Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

‘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.