When God Was a Rabbit (14 page)

Part Two

1995

Brixton was angry, Brixton burned. That was the story I was meant to cover six days after my twenty-seventh birthday, but I didn’t show, something I still can’t fully explain. I’d had moments like that before – the sudden expiration of confidence or care – but never such a panic; one that gripped me with the hold of terror and made me feel both I and the world was all wrong. I told no one. Turned off the phones instead and hid at Nancy’s. I lost my job. Not for the first time. Made up excuses. Not for the first time. And it was into this broken world that the card arrived. As if she knew. As if she’d been listening and waiting, like she always had. My lifeline.

I opened the balcony doors to the dull December morn and sat overlooking Charterhouse Square; sounds of children squealing, and playing catch. I watched a boy race behind a bench and tumble freely onto a pile of coats, which turned out to be a pile of friends. I stirred my coffee, sipped it from the spoon. It was a cold day, would get colder still. A yellow tinge to the overcast light. It would snow before the end of the year. I pulled the blanket tighter around myself. I watched a small girl hide behind a tree; it took ages for her to reappear.

It had been fifteen years since that strange Christmas Day, when the past tired of us and closed its fragile doors.
You won’t remember me
, she wrote, but of course I did the moment I saw the scrawl of writing, black and unchanged and smudged across the envelope, and my joy was unchanged as I read the words
You won’t remember me
. She’d made the card herself, something she always did because she was keen on crafts, and whenever she came to school with glue or glitter in her hair everyone knew she’d been making something – birthday cards or Christmas cards – and everyone secretly hoped to be the lucky recipient of those laughed-at creative efforts because they were good and they spoke loud, for they said, ‘You are special. I have chosen you.’

But it was only ever I who received such a card.

It was a simple piece of blue paper folded down the middle with fragmented pictures of flowers and wine on the front, of mountains and smiles and cut-out letters like a ransom note, but saying
Happy Birthday
instead. And there between the letters I saw her again on the pavement in her favourite shoes, waving and receding, when she was nine, when I was nine, and when we vowed to keep in touch.

I looked again at the envelope. My parents had redirected it to Nancy’s flat in Charterhouse Square where I was temporarily staying. Originally, though, it had been sent from Her Majesty’s Prison.

The seagulls were loud that morning and drew me harshly away from the stillness of the bed. I picked up my water and drank through the minuscule specks of dust that had landed on the surface during the night. The house was quiet, my room stifling and radiator hot. I got up and went to the window and opened it wide to spring. It was still cold, with not a hush of breeze, and the cloudless sky reached beyond the trees like the morning itself, suspended, unmoving, waiting. I watched Arthur down below slowly raise himself into a headstand, his small red satin shorts (once my father’s) slipped to his groin revealing legs the colour and texture of bone. I had never seen his legs before. They looked as if they had lived a different life. They looked innocent.

Age had taken little from him and he still refused to reveal the time or circumstances of his earthly departure. Most mornings when I was home I’d sit with him at the water’s edge and watch him look towards the opposite bank, as if death were waving to him like a teasing friend, and he would smile and his smile would say, Not today, rather than, I’m not ready.

His knowledge had freed him from fear, but had left us with the ultimate burden of waiting. Would he prepare us? Would he suddenly disappear from our lives to shield us from the ultimate loss? Would we play a ghoulish part in this final act? We knew nothing; and had he not moved his foot when I coughed, I would have believed he’d been taken there and then in that upturned state like a wingless angel who’d unexpectedly crashed headfirst to earth.

On my way downstairs I peeked into Ginger’s room and could just make out her bald head nestled between the pillows like an abandoned egg. She was breathing hard, deep in sleep. This was her good phase, the phase between chemotherapy when she had energy and fun, just no hair.

The last round had been brutal, and the five-hundred-yard walk from the hospital to Nancy’s front door was made in a cab, her face leaning on the open window’s frame as her stomach churned over every bump. She liked to rest on the balcony, huddled in an eiderdown that barely kept her from cold, and there she flitted between wake and sleep with no concentration for anything except the occasional cup of tea, which she now took sweet.

I crept into her room and picked up the cardigan that had fallen on the floor. My mother laid out clothes for her every morning, because decision making had become hard and made her panic, and only my mother had noticed that. There was no left, no right any more in Ginger’s world; life was lived straight ahead. I closed the door because sleep was what she needed most. Sleep and luck.

I stumbled into the kitchen and turned the radio off. More about the massacre at Dunblane. The whys. The blame. The searing anguish of surmise. I watched my mother finish the last of her coffee. She was standing at the sink where a shaft of soft yellow light caught the side of her face, emphasising lines now permanently etched there. She had aged well, the process had been kind. And she had left nature alone, opting instead to banish vanity like the meddlesome, suffocating weed it was.

She was waiting for her only client of the day, a Mr A, as she referred to him (but who we all knew as Big Dave from the pub in Polperro). She’d been a qualified therapist for ten years, as well as the unqualified one for most of our young lives, and her practice was in the back room, which was really the front, depending from what side you entered the house.

We all knew ‘Mr A’ was secretly in love with her and hid his rather inappropriate behaviour behind thirty pounds an hour and the indefinable state of transference. He brought my mother flowers every session and she refused them every session. He brought her his dreams every session; she brought him reality. We heard the sound of bike wheels on the shingle outside. My mother peeked through the window.

‘Roses again,’ she said.

‘What colour?’ I said.

‘Yellow,’ she said.

‘He’s happy,’ I said.

‘God help me,’ she said.

The bell rang.

‘We’re leaving as soon as I’m finished, Elly, so make sure Ginger’s up and you’re all ready,’ she said in her therapist’s voice.

I smiled.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘The poinsettia?’

‘Oh. Put it back in the hallway,’ she said, ‘and I’ll deal with it later,’ and she marched quickly out of the room.

She’d been trying to get rid of the poinsettia since January, but it was stubborn and wouldn’t die, and every week she’d place it on the kitchen table and wonder what she could do with it. ‘Just leave it outside,’ my father would say. ‘Or throw it in the rubbish.’ But my mother couldn’t. It was a living thing; a step away from a human being. It could go back into the hallway. For another week.

‘Hello, my darling,’ said Arthur, skipping in from his yoga session and embracing me tightly. I felt the cold clinging to his sweatshirt.

‘Hey,’ I said, trying not to look down at his legs.

‘I’ll get Ginger up, shall I?’ he said as he checked that the kettle was still warm and shoved a handful of leaves into the teapot.

‘Oh, thanks,’ I said. ‘Need any help?’

‘Not today, my angel, I’ll manage,’ he said as he poured the water into the pot and replaced the lid. I handed him the mug with the worn-out picture of Burt Reynolds barely visible on its side. Ginger had a thing for Burt Reynolds. Ginger had a thing for men with moustaches.

‘This’ll wake her up,’ said Arthur, as he carefully carried the teapot and mug towards the door, halting only to let my father enter.

‘Very smart,’ said Arthur, disappearing into the hallway.

‘Thanks,’ said my father, adjusting his tie.

My father looked good in a suit and even though he rarely wore one he still carried its form with unquestionable style. I caught him admiring his reflection in the glass door, just as I noticed him the night before, quietly reading an old law book, and somewhere I wondered if two rivers were about to converge once again. I’d heard whispers, of course, mainly from my mother. She told me that he’d recently ‘gone back to Rumpole’, and had delivered this news with such secrecy that I could have been forgiven for thinking that ‘Rumpole’ was indeed code for an illegal drug rather than the entertaining book it was. ‘It’s not just a book, though, darling,’ she’d said to me. ‘It’s a way of life.’

My father cleared his throat for the recital of the final line, and then delivered it looking at his shoes. I could do nothing except applaud and hide behind noise.

‘Well, what do you think?’ he asked. ‘
Truthfully
.’

I sipped my coffee and tried to think of something kind, something positive to say about a poem he hadn’t chosen, but had agreed to read only because he was the godfather and that was his duty.

‘It’s really bad,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘Not you.’

‘I know.’

‘Just
it
.’

‘I know.’

Chubby little Alan junior had grown up and become a father when his wife gave birth to a baby girl called Alana (they were expecting a boy). The child arrived three weeks late and weighed ten pounds and ten ounces, and apparently looked every bit of it. When she was presented to her parents’ world at a small family gathering in St Austell, she revealed an astonishing head of curly hair that was quite particular to Alan’s wife’s side of the family. They all looked like they came from Naples, rather than Pelynt, and when Nancy commented that the baby looked like a fat Cher, it was only the careful addition of her laugh during the uncomfortable silence, that made people think she was only joking. (Over the years Nancy had lost interest in anyone less than three feet tall unless they were in pantomime and heading towards Snow White’s cottage.)

My parents were often invited to these gatherings, a fierce indebtedness that Alan senior still felt as sharply as a switch across his back. Nancy was invited simply because Nancy was a star. And everyone loves to rub shoulders with a star. But it was at this increasingly boisterous gathering that events took an unexpected – and some might say, careless – turn, when Alan junior gave my father a cigar and asked him to be Alana’s sole godparent, to the complete dismay of his wife’s side of the family. An uncomfortable silence ensued, in which my father’s mute embarrassment was somehow interpreted as a
Yes
. Whispers of ‘Outsider!’ and ‘What was he thinking?’ and ‘What about us?’ echoed around the small detached cottage, until Alan junior took his wife aside and put a halt to her family’s empty protestations. It was the first time he’d ever put his foot down, and even though he did it with the lightest of treads – that of fear – he was unflinching in his choice. My father was a good man; the best in the valley. The decision was made.

We bundled into the car late as usual, but Ginger said we’d already waited three weeks for the fat kid, so it was only fair that the fat kid waited an extra half an hour for us. My mother looked at her in the rear-view mirror and I noted the slight worry on her face. Ginger had drunk only half a mug of marijuana tea that morning, but it was Arthur who had administered the heavy-handed dose and not my mother because she was still busy deciphering Mr A’s erotic dream. And now Ginger was wearing a feather boa over the lovely dress and cardigan my mother had laid out for her, and had refused to take it off even when my mother reminded her that it was a christening they were attending and not sing-along night at the Fisherman’s Arm’s.

‘I’m still going to perform,’ said Ginger, grinning wildly.

‘You are part of a church service, Ginger,’ said my mother, ‘not singing at Carnegie Hall.’

Ginger sucked her teeth and wrapped the feathers tightly around her neck, and with her accentuated nose she resembled a mighty bald-headed eagle looking out for prey; my mother’s only fear was that she’d already found it and it was swaddled and curly haired and waiting for us at the font.

‘Right,’ said my father as he started the van. ‘Are we all here?’

‘Yes,’ said Arthur.

‘Yes,’ said Ginger.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Not quite,’ said my mother wistfully, looking down at her hands, thinking of my brother. It’s what happened whenever anyone said, ‘Are we all here?’

My father reached across for her hand but she pushed it away and said, ‘I’m all right, Alfie.’

My father shrugged and looked at us in the mirror. We sat there squashed and not daring to say a word, until Arthur finally did: ‘I don’t know why we have to be sad. There he is, having the time of his life clubbing and fucking in New York, and making obscene amounts of money on those trading floors, and here we are, attending a christening where the majority of people wished we were dead.’

‘Shut up, Arthur,’ said my mother, and he zipped his mouth shut like an infuriating child.

Ginger started to laugh. Not at anything in particular, but just because Ginger was stoned.

The postman waved us down as my father accelerated up the driveway, spitting shingle and dirt from his back wheels. He wasn’t used to driving the van – Alan still did that – and on every hill he seemed to override third gear as if it never existed at all.

‘Want these now then?’ said the postman, waving a bundle of letters and bills in front of my father.

‘OK, Brian,’ my father said as he took them, and handed them to my mother, who quickly scoured them for the flimsy blue airmail envelope that brought news from her son. She handed me a letter that had been redirected by Nancy.

‘Off to little Alana’s christening?’ said the postman.

Ginger rudely scoffed at the term ‘little’.

‘Yes,’ said my father. ‘I expect you’ve heard that I’m the godfather?’

‘I did,’ said the postman. ‘And heard you weren’t the most popular of choices round here.’

‘Well,’ said my father, as if he were about to say something more. But he didn’t.

‘Bye then,’ said the postman abruptly, as he turned and struggled up the lane.

‘Tosser,’ said Ginger.

‘Now, now,’ said my mother.

‘Run him over,’ said Arthur.

‘Oh for God’s sake!’ said my mother, stuffing a piece of chewing gum in her mouth.

The church wasn’t full and our lateness was noted by each and every one of the Pelynt lot who sat in the front stalls, best seats in the house, as Ginger loudly said. Alan hugged us all and led us to a section he’d reserved for us, a section that was easy for my father and Ginger to get in and out from.

It was a simple service of promises and tears and child-appropriate readings. My father got up and did the best he could with the poem entitled ‘The Child in my Arms Lays Quietly in your Heart’, and Alan senior made an interesting speech that included words like, ‘Lola’, ‘showgirl’, ‘diamond’, and ‘Havana’, obviously hoping that the big bundle weighing down the vicar’s arms could have been named after the heroine of one of the greatest songs ever. And as the opening bars to ‘O God, our help in ages past’ filled the air, I carefully pulled the letter from its prison envelope and started to read.

11 March 1996

I was so happy to get another letter from you, Elly. I know we’re back in contact but its hard for me to trust – I have to pinch myself.