Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (10 page)

Bobby's happy that there's still no school and says he's never going back there if he can help it. Instead he's always begging Dad or Annie to be taken “down the Dogs.” He wants a job there, or better still, he wants to be a boxer, when he's older, maybe a feather-weight because he's so small, but Dad puts his fists up and ducks and sweeps at him and then says, “Bleedin' hell, Bobby, you'll always be a milky—go play with the traffic on the Whitechapel Road.”

Bobby hangs about outside York Hall watching the boxers, especially this one boy he loves to watch, this Irish one with freckles and tufty blond hair and an impish face: Jimmy. He hangs around and tries to get Jimmy to sign his program until someone shoos him away and then it's down the Dogs with Uncle Charlie and watching the kennel boys. The dogs might work for Bobby as a job, because Bobby is “superstitious,” Annie says. He has a system, involving colors, for making every simple decision, such as which sweet to choose.

Every day the Green Bottles are round our house. It turns out they knew our mum, knew her from when she first came to London from Dublin with her sister Brodie, and they tell me about her. Easily the prettiest of them all, Gloria says. What happened to Brodie? I ask. They cough then. Didn't she leave Moll behind, bugger off to America with a fella she met in the first month? Annie says, and then catches Gloria's eye and puts her hand over her mouth. Moll could sing beautifully, Gloria says, and didn't Moll used to be the best Irish dancer? I whisper to Gloria that I have a horse named Betsy with a white mane and a pink ribbon and I keep her in the garage. Gloria ruffles my hair and tickles me under the ribs.

I can't get enough of hearing about Mum. Will you take me to see her? How long is she going to be in hospital for? They look at each other in a strange way when I beg that. I know they're hiding something from me, but for once my best talent fails me and I can't quite read their looks.

“Want to know why they call us the Green Bottles?” Gloria asks, trying to divert me, I know.

“No, I blinkin' never.”

“Because of the bottle parties we used to have, up the West End. We wore these green dresses. Your mum was the youngest—she did it for six months. That's where she went and met your dad.”

I clamp my teeth so I'm not tempted to reply. Annie looks up from patting at her chin with her powder puff and snaps the mirror shut.

“We'll take you. Soon as your dad gives us the say-so, we'll take you to see her, OK? If you stop going on about her. Don't want to annoy your dad now, do we?”

Annie gives me a funny little smile when she says this, peeking at me with her big eyes from under her hair the way she always does, like she's afraid to look straight at you. I feel a stab of dislike for her. She's scared of him, I'm thinking. How pathetic. She's not like Mum . . . and I remember Mum, continuing to walk into the kitchen while he picked up his shoe, aiming his hard heel at her. Well, I'm not Annie. He doesn't scare me.

Not for the first time, I long for Nan to talk to.
She
would tell me, eventually, I think. She might even have taken me to visit Mum, like we did that first time. (Somehow I've got the feeling that Mum isn't in the London Hospital anymore. I don't know how I know this, or where I've got this idea from, but it feels like a certainty.) Nan wouldn't have intended to tell me, but however bad the news, I'd wiggle it out of her, in the end. She couldn't resist me.

I picture Nan whenever I look at Bunny's tiny gas mask, made of black cloth and now hanging from its strap from the fender. I imagine Nan sitting up one evening to sew it. It produces a funny little pang to look at it, because two thoughts happen at the same time. How I'm not a child, and I can face facts: how silly that Nan would think I'd need such a babyish thing when I'm older than Bobby and not a baby. And at the same moment, another thought. How glad I am that Nan knew and no one else did: I am a child, quite a little girl, surely? I did need that babyish thing, wasn't I only six or seven when she made it? I did need
something
, sometimes.

B
obby doesn't seem pleased to be back in London, even though now there are big balloons in the sky and Doodlebugs and he has taught me to listen to them, to listen to the moment when the engine stops—the important bit, that's the bit when it's going to happen, and you need to be sure that the plane has gone further than your house, that it's going to be streets away. Bobby lies under his bed shooting at planes in the sky with a pretend gun. He lines up the things in his room, on the windowsill, his cards about racing drivers, his bits of shrapnel that he's finally managed to get. There's something funny that I've never seen him do before: he has to touch everything twenty times before he can wear it. I mean his socks or his cap or his shorts: he does an odd little touching gesture, and counts “one two three four . . .” as he does it.

“What do you think it's like getting squashed to death?” he asks one night when we're both in our bedroom.

Of course I say nothing. Even so, our bedroom swarms at me like I'm in the middle of the worst nightmare and can't breathe. Shapes keep unfolding in front of me.

“What do you think it's like getting boiled to death in a big pot?” he asks, another night, in the same cold voice.

“Shut up! Blinkin' shut up, Bobby!”

He seems to wait until I'm just about to slide off into sleep and then says these things. Of course then my eyes snap open and stay that way. It's bad enough that I wake up sleepwalking. Now he's making it hard for me to get to sleep, too. Bobby seems different, and sulky. I'm no longer sure if we're on the same side.

“I wrote you letters,” I tell him one night, but he doesn't reply. Bedtime, alone in our shared room, is the only time this happens. Things we can't say in the day. In the darkness I can just make out his nose poking up into the stuffy bedroom air. The bed Nan used to sleep in. One night, though, I hear him sniffling into his pillow, and when I whisper, “Bobby?” he sits up and thumps the pillow and wails, “Where is she, eh? What's he done to her?” And when I pretend I don't know who he means, he says he hates all of us and he wishes he could go back to the farm. That makes me cry, too, because Bobby has never been mean to me before, and I don't hate him, but I feel he's blaming me for something. I'm the eldest. I didn't save Nan, and I didn't save Vera. And I like the Green Bottles and to him that's one Great Big Betrayal.

Coming downstairs one day, swinging his monkey arms, he says rudely to Annie, “Why are
you
still here?” and he won't take it back, even when Dad comes into the hallway and unbuckles his belt.

“You bloody little bastard. You say sorry to her!” Dad shouts.

Say it, Bobby,
please
, I'm thinking. I clutch my fists inside the pockets of my pinafore dress and pray for Bobby to take it back, or Dad's mood to flit back to cheerful, lightning-fast, the way it sometimes does. Bobby starts to shake and he's looking like he wants to melt into the wallpaper but his mouth remains shut.

I try to wedge between him and Dad but Dad pushes me to one side and says to Bobby, “You milky little—” and Bobby's big eyes wider still, he manages to duck his head as Dad aims a blow at him. Bobby bolts upstairs and Dad thunders after him. I move to follow but Annie takes my arm and pushes me into the kitchen, where she closes the door and stands against it, biting her nails. She turns the radio up. Still, Mrs. Mopp and Colonel Chinstrap can't cover up; we both hear him clearly. Dad with that frightening bark of a laugh, and then shouting. And nothing from Bobby. Just horrid thumping sounds through the floorboards that could mean anything.

“No fucking son of mine . . .” That's the only part I hear. I don't hear the end of the sentence.

Annie is humming, washing a mug in the sink, pretending. I'm digging my fists into my pockets so hard that I can feel the nails piercing my skin.

About ten minutes later Dad comes downstairs. I'm waiting for him. As the kitchen door opens I fling myself at him, fists tight, battering as hard as I can at wherever I can reach on him—his stomach mostly, with my fists. I expect him to belt me back, so I screw up my eyes and wait and wait for the roar from him, but instead I feel his big hands grasping at me, getting hold of my fists and holding them tight, so that I can't hit him anymore.

“Little spitfire, ain't we?” Dad says, mildly. And that's all.

He just sits at the table, whistling, and reaching for the Garibaldi biscuits to dunk in the tea that Annie is pushing his way, while I'm panting and staring at him, like a bull ready for its next charge. Annie is staring at him, too, and folding her teeth over her bottom lip as if she's trying to stop herself speaking. Dad pushes back his chair and picks up the
Racing Post
.

After a while, Dad flaps the paper down and grins at me over the top of it. He sighs loudly. “Shall I go and get that milky brother of yours a job as a kennel boy then?” he asks.

The kitchen is suddenly full of yellow light. Dad kisses the top of my head, and goes out of the kitchen to fetch his cigarettes from the pocket of his jacket in the hall.

Annie watches him, then puts the kettle on again, takes up her nail-buffer, and turns the radio down low.

“Still wanting to visit Moll?” Annie says. She's sorry for Bobby, too, I think, and guilty, like Elsie was that day, because she was a milky too; too scared to stick up for us. This introduction of Mum's name into the air again feels wobbly, like the flame on a birthday candle. I daren't even answer, in case my breath blows it out.

4

My Education

I
t's a while before Annie mentions Mum again. The war is over—Mr. Churchill says it on the radio—and that day everyone goes up the West End at nine o'clock to shout and carry on, banging bin lids together. VE day is the same day as my birthday so it feels as if everyone is celebrating with me, kissing Americans in their uniforms and climbing up lampposts, sending rockets streaking red into the sky. We sing “Bless 'Em All” and “Pack Up Your Troubles” and “Roll Out the Barrel” and no one mentions Nan or anything sad at all; it's the one day no sadness is allowed, Gloria says, no matter what you're feeling, because everybody in this world has lost
something
, it doesn't make you special. She holds onto my chin with her finger and thumb as she says this so she can look into my eyes, and she's smiling, but her look is hard to read. Everyone wakes up the next day with bad heads and Annie says her mouth tastes like the inside of a budgie's cage, but here they are a few days later, they want to go out again, shout and joke and carry on some more.

“If you're off to see Moll, we'd better get you some decent clobber,” Annie says to me. I wonder if she remembered it was my birthday: I'm twelve now, and no one really gave me a present, but now perhaps they will.

So Annie takes me to a shop she knows, up the West End. Gloria comes, too, and Beattie Rolls. Gloria looks the business. She has a fox fur on and diamonds on two of her fingers. And she looks fat. Fatter than usual. The fox fur round her neck has a pointy face and eyes and all, and lies there, gazing down at her bosom. I mean, I know from everyone else, from school now I'm back some of the time, or just from the radio that whether the war is over or not these are hard times, that everything is in short supply—chocolate, stockings, eggs, meat, Pond's cold cream—but it makes no sense to me, they must be lying, because our house is always full of these things. Great piles of them, down in that cellar. I've never eaten so well in my life.

Beattie, too, is wearing her good coat—a dark brown velvet with buttons in the shapes of little brown butterflies and court shoes in a glossy chestnut color, a bronze-tipped toe, and a little brown bow, like a box of fancy chocolates. They have four leather bags, exactly the same, and they give me two empty ones to carry.

“Now you just hold them bags and do everything we tell you,” Annie says.

“And don't
say nothing
,” Beattie says, drawing on her cigarette.

Saying nothing. My best talent.

So we go into the shop and Gloria keeps opening and closing her coat, and wrapping and rewrapping it all around her, like she's hot and needs to fan herself. Beattie wanders round, picking up handkerchiefs and silk stockings, chatting to her, offering her cigarettes. And Annie picks up a chocolate brown pinafore dress, in soft wool and holds it up against me. “Would that fit you?” Annie says. They're talking, talking all the time. They smell powerful flowery, a talcum powder smell; it's choking me. My heart is pitter-pattering softly; I can see full well what they're doing.

Then we have to wait in line at the counter. The lady sitting behind it has her hair in a bun with a little net over it, and a cream lace collar on her blue dress, with the tiniest waist I've ever seen; the dress has a frill at the bottom and the dress has a sort of fake jacket attached to it. I can't help staring at that dress, until Annie, behind Beattie in her big saucer hat in the queue, nudges me. “Hold out the bag,” Annie whispers. Then she steps forward to the counter and says in a louder voice, a posh one I've never heard her use before: “My niece is admiring the peplum on your dress, dear.”

The lady behind the counter smiles, says, “thank you,” and pats her bun. She has tiny hands, too, as she reaches for the chain to pull the tin down that the money goes into. Annie hands over some notes and coupons from her book and I watch in delight as the tin is yanked up and disappears above us. Then it comes back down again on its chain and some coins appear and the coupons have been stamped.

Annie has bought a pair of Dent's gauntlet kid gloves, cream colored, with tiny little holes in them in the pattern of a four-leafed clover, very like her other “lucky” pair.

“Oh, there's your brother!” Gloria says to me, nudging me, quite hard.

“Pop over and tell him we'll just be a minute . . .” Annie adds.

I know Bobby isn't over the road, but I know better than to say anything, or even to look surprised. I understand at once what they mean. I'm holding two full carrier bags and I'm given a little push in the back by Beattie while the three women continue chatting coolly at the counter, admiring the gloves, complimenting the lady in the blue dress.

I keep walking. There is a man by the door who opens it for me. I wave my hand, as if I'm seeing Bobby over the road, but my heartbeat is now worse than pitter-pattering; it's bounding around in my chest, like a puppy trying to leap out of its cage in the pet-shop window. Surely they'll hear it? Surely that man will notice how white I look, how tightly I'm clutching the bags, not hiding them or disguising them, brazening it out; how hard I'm concentrating on walking normally.

The man at the door coughs. He puts a hand out just as I pass by him and my blood turns to ice. I almost stop, give myself up. I wait, just for a second, and then realize he's giving me a friendly pat on the head. Like the sort a head teacher gives their favorite pupil.

Outside the shop, I carry on walking. I don't turn my head or look back. I clutch the full bags and my hands are slippery with sweat. When I think I'm far enough my legs wobble beneath me; they've turned to string and will barely hold me up. I stand under a striped awning and wait.
Blinkin' hell,
I'm thinking.

And soon the Green Bottles are all around me, laughing and hugging me and smiling, and a car slides up beside us and we all pile in. Beattie lifts the bags from my hand, her hat tipping as she scrambles into the car, and all cool has gone: she's whooping. I recognize the driver, Sly Roger from the butcher's, and he winks at me, in his driver's mirror, and tips his cap to the others.

“Queenie! You're a fucking marvel!” Gloria says, stretching her arms out of her fur coat and shrugging it onto the seat behind her. “Bleedin' Nora I'm hot!” Gloria says, while Annie tells me that she “never knew you had it in you . . . you're a natural!”

“She never bat an eyelid, did she, when you said Bobby was there? No need to spell nothing out for that one,” Beattie adds, laughing and lighting up a cigarette, taking off her hat and putting it on the back window of the car, patting at her neat hair with one hand. They rabbit on and on. They bubble away at me. How smart I am, how quick, how butter wouldn't melt; how pretty in the brown felt beret they've given me, hinting at the Brownies, at good girls and uniforms. Annie hands me a bottle of ginger beer and Roger, hearing the top come off, says, “Hey, watch me bleedin' car!” but the Green Bottles all shout him down and tell him to cover his eyes, because Gloria's taking her big knickers off. The laughter that greets this remark is deafening, and it's true, too: Gloria is wiggling in her seat, and pulling down the pale blue nylon pants she's wearing, and she's immediately slimmer, her whole shape has changed. The pants are elasticated at the top and around the legs, they're homemade with rubbish stitching, and they look like giant baby knickers, and suddenly things keep tumbling out of them—strings of pearls, stockings, lipsticks, compacts, even a tightly rolled child's dress, which I realize is the one I looked at, the chocolate brown wool pinafore dress.

“Should see your face!” Gloria says, and the others shriek and holler some more, while Annie smothers me in a big hug. I see that Roger is looking at us all in his wing mirror and grinning out of the side of his cigarette; he's just not looking at the road at all. Gloria wants to stop at Harrods. Sly Roger practically knocks a horse down as he skids to a stop, lets us out.

A doorman opens the door to her and Gloria stalks in. A lady steps forward and puffs some perfume at her, and Gloria and I march right into the cloud of it. I'm nearly choking. “I need a lipstick,” Gloria says.

There's a mood, somehow, like that perfume cloud, all around her. I can tell that Gloria is not like the others. That she doesn't do it for the same reasons.

She stands at the counter, opening her purse. It's a gorgeous soft tan suede purse, shaped like a lovely fat apple and with this satisfying clicky swishy catch, gold metal with a crossover snap to it, and I feel such a tick-tick-ticking feeling standing beside her, as she opens it and, shoving aside her coupons, takes out a brand-new ten-shilling note. She's wearing the new Dent gloves, Annie's gloves. The smell—the smell of leather and perfume and Gloria and
love
—wafts down to me, as I stand there, hopping from foot to foot, the blue note flying just above my head, like a flag.

N
ow you look the business—we can go and celebrate—I'll take you to see your mum, sugar, I promise, but first we ought to—go see your brother? Ain't he a kennel boy these days?”

My reward: the Green Bottles take me down the Dogs. And after that, to see Mum at long, long last.

I thought we'd go to the Stow Dogs, with its lovely white front like a big Christmas cake and the curved dog in his red jacket that I've gazed at so many times, arching over our heads like a crescent moon; but that's not the stadium that Bobby works at; he works at Hackney Wick.

“There's afternoon races at Hackney Wick, and a proper crowd. War might be over. Things ain't back to normal, thank God,” Dad answers.

So we're now piling into the same car that slid up to me in the West End a week ago, and we're off to Waterden Road, only this time it's Dad who is driving, not Sly Roger, and “Look at you! All suited and booted,” Gloria says to him admiringly, as she climbs in, but he's just staring stubbornly ahead, teeth clamped on his cigarette; he's not wisecracking, not smiling.

It's a squash. Cigarettes and lily of the valley mixed with the perfumed chocolates—rose and violet creams—being passed around from a padded lilac box. I crack one against my tongue and the sweet violet perfume floods out. The taste is a sad memory, strange. Like eating Nan.

Annie has on this emerald green jacket and skirt in bobbly material with flaps on the pockets and a collar of fur, and her hair piled up in not quite such a bird's nest as usual, she's curled it into ginger sausages; and Gloria has her fur on again and the cherry-red lipstick, and Beattie is all blond and sparkly with a big diamond necklace and she's brought her sister Dolly—another of the Green Bottles—and they're both in black velvet and golden silk blouses, with ruffles frothing out of the buttons at the top and little gold satin flowers on their hats, all cock-eyed at a funny angle (but they say it's deliberate), and I'm all dressed up, too, in my new dress, the brown pinafore. Gloria did my hair for me and patted powder from her compact on my cheeks and wet a tiny brush on her tongue, dipped it in a square of black she has, and said, “Look up,” and as I did, she brushed it across my eyelashes. She hands me her compact to admire the effect: spidery lashes, like Vivien Leigh. Whenever I blink I can see them: black spots, in front of my eyes.

Everyone is shrieking and laughing. The noise is deafening. It seems to go on and on, the celebrating, everyone happy and shouting for no reason. Bobby says they're Raving Bonkers. Bobby seems in a bad mood all the time these days and the only thing I can think is that he's jealous. Jealous of the way the Green Bottles treat me, jealous of the fact that I stayed home and he went to Ely, even though that's stupid, because it was him who wanted to go.

Now our car is crawling along the Waterden Road; we're going to have to get out and walk, there's such a crush outside the stadium. Crowds make me nervous these days, but there's no point in saying so. No one wants to talk about Nan, or be reminded of her, and even though Beattie and Dolly lost someone in the tube that day, too, another sister I think, they won't talk to me about it. I haven't seen Bobby since this morning. “What do you want to go with that lot for?” he says, when I tell him I'm off with the Green Bottles to the Dogs finally.

He's been working at the Dogs on Saturdays and any other day he can bunk off from school. He's one of the youngest, but he takes it really seriously, being a kennel boy, he likes it, but I do hear him whining sometimes, arguing with Dad about it, and I realize that Dad and Uncle Charlie are asking Bobby to do things, and Bobby doesn't want to.

This morning he was in our bedroom, all important, eleven years old and getting ready to go to work, laying out his money on the bedspread, ten one-pound notes. When I go to touch one, he put his hand over mine.

“Hands off of my money! I earned that. You go and get your own.”

Bobby's quirks are getting worse. Like he's convinced the color yellow is unlucky, and if I wear a yellow dress he pulls a face and scowls at me and tells me to burn it and wear something else. The notes lay there, lazily, flatly, like they didn't care if I touch them or not.

“I only want to
look
,” I told him crossly. “I don't need your blinkin' money. The Green Bottles will get me jellied eels or anything else I want.”

He snorted, gathered up the notes.

“Got any tips?” I asked him.

He looked funny then. Like he couldn't make up his mind what to tell me. Or maybe, thinking about it now, what he was going to do. I've puzzled about it, and the look he gave me, and tried to remember the exact words. He didn't sound unfriendly, suddenly. “British Girl. She's a grand bitch. A railer.” That was the first bit. And then something like: “But never put nothing on her. No matter what anyone says. No one knows what will happen. Never listen to Dad.”