The Rabbit

by Ted Lewis

  About half an hour after the snooker match we moved into the games room because my father wanted to sit down. The games room was brightly lit, like a public bar, and this was where all the dominoes and cards were played. Uncle Eddie sat down at one of the card tables but my father decided he wanted to go to the toilet and left us alone for a minute or two. We sat in silence until my Uncle Eddie said:

  “He’s a rum bugger, your dad, isn’t he?”

  “How do you mean?”

  He smiled.

  “I was just thinking about last night, the way he was on at you about what you’d been up to.”

  I waited for him to go on.

  “I could tell you a few tales,” he said. “You know, about when he and I were lads.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  Uncle Eddie grinned again.

  “Next time he pulls you up, just ask him about Edith Ashover and me and him either side of her on back row of Picturedrome.”

  “What about her?”

  “Just ask him. Next time he pulls you up.”

  “I won’t have to wait long.”

  Uncle Eddie lit a cigarette.

  “You know, your dad thinks the world of you.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Don’t have to believe me,” said Uncle Eddie, “but it’s a fact. He’s very proud of you.”

  “He never lets me know if he is.”

  “Maybe not. But, nevertheless, I know what I’m talking about. He’d do anything for you.”

  My father came back into the games room and sat down with us and as he sat down he gave me one of his grins accompanied by a small nod of the head. I grinned back. Of course I knew the truth of what Uncle Eddie had said. It was just that the knowledge was extremely difficult to respond to, causing more demonstrations of animosity than of love, and it was the same with my father.

  A little while later we were joined by Barry Lee and his father. Barry and I talked about what he was doing and about what I was doing and whereas I was hypocritically earnest in the interest I showed in the profession he was about to take up, I sensed a certain faint amusement behind the questions he asked me, as if what I’d decided to do lacked the seriousness and importance of his own subject. But luckily our conversation didn’t last too long because Sid Curtis and a stranger came and stood by our table. The stranger was thickset, with a beer belly. His lips were thick too and he wore his shirt open at the neck and his clothes, although clean and pressed, were the clothes he worked in.

  “Harry,” said Sid to my father, “here’s somebody I think you’d like to meet.”

  “Oh, yes, why’s that, Sid?”

  “From your neck of the woods, aren’t you, Norman?”

  “That’s right,” said Norman. “If he’s a Manchester lad, which I can see he is.”

  My father stood up and shook hands with Norman, delighted to meet someone from home.

  “Pleased to meet you, son,” said my father. “Sit yourself down.”

  Sid and Norman drew up chairs and my father introduced everyone to Norman. When it came to my Uncle Eddie, my father said:

  “This is my pal Eddie. He’s from our way, too. He’s a Bolton lad.”

  “Bolton?” Norman said, delivering the word the way a music-hall comedian would say “wife” and continued, “Bolton? You don’t call Bolton our way, do you? I didn’t even know Bolton was in Lancashire.”

  “It’s the posh part,” Uncle Eddie said, withholding judge¬ment on the newcomer by putting rather less warmth into his lazy grin.

  “God, he talks like a Yorky,” said Norman. “Are you sure he’s Lancashire?”

  “He’s Lancashire all right,” my father said.

  “Anyway, you’re all going to have a drink, Lancashire or not,” Norman said. “And there’ll be no jibbers.”

  He went round the table and found out what everyone was drinking and went to the bar to get them in.

  “He’s a rum ’un, Sid,” said my father. “How is it you know him?”

  “He runs a haulage firm. Drives himself, along with his sons. Delivered me some timber today but the air-brakes on his lorry need looking at so he’s staying at Mrs Beatty’s tonight.”

  “He’s certainly a rum ’un,” my father said.

  Norman returned with the drinks and set them out.

  “Now then,” he said to my father, “whereabouts in Man¬chester would you call home?”

  “Stretford.”

  “Stretford? What part?”

  “Old Trafford end. Gorse Hill. Do you know it?”

  “Know it? I was bloody born there, man. Fifteen Lacey Street.”

  “Christ,” my father said. “Lacey Street. Do you know where I used to live? Brunswick Street.”

  “Brunswick Street!” Norman looked round the company. “Well, I’ll go to our house.”

  “Would you believe it?” my father said.

  The assembled company shook their heads in the col¬lective disbelief that was expected of them and from then on there was no turning back for Norman and my father. Do you remember this, that, old so-and-so, before such-and-such was knocked down, how far it was to this place, how that place had changed, and inevitably through to how hard each of them had had it as children and young men, each trying to outdo the other in tales of deprivation. An hour must have gone by in this fashion. Norman got louder and more aggressive in his descriptions of the past as the time moved on and the bottles accumulated on the card table. It was as if he was hoping for someone to challenge one of his reminiscences so that he could use the challenge as an excuse for him to heap sarcasm on the challenger. In fact, the impression I got of him was that he was an uneasy man, someone who could live only in comparison with others, someone not content with being one of the crowd, someone who had to prove his superiority and consequently treated everyone with the sarcasm that he felt his inferiors deserved. I couldn’t stand him, not because of his attitude alone, but because of the way his attitude affected the company; the uneasiness about him communicated itself to everyone else, and the others were over attentive, laughing too hard at his jokes and listening too hard to his stories. All except my Uncle Eddie, who threw in the occasional dry comment, usually double-edged, comments which so far Norman had either missed or chosen to ignore.

  “I used to get up at quarter to five,” my father was saying, “and I used to leave the house at five and walk down to the corner of Sandy Lane and catch the twenty-five past five tram; and you know how far it is from Brunswick Street to Sandy Lane corner.”

  “Yes, I know—” said Norman, but my father wasn’t going to stop till he was finished.

  “No, listen,” he said. “I got the twenty-five past five tram that got me to the Iron Bridge (you know the Iron Bridge) at ten to six. Then I had to run to the coal docks to clock on for six o’clock. Must be at least a mile and a half—”

  “About a mile—”

  “And then I’d start work and I wouldn’t be back home again till nine o’clock at night because the half past seven tram home only went as far as Five Ways.”

  “Aye, I suppose it’s a long day by today’s standards.”

  “Standards? There aren’t any standards today. All this rock and roll rubbish and Teddy boys. We’d have had that lot sorted out in our day.”

  “We would that,” Norman agreed, lighting a cigarette. “And what about your lad? Is he following in his father’s footsteps, or what?”

  As Norman spoke I noticed again something he’d done all night and that was whenever he replied to something I’d said (he’d never spoken to me unsolicited), he’d always averted his eyes, never looked at me directly and behind the expres¬sion he’d assumed for his answers there seemed to be some¬thing else, a sense of calculation, as if he was scoring or adding up, but whateve
r the reason he wanted to guard his eyes in case I saw beyond them.

  “Following in his father’s footsteps?” my father said. “No, he’s got more sense. He’s at college.”

  “A college boy, eh?” Norman said, flicking ash into the ashtray, his little finger snapping away long after the ash had broken.

  “Yes, art school. Started this year. Doing all right, I think.”

  “Ah,” said Norman. “But you can tell he’s not off to be the man his father is.”

  My father, whether out of surprise or embarrassment or the deference that had been shown to Norman throughout the evening, gave a what-can-you-expect kind of grin and made a vague gesture with his hand and said:

  “Well, times have changed. Times have changed.”

  The first effect that Norman’s remark had on me was to cause me to stare at him, as if in some way the staring would prove to me that I’d actually heard what he’d just said. And in fact seconds later the sentence began to echo in my ears. A great heat of embarrassment flooded through my body and the skin on my face turned scarlet. I stayed in the position I’d been in previous to the sentence, one elbow on the table, my hand supporting my chin, my other hand closed round my pint glass, because that way, if I moved, even slightly, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to contain either my anger at what Norman had said or the embarrassment and pain my father’s failure to speak in my defence had caused me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my Uncle Eddie looking at my father, and my father self-consciously avoiding the look.

  “Yes, times have changed,” Uncle Eddie said, still looking at my father.

  This remark of Uncle Eddie’s stirred me to the verge of tears because the remark had been offered in my favour, as a kindness, and such kindness always made me more emotional than cruelty. I remembered when I’d pissed myself in front of the whole school, I’d born the ensuing cruelties from the mouths of other pupils, but when one day Ralph Parkin had stood up for me and offered to fight anyone who called me wet-legs one more time I’d broken down and cried. So to avoid the same thing happening in the masculine atmosphere of the games room of the Conservative Club there was no alternative this time to standing up for myself.

  “Do you always make judgements like that on somebody you’ve just met?” I said, aware that although I was managing to keep my body rigid my voice was shaking, close to crack¬ing.

  There was an embarrassed silence. All my senses seemed suddenly heightened and I was able to take in everyone’s reactions all at the same time. My father frowned and tutted, Barry Lee smirked, his father coughed and Sid Curtis smiled into his beer. But as I took in Norman’s reaction, which was to look me in the face for the first time, I realized I’d made a mistake and played into his hands. He’d been looking for something like this since he sat down.

  “Now, now,” my father said, embarrassed, looking from face to face with a grin that was supposed to explain away my reaction as springing from my youth. “Now, now. It wasn’t meant the way you took it, Victor.”

  This was worse, the deliberate underlaying of something he should have taken a stand against.

  “How was it meant, then?” I said, looking at Norman.

  Norman behaved as though the incident was of small importance.

  “Wasn’t meant any way at all,” he said, leaning against the back of his chair and inclining his head at a casually aloof angle. “You don’t want to get steamed up about a little remark like that. Hell, you’ll hear a bloody sight worse than that before you’re a man.”

  “Probably,” I said, standing up. “But not from you.”

  I walked over to the door. Behind me I heard my father telling me to hold on, but now I was past the point of no return and I went through the door out into the empty hall. There were two choices. Either the snooker room or out into the street. For some reason I chose the snooker room.

  I went to the bar and bought a pint and took it over to one of the benches and sat down and stared at one of the snooker matches that was in progress. The baize and the yellow light swam in front of my eyes.

  Soon after I’d sat down the double doors opened. Without looking up I knew it was my father come to look for me. I stayed sitting the way I was until he came and sat next to me, then I took a sip of my pint. A minute or so elapsed before my father said:

  “Well, that was a daft way to carry on.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “There wasn’t anything meant. You got the wrong end of the stick.”

  “Uncle Eddie didn’t.”

  “Uncle Eddie? He was as surprised as anyone else when you got up.”

  I knew that my father didn’t believe that.

  “You should have said something.”

  “What for? He’s just a rough and ready kind of a chap who speaks a certain way. He certainly didn’t mean it the way you took it.”

  “How else could he have meant it?”

  “Well, it was just a figure of speech. An old-timer talking. Besides, everybody there knows that the way you took it, well, that it’s not true. I mean, I didn’t say anything partly because it’s not true. Nothing needed saying, on the evidence of yourself.”

  “Now you’re admitting I’m right about what was said.”

  “No, I’m not,” he said lighting a cigarette.

  “You should have said something. I would have done, if the position had been reversed.”

  “Well it wasn’t, so you can’t say that.”

  There was a silence.

  “Are you coming back in?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’ll only feel worse if you don’t. I mean, it’ll look bad.”

  “I don’t care how it looks. You’re the one who cares how it looks. You can tell them I’m playing snooker if it’ll make you feel any better.”

  “Now look—”

  “Oh, leave it, will you,” I said and stood up and walked over to an empty table. I picked a cue out from the rack and made a shot. Then I began to set up the balls in their proper positions and while I was doing this my father got up and went out of the snooker room. I carried on until all the balls were in position. I was chalking the end of my cue when Uncle Eddie came through the double doors. I pre¬tended not to notice him and took my position to break. He came over and stood by the side of the table and watched me as I hit the cue-ball. For the first time that night I made a good shot. The white tickled the outside of the triangle of reds and glided off two cushions and came to rest back at the top of the table, making it impossible, if I’d had an opponent, for him to pot any of the reds.

  “Exhibition stuff,” Uncle Eddie said.

  I chalked my cue and managed to shrug my shoulders but I was unable to look at him because I was still too full of what had happened in the other room.

  “Shall I follow you?” he said.

  I nodded and he took a cue and inspected the lie of the table. Then he selected a position and prodded the cue-ball so that it rolled slowly into the triangle of reds, but not slowly enough because one of the reds rolled away from the rest of the triangle, leaving an easy shot for me.

  I leant over and sank the red and by a stroke of luck the white lined up behind the black, but to someone who had never seen me play the shot would have looked purely intentional. I potted the black and tried for another red but this time I didn’t succeed, although the ball came to rest less than half an inch from the lip of the pocket.

  “Why didn’t you play like this earlier?” said Uncle Eddie. “You would have wiped the floor with us.” He potted the red I’d left and straightened up and searched the table for a likely colour. His eyes still roaming the cloth, he said:

  “I know how you feel, you know.”

  He strolled round to the opposite side of the table and checked the angle of the blue, then walked back to his pre¬vious
position. I didn’t say anything. He leant forward to make the shot.

  “It was unfortunate.” He made the shot and the blue went down and he straightened up. “Very unfortunate.”

  I tried to make some kind of reply but I was unable to.

  “It was just that your dad didn’t know how to deal with it, nothing more than that, I think.” He went after another red.

  “He doesn’t like trouble, your dad doesn’t. Likes every¬thing to be on an even keel. Likes people to like him. That’s why he didn’t want to upset the applecart. Nothing to do with agreeing with what that shit-house had to say. I can tell you that for nothing.”

  “I would,” I managed to say. “I would have said something.”

  Uncle Eddie sank the red.

  “Well, perhaps. It’s difficult,” he said, and the way he said the words told me that had it been him, he would have acted differently, and that he was surprised and disappointed in my father.

  When we’d finished the game, Uncle Eddie said:

  “Do you want to go back in the other room?”

  There was really nothing else for me to do. To leave would be to create further embarrassment and leave too many loose ends; the others might think I’d gone because I couldn’t take it, or had got all steamed up over nothing, but whatever they thought the end result would be my appearing to be childish, unmanly, over-sensitive.

  I nodded in agreement and we went back into the games room. I set my face in case the harshness of the lighting revealed too much of how I felt. Barry and his father had already gone, but Sid and Norman and my father were still sitting at the table, talking about football. Uncle Eddie and I sat down. Norman was talking, and neither he nor Sid took any notice of our arrival, but my father shifted in his seat and gave me a cold, swift, suspicious glance.

  “What about in forty-eight?” Norman was saying. “Black¬pool nearly had ’em in that final.”