Various Pets Alive and Dead

by Lewycka, Marina

  ‘Sure,’ said Doro.

  ‘Bring ’im too,’ said June, flashing two rows of incongruously pearly teeth.

  Another time, it was a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  ‘It’s a bad case of devil-possession, we’re trying to exorcise …’ Doro began, but they didn’t hang around for an explanation.

  Maybe it was the milkman, or June and Janey, or even the Witnesses, but somehow word got around the village, and they started to get a steady trickle of visitors, male and female, who would call on some pretext and stand on the doorstep trying to peer through the open door into the house. In those weeks of the miners’ strike, there was always someone coming to their commune collecting for petrol-money for the pickets or donations for the soup kitchen where miners and their families could get at least one meal a day, and they were pleased and excited that they seemed at last to be making links with the local community, who had previously shown little interest in the Marxism Study Centre or the Anti-Colonialism Discussion Group.

  Bruno was delighted when Doro conveyed the news that the women in the village had invited him to volunteer in the kitchen.

  ‘They like to experience the Italian cuisine?’

  ‘Er … I think so,’ said Doro.

  Moira was less pleased. She’d cut quite a figure on the picket line at Askern, with her flaming hair and interesting slogans (‘Miners are the midwives of socialism!’) which drew puzzled but admiring glances from the ranks of the pickets.

  ‘I’ve been called all sorts,’ declared Jimmy Darkins, Chairman of the National Union of Mineworkers’ local branch, ‘but never a midwife. I shall ’ave to give it a gooa.’

  Moira obviously revelled in all that male attention. She and Bruno would regularly rush home exhilarated after picketing duty, fling themselves down on the mattress and make noisy love. It was awful.

  Now she’d just have to choose between spending her time with a load of women doing boring domestic chores on an epic scale, or letting her lover loose in that hormone-heavy environment.

  ‘The role of the women is absolutely crucial in this struggle, Bruno,’ Doro said.

  ‘But the picket line is where it’s at, comrade,’ urged Moira.

  ‘Hm. However, as Gramsci says, is important to build the counter-hegemonic positions in all social institutions.’ Bruno twirled his fork through the pasta.

  ‘Exactly!’ cried Doro.

  Moira shrugged defeat, slurping in a mouthful of spaghetti alla Napoletana, letting the sauce dribble down her chin.

  ‘Oh my!’ said June, when Doro led Bruno into the Askern miners’ welfare hall next day.

  The room fell silent as twenty women stopped what they were doing and stared at the newcomer.

  ‘Come on in, duck! Don’t be shy! We’re not gonner rip yer keks off. Not till after dinner, any rood.’

  Bruno smiled innocently.

  Janey whispered to Doro, ‘Does ’e talk English, love?’

  June whispered, ‘Does ’e talk the language of love?’

  Unfortunately Doro had a class that afternoon, so she had to leave. Bruno came home several hours later, hitching up his jeans as he lurched through the door, his face covered with reddish blotches.

  ‘How was the cooking?’ asked Moira sulkily.

  ‘The ingredients were poor.’ His voice sounded faint. ‘It is a disaster the British masses have a diet of such impoverishment.’

  ‘How did you get on with the miners’ wives?’ asked Doro.

  ‘The proletarian women displayed extreme … how I should say …?’ He fumbled for words, ‘… class consciousness.’

  The problem of class consciousness dogged Doro for days. If that’s the secret, there could be no hope for her, she fretted, drowning her disappointment in soapy water as she rinsed the breakfast clutter in the sink. For she couldn’t help being thoroughly and undeniably middle class. But then so was Moira. So were all of them, in their thoughts, their habits, their tastes and preferences. The fact that they’d all just gone off picketing didn’t alter that one iota. Did any of the women in the soup kitchen wear dungarees or read George Eliot or eat vegetarian mush? Although they’d lived up here on the fringes of this working-class community for fifteen years, they’d barely touched its inner life. Having finished the washing-up, she smoked a joint and brooded on the inherent unfairness of the class system, which suddenly seemed to cut her off from all possibility of happiness.

  ‘Why are you sad, my most beautiful compagna?’

  His arm was around her shoulder.

  ‘Oh! I’m …’ her eyes filled with tears, ‘… I’m just thinking of the unfairness …’ a sob rose in her throat, ‘… of the class system.’

  ‘Do not weep, my noble spirit. It is of course unjust. But this is why we are in straaggle, yes?’

  His fuzzy cheek pressed against hers, his warm hands searching the opening of her blouse.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Doro learned a great deal about class consciousness and struggle that day. And her pleasure was enhanced when she later bumped into Moira coming out of the bathroom with a mardy look on her face.

  Sometimes Bruno slept with Doro (who also slept with Marcus, who didn’t know), and sometimes he slept with Moira (who also slept with Nick Holliday and Fred the Red, who did know) and sometimes he got back from the soup kitchen too exhausted to do anything but sleep. Then one evening when he arrived back from the soup kitchen, there was a young woman with him.

  ‘This is Megan.’

  He introduced her to the group, repeating their names for her.

  ‘Hi.’

  She looked up from lowered eyes, not smiling, and stuck to Bruno like a shadow.

  Doro didn’t feel particularly threatened by Megan at first. She wasn’t pretty – at least, not in a conventional way – she had a thin angular body with heavy breasts, a long curtain of dark hair, and grey-green watchful eyes. She moved silently, like a cat, and hardly spoke. In fact, she’s not sure, even after so many years, who Megan really was, except that she’d been married to a strike-breaking miner, and was brought into the commune by Bruno. Doro can still remember that night. She shivers.

  It was the dead of winter, the long bitter winter of 1984–5, and it was strange, Doro recalls, that Megan had no possessions with her, not even a coat. Bruno explained that she was running away from an abusive relationship. They welcomed her unquestioningly, made up a bed for her in the annexe in Moira’s studio, and the women lent her the clothes she needed.

  It turned out that Megan had a son, a sullen five-year-old called Carl, who stayed with Megan’s mother in Harworth during the week but often came to Solidarity Hall at weekends. He was a clingy insecure child who didn’t mix with the other kids, and stole from the kitty. His nickname was Crunchy Carl from his habit of crunching insects – spiders, flies, butterflies, or whatever he could get hold of – between his fingers. Once when Chris Watt reprimanded him, he spat at her and called her a fat slag. His father was never talked about and, when Doro asked, Megan just shrugged and said, ‘’E took off, din’t ’e?’

  Chris and Doro tried to explain what the commune was about without sounding too preachy.

  ‘See, we’re trying to create a society based on common purpose and sharing what we have, and looking after each other.’

  Megan stared for a long time. ‘You mean, you don’t have your own possessions?’

  ‘We do have some possessions. But we share the money we earn, and everyday things like books and clothes.’

  ‘In’t nobody gonner share my clothes.’

  Doro refrained from pointing out that actually she was sharing their clothes.

  ‘ “We have moved away from the post-war vision of a society based on shared prosperity, to a society based on grotesque accumulation of personal wealth on the one hand, and increasing insecurity on the other.” ’

  Marcus, still reading from th
e computer screen, looks up to catch her eye.

  ‘Drink your tea, love, before it gets cold.’

  SERGE: The rabbits

  Serge must have been nearly six when he first encountered Fibonacci, because he remembers the Groans at Solidarity Hall were all preoccupied with the miners’ strike that year, and the kids were often left to their own devices. However, one day Nick Holliday and that Italian guy built a wire-mesh rabbit cage in the back garden, with two rabbits which were supposed to teach the kids responsibility, non-competitive play, and introduce them to non-patriarchal social communities, i.e. there was supposed to be no Mr Rabbit.

  Despite this, the kids came back after school one day to find five baby rabbits snuggled up around their mother, still blind, almost bald, and unbearably cute. They took them out one at a time and passed them around. There was him, Clara, funny little Otto and Star, who at that time was a toddler in permanently stinky nappies. (Oolie-Anna hadn’t been born.) Anyway, they kept passing the baby rabbits around and stroking them and kissing them, maybe squeezing them a bit too much, especially Star, who wanted to make them open their eyes, and when they put them back they realised they weren’t moving a lot. In fact, they weren’t moving at all. In fact, they were dead.

  Clara, who was the oldest, and had already experienced pet-death trauma, said they should bury them in the garden and not tell anybody. So they did. He didn’t know where exactly they buried them, but he recalls how hard and dry the ground was as they scraped away with a trowel to make a big enough hole, and he remembers being sick on the grave.

  But amazingly, as if by magic, a few weeks later, more baby rabbits appeared. Five of them. Otto thought they’d come back from the dead, and started to blub. His own fear, which he kept to himself, was that they’d never really been dead at all. Clara told Otto not to be so stupid, and she said they should leave them alone this time, and alert the Groans. Nick Holliday, who was Otto’s dad and a school teacher, took the opportunity to give the kids a long lecture about sex and where babies come from. It sounded highly implausible.

  Two of the new baby rabbits died within a week, but three survived. Then just as they were getting used to having six rabbits instead of three, six more babies appeared. This really freaked all the kids out. It seemed like the rabbits which kept on appearing so inexorably were in fact zombie-bunnies linked in some supernatural way with those little hairless corpses they’d buried. They started to burrow their way out of the cage; before long there were rabbits and rabbit holes all over the garden. Every month there seemed to be more.

  ‘We planted them in the garden and they growed,’ whispered Otto.

  As the rabbits multiplied, all the flowers and vegetables in the garden were nibbled down to the roots, apart from the gooseberry bushes and the sunflowers, which were too tall or too tough. The herbs planted around the back door in plastic buckets and a cracked chamber pot disappeared. Only the rosemary bush, planted well off the ground in a disused toilet bowl, escaped. What had been the lawn was now bare earth with a few patches of grass and grotty bits of leftover vegetables scattered everywhere, because of course now the rabbits had to be fed. Little balls of rabbit pooh clung to everybody’s shoes and got trodden into the already grungy carpet. Sometimes he noticed a strange sinister smell lingering in the garden.

  ‘How many rabbits d’you think we’ll get?’ he asked Nick Holliday one bedtime.

  Surely Nick would know when it was time for this scary torrent of zombie-rabbits to stop. He liked talking with Nick, because he always answered the kids’ questions seriously, though he could sometimes get long-winded.

  ‘It’s a Fibonacci series,’ Nick explained. ‘It just goes on getting bigger.’

  ‘Fibber who?’

  ‘He was an Italian mathematician from the twelfth century. He discovered this series.’

  Serge felt a great urge to confess the terrible secret of the buried rabbits. Nick was a gentle guy and he might be more forgiving than the other Groans. He was about to explain what had happened that afternoon, how it had all been a terrible mistake, when Nick reached for a sheet of paper, and started to draw.

  When the number of rabbits in the garden reached twenty-six (fortunately some had died) the Groans convened a meeting to debate what should be done. Marcus suggested taking them to the miners’ soup kitchen, up at Askern, but other members of the commune who were vegetarian reacted with horror. Moira Lafferty tried giving them to a pet shop, but they weren’t pretty enough, and the owner already had too many. Doro put a notice outside on the gate saying ‘LOVELY BABY RABBITS FREE TO GOOD HOMES’ and one day a bloke came in a van and took all the babies away.

  ‘They’ll go to poor children who haven’t got any rabbits,’ said Doro.

  But next time he came Serge noticed the sign on the side of his van: ‘RANDY’S REPTILES’. He didn’t say anything to Doro. To be honest, he was getting spooked by the rabbits too. He’d pinned Nick’s diagram up on the wall by his bed, and he studied it nightly as he drifted off to sleep. He realised the sequence could be extended.

  1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 …

  Three hundred and seventy-seven rabbits. He felt his chest tighten with panic as he added the new numbers.

  He and Otto shared a bedroom up in the attic, so they often talked together, even though Otto wasn’t yet four and talked a lot of rubbish, because of his mum, Jen, who didn’t live with them any more but took Otto away to her commune at weekends and holidays where they practised primal screaming. Otto usually came back with a sore throat.

  ‘You sit in this William Right organ box,’ he explained to Serge in a croaky voice, ‘then you scream and you get energy.’

  ‘What does it feel like?’ asked Serge.

  ‘I dunno.’ Otto sucked his thumb and twirled a finger in his hair, which was white-blond and curly like an angel’s. ‘I think it’s like the rabbits. They get reborned.’

  ‘But rabbits don’t scream, Otto.’

  ‘They screamed under the ground. We din’t hear them.’

  But one night, the rabbits did scream. The sound was terrible, visceral, primal. It ripped through his dreams, making him jump out of bed and rush to the window. The garden was in darkness, but there was just enough moonlight to see a flicker of movement down below, shadows chasing shadows.

  ‘They’re doing it,’ said Otto, standing beside him on tiptoe with a multicoloured crocheted quilt wrapped around him, because he didn’t have any pyjamas. ‘That’s how they make their babies.’ His skinny shoulders were trembling.

  Serge put his arm around him for comfort, then took it away quickly – although he was only six, he already knew that boys didn’t do that sort of thing.

  ‘We might see them in the morning,’ Otto said.

  ‘No, because …’ He guessed Otto was wrong, but he couldn’t explain why. Then there was another sound in the garden – human voices, yelling.

  ‘Get away wi’ you!’ A woman’s shriek, and then a man’s voice shouting, ‘Scarper!’

  In the morning, there were no babies. A mess of fur fragments and mangled bunny limbs was spread out all over the garden. There was that strange smell, pungent and pissy. He realised now it was the smell of death. Not a single rabbit was left. Otto went very quiet. Star started to cry.

  ‘It was only a fox. Let’s get going,’ Clara said in her usual bossy way.

  It was her job to see them all safely to school.

  When they got home at four o’clock, they found that there had in fact been two survivors of the rabbit massacre, who must have bolted underground when the fox attacked. Over the next few weeks he and Otto went back every day to check for babies, but none appeared.

  ‘It’s because they’re both mummies,’ he explained, but Otto maintained it was because they’d run out of energy and needed the organ box.

  He didn’t bother to argue, because something else Nick had told him was preoccupying his mind. The complex branching pattern of the rabbit couples in the diagr
am, Nick pointed out, was the same pattern you could see in the head of a sunflower, a pine cone, or in leaves, twigs and branches of a tree. It was there coiled in the shell of a snail or in the spiral of a galaxy spinning through space. You could find it in a violin string when you divide it to make a musical scale, or in the perfect proportions of classical building. He talked faster and faster, and his eyes shone the way Marcus’s eyes would shine when he was on about socialism.

  Serge started to collect snail shells and pine cones in an old shoe box that he kept under his bed, and every night he added a few more numbers to his sequence. When things got bad, he talked to the numbers almost as if they were his friends, and made up rhymes to help him remember.

  Over the next few years, after Oolie-Anna was born, and Megan disappeared, and the fire happened, and the break-up of the commune, and all the Groans went mad, and Doro got into a fight with Moira Lafferty, and Jen came and took Otto away for the last time, and Nick Holliday left, and Clara went off to University, and the Chrises and their weird kids vanished into the night, he often went up and sat on his bed in the attic and arranged his snail shells and pine cones in a pattern, and dwelled on the mystery of the Fibonacci numbers, the way they seemed to unwind one after another in an infinite spiral of order and harmony which swirled everything up together like the stars in the sky.

  1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1,597 2,584 4,181 6,765 10,946 17,711 28,657 46,368 …

  PART TWO

  Family Snaps

  DORO: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need

  Doro has been trying to get through to Serge, without success, so she phones Clara instead on Sunday evening, not about anything in particular, but because she wants to chat. However, what starts out as a perfectly friendly conversation about plants and trees suddenly turns into an attack upon her vegetable-carving demonstration. Why is Clara so prickly? Surely the hormones of adolescence must have calmed down by now. A bit embarrassing, she said. What’s to be embarrassed about? She was just trying to be helpful.