Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

‘My brother,’ I said, smoothing the crease that crooked his smile.

It was late. Latter than I usually went out, and I sat at the bar and faced bottles and optics, and a distorted reflection of myself in between. Behind me were quiet stragglers; ones left thinking and drinking, no pause in between. In front of me, whiskey.

I didn’t know this part of town, could be anonymous in this part of town and moments before, I’d come back from the bathroom with an extra button undone. It felt crass, I felt awkward, but I hoped for a pick-up, a date or something, but I was out of practice, out of touch with a world like that. Cut off from a world that required behaviour like that. A man looked over. He smiled, I smiled, my standards were dropping. I paid the tab and headed out into the sobering air. My heart tore. I’d had no one for so long.

I walked the block, passing couples, a dog walker, a runner too. All had direction; me, aimless. I turned up a tree-lined street, its symmetry halted by the red and white lights of a neighbourhood bistro.

It was warm inside, and smelt of garlic and coffee. The owner was cheery. I was his only customer, he might have been waiting to go home, but he didn’t show it. He brought over my coffee, enquired about my evening, gave me a piece of Torta di Nonna . ‘You won’t be disappointed,’ he said. I wasn’t. He handed me the arts section of the weekend Times . Kind.

The soft bell above the door rang. I heard a brief conversation and the subsequent groan of the espresso machine. I looked up. A man. He looked at me. I think he smiled. I looked down, pretended to read. He pulled out a chair and sat down behind me. I wanted another coffee but I felt wired, didn’t want to get up, could feel him behind me. The man went to the counter and paid his bill. Don’t go. Look up. I listened for the sound of the bell. Nothing. Footsteps towards me.

‘You look how I feel,’ he said, his face tired, sad. He handed me another coffee, a baci perched on the saucer.

We barrelled through his front door, a heaving mass of peeling clothes and reaching hands, and we crawled from floor to sofa to bed, but slowed at bed. The startling intimacy of perfume and photos, this once-shared life, stemmed our need, and that’s when he said, ‘We can stop if you like.’ No stop. His mouth tasted of cinnamon and sugar. Coffee too.

I unbuttoned his shirt. His skin felt cool and pimpled as I ran my fingers across his chest and down the hairline of his stomach. I stopped at the elastic of his pants. He sat up awkward, shy even. His cock between us, hard and ready. I held it against the fabric. Outlined the shape with my fingers, grasped it. He didn’t move, no thrust, waiting to see what I would do. I lifted his hips and peeled off the white shorts. I bent down. He tasted of soap.

I buried my head in the pillows as my cunt clasped around his fingers, as they slid deep in me, wet and fast, thrusting fast until his cock took over, until he rolled me over and faced me. This sad face, this gentle, beautiful face that had no name. He bent down and kissed me, kissed her. I reached for his hair, lank and wet. I grabbed his mouth, sucked his tongue. He pushed me into the sheets, my knees tight around his ribs clinging to this shared moment, faster shunting as he moved deeper in me, expelling all that had been buried, all that had been hidden, faster fucking, until I felt the surge of energy and reached for him, this stranger, and bit hard on his shoulder as my sound – as his sound – filled the room, and brought back life to a bed, coated in ache.

Five o’clock. Life was beginning outside. I rolled over, exhausted; felt sore between my legs. I dressed quietly in the twilight and watched him sleep. I would leave no note. I made my way to the door.

‘This wasn’t nothing,’ he said.

‘I know.’ I went back and held him. This was breath.

The days spread out before me, interminable, senseless hours, and I went to a French café where I wasn’t known and where I didn’t have to deflect the ‘Any news?’ with polite ‘Not yet’s. I sat in the window and watched life pass, watched it head Uptown. I saw three young women walking arm in arm and they were laughing, and I realised that I hadn’t seen that in days; it looked so strange.

I wrote there. Wrote the column and wrote about the Lost. I wrote about the flowers at every fire station, piled three, five high, and the candles that never went out; prayers burning through despair, because it was still early days and you never knew, but of course most people did. People knew as they lay alone at night, that this was the beginning, the raw beginning that was to be their Present, their Now, their Future, their Memory. I wrote about the sudden embraces in the middle of shops, and the funerals that appeared everyday for fire-fighters and cops, funerals that stopped the streetflow with a volley of salutes and tears. I wrote about the lost cityscape as I sat on our favourite bench along the promenade by Brooklyn Bridge; the place we went to to think and where we imagined what our lives would be three, five, ten years hence.

But most of all I wrote about him – now called Max – my brother, our friend, missing now for ten days. And I wrote about what I’d lost that morning. The witness of my soul, my shadow in childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.

Nancy went back to LA to work. She wasn’t ready, but they called her back and I said she’d never be ready so she had to go.

‘I’m thinking of coming back,’ she said.

‘To here, New York?’

‘No. To England. I miss it.’

‘It’s not perfect.’

‘Seems so after this.’

‘This could happen anywhere,’ I said. ‘Nowhere’s safe. This will happen again.’

‘But I miss you lot,’ she said. ‘The everyday.’

‘You’ll feel different when you get that holster back on.’

‘Idiot,’ she said.

‘So come home,’ I said as I held her. ‘We need you.’

And as she opened the front door and headed down the stoop she turned and put on her sunglasses. ‘I’ll be all right, won’t I?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Flying. I’ll be all right?’

‘You’ll always be all right,’ I said.

She smiled. Fear was catching. Even the immune were suffering.

We went out to eat that night, just Charlie and I, the first and only night since I’d got there. We went to their place, to Balthazar, and we sat where they always sat, and people were discreet but still asked how we were and Charlie said, ‘We’re OK, thanks.’

We ate from platters of fruits de mer and drank Burgundy and ate steak frites and drank more Burgundy and did as they used to do, and we laughed and got drunk, until the restaurant thinned out and we were allowed to stay in the corner like the Forgotten, as they cleared around us and told jokes about the evening. And that’s when he told me. So unexpectedly. Told me about that room in Lebanon.

‘You can hold on to anything, Elly, to make you carry on.’

‘So what did you hold on to?’

Pause.

‘The sight of a lemon tree.’

He proceeded to tell me about the small window high up in his room, no glass, just open to the elements, his only source of light. He would climb up to it and hold himself in the draught of fresh air, the scented fresh air that made him feel less forgotten. He couldn’t hold on to the wall for long, and would drop back down into the darkness, where the smells were then his; humiliating and dirty, clinging.