The Rabbit

by Ted Lewis

  “Nearly had them? Four-two? You call four-two nearly having them?” my father said.

  “Mortenson was running rings round that defence.”

  “If he was, then why didn’t they get more in the net?”

  “Lucky. United were lucky. Always was and always will be.”

  “Lucky,” my father said. “That’s all a Maine Roader can say. It’s just jealousy.”

  “City supporters aren’t jealous. There’s nowt for ’em to be jealous of. They just don’t like jam.”

  My father’s head was beginning to shake a little, the way it always did when he was angry. The whole tone of the conversation between Norman and my father had changed and it had taken the support of different football clubs to change it, to make my father show his dislike for Norman.

  My father prodded the table with his forefinger, accom¬panying the rhythm of his words.

  “Manchester United,” he said, “are the finest football club in the world. Not only have you had your Careys, your Cockburns, your Chiltons, your Rowleys, now you’ve got your Taylors, your Colemans, your Viollets, your Quixalls. And what about Duncan Edwards? He’s going to be the greatest centre forward the world has ever seen.”

  “Jam,” Norman said.

  “Aye, well I won’t say any more,” my father said, looking quickly round the room, as though each person or object he set eyes on filled him with great bitterness. There was a silence until my father said:

  “Anyway, it’s past time. We ought to be getting off. Are you right, Eddie?”

  “Ready when you are,” said Uncle Eddie, picking up his glass and draining it. Then he and my father stood up.

  “Are you ready, Victor?” my father said.

  “Not yet,” I said, standing up and picking up what was left of my pint. “I feel like another game of snooker.”

  My father looked at his watch.

  “It’s eleven now, you know,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  There was an awkward silence. My father was about to speak but I beat him to it by saying:

  “See you later.”

  I walked out of the games room and into the snooker room. All the other tables were empty. A few people were standing at the bar, getting them in as the last half-hour approached. I waited for about five minutes until I was sure my father and Uncle Eddie were clear of the building, then I went out into the market place. The lights in the bars of the George were still on, and that meant that there was a good chance that Mart and Cec and perhaps Don and Veronica were still there talking across their empty glasses. It occurred to me that I could drop in and remind them of the fact that I was going to an all-night party the next day, but when I looked in the bar Lila told me that they’d all been in, and that they’d all had a good night, at least she assumed they had going by all the laughing and joking they’d been doing, and that they’d all gone home a good half an hour ago, at least Mart and Cec had; Don and Veronica had left a bit earlier, because of Veronica’s dad having to go on shift, Lila expected.

  So after Lila’s news all that remained was for me to go home too.

  I woke the next morning with no immediate memory of what had happened the previous evening. My mind was too full of the expectation of the coming day. I got up without having to be called and was in the kitchen only a few minutes after my mother. It wasn’t until I heard my father making his noises in the bathroom above that I remembered the events of the night before. If what had happened had been discussed with my mother, she made no mention of it. Thinking about it, my father had probably decided not to tell her. More proof that he knew he’d let me down. I savoured the thought of his cowardice, and also that in the very near future, I would myself tell my mother, so that she would know that his regular pronouncements on charac¬ter and integrity were like so many duck farts on the surface of a shallow pond. But I would leave it for today; today was too good to be clouded by any unpleasant confidences.

  At work the morning passed without event. Clacker sweated away with his usual thoroughness. Even Jackson applied himself more usefully than ever before, perhaps in¬spired by the sacking of Willie Webster. As he worked he described the double feature he’d seen the previous night, but even that monotony failed to affect my excited spirits.

  The last half an hour to knocking-off time dragged like no other so far. I kept looking at my watch at five-minute intervals to find that each time only a minute had passed. Finally Arthur’s lorry jolted its way up the slope, followed by my father’s car. Arthur and Herbert got down from the lorry and unbolted the tailboard. My father got out of his car and watched the operation. I got out of the wagon and put my hammer on the barrow and began to wheel it over to the flint tip.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” my father said. I stopped and looked at him.

  “We want this load doing before we go,” he said. I felt like throwing my hammer at him. This was his revenge, his way of re-asserting himself with me. I wheeled the barrow back to the platform’s edge and jumped down into the wagon and began to sort the flints as fast as I could. Meanwhile Clacker and Jackson got out of their wagons and got their things ready in preparation for going home, but my father didn’t give any orders to them. He just stood on the edge of the platform and watched me until I’d finished, and after I’d finished twice, he was finally satisfied.

  On the way home the only time we spoke was just before my father drove into Johnson’s yard.

  “Your mother says you want to stay over in Hull tonight,” my father said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Don’t you think you’d be better off getting home?”

  “No.”

  My father eased the car into its shelter and that was the end of the conversation. I got out of the car and without bothering to wait for my father I ran down the yard and made for home.

  I had no time to eat anything. All I had time to do was to wash the lime from myself and get into the clothes I’d already decided on for the occasion. I ran out of the house and I didn’t stop running till I got to the station and got on the diesel. It didn’t, as I expected, pull out the minute I slammed the door behind me, but instead I found myself sitting motionless in my own sweat for five minutes before the klaxon sounded. The minute the train moved out I went to the lavatory and dried my face and hair on the roller-towel and tried to make myself look the way I hoped I’d look as I strode up the gangway on the other side. After I’d done that I went back to my seat and looked out of the window. The track ran alongside the river, raised on a small embankment that stood between the flowing reeds of the flooded brick-pits which lay either side. The long low brick sheds ran parallel to the embankment at intervals, their small scale accentuated by the observer’s elevated position in the train. I looked down on ancient tiles baking under the sun, old barrows at broken angles, half in and half out of long grass, the occasional bicycle propped up in the shade of a tile shed. And then, as the train curved round towards the pier, the mean village of New Holland, a place of Victorian artisans’ villas, stretched out along a single flat vanishing road, a Toe H hall and a pub finished in white tiles that looked like a lavatory, and a great three-storey Georgian house rotting away in the background, and the pier itself, a three-hundred-yard extension of the narrow road, a low spur spanning the mud flats and claiming access to the great swirl of turpentine-coloured water.

  The train glided slowly on to the pier and crawled to the end. I got out and walked along the platform and down the long steep ramp to the pontoon where the ferry was berthed. There had been about twenty other passengers on the train who were now moving like an out-of-step platoon down the ramp to the ferry. Most of these passengers could be seen every Saturday at this time bound for their afternoon in Hull, like the group of women from the Ropery who went to football in winter and cricket in summer but always finished off their afte
rnoons with fish, chips and peas at the Gainsborough Fish Restaurant, like Colin Hill with his iron leg-brace who managed to visit as many as four cinemas in one day, like Margaret Blaxall who wandered from pub to pub and however drunk she got she always managed to end up in the Tivoli Tavern, which was the pub opposite the pier on the Hull side, so that her brother the barman could escort her onto the ferry.

  I walked on to the car deck and leant against the ferry’s side and watched the last passengers cross the gangplank. Then two of the ferry’s crew pulled the chains on the gangplank’s pulleys and the gangplank rattled to its vertical position. The paddlewheels began to turn and the ferry drifted slowly away from the shadow of the pontoon, out into the sunlight breadth of the river. A slight breeze began to blow in my face. I walked to the other side of the car deck and looked at the low skyline of Hull two miles away. I wondered if she was still on the bus on her way to the city centre, or if she was already walking down the cobbled dockside to the pier, but most of all I wondered if she was feeling as nervous as I was feeling. But of course she wasn’t. She wasn’t the nervous sort. I remembered the first time she’d walked into the Life room, aware of the stares from the rest of the boys, but able to project an amused indifference to the attention. And in fact there was no logical reason for me to be nervous. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t talked intimately with her on several occasions. It wasn’t as if I knew her reaction to me had been indifferent; she’d always been encouraging and interested. And she had made the first move. She had phoned me. What was there for me to be nervous about? Only my own awkwardness, my own lack of confidence, my own inadequate appearance, that was all.

  As the ferry thumped across the river I spent the time trying to quell these nerves, trying to think myself into an attitude of relaxed confidence instead of this jangling self-consciousness that made me aware of every blemish, every footstep, every strand of hair.

  The ferry sidled into the landing stage at Hull Pier. There was a row of people at the railings on the pier’s upper level but I could see no sign of Janet. However, I only glanced briefly, in case she was looking and saw my anxiousness. The ferry and the pontoon bumped together and the paddles back-pedalled so that the drawbridge could align itself with the gates in the ferry’s side. The passengers collected in a semicircle on the perimeter of the drawbridge’s arc and two of the crew trundled open the iron gates and the drawbridge began to fall. Then came the final crash and the passengers funnelled forward.

  I moved forward myself and was suddenly overcome by a great depression. It was a feeling I’d had before, always just prior to the moment of meeting a girl. It was a feeling of desperation, of emptiness; what was the point of it all, this self-inflicted misery, this play-acting? Wouldn’t I rather be at home, or with the boys, instead of suddenly finding, as I walked up the gangway, that I was wondering if she had paid a final visit to the lavatory before setting out to meet me?

  Then everything happened in a rush. I handed in my ticket and searched the bright sunlight for her face, and even as I began to look she stepped in front of me, smiling.

  She was wearing dark glasses and a white lace-fronted blouse, and a black taffeta skirt. My stomach overturned and the depression fled. The usual nonsenses about times of arrival were exchanged as a device to ease the immediate tension and we fell into step and began to walk along the dockside towards the city centre. I was glad that I had been almost the last to leave the ferry because that meant I wouldn’t have to suffer the gauntlet of a knowing pair of eyes at my back all the way to the city centre.

  I have no recollection of what we said as we walked along because my mind was concentrating too hard on not stumb¬ling off the pavement or bumping into her, and also trying to decide whether her left arm was swinging free as an invita¬tion for me to take her hand or not. When we got to the end of the dockside we had to cross over the cobbled road, which meant I had to re-negotiate myself into the outside position on the pavement, a manoeuvre I executed awk¬wardly, as if I was practising some particularly complicated fox-trot passage, and in the process I caught my toe on the curb and fell against her. With great ease she took my hand, not pausing in what she had been saying, and we continued on our way as I tried to control the shuddering feeling the touch of her hand had caused. Now we were in one of the main shopping streets and ranks of shoppers seemed to fill every square inch of pavement, making it difficult for us to remain hand in hand for more than a minute at a time, but each time we rejoined the pressure of her hand grew successively greater and my own response was more relaxed and I grew in confidence as we threaded our way through the barging crowd. I kept looking at her when she was look¬ing elsewhere, and my impression was that she was as happy as I now was, as excited, as thrilled by the heightening of our relationship by the touching of our hands. What I was now feeling was like nothing else I had yet encountered. It was a state of constant ecstasy, its source suspended some¬where just below my ribs, vibrating like a dynamo and flooding my body with strong warm waves of happiness, like some internal sun.

  We reached the Tower Cinema and walked up the steps and into the foyer. I bought the tickets and we were shown into the darkness of the auditorium. Somehow we managed to find a place to sit and in sitting down, armored by the darkness, the last of my tensions left me and instead of being conscious of myself I was conscious of the warmth and smell of her easing away the over-awareness of myself. There was no awkwardness to contend with when I took her hand and as I did so her head inclined on to my shoulder and her knee pressed against my knee. Very slowly, she turned her head towards me and we kissed. I remember thinking that I’d never felt anything quite like this before when, from about four rows behind me, came a barrage of quacking noises. I jerked my head round and illuminated in the pale¬ness of the shaft of light from the projector were Billy Hanson and his mates. They must have come over on the early boat. I swore to myself and Janet said:

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Some yobboes I know,” I whispered. “I had to sort them out last week and they’ve been out to get me ever since.”

  “Do you think we ought to go?” she said, and I saw on her face what I read as a wonderful concern for my safety. “Will they try anything here?”

  “They daren’t,” I said, realizing that I was trapped: if we went now, they’d follow. If we stayed, they’d wait.

  “What happened, anyway?”

  “They picked on the village idiot and so I gave one of them a pasting.”

  She squeezed my hand.

  “The reason they’re making that row is because they killed three of our geese in return,” I said.

  “The cowards.”

  “Yes, that’s all they are,” I said, wondering what the hell I was going to do. The quacking continued.

  “They think they’re really clever,” Janet said.

  A minute later the quacking stopped and a voice said:

  “You lot. Out.”

  I turned round. An usherette was shining a torch on Billy and his mates, and the manager was standing at the end of their row, his arm crooked in a beckoning gesture.

  “What for?” Billy said, all hurt innocence.

  “Come on. Out.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Right,” said the manager. “Mrs Burnett, call the police.”

  The manager took the torch from the usherette and kept it trained on the group which was now completely silent.

  “You can stay there as long as you like,” said the manager, a deeply satisfied tone to his voice. “They’ll not be long. Five minutes or less. They’re only round the corner.”

  Billy and his mates continued to sit it out for a while, but eventually they decided against direct confrontation and got up and slammed back their seats and left the row at the opposite end to where the manager was standing. The manager followed their progress with his torch, and after a token burst
of quacking as they reached the door, they were gone. The manager gave a few searching sweeps of his torch to remind any other potential trouble makers that that was the way things were handled in his cinema and then he was gone too.

  Janet and I settled back in our previous positions and I was glad to find that the incident with Billy hadn’t broken the train of our feelings as it had been designed to do. Janet pressed her body even closer to mine and I could smell the sweet scent of her breasts as it filtered through the thin lace of her blouse. She turned her face to me again and we kissed and it seemed to be more than just a kiss, it seemed to be a declaration of intent, a way of telling me that this was the beginning of something that neither of us had experienced before.

  The trolley lurched along Anlaby Road. The tea-time traffic taking the shoppers out of the city centre was slow and fitful but that didn’t matter. There we were, on top of a sixty-four trolley bus, in the front seat, the sun streaming warmth through the dusty windows, and we were holding hands, talking as though we’d been lovers for ages, and it was only a matter of time before one of us used the words to rationalize the feeling.

  “Here’s our stop,” Janet said, and we jumped up and clattered down the spiralling stairs. The doors swished open and we got off the bus and crossed the road in its dusty wake. We walked along for a while until Janet said:

  “Here it is. Marlborough Avenue. Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  We turned the corner and I looked at the wide suburban street stretching away to the crescent at the far end. I didn’t mind it at all. Suburban streets like this one brought back memories of my childhood in Manchester. I responded to such a street in the same way as Wordsworth responded to his daffodils.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s just so boring. Nobody knows each other. I can’t wait till I’ve finished college so I can get away.”

  “You get on with your parents all right, though, don’t you?”

  “Dad’s all right. It’s my mother.”