Lucky Bunny (9780062202512)

by Dawson, Jill

  So we’re now piling into the same car that slid up to me in the West End a week ago, and we’re off to Waterden Road, only this time it’s Dad who is driving, not Sly Roger, and “Look at you! All suited and booted,” Gloria says to him admiringly, as she climbs in, but he’s just staring stubbornly ahead, teeth clamped on his cigarette; he’s not wisecracking, not smiling.

  It’s a squash. Cigarettes and lily of the valley mixed with the perfumed chocolates—rose and violet creams—being passed around from a padded lilac box. I crack one against my tongue and the sweet violet perfume floods out. The taste is a sad memory, strange. Like eating Nan.

  Annie has on this emerald green jacket and skirt in bobbly material with flaps on the pockets and a collar of fur, and her hair piled up in not quite such a bird’s nest as usual, she’s curled it into ginger sausages; and Gloria has her fur on again and the cherry-red lipstick, and Beattie is all blond and sparkly with a big diamond necklace and she’s brought her sister Dolly—another of the Green Bottles—and they’re both in black velvet and golden silk blouses, with ruffles frothing out of the buttons at the top and little gold satin flowers on their hats, all cock-eyed at a funny angle (but they say it’s deliberate), and I’m all dressed up, too, in my new dress, the brown pinafore. Gloria did my hair for me and patted powder from her compact on my cheeks and wet a tiny brush on her tongue, dipped it in a square of black she has, and said, “Look up,” and as I did, she brushed it across my eyelashes. She hands me her compact to admire the effect: spidery lashes, like Vivien Leigh. Whenever I blink I can see them: black spots, in front of my eyes.

  Everyone is shrieking and laughing. The noise is deafening. It seems to go on and on, the celebrating, everyone happy and shouting for no reason. Bobby says they’re Raving Bonkers. Bobby seems in a bad mood all the time these days and the only thing I can think is that he’s jealous. Jealous of the way the Green Bottles treat me, jealous of the fact that I stayed home and he went to Ely, even though that’s stupid, because it was him who wanted to go.

  Now our car is crawling along the Waterden Road; we’re going to have to get out and walk, there’s such a crush outside the stadium. Crowds make me nervous these days, but there’s no point in saying so. No one wants to talk about Nan, or be reminded of her, and even though Beattie and Dolly lost someone in the tube that day, too, another sister I think, they won’t talk to me about it. I haven’t seen Bobby since this morning. “What do you want to go with that lot for?” he says, when I tell him I’m off with the Green Bottles to the Dogs finally.

  He’s been working at the Dogs on Saturdays and any other day he can bunk off from school. He’s one of the youngest, but he takes it really seriously, being a kennel boy, he likes it, but I do hear him whining sometimes, arguing with Dad about it, and I realize that Dad and Uncle Charlie are asking Bobby to do things, and Bobby doesn’t want to.

  This morning he was in our bedroom, all important, eleven years old and getting ready to go to work, laying out his money on the bedspread, ten one-pound notes. When I go to touch one, he put his hand over mine.

  “Hands off of my money! I earned that. You go and get your own.”

  Bobby’s quirks are getting worse. Like he’s convinced the color yellow is unlucky, and if I wear a yellow dress he pulls a face and scowls at me and tells me to burn it and wear something else. The notes lay there, lazily, flatly, like they didn’t care if I touch them or not.

  “I only want to look,” I told him crossly. “I don’t need your blinkin’ money. The Green Bottles will get me jellied eels or anything else I want.”

  He snorted, gathered up the notes.

  “Got any tips?” I asked him.

  He looked funny then. Like he couldn’t make up his mind what to tell me. Or maybe, thinking about it now, what he was going to do. I’ve puzzled about it, and the look he gave me, and tried to remember the exact words. He didn’t sound unfriendly, suddenly. “British Girl. She’s a grand bitch. A railer.” That was the first bit. And then something like: “But never put nothing on her. No matter what anyone says. No one knows what will happen. Never listen to Dad.”

  “I never listen to Dad,” I said. Although being such a daddy’s girl, of course that wasn’t true. I’d always believe him the cleverest. Especially about dogs.

  Now I’m thinking about how different Bobby seems since coming back from the farm, and why that might be. He acts like it was me who wanted to be apart from him, when all the time it was his choice to go there and it’s me who should be feeling rejected. And he’s so superstitious, and sometimes acts like I’m unlucky. (I think this is his horrid way of blaming me for Nan.)

  He likes to use all these new dog terms to dazzle me, make me feel left out. Scrubbers, graders, railers, fliers, wide runners. He doesn’t seem such a little boy anymore; he likes throwing back his head to drop these Phosferine tablets into his mouth—he says they give him “pep”—and he’s still trying to follow that Jimmy around, the freckle-faced boxer one. He nicks Dad’s Brylcream to stick down his hair but he’s still so small—and I know it embarrasses him. He even smells different since working at the kennels: the dusty fur smell, the dog hairs and dog drool clinging to his clothes. His ears stick out worse than ever. Gloria calls him Toby Jug and tugs on one whenever she passes him. Then he blushes a hot red and I always feel sorry for him again, remember he’s my brother.

  I can’t see why he couldn’t give me an answer about which dog to put money on, and why he acted funny when I asked him. It’s his job, isn’t it? Now we’re pulling up next to a long queue of people outside the Hackney Wick stadium.

  “Head for the stand and I’ll go park the motor on Cassland Road,” Dad calls to Annie as the car door opens, and we spill out onto the street to join the crowds.

  “Why’d he bring the motor anyway . . . using up his ration?” Beattie asks, pressing down the ruffles at her throat and trying to stop them from exploding up over her mouth. Dolly laughs at her sister.

  “Why d’you think? Flash Harry . . . he’s only sorry he can’t park it in full view!” Dolly says, flicking her sister with her gloves, then fixing her hat again, to make it even more cock-eyed, just like a flying saucer lying there, and they tilt their heads together and giggle. I follow the others. We’re drawing every eye in the crowd towards us. Old men are laughing, calling out things and sidling up to Annie and the others; young men in uniforms, opening their cigarette boxes like they’re about to blow kisses from their palms, moving in close with flaring matches, close enough to gaze into the eyes of whichever of the Green Bottles they want to snap up.

  “Queenie! Hold onto me, sugar,” Gloria says, taking my hand as we go through the gates. Annie’s sausage-head and twig figure in her green skirt-suit disappears in the crowd of caps and shoulders but Gloria doesn’t click fast enough in her high courts to catch her. I wonder for a minute why it’s Annie, not Gloria, who is Dad’s girlfriend, when Gloria is so . . . sparkly and bubbly and sort of more alive. When Gloria is the one I like best. Maybe Dad doesn’t like makeup and big bosoms, I decide. He likes girls to be plain and simple, like Annie. Or slim and pretty the way Mum is, not all lipsticked and saucy.

  A powerful smell of vinegar floats up to me from someone’s fish and chips and my stomach rumbles but I’m shunted along and there’s no moment to stop and beg for a bag of chips or a little bag of shrimps. Gloria is leading me to the tea bar in the standing area. A big mass of old men in camel coats and hats are all swarming like a beehive. She’s lost the others but she doesn’t seem to care; she wants to buy me a soupy thick mug of tea, brown as the River Lea, and find out what Bobby said when he left the house this morning.

  “Come on, you can tell your best Green Bottle, your old friend Gloria, can’t you? I know they know. I know Bobby would of told you. Is he working for London Joe’s gang then or is it your dad?”

  I take a big gulp of tea and yelp where it scalds my tongue.
I’m thinking over what Bobby said, and why I was muddled.

  “Where’s your dad now, eh?” Gloria says. “He ain’t looking out for us, is he? He’s just thinking of hisself, doing his own little bit of business . . . me and you, we should stick together.”

  I look around for Dad and see his hat in the distance, amongst a crowd of men’s shoulders. A few moments ago he pressed a coin into my hand and said, “Be lucky, darling.” I sip the thick tea and my nose is crowded with Gloria’s perfume and the tobacco and salt and excitement in the air, and I wonder which of the Green Bottles is the best way to get to see Mum: Annie or Gloria?

  “Well, Bobby . . . he did tell me something,” I begin.

  “I knew it!” Gloria squeaks.

  She twirls me around, trying to steer me away from the crowd at the tea bar and towards the bookie’s pit.

  “But, Gloria, if I tell you, will you promise—”

  “Port and lemonade, girls?” butts in an American with a newly shaved chin, like a shiny side of boiled ham. He’s smiling a toothy grin at Gloria. “Sherry, honey? What can I get you?”

  Gloria shakes her head smartly without even glancing at him and crouches down beside me again. She seems very surprised.

  “OK, what is it? You little—you’re a right one, ain’t you?”

  “Can I go visit Mum?”

  Gloria straightens up. She squeezes her fur coat a little tighter over her cleavage, and the silver locket she wears slithers between her huge bosoms.

  “Gawd—in that place? Are you sure? But you’d better be right then, and be quick, too. Your dad ain’t going to give me the nod, that’s certain. Always has his favorites, does Lucky Boy . . .”

  And so I tell her what Bobby said. That he started to hint that British Girl was a good bet but then he seemed to change his mind and told me not to bet at all.

  “Bobby’s lost his bottle,” Gloria says, mysteriously.

  I do know that Bobby’s been doping dogs for weeks. He loves to tell me his tricks: a straw in one of the dogs’ eyelids so that it blinked throughout the race, or chloretone wrapped up inside the sausage of another one. Tying up the dog’s balls. Feeding them just before a race slows them down; that’s the easiest way. Chloretone is usually for travel sickness in people, but it makes the dog’s blood pressure rise when it first shoots out, Bobby says. They look good at first, but soon fade.

  “So. It’s whether Bobby does what he’s been told or not? That’s a toughie. Must of told him to dope all the others.”

  I don’t know what she means. I wish I’d been concentrating when Bobby talked to me, instead of wondering why things weren’t quite the same between us since . . . since that day in the Bethnal Green shelter.

  “No one can resist your dad, know that, Queenie? I don’t know what it is about that fella. Luck of the devil.”

  I wait by the tea stand, wondering at this, while she flounces down to the bookie’s pit, nearly tripping over herself to get a bet on before the traps come up. “You’re sure?” she asks, coming back, staring at me. I’m not sure, so I shake my head but she accepts this, and turns to look at her race card.

  I don’t like trailing behind her now to watch the race. I’m wondering about what she said about Dad: that no one can resist him. Women do usually like him, they look at him, it’s true, I’ve noticed that. I glance over at Dad, talking with a bookie. I wish Dad would look my way, flash the full beam of his smile towards me and ruffle my hair and snuggle my head towards his shoulder.

  As the lights dim and the buzz of people quietens to a sizzle, all eyes pinned on the traps lifting and the dogs exploding out of them, I’m still puzzling over Bobby and Dad and me and how it got to be so complicated. I’m wondering if I did the wrong thing in telling Gloria, but I hope she’ll keep her promise.

  Five out of the six races have run. It’s the sixth coming up and the dog in trap two, wearing blue, thank God, Bobby’s lucky color, is British Girl.

  Gloria slipped away minutes ago to place her bet. Dad is staring at his race card and smoking one after another cigarette, trying to seem casual and playful and at the same time, not really bothering to talk to anyone, or answer Annie’s questions. We’re milling close by the track, all of us (except Dad) eating shrimps with our little wooden forks and chatting, hemmed in on all sides by the shoulders of men in uniforms and GIs and the jewel colors of the women’s jackets; the sudden laughter and excited shouting. Gloria is busy plucking the heel of her shoe from the grass and doesn’t look anybody else in the eye. Dad keeps his nose in his race card but he looks up when Annie says, “The Flying Squad’s here. NGRC. Did you reckon on that?”

  She says it nastily, crossly, and Dad looks up, pretending to be unbothered. He puts a finger in one of her sausage curls, which has unraveled and is bouncing down around her ear.

  “Relax . . .” He glances down at me, and then moves closer, to whisper something in Annie’s ear.

  “ . . . it don’t stay in the system . . . they can’t test for it,” I catch.

  “That what Bobby says? Or do you know?”

  I notice that Gloria is holding her little wooden fork in midair, closing her mouth thoughtfully around a shrimp and listening.

  “He’s a dead cert. Mad March Hare. He’s like Mick the Miller—he’ll be a Derby winner one day,” Dad says, loudly, lighting up one of Buster’s Du Maurier cigarettes. I glance at him. Surely he’s not betting on Mad March Hare? It’s British Girl he’s meant to bet on, isn’t it? Then I wonder if he just says this to fool everyone, so the odds remain high, so no one bets on the real dead cert.

  Dad’s only pretending to read his race card. He lights another cigarette, shakes the match, grinds it under his foot. Sweat, a fine coating, shines along his forehead and his nose.

  Suddenly, I understand Gloria’s comments perfectly. In some dim place I think I did all along. It’s Dad who’s been putting Bobby up to it. And the only really chancy thing is whether Bobby did what he was told today, or thought better of it. Let Dad down. I feel certain I know which.

  “I didn’t put my money on nothing! Can I, Dad? Just the tote. Please, Dad.”

  “No—shh—come on, the hare’s running.”

  The crowd starts up the Derby roar. It’s such a quick thing, a race. There’s barely time to see the flash of ghostly dogs with their colored jackets—I’m stuck between the furs and leather of the dog men and women anyway—but one thing I do see, as they shoot round the bend, is that the dog in the blue, the dog out of trap two, British Girl, she’s flying, she’s leaving the rest way behind and Gloria can barely hide it, how hard she’s trying not to look excited.

  Mad March Hare, trap five, orange jacket, limps in fourth. Not quite last. He’d started off so well but there’s no mistaking it. He definitely fades.

  I glance at Gloria, who is staring at me and biting her lip until the lipstick comes off on her teeth. And I sneak a glance at Dad. He’s beaming. His face is lit up, like the sun. He flutters his race card to the wind; all the fun, all the jolly-boy let loose in him. He’s off right away, towards the bookie’s, towards the paying-out booths. Then he’s back, still grinning and trying not to grin, and giving my arm a squeeze and grabbing hold of Annie.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says, shoving through the crowds ahead of him.

  He’s so far ahead that I don’t see it. Gloria has disappeared; I think nothing of it—she must have gone to the Ladies.

  Then suddenly she’s back, and instead of looking happy, she looks at me so sadly that I know at once something frightening has happened. She puts a hand on my shoulder and keeps pushing me through the crowd, towards the exit, and I only turn around to say once, “Where’s Dad?” before I realize that once again, someone has been snatched from me.

  “Don’t fret, sugar, just keep walking towards the car,” Gloria says.

  Uncle Charlie drives us ho
me in Dad’s car, in a choked silence.

  Gloria had been to collect her winnings, and at that point, she says, she saw them. Dad and two undercover detectives ahead of us, suddenly bleeding obvious, in their new camel coats, smoking their cigars, trying to blend in. A couple of kennel boys with them, including Bobby. Gloria had blocked me seeing them, hustling me towards the car with Annie and Uncle Charlie.

  The car is full of hushed half sentences and strange conversation.

  “You think Bobby’s gone and grassed? How’d they connect it to Tommy?”

  Bitter remarks burst from Annie, then Beattie, like traps opening: “The bastard, the stupid bastard!” “I’d like to wring his jug-eared little neck.”

  They’re sure it’s Bobby’s fault and that, somehow, it’s no accident either. That Bobby got himself caught and along the way grassed up Dad and the trainer, too.

  I go over and over the conversation with Bobby, in my mind, trying to remember his instructions. I glance at Gloria, at her now, her profile beside me, the little brooch shaped like a sea horse in diamante on her collar. She’s a proper little actress, like Mum said of me once. She’s trying to act sorry about Dad, and sorry about Bobby, and maybe she is, but she’s full of deceit, too: her face tells me that.

  What did Bobby mean for me to do? He definitely said, “No one knows what will happen. Never listen to Dad.” Don’t put money on. But it seems like Gloria and Dad won, so Bobby must have changed his mind. Or maybe, as Gloria said, Bobby meant to disobey, but in the end, just couldn’t resist Dad. Luck of the blinkin’ devil. It’s such a puzzle that my head spins, and I sit beside Gloria, at least relieved that she doesn’t join in when Annie and Beattie say horrid things about Bobby.

  Bobby wouldn’t grass, would he? He’s still family, even if he is in one almighty sulk. And he’s not stupid either . . . so how could he get caught? And where are they now, Dad and Bobby? Gloria says it’ll be Shoreditch Station. “Let’s pray they ain’t got nothing on them,” she says. Gloria’s winnings—I glance at her again and she is glowing—how much are they? How much did Gloria win?