When God Was a Rabbit Read online

  When God Was a Rabbit

  Winman, Sarah

  When God Was a Rabbit

  SARAH WINMAN

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2011 Sarah Winman

  The right of Sarah Winman to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2010.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ words and music by Freddie Mercury © 1976, reproduced by permission of Queen Music Ltd/ EMI Music Publishing, London W8 5SW

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 7931 6

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations.

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  1968

  Part Two

  1995

  Acknowledgements

  to Dad

  I divide my life into two parts. Not really a Before and After, more as if they are bookends, holding together flaccid years of empty musings, years of the late adolescent or the twentysomething whose coat of adulthood simply does not fit. Wandering years I waste no time in recalling.

  I look at photographs from those years and my presence is there, in front of the Eiffel Tower maybe, or the Statue of Liberty, or knee-deep in sea water, waving and smiling; but these experiences, I now know, were greeted with the dull tint of disinterest that made even rainbows appear grey.

  She featured not at all during this period and I realise she was the colour that was missing. She clasped the years either side of this waiting and held them up as beacons, and when she arrived in class that dull January morning it was as if she herself was the New Year; the thing that offered me the promise of beyond. But only I could see that. Others, bound by convention, found her at best laughable, and at worst someone to mock. She was of another world; different. But by then, secretly, so was I. She was my missing piece; my complement in play.

  One day she turned to me and said, ‘Watch this,’ and pulled from her forearm a new fifty-pence piece. I saw the flattened edge peeking out of her skin like a staple. She didn’t produce it from the air or from her sleeve – I’d seen all that before – no, she pulled it from her actual skin and left a bloody scar. Two days later the scar was gone; the fifty pence, though, still in her pocket. Now this is the part where nobody ever believes me. The date on the coin was odd. It was nineteen years hence: it was 1995.

  I cannot explain the magic trick just as I cannot explain her sudden expertise in the piano that strange morning in church. She had no tutelage in these pastimes. It was as if she could will her mind into talent and, through the willing, achieve a sudden and fleeting competency. I saw it all and marvelled. But these moments were for my eyes only: proof of some sorts, that I might believe her when the time was necessary.

  Part One

  1968

  I decided to enter this world just as my mother got off the bus after an unproductive shopping trip to Ilford. She’d gone to change a pair of trousers and, distracted by my shifting position, found it impossible to choose between patched denims or velvet flares, and fearful that my place of birth would be a department store, she made a staggered journey back to the safe confines of her postcode, where her waters broke just as the heavens opened. And during the seventy-yard walk back down to our house, her amniotic fluid mixed with the December rain and spiralled down the gutter until the cycle of life was momentously and, one might say, poetically complete.

  I was delivered by an off-duty nurse in my parents’ bedroom on an eiderdown that had been won in a raffle, and after a swift labour of twenty-two minutes my head appeared and the nurse shouted Push! and my father shouted Push! and my mother pushed, and I slipped out effortlessly into that fabled year. The year Paris took to the streets. The year of the Tet offensive. The year Martin Luther King lost his life for a dream.

  For months I lived in a quiet world of fulfilled need. Cherished and doted on. Until the day, that is, my mother’s milk dried up to make way for the flood of grief that suddenly engulfed her when she learnt her parents had died on a walking holiday in Austria.

  It was in all the papers. The freak accident that took the life of twenty-seven tourists. A grainy photograph of a mangled coach lodged between two pine trees like a hammock.

  There was only one survivor of the crash, the German tour guide, who had been trying on a new ski helmet at the time – the thing that had obviously saved his life – and from his hospital bed in Vienna, he looked into the television camera as another dose of morphine was administered, and said that although it was a tragic accident, they had just eaten so they died happy. Obviously the trauma of plummeting down the rocky crevasse had obliterated his memory. Or maybe a full stomach of dumplings and strudel had softened the blow; that is something we would never know. But the television camera stayed on his bruised face, hoping for a moment of sensitive lucidity for the heartbroken families back home, but it never came. My mother remained grief-stricken for the whole of my second year and well into my third. She had no stories to recall, no walking stories or funny first words, those events that give clues to the child that might become. The everyday was a blur; a foggy window she had no interest in wiping clear.

  ‘What’s Going On’ sang Marvin Gaye, but no one had an answer.

  And yet that was the moment my brother took my hand. Took me protectively into his world.

  He had skirted the periphery of my early life like an orbiting moon, held between the alternate pull of curiosity and indifference, and probably would have remained that way, had Destiny not collided with a Tyrolean coach that tragic, pivotal afternoon.

  He was five years older than I was, and had blond curly hair that was as unfamiliar to our family as the brand-new car my father would one day buy. He was different from other boys his age; an exotic creature who secretly wore our mother’s lipstick at night and patterned my face with kisses that mimicked impetigo. It was his outlet against a conservative world. The quiet rebellion of a rank outsider.

  I blossomed into an inquisitive and capable child; one who could read and spell by the age of four and have conversations usually reserved for eight year olds. It wasn’t precocity or genius that had become my bedfellow, simply the influence of this older brother, who was by then hooked on the verse of Noël Coward and the songs of Kander and Ebb. He presented a colourful alternative to our mapped-out lives. And every day as I awaited his return from school, my longing became taut, became physical. I never felt complete without him. In truth, I never would.

  ‘Does God love everyone?’ I asked my mother as I reached across a bowl of celery to take the last teacake. My father looked up from his papers. He always looked up when someone mentioned God. It was a reflex, as if he were about to be hit.

  ‘Of course he does,’ my mother replied, pausing in her ironing.

  ‘Does God love murderers?’ I continue
d.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. My father looked at her and tutted loudly.

  ‘Robbers?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poo?’ I asked.

  ‘Poo’s not a living thing, darling,’ she said seriously.

  ‘But if it was, would God love it?’

  ‘Yes, I expect he would.’

  This was not helping. God loved everything, it seemed, except me. I peeled off the last curve of chocolate, exposing the white marshmallow mound and the heart of jam.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked my mother.

  ‘I’m not going back to Sunday school,’ I said.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ said my father. ‘I’m glad about that.’

  ‘But I thought you liked it?’ said my mother.

  ‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘I only really liked the singing bit.’

  ‘You can sing here,’ said my father, looking back down at his papers. ‘Everyone can sing here.’

  ‘Any reason?’ my mother asked, sensing my withholding.

  ‘Nope,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to talk about anything?’ she asked quietly, reaching for my hand. (She had started to read a book on child psychology from America. It encouraged us to talk about our feelings. It made us want to clam up.)

  ‘Nope,’ I said again through a small mouth.

  It had been a simple misunderstanding. All I had suggested was that Jesus Christ had been a mistake, that was all; an unplanned pregnancy.

  ‘Unplanned indeed!’ screamed the vicar. ‘And where did you get such blasphemous filth, you ungodly child?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘just an idea.’

  ‘Just an idea?’ he repeated. ‘Do you honestly think God loves those who question his Divine Plan? Well, I’ll tell you, missy, he does not,’ and his arm shot out and pointed towards my banishment. ‘Corner,’ he said, and I wandered over to the chair facing the damp, crumbling green wall.

  I sat there thinking about the night my parents had crept into my room and said, ‘We want to talk to you about something. Something your brother keeps saying to you. About you being a mistake.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you weren’t a mistake,’ said my mother, ‘just unplanned. We weren’t really expecting you. To turn up, that is.’

  ‘Like Mr Harris?’ I said (a man who always seemed to know when we were about to sit down and eat).

  ‘Sort of,’ said my father.

  ‘Like Jesus?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said my mother carelessly. ‘Exactly like Jesus. It was like a miracle when you arrived; the best miracle ever.’

  My father put his papers back into his battered briefcase and sat next to me.

  ‘You don’t have to go to Sunday school or church for God to love you,’ he said. ‘Or for anyone to love you. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, not believing him.

  ‘You’ll understand that more as you get older,’ he added. But I couldn’t wait that long. I’d already resolved that if this God couldn’t love me, then it was clear I’d need to find another one that could.

  ‘What we need is another war,’ said Mr Abraham Golan, my new next-door neighbour. ‘Men need wars.’

  ‘Men need brains,’ said his sister, Esther, winking at me as she hoovered around his feet and sucked up a loose shoelace, which broke the fan belt and made the room smell of burnt rubber. I liked the smell of burnt rubber. And I liked Mr Golan. I liked the fact that he lived with a sister in his old age and not a wife, and hoped my brother might make the same choice when that far-off time came.

  Mr Golan and his sister had come to our street in September and by December had illuminated every window with candles, announcing their faith in a display of light. My brother and I leant against our wall and watched the blue Pickford van turn up one mild weekend. We watched crates and furniture carried carelessly from the truck by men with cigarettes in their mouths and newspapers in their back pockets.

  ‘Looks like something died in that chair,’ said my brother as it went past.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘Just know,’ he said, tapping his nose, making out he had a sixth sense, even though the other five had proven many times to be shaky and unreliable.

  A black Zephyr pulled up and parked badly on the pavement in front, and an old man got out, a man older than any man I’d ever seen before. He had goose-white hair and wore a cream corduroy jacket that hung off his frame like loose skin. He looked up and down the road before heading towards his front door. He stopped as he passed us and said, ‘Good morning.’ He had a strange accent – Hungarian, we later learnt.

  ‘You’re old,’ I said. (I’d meant to say ‘Hello’.)

  ‘I’m as old as time,’ he said, and laughed. ‘What’s your name?’

  I told him and he held out his hand and I shook it very firmly. I was four years, nine months and four days old. He was eighty. And yet the age gap between us dissolved as seamlessly as aspirin in water.

  I quickly shunned the norm of our street, swapping it instead for Mr Golan’s illicit world of candles and prayers. Everything was a secret and I guarded each one like a brittle egg. He told me that nothing could be used on Saturdays except television, and when he returned from shul we ate exotic foods – foods I’d never tasted before – foods like matzo bread and chopped liver and herring and gefilte fish balls, foods that ‘evoked memories of the old country’, he said.

  ‘Ah, Cricklewood,’ he’d say, wiping a tear from his blue, rheumy eyes, and it was only later at night that my father would sit on my bed and inform me that Cricklewood bordered neither Syria nor Jordan, and it certainly didn’t have an army of its own.

  ‘I am a Jew,’ Mr Golan said to me one day, ‘but a man above all else,’ and I nodded as if I knew what that meant. As the weeks went by I listened to his prayers, to the Shema Yisrael, and believed that no God could fail to answer such beautiful sounds, and often he would pick up his violin and let the notes transport the words to the heart of the Divine.

  ‘You hear how it weeps?’ he said to me as the bow glided across the strings.

  ‘I do, I do,’ I said.

  I would sit there for hours listening to the saddest music ears could bear, and would often return home unable to eat, unable even to talk, with a heavy pallor descending across my young cheeks. My mother would sit next to me on my bed and place her cool hand on my forehead and say, ‘What is it? Do you feel ill?’ But what could a child say who has started to understand the pain of another?

  ‘Maybe she shouldn’t spend so much time with Old Abraham,’ I heard my father say outside my door. ‘She needs friends her own age.’ But I had no friends my own age. And I simply couldn’t keep away.

  ‘The first thing we need to find,’ said Mr Golan, ‘is a reason to live,’ and he looked at the little coloured pills rolling around in his palm and quickly swallowed them. He began to laugh.

  ‘OK,’ I said, and laughed too, although the ache in my stomach would years later be identified by a psychologist as nerves.

  He then opened the book he always carried and said, ‘Without a reason, why bother? Existence needs purpose: to be able to endure the pain of life with dignity; to give us a reason to continue. The meaning must enter our hearts, not our heads. We must understand the meaning of our suffering.’

  I looked at his old hands, as dry as the pages he turned. He wasn’t looking at me but at the ceiling, as if his ideals were already heaven-bound. I had nothing to say and felt compelled to remain quiet, trapped by thoughts so hard to understand. My leg, however, soon started to itch; a small band of psoriasis, which had taken refuge under my sock, was becoming heated and raised, and I urgently needed to scratch it – slowly to start with – but then with a voracious vigour that dispelled the magic in the room.

  Mr Golan looked at me, a little confused.

  ‘Where was I?’ he said.

  I hesitated for a moment.

  ‘Suffering,
’ I said quietly.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ I said later that evening, as my parents’ guests huddled silently around the fondue burner. The room fell silent, just the gentle gurgling of the Gruyère and Emmental mix and its fetid smell.

  ‘He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how,’ I said solemnly. ‘That’s Nietzsche,’ I continued with emphasis.

  ‘You should be in bed, not wondering about death,’ said Mr Harris, who lived in number thirty-seven. He’d been in a bad mood since his wife left him the previous year, after her brief affair with (whispered) ‘another woman’.

  ‘I’d like to be Jewish,’ I pronounced, as Mr Harris dipped a large hunk of bread into the bubbling cheese.

  ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning,’ said my father, topping up the wine glasses.

  My mother lay down with me on my bed, her perfume tumbling over my face like breath, her words smelling of Dubonnet and lemonade.

  ‘You said I could be anything I wanted when I was older,’ I said.

  She smiled and said, ‘And you can be. But it’s not very easy to become Jewish.’

  ‘I know,’ I said forlornly. ‘I need a number.’