When God Was a Rabbit: A Novel

by Sarah Winman

“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.)

I knew she was being random, and such randomness annoyed me; it was like someone carelessly coloring in an orange using only a blue pen.

And we stood in the middle of our garden, unsheltered, unprotected, and looked around at the turbulence of the lives we backed onto, sat next to, the lives of the neighborhood, and it shook clear our apathy until we saw again what our life here had been. There was the sledge our father had made, the one we took to school, the envy of all, and the ghosts of swings and climbing frames that had held us, and dropped us; the sounds of our tears.

And we remembered the tents we had made and the nights spent within: imaginary countries, us the explorers. There was suddenly so much to say good-bye to.

“Where are you going?” she said, gripping the rabbit so tightly he started to struggle. “Cornwall.” “You may as well be dead,” she said, and let god fall to the floor. “Fuck,” he said, and scuttled under a box.

That at the age of nine years and eight months a child should welcome the chance to start again didn’t seem particularly unusual at the time. I sat down on my bed with a beach towel wrapped around my shoulders. I was packed and ready to leave: only twelve days and three hours early. I closed my eyes and heard the call of seagulls.

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.”

“Do you think a rabbit could be God?” I asked casually. “There is absolutely no reason at all why a rabbit should not be God.”

He was dressed as Liza Minnelli, and looked really pretty until you saw that he hadn’t shaved, either his face or his legs. When we left the house both my mother and father had shed a tear as their beloved son walked out into the cold night air dressed as a daughter, unsure as to what he might return as. That, my father would later say, was one of the unexpected gifts of parenthood.

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? Could I have changed what happened to her?

My brother had episodes like this, ones that eclipsed the brightness that he was, that he could be. My mother blamed it on rugby, on the frequent knocks to his head, the concussion. I blamed it on the secret I made him carry. My father simply thought it must be quite lonely at times, being gay. Maybe it was a bit of everything, I thought.

The night it happened he came home to a take-out meal rather than the beef stew she’d promised to make him, and it was a Chinese meal, something she liked more than him, something she hadn’t dared to order in months, but she needed his rage, you see.

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 primrose, fragrant and lush. We never wanted to conquer the world, only our fears.

😊

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-colored 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,...

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.

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 brothe...

“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.

Great visual

I never knew if she had any real appetite or not, for she hadn’t eaten solids for days. But he broke a piece off and held it to her mouth and she ate hungrily, for it was the memory she was tasting again and the memory tasted good.

They were best friends, telling best-friend tales.

I walked out and breathed fresh air. I felt the sun on my skin. The world is a different place when you are well, when you are young. The world is beautiful and safe.

I sat down on the grass, lay down until my back was wet, uncomfortable and wet, and the aching gratitude that burned my eyes had rolled away. I’d been feeling like this for a while, the continual looking back, the stuckness of it all. I blamed it on the coming new year, only four and a half months away, when the clocks would read zero and we would start again, could start again, but I knew we wouldn’t. Nothing would. The world would be the same, just a little bit worse.

And I wrote about the sudden embraces in the middle of a shop, and the funerals that appeared every day for firefighters and cops, funerals that stopped the street flow with a volley of salutes and tears. And I wrote about the lost cityscape as I sat on our favorite bench along the promenade by the Brooklyn Bridge,

And I wrote about what I’d lost that morning. The witness of my soul, my shadow in childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.

I dig through moist leaves until I hit the dirt. I follow the line down from the slatted fence and measure a hand’s width away. I scoop out handfuls of earth until I feel the chilly sensation of tin. I pull it free and wipe the lid clean: biscuit assortment (we ate them all).

I kick away the brick and secure the gate. I stride quickly away. Darkness enfolds the wake of my presence. I was never there.

In truth I’d wanted to stay in London, away from everything

that said, This is Joe; for the views and the smells and the trees were all him as they were also me, intertwined as we were in this landscape, forged and rooted and held.

And as the hill took me down toward the house, the space he’d left seized me and something somewhere in that space whispered, He’s still here,

“Your father thinks I’m mad. Walks away when I say such things, says it’s grief making me mad, making me say such things, but I know it, Elly. I know it I know it I know it.”

“Where is he then, Mum?”

“I’d do anything,” he said, “anything to have him back. I pray and I want to believe her, I so do. And I feel I am betraying her.

But I saw the images, Elly. And every day I read about the fatalities.”

And I can’t hope anymore. Because I don’t deserve hope.” He stopped working and leaned over his bench. I knew what he was talking about again and I quietly said, “That was all a long time ago, Dad.”

The dark, intense eyes came out of a pile of leaves, followed by the chestnut fur, the pointed nose twitching in recognition. It stopped in front of me as if wanting something.

And it stayed staring at me as I listened to her voice—now so much older—as she whispered the words, “Elly, I can’t talk for long,” just like she said twenty-one years ago. “Listen to me, don’t give up. He’s alive, I know he’s alive. Trust me, Elly. You must trust me.”

“I’m ready now, Elly. Ready to depart. The fear has gone, together with my desire for life. I’m so tired now. Tired of saying good-bye to those I love. I’m so sorry, my darling.”

Arthur shouted out into the storm and railed at the loss of his boy, his hallowed gentle boy he’d feel and know no more.

But as the storm moved over and left us with the feeble spray of sunlit rain, that’s when I heard it, the ring suddenly echoing amidst the quiet exhaustion of the scarred river valley. “Elly,” the voice said. “Charlie?” “Elly, they’ve found him.”

What thing had they found that had declared him, him? And as if he could read my silence, he quickly said, “No Elly, they’ve found him. He’s alive.”

They rushed him to the ER, where they drained the fluid and worked on his head until the swelling retreated. They took him up to the ICU, where they put him with four other patients and there he stayed, waiting for his mind to return to gently inform the rest of his body to awaken and live.

She brought in different smells and oils and placed them under his nose, anything to flick the switch of memory. She introduced lavender and rose and frankincense to his mind, coffee too, and her latest perfume—Chanel No. 5—that Lisa from emergency had brought back from Paris.

It was late, too late to call, but she called anyway. A man answered. He wasn’t angry, just tired. She asked him if any of his singers were missing. One, he said. I think I’ve found him, she said. “He has a gap in the front of his teeth.”

“Hi,” I said. He turned around and smiled, looked exactly the same; more rested, perhaps, but no bruising, just the same.

“You’re Elly?” he said, and put his hand to his mouth, started to bite his nails; a gesture that made him, him. “My sister.” “Yeah.”

I saw her in the corridor as I was speaking to my parents. She was relacing her sensible black shoes, styled for comfort, not for fashion. What would I do with fashion? I could hear her say. My parents made me put her on the line, thanked her, invited her to Cornwall to stay as long as she wanted: Forever, my babbling father shouted, and he meant it, of course. Grace Mary Goodfield, who smelled so wondrously of Chanel and hope. I will know you for the rest of my life.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.” And he whispered something neither of us could hear. “You keep in touch now. Get that aunt of yours to send some signed photos for us all. Item of clothing for the raffle would be nice,” she added, laughing.

The house felt warm and the lighting cast shadows around the hearth and stairwells and made the rooms look strangely bigger. Joe followed me in; he stopped and quietly looked around.