When God Was a Rabbit (16 page)

I waited in line for the gates to open, surrounded by excited chattering families about to see a mum, a sister, a daughter, a wife. It was cool in the shade, and instinctively I blew on my hands, as much as for my nerves as for the initial feelings of cold I’d felt, and yet no longer did.

‘Cigarette?’ said a voice from behind.

I turned and smiled into the face of a woman.

‘No I’m fine – thanks, though,’ I said.

‘First time?’ she asked.

‘That obvious?’ I said.

‘I can always tell,’ she said, lighting her cigarette and smiling at the same time; an action that turned her mouth into a lopsided grimace. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she added, looking towards the gates.

‘Yeah,’ I said without any conviction, not really knowing if I would be or not.

‘Have you been coming here long?’ I said, regretting the line as soon as it had left my mouth, but she was kind and laughed, and knew what I meant.

‘Five years. She should be out next month.’

‘That’s great,’ I said.

‘It’s me sister.’

‘OK.’

‘I’ve got her kid.’

‘That’s tough.’

‘Happens,’ she said. ‘Which of yours is in?’

‘Friend.’

‘How long?’

‘Nine,’ I said, suddenly getting used to the clipped edit of this conversation.

‘Blimey,’ she said. ‘Serious.’

‘I s’pose.’

A child suddenly shouted and ran forward as the gates opened up.

‘Well, here we go,’ she said, taking a last drag on her cigarette before flicking it to the floor. The child ran back and stamped on it as if it was an ant.

‘Good luck, eh?’ she said as we started to move forwards.

‘You too,’ I said, suddenly nervous again.

I’d been searched before, of course – airports, stations, theatres, places like that – but this time felt different. Two months before, the IRA had started bombing again – once in the Docklands and then on a bus in the Aldwych. Everyone was jittery.

The officer went through the little bag of measly items I’d brought for Jenny Penny, those memories from outside, and laid each one out on the table as if they were for sale: stamps, CDs, a nice face cream, a deodorant and a cake, magazines and a writing pad. I could have amassed more, I could have kept going, believing such acquisitions would make her room feel bigger, would make her days seem shorter, would make her reality seem more bearable. The officer told me there would be no kissing and I blushed, even though the normality of such a statement had been a constant throughout my life. I placed the items back into their bag as he called the next person over.

I went through into the visitors’ hall where the air was still and remote, as if it too was living its own cloistered sentence, and I sat at my allotted table, which was number fifteen, and which gave me a good view of the rest of the room.

The woman I’d spoken to in the queue was near the front talking to a man at the adjacent table, adding to the low hum of expectant chatter. I bent down to my bag to pull out a newspaper and as I did, I missed the arrival of the first inmates. They came out in normal clothes, ambling and waving towards their friends and families, and their voices rose as normal, as normal greetings took place. I looked towards the door at the faces coming in. The thought that I probably wouldn’t recognise her suddenly became real. Why should I? I had no photograph and people change; I’d changed. What was the discernible characteristic I remembered of her as a child? Her hair, of course, but what if she’d cut it – dyed it, even – what was left? What colour were her eyes? What was now her height? What was the sound of her laugh; I had no recollection of her smile. As an adult she was a stranger.

I was used to waiting for her. As a child I’d waited for her all the time, but it never annoyed me because I didn’t have the one thing that unfailingly stole hours from her life.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she used to say. ‘It was my hair again.’

And she spoke of it as if it was an affliction like asthma or a limp or a problem heart, one that slowed her down. I’d once waited two hours for her at the recreation park, only to bump into her on my way home.

‘You won’t believe what just happened,’ she said crying uncontrollably.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I had to brush my hair twenty-seven times before it would tie up properly,’ she said, shaking her head. And I instinctively put my arms around her as if she was hurt, or worse – had been dealt the cruellest possible hand that life could deal – and she clung on hard to me, stayed like that for minutes, until she felt the safety again of our uncompromised world and she pulled away and smiled and said, ‘Don’t ever leave me, Elly.’

A woman came through the door by herself. Most of the tables were deep in conversation; only mine and one other were still waiting. Her hair was quite short and wavy and she looked in my direction and I smiled. She couldn’t have seen me. She was tall, slim, thin even, and her shoulders hunched forwards deflating her chest, causing her to stoop, ageing her by years. I didn’t think it was her, but as I studied her movements I started to read into her face features that might once have been familiar, and could even be now. And then as she came towards me I stood up as if she was joining me for dinner, but she walked past to the table of two behind and said, ‘How ya doin’, Mum?’

‘You look well, Jacqui. Doesn’t she, Beth?’

‘Yeah, she looks good.’

‘Thanks. How’s Dad?’

‘Still the same.’

‘Pain in the arse. Sends his love.’

‘Send mine back.’

It happened quite suddenly, the moment I knew she wasn’t coming. I heard her voice amidst the hundred others in that sealed room, and I heard her say, ‘Sorry, Elly, I can’t.’ It happened before the prison officer came towards me, before he bent down and whispered in my ear, before everyone in the room stopped to look at me.

It was the same feeling I’d had when I’d been stood up for the last time, when his rejection sent a spiral of self-disgust coiling itself around my brittle self-image. I’d tried to become what he’d wanted me to become, which was impossible because what he wanted was someone else. But I still tried in my tired, misjudged way. And I waited for him. Waited until the bar emptied, until the staff headed wearily towards the exit; waited until his absence lodged itself in my heart and became confirmation of what I’d always known.

I got up with half an hour to go and made for the exit, conspicuous in my embarrassment. I dropped one of the bags and heard the face cream smash but I didn’t care because it didn’t matter any more, because I’d dump it in the bin at the station.

The train journey back felt tedious and slow. I was tired of eavesdropping. I was tired of the constant stops at the villagelike stations ‘just a stone’s throw from London with the benefit of countryside’. I was tired of thinking about her.

The taxi across Waterloo Bridge revived me as it always did, and I relaxed as I looked east and took in the familiar sights of St Paul’s and St Bride’s and the disparate towers of Docklands glinting in the early evening sun. Commuters walked; buses were unnecessary. The old moored steamers were packed with drinkers, and the cool breeze that whispered through the city flicked the surface of the Thames, scattering sunlight as white and as piercing as ice.

We passed the Aldwych, the Royal Courts of Justice and headed down Fleet Street, where I had lived during my studies. There was nothing there then, very little now, (the cafés would come later), and I used to have to walk to a shop on the Strand if I needed late-night snacks or that forgotten pint of milk. As we drove level to Bouverie Street I looked towards the river and saw the imposing building at the bottom on the right, near to the old
Daily Mail
works.

There were seven of us then, scattered in tiny rooms on the two uppermost floors: actors and writers, artists and musicians. We were a hidden ghetto away from the lives lived among the legal offices below. We were solitary and apart. Slept during the day, and uncurled at dusk like evening primroses; fragrant and lush. We never wanted to conquer the world, only our fears. We didn’t keep in touch. Somewhere, though, our memories had.

I opened the balcony doors and looked out over the square. The sense of freedom and privilege the view offered was unimaginable in its calm and beauty, and never more so that evening. I undid my shirt. I’d felt dirty all day but now preferred a martini to taking a shower. Why hadn’t she come? Why at the last moment had she faltered? Was it me? Had I asked too much of her? My disappointment was raw, as if she held the key to something unnamed, something vital.

I sat down and rolled the olive around the edge of the glass. Music from next door rose up and soared across the square, taking my thoughts with it; leading me once again to childhood rooms and rediscovered faces and games and jokes we once found funny.

I thought back to the Christmas she’d spent with us; her fierce belief in the strange declaration that left us sleepless the long night that followed. I saw her again on the beach, walking on the surface of the water in the moonlight, her hair wild and uncompromising in the briny squalls, her ears deaf to my pleas.

‘Look at me!’ she shouted, arms wide at her side. ‘Look what I can do, Elly!’ before she disappeared down into the dark sea, not struggling but calm against the billowing waves, and only emerging at the heaving pull of my brother’s determined arms.

‘What the fuck are you doing, Jenny?’ he screamed, as he dragged her limp, smiling body through the surf, across the shingle. ‘You fucking little idiot! We’re all out looking for you, worried about you. How dare you? You could have drowned out there.’

‘I was never in any danger,’ she said calmly. ‘Nothing can ever hurt me. Nothing can take me from me.’

And from that moment, I watched her. Watched her with different coloured eyes, until the raging energy that coursed through my body finally revealed itself and gave itself name: envy. For I knew already that something had taken me from me, and had replaced it with a desperate longing for a time before; a time before fear, a time before shame. And now that knowledge had a voice, and it was a voice that rose from the depths of my years and howled into the night sky like a wounded animal longing for home.

She never explained what happened, why she didn’t show, and I never pushed; instead she disappeared for weeks, leaving my letters, my concern, unanswered. And then as June approached, her reappearance was heralded by a familiar scrawl across a familiar envelope, inside of which was a familiar hand-made card, this time with a solitary rabbit on the front.

I’m sorry Elly
, she wrote in her minuscule cut-out lettering.
Be patient with me. I’m Sorry
.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know it’s late.’

I’d just finished a magazine article, just got to bed and looked at the clock – three o’clock – and that was when the phone rang and that’s when I’d considered letting the answer-machine pick up but I could never do that, because I knew it was him – he always called at that time – and so I reached for the phone and said, ‘Joe?’ and he said, ‘Guess what?’ and I said, ‘What?’ and he did something unusual. He laughed.

‘What is it?’ I said, hearing the sound of people in the background, the clink of glasses. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Out,’ he said.

‘That’s great,’ I said.

‘Guess who’s here?’

‘Dunno,’ I said.

‘Guess,’ he said again.

‘I
dunno
,’ I said, feeling suddenly irritated. ‘Gwyneth Paltrow?’ (He’d actually met her two weeks before at an opening, and had forced me to talk to her on the phone like a fan.)

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not Gwynnie.’

‘Who then?’ I said, adjusting my pillow.

And he told me.

And on the line I heard a voice that might or might not have been him; a man’s voice, not a boy’s, surrounded by eighteen years of silence. But when he said, ‘Hey, little Ell,’ the thing he always said to me, I felt a sensation upon my skin as if I was falling through feathers.

Two weeks later, the sound of New York chatter and car horns rose from Greene Street as the sun poured through the large windows, filling the space with an abundance of light that seemed lavish and greedy. I rolled over and opened my eyes. My brother was standing holding a coffee, staring at me.

‘How long have you been there?’ I said.

‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Sometimes on one leg, like this,’ and he showed me. ‘Or like this,’ and he changed legs. ‘Like an Aborigine.’

‘You’re so weird,’ I said, and rolled over, tired, happy, hung over.

I’d landed quite late the previous night. Joe had met me at JFK as he always did, and held a big sign that said ‘Sharon Stone’. He loved to listen to the whispers of the passers-by, the gorging anticipation of the star-struck, and he loved to watch their mute disappointment as I stood in front of him, dishevelled and casual and oh so not Sharon Stone. He relished this statement meant for the masses, and delivered it with precision that verged on cruelty.

As the taxi crossed Brooklyn Bridge (the bridge we always asked the driver to take), I opened my window to the smell of the city, to the noise, and my heart leapt as the lights illuminated my welcome, urging me onwards as it had done to millions of others, those wanting a different life. My brother had been one of the lured; brought by the promise of anonymity, not of gold, where he could be himself without the label of the past; without all those workings-out and crossings-out, the things we have to do before we come to an answer, the answer of who we are.

As I looked towards the financial district I felt a surge in my chest – for my brother, for Jenny, for the past, for Charlie, and I could feel the gnawing inclusiveness again; the
them
and
us
of my brother’s world; the one where I was always an
us
. He pointed to the Twin Towers and said, ‘You’ve never been up there, have you?’ And I said, ‘No.’

‘You look down and you’re so cut off from everything. It’s another world. I went last week for breakfast. Stood against the window, leant against it and felt my mind pulled towards the life below. It’s awesome, Elly. Fucking awesome. The life below feels so far away when you’re there. The minusculeness of existence.’

The taxi pulled to a sudden halt. ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re fuckin’ killin’ me. Fuck you, asshole!’

We pulled away slowly and my brother leant towards the grille. ‘Let’s go to the Algonquin instead, sir.’

‘Anything you want, buddy,’ said the driver, and swerved dangerously into the inside lane. He reached down for the radio and turned it on. Liza Minnelli. A song about maybes and being lucky – even a winner – a song about love not running away.

His name had sat between us since my arrival like an odd chaperone, bringing a quaint propriety to our stories. It was as if he deserved a chapter all to himself, a moment when we turned the page and only his name was visible. And so with the drinks ordered, the bar quiet and our attention mutual and assisting, that chapter began when my brother finished chewing on a handful of peanuts and said, ‘You’ll see him tomorrow, you know.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘He’s coming with us,’ he said. ‘To watch me sing. Do you mind?’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘It’s just so quick, for us, I mean. You’ve just got here.’

‘I’m OK.’

‘He just wanted to,’ he said. ‘He wants to see you.’

‘It’s OK, I understand.’

‘You sure? He just wanted to.’

‘I want to, too,’ I said, and I was about to ask if they had become lovers again, but the martinis arrived and they looked perfect and tempting, and there would be time for that, and so instead I reached for my glass and took the first sip and said, ‘Perfect!’ instead of ‘Cheers!’ Because it was.

‘Perfect,’ said my brother, and he unexpectedly reached over and held me.

He had become like Ginger. You had to translate his actions, for they were seldom accompanied by words, because his world was a quiet world; a disconnected, fractured space; a puzzle that made him phone me at three o’clock in the morning, asking me for the last piece of the border, so he could fill in the sky.

‘I’m so happy you’re here,’ he said, and I sat back and looked at him. His face was different: softer; the taut tiredness that had hung about his eyes, gone. His face looked happy.

‘You are, aren’t you?’ I said, grinning.

The older couple by the palm looked at us and smiled.

‘So,’ my brother said.

‘So?’

‘Can I tell you all over again?’

‘Of course,’ I said, and he downed half his glass and started again from the beginning.

It was a Stonewall party, a charity party he always supported, and one that was going to be held that year in one of the large brownstones on the edge of the Village. They were intimate affairs that catered for the usual people, but which always made good money from the tickets and the silent auction, and the other silent auction that only the naughty ever knew about.

‘But you didn’t want to go?’ I said, rushing the story ahead to territory I knew nothing about.

‘No I didn’t. But then I remembered I wanted to check out their renovations, because I’ve got my eye on a new place and I need an architect; which is also another story because I want you to come and see this house with me tomorrow.’

‘OK, OK, I will,’ I said, and drank a large mouthful of vodka, feeling its flush in my head. ‘Now continue,’ I said.

A string quartet was playing in the walled garden and he sat outside most of the evening, gladly cornered by an older gentleman called Ray, who talked to him about the riots of ’69, and told him of suppers spent with Katharine Hepburn and Marlene, whom he used to know because he was involved in wardrobe at MGM and because he had association with von Sternberg too, because of his own German lineage (mother’s side). And then the light faded and candles arrived, filling the atmosphere with scents like tea and jasmine; fig, too. People deserted as the music stopped, headed indoors to hear the results of the auction and to sample the Japanese buffet orchestrated by the events caterer
du jour
. And that’s how they found themselves alone. There was no inappropriate suggestion, just the quiet familiarity of evenings he used to spend with Arthur, when they talked about Halston and Warhol and those seventies parties whose themes were as blurred as the preferences of the guests.

And then a man approached down the fire escape. A young man, it seemed, in the candlelit night; less young as he approached. But Ray looked over to him and smiled and said, ‘And who might you be, handsome young brave?’ and the man laughed and said, ‘My name is Charlie Hunter. How’re you doing, Joe?’

The waiter placed the second round of martinis down. I was hungry. I ordered extra olives.

They crammed years into those remaining hours before they tumbled out onto the sidewalks of the Village and wandered back to SoHo, happy and drunk and disbelieving. They spent the weekend at Joe’s apartment, cocooned in movies and take-out boxes and beer, and voraciously ate away at the years, the lost years that had defined one another’s name. And that’s when Charlie told him he shouldn’t have been at the party either. He should have been back home in Denver, but his flight had been delayed and a meeting had suddenly come up for Monday, and a business colleague he knew only as Phil had said, ‘Stay – there’s this party,’ and so he’d stayed and hadn’t seen Phil since; not since he’d left him by the silent auction, bidding for a dinner for two at the Tribeca Grill with an unknown celebrity.

Joe downed the remainder of his glass. ‘And guess what, Ell? I think he’s going to move to New York for good.’

And that’s when I really thought I’d asked if they’d become lovers; but maybe I hadn’t because I couldn’t remember, because that was when we ordered the third martini, the third martini that seemed such a good idea at the time; the third martini that stayed in my mouth as I awoke to that piercing sunlight and a brother standing on one leg, holding a double macchiato, pretending to be an Aborigine.