When God Was a Rabbit

by Winman, Sarah

  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 Katharine 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?’

  ‘Good morning,’ said Nancy, opening her eyes to the dull November morn.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘What’s up?’ she said, rolling over and meeting my face.

  ‘It’s the auditions today,’ I said to her quietly, placing my red and blue school tie over my head.

  ‘What auditions?’ she said, quickly sitting up.

  ‘For the Nativity play,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t know you were interested in that.’

  ‘I wasn’t, but Jenny Penny persuaded me.’

  ‘What part are you going up for?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘Mary, Joseph, the usual,’ I said. ‘The lead.’ (Omitting baby Jesus since it was a nonspeaking part and also I didn’t know if I’d been forgiven for saying he was a mistake.)

  ‘What do you have to do in the audition?’ she asked.

  ‘Just stand there,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing more?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, Jenny Penny said so,’ I said. ‘She said they can tell star quality just by that. She said it’s in my jeans.’

  ‘OK then. Well, good luck, angel,’ she said, leant across to her bedside table and opened the drawer.

  ‘Take these,’ she said. ‘For luck. They exude star quality and always work for me.’

  I’d never heard her use the word exude before. I would use it later that day.

  I walked briskly to the end of the road where a large privet hedge had made its home. It was where I always met Jenny Penny to walk to school; we never met at her house because it was difficult at her house, something to do with her mum’s new boyfriend. She got on OK with him, she said, when her mum was there. But her mum wasn’t always there, you see; she was often at funerals now, a new hobby that she had recently embraced. I guessed her mum simply liked to cry.

  ‘Laughing? Crying? It’s all the same really, isn’t it?’ said Jenny Penny.

  I didn’t think it was but I didn’t say anything. Even then I knew her world was different from mine.

  I looked up the road and saw Jenny Penny running towards me with a shimmering line of moisture hanging off her plump upper lip.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said.

  She was always late because she had unmanageable hair.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said.

  ‘They’re nice glasses,’ she said. ‘Did you get them from Nancy?’

  ‘I did,’ I said proudly. ‘She wears them at premieres.’

  ‘I thought so,’ said Jenny.

  ‘They don’t look too big?’ I ventured.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ she said. ‘But they’re really dark. Can you see all right?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ I said, lying, having just missed a lamppost but not unfortunately the curl of dog turd that was positioned at its base. It coated the underside of my shoe like grease and its sour smell lounged around in my nostrils.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ asked Jenny, looking around.

  ‘Winter drawing in,’ I said with a heavy sigh, and I grabbed her arm and we marched towards the safety of the black iron gates.

  In hindsight, I probably should have taken the glasses off for my audition, because I stumbled towards the school assembly hall like an old seer.

  ‘Sure you’re OK?’ said the prefect, leading me by the arm.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I said as I tripped over his shoe. The large doors opened and Jenny Penny ran out.

  ‘How’d it go?’ I asked eagerly.

  ‘Great,’ she said, giving me the thumbs up.

  ‘What part did they give you?’ I whispered.

  ‘The octopus. Nonspeaking,’ she said. ‘What I wanted.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was an octopus,’ I said.

  ‘There’s not,’ she said. ‘They asked me to be a camel. But with all the animals marching in two
by two, there must have been an octopus.’

  ‘That’s Noah’s Ark,’ I said.

  ‘Same thing. Still the Bible,’ she said. ‘They’ll never know the difference.’

  ‘Probably not,’ I said, trying to be supportive.

  ‘I’m making the costume myself,’ she said, and I suddenly felt nervous.

  As I walked into the great hall, I could barely make out the five faces seated behind the desk; but there was one face that cut through the blackness like the all-seeing eye of Horus: my old teacher, Miss Grogney. The Nativity play was her ‘baby’ and she boasted that she had written it all by herself; strangely omitting any mention of either Matthew or Luke.

  ‘Eleanor Maud?’ said a man’s voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Are your eyes OK?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, nervously adjusting the frames on my face.

  ‘Don’t fidget,’ shouted Miss Grogney, and I waited for her to add, You blasphemer.

  ‘What do you have for us?’ asked the man.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Your audition piece,’ said Miss Grogney.

  Panic gripped my unprepared being.

  ‘Well?’ said Miss Grogney. ‘Hurry up.’

  I moved slowly to the front of the stage, words floating in and out of my mind, some lucid, many random, until a group huddled together and I recognised the coherent rhythmic pattern. I couldn’t remember it all, but it was one of Nancy’s favourite speeches and I’d heard her practise it as religiously as a scale. I didn’t understand it all, but maybe they would and I coughed and said, ‘It’s from the film The Covenant1 and I’m the character Jackie and I’m ready.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Miss Grogney.

  I took a deep breath and opened my arms.

  ‘I know you won’t pay for the shoes or even the dress. But what about the abortion, godammit! At least give me money for a bottle of gin.’