When God Was a Rabbit

by Winman, Sarah

  ‘A bath?’ repeated my father, in a tone that suggested he was uncertain what a bath actually was.

  ‘Yes, a bath,’ said Mr Catt clearly.

  ‘Right,’ said my father, playing for time, but even he couldn’t stretch that word for the necessary thirty-five minutes.

  ‘Actually, do you know what’s better than a bath?’ my mother said with seamless reassurance.

  ‘A shower?’ said Mr Catt.

  ‘No,’ said my mother. ‘A look at the garden,’ and she marched the weary travellers down to the water’s edge, where they gazed at nothing apart from their tired and vapid reflections. And at the precise moment when the sealant had set, my mother reached for their hands and shouted enthusiastically, ‘Bath time!’ and Mr and Mrs Catt looked at my mother in horror, suddenly imagining that she meant they’d all get in together.

  They were harmless people who wanted no relationship with us, and only a very simple and private one with our house. They were up early whatever the weather, and had the same breakfast every morning. My mother could never tempt them beyond bran flakes and a small glass of orange juice, and my father could never tempt them beyond nine o’clock at night. He tried a film night and a cards night and a wine-tasting night, but nothing could lure them away from their own snug symbiosis. These were not the guests my parents had envisaged; they had envisaged guests who would be friends – a rather naïve and unrealistic aspiration – but one they would cling to over the years in their own impervious enthusiasm.

  ‘Why does Mr Catt talk so loudly and slowly to you, Elly?’ my mother asked one morning as I helped her to wash up.

  ‘He thinks I’m deaf,’ I said.

  ‘What? Why?’ asked my mother, and she pulled me to her and I nestled into her soft stomach. ‘People are so different and wonderful, aren’t they, Elly? Never forget that. Never give up on people.’

  I didn’t really know what she meant, but I said that I wouldn’t, and clung to her scented clothes as fiercely as a hungry moth. I had missed this.

  We were alone the day it happened. My parents had gone to Plymouth to order a new cooker and had left my brother and me to make wind chimes out of shells and metal scraps scavenged from the strand. The sky was an unblemished blue haze that morning and seemed to hypnotise all with its unstirring; quietening thrushes mid-song.

  I heard the screech of brakes first, not the faint thud of impact; he was too small, you see. They had missed his head – the wheels, that is – and my brother had covered his body with his favourite shirt, the denim one Nancy had brought him from America. He looked like a discarded bundle lying at the side of the track; mislaid goods of the departed.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Mr Catt, getting out of his car. ‘I didn’t see it.’

  It, he said, not him. It, he said.

  My brother wrapped god up and held him like a baby and carried him towards me as I waited by the gate. He was still warm, but where the firm rotundity of his body was supposed to be, instead there was something watery, something without essence, and as I held him I felt his warmth run from the shirt onto my leg until I looked down and my feet were covered in blood.

  ‘What can I do?’ said Mr Catt.

  ‘You’ve done enough,’ said my brother. ‘Just pay and leave.’

  ‘Leave?’ said Mr Catt. ‘Don’t you think I should speak to your parents first?’

  ‘No, I don’t actually,’ said my brother, picking up my father’s axe. ‘Just fucking leave. You’re a murderer and we never wanted you here in the first place, so go on, piss off! I said Piss Off!’ and he lunged for the car.

  I watched the sand-coloured Marina spit and slide its way up the pebbled path, gear-straining somewhere between first and fourth, until it disappeared round the curve and left us to our unquenchable loss. My brother threw down the axe. His hands were shaking.

  ‘I can’t bear anyone to hurt you,’ he said, and walked towards the shed to look for a box.

  She picked up on the second ring as if she knew I’d call, as if she’d been standing by the phone waiting; and before I could say anything she said, ‘God’s dead, isn’t he?’ I never asked her how she knew – some things I preferred not to know – and so I said, ‘Yes he is,’ and promptly told her how it happened.

  ‘It’s the end of a chapter, Elly,’ was all she could say after that, and she was right. His life meant more to me than anything, and now his death did, for it left an anguished hole impossible to fill. Jenny Penny was always right.

  ‘He came back to you,’ my brother said as I lay across my bed in the darkness. There was a pulse, a faint miraculous pulse, my brother said, that could not be felt before he laid the rabbit in my arms. And as he did, god opened his eyes and his paw brushed across my cheek.

  ‘He came back to say goodbye.’

  Then he should have stayed, was all I kept thinking.

  ‘Maybe you’d like god buried in a special pet graveyard?’ my mother gently said to me the following day.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘So that he might be with other animals,’ she said.

  ‘He didn’t like other animals, actually,’ I said. ‘I want him cremated. I want his ashes.’

  And even though this was an unusual request in the late seventies, my mother scoured veterinary practices in the area until she found one agreeable to such a deed.

  The memorial service was small and intimate, and huddled around his empty hutch each one of us had something nice to say. Nancy wrote a poem entitled ‘Just When You Think It’s All Over’, which was really good, especially the last two lines, which she read out dramatically as if she was on stage: ‘And if you think you can’t see me, close your eyes and there I’ll be.’ Nancy was good with things like that; she always knew the right thing to say at memorials and other life-changing events. She made people feel better just by turning up. She went to lots of memorials in the eighties and most of her friends agreed that it wouldn’t have been much of a memorial without her. She remembered things other people forgot. She remembered when Andy Harman met Nina Simone in Selfridges and offered to sing a duet with her at Heaven, if only she could haul her iconic presence down to Villiers Street that week. She also remembered that Bob Fraser’s favourite song was ‘MacArthur Park’ not ‘Love to Love You Baby’, as most people thought, and that his favourite flower was actually a tulip – a flower no self-respecting gay man would ever own up to. ‘Memories,’ she said to me, ‘no matter how small or inconsequential, are the pages that define us.’

  Joe said something about god being more than a rabbit and more like a god, which I liked, and Dad thanked god for making me so happy over the years, which made my mum cry in a way I’d never seen before. He said afterwards that she was still saying goodbye to her parents.

  Mum put god’s ashes into an old French peppermint tin and sealed it firmly with a red elastic band.

  ‘Where are you going to scatter them, Elly?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said. ‘Somewhere special.’ And until I decided, I put his ashes on my dressing table next to my favourite brush, and at night, when my room was secured in darkness, I saw lights dance in the air, which I knew were him.

  ‘Here,’ my brother said, offering me the tiller for the first time. The river divide was just ahead and I steered towards the left-hand side where the river cut through dense woodland of scrub oaks and beech and sycamore too, and where I surprised a flock of Canada geese and sent them hurtling into distinctive formation.

  Soon the river would narrow and carve through water rushes and overhanging trees still dripping with weed and flotsam from the previous high tide; it was the stretch I never trusted, the stretch of river that pulled my imagination as taut as rope around a cleat, and where I saw thick gnarled roots crawling across the mudflats like hungry arachnids.

  ‘That’s great,’ my brother said. ‘You’re doing so well. Keep to the middle, let the boat search for deep water,’ and I did, and only occasionally heard the sound of shingle
against the wooden hull.

  I cupped my hand across my brow; the sunlight was piercing and caught the surface of the water, highlighting the ragged spume. It was one of the last days of summer, and both nature and my brother responded. He lay down on the seat slats and placed his fishing cap over his face.

  ‘Wake me up when we get there,’ he said lazily, and in that one action I felt the responsibility for our safe return in my unsure hand.

  I watched him doze. He seemed older these days, so much older than I was, and he’d grown into the landscape as if he’d always lived here and always would; but he would be gone by the following year, to finish his schooling in London, a sudden decision taken on a whim.

  I looked at my watch; it was still early and they wouldn’t miss us. We had the shopping for dinner and the guests wouldn’t be back for hours. I cut the engine and let us float along with the tide, ducking under overhanging branches of trees that leant out at precarious degrees. I heard the faint sound of ducks gossiping in the weedy banks ahead.

  ‘Everything OK?’ my brother asked from under his hat.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and picked up a small oar as a precaution against the shallow sandbanks that suddenly reared like seal backs.

  A buzzard flew on the thermals overhead. I watched him hover against a backdrop of pink and violet heather until he swooped down into the hillside and emerged with a terrified vole clutched between his talons.

  A grey mullet was flanking the hull, in search of company. It was large – four or five pounds, I think – similar to the one my brother caught the first autumn we arrived.

  He’d taken so much pleasure in gutting it; he sliced under the gills and sharp along the belly, and soon the innards were floating downstream before being scooped up by a patient heron. My brother placed a small translucent orb into my palm.

  ‘That’s his eye,’ he said. ‘It still sees, even in death.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, and flicked it into the water.

  He grinned and looked happier than I’d seen him in weeks. We cooked the fish on a makeshift fire next to the jetty and I said that if we were shipwrecked we’d do OK by ourselves now, and we wouldn’t need anyone else. He smiled, but his eyes gave away that he’d always need someone else. No amount of self-sufficiency could dispel the craving he still felt for that person we no longer talked about; that person who’d taken him apart and left a piece missing that none of us could find.

  I punted the boat under the branches and saw damson berries on the bushes ahead. I’d be making jam with my mother soon. I liked making jam. Swapping schoolbooks for activity.

  ‘Joe,’ I said, completely unthinking, ‘Charlie would have liked this, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Fuck off, Elly,’ he said, suddenly sitting up, and I recoiled at his sharpness.

  I lost my balance and fell onto the side of the boat, just missing a rowlock and a worse injury. The pain shot into my shoulder and I reached for my arm; rubbed it hard and stifled the tears wedged in my throat. I wanted him to look at me, to help me, but he wouldn’t; instead his eyes narrowed as he looked into the sun, as if blindness was preferable to the sight of my betraying face. Unhelmed, the boat floated aimlessly and became wedged on a bank of shingle.

  ‘See what you’ve done,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, rubbing my arm.

  ‘Fucking idiot.’

  It was a fallacy that time had healed him; it had simply allowed him to hide and file his experience away under the simple labelling of: Him and Me.

  We waited silently for the tide to catch up, and as I rubbed the bruising on my elbow, I vowed never to mention his name again. To me he was dead. And he disappeared once again from our lives back into our convenient amnesia, until that strange night in December when he unexpectedly returned. And when his name was unexpectedly mentioned. But not by us.

  The crisp smell of rime awoke me from my sleep and I got up swiftly to secure the window. I looked out onto the milky landscape; perfectly silent, eerily untouched except for the staggered imprints of a lone chaffinch in search of life. Winter had fallen heavily and precisely that morning across an unprepared valley. Everything felt slow. Movement, thought. Even breath. Until, that is, the frantic screaming of my name cut through the white like a saw through steel, propelling me downstairs on the swift tread of fear. The television was on:

  ‘The sixteen-year-old boy was named as Charlie Hunter, our sources can reveal,’ the newsreader said. ‘He was kidnapped at approximately ten o’clock at night when masked men broke into what was considered a secure house on the outskirts of Beirut. He was with his father, an oil executive working for an American company in Dubai. They were visiting friends at the time. A ransom note was left behind at the scene, although this has not been confirmed. No group has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and we are so far unsure as to whether the demands are political or financial. We shall keep you updated of any further developments.’

  The scene suddenly changed and a reporter started to talk about fuel prices. My father turned the volume down until the room was left in silence and images flickered upon our faces.

  ‘Good God,’ said Nancy.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ said my mother. ‘Charlie? Our Charlie?’

  ‘Scrum half Charlie?’ said my father.

  ‘Joe’s Charlie,’ I said supportively, but it had the opposite effect, and Joe ran from the room.

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Nancy, and she got up and followed him out.

  She sat down with him on the bed.

  ‘I wanted him dead, Nance,’ said my brother, choking for breath. ‘I always wanted him fucking dead, like Golan.’

  I stood and watched from the door. Waited for a command that might help to ease the situation or would have me running from room to room to kitchen on an errand that only I could fulfil. But none came.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Nancy quietly.

  ‘And now it might happen,’ Joe said.

  ‘It won’t happen,’ she said.

  ‘How could I live with myself?’

  ‘We just say these things,’ said Nancy. ‘It’s not real. It’s hurt and anger and tiredness, and a whole load of other shit, and it doesn’t mean it’ll happen. You’re not that powerful,’ she said, kissing his head.

  ‘I don’t care any more. He doesn’t have to be mine, I just want him found, I want him safe, nothing more. He doesn’t have to be mine.’ And he pulled the pillow over his face. ‘Please find him,’ I heard him say. ‘Oh God, please find him.’

  I smelt her perfume first and that’s what made me turn round and watch her tentatively climb the last of the stairs. She stood next to me in the doorway; in time to hear his truth.

  ‘I loved him so much,’ said my brother as he pulled the pillow away from his face.

  His grainy image stood out from broadsheet to tabloid, and under any other circumstances it would have been exciting to see his dark, handsome face again, smiling out at us from beyond a beach; a beach we might one day have visited if only their hearts had taken a less potholed route. He looked happy (happier than us), and so unaware of the violence about to trespass on his life. I wondered how much his kidnappers thought he was worth; how much my parents thought I was worth, and wondered if worth was connected to things like goodness or usefulness or helping people less fortunate. I thought that probably I was worth more when I was younger.

  At night, as I lay in bed listening to the owls, I saw him in a dark cellar, chained to a wall and surrounded by bones. There was stink on the floor and a cup of dirty water. Things crawled in the darkness, black backs shimmering green. I heard a chant, a call to prayer. A scream. I sat up. Just a fox.

  They cut his ear off. They wrapped it in a handkerchief and sent it to his father’s company; said they’d cut the other one off in time for Christmas Day, then his hands.

  ‘How much do you think an ear is worth, Nancy?’ I said quietly.

  ‘Everything,’ she said, as she layered cre
am onto a trifle that none of us felt like eating.

  We sat in vigil in front of the television day and night, taking it in turns to relay news to those of us indisposed at the time. School took a back seat – I wouldn’t return now until the following term – and the routine of our days was simply forgotten. We had two guests left, happy guests who stood out like our decorations, garishly cheap and inappropriate, and we neglected them like Christmastime itself.

  ‘What goes on in other countries doesn’t really concern us, does it?’ they said.

  ‘How can it not?’ said my father incredulously.

  My mother told them to help themselves to breakfast and anything else they needed. They did and then left without paying.

  My brother no longer ate; nothing could tempt his stomach to unclench as he walked from room to room, pacing, bent double by the cold and his fear of what might come. He was shrinking, guilt was eating him, and only my father understood the power that such an emotion held.

  I strode across the lawn, rudely disturbing the frost, and entered the forest like the early morning sun, so maddeningly awake. There was a metallic taste to the air, an expectant taste, and I ran through the undergrowth startling the squirrels and birds still lethargic with sleep, and slowed as I saw my seat up ahead. I sat down and shivered. I took the tin from my pocket and removed the elastic band. I prised off the lid and peeked inside. Just ashes, nothing more. No scent of peppermint, just ashes. I couldn’t think of a prayer nor even a song as I scattered his dusty life across the woodland floor.

  ‘Please find him,’ I said. ‘Please find Charlie.’

  It was midday on 23 December. It was cold and overcast, and the whole village had awoken to news that a small fishing boat had been holed on the rocks out by the island. My parents and I watched the rescue from the shore. My mother had brought down flasks of tea and warm fruit scones for the rescuers and the inquisitives, and we watched the strange circling of the gulls, so predatory and foreboding, and their presence filled us with a nauseating doom.