Black Rabbit Summer (2 page)

Memories… that’s all they were.

Kids’ stuff.

‘Pete?’ I heard Nic say. ‘Did you hear me?’

‘What?’

‘I said, don’t forget to bring a bottle.’

‘Sorry?’

‘A bottle… something to drink. On Saturday.’

‘Oh, yeah… right.’

‘We’re meeting in the den at nine thirty, OK?’

‘The den in Back Lane?’

‘Yeah, the one up the bank near the old factory. Opposite the gas towers.’

‘Right.’

She hesitated for a moment. ‘Are you still thinking of bringing Raymond?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘All right. But you can’t spend the whole night looking after him.’

‘Raymond doesn’t need looking after.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant…’ Her voice trailed off and I heard her lighting a cigarette. ‘Anyway, listen,’ she went on. ‘After the fair we’re all going back to my place. Mum and Dad’ll be away by then, so… you know… if you want to stay over, you’re welcome.’ She paused for a moment, then added quietly, ‘No strings attached.’

You know what it’s like when you’re talking to someone, and at the time you’re not quite sure what they’re trying to say, but then, when they’ve gone, and you’ve had time to think about it, you realize that in actual fact you haven’t got a
clue
what they were trying to say? Well, that’s how I felt after I’d said goodbye to Nicole. I just stood there in the hallway, staring dumbly at the floor, thinking to myself…

I was still standing there five minutes later when the living-room door opened and Mum came out.

‘All right, love?’ she said.

I looked up at her. ‘Yeah… yeah, I’m fine.’

She glanced at the phone, then looked back at me. ‘How’s Nicole?’

‘She’s all right… she’s moving soon. Her dad’s got a new job in Paris. He’s setting up some kind of theatre or something. They’re all moving out there in September.’ I didn’t know why I was telling her all this. I suppose I was still a bit stunned, a bit confused. I was just opening my mouth and making noises. ‘Nicole asked me if I wanted to go to the fair on Saturday with Eric and Pauly.’

‘Sounds nice,’ Mum said.

I shrugged.

She said, ‘Don’t you want to go?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘It’d do you good.’

I looked at her.

She smiled sadly at me. ‘You need to get out a bit more, Pete. Get some fresh air into your lungs. You can’t spend all your time sitting around the house.’

‘I
don’t
spend all my time sitting around the house… sometimes I go out and sit in the garden.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m serious, Pete. I worry about you sometimes.’

‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

‘But you never seem to
do
anything any more. You don’t go out, you’re not interested in anything, you just lie around all day watching TV or sleeping.’ She gave me a worried look. ‘I mean, what about all the stuff you used to do?’

‘What stuff?’

‘Football… you used to play football every Saturday. And
there was that reading group you used to go to, the one at the library. You used to really enjoy that.’

I shrugged again. ‘I still
read
a lot… I’m always reading books. I just don’t want to sit around talking about them.’

‘All right,’ Mum said. ‘What about your guitar? You haven’t touched it in months… it’s just leaning in the corner of your room gathering dust. You used to practise every night. You were getting really good at it –’

‘No, I wasn’t. I was rubbish.’

Mum gave me another long look. ‘You’d tell me if there was anything wrong, wouldn’t you?’

‘There’s nothing wrong, Mum. I’m fine – really.’

‘You’re not worried about anything, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Your exam results?’

‘No.’

‘College?’

‘Mum,’ I said firmly, ‘I’ve already told you – I’m not worried about anything, OK? I’m fine. I’m just… I don’t know. I’m just a bit tired…’

‘Tired? What kind of tired?’

‘I don’t know…’

She peered into my eyes, studying my pupils.

‘No,’ I sighed, ‘I’m not on drugs.’

She stood back and looked at me again. ‘I’m only trying to help, Pete.’

‘I don’t need any help.’

‘You shouldn’t be tired and down all the time,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Not at your age. It’s not right.’

I smiled at her. ‘It’s probably just a phase I’m going through. Hormones or something.’

She tried smiling back at me, but she couldn’t quite manage it. And that saddened me. I didn’t like upsetting her.

‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I said quietly. ‘Really, everything’s OK. I’m just feeling a bit funny at the moment, that’s all. It’s like I’m in between things, you know… like I’m not quite sure where I’m going. It’s no big deal or anything, I just feel a bit…’

I didn’t get to sleep for a long time that night. As I lay in my bed, staring into the moonlit darkness, there were so many thoughts stuffing up my head that I could feel them seeping out of my skull. Sweaty thoughts, sticky and salty, oozing out of my ears, my eyes, my mouth, my skin.

Thoughts, images, memories.

The sound of Nic’s voice:
If you want to stay over, you’re welcome… no strings attached.

The pictures in my mind: me and Nic at a party when we were thirteen, maybe fourteen, years old, locked in a bathroom together… too young to know what we were doing, but still trying to do it anyway…

You’re not going to say no to me, are you
?

I got out of bed then, covered in sweat, and went over to stand at the open window. The air was stuffy and thick, the night warm and still. I wasn’t wearing any pyjamas or anything – it was too hot for that – and although there was no breeze coming in
through the window, I could feel the sweat beginning to cool on my skin.

I shivered.

Hot and cold.

It was some time in the early morning now. Two o’clock, three o’clock, something like that. The street down below was empty and quiet, but I could hear faint sounds drifting over from the main road nearby – the occasional passing car, late-night clubbers going home, a distant shout, drunken voices…

The sounds of the night.

I gazed down the street at Raymond Daggett’s house. It was dark, the curtains closed, the lights all out. In the pale glow of a street light, I could see the alleyway that leads round to the back of his house, and I could see all the crap that littered his front yard – bike frames, boxes, pallets, bin liners. I stared at Raymond’s bedroom window, wondering if he was in there or not.

Raymond didn’t always spend the night in his room. Sometimes he’d wait until his parents were asleep, then he’d creep downstairs, go outside, and spend the night in the garden with his rabbit. He kept the rabbit in a hutch by a shed at the bottom of the garden. If the night was cold, he’d take his rabbit into the shed with him and they’d snuggle up together in some old sacking or something. But on a warm night, like tonight, he’d let the rabbit out of its hutch and they’d both just sit there, quietly content, beneath the summer stars.

It all started for Raymond when he was eleven years old and his parents gave him a rabbit for his birthday. It was a scrawny
little thing, black all over, with slightly glazed eyes, a matted tail, and big patches of mangy fur down its back. I think Raymond’s dad bought it off someone in a pub or something. Or maybe he just found it… I don’t know. Anyway, wherever his dad got it from, Raymond was pretty surprised to get a rabbit for his birthday. Firstly, because he hadn’t asked for one, and this was the first time in his life he’d ever got anything from his parents without asking for it. Secondly, because his parents usually forgot his birthday. And thirdly, as Raymond admitted to me later, he didn’t even
like
rabbits at the time.

But he didn’t let his parents know that. They wouldn’t have been pleased. And Raymond had learned a long time ago that it wasn’t a good idea to displease his parents. So he’d thanked them very much, and he’d smiled awkwardly, and he’d held the rabbit in his arms and stroked it.

‘What are you going to call him?’ his mother had asked.

‘Raymond,’ said Raymond. ‘I’ll call him Raymond.’

But he was lying. He wasn’t going to call the rabbit Raymond. He wasn’t going to call it anything. Why should he? It was a rabbit. Rabbits don’t have names. They don’t
need
names. They’re just dumb little animals.

It was probably about a year or so later that Raymond first told me his rabbit had started talking to him. I thought at first he was just messing around, making up one of his odd little stories – Raymond was always making up odd little stories – but after a while I began to realize he was serious. We were down at the river at the time – just the two of us, hanging around on the bank, looking for voles, skipping stones across the river… the usual kind of stuff – and as Raymond started telling me about his rabbit, I could tell by the look in his eyes that he believed every word he was saying.

‘I know it sounds really stupid,’ he told me, ‘and I know he’s not
really
talking to me, but it’s like I can hear things in my head.’

‘What kind of things?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t know… words, I suppose. But they’re not really words. They’re like… I don’t know… like whispers floating in the wind.’

‘Yeah, but how do you know they’re coming from the rabbit?’ I said. ‘I mean, it could be just some kind of weird stuff going on in your head.’

‘He tells me things.’

I stared at him. ‘What kind of things?’

Raymond shrugged and lobbed a pebble into the river. ‘Just things… he says
hello
sometimes.
Thank you.
Stuff like that.’

‘Is that it? Just
hello
and
thank you
?’

Raymond gazed thoughtfully across the river, his eyes kind of glazed and distant. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange. ‘A fine sky this evening…’

‘What?’ I said.

‘That’s what Black Rabbit said last night. He told me it was a fine sky this evening.’

‘A fine sky this evening?’

‘Yeah… and green is fresh like water. He said that, too.
Green is fresh like water.
And the other day he said
This good wooden house
and
Straw smell blue sky.
He says all kinds of things.’

Raymond went quiet then, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so we just sat there for a while, not doing anything, just staring in silence at the murky brown waters of the river.

After a minute or two, Raymond turned and looked at me. ‘I know it doesn’t make any sense, Pete, and I know it’s kind of weird… but I really like it. It’s like when I get home from school
every day and I go down to the hutch at the bottom of the garden and I feed Black Rabbit and give him fresh water and let him out for a run and clean his hutch… it’s like I’ve got this friend who tells me stuff that’s OK. He says stuff that doesn’t hurt me. It makes me feel good.’

Two years later, when Black Rabbit died of a fungal infection of the mouth, Raymond cried like he’d never cried before. He cried for three days solid. He was still crying when I helped him bury Black Rabbit’s body in an empty Cornflakes packet in his garden.

‘He told me not to cry,’ Raymond sobbed, filling in the hole, ‘but I just can’t help it.’

‘Who did?’ I asked him, thinking he meant his dad. ‘Who told you not to cry?’

‘Black Rabbit…’ Raymond sniffed hard and wiped the snot from his nose. ‘I know what to do… I mean, I know he’s not gone.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He told me to bring him home.’

I didn’t know what Raymond was talking about at the time, but when I went round to see him the next day and found out that he’d been down to the pet shop and bought himself another black rabbit… well, I still didn’t understand what he was talking about, but I kind of realized what he meant. Because, as far as Raymond was concerned, the rabbit he’d got from the pet shop wasn’t just another black rabbit, it was the
same
Black Rabbit. Same eyes, same ears, same jet-black fur… same whispered voice.

Raymond had done as he was told – he’d brought Black Rabbit home.

∗

I shivered again. The sweat had dried on my skin now, and I was beginning to feel cool enough to get back into bed. I stayed at the window for a while longer, though, thinking about Raymond, wondering if he was out there… sitting in the darkness, listening to the whispers in his head.

I thought about what Nicole had said – about Raymond not wanting to go to the funfair on Saturday – and I knew she was probably right. I was pretty sure that he’d want to go if it was just me and him, but I didn’t know how he’d feel about meeting up with the others. I didn’t know how I felt about it myself either. Nicole and Eric? Pauly Gilpin? It just seemed so… I don’t know. Like stepping back into the past: back to junior school, sitting together at the back of the class; back to middle school, watching out for each other in the playground, hanging around after school, spending our weekends and school holidays together…

We were friends then.

We had connections: Nicole and Eric were twins, Nic and me pretended we loved each other, Pauly looked up to Eric, Eric looked after Nic…

Connections.

But that was then, and things were different then.
We
were different. We were kids. And we weren’t kids any more. We’d moved on to secondary school, we’d turned thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen… and things had gradually changed. You know how it is – the world gets bigger, things drift apart, your childhood friends become
people you used to know.
I mean, you still
know
them, you still see them at school every day, you still say hello to them… but they’re not what they were any more.