When God Was a Rabbit

1995

Brixton was angry, Brixton burned. That was the story I was meant to cover six days after my twenty-seventh birthday, but I didn’t show, something I still can’t fully explain. I’d had moments like that before – the sudden expiration of confidence or care – but never such a panic; one that gripped me with the hold of terror and made me feel both I and the world was all wrong. I told no one. Turned off the phones instead and hid at Nancy’s. I lost my job. Not for the first time. Made up excuses. Not for the first time. And it was into this broken world that the card arrived. As if she knew. As if she’d been listening and waiting, like she always had. My lifeline.

I opened the balcony doors to the dull December morn and sat overlooking Charterhouse Square; sounds of children squealing, and playing catch. I watched a boy race behind a bench and tumble freely onto a pile of coats, which turned out to be a pile of friends. I stirred my coffee, sipped it from the spoon. It was a cold day, would get colder still. A yellow tinge to the overcast light. It would snow before the end of the year. I pulled the blanket tighter around myself. I watched a small girl hide behind a tree; it took ages for her to reappear.

It had been fifteen years since that strange Christmas Day, when the past tired of us and closed its fragile doors. You won’t remember me, she wrote, but of course I did the moment I saw the scrawl of writing, black and unchanged and smudged across the envelope, and my joy was unchanged as I read the words You won’t remember me. She’d made the card herself, something she always did because she was keen on crafts, and whenever she came to school with glue or glitter in her hair everyone knew she’d been making something – birthday cards or Christmas cards – and everyone secretly hoped to be the lucky recipient of those laughed-at creative efforts because they were good and they spoke loud, for they said, ‘You are special. I have chosen you.’

But it was only ever I who received such a card.

It was a simple piece of blue paper folded down the middle with fragmented pictures of flowers and wine on the front, of mountains and smiles and cut-out letters like a ransom note, but saying Happy Birthday instead. And there between the letters I saw her again on the pavement in her favourite shoes, waving and receding, when she was nine, when I was nine, and when we vowed to keep in touch.

I looked again at the envelope. My parents had redirected it to Nancy’s flat in Charterhouse Square where I was temporarily staying. Originally, though, it had been sent from Her Majesty’s Prison.