Lucky Bunny (9780062202512)

by Dawson, Jill

  It looks a long way down. There’s a couple of bins I can head for to break my fall, which will have to be face first. I’ve wiggled out far enough to the waist to free my arms and shoulders and find myself where I hoped I would be, in an area that stinks of bad drains—the rear entrance to the court just like Stella described it—and so there’s nothing for it but to push myself forward and try to steady myself as I land crashing onto the nearest bin. I wipe my stinging, greasy hands on my slacks and take a couple of heaving breaths, bending double. I try and pull myself together, look around.

  Where’s the wall Stella thought I could climb over—surely she didn’t mean that one? I have to run and throw myself at it and realize with a sickening dread that Stella must have forgotten how short I am, and that I’m four months pregnant, too, and not as nimble as usual. I hurl myself at it again and manage to snatch at the top with the tips of my fingers, bricks scraping under my nails as I haul myself with all my strength—with a strength that surprises me—and sort of fling myself violently over the other side, tearing my slacks and scraping my arm and cheek, but only dimly conscious of any pain, bouncing back onto my feet and half running, half walking down the main road.

  Now the next problem—where’s the blinkin’ motor? Where is Tony? I smooth down my blouse to try and look respectable, praying that no passerby will glance down at my stockinged feet and wonder about me. I think that I can hear voices, blokes’ voices, and at any moment I expect to see the silver badge of a police helmet glinting in the sun.

  My stomach rushes at me, welling up, and I have to turn towards one of the spiked fences to throw up in someone’s geranium boxes. My usual reaction to nerves, made worse by the pregnancy. Surely they will have noticed by now in the court that I’m gone and raised the alarm? How long can Stella keep the screw talking? Tony, where the fuck are you?!

  Then at last it’s there: the loveliest sight in the world, a car with its engine running and the window open and there inside it is not Tony, but Bobby, my lovely darling brother, in a mohair suit and a spanking new trilby: monkey-faced Bobby, grinning from one blinkin’ ear to the other.

  The car is spanking new, too. A red Austin-Healey 100, like something from the London Motor Show, one of those sports cars with a cream side panel, just shrieking to be noticed, parked up on Queen Victoria Street with the engine running.

  I rush to it, and fling the door open.

  “Blimey, Bobby, you flash git—what a motor to pick!”

  His foot is on the accelerator before I’ve even slammed the door shut and his grinning doesn’t stop, his mouth is stretched wide.

  “Is that all the fucking thanks I get? Thought I’d greet you in style—you know, in the manor . . .”

  I lean over and squeeze him, making his hands in their leather gloves wobble on the wheel a bit. He nods towards a bag and I reach over and pick out what he’s brought me: a hilarious Bardot wig and a pair of cat’s-eye sunglasses—and we’re off, squealing up Liverpool Street, our hearts soaring up towards the true blue sky, heading towards Hackney, laughing and shouting: hysterical. I’ve never loved my brother more.

  He takes me to a new flat, in Bethnal Green, wanting to show it off. He’s got a new boyfriend. No cozzer would make the connection between Bobby and the new boyfriend, with this place: no one will look for me here. He doesn’t tell me this, but it’s clear the Austin-Healey 100 was a gift, and someone else is paying the rent on his new swish place. It’s hilarious, the décor. Cockney Moroccan: rugs, leather tassels, silk hangings, little tea glasses on a brass tray. I look around in wonder, then sit down heftily. I dab at my cheek with one finger, feeling a long scratch, like the little raised teeth of a zip.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah, could I—have a drink of water?”

  He brings me it in one of the Moroccan tea glasses, and offers me a cigarette, too, from some silly scented tray. My hand is shaking but I sip slowly, trying to calm myself.

  “Where’s all this swanky stuff from?” I ask Bobby. I remember a conversation with Stella, in the lavatory of the spieler at Ham Yard, all those years ago, when she said she hoped Bobby was working for the right firm. Everyone knows that these days it’s the Krays, not Spot and Hill, who are running things. The Soho Don set them going, like a big gold watch.

  “Later,” Bobby says. “Stella says you’re—she told me—”

  My brother, the hard man. Can’t bring himself to say the word “expecting.”

  “Yeah. I am. That’s OK. I feel OK. Just because I’ve clicked I can still work, you know. I’m not an invalid.”

  “We got to hide you. You can’t go up West, or any of your old places. Look, see here, what I built—”

  And he shows me how, in one of the wardrobes, behind his rows of stiffly new shirts (all from the same shop on Jermyn Street and mostly blues and whites—of course the color yellow is nowhere to be seen), there’s a false wooden panel. If you peel it away there’s quite a big space, fine enough for me to stand in, even when I’m fat as a whale.

  His new place smells like disinfectant, for all the Moroccan leather wafting around. Bobby seems to have grown even more strange in his habits and fastidious, compulsively so; maybe it’s his reaction to those years when Mum let him stink the place out like a little animal. Again I wonder if this is a boyfriend, or a boss. Probably safer not to ask. In any case, probably both.

  Bobby still seems agitated, can’t sit still, smoking and prowling.

  “D’you mind if I go out? I could pick up the papers at Kings Cross when they come out. See if they mention any breakouts by remand prisoners?”

  “Good idea.”

  He wanders into the kitchen and I follow him. That, too, is all spanking, like something right out of one of the London shows. All new mod-cons. Not a banana or a lemon allowed to spoil the color scheme: pale blue and tomato red. He leans his back against the refrigerator and he’s staring at me.

  “You heard then? Did Gloria tell you?” he asks.

  “Heard what?”

  But I know. I do know what he’s going to say, and why it’s him somehow who picked me up, not Tony.

  “Is it Mum?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  I stand there smoking and staring, and there’s a funny little movement inside me, like bubbles popping. Quickening. The baby.

  “I had the weirdest dream about her, when I was inside,” I tell Bobby. I’m dry-eyed. Neither of us is crying, but our voices are very quiet and the kitchen feels full, shimmering, so that there’s hardly space to take a breath.

  “I know you visited her once,” Bobby says. “I always meant to . . .”

  “We should of gone again. We should of both gone. What happened?”

  “You know she burned herself? She was ill for a good long while after that. Heavier drugs. Then . . . she never recovered.”

  I knew. I knew that night. I knew before that, that I would never see her again, and I made no effort to see her, or find out.

  “Will there be a funeral?” I try to make my voice sound neutral.

  “We missed it. Like everything else.”

  Bobby’s face. His eyes glitter, but no tears fall. I watch him carefully and he looks away, puts his hand up, as if to hide his expression from me.

  “I’m hard to find,” Bobby says, “ducking and diving, you know. Dad didn’t know about this place. Annie tried sniffing around . . . I had to wait ’til Gloria found me.”

  I think of Dad and Annie visiting me in prison, and wonder. Dad’s cowardice meant he always avoided talking to us about Moll, acted like she didn’t exist after Annie moved in. What little I knew I found out from Gloria and from guesswork. I’d figured out what Mum’s sentence must have been: indefinite. Probably Mum had hoped that pleading criminal insanity would mean a lighter sentence than prison, that going to a hospital would have been easier. She hadn’t reckoned on secu
re hospitals, and drugs, and her own hopelessness, or the “indefinite sentence” idea, the fact that for you to get out, someone has to be interested, someone high up has to care, has to plead your case before the medical superintendent. People—women—were locked up in places like that forever, for less than Moll did. There was a case I found out about, these women were moved from Broadmoor to solitary confinement in Epsom for twenty years, just for having typhoid—they were a danger to the public. That’s what they said. No, you could be a serial killer or a mass rapist and be let out sooner than Moll, pleading postnatal insanity and getting herself sent to a secure hospital.

  So Dad hadn’t bothered to tell me. I remember now how quick he was to get up, during the visit with Annie and Grace, how shifty. How he wasn’t really listening to me; in a hurry to get away. I thought at the time it was because he was embarrassed at Annie blabbing on about him going straight, or about his ticker. But now I see. It was more than that. The bastard knew; he’d decided not to tell me. And—this is something I cling to, this is the only thing that makes it bearable—I think he was ashamed. For once in his life, ashamed of his own ducking and diving, knew himself to be a coward. Maybe my dream that night about Moll just confirmed all that was hovering around us, unsaid.

  “Do they think she—done it deliberately?” I wish I hadn’t said this. I don’t want to know the answer.

  Bobby sighs then. If I put out a hand to touch his skin it would rustle, like parchment, like sandpaper, he looks so old and tired. His fingers are tap tapping on the countertop. He stubs his cigarette out into a saucer he then carefully washes. Turns away from me.

  “Who knows,” he says, quietly, and I wonder if he does; if he’s keeping it from me.

  He turns back and we stare at one another. Then, expressionless, he nods, and opens the refrigerator. It’s cavernous, all gleaming white shelves: empty except for one pint of milk. He pours me a glass and hands it to me. I stare at him. He’s only about five seven. Jockey-sized. On my tiptoes I can almost reach him. He’s not that little monkey-boy I stole my first bottle of milk for, but we’re motherless again, I think, unable to stop such a funny old-fashioned expression from popping up. Fending for ourselves.

  “You have to eat,” he says, a little sheepishly. “For the . . . you know. I’ll send Stella over to visit, and whenever you hear this knock”—he raps a little tune out on the door frame—“you know it’s me, or a mate behind the door.”

  I nod; sip at the milk.

  “OK? You OK? You don’t mind me going now?”

  I do mind.

  “I’ll be all right,” I say. “You go off. I know you’ve got stuff to do.” Then, “Bobby?”

  He turns, looking at me as if he’s been expecting this question. “What do you think,” I say. “D’you think he ever loved her?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah. Maybe. In his way.”

  “And d’you think she was, you know, what they said. Not her ticket? Was it the way Dad treated her? Or was it, you know, the baby. What if—what if it happens to me?”

  “God, Queenie. I went away. I was—what—five years old. I don’t remember nothing. Why the fuck are you asking me?”

  I nod, and he tries to smile, to soften what he just said.

  “And . . . you know, if you make yourself a tea or something. Use a coaster.”

  I almost laugh, but instead I nod and make a big fuss of washing out the glass in the bowl in the sink.

  After Bobby has gone I shed a few tears. Only a few. Then I wander round the flat, picking up red velvet cushions, and sliding paintings to look behind them. I play a game to see if I can spot anything yellow at all, one tiny spot of it, but I can’t. Then I sit on the lavatory (even in this room it’s red-tasseled curtains and a leopard print rug) and feel half my body peel away—the reaction I always have to nerves. I’m surprised to find how much I’m shaking. I hold my hand to the mirror, watch it trembling. My teeth even seem to be chattering.

  Queenie Queenie, who’s got the ball?

  I stand in Bobby’s bathroom for minutes and minutes, noticing myself shaking, and waiting for my teeth to stop clattering, looking at the long red scratch down my cheek, feeling the salt snake into it. Watching my reflection calms me. It’s hard to be in a state when you watch a person in the mirror doing it; it seems indulgent.

  I pour a second glass of milk and carry it into the bedroom Bobby said was for me, and—popping the glass onto one of the red leather coasters—I slip between the sheets. The sheets are new, straight out of the shop; still ironed. The thought of my brother tenderly making up this bed for me, planning to bring me here, makes me cry again.

  I wish I could feel Tony’s arms around me, bury my face in his chest. Or feel his hot, heavy leg suddenly kick out and be flung over me. He’d do that sometimes, in his sleep. I loved it, being locked under him, knowing he was trying to keep me there, to claim me.

  Maybe—a tiny, rebellious thought this. How lovely it would be to give up, to be—what was it that Sister Catherine wanted? To be obedient. Easier to do than this; this takes all of your strength. And then, it’s never enough. You can’t just do it the once: you have to keep doing it, over and over again.

  The next morning I’m woken by that little knock at the door that Bobby told me about and I open it gingerly, expecting Stella. There’s Tony: taller than I remember him, shinier, darker, more beautiful, glittering. I can see from his expression that he doesn’t know at all if I’ll let him in and is swallowing hard, and not smiling.

  He’s brought me rollmops and the Express and yes, I’m in the papers, as the “First Woman to Ever Escape from Holloway.” The fact that I wasn’t actually in prison but was on my way to court and hadn’t yet been charged doesn’t stop them from having a field day with detailing the “Pint-sized Good Time Girl who goes by the name of Queenie Dove” and her history of stealing and absconding and her “shocking disregard for the law.” My hair color, it’s noted, might be blond, auburn, or black: I’ve been known to wear a wig. The piece goes on to note that I’m four months pregnant and unmarried, and believed to be “caught up in a gangster’s underworld.” I grin, unable to stop a little blaze of pride.

  Tony watches me read, leaning against Bobby’s countertop, drinking the coffee I’ve made him, and helping himself to more sugar, cube after cube, until the coffee is almost too stiff to twirl the spoon in.

  “I’ve brought you something else. My mum knit it,” he says.

  He rummages in the pocket of his coat, glances at what he finds there as if he’s surprised, or embarrassed, but hands it over. A knitted baby hat springs open in his palm. White, with a bobble, and tiny, like the bonnet for an imp, or a fairy.

  “You’ve told your mum?” I take the little hat, and lift it to my face. It smells faintly of cheese and fat from a chip fryer.

  “And this,” he says, producing a little box, black. Inside is a gold christening bracelet, the size of the circle my finger and thumb can make. He watches me turn the bracelet over, testing the spring, and lifting it to the light, looking for the hallmark. This is automatic behavior; I’m not thinking at all of christening bracelets, or white knitted hats, but only remembering a fresh new bunny; white, with a pink ribbon bow.

  Tony nods as if I had spoken; he gulps the crystallized coffee in one swig. “Doll—I’m sorry. Never again, I swear, I’ll never lay a finger . . .”

  He pulls me forward in a kiss and that familiar hot fizzing feeling flickers up from my groin to my mouth in one long flare; a match being struck. I wonder if Tony was genuinely afraid, or if he understood? There was never a question of whether I’d take him back. It was only a question of when.

  Those months in hiding went by in a blur of boredom and loneliness, alternating with fascination with my pregnant state. I flicked through magazines to learn about the “nest-building” I’d be sure to experience; the happy anticipation and the desire o
n my husband’s part to busy himself with DIY in preparation for the Big Day. (It was true that Tony was carving the baby a cradle.) Days were boring if Stella or Bobby or Tony or Gloria or Dad and Annie couldn’t visit, but pregnancy made me endlessly sleepy and over-warm, so it was possible to spend hours, sometimes days just like a caterpillar snuggled in Bobby’s red and tassly bedroom, only emerging for feeds and fattening up. I couldn’t go out too much in case I was recognized. The only stab of envy I felt was when Stella told me a tale of high rolling in L’Escargot Bienvenu and the Savoyard, with her new gourmet boyfriend who knew all about snail seasons and how to get round the five-shilling limit, and which restaurant it was that Prince Antoine Bibesco courted his Princess in.

  Sometimes I wondered if, despite her amazement at my “bravery,” Stella wasn’t in fact envious of my pregnancy. She liked to regale me with her tales of the men she knew who wanted to do it with “preggies”—“Like those little birds, you know, who wants to follow around fat hippos, trying to peck them.”

  It was unthinkable in those days to raise a child on your own; if you’d been foolish enough not to take the opportunity for abortion when you had it, you had to go into a Mothers’ Home and give the child up for adoption; but since I was already a criminal on the run, being an unmarried mother couldn’t be any worse. Not that Tony was against us getting spliced; but it was impossible, in the present secretive and complicated arrangement, for us to think how on earth such a thing could be achieved.

  I was thankful for Stella’s visits, for the blast of cold, coal-smoked air from the outside world she brought with her. And Gloria, too. With Gloria I made contingency plans, that I didn’t discuss with a soul, and week by week Gloria released to me a little of my stashed robbery money, so that I could buy food and help Bobby out here and there. Two thousand pounds was an enormous sum in those days, and would last a long time, properly eked out. (Stella alternated between fancy cars and splashing it on her boyfriends and hoarding, so we never discussed how much she had left, or whether she’d made plans for the future.) The months ambled by. On a good day I felt snug as a bug in a rug and thought nothing could go wrong. On a lonely one, I’d long to hoist, because only hoisting could lift my spirits and take away the gravelly feeling that some big wheel was rolling over me, flattening me into the ground.