When God Was a Rabbit

The days spread out before me, interminable, senseless hours, and I went to a French café where I wasn’t known and where I didn’t have to deflect the ‘Any news?’ with polite ‘Not yet’s. I sat in the window and watched life pass, watched it head Uptown. I saw three young women walking arm in arm and they were laughing, and I realised that I hadn’t seen that in days; it looked so strange.

I wrote there. Wrote the column and wrote about the Lost. I wrote about the flowers at every fire station, piled three, five high, and the candles that never went out; prayers burning through despair, because it was still early days and you never knew, but of course most people did. People knew as they lay alone at night, that this was the beginning, the raw beginning that was to be their Present, their Now, their Future, their Memory. I wrote about the sudden embraces in the middle of shops, and the funerals that appeared everyday for fire-fighters and cops, funerals that stopped the streetflow with a volley of salutes and tears. I wrote about the lost cityscape as I sat on our favourite bench along the promenade by Brooklyn Bridge; the place we went to to think and where we imagined what our lives would be three, five, ten years hence.

But most of all I wrote about him – now called Max – my brother, our friend, missing now for ten days. 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.

Nancy went back to LA to work. She wasn’t ready, but they called her back and I said she’d never be ready so she had to go.

‘I’m thinking of coming back,’ she said.

‘To here, New York?’

‘No. To England. I miss it.’

‘It’s not perfect.’

‘Seems so after this.’

‘This could happen anywhere,’ I said. ‘Nowhere’s safe. This will happen again.’

‘But I miss you lot,’ she said. ‘The everyday.’

‘You’ll feel different when you get that holster back on.’

‘Idiot,’ she said.

‘So come home,’ I said as I held her. ‘We need you.’

And as she opened the front door and headed down the stoop she turned and put on her sunglasses. ‘I’ll be all right, won’t I?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Flying. I’ll be all right?’

‘You’ll always be all right,’ I said.

She smiled. Fear was catching. Even the immune were suffering.

We went out to eat that night, just Charlie and I, the first and only night since I’d got there. We went to their place, to Balthazar, and we sat where they always sat, and people were discreet but still asked how we were and Charlie said, ‘We’re OK, thanks.’

We ate from platters of fruits de mer and drank Burgundy and ate steak frites and drank more Burgundy and did as they used to do, and we laughed and got drunk, until the restaurant thinned out and we were allowed to stay in the corner like the Forgotten, as they cleared around us and told jokes about the evening. And that’s when he told me. So unexpectedly. Told me about that room in Lebanon.

‘You can hold on to anything, Elly, to make you carry on.’

‘So what did you hold on to?’

Pause.

‘The sight of a lemon tree.’

He proceeded to tell me about the small window high up in his room, no glass, just open to the elements, his only source of light. He would climb up to it and hold himself in the draught of fresh air, the scented fresh air that made him feel less forgotten. He couldn’t hold on to the wall for long, and would drop back down into the darkness, where the smells were then his; humiliating and dirty, clinging.

A few days after they had taken his ear, he awoke very late in the afternoon and climbed up to the window and saw that a small lemon tree had been brought into the yard. And in the fading light, the lemons seemed to glow and they were beautiful, and his mouth watered, and there was a breeze and he could smell coffee, perfume, even mint. 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.

I reached for his hand. It was cold.

‘I have to go back to England,’ I said. ‘Come with me.’

‘Not without him,’ he said.

I knew they’d want something with his DNA in case they found him, found something of him. I went into the bathroom before I left and bagged his toothbrush and a hairbrush, but not his favourite brush, in case he came back, you see; I left that on the side next to his aftershave, next to an old copy of Rugby World. I sat on the edge of the bath and felt so guilty that I was to go home and leave him there, but I had to go; had to go and bridge the distance that now separated my stricken parents. And so I left Charlie there, in the house we spent months working on, the house with the bird’s nest and the ailanthus tree and the old gold coin we’d found whilst digging out the garden. I left Charlie there to man the phone line, to make calls to the Embassy, and to be there when they called. Charlie, the old hand at trauma; Charlie, the unexpected proof that life can sometimes turn out all right.