When God Was a Rabbit

I arrived as a grey afternoon chill descended upon the station and heralded my arrival with the promise of nothing. The station was quiet; only one other passenger disembarked with me, a passenger who carried his home on his back and who strode up the hill with the practised gait of a professional walker. I let him go ahead.

I’d told no one I was coming, not even Alan, and had simply picked up a local cab outside the station. 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.

I asked to be dropped at the top of the roadway by the old bar gate, by the mossy indented word TREHAVEN that we’d first seen twenty-three years ago, when we were poised on the edge of adventure, me with a timid yearning to start my life again, him with a broken heart that had never healed.

It was cold and I wore too little, but the cold felt good and it cleared my head, allowed me to stop and listen to the faint drilling of a woodpecker. And as the hill took me down towards the house, the space he’d left seized me and something somewhere in that space whispered, He’s still here. I heard it as the hill propelled me towards the silence of meal times and the masked pain, and the open photo albums no longer stored away in musty drawers. He’s still here, it whispered as my pace quickened and my tears fell, still here, until I started to run.

They were in the kitchen, all three of them, drinking tea and eating sponge cake. It was Nelson, Arthur’s guide dog, who noticed me first, the little chocolate-brown Labrador who’d become his eyes a year ago when mine could no longer commit full time. He bounded towards the door and barked, and I saw Arthur smile because he knew the bark, knew what it meant, and my mother and father got up and ran towards me, and everything seemed strangely normal that first moment when I arrived. The cracks appeared only after I went up to my room.

I hadn’t heard her behind me; the weight she’d lost made her tread lighter, or maybe I was distracted by the sudden emergence of a photograph on my dresser, a photo of me and Joe at Plymouth Navy Days, when we were young, a photo I hadn’t seen in almost fifteen years. He was wearing a sailor’s hat and I had wanted to laugh, but it hadn’t been placed in irony, and so I didn’t. My mother picked it up and looked at it – ran her fingers across his face, ran them across her brow.

‘We were so lucky that he was ours,’ I said.

My mother carefully replaced the photograph.

Silence.

‘I’ve never been a crazy person, Elly, not hysterical. I’ve been rational all my life and so when I say, he’s not dead, it’s not wishing or hoping, it’s rational; it’s clear thought.’

‘OK,’ I said, and started to unzip my bag.

‘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.’

I stopped unpacking. Halted by the desperate grip of her words.

‘Where is he then, Mum?’

She was about to answer when she saw my father standing in the doorway. He looked at her and came towards me and handed me a pile of old Cornish Times.

‘Thought you might like these,’ he said, and backed out of the room, hardly looking at my mother.

‘Stay,’ I said, but he chose not to hear me and I heard his footsteps heavy and sad on the oaken staircase.

I found him in his workroom. A stooped figure, suddenly old. A makeshift lamp was clamped to an overhead shelf just behind him, and his face appeared soft and masked in the illuminated dust, his eyes dark and sad. He didn’t look up as I came in and I went over and sat on the old armchair, the one we’d brought from our old terraced house in Essex, the one that was re-covered in burnt-orange cotton twill.

‘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.’

He picked up a sheet of sandpaper and started smoothing the edge of the bookcase he’d almost finished.

‘I’ve always known something like this would happen. Something has always hung over this family. Something, just waiting. I can’t hope any more. Because I don’t deserve hope.’

He stopped working and leant over his bench. I knew what he was talking about again and I quietly said, ‘That was all a long time ago, Dad.’

‘Not for her family, Elly. It’s still like yesterday for them,’ he said. ‘Their grief is my grief now. The circle’s complete.’