Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

I thought this is how it would be if the sun died; the gentle shutting down of an organ, sleepy, no longer working. No explosion at the end of life, just this slow disintegration into darkness, where life as we know it never wakes up, because nothing reminds us that we have to.

The sun started to reappear a couple of minutes later, slowly, of course, until colour once again saturated the sea and our faces, and birdsong filled the air, songs this time of joy, of relief. Cheers rang out from the cliff tops and the ra ta ta ta of applause. Yet we were all quiet for so long after, touched by the magnitude, the beautiful unfathomable magnitude of it all. This is what we are connected to. What we are all connected to. When the lights go out, so do we.

A month later, Arthur woke up at six like he did every morning; and yet on that particular morning his eyes didn’t. I looked out from my window and I saw him stumble onto the lawn like a drunk. I ran down the stairs and into the fresh morning air and caught him as he knelt groping for direction.

‘What is it, Arthur? What’s happened?’

‘I can’t see anything,’ he said. ‘I’m blind.’

Non-arteritic anterior ischaemic optic neuropathy – that was the term the specialist used; an optic nerve stroke that lessened the blood supply to the eyes and instead deposited large shadows across both fields of vision. It was something that happened to older men with heart disease; one of those tragic, unfortunate things.

‘Heart disease,’ scoffed Arthur. ‘It must be something else.’

My mother reached for his hand, held it tight.

‘But I’m fit. I always have been; have never had any problem with illness whatsoever, and certainly not with my heart.’

‘But your results say something different,’ said the specialist.

‘Then you can shove that difference up your tight little arse,’ and he got up to leave.

‘Come on, Arthur,’ said my mother, leading him back to his seat.

The specialist went back to his desk. He looked at his notes, then out of the window; allowed his mind to wander back to similar occurrences and strange side effects filed under Coincidence, rather than the red of WARNING . He looked at Arthur again and said, ‘Do you take a drug for erectile dysfunction?’ At which point, seeming to know what the answer was already, my mother got up and said, ‘All yours, Alfie,’ and she left the room, leaving my father to deal with the sexual fallout of octogenarian practices.

The answer, apparently, was Yes ; for a whole year now. He’d been one of the first to take it, of course, and had waited for its arrival like a child waits for Christmas. The specialist believed there was a link; the ‘something else’ that he’d heard about before, but he had no proof, so it was goodbye to the pills, Arthur, and a slow hopeful wait for sight.

They came back the following day, tired but relieved, and I waited for them in the kitchen, mugs filled with Scotch, not with tea, because it was late in the afternoon and only Scotch would do.

‘I’m sorry, Arthur,’ I said.

‘Don’t you worry.’

‘It’s not necessarily permanent,’ said my mother. ‘The specialist said your sight could come back at any time. They know so little about this.’

‘But I must prepare for it not to,’ he said, reaching for his Scotch and finding the salt cellar instead. ‘I simply like having erections. I haven’t been doing much with them, but I find them a comfort. Rather like a good book. It’s the anticipation, really. I don’t even have to get to the end.’

‘I know exactly what you mean, Arthur,’ said my father, before being cut short by a withering look from my mother. ‘You’re not a man,’ he added bravely. ‘You can’t possibly understand,’ and he leant across the table and held Arthur’s arm in solidarity.

I led Arthur back to his cottage, which was warm and smelt of the previous day’s coffee, and I helped him to his favourite chair, which we’d positioned by the small hearth, now that autumn was upon us.

‘A new chapter, Elly,’ he said, and sighed deeply. And a new chapter it truly became; a chapter when I became his eyes.

I’d had years of practice as a child, when he’d led me down to the river or into the forest to describe the seasonal changes and the smells each brought with them. I told him about the increased migration of egrets and described how they behaved, white and sullen, in the scrub oaks beyond. And we picked fungi in the woods and he truly smelt for the first time their earthy scent and felt the spongy sensation between his fingers and we fished, quietly at first, in the river waters until he could almost sense a fish upon his hook, as his fingers played on the line, like gently strumming fingers on a guitar string.

And it was my eyes, too, that led him nervously to his book launch that cold December night, as a sharp wind blew through Smithfield, chasing stragglers to the warmth of a bar. And it was my eyes that led him through the long, white entranceway of the once-upon-a-time smokehouse, through to the high minimal surrounds of the restaurant where everyone was waiting for him, and where his hand tightened around my arm as the sounds of voices and echoes and movement descended upon his ears in a crescendo of disorientation. I felt the fear pulse throughout his body until my mother came up to him and whispered, ‘Everyone’s saying such wonderful things, Arthur. You’re a bit of a star,’ and his grasp relaxed, and his voice relaxed, and he said rather loudly, ‘ Champagne pour tout! ’

It was late. Most people had gone. My father was cornered by a young artist who’d come down from dinner and I heard them discussing the importance of depression and jealousy on the British psyche. My mother was tipsy, flirting with an older gentleman who worked for Orion; she was showing him how to make a chicken by folding a serviette. He was engrossed. As I came up from the bathrooms, I looked around for Arthur, and, rather than seeing him crowded by people, I saw him sitting alone by the exit doors, a forlorn figure part hidden in shadow; a deep frown set across his brow. I thought it had been the anxiety of the evening that had ambushed his ebullience; the anticlimax of a project completed, and completed well. And yet as I approached, I could see it was something else, something much deeper; its resonance present, frenetic and cloying.

‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’

He smiled and nodded.

‘It’s been a good evening.’ I sat down next to him.

‘It has.’ He looked down at his hands; ran a finger along a vein, plump, swollen, a green worm buried under his skin.

‘I’ve run out of money,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve run out of money.’

Silence.

‘Is that what’s worrying you? Arthur, we’ve got plenty, you know that. You can have as much as you need. Tell Mum and Dad.’

‘No, Elly. I’ve. Run. Out. Of. Money,’ he said, clearly intonating each word, wringing out meaning until he could sense the understanding and implication spreading across my face.

‘Oh my God.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Who else knows?’

‘Only you.’

‘When did you run out?’

‘A month ago. Six weeks.’

‘Fuck.’

‘Exactly.’

Pause.

‘So you’re not going to die?’

‘Well, I am some day,’ he said rather grandly.

‘I know,’ I said, laughing. I stopped. He looked sad.

‘I’ve become mortal again. Human. I have the not-knowing again and I feel scared.’ A solitary tear ran from his eye.