Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (5 page)

O
K, that might be a fabrication. That's how I remembered it, changing my name, but you know. I know there'll be plenty who knew me, knew me later I mean, as an adult and reading this, might say—that's not right, you didn't change your name 'til later, when you had good reason to, but this is my story and that's the way I remember it. In any case, that's just the detail—was there a pint of milk on the step, was it jugs of milk back then? The facts are just as I told you. First thing I ever nicked was milk. My dad was banged up for God knows what and my mum was depressed, a drinker who through neglect or an accident or—whatever, things I never really knew about properly and were never explained to me—caused the death of her own child. Oh and Dad must have been inside before, come to think of it. That's why those matchstick models—his Ship of the Fens—produced a loud sigh from Nan whenever she looked at them. We lived in the East End and our fortunes changed constantly and we were sent away during the war. Don't listen to those who tell you that billeting officers didn't marshal any evacuated kids in Ely Cathedral. Stick with the facts, as outlined above. It's all true.

What strikes me now, in any case, is not all of that but this: Bobby's immediate acceptance of my new name. You'll see. He opened his mouth once to protest, and closed it again. And after that, he never slipped up. He never called me anything but Queenie, and he never forgot. That tells you a lot about my little brother, that detail. How loving he was. How he let me be who I wanted to be, and never mocked it. He understood somehow. That's a rare thing: to love someone, not for how you think of them, but for how they think of themselves.

M
e and Bobby are among the last to be picked. The crowd of children is now down to a straggle. We're sitting with our knees up to our chests, on the floor of this most enormous cold church, bigger than any stone dungeon, our bags and boxes at our feet, our bums aching because the tiles are icy, tiles that look like patterns on a checkers board. The place smells of nurse-and-hospital smell, and sweaty feet because some of the boys have taken their shoes off. When we first got here we sounded just like a big hive of bees, or like being at the swimming baths, it was deafening. But now it's just us and the noise is down to a trickle.

There are some tiny candles lit and they splutter as a new group of people come in, and go over to the billeting lady, and look over at us. Right now I'm staring up at the ceiling, at the colored glass above us with the nudie figures, showing Bobby, trying to stop him from being bored. To stop him whispering about Nan, where's Nan, when are we going back to Nan?

And wondering, what is it about us, why are we among the last to be picked?

Bobby's playing with some conkers he picked up on the way over here, jiggling them in his pockets and rolling them in his palm like shiny wooden marbles and then suddenly leaping on Archie and wrestling him to the floor, accusing him of nicking one.

We haven't eaten since the sandwiches on the station and as ever we're hungry and tired, and a little picture of Nan pops into my head, back home taping up that blackout curtain like yesterday, and sighing and showing her nylon slip as she stretches up to pin it with pegs to the top of the curtain rail. And she would at least have bought us some tea and the kettle would be whistling and she'd be getting out
The Review
and settling down with a mug, having made me and Bobby a half cup each, with lots of sugar.

I screw up my eyes tight because I don't like the leaky feeling in them, when I think of Nan, and imagine sleeping in bed beside her with her rustling hairnet that she wears at night, with little wisps of white hair poking out like the grandmother in Red Riding Hood (only our grandmother smells of paregorics and parma-violets, not apples). Her pink dentures are always beside the bed in the glass and her mouth closes down into this strange gummy line, and sometimes when she's asleep and I'm not, I stare at it, and want to open her mouth, and look inside at the place where all the teeth used to be.

A lady's voice suddenly.

“But he looks puny. What d'you think, Bert? The one with the ears. What's your name, boy?”

A man and a woman. The man silent, like a tree, and with so much black hair and big red hands. They stand in front of us, staring at us.

“Bit of a rum lot left, isn't it,” says the man. I get a sniff of pipe tobacco as he steps over to us; he's slipping the pipe into the pocket of his jacket but it still peeps out, like a snake's head.

“At least they're not Jews! I wouldn't know what to do with a Jew,” the lady says.

Then to me she says, “What's your name?” She's wearing a thick coat, that Nan would call a “camel coat” for the color, and the way it looks like an animal's skin, and men's shoes, and her skin has a rough coating on each cheek, like the skin of some apples. I'm wondering what she might be like underneath, if you peeled her with a knife, like an apple?

“Queenie,” I answer.

Bobby stares at me. He opens his mouth a little, like a big fish.

“I don't think there's any Queenie left . . . only Beryl, Mary, Robert, Archibald . . .” says the billeting lady, coming over to us. She has a clipboard, a pen parked above her ear, the way Dad does with a cigarette.

“It's my nickname. Everyone calls me Queenie.” I point to the place on her list where my real name is. Bobby closes his mouth tight.

“And we have to stay together,” I add. “My nan said.”

“It's the start of the Campaign,” the man says to Bobby. “You're little . . . skin and bone. Can you work hard?” This man's hair is long for a grown-up. It sticks up from his head like a brush you use to sweep the hearth. His cheeks have these puffs of hair sprouting from them. I suppose it's a beard, but it looks more like the stuff you get growing on potatoes when you leave them for too long.

“Yes,” I pipe up. “We're grand. We're really good in all—campaigns.” We don't know what they mean, and Bobby's mouth is now firm shut, like a letterbox stuck with glue.

The lady in the camel coat laughs. I think she knows I don't know what the man means, but she likes my cheek. The man and the lady—she's quite fat, bundled up to the neck in the coat, her apple-skinned face not very smiley—turn to go, as if that decides it, nodding to the billeting officer, and then the man jerks his head towards Bobby to follow them, towards the great big dark doors of the cathedral. I scramble up.

And that's it. The billeting lady crosses our names off the list and nods at the man and lady, and they lead us out towards the huge doors, with the iron patterns on them, and we hear them clank behind us, like the doors of a castle.

Bobby holds my hand. I wrap my fingers around his fist, feeling through his fingers that he's still tightly holding his conkers. Somehow we both know that if the brush-haired man and the camel-coat woman saw them, we'd have to give them up.

“It's ten shillings and eight pence for the first one. How much do we get if we have the girl, too?” the lady asks.

The man says something we don't hear, and again looks back at us, nodding towards a great big conker-colored horse with a sort of cart behind it, parked across from the cathedral, on a very posh bit of grass. Surely they don't mean us to get in that? Don't they know my dad had a
Chrysler?
The horse is eating the grass near the cathedral and the gardens look so bright and neat that, somehow, I think this must be naughty.

“Just the dregs left,” says the lady, as we scramble up onto the high seat behind the man and the woman. Bobby holds his bag to his chest and bites his bottom lip.

“Call me Auntie Elsie.” The lady sits in front of us and turns over her shoulder to talk to us: “And this is . . . Uncle Bert.”

The horse clops across the marketplace and down a hill that I read is called Fore Hill. There's a cottage at the bottom near the river, and as I go past it I turn my head, because I have a very strange feeling about it. As if somebody is inside it, someone I know. I turn my head, and think for a minute about saying something to Bobby—did he see anyone at the window, did he have the same funny feeling?—but when I look at his face I see his eyes are like saucers and I know that if I say anything he might burst into tears. A big cloud of geese bursts from somewhere, making this horrible honking noise, a really frightening noise, something I've never heard before: they make me think of children, unfriendly children, shouting and cackling at you. Bobby and I watch the geese go over us, over the high towers of the cathedral. But the man and the woman don't see them.

“Come on, you little old boy,” the man says, jerking at the horse's reins. The horse makes a loud sharp snort and I jump in my seat. Then I start whistling, in case anyone thought I was scared.

A
fter the road to the river, we start to go out on a rough bumpy lane, and it's quiet, a sort of quiet I've never heard. It makes me feel quiet, too. I hold Bobby's hand and want to whisper to him, but I don't. Where are the shops and the cars and the smoke and the cinemas and the schools—it's just flat, as if we're rolling along on a big flat blanket of green. No cranes or chimneys or buildings at all, just empty. We clop along. Bobby's hand is hot, and sweaty, so I sing a skipping song and lean closer to him so that he can hear it
:
“
Bluebell, cockleshell, evie, ivy, over . . .”

Beside us the fields stretch away from us in black squares, with the soil all folded in lines and oily looking where it's rained. Bobby whispers that they look like chocolate, do you think we could eat some? His eyes are big. His voice is very small.

Then he says, “Do you think this is what it's like where Vera is? Are we in heaven?”

The way he says it, heaven doesn't sound nice; it sounds empty, and scary. I tell him to shoosh, not wanting Elsie or Bert to hear.

The road we're on is straight and strict as a ruler. Beside us is a high bank of green, but I somehow know there is water behind it, some kind of river. My bottom keeps jolting on my seat, bouncing me up and down really hard, and bumping me into Bobby. Suddenly, from behind the bank, a big bird appears like a monster—a bird bigger than anything we've ever seen, with hunched wings in the shape of a giant pair of eyebrows and a beak like a knife. Bobby screams and flings himself at me. Elsie turns around and laughs.

“Oh, that's just a heron. You've never seen a heron before? He won't hurt you . . . after a fish, he is, not a skinny little boy . . .”

Bobby straightens up to try and look like he's not scared, and watches the bird fly off, its wings making a noise like a man flapping his arms in a wet raincoat. It's so quiet: the clopping of the horse and the rattle of the wheels and the heron's wings and then . . . nothing. I'm listening hard. There must be other noises in the country, other things? Where are the
people
?

The journey goes on forever. Bert is smoking his pipe and the only good thing about it is the smell I keep getting, of his tobacco, which smells like my uncle Charlie. We don't pass a single car or cart or person on the road. The sky turns a peachy pink, but in long, flat stripes like lines in a school exercise book. Bobby's head bounces against me with every step of the horse's hooves.

I think of Bunny, in my bag on the floor at my feet, and a song that Nan used to sing:
My bunny lies over the ocean, my bunny lies over the sea. My bunny lies over the ocean, oh let's have a nice cup of tea.

I listen and listen, trying hard to hear the country. It's not what I thought at all: I had no idea anywhere in the world could ever be this quiet. Just the rattle of the cart. Clop, clop of the horse. Just Bobby's breathing.

“Not scared of horses, are we?” Elsie asks, suddenly, over her shoulder.

“No,” I say. Then a little more loudly: “Me and him have got a horse at home. We've got one in our . . . stables. A white one. She's called Betty—I mean
Betsy.
”

Elsie doesn't turn round to look at me. Her neck stiffens. Bobby continues to rest his head against my shoulder, but I know from the way he is holding it that he's not resting at all, but listening.

“That can be your job then,” Elsie says, after a snort, and a glance at Bert, and a long pause. “To feed the horse. His name is Highflyer. Highflyer was a famous horse, buried near the pub. Pub's named after him. And
our
horse is named after the pub.”

“Or the other horse,” I mutter.

Elsie's a bit stupid, surely. Feed a horse? (I know that Bobby wants to whisper to me, to laugh and giggle and tease me, but I pretend not to see; I don't want him to break the spell.) I can feed a horse named after a pub. My granddad had a horse like that. Easy-peasy. And I have a beautiful white horse, her soft mane that feels just like the tassels on Nan's bedspread and her soft munching mouth on my hand as I feed her apples in the stables we own behind our house . . . oh, and a pink silk ribbon round her neck. A little wash of sadness, as the details come to me. I
miss
her so much, I say to myself. I try her name on my tongue.
Betsy
.

I sit back in my seat, feeling for Bunny in my bag. Nan will be drawing the curtains at home, putting the kettle on. Don't they have blackout out here in this flat open moon country? How do they cover up that sky color, now red as the inside of a mouth? Hitler would see
that
right away. See that big cathedral behind us, black against it.

I turn my head back for one last look at it. It doesn't seem to matter how far you go in the country, you can always see the cathedral; it's higher than everywhere else, it's like it's sitting on a cloud. It
does
look like those models Dad makes. Men in prison make them. Boats. Cathedrals. All made out of matches, thousands and thousands of them, every last bit, every little window and porthole (you have to soften and bend them for those, really carefully, so they don't snap), so that Nan always says, “Gawd, Tommy, you had
time
all right,” and sighs when she sees them. Why did they send us away? Are we really so safe here? I feel like we've gone back in time, to the olden days before houses and buildings. I feel like we've gone to the moon, and I've changed forever. I'm different here: my name is Queenie and I'm not scared of horses or giant birds, or dogs. I've got a white horse, all of my own, back home in the stables we own. A really
really
pretty horse, and her name is Betsy.