Winman, Sarah - When God Was a Rabbit

His screams sent shudders around the auditorium, and as Jenny Penny tried to lead the audience in the opening verse of ‘Joy to the World!’ the first of the ambulance and police sirens could just be heard above the chords.

BABY JESUS IN COMA

That was the early headline. There was no picture of Michael Jacobs, only a picture of a weeping king, who wasn’t weeping because of the accident but because his mother was telling him off for stealing. One witness commented that it was the end of Christmas for the community, but my brother said we shouldn’t go that far and that Jesus would rise again. Not until Easter, said Jenny Penny, crying into a pillow.

Of course it was Miss Grogney who blamed both Jenny and me for the whole tragedy, and told the police as much, but they were having none of it. It was a Safety Issue, and as she was supervising the whole palaver (they actually used that word), the blame should lay fairly and squarely on her round shoulders. She would resign before the inquest, treating the whole incident as a question of faith. She’d renounce modern life and do good deeds. She’d move to Blackpool.

My mother had tried to contact Mrs Penny throughout the day and eventually she contacted my mother and said that she was in Southend-on-Sea eating cockles, and could my mother look after Jenny for the night. Of course, my mother said, and promptly told her all that had happened.

‘I’ll be there as soon as I can,’ said Mrs Penny. ‘Tomorrow OK?’ And then like a dingo scenting blood, she added a little too eagerly, ‘When’s the funeral?’

‘He’s not dead yet,’ said my mother sharply, albeit a little carelessly.

BABY JESUS DEAD

That was the late headline. My father’s Evening News was handed around in a quiet daze. All vital signs were missing and so his atheist family had agreed to turn off the life-support machine.

‘Christ, that was quick,’ said Nancy. ‘What were they doing? Saving electricity?’

‘Not funny, Nancy,’ said my mother, hiding her face. ‘Not funny at all.’

But even I saw my father laugh, and my brother, and Jenny Penny swore that she saw my mother laugh as she looked up from her hot chocolate. She loved moments like that. The inclusiveness of family. I guess because she had none.

Jenny Penny’s mother was as different from mine as any mother could be; a woman who was in fact a child herself, in constant need of the gilded approbation of a peer group, no matter how young it happened to be. ‘How do I look, girls?’ ‘Do my hair, girls.’ ‘Am I pretty, girls?’

It was fun at first – like having a rather large doll to play with – but then her expectations and demands would override all, and her fierce resentment would hang in the room like a gaudy light fitting, exposing the youth she no longer had.

‘“Mrs Penny” sounds so old, Elly. We’re friends. Call me Hayley. Or Hayles.’

‘OK, Mrs Penny, I will next time,’ I said. But I couldn’t.

Her everyday existence was secretive. She didn’t have a job but was rarely at home, and Jenny Penny had few clues to her mother’s lifestyle, except that she loved having boyfriends and loved developing various hobbies that were conducive to her lifestyle as a ‘gypsy’.

‘What’s a gypsy?’ I asked.

‘People who travel from place to place,’ said Jenny Penny.

‘Have you done that a lot?’

‘Quite a lot,’ she said.

‘Is it fun?’ I asked.

‘Not always,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because people chase us.’

‘Who?’

‘Women.’

They lived in a temporary world of temporary men; a world that could be broken up and reassembled as easily and as quickly as Lego. Fabric hung from most walls in staggered strips, and around the doorframe was a pattern of flowered handprints in pinks and reds, which in the dingy light looked like the bloodied hands of a crime scene searching for an exit. Rugs were strewn around the floor and in the corner perched on a Book of Nudes was a lamp with a shade made of magenta silk. It threw a brothel-like hue into the room – not that I knew about brothels at that time – but it was red and eerie and suffocating, and made me feel ashamed.

I rarely went upstairs because the current boyfriend would so often be asleep, having in common with all the others a nocturnal existence of late shifts and even later drinking. But I used to hear the footsteps above, the toilet flush, the worried look on Jenny’s face.

‘Shh,’ she said. ‘We have to be quiet.’

And it was because of this restriction that we seldom played in her room – not that there was much to play with – but she had a hammock that caught my eye, which was suspended above a flattened poster of a calm, blue sea.

‘I look down, rock and dream,’ she said to me proudly. ‘The Lost City of Atlantis is somewhere below me. An adventure waiting for me.’

‘Have you ever seen the sea before?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ she said, turning away, wiping off a small handprint that had smeared the centre of a mirror.

‘Not even at Southend?’ I said.

‘Tide was out,’ she said.

‘It comes back, you know.’

‘My mum was too bored to wait for it to come back. I could smell it, though. I think I’d like the sea, Elly. Know I would.’

Only once did I see a boyfriend. I’d gone upstairs to use the toilet and, being alone and inquisitive, I crept into Mrs Penny’s room, which was warm and musty with a large mirror at the foot of the bed. I saw his back only. A naked lump of a back that was as uncouth in sleep as it probably was in wakefulness. Even the mirror didn’t reveal his face, it only revealed mine as I stood hypnotised by the wall to my left, where Mrs Penny had written in lipstick ‘I am me’ over and over again, until the multicoloured cursive shapes merged into a tangled mess of expression that hauntingly said, ‘Am I me’.

I was transfixed by the possibility of imagination within this home, no matter how strange it appeared to be. This wasn’t the quiet symmetry of my everyday: the rows of terraced houses with their rectangular gardens and the routines as reliable as sturdy chairs. This wasn’t the world in which things matched, or even went with. This was a world devoid of harmony. This was a world of drama, where comedy and tragedy fought for space.

‘There are givers and takers,’ said Mrs Penny as we sat down to sweets and squash. ‘I’m a giver. What are you, Elly?’

‘She’s a giver, Mum,’ said Jenny Penny protectively.

‘Women are givers, men are takers.’ So said the oracle.

‘My dad gives a lot,’ I said. ‘Gives all the time, in fact.’

‘Then he’s a rare bird,’ she said, and quickly changed the subject to something that no one could contradict. When Jenny Penny left the room her mother reached for my hand and asked if I’d ever had my palm read. She was highly skilled at reading palms, she said, tarot cards and tea leaves too. She could read anything; it was her gypsy blood.

‘Books?’ I asked naïvely.

And she blushed and laughed, and her laugh sounded angry.

‘Come on, girls,’ she said as Jenny reappeared. ‘I’ve had enough of your boring games, I’m taking you out.’

‘Where to?’ asked Jenny Penny.

‘Surprise,’ her mother said, in that awful singsong way of hers. ‘You like surprises, don’t you, Elly?’

‘Um,’ I said, not really sure that in her hands I did.

‘Here – coats!’ she said, and threw ours at us as she stormed towards the front door.