When God Was a Rabbit

  One night he stopped me in the kitchen and asked me about the car.

  ‘You like it, don’t you, Elly?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘But it’s a beautiful car.’

  ‘But no one else has got one,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it? To stand apart and be different?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, quite aware of my own muted need to fit in, somehow simply to hide. ‘I don’t want people to know I’m different.’

  And I looked up and saw my brother standing in the doorway.

  As my family fell apart, so did my school life. I happily abstained from reading and writing projects by wilfully letting the teacher know that there were domestic problems in our household, and I took every opportunity to embrace the possibility that I too might come from a broken home. I told Jenny Penny that my parents were probably divorcing.

  ‘How long for?’ she asked.

  ‘As long as it takes,’ I said, repeating my mother’s dramatic, final words; the words I’d overheard her say, as she closed the front door defiantly in my father’s face.

  I was quite happy in this new life, just Jenny Penny and me, and we would go and sit in the bottom shed, a welcome quiet away from the chaos and unhappiness that being rich had somehow instilled. My brother had made it comfortable inside, and there was a small electric heater that god always liked to sit in front of whilst his fur cooked and gave off a sour smell. I sat on the fraying armchair that used to be in our lounge, and offered Jenny Penny the old wooden wine crate. I pretended to order vodka martinis from our invisible waiter: the drink of the rich, my brother used to say, the drink of the sophisticate. The drink that would one day mark the start of my eighteenth birthday celebrations.

  ‘Cheers!’ I said and took a sip.

  ‘Cheers,’ she said.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘You can tell me anything, you know,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said, and pretended to finish off her martini.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked her again.

  She looked more pensive than usual.

  ‘What’ll happen to me if your mum and dad split up for good? Who will I go with?’ she asked.

  What could I say? I hadn’t even made the choice myself. There were pros and cons to both my parents and my list was far from complete. I handed her god instead, who was starting to give off his rather pungent scent. He comforted her instantly, and tolerated the harsh, abrasive groping of her chubby fingers, as tufts of his fur fell carelessly to the ground.

  ‘Ouch,’ he said, ‘not a-bloody-gain. Arse. Ouch.’

  I bent down to pick up my glass and as I did, I noticed a magazine part hidden under the chair. I knew what it was before I opened it – could tell by the cover – but I opened it nevertheless, and ran my eyes over an assorted display of nude bodies doing various things with their private parts. I didn’t know vaginas and penises were used in those ways, but by that age, I’d understood that people had a fondness for touching them.

  ‘Look at that,’ I said to Jenny Penny as I held the picture in front of her face. But she didn’t look. Or laugh. Or say anything actually. She did something quite unexpected. She burst into tears and ran.

  I found her huddled in the shadow of the almond tree, halfway down the alley where we’d once found a dead cat, poisoned probably. She looked scrappy and orphaned in the twilight, surrounded by the scent of urine and shit as it conspired with the warm breeze. Everyone used the alleyway as a toilet or a dumping ground for the no-longer-useful. I sat down beside her and moved her hair away from her mouth, away from her pale brow.

  ‘I’m going to run away,’ she said.

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Atlantis,’ she said.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘No one really knows where it is,’ she said, ‘but I’ll find it and then I’ll go and then they’ll worry,’ and she looked at me and her dark eyes melted into the deep, shadowed sockets.

  ‘Come with me,’ she pleaded.

  ‘OK, but not before next week,’ I said (knowing that I had a dental appointment), and she agreed, and we leant our backs against the fence and inhaled the smell of its recent creosote coating. Jenny Penny looked calmer.

  ‘Atlantis is special, Elly. I heard about it recently. It was sunk by a huge tidal wave quite a few years ago and it’s a magic place with magic people. A lost civilisation probably still alive,’ she said. I sat transfixed by the surety in her voice; it was hypnotic; otherworldly even. Made everything possible.

  ‘There are lovely gardens and libraries and universities, and everyone is clever and beautiful, and they are peaceful and help each other and they have special powers and know the mysteries of the Cosmos. We can do anything there, be anything, Elly. It’s our city and we’ll be really happy.’

  ‘And all we have to do is find it?’ I said.

  ‘That’s all,’ she said, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. And I must have looked doubtful because it was at that moment that she suddenly said, ‘Watch this!’ and performed the magic trick of pulling the fifty-pence piece out of her plump arm.

  ‘Here,’ she said, handing me the coin.

  I held it in my hand. It was bloody and warm, as if of her essence, and I half expected it to disappear, to simply melt into the weirdness of the night.

  ‘Now you can trust me,’ she said.

  And I said I did, as I looked down at the strange coin with the even stranger date.

  My mother returned eight days later, more refreshed than when she’d had her lump removed. Nancy had taken her to Paris, where they’d stayed in St-Germain and met Gérard Dépardieu. She arrived with bags and clothes and new make-up, and looked ten years younger, and when she stood in front of my father and said, ‘Well?’ we knew immediately that he’d lost. He said nothing, and after that afternoon we never saw the car again. In fact, we were never allowed to talk about the car again without my father falling into an abyss of shame and a sudden selfinduced amnesia.

  My parents were writing Christmas cards together in the dining room and, bored by my own company and lack of my brother’s, I decided to go to the shed instead and look at the remaining pages of the magazine I’d carefully put back for another day.

  The garden was dark and shadows of trees bent towards me in the breeze. There were bright hard berries on the holly and everyone said it would snow soon. The anticipation of snow was as good as the reality at that age. My father had made me a new sledge in preparation and I could see it propped up by the side of the shed, its metal runners waxed and shining ready for the glide. As I passed by the shed window, I saw flickering torchlight within. I picked up a stray cricket stump and slowly made my way to the door. It was hard to open the door quietly because it stuck halfway on the concrete step, and so instead I pulled the door quickly towards me and saw the fractured image of Charlie on his knees in front of my shivering, naked brother. My brother’s hand caressing his hair.

  I ran. Not because I was scared, not at all – I’d seen that interaction in the magazine; a woman was doing it that time and maybe someone was watching, though I couldn’t be sure – but I ran because I’d trespassed on their clandestine world, and I ran because I realised it was a world that no longer held a place for me.

  I sat in my room and watched the clock rotate a slow languid hour as the carols from downstairs grew loud. My mother was singing along as if she was in a choir; being rich made her sing more confidently. I was asleep when they came in. My brother woke me up; he only did that when it was important. Budge up, they said, and they both squeezed into my bed, bringing the cold from outside.

  ‘You can’t tell anyone,’ they said.

  ‘I won’t,’ I said.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise,’ I said, and I told my brother I’d seen it all before anyway, in the magazines in the shed. He said they weren’t his and togeth
er we said, ‘Oh,’ as the awful realisation dawned on us that they were probably the quiet consolation of our father. Or our mother. Or maybe both. Maybe the shed had been the scene of the amorous lead-up to my conception, and I suddenly felt guilty about the uncontrollable urges that hid in the tree of my genealogy.

  ‘I want to go to sleep now,’ I said, and they kissed me good night and crept away.

  In the darkness I thought about the images, and about Mr Golan, and I felt old. Maybe this was what my father meant when he said that Nancy had grown up too quickly; I suddenly started to understand.

  The bunting was up and the mercury slowly rising, and capes made from Union Jacks rose and fell against the contours of our young backs. It was the last weekend in May. 1977. Our Queen had never been so popular.

  The Sex Pistols blared out from the record player that Mrs Penny had held hostage ever since her dramatic arrival at the street party, half an hour before.

  She’d cut a towering figure as she’d tottered up the road in an unbuttoned silk shirt that reminded our neighbour Miss Gobb ‘of a pair of jammed curtains. And no one needs to see what’s going on in her living room’.

  Mrs Penny stopped at the first trestle table and handed over the box she was carrying.

  ‘Made it myself,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t?’ asked Olive Binsbury nervously.

  ‘No, I nicked it.’

  Silence.

  ‘Joke. Joke,’ said Mrs Penny. ‘It’s a Victoria sponge – after the old Queen,’ and everyone laughed. Too loudly. As if they were scared.

  She pogoed and spat and flexed her studded fist, and came close to electrocution when her four-inch stiletto heel got caught in the precariously long extension lead that had started to fray at the edge of a mossy wall. Only the quick thinking and even quicker reflexes of my father prevented her cindered demise, when he shoved her gently onto a pile of beanbags and sent the remaining two inches of her skirt up to her exposed waist.

  ‘Oh, Alfie, you are naughty!’ she shouted as she rolled laughing into the gutter, and as my father tried to help her up, she pulled him down on top of her ripped fishnets and tiny leather skirt, which, Miss Gobb also noted, would have been more useful as a purse. My father stood up and brushed himself down. Tried to rid himself of her perfume, which clung like tired fingers to a cliff face.

  ‘Let’s try again, shall we?’ he said, as he lifted her to her feet.

  ‘My hero,’ she said, licking her purple pouting lips.

  My father laughed nervously. ‘Didn’t have you down as a royalist, Hayley.’

  ‘Still waters, Alfie,’ she said, reaching for my father’s arse and finding my mother’s hand instead.

  ‘Kate, didn’t see you there, love,’ said Mrs Penny.

  ‘Can you give Greg Harris a hand with traffic patrol?’

  ‘I’ll give him a hand with something,’ she said, and teetered off to our makeshift barricade that hadn’t as yet got the required police approval, as it temporarily blocked off our road from Woodford Avenue.

  Jenny Penny and I were on trestle-table duty, covering them in Union Jack paper tablecloths and placing paper cups and plastic cutlery at ‘sensible’ intervals along the edge. We laid out plates of jam tarts and chocolate rolls and Wagon Wheels, that immediately started to glisten in the rare, balmy sunshine.

  ‘I wrote to the Queen once,’ said Jenny Penny.

  ‘What did you write?’

  ‘Asked if I could live with her.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Said she’d think about it.’

  ‘Do you think she will?’

  ‘Can’t see why not.’

  A car beeped angrily behind us. We heard Jenny Penny’s mother shout, ‘Oh, fuck off. No I’m not. Go on, back up. You’re not coming through.’

  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  Jenny Penny looked pale. Someone turned the music up – my mother probably – to drown out the louder expletives.

  ‘Oh, listen,’ I said, raising my finger heavenwards. ‘This is my favourite.’

  Jenny Penny listened. She smiled. ‘Mine too. I know all the words. I’ll start. “I see a little silhouetto of a man. Scary mush, Scary mush, will you do the fandango?” ’

  ‘You’re not coming through!’ screamed Mrs Penny.

  ‘ “Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening. MEEE!” ’ I sang.

  Mr Harris ran towards us. ‘Where’s your dad, Elly?’

  ‘ “Galileo, Galileo, Galileo.” ’

  ‘ “Fig Roll!” ’ screamed Jenny Penny.

  ‘Your father, Elly? Where is he? This is serious. I think there’s going to be a fight.’

  ‘ “I’m just a poor boy, nobody loves me,”’ I sang.

  ‘Oh, fuckit,’ said Mr Harris, walking off.

  ‘And that’s what I think of your cousin in the police!’ shouted Mrs Penny as she exposed her jiggling breasts.

  ‘Yikes,’ said my father, running past us, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Trou-ble,’ he said in that broken-up, annoying way of his.

  ‘ “Let him go!” ’ sang Jenny Penny.

  ‘ “I will not let you go,”’ I sang.

  ‘It’s just a simple misunderstanding,’ said my father.

  ‘Let me go!’ shouted Mrs Penny.

  ‘We can sort this out over a cup of tea,’ said my father calmly.

  ‘ “I will not let you go!” ’

  ‘ “Let him—” ’

  ‘WILL YOU TWO SHUT THE HELL UP NOW!’ screamed Mr Harris, pulling the plug from the record player. He led us by the arm to the dappled shade of the large plane tree.

  ‘Now sit down and don’t move until I say so,’ he said, wiping away the sweat that had formed under his nose. Jenny Penny moved.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ he said before unscrewing his pewter hip flask and downing at least half of its contents. ‘Some of us have duties to perform. Important duties.’

  Mr Harris officially opened the party at two o’clock that afternoon, heavily aided by the remaining contents of his hip flask and his sailing horn. He made a rousing speech about the importance of monarchy and how it separates us from the uncivilised world. Especially the Americans. My parents looked down at their feet and said something uncharacteristically rude. He said that queens are necessary to the heritage of our country, which made my brother and Charlie laugh, and said that should the monarchy ever fall, he would hang himself and finish what his first wife had promised.

  ‘To His Majesty,’ he said, raising his glass and sounding his hooter.

  Nancy turned up dressed as Elizabeth the First. She was in disguise because she’d just had a film out and wanted to avoid a photographer who was keen to catch her in a compromising position.

  ‘Hey, beautiful!’ she said when she saw me.

  ‘Nancy,’ said Jenny Penny, barging her way through, ‘can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Course you can, darling.’

  ‘Is Shirley Bassey a lesbian?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Nancy, laughing. ‘Why?’

  ‘Alice Cooper?’

  ‘No. Definitely not.’

  ‘What about Vanessa Redgrave?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about Abba?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘All of them.’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘So none of them are?’

  ‘No. Why do you want to know, sugar?’

  ‘Well, it’s for my school project.’

  ‘Really?’ said Nancy, looking at me. I shrugged. I hadn’t got a clue what she was going on about. My school project was about pandas and elephants. The theme for us all being Endangered Species.

  Night fell heavily. The smell of sugar and sausages and onions and stale perfume hung above the tables, warmed by tealights and chatting breath, and it merged into a giant scent that ebbed and flowed like a spring tide. Cardigans were pulled across shoulders, and neighbours – once insular, once shy – leant upon those same clad sho
ulders and whispered boozy secrets into disbelieving ears. Nancy helped Joe and Charlie on the drinks table, ladling out the non-alcoholic punch called Silver Jubilee, and the much more popular alcoholic version called Jilver Subilee, and people danced and told jokes, all in celebration of a woman no one had ever met.