When God Was a Rabbit (20 page)

The following day, the partial eclipse began just before ten. The sky was overcast, which was a shame, because the lessening of light became a subtle phenomenon rather than the dramatic occurrence of ancient times. We were out in the bay with other boats, surrounded by cliff tops dotted with hundreds of observers, their faces looking towards the cloudmasked sun, protective mirrored viewers held up like 3D glasses. Gulls were singing, and land birds too from the island haven, but there was chaos in their voices, melody gone. They were sensing the unusual, I was sensing the cold. The diminishing light felt like the approach of a storm, like something harmful, inexplicable. And then just before eleven fifteen, the last of the sun disappeared, and the darkness and silence were total, and the cold descended upon the water, and us, and the whole bay locked down into this ravenous silence; the birds quiet, confused into sleep.

I thought this is how it would be if the sun died; the gentle shutting down of an organ, sleepy, no longer working. No explosion at the end of life, just this slow disintegration into darkness, where life as we know it never wakes up, because nothing reminds us that we have to.

The sun started to reappear a couple of minutes later, slowly, of course, until colour once again saturated the sea and our faces, and birdsong filled the air, songs this time of joy, of relief. Cheers rang out from the cliff tops and the
ra ta ta ta
of applause. Yet we were all quiet for so long after, touched by the magnitude, the beautiful unfathomable magnitude of it all. This is what we are connected to. What we are all connected to. When the lights go out, so do we.

A month later, Arthur woke up at six like he did every morning; and yet on that particular morning his eyes didn’t. I looked out from my window and I saw him stumble onto the lawn like a drunk. I ran down the stairs and into the fresh morning air and caught him as he knelt groping for direction.

‘What is it, Arthur? What’s happened?’

‘I can’t see anything,’ he said. ‘I’m blind.’

Non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy – that was the term the specialist used; an optic nerve stroke that lessened the blood supply to the eyes and instead deposited large shadows across both fields of vision. It was something that happened to older men with heart disease; one of those tragic, unfortunate things.

‘Heart disease,’ scoffed Arthur. ‘It must be something else.’

My mother reached for his hand, held it tight.

‘But I’m fit. I always have been; have never had any problem with illness whatsoever, and certainly not with my heart.’

‘But your results say something different,’ said the specialist.

‘Then you can shove that difference up your tight little arse,’ and he got up to leave.

‘Come on, Arthur,’ said my mother, leading him back to his seat.

The specialist went back to his desk. He looked at his notes, then out of the window; allowed his mind to wander back to similar occurrences and strange side effects filed under Coincidence, rather than the red of
WARNING
. He looked at Arthur again and said, ‘Do you take a drug for erectile dysfunction?’ At which point, seeming to know what the answer was already, my mother got up and said, ‘All yours, Alfie,’ and she left the room, leaving my father to deal with the sexual fallout of octogenarian practices.

The answer, apparently, was
Yes
; for a whole year now. He’d been one of the first to take it, of course, and had waited for its arrival like a child waits for Christmas. The specialist believed there was a link; the ‘something else’ that he’d heard about before, but he had no proof, so it was goodbye to the pills, Arthur, and a slow hopeful wait for sight.

They came back the following day, tired but relieved, and I waited for them in the kitchen, mugs filled with Scotch, not with tea, because it was late in the afternoon and only Scotch would do.

‘I’m sorry, Arthur,’ I said.

‘Don’t you worry.’

‘It’s not necessarily permanent,’ said my mother. ‘The specialist said your sight could come back at any time. They know so little about this.’

‘But I must prepare for it not to,’ he said, reaching for his Scotch and finding the salt cellar instead. ‘I simply like having erections. I haven’t been doing much with them, but I find them a comfort. Rather like a good book. It’s the anticipation, really. I don’t even have to get to the end.’

‘I know exactly what you mean, Arthur,’ said my father, before being cut short by a withering look from my mother. ‘You’re not a man,’ he added bravely. ‘You can’t possibly understand,’ and he leant across the table and held Arthur’s arm in solidarity.

I led Arthur back to his cottage, which was warm and smelt of the previous day’s coffee, and I helped him to his favourite chair, which we’d positioned by the small hearth, now that autumn was upon us.

‘A new chapter, Elly,’ he said, and sighed deeply. And a new chapter it truly became; a chapter when I became his eyes.

I’d had years of practice as a child, when he’d led me down to the river or into the forest to describe the seasonal changes and the smells each brought with them. I told him about the increased migration of egrets and described how they behaved, white and sullen, in the scrub oaks beyond. And we picked fungi in the woods and he truly smelt for the first time their earthy scent and felt the spongy sensation between his fingers and we fished, quietly at first, in the river waters until he could almost sense a fish upon his hook, as his fingers played on the line, like gently strumming fingers on a guitar string.

And it was my eyes, too, that led him nervously to his book launch that cold December night, as a sharp wind blew through Smithfield, chasing stragglers to the warmth of a bar. And it was my eyes that led him through the long, white entranceway of the once-upon-a-time smokehouse, through to the high minimal surrounds of the restaurant where everyone was waiting for him, and where his hand tightened around my arm as the sounds of voices and echoes and movement descended upon his ears in a crescendo of disorientation. I felt the fear pulse throughout his body until my mother came up to him and whispered, ‘Everyone’s saying such wonderful things, Arthur. You’re a bit of a star,’ and his grasp relaxed, and his voice relaxed, and he said rather loudly, ‘
Champagne pour tout!
’

It was late. Most people had gone. My father was cornered by a young artist who’d come down from dinner and I heard them discussing the importance of depression and jealousy on the British psyche. My mother was tipsy, flirting with an older gentleman who worked for Orion; she was showing him how to make a chicken by folding a serviette. He was engrossed. As I came up from the bathrooms, I looked around for Arthur, and, rather than seeing him crowded by people, I saw him sitting alone by the exit doors, a forlorn figure part hidden in shadow; a deep frown set across his brow. I thought it had been the anxiety of the evening that had ambushed his ebullience; the anticlimax of a project completed, and completed well. And yet as I approached, I could see it was something else, something much deeper; its resonance present, frenetic and cloying.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’

He smiled and nodded.

‘It’s been a good evening.’ I sat down next to him.

‘It has.’ He looked down at his hands; ran a finger along a vein, plump, swollen, a green worm buried under his skin.

‘I’ve run out of money,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve run out of money.’

Silence.

‘Is that what’s worrying you? Arthur, we’ve got plenty, you know that. You can have as much as you need. Tell Mum and Dad.’

‘No, Elly. I’ve. Run. Out. Of. Money,’ he said, clearly intonating each word, wringing out meaning until he could sense the understanding and implication spreading across my face.

‘Oh my God.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Who else knows?’

‘Only you.’

‘When did you run out?’

‘A month ago. Six weeks.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Exactly.’

Pause.

‘So you’re not going to die?’

‘Well, I am some day,’ he said rather grandly.

‘I know,’ I said, laughing. I stopped. He looked sad.

‘I’ve become mortal again. Human. I have the not-knowing again and I feel scared.’ A solitary tear ran from his eye.

We sat like that, quietly, until the stragglers left; until the cavernous room echoed with the sound of table-clearing and chair-scraping, rather than the sound of good times, good cheer.

‘Arthur?’

‘Mmm?’

‘You can tell me now. How was it going to happen? How were you going to die?’

And he looked towards the sound of my voice and said, ‘A coconut was going to fall on my head.’

I rose with the sun and had my cofee on the roof, wrapped in an old cashmere cardigan that Nancy had bought me years ago – my first adult possession, a cardigan that cost more than a coat. As I watched the meat market close down for the day and the workers discard their whites and head instead for a breakfast pint before sleep, I read again Jenny Penny’s letter and finished the ‘Lost and Found’ article for that week.

7 September 2001

Elly . . . I’ve been making some extra money doing my tarot readings again. It gives people hope. I try to explain that its not just the reading itself, but the psychology behind it. But some people have never looked back you see. For some its simply too far to see. I’m quite popular with the lifers you know! I’ve recently been seeing ‘freedom’ in whatever cards they choose be it Strife or the Princess of Wands or even Death. I never see freedom in Justice though. Justice is a difficult card for the imprisoned.

I pulled a card this morning – a random card – one for me and a moment later, one for you. I usually get Adjustment or the Five of Cups. But this morning I pulled The Tower. The Tower! And then I pulled it again for you. Two towers Elly! One after the other. What’s the chance of that?

Its the most powerful of cards. The Tower falls and nothing can be the same again. Nows the time for true healing. The old is destroyed to make way for the New. We mustn’t hold on to anything any more because all will be destroyed by this trans formative power. The world is changing Elly and we must trust. Fate is beckoning. And if we can accept the laws of the Universe, the ebb and flow of joy of tragedy, then we have everything we need to embrace our true freedom . . .

I stopped reading. Could hear her words exact and persuasive, like her explanation of Atlantis all those years ago. The surety. The hypnotic lure of belief. I closed the computer and finished my coffee.

I felt restless, started to feel something that I’d known for a while: that we were finally coming to an end. It had been five years now, five years of Liberty and Ellis, and I felt their stories were now told, but I’d been putting it off, that final goodbye, especially when I found out that Jenny would be eligible for parole soon, something my father had told me the week before. And although some things were still to be decided, she would soon learn that it would be he who’d be representing her at that final hearing, leading her outside, to where life had progressed six years without her. And so I would wait a little while longer; for that final column; the one she would write herself, sitting on this roof with me by her side.

I skipped breakfast and made my way instead towards Soho for a lunch of cappuccino and croissant. I liked the walk; simply west along Holborn from Chancery Lane to the divide at New Oxford Street. The sun climbed higher and shadows shortened and the city awoke, spewing people onto the streets from all directions. I came to Cambridge Circus and suddenly veered off down Charing Cross Road towards the National Gallery and the Vermeer exhibition, an exhibition I’d been sloppy and procrastinating in my desire to see. Time was running out; only six days left. I didn’t even stop in Zwemmer’s, as I usually did, or the second-hand bookshops whose bargain basements filled most of my shelves; no, I continued on fast and dodged tourists slow to browse.

I could see the lines at the ticket desk already. The exhibition had been sold out for most of its run and I soon resigned myself to yet another wasted opportunity, but as I joined the end of a slow-moving queue, I heard the whisper that there were tickets available for that afternoon, and sure enough as I reached the desk, the assistant said, ‘Three o’clock OK?’ and I said, OK. And in the cool air-conditioned entrance hall I stood holding my ticket, feeling lucky that my day was now planned.

Soho was quiet and I sat outside; something I always did, even in winter. Deliveries were late and trolleys piled high with cans of oil and wine and tomatoes trundled carelessly towards doorways and disappeared into kitchens, only later to return. This would always be a working street to me. Elsewhere all the old shops had gone or were going, greedy landlords waiting for the brand names, the names that could afford the hefty rents, so byebye the rest. I looked to my left; Jean’s hairdressing was still there and Jimmy’s, of course, and Angelucci’s too, thank goodness. They still sent coffee down to my parents, an espresso blend that the postman loved to deliver, for the smell made his day, he said. This corner was safe, for now at least. I took out my newspaper and ordered a double macchiato with a
baci
on the side. This corner was safe.

It was hard to imagine we were heading towards dark mornings and the long cold haul of winter that would turn my skin the colour of greying whites. I knew this mild autumn would send the leaves into a riot of frenzied colour, more golds and reds dominating many a wood, the colours of Vermont, the place we’d gone to the previous year.

We’d driven up from New Paltz, a spur-of-the-moment thing, just the three of us. We went to ride horses but hiked instead, and on the way there we picked someone up, a young woman who looked more like a girl. We picked her up because it wasn’t safe to hitch-hike – and we all said that, not just me – and she said, ‘Yeah, Yeah,’ as she scrambled into the back. Her odour smelled strong; it was an odour that said, Don’t fuck with me, as she sat next to me with her black garbage bag on her lap. And the youthfulness we’d imagined from the roadside disappeared inside the car, because there under the rim of her Dodgers cap, was the face of a tough life: eyes tired and harder than her years. She said she was going on holiday. We knew she was running away. She took nothing from us except a big breakfast. We watched her disappear into a bus station, engorged by a carelessness she took for adventure. She said her name was Lacey; after the cop show. We became quiet after she left.

I must have heard the shout, but I just wasn’t aware of it at the time. But looking back I remembered I’d heard
something
, but I had no context, you see. But then someone tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the screen inside and I turned round and saw four people already watching. I couldn’t see clearly what was going on because it was quite dark, and so I got up and followed inside; slowly, horrifically, drawn to the solitary image that filled the giant screen:

Blue sky. A beautiful September morning. Black smoke and flames billowing from the gaping wound in its side. North Tower, the caption said.

Gotta call Joe. North. Charlie’s South. South’s safe. I dialled his number, straight to voice mail.

‘Joe, it’s me. I’m sure you’re all right but I’m watching TV and I can’t believe this. Have you spoken to Charlie? Call me.’

It came in low and banked and it was the noise, a haunting whine that greeted its target as it exploded into a fireball, sending thousands of gallons of burning fuel rampaging through the lift shafts, melting its spine. Your tower. Charlie. Yours. The woman next to me started to cry. Straight to voice mail. Fuck.

‘Charlie, it’s me. I’m watching it. Phone me; please tell me you’re all right. Please phone me, Charlie.’

My phone rang immediately and I picked up.

‘Charlie?’

It was my mother.

‘I don’t know. I’m watching it now. I can’t get through either. I’ve left messages. Yeah, of course keep trying. Let me know. Of course I will. I love you too.’

The café was packed, silent. Strangers comforted strangers. The impact zone was lower than the North Tower and that was a bad thing. Maybe he was downstairs buying a newspaper or in the bathroom, not at his desk. Not at your desk, Charlie.

People were now waving at the windows, looking for rescue. They were leaning so far out, straining away from the black smoke creeping towards them. I dialled Joe again. Fucking voice mail.

‘It’s me. Call me. We’re all worried. I can’t get hold of Charlie. Tell me he’s OK. I love you.’

They tumbled out, just a couple at first and then more, like wounded archers from distant ramparts. And then I saw them, the two people of my future dreams. I saw them hold hands and jump; witnessed the last seconds of their friendship and they never let go. Who reassured who? Who could do that? Was it done with words or a smile? That brief moment of fresh air when they were free, when they could remember how it was before; a brief moment of sunshine, a brief moment of friends holding hands. And they never let go. Friends never let go.

I picked up.

‘No I haven’t,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

I sounded tired, I knew I did. I heard the fear in her voice and I tried to reassure her, but she was a mother and she was scared. She’d heard from Nancy, she was trying to get from LAX to New York but the airports had shut down. A plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

‘Joe,’ I said again. ‘Call me – just a quick, I’m OK.’

‘Charlie, it’s me again. Call me. Please.’

People all around were on their phones, the lucky ones had located friends; others waited, pale; I was one of them.

Two fifty-nine p.m. South Tower sucked to the ground amidst a flurry of millions of bits of paper, of memos and drafts with names of those now lost, until it was gone, and all those inside were gone and their nightmare was over, now handed to those who were left, those left waiting, now mourning by their phones.

I rang again. No voice mail now, nothing. Another plane had crashed outside of Pittsburgh; a rumour that it was shot down – conspiracy was starting already.
Conspiracy breeds conspiracy
. That’s what Jenny Penny would have said.

The Tower is falling. Nothing can be the same.

Three twenty-eight. North Tower gone. Scenes of dusty moonscape where once was an avenue of people holding coffees, and smiling and rushing to work with thoughts of lunch maybe, or what they’d be doing later, because at that time of the morning they still had later. And as the dust cleared, survivors from the street crawled out dazed and covered in ash, and a man whose shirt had ripped across his front revealed a bleeding chest, but he was oblivious as he concentrated on smoothing his hair to the side, because he’d always smoothed his hair to the side – it was something his mother had started when he was young – so why should that day be any different? It was his search for normality. Call me, Joe. Call me, Charlie. I want normal again.

And that’s when I could’ve done it. Could have wandered down to the Vermeer and reminded myself of beauty. I could have gone down there and been normal. I could have lost myself in a joy I could still remember from that morning, because it was still so close, and I could remember everything before the world changed.

I could have done all that and would have, had I not picked up my phone instead and heard his voice and I started to shake when I heard his voice, and he was talking fast, and he sounded panicked but he was OK. He’d never gone to work that day, had got up late and couldn’t be fucked, and I was telling him about the reports here, stuff I’d heard, but he kept telling me to stop, and I didn’t hear him at first because I was so happy. But then he shouted at me and I heard.

‘I can’t find Joe,’ he said, and his voice broke.