When God Was a Rabbit

Jenny Penny’s mother was as different from mine as any mother could be; 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. ‘How do I look, girls?’ ‘Do my hair, girls.’ ‘Am I pretty, girls?’

It was fun at first – like having a rather large doll to play with – but then her expectations and demands would override all, and her fierce resentment would hang in the room like a gaudy light fitting, exposing the youth she no longer had.

‘“Mrs Penny” sounds so old, Elly. We’re friends. Call me Hayley. Or Hayles.’

‘OK, Mrs Penny, I will next time,’ I said. But I couldn’t.

Her everyday existence was secretive. She didn’t have a job but was rarely at home, and Jenny Penny had few clues to her mother’s lifestyle, except that she loved having boyfriends and loved developing various hobbies that were conducive to her lifestyle as a ‘gypsy’.

‘What’s a gypsy?’ I asked.

‘People who travel from place to place,’ said Jenny Penny.

‘Have you done that a lot?’

‘Quite a lot,’ she said.

‘Is it fun?’ I asked.

‘Not always,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because people chase us.’

‘Who?’

‘Women.’

They lived in a temporary world of temporary men; a world that could be broken up and reassembled as easily and as quickly as Lego. Fabric hung from most walls in staggered strips, and around the doorframe was a pattern of flowered handprints in pinks and reds, which in the dingy light looked like the bloodied hands of a crime scene searching for an exit. Rugs were strewn around the floor and in the corner perched on a Book of Nudes was a lamp with a shade made of magenta silk. It threw a brothel-like hue into the room – not that I knew about brothels at that time – but it was red and eerie and suffocating, and made me feel ashamed.

I rarely went upstairs because the current boyfriend would so often be asleep, having in common with all the others a nocturnal existence of late shifts and even later drinking. But I used to hear the footsteps above, the toilet flush, the worried look on Jenny’s face.

‘Shh,’ she said. ‘We have to be quiet.’

And it was because of this restriction that we seldom played in her room – not that there was much to play with – but she had a hammock that caught my eye, which was suspended above a flattened poster of a calm, blue sea.

‘I look down, rock and dream,’ she said to me proudly. ‘The Lost City of Atlantis is somewhere below me. An adventure waiting for me.’

‘Have you ever seen the sea before?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ she said, turning away, wiping off a small handprint that had smeared the centre of a mirror.

‘Not even at Southend?’ I said.

‘Tide was out,’ she said.

‘It comes back, you know.’

‘My mum was too bored to wait for it to come back. I could smell it, though. I think I’d like the sea, Elly. Know I would.’

Only once did I see a boyfriend. I’d gone upstairs to use the toilet and, being alone and inquisitive, I crept into Mrs Penny’s room, which was warm and musty with a large mirror at the foot of the bed. I saw his back only. A naked lump of a back that was as uncouth in sleep as it probably was in wakefulness. Even the mirror didn’t reveal his face, it only revealed mine as I stood hypnotised by the wall to my left, where Mrs Penny had written in lipstick ‘I am me’ over and over again, until the multicoloured cursive shapes merged into a tangled mess of expression that hauntingly said, ‘Am I me’.

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.

‘There are givers and takers,’ said Mrs Penny as we sat down to sweets and squash. ‘I’m a giver. What are you, Elly?’

‘She’s a giver, Mum,’ said Jenny Penny protectively.

‘Women are givers, men are takers.’ So said the oracle.

‘My dad gives a lot,’ I said. ‘Gives all the time, in fact.’

‘Then he’s a rare bird,’ she said, and quickly changed the subject to something that no one could contradict. When Jenny Penny left the room her mother reached for my hand and asked if I’d ever had my palm read. She was highly skilled at reading palms, she said, tarot cards and tea leaves too. She could read anything; it was her gypsy blood.

‘Books?’ I asked naïvely.

And she blushed and laughed, and her laugh sounded angry.

‘Come on, girls,’ she said as Jenny reappeared. ‘I’ve had enough of your boring games, I’m taking you out.’

‘Where to?’ asked Jenny Penny.

‘Surprise,’ her mother said, in that awful singsong way of hers. ‘You like surprises, don’t you, Elly?’

‘Um,’ I said, not really sure that in her hands I did.

‘Here – coats!’ she said, and threw ours at us as she stormed towards the front door.

She drove badly and erratically, and used her horn as a battering ram to push in and around wherever it was necessary. The dented trailer clattered behind us and swung dangerously around corners, riding up on the pavement, missing pedestrians’ feet by inches.

‘Why don’t we take it off?’ I’d suggested at the start.

‘Can’t,’ she said, revving into first. ‘It’s attached. Soldered on. Where I go, it goes. Like my girl,’ and she laughed loudly.

Jenny Penny looked down at her shoes. I looked down at mine too. I saw a floor cluttered with Coca-Cola cans and tissues and sweet wrappers and something odd that looked like a flaccid balloon.

We saw the church up ahead and, without signalling, turned sharply into the car park. Horns blared. Fists were threatening.

‘Fuck off!’ shouted Mrs Penny as she parked badly behind the hearse: a gaudy expression of life, mocking the transport of the departed. She was asked to move. She did it begrudgingly.

‘House of God,’ she said. ‘What does He care?’

‘He doesn’t,’ said the funeral director. ‘But we can’t get the coffin out.’

We walked into church, Mrs Penny between us, holding our hands, her body bent forwards in an embodiment of sadness. She ushered us into the pew and handed round tissues. Looked up and smiled gently at the truly bereaved. She marked down the corners of the hymn book in preparation for song and threw down the hassock, on which she knelt in prayer. Her actions were fluid and graceful – professional, even? – and from her mouth came a strange whispered reverie, unstoppable even on the intake of breath, and for the first time since I’d known her, she looked as if she truly belonged.

As the church slowly filled up, Jenny Penny pulled me towards her and motioned me to follow. We slipped out and crept along the side wall until we came to a heavy wooden door that said: Choir Room. We entered. It was empty and felt airtight. Uncomfortable.

‘Have you done this before?’ I asked. ‘Been to a funeral, I mean?’

‘Once,’ she said, not that interested. ‘Look!’ She wandered over to the piano.

‘Have you seen a dead body before?’

‘Yep,’ she said. ‘In a coffin. The lid was off. They made me kiss it.’

‘Why?’

‘God knows.’

‘What did it feel like?’

‘Kissing a fridge.’

She pressed a key and a clear mid-range note rang out.

‘Maybe you shouldn’t touch anything,’ I said.

‘It’s all right, no one can hear,’ she said, and pressed the note again. Bing, bing, bing. She closed her eyes. Breathed intently for a moment. Then brought her hands up in front of her chest and blindly laid them on the black and white keys in front.

‘Do you know how to play?’ I whispered.

‘No,’ she said, ‘but I’m trying something,’ and as she pressed down on the notes, I was ambushed by the most beautiful music I’d ever heard. 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.

‘Again,’ I said.

‘Don’t think I can,’ she said sadly.

All of a sudden organ music boomed around the church. The music was dulled by the stone walls of the room, but the heavy bass notes reverberated throughout my body, ricocheting against my ribs before barrelling into the cavern that was my pelvis.

‘That’ll be the coffin,’ said Jenny Penny. ‘Come on, let’s have a look, it’s really cool.’ She opened the door and we caught its slow procession as it passed.

We sat on the wall outside and waited. The clouds were quite low, arm’s length from the steeple, falling, falling. We listened to the singing. Two songs, joyous songs, hopeful songs. We knew them but didn’t join in. We kicked our legs and had nothing to say. Jenny Penny reached across and held my hand. Her palm was slippery. I couldn’t look at her. Our guilt and our tears were not for each other. They were for someone else that day.

‘You two are so boring,’ said Mrs Penny, as we sat in the Wimpy Bar, trying to eat lunch.

She looked refreshed and invigorated, with no sign of the morning’s events clinging to her once mournful face. Normally I’d have been ecstatic eating food I rarely ate, but I couldn’t even finish my beefburger or my portion of chips or the tumbler of Coca-Cola that was as big as a boot. My appetite, along with the one for life, had momentarily disappeared.

‘I’m out tonight, Jenpen,’ said Mrs Penny. ‘Gary said he’ll look after you.’

Jenny Penny looked up and nodded.

‘I’m gonna have fun! Fun! Fun!’ said Mrs Penny as her mouth gorged a quarter of the bun, leaving a smear of lipstick to compete with the ketchup. ‘Bet you girls can’t wait to grow up, eh?’

I looked at Jenny Penny. Looked at the circle of gherkin on the side of my plate. Looked at the wipe-down table. Looked at everything except her.

All through the evening, the visions of the tiny white coffin, not even two feet long, stayed with me. It was bedecked with pink roses and a teddy; carried in protective arms like a newborn. I never told my mother where I’d been that day, nor my father; only my brother learnt of that strange day, the day when I discovered that even babies could die.

Why were we there? Why was Mrs Penny there? Something unnatural held their world together and it was a feeling that, at that age, I couldn’t yet put a word to. My brother said it was probably the braided twine of heartbreak. Of disappointment. Of regret. I was too young to disagree. Or to fully understand.