Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Not long.’

‘Come here, sit down.’

I went to the fraying armchair and brushed away the wooden curls that he’d planed from a piece of oak.

‘Drink?’ he said.

‘What’s the time?’

‘Time for Scotch. Come on, I found Dad’s stash.’

‘Where?’

‘Wellington boot.’

‘So obvious,’ we both said.

He poured out the Scotch into stained mugs, and we downed them in one.

‘Another?’

‘I’m all right,’ I said, feeling my stomach recoil and churn at the smoky heat. I had eaten too little that day. I stood up, suddenly needing water.

‘Wait,’ he said, and held out his arm; told me to look behind. I turned, and there framed in the doorway was a large buck rabbit. It watched us with dark eyes as it nuzzled its way through sawdust and cuts of wood, debris and dust clinging to its chestnut-coloured fur. And as we watched it, the years peeled away and we became small again, and it brought something in with it, something we never talked about, the something that happened when I was almost six, when he was eleven. It was there as we watched it, and we knew because we both became quiet.

I knelt down and held out my hand. Waited. The rabbit moved closer. I waited. I felt the cold twitching nose upon my hand, something warm, breath.

‘Look at this,’ said Joe.

The sharpness of my turn caused the rabbit to run. I stood up and went over to my brother.

‘Where did you find it?’

‘Back there. Behind the shelving. Dad must have kept it.’

‘Why would he keep it?’

‘Souvenir of a memorable day?’

I took the large arrow head from him and turned it over. My father had encouraged Jenny Penny to make it that first Christmas. Helped her to saw the scrappy pieces of oak and to nail them together into the large pointed formation before me. She’d decorated one side with empty limpet shells and grey-only pebbles from the shore, and sprinkled it all with glitter. The surface of my palm shimmered in the light.

‘She’d wanted to be found,’ he said.

‘Everyone wants to be found.’

‘Yeah, but that’s the bit I always forget. We didn’t guess where she might be, we didn’t find her. She led us there.’

‘Where was it found that night? D’you remember?’

‘On the jetty. Pointing downriver . . .’

‘To the sea.’

‘I always thought she disappeared to hurt herself, or to kill herself. You know, a grand gesture, her refusal to go home. But now I see she simply led us to a place, to a moment, where she could show us how special she was. How different from everyone else she was.’

‘How chosen .’

I felt uneasy. I clambered over the rocks to the furthermost point, where the craggy strand joined the sea. The tide was out – far out – and it wouldn’t have been an impossibility to have walked over to the island that afternoon; I’d done it before. I looked east over to the Black Rock, to its familiar shape rising from a bed of heaving dark. Prawning had been good this season; always sparked my childhood enthusiasm. Buckets full of the translucent greys, boiled on the beach. We could in those days – not now, of course.

The sun felt hot. The familiar fetid arsestink of low tide. A strong briny smell on the wind. I threw a stone for a scampering mutt. Turned back; carefully retracing my footing. I realised the memory of that Christmas was as imprecise to my brother as it was to me. It was Jenny Penny who had instigated the search, and instigated her discovery, just as she had provoked the conversation the night she arrived.

‘Do you believe in God?’ she’d asked loudly, silencing the hum of our familiar chatter.

‘Do we what?’ said my father.

‘Believe in God?’

‘That’s a big old question for a night like this,’ said Nancy. ‘Although to be fair, quite relevant for this time of year.’

‘Do you believe in God, Jenny?’ asked my mother.

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘You seem very sure of that,’ said my father.

‘I am.

‘Why’s that, honey?’ asked Nancy.

‘Because he chose me.’

Silence.

‘What do you mean?’ asked my brother.

‘I was born dead.’

And the table fell silent as she intimately described her birth, and the prayers, and the resuscitation that followed. And no one in our house slept that night. No one wanted to be absent in her presence – not through fear, but that she might show us something we weren’t ready to see.

I sat on the wall and looked across the flattened tops of weeddraped rocks and knew how she’d walked on water that night. I’d known it for years now, but I saw how carefully she must have noted the staggered formation, the isolated pathway that had collaborated with her that night, and had given her momentary surety of footing.

I’d come over the hill, I remember, breathless from my panicked run. She’s here! I shouted to my brother; and I saw her looking back at us; not running from us, but waiting for our audience, before she started her slow trajectory across the barely submerged rocks, into the oncoming waves.

‘I’m never going home, Elly.’ That’s what she’d said the day before, but I didn’t take her seriously – thought it was the anticlimax, the malaise of Boxing Day that was affecting her.

She’d left notes around the house, around the garden, tied onto the bare branches of fruit trees. We thought it was a game – it was a game – but we thought it was a game whose ending would bring a joyous relief; a shared Well done! My turn now! But then it changed. It grew dark, and we grew fearful. My parents and Nancy headed into the forest and up the valley into neighbouring terrain, where boggy earth could ambush even the careful-footed-sighted. Alan took the roads leading to Talland, Polperro, Pelynt. He later took the road that carved through the village, intending to follow its winding path into Sandplace. We were on the bridge when we flagged him down. The three of us. Joe, me and her. Silent, shivering, unimpressed.

She would give no answers to my parents’ anguished questions. Sat in front of the fire instead and lifted a blanket over her head, refusing to talk. Her mother was called that night – my parents had no choice – and her fate was seamlessly sealed.

‘There’ll be no train ride home for her now, no way. No, Des’s back. You remember Des? My ex of a few years ago. He’s been with me a while now. Oh, didn’t she say? Well, he said he’ll drive down tomorrow and pick her up.’

Des, Des. Uncle Des.

The one who chose her.

The kitchen table was carried outside and covered with newspaper secured by three tarnished silver candelabras, dripping trails of melted wax over the printed stories of yesterday and beyond. By the time we’d carried out the glasses and the wine and the trays of crabs and langoustines, the sky had turned dark, a fearsome dark, and we huddled around the candles like a pack of strays. We were about to start, but then we realised that someone wasn’t with us and so we shouted her name until out of the darkness she appeared, like a beautiful wandering ghost dressed in a white silk shirtdress, the buttons of which were undone so low it was hard to decipher if it was going on or coming off. And as she strode across the dew-soaked lawn like the character in her new TV series, Detective Molly Crenshaw (Moll to her friends), her swagger was now a cop swagger, as if her gun was hidden somewhere awkward, and only the lucky few knew where.

As she reached the table she triumphantly held up two bottles of champagne as if she herself had picked and fermented those grapes and had bottled them all in the space of a day, and we couldn’t help but cheer and applaud this feat. The sound brought an unmistakable glow to her cheeks, dismissing instantly the lie that she had taken her last bow in Theatreland.