Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

I sat down on the grass, lay down until my back was wet, uncomfortable and wet, and the aching gratitude that burnt my eyes had rolled away. I’d been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming New Year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew we wouldn’t. Nothing would. The world would be the same, just a little bit worse.

My mother leant out of the window and waved; she blew kisses to me. I blew kisses back. She was about to embark on an MA, the secret dream that had so recently found voice, and she no longer saw Mr A and the contents of his wayward mind. Three months before, he’d fallen in love with a holiday-maker from Beaconsfield and had stopped his sessions immediately, giving credence to the myth that love cures everything (except perhaps the settlement of an outstanding bill).

I stood up and ran back up the lawn towards the house and that upstairs room where I would shake the pillows and smooth the sheets and fill the jugs and arrange the flowers, and all just to be with her; to be with her with the something I could never tell her.

‘Arthur!’

I shouted his name again and just as I unleashed the rope from its mooring loop and was about to give up, he appeared from his cottage and ran towards me with an empty, old rucksack bouncing on his back like a deflated blue lung.

‘Sure you want to come?’ I said. ‘You could stay with Joe and Charlie.’

‘They’re napping again,’ a touch of disappointment in his voice.

‘OK then,’ I said, and helped him carefully into the boat.

He loved it when we all returned; he was nearly eighty but became a chameleon around us, and our youth became his. I pushed away from the bank. I didn’t start the engine immediately, but let us drift towards the central tidal flow where we said out loud as we always did, ‘All right, Ginger?’ And where we both felt the slight jolt of the boat; the swift acknowledgement of our words, caused not by wake, nor wind, nor shallows, but by the something other that outwitted proof.

I slowed along the bank to pick blackberries and early damsons, and we hid under overhanging branches to look out for the large male otter my father reckoned he’d seen a few days before; a figment of his imagination really, a ploy I believed, to get us to really look once again, to soften the impenetrable gaze of the harried.

‘I’ve been getting dizzy,’ Arthur said, as he trailed his hand in the cool clear water.

‘What kind of dizzy?’

‘Just dizzy.’

‘Have you fallen?’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Dizzy, not doddery .’

‘Have you changed your diet yet?’ I said, knowing full well he hadn’t; and he scoffed at such a suggestion, for it was as unworthy to him as a life without bacon and cream and eggs, utterly unthinkable.

His cholesterol and blood pressure were as high as they could be; something he delighted in as if it had taken the utmost skill to get them to such dizzying heights. And he refused to take the tablets prescribed, because a few months before he’d secretly told me that he wasn’t going to die that way and so he didn’t need to take them, and instead reached for another scone dripping with jam and clotted cream.

‘Are you worried?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘So why are you telling me?’

‘Just filling you in,’ he said quietly.

‘Do you want me to do anything?’

‘No,’ he said, drying his hand on his sleeve.

He’d started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric. I think it was because I knew everything about him, had read it all – the beautiful, the sordid, the all of his book. I had been his editor for five years, and now it seemed, had become his editor away from the printed page.

‘I’ll be back here in ten minutes,’ I said as I took the rucksack and climbed the vertical, rusty steps of the harbour wall. At the top, I stopped and watched him nervously manoeuvre the boat around two red buoys before he zigzagged out to sea, and I wondered if I’d see him again, or if he’d suffer once again the indignity of being led back into harbour by an irate coastguard deaf to his consoling pleas. In his imagination Arthur Henry was a seaman, competent and brave; but in reality nothing except terra firma could provide those qualities, and I knew he’d stop just beyond the harbour mouth and go round in circles until the ten minutes were up. And sure enough, by the time I’d descended the ladder weighed down by my order of packed ice and crabs and langoustines, sweat had appeared across his forehead and in the cleft of his bony chest, and he moved back swiftly to his position at the bow of the boat in a manner that said, Never again.

We glided effortlessly across the glassy surface, the phut phut phut of the engine quiet and considered against the bustling backdrop of the tourist-crammed village.

‘Here, Arthur.’

He sat up as I handed him an Orange Maid.

‘I thought you might have forgotten.’

‘Never,’ I winked, and he pulled out a handkerchief to catch the first of the drips.

‘Fancy a bite?’

‘It’s all yours,’ I said, as we veered left up the open sprawl of river towards home.

They were dozing on the lawn when we returned and, seeing Charlie engrossed in a proof copy of his book, Benders and Bandits, Busboys and Booze , Arthur walked briskly up the slope and flopped eagerly into the unclaimed chair next to him.

He leant towards him and said, ‘Where are you up to, Charlie?’

‘Berlin.’

‘Oh dear me,’ said Arthur, rather strangely adjusting the right leg of his oversized desert shorts. ‘Close your ears, Nancy!’

‘Oh, yeah right, Arthur,’ said Nancy, not looking up from her American Vogue . ‘Never lived, have I, sweetie?’

‘Not in a dark little room on Nollendorfstrasse,’ said Arthur, leaning back blissfully into his chair.

My brother was in my father’s workroom. He didn’t turn round at first, so I watched him carving and chiselling, practising a simple tongue-and-groove joint. He’d made two already and they were balanced on the ledge above his head. He looked like my father in that dim light, the father I knew when I was small; the same silhouette, the hunched, curved back that never seemed to breathe, for breath disturbed precision, and precision in woodwork was everything.

He was going to night school, learning furniture restoration, might learn more, he said. He’d given it all up, the life he’d run away to. Left his job on Wall Street, left the space in SoHo that sucked thousands every month, and he’d bought the townhouse in the Village, with its bird’s nest and ailanthus and its brown hall wall that we knocked down after Christmas. And he was restoring it by himself; had been restoring it room by room, month by month, in an unhurried tribute to its former state. This slow pace suited him, because there was now weight around his middle and the weight suited him, but that I would never say. And it was really only Charlie now who was his connection to the old life and the trading floors, to the constantly changing numbers and those early breakfasts at Windows on the World. Because it was Charlie who now worked in the South Tower, overlooking Manhattan from the eighty-seventh floor, an untouchable presence as I flew over New York, him King of the World.

My brother rubbed his eyes. I turned on the light; he turned to me.