Black Rabbit Summer Read online

  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.

  I wondered if they were out there now.

  Raymond and his Black Rabbit.

  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.

  A fine sky this evening.

  This good wooden house.

  Straw smell blue sky.

  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 playgroun
d, 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.

  The world gets bigger.

  Not everything changes, though.

  Raymond and me had never changed. Our world had never got any bigger. We’d always been friends. We’d been friends before the others, we’d been friends with the others and apart from the others, and, in lots of ways, we’d been friends in spite of the others.

  We were friends.

  Then and now.

  And so the idea of us all getting together again on Saturday… well, it just felt really strange. A bit scary, I suppose. A bit pointless even. But at the same time it was sort of exciting too. Exciting in a strangely-scary-and-pointless kind of way.

  I’d turned away from the window now and was gazing over at a black porcelain rabbit that I keep on top of my chest of drawers. It was a sixteenth birthday present from Raymond. A black porcelain rabbit, almost life-size, sitting on all fours. It’s a beautiful thing – glossy and smooth, with shining black eyes, a necklace of flowers, and a face that seems to be frowning. It’s as if the rabbit is thinking about something that happened a long time ago, something saddening, something that will always prey on its mind.

  I don’t usually get all emotional about stuff, but I was really quite touched when Raymond had given me the rabbit. Everyone else had given me the kind of presents you expect on your sixteenth birthday – Mum and Dad had given me money, a girl I’d gone out with a couple of times had given me a night to remember, and I’d got a few cards and jokey little things from friends at school – but this, Raymond’s rabbit… well, this was a proper present. A serious present, given with thought and feeling.

  ‘You don’t have to keep it if you don’t want to,’ Raymond had mumbled awkwardly as he’d watched me unwrap it. ‘I mean, I know it’s a bit… well, you know… I mean, if you don’t like it…’

  ‘Thanks, Raymond,’ I’d told him, holding the porcelain rabbit in my hands. ‘It’s wonderful. I love it. Thank you.’

  He’d lowered his eyes and smiled then, and the way that’d made me feel was better than all the best Christmas and birthday presents rolled into one.

  I looked at the rabbit now – its porcelain body shimmering in the moonlight, its black eyes shining and sad.

  ‘What do you think, Raymond?’ I said quietly. ‘Do you want to go to the funfair, take a trip down memory lane? Or should we both just stay where we are, hiding away in our own small worlds?’

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but the porcelain rabbit didn’t say anything back to me. It just sat there, black-eyed and sad, gazing at nothing. And after a while I began to feel pretty stupid – standing by the window in the middle of the night, naked and alone, talking to a porcelain rabbit…

  Mum was right – I definitely needed to get out a bit more.

  I shook my head and got back into bed.

  Two

  The houses in our street, Hythe Street, are all pretty much the same – flat-fronted terraced houses with small front yards and walled back gardens. The gardens on my side of the street back on to a scrubby little hill that leads down to the river, while the back gardens of the houses on Raymond’s side of the street look out over a shared alleyway and a dilapidated church to the main road that runs parallel to Hythe Street. This main road, St Leonard’s Road, runs south from the town centre all the way down to the docks at the bottom of the hill, about half a mile or so from Hythe Street.

  The alleyway that leads round to the back of Raymond’s house isn’t the nicest place in the world. It’s quite cramped, for a start, kind of narrow and poky, and it has high brick walls on either side that shut out the light, so even in the middle of summer it’s always pretty gloomy and damp. The crumbly old walls are topped with barbed wire and broken glass, and for some strange reason the bricks have always been stained with layers of grimy black soot. The alleyway is also the place where everyone leaves their rubbish, so it’s always cluttered with crap – bulging black bin liners, overflowing wheelie bins, empty bottles, beer cans, dog shit… all kinds of muck. So, like I said, it’s not the nicest place in the world, but I always used the alleyway whenever I went round to see Raymond, and he always used it whenever he came round to see me.

  It was our route to each other.

  It must have been around midday on Friday when I left my house and headed down the street towards Raymond’s place. The sun was burning high in the sky, filling the air with a bright white haze, and as I crossed the road and entered the alleyway I could feel the stickiness of melted tarmac clinging to the soles of my trainers. It was that kind of day – the kind of day when the heat is so thick that everything seems to slow down and melt, including your brain. And I was already suffering from a brain-melting lack of sleep anyway. But despite all that, I was actually feeling surprisingly fresh. I’d changed out of the dirty clothes I’d been wearing for the last three days, I’d taken a shower, I’d even managed to get some of the knots out of my hair. God knows why I’d bothered. I mean, I was only going to see Raymond, and he’d never cared what I looked like. I don’t think he’d ever cared what anyone looked like.

  But I was feeling kind of OK, and even as I followed the alleyway down to Raymond’s back gate, and the sunlight gave way to the cold shadows of the blackened brick walls, I still felt better than I had for a long time.

  The gate was closed when I got there. It’s a big old wooden gate, too tall to see over, so I couldn’t see if Raymond was in his garden or not, and I couldn’t hear anything either. But I knew he was in there. I always knew. I’d stood at his gate so many times over the years that I could somehow feel if Raymond was in his garden or not. I’ve never understood how it worked, this feeling, but it always did. And it was always right. In fact, I trusted the feeling so much that if ever I felt he wasn’t there, I didn’t even have to open the gate. I could just turn round and go home without so much as a flicker of doubt.

  He was there today, though.

  I knew it.

  The gate led me through to the bottom of the garden, and when I looked over to my right I saw Raymond sitting on a rickety old wooden chair by the shed. He didn’t seem to have noticed me, though. He was just sitting there, gazing out over the garden, his eyes fixed on nothing and his head perfectly still. The only movement I could see in him was a very faint fluttering of his lips, as if he was whispering secrets to himself under his breath. Apart from that, though, he was as still as a statue.

  The rabbit hutch beside him was empty, its wire-mesh door wide open. I glanced around the garden – a scrubby mess of sun-browned lawn and overgrown borders – and I spotted Black Rabbit squatting in the shade of a lilac bush. He wasn’t doing much – just sitting there, looking around, lazily twitching his nose.

  ‘Hello, Pete.’

  At the sound of Raymond’s voice, I looked over and saw him smiling at me.

  ‘Hey, Raymond,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’

  He nodded his head, still smiling. ‘Yeah, everything’s OK… you know… nice and hot.’ He looked up, then almost immediately looked back at me again. ‘Blue skies,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah…’

  As I started walking over towards him, I couldn’t help smiling to myself. Raymond had always made me smile. His face made me smile, his smile made me smile, everything about h
im made me smile. It was strange really, because most people thought Raymond was a really weird-looking kid… and, in a way, I suppose he was. His head was too big for his body, his eyes were a bit loopy, and there was something about the way he dressed that always made him look childishly small. He didn’t actually dress childishly, and he didn’t look anything like a child either. It’s just that his clothing always seemed to somehow diminish him. I used to think it was because his parents bought most of his clothes from charity shops, and they usually bought them a size too big so he’d have plenty of time to ‘grow into them’. But over the years I’d seen Raymond dressed in all kinds of clothes – brand-new shirts, the perfect size… shapeless coats, baggy shorts, even skin-tight jeans (forced on him once by his mother) – and eventually I came to realize that it didn’t matter what he was wearing – old clothes, new clothes, too big or too small – everything made him look small.

  But I liked the way he looked – his weirdness, his difference, his oddity. It suited him. It helped to make him what he was.

  It also helped to make his life really hard sometimes.

  But right now – as he got up from his chair, went into the shed, and came back out carrying another rickety chair for me – right now, he was fine. I watched him, still smiling, as he set the chair down next to his, swept the dust off it, and gestured awkwardly for me to sit down.

  I sat.

  Raymond sat.

  We grinned at each other.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re doing all right then?’

  He nodded, smiled, then glanced over at Black Rabbit. The rabbit was still just sitting there, not doing anything.

  I said, ‘He’s getting big.’

  ‘Yeah…’

  I gazed at the big black rabbit. It was actually Black Rabbit the Third. Black Rabbit the Second had died from an infected rat bite last year. Raymond had been sad for a while, but he hadn’t cried this time. He’d just buried him in the garden, right next to the original Black Rabbit, and then he’d gone out and bought another one. Although, to Raymond, it wasn’t another one, because by now he was convinced – or at least part of him was – that Black Rabbit lived for ever.