When God was a Rabbit

by Sarah Winman

And yet the age gap between us dissolved as seamlessly as aspirin in water.

He looked troubled; I could always tell because his silence was flimsy and craved the dislocation of noise.

‘Just like Mr Golan’s penis,’ I said, lying back onto my pillow, unaware of the silence that had immediately filled the room. ‘How do you know about Mr Golan’s penis?’ A pale sheen now formed across his face. I heard him swallow. I sat up. Silence. The faint sound of a dog barking outside. Silence. ‘How do you know?’ he asked again. ‘Tell me.’ My head pounded. I started to shake. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone,’ I said.

We were standing in front of the Christmas tree, the lights dangerously flickering and buzzing due to a faulty connection somewhere near the star (something my mother had already warned me not to touch with wet hands).

The rabbit struggled in my arms as temporarily I went blind.

I tried most things to delay my imminent return to school, but eventually I passed through those heavy, grey doors with the sullen weight of Christmas Past pressed firmly on my chest.

Her cardigan was too long – handmade and handwashed – stretched at the last wringing out, and it hung down by her knees and was only a little shorter than the grey school skirt we were all forced to wear.

my brother offered his hand, and together we passed through the hallway, with its smell of old coats and stale meals, and headed towards the kitchen where the sound of subdued voices lured us like flickering bait.

She was about to say something when she suddenly stopped and stared at me. And I believe now that what she saw in my eyes, what I saw in hers – the fear – was the realisation that she knew what had happened to me.

My father believed it was a cancerous lump, not because my mother was genetically prone to such a thing, but because he was looking out for the saboteur of his wonderful life.

And she would nod to the medical students crowded around her bed, as one by one they offered their diagnosis of the growth that had taken illicit refuge.

We were her career, and long ago had she given up that other world, choosing instead to watch over us night and day in constant vigilance

I sat on the bed, noting her qualities in a way most people would have reserved for an epitaph. My fear was as silent as her multiplying cells. My mother was beautiful. She had lovely hands that lifted the conversation when she spoke, and had she been deaf, her signing would have been as elegant as a poet speaking verse.

She was mercurial; her visits often fleeting. She’d simply turn up – sometimes out of nowhere – a fairy godmother whose sole purpose was to make things right. She used to share my bedroom when she stayed over and I thought life was brighter with her around.

She was a self-confessed cinephile whose knowledge of films was surpassed only by her knowledge of mental health care within the NHS;

The biopsy had been a success and the benign lump quickly removed. I asked to see it – I’d imagined it black like coal – but my brother told me to shut up, said I was being weird.

I looked up the road and saw Jenny Penny running towards me with a shimmering line of moisture hanging off her plump upper lip.

It felt late but it wasn’t; the darkness of our house made it feel late.

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:

I watched her sway, overcome. The rapture across her brow, the luminescence. I watched her be someone in that moment; free of the shunting, and the making-do, and the calamitous criticism that forged her way and always would. She was whole. And when she opened her eyes, I think she knew it too.

It was white with black arms and a black back, and as tight as a knee support but less useful, and although it was keeping the cold at bay, I felt it was simply because the cold stopped as it approached me and burst into laughter, rather than by any practical means.

the boiled eggs too – my favourite – which had cracked and spewed their viscous fluids into patterns of white trailing innards around the pan.

but unknown to him he had inadvertently climbed onto that ladder reserved for the élite, and was already looking down on the kind familiar faces he’d shared years of his life with. I felt embarrassed and went inside.

My father stood up and brushed himself down. Tried to rid himself of her perfume, which clung like tired fingers to a cliff face.

Night fell heavily. The smell of sugar and sausages and onions and stale perfume hung above the tables, warmed by tealights and chatting breath, and it merged into a giant scent that ebbed and flowed like a spring tide.

But Jenny Penny said nothing. She knew my mother’s words were mere scaffolding holding up a crumbling wall.

June moved idly into July. The sun was high and burning and would be for another four hours, and I’d wished I’d worn my hat: the white hand-me-down cricket hat that Charlie had given me last month.

Had my parents ceased for one glorious moment, to stop and be still in the silence, they would have heard the sound of my brother’s heart break in two.