When God was a Rabbit

by Sarah Winman

The everyday was a blur; a foggy window she had no interest in wiping clear.

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

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

I sat on the bed, noting her qualities in a way most people would have reserved for an epitaph.

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.

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.

Our guilt and our tears were not for each other. They were for someone else that day.

the braided twine of heartbreak.

She knew my mother’s words were mere scaffolding holding up a crumbling wall.

he loved, yet wasn’t loved back. Even Nancy had no words of comfort or explanation. This was part of life and she was sorry that the realisation had hit him so young.

This was his task, he said, and it would be carried out alone. Penance, my brother reminded me, was a lonely place to be.

She was lefthanded and a trail of smudge followed her words across the envelope. I could see the ink now stretching down her little finger to her palm, where she would transfer it to her forehead in moments of hesitation and insecurity.

‘Are you jealous?’ I shook my head. ‘I just want my friend back,’ I said, tears burning behind my eyes. ‘I’ve become forgettable.’

‘Nothing stays forgotten for long, Elly. Sometimes we simply have to remind the world that we’re special and that we’re still here.’

Not once had our parents told us of their plans for a bed and breakfast, and not once had they ever revealed this unnatural desire to house people who wouldn’t normally be encouraged to share our lives.

‘Memories,’ she said to me, ‘no matter how small or inconsequential, are the pages that define us.’

‘We just say these things,’ said Nancy. ‘It’s not real. It’s hurt and anger and tiredness, and a whole load of other shit, and it doesn’t mean it’ll happen. You’re not that powerful,’ she said, kissing his head.

wondered if worth was connected to things like goodness or usefulness or helping people less fortunate.

He let it go and allowed possibility to once again enter his life.

A new decade dawned, and my parents would eventually have guests who returned to them year after year, and who would all be a bit like us – a collage of the useful and impractical, the heady and the mundane.

Our lives had become tidal; friendships, money, business, love; nothing ever stayed the same.

Do I believe in a mystery; the unexplained phenomenon that is life itself? The greater something that illuminates inconsequence in our lives; that gives us something to strive for as well as the humility to brush ourselves down and start all over again? Then yes, I do. It is the source of art, of beauty, of love, and proffers the ultimate goodness to mankind. That to me is God. That to me is life. That is what I believe in.’

Their banter was rich and comfortable, their teasing intimate and profound; their ‘I love you’ without the use of those startling words.

I missed her. I would always miss her. I often wondered how it would have been if we could have experienced the coming years together. What would have been different?

She had aged well, the process had been kind. And she had left nature alone, opting instead to banish vanity like the meddlesome, suffocating weed it was.

you don’t know her. You knew her as a kid. You can’t freeze someone in time,’

‘Come back,’ I said. ‘I miss you. We all do.’ Nothing. ‘You know I have to be here.’ ‘Still?’ ‘Yeah. Work. You know.’ ‘You hate your work.’ ‘I love the money.’

We never wanted to conquer the world, only our fears.

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,

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.

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.

Fear was catching. Even the immune were suffering.

And for a moment he was all right because the world was still there, and the world out there was good, and when the world was good, there was hope.

‘Everybody seemed to love me. What am I supposed to do with that?’

‘You see, you were the only person who knew everything . Because you were there. And you were my witness.

And I could at least look at you and think, at least he knows why I am the way I am. There were reasons.

And he uncovered in us a curious need: that we each secretly wanted him to remember us the most. It was strange, both vital and flawed, until I realised that maybe the need to be remembered is stronger than the need to remember.