When God Was a Rabbit

  The referee peeled off the battered players, until there, crumpled at the bottom, lay my brother, motionless, half embedded in the mud. I tried to bend towards him but was hindered by my strait-jacket, and in one momentous effort, I lost my balance and fell onto him and winded him, the force of which propelled him into a sitting position.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

  He looked at me strangely, not recognising me.

  ‘It’s me. Elly,’ I said, waving my hand in front of his face. ‘Joe?’ I said again, and instinctively slapped him across his cheek.

  ‘Ow,’ he said. ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘I saw someone do it on the telly.’

  ‘Why are you dressed as a penguin?’ he said.

  ‘To make you laugh,’ I said.

  And he laughed.

  ‘Where’s your tooth?’ I said.

  ‘I think I swallowed it,’ he said.

  We were the last to leave the ground, and the car was slowly heating up by the time they clambered into the back.

  ‘Have you got enough room?’ my mother asked from the front.

  ‘Oh, yes, plenty of room, Mrs P,’ said Charlie Hunter, my brother’s best friend, and of course he had plenty of room because my mother had pulled her seat so far forward that her face was pressed against the windscreen like a splattered fly.

  Charlie had played scrum half in the match (so I was told), and I thought it the most important position because he decided where the ball should go, and in the car on the way home I said, ‘If Joe’s your best friend why didn’t you give him the ball more?’ And laughter and a vigorous rub of my head came as my reply.

  I liked Charlie. He smelt of Palmolive soap and peppermints, and looked like my brother, but just a darker version of him. It was this darkness that made him seem older than his thirteen years and a little wiser. He bit his nails like my brother, though, and as I sat between them, I watched them gnaw at their fingers like rodents.

  Mum and Dad liked Charlie and always gave him a lift home after matches because his parents never came to watch him play and they thought that was sad. I thought that was lucky. His father worked for an oil company and had shunted his family back and forth from oil-rich country to oil-rich country until the natural resources of both were exhausted. His parents divorced – which I found extremely exciting – and Charlie opted to live with his father and a latchkey existence, rather than with his mother, who had recently married a hairdresser called Ian. Charlie cooked his own meals and had a television in his room. He was wild and self-sufficient, and my brother and I both agreed that should we ever be shipwrecked, it would be better if we were shipwrecked with Charlie. Around corners I leant unnecessarily in to him to see if he’d nudge me away, but he never did. And as the heat finally reached the back seats, the red in my cheeks masked the blushes I felt as I looked from Charlie to my brother and back again.

  Charlie’s street was the show street of an affluent suburb not far from us. Gardens were landscaped, dogs clipped and cars valeted. It was a way of life that seemed to drink the remaining dregs of my father’s half-empty glass and left him wilting in the weekend traffic.

  ‘What a lovely house,’ said my mother, with not a jealous thought coursing through her mind.

  She was always like that: grateful for life itself. Her glass was not only half full, it was gold plated with a permanent refill.

  ‘Thanks for the lift,’ said Charlie, opening the door.

  ‘Any time, Charlie,’ said my father.

  ‘Bye, Charlie,’ said my mother, her hand already on the seat lever, and Charlie leant across to Joe and said quietly that they’d talk later. I leant in and said I would too, but he’d already got out of the car.

  That evening, the sound of football results droned in from the living room; a distant update like a shipping forecast, but not as important and certainly not as interesting. We often left the television on in the living room when we went into the kitchen to eat. It was for company, I think, as if our family had been destined to be bigger and the disconnected voice made us feel complete.

  The kitchen was warm and smelt of crumpets, and the darkness from the garden strained at the window like a hungry guest. The plane tree was still bare; a system of nerves and veins stretching out into the blue-black sky. French navy, my mum called it; a French-navy sky. She turned the radio on. The Carpenters, ‘Yesterday Once More’. She looked wistful, sad even. My father had been called away at the last moment, offering support and options to a rogue many would say was undeserving. My mother started to sing. She placed the celery and winkles onto the table, the boiled eggs too – my favourite – which had cracked and spewed their viscous fluids into patterns of white trailing innards around the pan.

  My brother came in from his bath and sat next to me, shiny and pink from the steaming water. I looked at him and said, ‘Smile,’ and as if on cue he smiled, and there in the middle of his mouth was the dark hole. I fed a winkle through it.

  ‘Stop it, Elly!’ my mother snapped, and turned off the radio.

  ‘And you,’ she said pointing to my brother, ‘don’t encourage her.’

  I watched my brother lean over and catch his reflection in the back door. These new wounds went with the new him; there was something noble about the landscape that now inhabited his face and he liked it; he gently touched the swelling around his eye. My mother slammed a mug of tea in front of him and said nothing; an action purely to interrupt his brooding pride. I reached for another winkle; hooked it with the end of my safety pin and tried to pull its uncoiling body away from the shell, but it wouldn’t come. Instead it clung on hard, which was odd; for even in death it said, ‘I won’t let go.’ Won’t let go.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ my mother said.

  ‘Not too bad,’ I said.

  ‘Not you, Elly.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ my brother said.

  ‘Not nauseous?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Dizzy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You wouldn’t tell me, though, would you?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘I don’t want you to play rugby any more,’ my mother said curtly.

  And he calmly looked at her and said, ‘I don’t care what you want, I’m playing,’ and he picked up his tea and drank three large gulps, which must have burnt his throat, but he never let on.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ she said.

  ‘Life’s dangerous,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t bear to watch.’

  ‘Then don’t,’ he said. ‘But I’m still playing because I’ve never felt more alive, or more myself. I’ve never felt so happy,’ and he got up and left the table.

  My mother turned towards the sink and wiped her cheek. A tear maybe? I realised it was because my brother had never equated himself with the word happy before.

  I put god to bed with his usual late-night snack. His hutch was on the patio now, shielded from the wind by the new fence the neighbours had put up, the neighbours we didn’t know too well, who had moved in after Mr Golan. Sometimes I thought I could still see his old face peering through the fence slats, the pale eyes that had the translucency of the blind.

  I sat down on the cold patio slabs and watched god’s movement under the newspaper. I pulled the blanket around my shoulders. The sky was dark and vast and empty and not even a plane disturbed that sullen stillness, not even a star. The emptiness above was now mine within. It was a part of me, like a freckle, like a bruise. Like a middle name no one acknowledged.

  I poked my finger through the wire and found his nose. His breath was slight, warm. His tongue insistent.

  ‘Things pass,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘A bit,’ he said, and I pushed a carrot baton through the wire.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Much better.’

  I thought it was a fox at first, the snuffling, the sound of dislodged leaves and I reached for an
old cricket bat that had been left out since the previous summer. I made my way towards the sound, and as I got near to the back fence I saw her body fall from the shadows, a pink furry heap now prostrate on a bale of straw. She looked up at me, her face smudged with dirt.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said as I helped her up and brushed the leaves and twigs from her favourite dressing gown.

  ‘I had to get out, they’re arguing again,’ she said. ‘They’re really loud, and Mum threw a lamp at the wall.’

  I took her hand and led her back up the path towards the house.

  ‘Can I stay over tonight?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll ask my mum,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she’ll say yes.’ My mother always said yes. We sat down next to the hutch and huddled against the cold.

  ‘Who were you talking to out here?’ Jenny Penny asked.

  ‘My rabbit. It speaks, you know. Sounds like Harold Wilson,’ I said.

  ‘Really? Do you think he’ll talk to me?’

  ‘Dunno. Try,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, rabbity rabbit,’ she said, as she prodded him in the stomach with her chunky finger. ‘Say something.’

  ‘Ouch, you little shit,’ said god. ‘That hurt.’

  Jenny Penny waited quietly for a moment. Then looked at me. Waited a moment more.

  ‘Can’t hear anything,’ she finally said.

  ‘Maybe he’s just tired.’

  ‘I had a rabbit once,’ she said. ‘When I was really little, when we lived in a caravan.’

  ‘What happened to it?’ I asked, already sensing the strange inevitability of it all.

  ‘They ate it,’ she said, and a lone tear tracked down her muddy cheek to the side of her mouth. ‘They said it had run away, but I knew the truth. Not everything tastes like chicken,’ and she’d hardly finished the sentence before the white skin of her knee was exposed to the cold night air and she ran it viciously across the rough edge of the paving slab. Blood appeared instantly; ran down her plump shin to her ragged ankle sock. I stared at her, both attracted and repulsed by the suddenness of her violence, by the calm now sweeping across her face. The back door opened and my brother walked out.

  ‘Christ, it’s freezing out here! What are you two doing?’

  And before we could answer he looked down at Jenny’s leg and said, ‘Shit.’

  ‘She tripped,’ I said, not looking at her.

  My brother bent down and held her leg up to the shaft of light emanating from the kitchen.

  ‘Let’s see what you’ve done,’ he said. ‘God, that’s messy. Does it hurt?’ he asked.

  ‘Not any more,’ she said, stuffing her hands into her overly large pockets.

  ‘You’ll need a plaster,’ he said.

  ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Maybe two.’

  ‘Come on then,’ he said, and he lifted her up and held her against his chest.

  I’d never thought of her as young before. There was something ageing about her nocturnal existence, about her self-sufficiency enforced by neglect. But that night, nestled against him, she looked small and vulnerable; and wanting. Her face rested peacefully against his neck; her eyes closed to the sensation of his care as he carried her inside. I didn’t follow them straight away. I let her have her moment. That uninterrupted moment when she could dream and believe that all I had was hers.

  A few day later my brother and I awoke to shouts and terrifying screams. We converged on the landing holding an array of makeshift weapons – I, a dripping toilet brush; he, a long, wooden shoehorn – until my father raced up the stairs followed by my mother. He looked pale and gaunt, as if, in the hours between asleep and awake, he’d lost a stone in weight.

  ‘I said it, didn’t I?’ he told us, the fog of madness obscuring the familiarity of his features.

  My brother and I looked at each other.

  ‘I said we’d win, didn’t I? I am a lucky man. A blessed man, a chosen man,’ and he sat down on the top stair and wept.

  Heaving sobs tore at his shoulders, loosening years of torment, and momentarily his esteem seemed buoyed by the magic of that slip of grid paper held between his thumb and forefinger. My mother caressed his head and left him, foetus-like, on the stairs. She led us into their bedroom, which still smelt of sleep. The curtains were drawn, the bed scruffy and cold. We were both strangely nervous.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said.

  We did. I sat on her hot-water bottle and felt its lingering warmth.

  ‘We’ve won the football pools,’ she said matter-of-factly.

  ‘Blimey,’ said my brother.

  ‘What’s wrong with Dad then?’ I said.

  My mother sat down on the bed and smoothed the sheets.

  ‘He’s traumatised,’ she said, not hiding the fact that he clearly was.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I said.

  ‘Mental,’ whispered my brother.

  ‘You know what your father thinks about God and stuff like that, don’t you?’ she said, still looking down at the area of sheet that had hypnotised her hand into slow circular movements.

  ‘Yes,’ my brother said. ‘He doesn’t believe in one.’

  ‘Yes, well, now it’s complicated; he’s prayed for this and he’s been answered and a door has opened for your father, and to walk through that door he knows he’ll have to give something up.’

  ‘What will he have to give up?’ I asked, wondering if it might be us.

  ‘The image of himself as a bad man,’ said my mother.

  The football pools win was to remain a secret to everyone outside of the family, except Nancy, of course. She was on holiday at the time in Florence with a new lover, an American actress call Eva. I wasn’t even allowed to tell Jenny Penny, and when I kept drawing piles of coins just to give her a clue, she took it as a coded message to steal money from her mother’s purse, which she duly did, and exchanged for sherbet dabs.

  Excluded from talking about our win to the world outside, we stopped talking about the win to our world inside, and it soon became something that had momentarily happened to us, rather than the life-changing event most normal people would have allowed it to be. My mother still looked for bargains in the shops and her frugality became compulsive. She darned our socks, patched our jeans, and even the tooth fairy refused to reimburse me for a particularly painful molar, even when I left it a note saying that every additional day accrued interest.

  One day in June, about two months after ‘the win’, my father pulled up in a brand-new silver Mercedes with blacked-out windows, the type usually reserved for diplomats. The whole street came out to witness the brutality of such ostentation. When the door opened and my father stepped out, the street echoed with the sound of broken teeth as jaws dropped to the floor. My father tried to smile and said something wan, something about a ‘bonus’, but unknown to him he had inadvertently climbed onto that ladder reserved for the élite, and was already looking down on the kind familiar faces he’d shared years of his life with. I felt embarrassed and went inside.

  We ate dinner in silence that evening. The subject on everyone’s lips was ‘that car’, and it soured the taste of every morsel that passed it. Finally, my mother could stand it no more and calmly asked, ‘Why?’ as she got up to get another glass of water.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said my father. ‘I could, so I did.’

  My brother and I looked to my mother.

  ‘It’s not us. That car is not us. It stands for everything ugly in this world,’ she said.

  We turned to my father.

  ‘I’ve never bought a new car before,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not the newness of the car, for God’s sake! That car’s a bloody down payment on a house for most people. That car says we are something that we’re not. That car is not a car, it’s a bloody statement of all that’s wrong in this country. I shall never ride in it. Either it goes or I shall.’

  ‘So be it,’ said my father, and he got up and left the table.

&nbs
p; Awaiting my father’s choice of Wife or Wheels, my mother disappeared, leaving only a note that said: Don’t worry about me. (We hadn’t been, but it suddenly made us.) I shall miss you, my two precious children – the bold omission of my father hovering in the air like the smell of last Christmas’s festering Stilton.

  During this period of trial separation, my father drove to his Legal Aid position undaunted by his sudden singleness, and brought an unquestioning glamour to the potholed car park his offices shared with a greasy spoon. Criminals would enter and openly ask for the lawyer ‘who’s got them wheels outside’. They saw it as a badge of success, not knowing that the only person wearing it had never felt more of a failure.