When God Was a Rabbit (3 page)

January 1975 was snowless and mild. A drab, uninspiring month that left sledges unused and resolutions unsaid. I tried most things to delay my imminent return to school, but eventually I passed through those heavy, grey doors with the sullen weight of Christmas Past pressed firmly on my chest. This would be a
dull
term, I concluded, as I dodged airless pools of malignant torpor. Colourless and
dull
. Until I turned the corner, that is, and there she was; standing outside my classroom.

It was her hair I noticed first, wild and dark and woolly, and breaking free from the ineffectual Alice band that had slipped down onto her shiny forehead. Her cardigan was too long – handmade and handwashed – stretched at the last wringing out, and it hung down by her knees and was only a little shorter than the grey school skirt we were all forced to wear. She didn’t notice me as I walked past her, even when I coughed. She was staring at her finger. I looked back; she’d drawn an eye on the skin at the tip. Practising hypnosis, she would later say.

I held up the final picture of my rabbit to the bewildered faces of my classmates.

‘. . . And so at Christmas, god finally came to live with me,’ I ended triumphantly.

I paused, big smile, waiting for my applause. None came and the room fell silent, unexpectedly went dark; the overhead lights useless and straining and yellow against the storm clouds gathering outside. All of a sudden, the new girl, Jenny Penny, started to clap and cheer.

‘Shut up!’ shouted my teacher, Miss Grogney, her lips disappearing into a line of non-secular hatred. Unknown to me, she was the product of missionaries who had spent a lifetime preaching the Lord’s work in an inhospitable part of Africa, only to have found that the Muslims had got there first.

I started to move towards my desk.

‘Stay there,’ said Miss Grogney firmly, and I did, and felt a warm pressure build in my bladder.

‘Do you think it’s right to call a hare—’ Miss Grogney started.

‘It’s a rabbit, actually,’ interrupted Jenny Penny. ‘It’s just called a Belgian—’

‘Do you think it’s right to call a rabbit
god
?’ Miss Grogney went on with emphasis.

I felt this was a trick question.

‘Do you think it’s right to say, “I took
god
out on a lead to the
shops
”?’

‘But I did,’ I said.

‘Do you know what the word “blasphemy” means?’ she asked.

I looked puzzled. It was that word again. Jenny Penny’s hand shot up.

‘Yes?’ said Miss Grogney.

‘Blasphemy means stupid,’ said Jenny Penny.

‘Blasphemy does not mean
stupid
.’

‘What about rude, then?’ she said.

‘It
means
,’ said Miss Grogney loudly, ‘insulting God or something
sacred
. Did you hear that, Eleanor Maud? Something
sacred
. You could have been stoned if you’d said that in another country.’

And I shivered, knowing full well who’d have been there to cast the first one.

Jenny Penny was waiting at the school gates, hopping from one foot to another, playing in her own spectacular world. It was a strange world, one that had already provoked the cruelty of whispers by morning’s end, and yet it was a world that intrigued me and crushed my sense of normality with the decisiveness of a fatal blow. I watched her wrap a see-through plastic rain bonnet around the mass of frizzy curls that framed her face. I thought she was waiting for the rain to stop, but actually she was waiting for me.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said.

I blushed.

‘Thanks for clapping,’ I said.

‘It was really good,’ she said, hardly able to open her mouth due to the tightness of her bow. ‘Better than everyone else’s.’

I unfolded my pink umbrella.

‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘My mum’s boyfriend’s going to buy me one of them. Or a ladybird one. If I’m good, that is.’

But I wasn’t that interested in umbrellas any more, not now that she’d mentioned a different word.

‘Why’s your mum got a boyfriend?’ I said.

‘Because I don’t have a dad. He ran away before I was born.’

‘Gosh,’ I said.

‘I call him “my uncle”, though. I call all my mum’s boyfriends my uncles.’

‘Why?’

‘Easier. Mum says people judge her. Call her names.’

‘Like what?’

‘Slag.’

‘What’s a slag?’

‘A woman who has a lot of boyfriends,’ she said, taking off her rain bonnet and inching under my umbrella. I shuffled over and made room for her. She smelt of chips.

‘Fancy a Bazooka? I asked, holding the gum out in my palm.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I almost choked last time I had one. Almost died, my mum said.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and put the gum back in my pocket, wishing I’d bought something less violent instead.

‘I’d really like to see your rabbit, though,’ Jenny Penny said. ‘Take it out for a walk. Or a hop,’ she added, doubling over with laughter.

‘All right,’ I said, watching her. ‘Where do you live?’

‘In your street. We moved there two days ago.’

I quickly remembered the yellow car everyone was talking about, the one that arrived in the middle of the night pulling a dented trailer.

‘My brother will be here in a minute,’ I said. ‘You can walk home with us, if you like.’

‘All right,’ she said, a slight smile forming on her lips. ‘Better than walking home by myself. What’s your brother like?’

‘Different,’ I said, unable to find a more precise word.

‘Good,’ she said, and started once again to hop from one foot to the glorious other.

‘What are you doing?’ I said.

‘Pretending I’m walking on glass.’

‘Is it fun?’

‘Try it if you like.’

‘OK,’ I said, and I did. And it strangely was.

We were watching
The Generation Game
, shouting, ‘Cuddly toy, cuddly toy,’ when the doorbell rang. My mother got up and was gone for quite a while. She missed most of the conveyor belt bit, the good bit, and when she came in she ignored us and went over to my father and whispered in his ear. He stood up quickly and said, ‘Joe, look after your sister. We’re going next door. We won’t be long.’

‘OK,’ my brother said, and we waited for the front door to slam before he looked at me and said, ‘Come on.’

The night was cold and urging frost, and much too harsh for slippered feet. And we crept nimbly in the shadow of the hedge until we reached Mr Golan’s front door, thankfully still on the latch. I paused in the doorway – three months since I’d last crossed it; since I began to avoid my parents’ questions and his pleading, rheumy eyes – my brother offered his hand, and together we passed through the hallway, with its smell of old coats and stale meals, and headed towards the kitchen where the sound of subdued voices lured us like flickering bait.

My brother squeezed my hand. ‘All right?’ he whispered.

The door was ajar. Esther was seated on a chair and my mother was talking on the telephone. My father had his back to us. No one noticed our entrance.

‘We think he took his own life,’ we heard our mother say. ‘Yes. There are tablets everywhere. I’m a neighbour. No, you were talking to his sister before. Yes, we’ll be here. Of course.’

I looked at my brother. He turned away. My father moved towards the window, and it was then that I saw Mr Golan again. But this time he was lying on the floor; legs together, one arm out straight, the other bent across his chest as if he’d died practising the tango. My brother tried to hold me back, but I escaped his hand and crept closer.

‘Where’s his number?’ I said loudly.

They all turned to look at me. My mother put down the receiver.

‘Come away, Elly,’ my father said, reaching towards me.

‘No!’ I said, pulling away. ‘Where’s his number? The one on his arm? Where is it?’

Esther looked at my mother. My mother turned away. Esther opened her arms, ‘Come here, Elly.’

I went to her. Stood in front of her. She smelt of sweets. Turkish delight, I think.

‘He never had a number,’ she said softly.

‘He did. I saw it.’

‘He never had a number,’ she repeated quietly. ‘He used to draw the numbers on himself, whenever he felt sad.’

And it was then that I learnt that the numbers, which looked as if they had been drawn on yesterday, probably had been.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘Nor should you,’ said my father angrily.

‘But what about the horror camps?’ I asked.

Esther placed her hands on my shoulders. ‘Oh, those camps were real and the horror was real, and we must never forget.’

She pulled me towards her; her voice faltered a little. ‘But Abraham was never there,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Never there. He was mentally disturbed,’ she added, as casually as if she’d been talking about a new hair colour. ‘He came to this country in 1927 and he had a happy life. Some may say a selfish life. He travelled a lot with his music and had great success. If he kept taking his tablets, then he was my old Abe. But if he stopped – well, he became a problem; to himself, to others . . .’

‘Then why did he tell me all those things?’ I said, tears streaming down my cheeks. ‘Why did he
lie
to me?’

She was about to say something when she suddenly stopped and stared at me. And I believe now that what she saw in my eyes, what I saw in hers – the
fear
– was the realisation that she knew what had happened to me. And so I offered my hand, to her the lifeline.

She turned away.

‘Why did he lie to you?’ she said hastily. ‘Guilt, that’s all. Sometimes life gives you too much good. You feel unworthy.’

Esther Golan let me drown.

My mother blamed it on shock, a delayed reaction to the sudden loss of her parents. That was how her lump had started, she said, as she placed the Bakewell tart onto the kitchen table and handed us the plates. The trigger of unnatural energy, she said, that whirls and gathers momentum until one day, when you are drying after a bath, you feel it sitting there within your breast and you know it shouldn’t be there but you ignore it until months go by and the fear adds to its size and then you sit in front of a doctor and say, ‘I’ve found a lump,’ as you start to unbutton your cardigan.

My father believed it was a cancerous lump, not because my mother was genetically prone to such a thing, but because he was looking out for the saboteur of his wonderful life. He’d started to believe that goodness was finite and even a glass that was once half full, could suddenly become half empty. It was strange to watch his idealism turn so rapidly to slush.

My mother wouldn’t be away for long, a few days at most, for the biopsy and the assessment, and she packed with a calm assurance as if she was going away on holiday. Only her best clothes went with her, perfume too, even a novel – one she would describe as a good read. Shirts were folded with a small sachet of lavender pressed between the cotton and the tissue paper, and doctors would soon exclaim, ‘You smell lovely. It’s lavender, isn’t it?’ And she would nod to the medical students crowded around her bed, as one by one they offered their diagnosis of the growth that had taken illicit refuge.

She placed a pair of new pyjamas into her tartan overnight bag. I ran my hand over the fabric.

‘It’s silk,’ my mother said. ‘A present from Nancy.’

‘Nancy buys you nice presents, doesn’t she?’ I said.

‘She’s coming to stay, you know.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘To help Daddy look after you.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s good, isn’t it?’ she said.

(It was that book again; the chapter called: ‘Hard Things to Tell Small Children’.)

‘Yes,’ I said quietly.

It was strange, her going away. Her presence in our young lives had been unequivocal, unfailing. Always there. We were her career, and long ago had she given up that other world, choosing instead to watch over us night and day in constant vigilance – her shield, she would one day tell us, against a policeman at the door, a stranger on the telephone, a sombre voice announcing that life had once again been torn apart: that unmendable rip that starts at the heart.

I sat on the bed, noting her qualities in a way most people would have reserved for an epitaph. My fear was as silent as her multiplying cells. My mother was beautiful. She had lovely hands that lifted the conversation when she spoke, and had she been deaf, her signing would have been as elegant as a poet speaking verse. I looked at her eyes: blue, blue, blue; same as mine. I sang the colour in my head until it swamped my essence like sea water.

My mother stopped and stretched and gently placed her hand on her breast; maybe she was saying goodbye to the lump, or imagining the cut. Maybe she was imagining the hand reaching in. Maybe I was.

I shuddered and said, ‘I’ve got a lump too.’

‘Where?’ she asked.

And I pointed to my throat, and she pulled me to her and held me, and I smelt the lavender that had escaped her shirts.

‘Are you going to die?’ I asked, and she laughed as if I’d told her a joke, and that laughter meant more to me than any
No
.

Aunt Nancy didn’t have any children. She liked children, or at least she said she liked us, and I often heard my mother say there was really no room in Nancy’s life for children, which I found quite odd, especially since she lived alone in quite a large flat in London. Nancy was a film star; not a massive one, by today’s standards, but a film star none the less. She was also a lesbian, and was defined as much by that as she was by her talent.

Nancy was my father’s younger sister, and she always said that he got the brains
and
the looks and she got whatever was left over, but we all knew that was a lie. When she flashed her film-star smile I could see why people were in love with her, because we all were actually, just a bit.

She was mercurial; her visits often fleeting. She’d simply turn up – sometimes out of nowhere – a fairy godmother whose sole purpose was to make things right. She used to share my bedroom when she stayed over and I thought life was brighter with her around. She made up for the blackouts the country was suffering from. She was generous, kind, and always smelt divine. I never knew the scent; it was just her. People said I looked like her and although I never said it, I loved the fact that I did. One day my father said that Nancy had grown up too quickly. ‘How can you grow up too quickly?’ I’d asked. He told me to forget it but I never did.

At the age of seventeen Nancy joined a radical theatre group and travelled around the country in an old van, performing improvised plays in pubs and clubs. Theatre was her first love, she used to say on chat shows, and we would huddle round the television and burst into laughter and shout, ‘Liar!’ because we all knew that it was Katherine Hepburn who was really her first love. Not
the
Kath
a
rine Hepburn, but a world-weary heavy-set stage manager who declared unencumbered love to her after a performance of their unpromising two-act play,
To Hell and Back and That’s OK
.

They were in a small village just outside Nantwich and their first encounter took place down the back alley of the Hen and Squirrel; it was a place usually reserved for urination but on that night, Nancy said, there was only the smell of romance in the air. They were walking side by side, carrying props back to the van when Katherine Hepburn suddenly pushed Nancy into the pebble-dashed wall and kissed her, tongues and all, and Nancy dropped her box of machetes and gasped at the speed of this feminine assault. Describing it afterwards, she said, ‘It felt so natural and sexy. Just like kissing myself’ – the ultimate accolade for an award-winning actress.

My father had never met a lesbian before, and it was unfortunate that K. H. should be his first, because his liberal cloak was pulled away to reveal an armoury of caricatured prejudice. He could never understand what Nancy saw in her, and all she ever said was that K. H. had amazing inner beauty, which my father said must be extremely hidden, since an archaeological dig working round the clock would probably have found it hard to discover. And he was right. She
was
hidden; hidden behind a birth certificate that said Carole Benchley. She was a self-confessed cinephile whose knowledge of films was surpassed only by her knowledge of mental health care within the NHS; a woman who frequently tiptoed across the celluloid line that kept Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road and the rest of us tucked up safely in bed.

‘Sorry I’m late!’ shouted Nancy one day, as she rushed into a café to meet her.

‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’ said K. H.

‘That’s all right then,’ said Nancy, sitting down.

Then looking round, and with raised voice, K. H. said, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.’

Nancy noticed the people in the café staring at them.

‘Fancy a sandwich?’ she said quietly.

‘If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes then,’ said Nancy, picking up a menu.

Most people would have instantly recognised the joyous pact that had been made with lunacy, but not Nancy. She was young and ever the adventurer, and went with the excitement of her first stirrings of lesbian love.

‘She was a great lover, though,’ my aunt used to say, at which point either my mother or father would stand up and say, ‘Anyway . . .’ and my brother and I would wait for the rest, but there never was any more, not until we were older,
anyway
. . .

I’d never known my father to cry before, and the night after my mother left would be his first. I sat at the bottom of the stairs eavesdropping on the conversation, and I heard his tears stutter between his words.

‘But what if she dies?’ he said.

My brother crept down the stairs and sat next to me, wrapping us both in a blanket still warm from his bed.

‘She’s not going to die,’ Nancy said commandingly.

My brother and I looked at each other. I felt his heart beat faster, but he said nothing; held me tighter.

‘Look at me, Alfie. She’s not going to die. Some things I know. You have to trust. This is not her time.’

‘Oh God, I’ll do anything,’ my father said, ‘
anything
. I’ll be anything,
do
anything, if only she’ll be all right.’

And it was then that I witnessed my father’s first bargain with a God he never believed in. The second would come nearly thirty years later.

My mother didn’t die and five days later she returned to us looking better than we’d seen her in years. The biopsy had been a success and the benign lump quickly removed. I asked to see it – I’d imagined it black like coal – but my brother told me to shut up, said I was being weird. Nancy cried the moment my mother walked through the door. She cried at odd times and that was what made her a good actress. But in his room later that night, my brother told me it was because she had been secretly in love with my mother since the first time they had met.

He told me that she had gone to Bristol to spend the weekend with her brother (our father, of course) who was in his last year at university there. They had gone walking along the Mendip Hills, and when the numbing cold had entered their bones, they in turn entered a pub and sat, dazed, in front of a roaring hearth.

Nancy was at the bar ordering a beer and a lemonade when a young woman, soaked to the skin, barrelled through the door, and headed over to where she was standing. Nancy was transfixed. She watched the young woman order a Scotch, watched her down it in one. Watched her light a cigarette. Smile.

They were soon in conversation. Nancy learnt that the woman’s name was Kate, and her pulse flared at the solid sound of her name. She was in her second year, studying English, and had just finished with a boyfriend the previous week – bit of a dullard, she said – and she laughed and threw her head back, revealing the soft down of her neck. Nancy gripped the bar and blushed as the sudden weakness in her legs moved north. And that was the exact moment she decided that if she couldn’t have this woman, then her brother should.

‘Alfie!’ she screamed. ‘Come here and meet someone really nice!’

And so it was Nancy who did the courting for my father during his final break from university. It was Nancy who delivered the flowers to my mother, Nancy who made the phone calls and Nancy who made the reservations for the clandestine dinners. And finally it was Nancy who wrote the poems that my father never knew about, the ones that made my mother fall in love with him and ‘reveal’ the hidden depths to his oft stagnant emotions. By the time the new term started, my father and mother were head over heels in love, and Nancy was a confused fifteen year old limping away on the uneven surface of a bruised heart.

‘Is she still in love with her?’ I asked.

My brother sighed. ‘Who knows?’