands into her overly large pockets.
‘You’ll need a plaster,’ he said.
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Maybe two.’
‘Come on then,’ he said, and he lifted her up and held her against his chest.
I’d never thought of her as young before. There was something ageing about her nocturnal existence, about her self-sufficiency enforced by neglect. But that night, nestled against him, she looked small and vulnerable; and wanting. Her face rested peacefully against his neck; her eyes closed to the sensation of his care as he carried her inside. I didn’t follow them straight away. I let her have her moment. That uninterrupted moment when she could dream and believe that all I had was hers.
A few day later my brother and I awoke to shouts and terrifying screams. We converged on the landing holding an array of makeshift weapons – I, a dripping toilet brush; he, a long, wooden shoehorn – until my father raced up the stairs followed by my mother. He looked pale and gaunt, as if, in the hours between asleep and awake, he’d lost a stone in weight.
‘I said it, didn’t I?’ he told us, the fog of madness obscuring the familiarity of his features.
My brother and I looked at each other.
‘I said we’d win, didn’t I? I am a lucky man. A blessed man, a chosen man,’ and he sat down on the top stair and wept.
Heaving sobs tore at his shoulders, loosening years of torment, and momentarily his esteem seemed buoyed by the magic of that slip of grid paper held between his thumb and forefinger. My mother caressed his head and left him, foetus-like, on the stairs. She led us into their bedroom, which still smelt of sleep. The curtains were drawn, the bed scruffy and cold. We were both strangely nervous.
‘Sit down,’ she said.
We did. I sat on her hot-water bottle and felt its lingering warmth.
‘We’ve won the football pools,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘Blimey,’ said my brother.
‘What’s wrong with Dad then?’ I said.
My mother sat down on the bed and smoothed the sheets.
‘He’s traumatised,’ she said, not hiding the fact that he clearly was.
‘What does that mean?’ I said.
‘Mental,’ whispered my brother.
‘You know what your father thinks about God and stuff like that, don’t you?’ she said, still looking down at the area of sheet that had hypnotised her hand into slow circular movements.
‘Yes,’ my brother said. ‘He doesn’t believe in one.’
‘Yes, well, now it’s complicated; he’s prayed for this and he’s been answered and a door has opened for your father, and to walk through that door he knows he’ll have to give something up.’
‘What will he have to give up?’ I asked, wondering if it might be us.
‘The image of himself as a bad man,’ said my mother.
The football pools win was to remain a secret to everyone outside of the family, except Nancy, of course. She was on holiday at the time in Florence with a new lover, an American actress call Eva. I wasn’t even allowed to tell Jenny Penny, and when I kept drawing piles of coins just to give her a clue, she took it as a coded message to steal money from her mother’s purse, which she duly did, and exchanged for sherbet dabs.
Excluded from talking about our win to the world outside, we stopped talking about the win to our world inside, and it soon became something that had momentarily happened to us, rather than the life-changing event most normal people would have allowed it to be. My mother still looked for bargains in the shops and her frugality became compulsive. She darned our socks, patched our jeans, and even the tooth fairy refused to reimburse me for a particularly painful molar, even when I left it a note saying that every additional day accrued interest.
One day in June, about two months after ‘the win’, my father pulled up in a brand-new silver Mercedes with blacked-out windows, the type usually reserved for diplomats. The whole street came out to witness the brutality of such ostentation. When the door opened and my father stepped out, the street echoed with the so
und of broken teeth as jaws dropped to the floor. My father tried to smile and said something wan, something about a ‘bonus’, but unknown to him he had inadvertently climbed onto that ladder reserved for the élite, and was already looking down on the kind familiar faces he’d shared years of his life with. I felt embarrassed and went inside.
We ate dinner in silence that evening. The subject on everyone’s lips was ‘that car’, and it soured the taste of every morsel that passed it. Finally, my mother could stand it no more and calmly asked, ‘Why?’ as she got up to get another glass of water.
‘I don’t know,’ said my father. ‘I could, so I did.’
My brother and I looked to my mother.
‘It’s not us. That car is not us. It stands for everything ugly in this world,’ she said.
We turned to my father.
‘I’ve never bought a new car before,’ he said.
‘It’s not the newness of the car, for God’s sake! That car’s a bloody down payment on a house for most people. That car says we are something that we’re not. That car is not a car, it’s a bloody statement of all that’s wrong in this country. I shall never ride in it. Either it goes or I shall.’
‘So be it,’ said my father, and he got up and left the table.
Awaiting my father’s choice of Wife or Wheels, my mother disappeared, leaving only a note that said: Don’t worry about me. (We hadn’t been, but it suddenly made us.) I shall miss you, my two precious children – the bold omission of my father hovering in the air like the smell of last Christmas’s festering Stilton.
During this period of trial separation, my father drove to his Legal Aid position undaunted by his sudden singleness, and brought an unquestioning glamour to the potholed car park his offices shared with a greasy spoon. Criminals would enter and openly ask for the lawyer ‘who’s got them wheels outside’. They saw it as a badge of success, not knowing that the only person wearing it had never felt more of a failure.
One night he stopped me in the kitchen and asked me about the car.
‘You like it, don’t you, Elly?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘But it’s a beautiful car.’
‘But no one else has got one,’ I said.
‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it? To stand apart and be different?’ he said.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, quite aware of my own muted need to fit in, somehow simply to hide. ‘I don’t want people to know I’m different.’
And I looked up and saw my brother standing in the doorway.
As my family fell apart, so did my school life. I happily abstained from reading and writing projects by wilfully letting the teacher know that there were domestic problems in our household, and I took every opportunity to embrace the possibility that I too might come from a broken home. I told Jenny Penny that my parents were probably divorcing.
‘How long for?’ she asked.
‘As long as it takes,’ I said, repeating my mother’s dramatic, final words; the words I’d overheard her say, as she closed the front door defiantly in my father’s face.
I was quite happy in this new life, just Jenny Penny and me, and we would go and sit in the bottom shed, a welcome quiet away from the chaos and unhappiness that being rich had somehow instilled. My brother had made it comfortable inside, and there was a small electric heater that god always liked to sit in front of whilst his fur cooked and gave off a sour smell. I sat on the fraying armchair that used to be in our lounge, and offered Jenny Penny the old wooden wine crate. I pretended to order vodka martinis from our invisible waiter: the drink of the rich, my brother used to say, the drink of the sophisticate. The drink that would one day mark the start of my eighteenth birthday celebrations.
‘Cheers!’ I said and took a sip.
‘Cheers,’ she said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘You can tell me anything, you know,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said, and pretended to finish off her martini.
‘What is it?’ I asked her again.
She looked more pensive than usual.
‘What’ll happen to me if your mum and dad split up for good? Who will I go with?’ she asked.
What could I say? I hadn’t even made the choice myself. There were pros and cons to both my parents and my list was far from complete. I handed her god instead, who was starting to give off his rather pungent scent. He comforted her instantly, and tolerated the harsh, abrasive groping of her chubby fingers, as tufts of his fur fell carelessly to the ground.
‘Ouch,’ he said, ‘not a-bloody-gain. Arse. Ouch.’
I bent down to pick up my glass and as I did, I noticed a magazine part hidden under the chair. I knew what it was before I opened it – could tell by the cover – but I opened it nevertheless, and ran my eyes over an assorted display of nude bodies doing various things with their private parts. I didn’t know vaginas and penises were used in those ways, but by that age, I’d understood that people had a fondness for touching them.
‘Look at that,’ I said to Jenny Penny as I held the picture in front of her face. But she didn’t look. Or laugh. Or say anything actually. She did something quite unexpected. She burst into tears and ran.
I found her huddled in the shadow of the almond tree, halfway down the alley where we’d once found a dead cat, poisoned probably. She looked scrappy and orphaned in the twilight, surrounded by the scent of urine and shit as it conspired with the warm breeze. Everyone used the alleyway as a toilet or a dumping ground for the no-longer-useful. I sat down beside her and moved her hair away from her mouth, away from her pale brow.
‘I’m going to run away,’ she said.
‘Where to?’
‘Atlantis,’ she said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘No one really knows where it is,’ she said, ‘but I’ll find it and then I’ll go and then they’ll worry,’ and she looked at me and her dark eyes melted into the deep, shadowed sockets.
‘Come with me,’ she pleaded.
‘OK, but not before next week,’ I said (knowing that I had a dental appointment), and she agreed, and we leant our backs against the fence and inhaled the smell of its recent creosote coating. Jenny Penny looked calmer.
‘Atlantis is special, Elly. I heard about it recently. It was sunk by a huge tidal wave quite a few years ago and it’s a magic place with magic people. A lost civilisation probably still alive,’ she said. I sat transfixed by the surety in her voice; it was hypnotic; otherworldly even. Made everything possible.
‘There are lovely gardens and libraries and universities, and everyone is clever and beautiful, and they are peaceful and help each other and they have special powers and know the mysteries of the Cosmos. We can do anything there, be anything, Elly. It’s our city and we’ll be really happy.’
‘And all we have to do is find it?’ I said.
‘That’s all,’ she said, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. And I must have looked doubtful because it was at that moment that she suddenly said, ‘Watch this!’ and performed the magic trick of pulling the fifty-pence piece out of her plump arm.
‘Here,’ she said, handing me the coin.
I held it in my hand. It was bloody and warm, as if of her essence, and I half expected it to disappear, to simply melt into the weirdness of the night.
‘Now you can trust me,’ she said.
And I said I did, as I looked down at the strange coin with the even stranger date.
My mother returned eight days later, more refreshed than when she’d had her lump removed. Nancy had taken her to Paris, where they’d stayed in St-Germain and met Gérard Dépardieu. She arrived with bags and clothes and new make-up, and looked ten years younger, and when she stood in front of my father and said, ‘Well?’ we knew immediately that he’d lost. He said nothing, and after that afternoon we never saw the car again. In fact, we were never allowed to talk about the car again without my fath
er falling into an abyss of shame and a sudden selfinduced amnesia.
My parents were writing Christmas cards together in the dining room and, bored by my own company and lack of my brother’s, I decided to go to the shed instead and look at the remaining pages of the magazine I’d carefully put back for another day.
The garden was dark and shadows of trees bent towards me in the breeze. There were bright hard berries on the holly and everyone said it would snow soon. The anticipation of snow was as good as the reality at that age. My father had made me a new sledge in preparation and I could see it propped up by the side of the shed, its metal runners waxed and shining ready for the glide. As I passed by the shed window, I saw flickering torchlight within. I picked up a stray cricket stump and slowly made my way to the door. It was hard to open the door quietly because it stuck halfway on the concrete step, and so instead I pulled the door quickly towards me and saw the fractured image of Charlie on his knees in front of my shivering, naked brother. My brother’s hand caressing his hair.
I ran. Not because I was scared, not at all – I’d seen that interaction in the magazine; a woman was doing it that time and maybe someone was watching, though I couldn’t be sure – but I ran because I’d trespassed on their clandestine world, and I ran because I realised it was a world that no longer held a place for me.
I sat in my room and watched the clock rotate a slow languid hour as the carols from downstairs grew loud. My mother was singing along as if she was in a choir; being rich made her sing more confidently. I was asleep when they came in. My brother woke me up; he only did that when it was important. Budge up, they said, and they both squeezed into my bed, bringing the cold from outside.
‘You can’t tell anyone,’ they said.
‘I won’t,’ I said.
‘Promise?’
‘Promise,’ I said, and I told my brother I’d seen it all before anyway, in the magazines in the shed. He said they weren’t his and together we said, ‘Oh,’ as the awful realisation dawned on us that they were probably the quiet consolation of our father. Or our mother. Or maybe both. Maybe the shed had been the scene of the amorous lead-up to my conception, and I suddenly felt guilty about the uncontrollable urges that hid in the tree of my genealogy.
When God Was a Rabbit Page 6