Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

She drove badly and erratically, and used her horn as a battering ram to push in and around wherever it was necessary. The dented trailer clattered behind us and swung dangerously around corners, riding up on the pavement, missing pedestrians’ feet by inches.

‘Why don’t we take it off?’ I’d suggested at the start.

‘Can’t,’ she said, revving into first. ‘It’s attached. Soldered on. Where I go, it goes. Like my girl,’ and she laughed loudly.

Jenny Penny looked down at her shoes. I looked down at mine too. I saw a floor cluttered with Coca-Cola cans and tissues and sweet wrappers and something odd that looked like a flaccid balloon.

We saw the church up ahead and, without signalling, turned sharply into the car park. Horns blared. Fists were threatening.

‘Fuck off!’ shouted Mrs Penny as she parked badly behind the hearse: a gaudy expression of life, mocking the transport of the departed. She was asked to move. She did it begrudgingly.

‘House of God,’ she said. ‘What does He care?’

‘He doesn’t,’ said the funeral director. ‘But we can’t get the coffin out.’

We walked into church, Mrs Penny between us, holding our hands, her body bent forwards in an embodiment of sadness. She ushered us into the pew and handed round tissues. Looked up and smiled gently at the truly bereaved. She marked down the corners of the hymn book in preparation for song and threw down the hassock, on which she knelt in prayer. Her actions were fluid and graceful – professional, even? – and from her mouth came a strange whispered reverie, unstoppable even on the intake of breath, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked as if she truly belonged.

As the church slowly filled up, Jenny Penny pulled me towards her and motioned me to follow. We slipped out and crept along the side wall until we came to a heavy wooden door that said: Choir Room . We entered. It was empty and felt airtight. Uncomfortable.

‘Have you done this before?’ I asked. ‘Been to a funeral, I mean?’

‘Once,’ she said, not that interested. ‘Look!’ She wandered over to the piano.

‘Have you seen a dead body before?’

‘Yep,’ she said. ‘In a coffin. The lid was off. They made me kiss it.’

‘Why?’

‘God knows.’

‘What did it feel like?’

‘Kissing a fridge.’

She pressed a key and a clear mid-range note rang out.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t touch anything,’ I said.

‘It’s all right, no one can hear,’ she said, and pressed the note again. Bing, bing, bing. She closed her eyes. Breathed intently for a moment. Then brought her hands up in front of her chest and blindly laid them on the black and white keys in front.

‘Do you know how to play?’ I whispered.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I’m trying something,’ and as she pressed down on the notes, I was ambushed by the most beautiful music I’d ever heard. I watched her sway, overcome. The rapture across her brow, the luminescence. I watched her be someone in that moment; free of the shunting, and the making-do, and the calamitous criticism that forged her way and always would. She was whole. And when she opened her eyes, I think she knew it too.

‘Again,’ I said.

‘Don’t think I can,’ she said sadly.

All of a sudden organ music boomed around the church. The music was dulled by the stone walls of the room, but the heavy bass notes reverberated throughout my body, ricocheting against my ribs before barrelling into the cavern that was my pelvis.

‘That’ll be the coffin,’ said Jenny Penny. ‘Come on, let’s have a look, it’s really cool.’ She opened the door and we caught its slow procession as it passed.

We sat on the wall outside and waited. The clouds were quite low, arm’s length from the steeple, falling, falling. We listened to the singing. Two songs, joyous songs, hopeful songs. We knew them but didn’t join in. We kicked our legs and had nothing to say. Jenny Penny reached across and held my hand. Her palm was slippery. I couldn’t look at her. Our guilt and our tears were not for each other. They were for someone else that day.

‘You two are so boring,’ said Mrs Penny, as we sat in the Wimpy Bar, trying to eat lunch.

She looked refreshed and invigorated, with no sign of the morning’s events clinging to her once mournful face. Normally I’d have been ecstatic eating food I rarely ate, but I couldn’t even finish my beefburger or my portion of chips or the tumbler of Coca-Cola that was as big as a boot. My appetite, along with the one for life, had momentarily disappeared.

‘I’m out tonight, Jenpen,’ said Mrs Penny. ‘Gary said he’ll look after you.’

Jenny Penny looked up and nodded.

‘I’m gonna have fun! Fun! Fun!’ said Mrs Penny as her mouth gorged a quarter of the bun, leaving a smear of lipstick to compete with the ketchup. ‘Bet you girls can’t wait to grow up, eh?’

I looked at Jenny Penny. Looked at the circle of gherkin on the side of my plate. Looked at the wipe-down table. Looked at everything except her .

All through the evening, the visions of the tiny white coffin, not even two feet long, stayed with me. It was bedecked with pink roses and a teddy; carried in protective arms like a newborn. I never told my mother where I’d been that day, nor my father; only my brother learnt of that strange day, the day when I discovered that even babies could die.

Why were we there? Why was Mrs Penny there? Something unnatural held their world together and it was a feeling that, at that age, I couldn’t yet put a word to. My brother said it was probably the braided twine of heartbreak. Of disappointment. Of regret. I was too young to disagree. Or to fully understand.

There had been a bomb blast on a tube train leaving West Ham station. My father had left his meeting early and was on that train when the blast occurred. That’s what he told us during the brief phone call to say he was fine , to say he really was all right and not to worry. And when he walked through the door that Monday evening in March, with flowers for his wife and early Easter eggs for his kids, his suit was still coated with dust and the last tread from the carriage floor. A strange smell hung about his ears – a smell that alternated between burnt matches and singed hair – and a patch of dried blood had pooled at the corner of his mouth. He’d bitten his tongue in shock, and after checking that it was miraculously still intact, he’d calmly picked himself up and wandered silently with the other passengers towards the exit doors and the fresh air beyond.

He laughed and played football in the garden with my brother. He dived to save goals and muddied his knees. He did everything to show us how far away he’d been from death. And it was only when we went to bed and decamped back down to the middle stair, that we heard the house groan, quite literally, with the deflation of his spirit.

‘It’s getting closer,’ he said.

‘Don’t talk such rot,’ said my mother.

‘Last year, and now this. It’s hunting me down.’

The previous September, he’d travelled to the Park Lane Hilton to witness passport forms for an important client, and was about to leave when a bomb tore through the foyer, killing two people and injuring countless others. And had it not been for a desperate last-minute piss he’d needed to take, he too might have been added to the casualty list that mournful week. Instead, a weak bladder had saved his life.

But as the weeks proceeded, instead of accepting that both brushes with death were in fact miracles of survival, my father convinced himself that the vengeful shadow of Justice was looming ever closer. He believed it was simply a matter of time before its jaws would shut and he would find himself a prisoner behind those gated slabs of bloody teeth, realising that all had passed. That life had, in fact, gone.