When God Was a Rabbit (19 page)

‘Arthur!’

I shouted his name again and just as I unleashed the rope from its mooring loop and was about to give up, he appeared from his cottage and ran towards me with an empty, old rucksack bouncing on his back like a deflated blue lung.

‘Sure you want to come?’ I said. ‘You could stay with Joe and Charlie.’

‘They’re napping again,’ a touch of disappointment in his voice.

‘OK then,’ I said, and helped him carefully into the boat.

He loved it when we all returned; he was nearly eighty but became a chameleon around us, and our youth became his. I pushed away from the bank. I didn’t start the engine immediately, but let us drift towards the central tidal flow where we said out loud as we always did, ‘All right, Ginger?’ And where we both felt the slight jolt of the boat; the swift acknowledgement of our words, caused not by wake, nor wind, nor shallows, but by the something other that outwitted proof.

I slowed along the bank to pick blackberries and early damsons, and we hid under overhanging branches to look out for the large male otter my father reckoned he’d seen a few days before; a figment of his imagination really, a ploy I believed, to get us to really look once again, to soften the impenetrable gaze of the harried.

‘I’ve been getting dizzy,’ Arthur said, as he trailed his hand in the cool clear water.

‘What kind of dizzy?’

‘Just dizzy.’

‘Have you fallen?’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Dizzy, not
doddery
.’

‘Have you changed your diet yet?’ I said, knowing full well he hadn’t; and he scoffed at such a suggestion, for it was as unworthy to him as a life without bacon and cream and eggs, utterly unthinkable.

His cholesterol and blood pressure were as high as they could be; something he delighted in as if it had taken the utmost skill to get them to such dizzying heights. And he refused to take the tablets prescribed, because a few months before he’d secretly told me that he wasn’t going to die that way and so he didn’t need to take them, and instead reached for another scone dripping with jam and clotted cream.

‘Are you worried?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘So why are you telling me?’

‘Just filling you in,’ he said quietly.

‘Do you want me to do anything?’

‘No,’ he said, drying his hand on his sleeve.

He’d started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric. I think it was because I knew everything about him, had read it all – the beautiful, the sordid, the all of his book. I had been his editor for five years, and now it seemed, had become his editor away from the printed page.

‘I’ll be back here in ten minutes,’ I said as I took the rucksack and climbed the vertical, rusty steps of the harbour wall. At the top, I stopped and watched him nervously manoeuvre the boat around two red buoys before he zigzagged out to sea, and I wondered if I’d see him again, or if he’d suffer once again the indignity of being led back into harbour by an irate coastguard deaf to his consoling pleas. In his imagination Arthur Henry was a seaman, competent and brave; but in reality nothing except terra firma could provide those qualities, and I knew he’d stop just beyond the harbour mouth and go round in circles until the ten minutes were up. And sure enough, by the time I’d descended the ladder weighed down by my order of packed ice and crabs and langoustines, sweat had appeared across his forehead and in the cleft of his bony chest, and he moved back swiftly to his position at the bow of the boat in a manner that said, Never again.

We glided effortlessly across the glassy surface, the
phut phut phut
of the engine quiet and considered against the bustling backdrop of the tourist-crammed village.

‘Here, Arthur.’

He sat up as I handed him an Orange Maid.

‘I thought you might have forgotten.’

‘Never,’ I winked, and he pulled out a handkerchief to catch the first of the drips.

‘Fancy a bite?’

‘It’s all yours,’ I said, as we veered left up the open sprawl of river towards home.

They were dozing on the lawn when we returned and, seeing Charlie engrossed in a proof copy of his book,
Benders and Bandits, Busboys and Booze
, Arthur walked briskly up the slope and flopped eagerly into the unclaimed chair next to him.

He leant towards him and said, ‘Where are you up to, Charlie?’

‘Berlin.’

‘Oh dear me,’ said Arthur, rather strangely adjusting the right leg of his oversized desert shorts. ‘Close your ears, Nancy!’

‘Oh, yeah right, Arthur,’ said Nancy, not looking up from her
American Vogue
. ‘Never lived, have I, sweetie?’

‘Not in a dark little room on Nollendorfstrasse,’ said Arthur, leaning back blissfully into his chair.

My brother was in my father’s workroom. He didn’t turn round at first, so I watched him carving and chiselling, practising a simple tongue-and-groove joint. He’d made two already and they were balanced on the ledge above his head. He looked like my father in that dim light, the father I knew when I was small; the same silhouette, the hunched, curved back that never seemed to breathe, for breath disturbed precision, and precision in woodwork was everything.

He was going to night school, learning furniture restoration, might learn more, he said. He’d given it all up, the life he’d run away to. Left his job on Wall Street, left the space in SoHo that sucked thousands every month, and he’d bought the townhouse in the Village, with its bird’s nest and ailanthus and its brown hall wall that we knocked down after Christmas. And he was restoring it by himself; had been restoring it room by room, month by month, in an unhurried tribute to its former state. This slow pace suited him, because there was now weight around his middle and the weight suited him, but that I would never say. And it was really only Charlie now who was his connection to the old life and the trading floors, to the constantly changing numbers and those early breakfasts at Windows on the World. Because it was Charlie who now worked in the South Tower, overlooking Manhattan from the eighty-seventh floor, an untouchable presence as I flew over New York, him King of the World.

My brother rubbed his eyes. I turned on the light; he turned to me.

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Not long.’

‘Come here, sit down.’

I went to the fraying armchair and brushed away the wooden curls that he’d planed from a piece of oak.

‘Drink?’ he said.

‘What’s the time?’

‘Time for Scotch. Come on, I found Dad’s stash.’

‘Where?’

‘Wellington boot.’

‘So obvious,’ we both said.

He poured out the Scotch into stained mugs, and we downed them in one.

‘Another?’

‘I’m all right,’ I said, feeling my stomach recoil and churn at the smoky heat. I had eaten too little that day. I stood up, suddenly needing water.

‘Wait,’ he said, and held out his arm; told me to look behind. I turned, and there framed in the doorway was a large buck rabbit. It watched us with dark eyes as it nuzzled its way through sawdust and cuts of wood, debris and dust clinging to its chestnut-coloured fur. And as we watched it, the years peeled away and we became small again, and it brought something in with it, something we never talked about, the something that happened when I was almost six, when he was eleven. It was there as we watched it, and we knew because we both became quiet.

I knelt down and held out my hand. Waited. The rabbit moved closer. I waited. I felt the cold twitching nose upon my hand, something warm, breath.

‘Look at this,’ said Joe.

The sharpness of my turn caused the rabbit to run. I stood up and went over to my brother.

‘Where did you find it?’

‘Back there. Behind the shelving. Dad must have kept it.’

‘Why would he keep it?’

‘Souvenir of a memorable day?’

I took the large arrow head from him and turned it over. My father had encouraged Jenny Penny to make it that first Christmas. Helped her to saw the scrappy pieces of oak and to nail them together into the large pointed formation before me. She’d decorated one side with empty limpet shells and grey-only pebbles from the shore, and sprinkled it all with glitter. The surface of my palm shimmered in the light.

‘She’d wanted to be found,’ he said.

‘Everyone wants to be found.’

‘Yeah, but that’s the bit I always forget. We didn’t guess where she might be, we didn’t find her. She led us there.’

‘Where was it found that night? D’you remember?’

‘On the jetty. Pointing downriver . . .’

‘To the sea.’

‘I always thought she disappeared to hurt herself, or to kill herself. You know, a grand gesture, her refusal to go home. But now I see she simply led us to a place, to a moment, where she could show us how special she was. How different from everyone else she was.’

‘How
chosen
.’

I felt uneasy. I clambered over the rocks to the furthermost point, where the craggy strand joined the sea. The tide was out – far out – and it wouldn’t have been an impossibility to have walked over to the island that afternoon; I’d done it before. I looked east over to the Black Rock, to its familiar shape rising from a bed of heaving dark. Prawning had been good this season; always sparked my childhood enthusiasm. Buckets full of the translucent greys, boiled on the beach. We could in those days – not now, of course.

The sun felt hot. The familiar fetid arsestink of low tide. A strong briny smell on the wind. I threw a stone for a scampering mutt. Turned back; carefully retracing my footing. I realised the memory of that Christmas was as imprecise to my brother as it was to me. It was Jenny Penny who had instigated the search, and instigated her discovery, just as she had provoked the conversation the night she arrived.

‘Do you believe in God?’ she’d asked loudly, silencing the hum of our familiar chatter.

‘Do we what?’ said my father.

‘Believe in God?’

‘That’s a big old question for a night like this,’ said Nancy. ‘Although to be fair, quite relevant for this time of year.’

‘Do
you
believe in God, Jenny?’ asked my mother.

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘You seem very sure of that,’ said my father.

‘I am.

‘Why’s that, honey?’ asked Nancy.

‘Because he chose me.’

Silence.

‘What do you mean?’ asked my brother.

‘I was born dead.’

And the table fell silent as she intimately described her birth, and the prayers, and the resuscitation that followed. And no one in our house slept that night. No one wanted to be absent in her presence – not through fear, but that she might show us something we weren’t ready to see.

I sat on the wall and looked across the flattened tops of weeddraped rocks and knew how she’d walked on water that night. I’d known it for years now, but I saw how carefully she must have noted the staggered formation, the isolated pathway that had collaborated with her that night, and had given her momentary surety of footing.

I’d come over the hill, I remember, breathless from my panicked run. She’s here! I shouted to my brother; and I saw her looking back at us; not running from us, but waiting for our audience, before she started her slow trajectory across the barely submerged rocks, into the oncoming waves.

‘I’m never going home, Elly.’ That’s what she’d said the day before, but I didn’t take her seriously – thought it was the anticlimax, the malaise of Boxing Day that was affecting her.

She’d left notes around the house, around the garden, tied onto the bare branches of fruit trees. We thought it was a game – it
was
a game – but we thought it was a game whose ending would bring a joyous relief; a shared Well done! My turn now! But then it changed. It grew dark, and we grew fearful. My parents and Nancy headed into the forest and up the valley into neighbouring terrain, where boggy earth could ambush even the careful-footed-sighted. Alan took the roads leading to Talland, Polperro, Pelynt. He later took the road that carved through the village, intending to follow its winding path into Sandplace. We were on the bridge when we flagged him down. The three of us. Joe, me and her. Silent, shivering, unimpressed.

She would give no answers to my parents’ anguished questions. Sat in front of the fire instead and lifted a blanket over her head, refusing to talk. Her mother was called that night – my parents had no choice – and her fate was seamlessly sealed.

‘There’ll be no train ride home for her now, no way. No, Des’s back. You remember Des? My ex of a few years ago. He’s been with me a while now. Oh, didn’t she say? Well, he said he’ll drive down tomorrow and pick her up.’

Des, Des. Uncle Des.

The one who chose her.

The kitchen table was carried outside and covered with newspaper secured by three tarnished silver candelabras, dripping trails of melted wax over the printed stories of yesterday and beyond. By the time we’d carried out the glasses and the wine and the trays of crabs and langoustines, the sky had turned dark, a fearsome dark, and we huddled around the candles like a pack of strays. We were about to start, but then we realised that someone wasn’t with us and so we shouted her name until out of the darkness she appeared, like a beautiful wandering ghost dressed in a white silk shirtdress, the buttons of which were undone so low it was hard to decipher if it was going on or coming off. And as she strode across the dew-soaked lawn like the character in her new TV series, Detective Molly Crenshaw (Moll to her friends), her swagger was now a cop swagger, as if her gun was hidden somewhere awkward, and only the lucky few knew where.

As she reached the table she triumphantly held up two bottles of champagne as if she herself had picked and fermented those grapes and had bottled them all in the space of a day, and we couldn’t help but cheer and applaud this feat. The sound brought an unmistakable glow to her cheeks, dismissing instantly the lie that she had taken her last bow in Theatreland.

‘Let us begin,’ she said, and as if on cue the quiet of the Cornish air was fractured by the sounds of shattering shell and the first ‘
Ah
’s as the sweet white claw meat found its way to our mouths.

‘You’re quiet,’ whispered my father as he leant across to refill my glass. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Of course,’ I said, as Nancy reached across Arthur for a large langoustine. It was decapitated in seconds, its jacketed skin parted and cast aside and its flesh dipped into a pungent bowl of aioli, before the ascent towards open mouth. She licked her fingers and said something but it was lost in the chewing, in the licking; she said something like, ‘I’m thinking of getting married,’ and a sudden silence fell upon the table.

‘What?’ said my mother, trying hard to disguise the horror in her voice.

‘I’m thinking of getting married.’

‘You’re
dating
someone?’ I said.

‘Yup,’ she said, filling her mouth this time with bread and dark crab meat.

‘Since when?’ I said.

‘A while.’

‘Who?’ my mother asked.

Pause.

‘A man.’

‘A
man
?’ my mother said, no longer bothering to disguise the horror in her voice. ‘But why?’

‘Hold on there,’ said my father. ‘We’re not all bad.’

‘Tell me – it’s not Detective Butler, is it?’ said Joe.

‘It is,’ said Nancy, giggling.

‘No way!’ said Joe.

‘Who’s Detective Butler?’ asked my mother; her voice getting higher, the more agitated she became.

‘The really hot, young one in the show,’ said Charlie.

‘But he’s so queer,’ said Joe.

‘He’s not queer,’ said Nancy. ‘I should know, I’m sleeping with him.’

‘You’re queer,’ said Arthur.

‘That’s different, Arthur,’ said Nancy, pulling apart a large claw. ‘My sexuality is fluid.’

‘Is that what you call it?’ said Arthur, randomly hammering at a crab’s head.

‘But why?’ asked my mother, filling her glass with wine and draining it almost before the answer had been given. ‘Why after all these years?’

‘I’ve changed, and it feels nice.
We
feel nice.’

‘Nice?’ my mother said, refilling her glass, her face pale and tortured in the flickering candlelight. ‘Nice?
Nice
has never been grounds for marriage,’ and she sat back, folded her arms and excluded herself from further discussion.

Nobody said much after that. There were a couple of banal comments about the size of the crabs and a discussion about whether whelks could ever rival oysters in gastronomic cuisine, and it would have stayed like that all night had my mother not softened and leant forwards and gently said, ‘Is this a phase, Nancy?’

‘Mid-life crisis, more like,’ said Arthur. ‘Why don’t you buy a Ferrari instead?’

‘I have.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nancy, reaching for my mother’s hand. ‘All the best women are taken.’

(My mother suddenly looked a little happier and blushed, although I can’t be sure of that because of the light.)

‘And,’ Nancy continued, ‘he doesn’t speak about his feelings, he doesn’t cause any dramas over exes, he doesn’t want to go shopping with me, he doesn’t wear my clothes and he doesn’t copy my hairstyle. It’s refreshing, to say the least.’

‘Nance, if you’re happy, we’re happy. Aren’t we everyone?’ said my father, and the table answered him with a pathetic scattering of ‘no’s and ‘suppose so’s.

‘So, congratulations,’ he said, ‘and I can’t wait to meet him.’

‘And neither can we!’ said Joe and Charlie a little too enthusiastically.

We raised our glasses and were about to toast the queer union, when all of a sudden we were interrupted by the sound of a heavy splash coming from the riverbank; a sound that propelled our drunken selves to the water’s edge.

We shuffled carefully along the jetty, huddled behind my father as he held the candelabra over the water, illuminating the black river with yellow. The overhanging trees danced grotesquely. Shadows of reaching arms and groping fingers came towards us. We heard another splash. My father turned to his left and it was then that we saw the frightened darting eyes; not the eyes of an otter this time, the size, the stroke of its paddle all wrong; no, what we saw was the gently lined face of a baby deer struggling to hold its head high above the water. It went under. Re-emerged. Its eyes terrified, staring into mine.

‘Get back, Elly!’ my father shouted, as I jumped into the shimmering cold.

‘Elly – it’s dangerous! For God’s sake get back!’

I waded towards the drowning beast; I heard another splash behind me and turned to see my brother thrashing towards me, water spraying as he kicked out towards me. The deer panicked as I drew near and it quickly turned and flailed towards the opposite bank. Its hoofs soon connected with an unexpected sandbank that had formed in the channel of the shallower waters, and I watched as it stumbled up the muddy edge, exhausted. It disappeared into the shadows of the forest opposite, just as the candles flickered and drowned in their own liquidity. We were left alone in the black.

‘Idiot,’ said my brother as he flung his arms around me. ‘What were you trying to do?’

‘Save it. What were you trying to do?’

‘Save you.’

‘If you didn’t want me to get married, Ell,’ bellowed Nancy across the Cornish valley, ‘all you needed to do was tell me, honey, not try to fucking kill yourself!’

‘Come on,’ said my brother as he guided me back to shore.

I sat in front of the roaring hearth and watched the men play poker badly and loudly. My mother bent down and filled my wine glass. Maybe it was the angle or the light, maybe it was simply her; but she looked so young that night. And Nancy must have noticed it too, because I caught her looking at her as she carried in a tray of teas, and it was a gaze, I could see, that extinguished all thoughts of her erratic marriage (a marriage that, incidentally, would never happen due to Detective Butler’s shameful ‘outing’ by
National Enquirer
magazine).

Later, as my mother entered my room to say good night, I sat up and said, ‘Nancy’s in love with you.’

‘And I’m in love with her.’

‘But what about Dad?’

She smiled. ‘I’m in love with him too.’

‘Oh. Is that allowed?’

She laughed and said, ‘For a child of the sixties, Elly . . .’

‘I know. Bit of a letdown.’

‘Never,’ she said. ‘
Never
. I love them differently, that’s all. I don’t sleep with Nancy.’

‘Oh God, I don’t need to know that.’

‘Yes you do. We play by our own rules, Elly, always have. That’s all we can do. For us it works.’

And she leant over and kissed me good night.