Lucky Bunny (9780062202512)

by Dawson, Jill

  Moll stood there with a cigarette in one hand, a leaflet in the other, and fanned her face with it, and she suddenly seemed all whipped up in a hot angry feeling and she’s saying, “Shall I then, shall I send ya?”

  At home, once her mood was quiet again and she had her feet up and her nose in My Weekly, I read the leaflet myself. It had a little crown at the top and an arc, a bit like a rainbow, and the words read, “EVACUATION—WHY AND HOW? Public Information Leaflet No 3. Read this and keep it carefully. You may need it.” The words were easy for me, the best reader in my class, in fact, Miss Clarkson said, the best little reader she’d ever come across. But even so. It made no sense. Why did we need to evacuate? I decided to ask Nan when next I saw her, on her weekly visit from Poplar to give me and Vera a bath (she’d given up on Bobby—who stank to high heaven—though if she could manage it she’d try and bring him a Knockout comic that was a few weeks old: she found them in a bin outside the shops on Well Street).

  I’d learned from Nan where Mum’s mood swings came from. If Mum had been to the shops and come back with a bottle in brown paper I knew she’d be merry for a while, squeezing our bottoms as she suddenly clutched us in a fierce squishy cuddle. Then she’d slump out, snoring, skirt all rucked up and her knickers on show, on the replacement sofa, a green thing with exploded insides that we rescued from a skip and smelled of dogs.

  Nan had said on her last visit that Dad was lucky to be inside because no one outside had a job anyway and knowing him he’d have only gone and fought the Blackshirts and got himself into more trouble. She saw him as “lucky” no matter what. She had a blind spot about Dad for all her goodness, but she didn’t know the half about the way we were living, about how hungry we were and how it was for Vera, and I never thought to tell her. What could she have done? She had no money, I knew that much. Only Dad could make a silver coin appear from nowhere.

  We were so poor by then. We were still living in that big house but every twig of furniture had been pawned and Moll had no idea, without Dad, how to do anything at all. There was nothing in for breakfast. There was no coal in the fire. We had long had to give back our fabulous new electric cooker that we’d been renting from the showroom, and the electric iron, too. The baby cried all night long, and Mum would sleep heavily through it, helped by a visit to Sly Roger and whatever gift he’d given her. Bobby and me took turns to walk Vera, to lift her from her crib and put her against our shoulders, the weight of her bouncing against us; to—when we felt really desperate—sneak our hand under Mum’s pillow, brave the stink of her breath, and dab at her gin with our fingers, so that we could let Vera suck on them to quieten her.

  That’s when I did it. The first time. It was a stroke of brilliance, if I say it myself. A talent I didn’t know I had was born.

  It’s like this: Bobby and I are running along Lauriston Road towards school. The bright green spire of St. John of Jerusalem church points up towards God in heaven. Bobby is nipping about in his monkey-boy style, sometimes jumping up from the pavement and scampering along a wall instead. We’ve had no breakfast, and we left Vera at home crying, snuggled up in bed with Mum, and something about this worries me; even though it’s the same every day, on this day I don’t feel good at all. We love to go to school, though Bobby has only just started and Mum is always trying to keep us home with her. Today she’s not fierce; she’s in one of her heavy moods. She’s slow and—well, I just don’t have a good feeling about her. Maybe she’ll roll over on Vera and crush her. I’m thinking of this and not really listening to Bobby, but then I do hear him, his little tuppence-ha’penny voice as he leaps down from a wall, saying, “I’m starving,” and, “My stomach’s aching.” As he says this, school is there, with its big arch and the word “BOYS” calling to Bobby, who is in the first year, the youngest class, but for some reason, I think it might be that I get a sniff of bread from the baker’s boy in his van, or just for mischief, I don’t know, I suddenly grab Bobby’s hand and snatch him away from that arch, and back the way we’ve come, running. Bobby laughs and follows me.

  We run back past the churchyard and the double-arched doorway of St. John of Jerusalem with its funny Jesus with his hand missing and the message saying, “I be not afraid,” and I think: right, I’m not, ta very much, I’m not afraid! And we run as far as Cassland Road, past privet hedges and gravestones and droopy bluebells in people’s gardens and dust bins, and tweety morning birds and propped-up bicycles, and past the stinky beer smell of the Albion pub, and past a sweep carrying all his brushes, and now there are no children going to school, and we’re on our own and the light is sticky, warm, and making you feel like you’re a wasp in a jar of honey.

  The milk van has already been up the street; the horse with its nose stuck in its nosebag. And on one of the steps of one of the fancier houses, in this little neat bit called Cassland Crescent, a maid or a housewife or someone has left it there on the step: a pint of milk sitting in a bottle with the top all curling and pecked by the birds. The street seems suddenly quiet. I look up and down it and don’t see a soul. I can’t even hear a dog barking, or the clop of the horse from the milk van, which must be long gone, away to Hackney Wick.

  Birds hold their breath, watching me. I’m listening to my own heartbeat. Bobby is bouncing on one leg, and then sniveling, and the white milk bottle smiles at me, glowing, handsome. Take me. I’m yours. Come on, gel. You can do it. Come on.

  I watch the long tall houses, staring down their noses at me, from the highfalutin street. I walk over towards the gate, and quietly undo the latch. The door is painted a color Nan always calls royal blue. It has one of those huge brass knockers, a lion’s head, but he’s just peering down towards the front step like he’s lost his body down there. Bobby is a stride away, one finger in his mouth. My heart is thumping: loud, now. Steady, though.

  So then I dart forward. I snatch at it, at the bottle, and it’s cold, the glass slippery. I hold it tight, clutch it to my chest and half-run, half-walk back towards the gate. I’m not sure if I imagine it, but there seems to be someone at the window of the house, or was there a voice, did someone shout, “Oi! You gel!”? I grab Bobby, almost spinning him round, and shove him towards Cassland Road, and in a kind of running walk, carefully so as not to drop the milk, I follow him.

  We stop then, in the doorway of a house on Gascoyne Road, and start laughing and shrieking, and Bobby is saying, “Give it, then, give us a drink!” and I’m scared I might drop it because it’s slippery and I’ve hugged it to me like a doll, or like my beloved white Bunny.

  We’ve found ourselves now far away from school and near to the Cawley Gate bit of Vicky Park. So we hop over the low fence, run towards the Vicky Fountain, and sit down behind it on the stone, right beneath the fat cherub riding an elephant. At least I think it’s an elephant—it could be a dolphin with teeth like a shark. But that would be silly.

  I pass the milk to Bobby, and let him take a sip.

  “Wonder if Flash Gordon has got himself to Mars?” Bobby says happily, after glugging a huge amount. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Give it me, then.” I take a sip myself.

  All the time we rushed away from that house, my heart was jabbering, sort of shouting at me. Something inside me rushing, rushing. Is my blood flowing faster? Something else, too. Something like the thing I described when Dad loses his temper. A feeling like shredding things, tearing things up, making them flutter in the wind. It’s such a blowy day, I notice suddenly. I glance around, at a stand of big trees near Victoria Park Road, staring down at me like a row of teachers. A paper bag bowls along between them. It doesn’t matter. They’ll never stop me. I can do it—do what I like. It’s mine, not theirs, this world, and I want it, I do, I do!

  It’s brilliant to watch Bobby put his mouth to the lip of the bottle and glug glug glug the milk down. His eyes wide and his ears waggling as he drinks, and his little nose all milky. He’s not a bit worr
ied about what I’ve just done; he’s too busy thinking about Flash Gordon. But I am, and not because I think I’ll get caught. I know that no one saw me. I can sit under this sign that reads something like, “For the love of God and the Gooded,” or does it even say, “For the love of God and Good Food”? Perfect! The words are a bit scratched out, being old.

  I let Bobby take his time, and slurp the rest when he’s ready. The reason I’m worried is because it was so easy and I know that this won’t be the last time. The world is full of milk on doorsteps. And bread left by the baker’s vans, and coal from the coal man. As long as I don’t pick the same doorstep, as long as no one spies me, I can do it every morning, can’t I? I can drink it then and there, the way the birds do sometimes, perching on rims to dip their heads in the skin of milk.

  Only yesterday we’d sat in St. John of Jerusalem, moss under our fingernails where we’d been picking it from the tops of walls, green smells under our noses, and the church organ plonking away and the vicar booming about Proverbs and saying, “Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.”

  Cheers, the poor and the needy. Ta very much. I be not afraid.

  I can take some home for Vera and say I found it, somebody left it behind. Finders keepers. It’s not as if Mum will ask. I don’t think I’ve eaten anything since the pie and mash that Nan brought us last Friday.

  So I’m thinking this on my way home, a little later that morning, as the clouds roll over the rooftops and everything, leaves, paper, is caught up and flapping, wheeling along as fast as a child’s hoop. I’m happily picturing Vera holding out her chubby little arms for a bottle of milk. I’m a bit surprised to see the knitted figure of Nan at the front door of our house, and see from the way she’s standing that she’s been there a while. I turn to go back, but she’s already spotted me and Bobby, who’s bouncing from one foot to the other behind me.

  She clacks her dentures at us as we get up close; moves the gobstopper to the side of her mouth so that it bulges scarily as she speaks, stretching her tortoise neck out.

  “And where you bin, my gel?”

  “School, course.”

  “School my arse. School’s the other way. It’s nearly ten o’clock. And where’s your mum? I can’t get an answer at this door. Is she in?”

  That scares me. As she says it I realize something: I’ve had this feeling, a cold stone-in-the-stomach kind of feeling, all morning, and I suddenly know that I didn’t want to go to school with Bobby to get away from it. And I did for a bit, there were stronger feelings, but now they’re gone and the stone in my stomach is back, all cold and heavy again. I don’t understand why, or what it was that I was dreading. I only know that now it’s happening. Something bad. Happening to Mum, or Vera.

  Nan gets her umbrella then and starts bashing the door. She peeks in at the window but the curtains are closed and all she can see is the backside of green velvet.

  “Might be asleep,” I say. “She was asleep when we left. She had Vera in bed with her.”

  Nan stops bashing the door and stares at me. She looks into my face for a minute. The gobstopper bulges in her cheek like a giant boil.

  “Had your mum . . . what kind of state was she in, when you two went out this morning?”

  I know what she’s asking but I can’t say it. Cat’s got my tongue.

  So now Nan seems really worried, and goes next door, and starts knocking on that door instead.

  Mr. Barry appears in his shirtsleeves. This is a posh street, not used to the likes of us. Mr. Barry is a night watchman and he sleeps in the day, so we’ve just woken him, too. He gives Nan a bad look, which Bobby and me can read perfectly well.

  “Molly. My daughter-in-law. I think she’s had an . . . accident,” Nan says, and I notice her voice changes a little, and she’s trying to speak “proper.” My stomach twists: I feel embarrassed for her.

  “You couldn’t . . . could you help us get inside?”

  Mr. Barry goes back inside his house without a word, and then he comes out again and says to Bobby and me, in a very important voice, “Stand Back, Children.”

  He has this big crowbar and he’s going to bash the door down. As he lifts it, swinging it behind him, Nan suddenly says, “I thought Moll might have given you a spare key?”

  At this, his missus, Glenda, appears, and after a chat it seems clear that Mum did give Glenda a spare key and the door is opened without the need to smash it up, and Mr. Barry puts his crowbar down and his handkerchief over his mouth and says, “What the—” and me and Bobby hang back and I know again, with the same stone-heavy feeling, that this is going to be as bad as Dad going away, maybe even worse. That something too bad to say has happened.

  And it has, because now Nan is in the front room and screaming, a sound I’ve never heard before, and Glenda is crying jesus christ almighty and they’re pushing us back outside into the front garden, and trying to block our eyes and not let Bobby squeeze under their legs and run back into the front room. I think that it’s Mum—Mum must be dead—and I start screaming, too, until Nan stops and her skin is the color of ash from the fire and she says sshh ssshhh and I do at last push past Nan’s knobbly knitted shape into the front room and I see then Mr. Barry is helping Mum up from the bed on the floor and she’s not dead, and I rush to her, and try to cuddle her; I bury my face in her legs in her shiny stockings, but she smells bad, really bad, like petrol or beer or something, but the crying is now from Nan, and Nan is holding my baby sister Vera, wrapped mostly in a sopping wet blanket, and the baby is all wrong, I can see that, with her head over to one side like a chicken when its neck is broken. Nan takes the baby and sits on the stairs, and now Mr. Barry is helping Mum over to their house, but I hear Glenda is asking if we have a telephone, does anyone have a telephone (we don’t) in the street? And I know she’s going to ring the Old Bill, that she’s going to tell them, to “grass,” which can only be a Terrible Thing.

  That night we spend at Nan’s, back at Canada Buildings. Mum is in hospital, and the cozzers are waiting to talk to her.

  Vera is in heaven. No one tells us why or what happened. Whenever I think of it, of what they were all trying to hide from us—we kept getting shooed back outside, onto the street, like we were chickens—I remember the kettle, and the fire in the grate, and then I have a funny surprise: Mum lit a fire? Mum got some coal from somewhere? Then I picture the kettle on its side, lying on the floor with no whistle in it, and remember there was water everywhere, as if it had been dropped from a long way. Mum’s mattress was on the floor in the front room where she always sleeps in the day and I saw that the bed was wet. Did she drop boiling water on Vera? Would that be enough to kill a baby? Vera did look terrible, her head a blackened red color—that was all I saw.

  But no one tells us. That night we sleep high up in Nan’s big bed, in her bedroom, the bed with the great black snaky springs, bursting through one little hole in the mattress at the bottom sometimes to poke at your foot. I usually loved Nan’s candlewick spread with the patterns to pluck at, and the tickly tassels that Bobby likes hiding under, and chewing. But I hardly sleep at all, because every time I close my eyes Vera rolls up, and she’s crying, and scolding me, and won’t stop.

  The next morning Nan says the welfare lady is coming to talk to us because Mum is going to be in a special hospital for a while and that we should be glad because it could be worse. We wonder how it could be worse.

  “Your dad’ll have to be told . . . and there’ll have to be a bleedin’ funeral for poor little Vera . . . and that ain’t no place for you nippers,” Nan says, eyes wet. The old tortoise seems older than ever—she hasn’t even done her hair, which bounces out from her ears like tufts of cotton wool now that it isn’t caught in a net, and I stare into her old blue eyes thinking: how many times has her face folded up that way, like a nice clean handkerchief, crumpled and crumpled in your hand? The welfare
lady wants to send us to Elephant and Castle to be with a foster family, Nan says, but she—Nan—has a better idea and will do her “bleedin’ best” for us. Nan’s legs are gnarly like a tree with veins and don’t work so well, and the dirt at our house is too much these days, even for her, she says, and she’d love to keep us, but she knows they’d never let her. If she makes a fuss they might send us to a home. I can’t believe those legs can hold her up at all, let alone take her up the flights of stairs she has to climb to get to her flat: they look so spindly, like twigs, so I know she’s telling the truth.

  Nan has been listening to the wireless and since May the government has been warning parents about something, about the “biggest sacrifice of all”: sending their children to the country. Sounds quite nice to me.

  She smiles a bit, ducking her head to look really closely at me and Bobby. There’s a huge creaky noise as she bends down to whisper in my ear, and a whiff of her, the perfume smell of parma-violet sweets: “And I’m telling you, at least you’ll get a bleedin’ wash there, and fed, too, and you can’t do any worse than Moll now, can you?” It sounds like a holiday, a trip to the country, Bobby says. He can’t wait.

  That night in Nan’s parma-violet-scented bed I have another horrible dream. Little Vera is an angel in heaven but she’s unhappy. She’s crying and waving her red arms—really in pain. In my hand I’m clutching a bottle of milk and I’m holding it out towards Bobby, and Vera is howling. Give me the milk! I’m the baby! What about me? Look what you’ve done.

  It’s my fault, I think. I’m the cleverest: I can see things differently from Bobby and Mum, and Nan. I’m more like Dad, I’m the one who does things. I’m the only one who can make things happen like he can: like he made a car appear from nowhere, and that’s my job, too.

  Waking up I remember something. “Like taking sweets from a baby.” I don’t know where I first heard that, but I picture the milk on the doorstep. How easy it was to nick it. And then more from that boring vicar, Proverbs again: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.” Yes. Bold as a lion—that’s me. Lying in the bed with Nan snoring beside me, a hot lump like a meat pie cooking, and Bobby’s elbow sticking in me on the other side, I think: I must take care of Bobby. And next time, when Mum is there, I’ll bring the milk home. If only I’d done it this time, I would have saved Vera. Next time I’ll bring home the bacon. Another funny sentence, heard somewhere, all mixing up. I want my mum, I’m thinking. I remember trying to hug her, at the house, trying to wrap my arms around her legs while they were taking her, and how she was being led by Mr. Barry, and how she stumbled against me and didn’t seem to see me and trod on my foot, and it hurt. I want Mum, I’m saying, into my pillow. Where is she? I don’t understand. Bad as Nan says you are, Mum, I want you.