Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

I handed around the glasses of champagne. I’d filled them to the top, not something I usually did, but it had been distracting and I’d needed that because when my brother raised his glass and said, ‘To us. Finally together,’ I had to turn away as I felt the first of my tears, before I’d even had my first mouthful, before I could even join them to say, ‘To us.’

I thought he was in the study with Joe helping with a finance problem, but as I began to close down the computer, I suddenly felt his hand on my arm and I startled and he said, ‘Wait,’ and began to read the opening paragraph.

‘What do you think?’ I said.

My brother ran in and said, ‘The taxi’s here. Are you ready?’ before disappearing into his room for a pile of promotional CDs and photos.

‘I want to be in this,’ said Charlie quietly. ‘Write about me.’

‘In this?’

He nodded. ‘You lost me and now you’ve found me. I should be in it too, don’t you think?’

‘You’ll need to change your name,’ I said.

‘Ellis.’

‘What?’

‘That’s the name I’d like. Ellis.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘What’s Jenny Penny’s?’ he asked.

‘Liberty,’ I said. ‘Liberty Belle.’

We sat at a small unoccupied table at the back of the suite, away from guests we didn’t know, ignoring the ones we did, close to the ice-sculpted vodka bar and a never-ending supply of mini hamburgers and fat breaded scampi.

‘I thought you might be married,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, finishing my drink.

Silence.

‘That’s it? No elaboration? No one special?’

‘No.’

‘Never?’

‘In hindsight, no.’

‘In hindsight . God, you’re so like him,’ he said, waving to my brother who had just peeped out from behind the makeshift red velvet curtain. ‘Your own little club.’

‘It’s not like that. It’s complicated.’

‘We’re all complicated, Ell. Do you remember the last time you saw me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You were nine, ten, right? And really pissed off at me.’

‘He never got over you.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Yeah, actually,’ and I reached swiftly for a glass of wine as it passed by on a tray.

‘We were what, fifteen? Fuck. Where did all the time go, Ell? Look at us.’

‘It’s as if it was yesterday,’ I said, downing half my glass. ‘So, are you fucking?’

‘God, you are all grown up.’

‘Yeah, happened overnight. Well?’

‘No,’ and he tried to swipe a glass of champagne from the tray, this time spilling it down his arm. ‘He won’t with me.’

‘Why not?’

‘He doesn’t go back,’ he said.

Bobby, the hairiest of The Judys, came out and introduced the rest of the group. He talked about the charities being represented that evening, talked about the artists exhibiting around the room. He talked about money and asked for lots of it.

‘By the way,’ I said turning back to Charlie, ‘the last time I saw you wasn’t then. It was when you were on television being bundled into a car.’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that.’

‘Well?’ I said, but he pretended not to hear me as the opening bars to ‘Dancing Queen’ quickly filled the room.

I couldn’t sleep. Buoyed by the latent effects of jet lag and coffee, I found myself wide awake at three in the morning. I got up, crept to the kitchen and poured out a large glass of water. I turned my computer on. The sound of breathing was loud and close. My brother never shut his bedroom door. It was a security thing: he needed to hear the sounds of his home, needed to hear if a different sound entered. I gently closed his door. Tonight he was safe; safe with me, and safe with Charlie asleep in the adjacent room.

It was then, in the three o’clock darkness, that I wrote about the moment Ellis re-entered our lives that evening in August, as shoppers gathered at corner bars, swapping tales of sales and divorces pending, of who loves who and holidays to come. I wrote about how he entered with a wallet crammed with fifties, and memberships to MOMA and the Met, and loyalty cards for Starbucks and Diedrich’s too. I wrote about how he entered with a slight scar above his lip from an accident skiing, and how he entered with a wounded heart from a man called Jens; a man he didn’t really love, but he was someone there, a late-night-talk-to; we’ve all had one of them. I wrote about how he entered with a letter in his pocket, which his mother had written a couple of days before, a letter more emotional than usual, wondering how he was, wishing they spoke more, stuff like that. I wrote about how he entered with a terrifying ordeal that he wouldn’t talk about for years, with an empty space where once was an ear. And I wrote about how he entered with the knowledge that he was changing jobs, leaving the snow fields of Breckenridge and the Rocky trails behind, and swapping them for land in the Upstate quiet, where neighbours were unseen, and where the Shawangunk Mountains would watch over him like the eagles they unleashed; swapping it all to be with an unlikely someone from his distant past.

That’s how he entered; how I remembered he entered.

5 July 1997

Jenny,

Every morning I pick up the Guardian and the News of the World and walk through the double-arched gateway and enter the courtyard, with its fountain and car park and patients sitting on benches with drip lines for company. I never say hello to anyone, not even to the gatekeeper; just keep to myself and to the story that lives so quietly on that upper floor. Ginger has shrunk before my eyes; she stopped momentarily at a weight that would have thrilled her years before and given her what she would have referred to as a ‘figure’, before plunging her headfirst towards a skeletal state too weak now to support anything other than sleep.

We’d got used to the cancer and so had she in many ways, or at least used to the habitual cycles of medication and chemotherapy and what it did to her body throughout those seven years. But we can’t get used to this infection and the way it’s decimated her frame and clawed so hungrily at her spirit. She’s never once said her cancer was unfair, but this infection has eaten at her dignity, and the self-pity she banished from her life has appeared now and then, and made her hate herself more. She has been dealt a shitty hand, Jenny; the days she feels it pain us to the core. I feel inadequate.

As she sleeps, so I work at her bedside. I work on our column, which has become a surprising success. I say surprising, but you say you always knew. Liberty and Ellis are mentioned now on trains and on buses and in the chatter of work breaks. What do you think of that, Jenny Penny, my friend of old? Fame has found you at last . . .

I looked out of the window; night was closing in on the building works and the overgrown trees from Postman’s Park. The shadows were large and grotesque. I didn’t want to go home. This had become my home, the nurses my friends, and as the long nights stretched out before me, I eavesdropped on their problems as they talked about broken hearts and money, about rents and the price of shoes and how depressing London was before the change of Government.

I told them stories about Ginger; this woman who’d shared champagne with Garland and a secret with Warhol. I showed them old photographs because I wanted them to know this woman; this woman beyond the name and number and date of birth that was wrapped around her wrist. I wanted them to know this woman who still tingled when she heard stories about meeting Liza down Fifth Avenue, or seeing Garbo garbed in sunglasses and scarf on the Upper East Side, stories like that, for she still thrilled at such epic stardom; glowed in a fame that scoffed the talentless. She’d found hers; had had that moment, that golden moment, forever untarnished by advancing years.