When God Was a Rabbit

by Winman, Sarah

  Alan was waiting for us at Liskeard, as usual. But when he came down the slope with hands outstretched for handshakes and bags, I could tell he was different; the robust joviality was gone, his eyes heavy and dull. And as he was pulled towards my brother’s chest and embraced in a tight unforgiving clasp, he didn’t blush or pull away as he normally did, but offered himself up to the safe warmth of another’s hold.

  ‘All right, boys?’ he said as he took their bags and placed them in the boot.

  ‘Yeah,’ they said. ‘You?’

  No answer.

  We weaved through the familiar lanes with their tightly banked hedges and scattering colour of yellows and blues, and faintly tinged pinks, and we stopped and reversed more than usual as holiday-makers panicked in the face of an oncoming car. We passed the monkey sanctuary where years ago I saw an unprovoked attack on a man’s wig. And then as we turned onto the main road, Alan quietly reached for one of his fabled CDs, blew on its underbelly before slipping it seductively into his new state-of-the-art CD player, the one my father had bought as a surprise last Christmas.

  It was a song about a depressed man and his longing for a girl and her selfless love. We joined in as the second line began, and captured the mood – the anguished tone – in a frenzy of descant; and even the hairs on Alan’s forearms rose, in, what I believed to be at the time, indescribable pleasure.

  It was at the point, however, just after Mandy came, of course, and gave without taking, that Alan suddenly turned the music off. He said we were ruining it for him and he didn’t speak to us for the rest of the journey.

  (My father later told us that there was trouble in Alan’s marriage, or rather he’d brought trouble into his marriage in the form of a foxy little hairstylist from Millendreath. Her name was Mandi.)

  They waited for us at the top of the driveway, all four of them, like a motley picket line, holding tall glasses and a jug of Pimm’s instead of placards and banners, and sharing a roll-up cigarette, which at first we thought was a spliff, but soon realised it couldn’t be because my mother still had her top on.

  ‘What kind of shoddy welcome is this?’ said my brother as he jumped out of the car, and everybody laughed as if he’d just told the funniest joke in the world, as if that roll-up cigarette had actually been a spliff.

  We tried to persuade Alan to follow us down to the house for drinks but he wouldn’t, he just wanted to unload the bags and sulk. He drove back up the slope with the music blaring, and crunched into third gear a little too quickly and immediately stalled. In the heavy silence that surrounded him, the music echoed through the trees, pitiful and forlorn, wailing like an illdisguised omen. Oh Mandy.

  Oh Alan, I thought.

  I strode down to the jetty alone, disturbing a heron quietly lazing on the bank in the afternoon sun. I watched him take flight, groggy and lethargic, low over the water. I looked back up to the house and saw my mother framed in an upstairs window, preparing the rooms as she always did. And I remembered again the house as I first saw it as a nine year old, with its off-white peeling façade like a tatty crown on an uncared-for tooth, shadowed by ragged trees, and grieving the frail ruin at its side. I remembered again the sense of adventure that flooded my thoughts, the breathlessness of the what-ifs, the connection, the infinite connection to a horizon that reached beyond and whispered, Follow, follow, follow.

  I sat down on the grass, lay down until my back was wet, uncomfortable and wet, and the aching gratitude that burnt my eyes had rolled away. I’d been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew we wouldn’t. Nothing would. The world would be the same, just a little bit worse.

  My mother leant out of the window and waved; she blew kisses to me. I blew kisses back. She was about to embark on an MA, the secret dream that had so recently found voice, and she no longer saw Mr A and the contents of his wayward mind. Three months before, he’d fallen in love with a holiday-maker from Beaconsfield and had stopped his sessions immediately, giving credence to the myth that love cures everything (except perhaps the settlement of an outstanding bill).

  I stood up and ran back up the lawn towards the house and that upstairs room where I would shake the pillows and smooth the sheets and fill the jugs and arrange the flowers, and all just to be with her; to be with her with the something I could never tell her.

  ‘Arthur!’

  I shouted his name again and just as I unleashed the rope from its mooring loop and was about to give up, he appeared from his cottage and ran towards me with an empty, old rucksack bouncing on his back like a deflated blue lung.

  ‘Sure you want to come?’ I said. ‘You could stay with Joe and Charlie.’

  ‘They’re napping again,’ a touch of disappointment in his voice.

  ‘OK then,’ I said, and helped him carefully into the boat.

  He loved it when we all returned; he was nearly eighty but became a chameleon around us, and our youth became his. I pushed away from the bank. I didn’t start the engine immediately, but let us drift towards the central tidal flow where we said out loud as we always did, ‘All right, Ginger?’ And where we both felt the slight jolt of the boat; the swift acknowledgement of our words, caused not by wake, nor wind, nor shallows, but by the something other that outwitted proof.

  I slowed along the bank to pick blackberries and early damsons, and we hid under overhanging branches to look out for the large male otter my father reckoned he’d seen a few days before; a figment of his imagination really, a ploy I believed, to get us to really look once again, to soften the impenetrable gaze of the harried.

  ‘I’ve been getting dizzy,’ Arthur said, as he trailed his hand in the cool clear water.

  ‘What kind of dizzy?’

  ‘Just dizzy.’

  ‘Have you fallen?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Dizzy, not doddery.’

  ‘Have you changed your diet yet?’ I said, knowing full well he hadn’t; and he scoffed at such a suggestion, for it was as unworthy to him as a life without bacon and cream and eggs, utterly unthinkable.

  His cholesterol and blood pressure were as high as they could be; something he delighted in as if it had taken the utmost skill to get them to such dizzying heights. And he refused to take the tablets prescribed, because a few months before he’d secretly told me that he wasn’t going to die that way and so he didn’t need to take them, and instead reached for another scone dripping with jam and clotted cream.

  ‘Are you worried?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘So why are you telling me?’

  ‘Just filling you in,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Do you want me to do anything?’

  ‘No,’ he said, drying his hand on his sleeve.

  He’d started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric. I think it was because I knew everything about him, had read it all – the beautiful, the sordid, the all of his book. I had been his editor for five years, and now it seemed, had become his editor away from the printed page.

  ‘I’ll be back here in ten minutes,’ I said as I took the rucksack and climbed the vertical, rusty steps of the harbour wall. At the top, I stopped and watched him nervously manoeuvre the boat around two red buoys before he zigzagged out to sea, and I wondered if I’d see him again, or if he’d suffer once again the indignity of being led back into harbour by an irate coastguard deaf to his consoling pleas. In his imagination Arthur Henry was a seaman, competent and brave; but in reality nothing except terra firma could provide those qualities, and I knew he’d stop just beyond the harbour mouth and go round in circles until the ten minutes were up. And sure enough, by the time I’d descended the ladder weighed down by my order of packed ice and crabs and langoustines, sweat had appeared acr
oss his forehead and in the cleft of his bony chest, and he moved back swiftly to his position at the bow of the boat in a manner that said, Never again.

  We glided effortlessly across the glassy surface, the phut phut phut of the engine quiet and considered against the bustling backdrop of the tourist-crammed village.

  ‘Here, Arthur.’

  He sat up as I handed him an Orange Maid.

  ‘I thought you might have forgotten.’

  ‘Never,’ I winked, and he pulled out a handkerchief to catch the first of the drips.

  ‘Fancy a bite?’

  ‘It’s all yours,’ I said, as we veered left up the open sprawl of river towards home.

  They were dozing on the lawn when we returned and, seeing Charlie engrossed in a proof copy of his book, Benders and Bandits, Busboys and Booze, Arthur walked briskly up the slope and flopped eagerly into the unclaimed chair next to him.

  He leant towards him and said, ‘Where are you up to, Charlie?’

  ‘Berlin.’

  ‘Oh dear me,’ said Arthur, rather strangely adjusting the right leg of his oversized desert shorts. ‘Close your ears, Nancy!’

  ‘Oh, yeah right, Arthur,’ said Nancy, not looking up from her American Vogue. ‘Never lived, have I, sweetie?’

  ‘Not in a dark little room on Nollendorfstrasse,’ said Arthur, leaning back blissfully into his chair.

  My brother was in my father’s workroom. He didn’t turn round at first, so I watched him carving and chiselling, practising a simple tongue-and-groove joint. He’d made two already and they were balanced on the ledge above his head. He looked like my father in that dim light, the father I knew when I was small; the same silhouette, the hunched, curved back that never seemed to breathe, for breath disturbed precision, and precision in woodwork was everything.

  He was going to night school, learning furniture restoration, might learn more, he said. He’d given it all up, the life he’d run away to. Left his job on Wall Street, left the space in SoHo that sucked thousands every month, and he’d bought the townhouse in the Village, with its bird’s nest and ailanthus and its brown hall wall that we knocked down after Christmas. And he was restoring it by himself; had been restoring it room by room, month by month, in an unhurried tribute to its former state. This slow pace suited him, because there was now weight around his middle and the weight suited him, but that I would never say. And it was really only Charlie now who was his connection to the old life and the trading floors, to the constantly changing numbers and those early breakfasts at Windows on the World. Because it was Charlie who now worked in the South Tower, overlooking Manhattan from the eighty-seventh floor, an untouchable presence as I flew over New York, him King of the World.

  My brother rubbed his eyes. I turned on the light; he turned to me.

  ‘How long have you been there?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘Come here, sit down.’

  I went to the fraying armchair and brushed away the wooden curls that he’d planed from a piece of oak.

  ‘Drink?’ he said.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Time for Scotch. Come on, I found Dad’s stash.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wellington boot.’

  ‘So obvious,’ we both said.

  He poured out the Scotch into stained mugs, and we downed them in one.

  ‘Another?’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said, feeling my stomach recoil and churn at the smoky heat. I had eaten too little that day. I stood up, suddenly needing water.

  ‘Wait,’ he said, and held out his arm; told me to look behind. I turned, and there framed in the doorway was a large buck rabbit. It watched us with dark eyes as it nuzzled its way through sawdust and cuts of wood, debris and dust clinging to its chestnut-coloured fur. And as we watched it, the years peeled away and we became small again, and it brought something in with it, something we never talked about, the something that happened when I was almost six, when he was eleven. It was there as we watched it, and we knew because we both became quiet.

  I knelt down and held out my hand. Waited. The rabbit moved closer. I waited. I felt the cold twitching nose upon my hand, something warm, breath.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Joe.

  The sharpness of my turn caused the rabbit to run. I stood up and went over to my brother.

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘Back there. Behind the shelving. Dad must have kept it.’

  ‘Why would he keep it?’

  ‘Souvenir of a memorable day?’

  I took the large arrow head from him and turned it over. My father had encouraged Jenny Penny to make it that first Christmas. Helped her to saw the scrappy pieces of oak and to nail them together into the large pointed formation before me. She’d decorated one side with empty limpet shells and grey-only pebbles from the shore, and sprinkled it all with glitter. The surface of my palm shimmered in the light.

  ‘She’d wanted to be found,’ he said.

  ‘Everyone wants to be found.’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s the bit I always forget. We didn’t guess where she might be, we didn’t find her. She led us there.’

  ‘Where was it found that night? D’you remember?’

  ‘On the jetty. Pointing downriver . . .’

  ‘To the sea.’

  ‘I always thought she disappeared to hurt herself, or to kill herself. You know, a grand gesture, her refusal to go home. But now I see she simply led us to a place, to a moment, where she could show us how special she was. How different from everyone else she was.’

  ‘How chosen.’

  I felt uneasy. I clambered over the rocks to the furthermost point, where the craggy strand joined the sea. The tide was out – far out – and it wouldn’t have been an impossibility to have walked over to the island that afternoon; I’d done it before. I looked east over to the Black Rock, to its familiar shape rising from a bed of heaving dark. Prawning had been good this season; always sparked my childhood enthusiasm. Buckets full of the translucent greys, boiled on the beach. We could in those days – not now, of course.

  The sun felt hot. The familiar fetid arsestink of low tide. A strong briny smell on the wind. I threw a stone for a scampering mutt. Turned back; carefully retracing my footing. I realised the memory of that Christmas was as imprecise to my brother as it was to me. It was Jenny Penny who had instigated the search, and instigated her discovery, just as she had provoked the conversation the night she arrived.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ she’d asked loudly, silencing the hum of our familiar chatter.

  ‘Do we what?’ said my father.

  ‘Believe in God?’

  ‘That’s a big old question for a night like this,’ said Nancy. ‘Although to be fair, quite relevant for this time of year.’

  ‘Do you believe in God, Jenny?’ asked my mother.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘You seem very sure of that,’ said my father.

  ‘I am.

  ‘Why’s that, honey?’ asked Nancy.

  ‘Because he chose me.’

  Silence.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked my brother.

  ‘I was born dead.’

  And the table fell silent as she intimately described her birth, and the prayers, and the resuscitation that followed. And no one in our house slept that night. No one wanted to be absent in her presence – not through fear, but that she might show us something we weren’t ready to see.

  I sat on the wall and looked across the flattened tops of weeddraped rocks and knew how she’d walked on water that night. I’d known it for years now, but I saw how carefully she must have noted the staggered formation, the isolated pathway that had collaborated with her that night, and had given her momentary surety of footing.

  I’d come over the hill, I remember, breathless from my panicked run. She’s here! I shouted to my brother; and I saw her looking back at us; not running from us, but waiting for our audience, before sh
e started her slow trajectory across the barely submerged rocks, into the oncoming waves.

  ‘I’m never going home, Elly.’ That’s what she’d said the day before, but I didn’t take her seriously – thought it was the anticlimax, the malaise of Boxing Day that was affecting her.

  She’d left notes around the house, around the garden, tied onto the bare branches of fruit trees. We thought it was a game – it was a game – but we thought it was a game whose ending would bring a joyous relief; a shared Well done! My turn now! But then it changed. It grew dark, and we grew fearful. My parents and Nancy headed into the forest and up the valley into neighbouring terrain, where boggy earth could ambush even the careful-footed-sighted. Alan took the roads leading to Talland, Polperro, Pelynt. He later took the road that carved through the village, intending to follow its winding path into Sandplace. We were on the bridge when we flagged him down. The three of us. Joe, me and her. Silent, shivering, unimpressed.

  She would give no answers to my parents’ anguished questions. Sat in front of the fire instead and lifted a blanket over her head, refusing to talk. Her mother was called that night – my parents had no choice – and her fate was seamlessly sealed.

  ‘There’ll be no train ride home for her now, no way. No, Des’s back. You remember Des? My ex of a few years ago. He’s been with me a while now. Oh, didn’t she say? Well, he said he’ll drive down tomorrow and pick her up.’

  Des, Des. Uncle Des.

  The one who chose her.