Black Rabbit Summer (16 page)

I knew I had to go back there.

I didn’t
want
to.

All I wanted to do was lie down on my bed and go to sleep. Just lie down and close my eyes, forget about thinking, forget about Raymond and Stella and Eric and Nicole… just go to sleep and forget about everything.

Something made me look over at my black porcelain rabbit then, and just for a moment I thought I could hear a fairground organ playing, and somewhere in the distance, the sound of children’s laughter…

Every second of every day, we choose which way to go…

A whispered voice.

Bring me home.

I blinked my eyes, and suddenly everything was quiet again. No voices, no music, no children’s laughter. There was just me, standing at my bedroom window, knowing what I had to do.

∗

As I started to change into some clean clothes, I remembered what Dad had said to me –
I want you to stay at home today. Do you understand?
– and I tried to convince myself that I hadn’t actually told him that I
would
stay at home. I knew that I had, of course, but if you really want to make yourself believe something, it’s not all that hard.

You just have to believe it.

By the time I’d got changed and gone downstairs, I was pretty sure that Dad hadn’t even said anything about staying at home in the first place.

‘Mum!’ I called out from the hallway. ‘I’m just going out for a while, OK?’

I called round to Raymond’s again first, only this time I went to the front door. I kind of guessed that his mum and dad wouldn’t be very pleased to see me, so I wasn’t too surprised when Mrs Daggett opened the door and immediately started glaring at me. It wasn’t a very attractive sight. Her hair was all lank and greasy, her eyes were pale and slightly glazed, and she was carelessly dressed in a shabby old dressing gown.

‘What do you want now?’ she said, lighting a cigarette.

‘Is he back yet?’

She put her hand on her hip and stared at me. ‘Christ… how many more times d’you have to be told? We’ve already had your old man round here, poking his snout in –’

‘I just want to know if Raymond’s back, that’s all.’

‘No, he’s not back.’

‘Aren’t you worried?’

‘Not particularly.’ She took a drag on her cigarette. ‘What’s it got to do with you, anyway?’

‘Have you seen what someone’s done to his rabbit?’

She grinned. ‘He probably did that himself.’

I stared at her, shaking my head. ‘What if something’s happened to him? Have you thought about that? I mean, what if someone’s got Raymond –?’

‘No one’s
got
Raymond, for Christ’s sake,’ she snapped. ‘He’s probably just wandering around on his own somewhere, talking to the fucking sky or something…’ She took another puff on her cigarette, and as she hungrily sucked in the smoke and quickly breathed it out again, I got the feeling that maybe she wasn’t as unconcerned as she wanted me to think.

I watched her as she leaned out of the doorway and flicked some ash from her cigarette. The sunlight dulled her eyes. She blinked, sniffed. Leaned back in again.

She looked at me, jerking her chin. ‘What?’

‘Nothing…’

She shook her head. ‘Why would anyone want to do anything to Raymond anyway?’

‘I don’t know… why would anyone want to cut off a rabbit’s head? It doesn’t matter
why
, does it?’

She sniffed again. ‘Yeah, well… Raymond’s not stupid. He can look after himself…’ She looked at me, her eyes frighteningly intense. ‘There’s nothing
wrong
with him, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘He’ll be all right.’

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say after that. We both just stood there for a second or two, waiting out the silence, then Mrs Daggett slowly moved back into the dimness of the
hallway, her paleness fading into the gloom, and without another word she quietly closed the front door.

I went down to the river then. It had always been one of Raymond’s favourite places, and I knew he still spent a lot of time down there – just walking around, or sitting on the bank – and if, for whatever reason, he was simply hiding away somewhere, he couldn’t have picked a much better place. There were all kinds of sanctuaries down there – bits of woodland, old bridges, hidden pathways and tracks…

It was a good place to go to hide away from the world.

There was still a faint stink of burning rubber in the air, and as I turned the corner at the end of the path and headed down towards the river, I could see the wreck of the burned-out car smouldering away on a patch of wasteground over to my right. It looked like a Ford Focus, but it was hard to tell. There wasn’t much left of it. The tyres had burned off, the windows were smashed, and the chassis was just a scorched grey shell.

I didn’t pay much attention to it.

It was just another burned-out car.

Across from the wasteground, parked between the riverside path and a steep wooded bank, was a small white caravan. I guessed it belonged to the dreadlocked guy I’d seen climbing over the gate on Saturday night.
I’ve seen him a couple of times by the river
, I remembered Raymond telling me.
He’s got a caravan down there.

And I wondered…

How well do you know him, Raymond?

Well enough to pay him a visit?

Well enough to trust him?

It wasn’t a particularly clean caravan, but it wasn’t disgusting
or anything. It was just a bit grubby – mud-spattered, rained-on, dirty-white. The towing hitch at the front was propped up on bricks, and there was a cylinder of propane gas standing in the muddy ground beside the door.

I slowed down as I walked past the caravan, trying to see inside, but the windows were blanked out with sheets of cardboard taped inside. I wondered why… why block out your windows? And I wondered why I was so scared of knocking on the door.

Just do it
, I told myself.
What’s the matter with you? Just knock on the door, for Christ’s sake.

I knocked on the caravan door.

Nothing happened.

I knocked again. ‘Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?’

No one answered me.

I tried the door handle, but it was locked.

‘Raymond?’ I called out, knocking again. ‘Raymond… are you in there?’

Nothing.

I gazed up at the bank behind the caravan. It was higher than the bank in Back Lane, but not so thickly wooded. Industrial rubbish from a warehouse at the top of the bank was scattered among the trees – rusted bits of old machinery, polystyrene blocks, broken pallets, tangles of plastic packing material…

We’d built a den up there once, I remembered, a ramshackle old thing made from sheets of corrugated iron, and as I scanned the top of the hill, looking for any signs that it was still there, I wondered briefly why we’d always seemed to build our dens at the tops of steep wooded banks. I suppose we’d thought they were safe up there. Safe and secret, out of the way. The kind of place where no one can see you, but you can see them…

The kind of place that Raymond liked.

I couldn’t see the old den anywhere. No ruined remains, no rusted sheets of corrugated iron. I cupped my hands to my mouth and called out up the bank. ‘
RAYMOND! RAAYMOND!
’

There was no answer.

I called out again, louder this time, but there was still no reply. I thought about climbing up the bank to take a closer look, but there didn’t seem much point. There were too many places to hide up there, too many nooks and crannies… it’d take me all day to check them all.

So, with a final useless glance at the caravan, I headed off along the path.

The path that runs alongside the river is actually made up of lots of different paths, but they all head in the same general direction – along the river, through some little woods, under a tunnel, over a bridge, then round the back of some allotments and out on to a road called Magdalen Hill. If you go down Magdalen Hill, it’s a short cut to the town centre, but if you turn left and head up the hill, it leads you over a crossroads into Recreation Road.

And that’s the way I went after I’d wandered around the river for an hour or so. I’d gone through the woods, calling out Raymond’s name again. I’d checked all the hiding places I knew about around the tunnel and the bridge. I’d even searched along the riverbank wherever it was possible. But I hadn’t come across any sign of Raymond.

So now I was going back to the fairground.

I didn’t know if it’d do any good or not, and I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there, but it seemed like a reasonable thing to do – follow your tracks, go back to the beginning, see if there’s anything there.

∗

Everything was still pretty quiet along Recreation Road, but the sun was out now, and it wasn’t raining any more, so the streets weren’t quite so empty and miserable as they had been before. There were a few people around – an old man washing his car, a couple of young kids kicking a ball around, a hungover-looking guy shuffling down to the shops – but none of them said anything to me.

Although I didn’t stop when I passed Eric and Nic’s house, I could see that there were a few windows open now, and the house didn’t feel empty any more. I wondered again why Eric had lied to me about getting home at three o’clock, and I tried to think if there was any way at all that it could be true. I would have been asleep at the time, so if he’d been really out of his head – so whacked out that he could hardly see – maybe he’d simply stumbled into the house without even noticing me? Or maybe he’d got the time completely wrong? Maybe it
wasn’t
three o’clock… maybe it was a lot earlier, or a lot later…?

Maybe…?

There were lots of other maybes, none of which I really believed, but I kept on thinking about them anyway, and by the time I’d reached the end of the road I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that even when I saw a familiar-looking figure shambling round the corner ahead of me, it still took me a moment or two to realize who it was. She was walking slowly – her head bowed down, her hands stuffed wearily into her pockets – and she didn’t look too happy. Her hair was uncombed, her make-up smeared… she looked as if she’d been crying. Her eyes were fixed miserably to the ground, so she didn’t see me coming until we’d almost bumped into each other.

‘Nicole?’ I said.

She looked up suddenly, slightly shocked, and stopped in front of me.

‘Hey, Pete…’ she said, blinking her eyes and running her hand through her hair. ‘What are you doing here?’

She seemed pretty dazed and blurry. A bit embarrassed too.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked her.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said, forcing herself to smile. ‘I’m OK…’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah… why?’

‘You look like shit.’

‘Thanks a lot.’ She blinked her eyes again. ‘You don’t look so great yourself.’

‘Yeah, well… it was a long night.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I lost Raymond.’

‘You what?’

‘He went off on his own last night, at the fair… I spent ages looking for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. And he never went home either.’

‘Shit,’ said Nic. ‘Do you think he’s all right?’

I looked at her, suddenly realizing that she was the first person I’d spoken to who’d expressed any genuine concern for Raymond. I wasn’t really surprised, because although Nic hadn’t been too keen on him coming to the fair in the first place, I knew she’d always had a soft spot for him. There’d been other times in the past when she hadn’t always
wanted
him to be there, times when she just wanted to be with me, but even then she’d always been OK with him. She liked him. Not just for what he meant to me, or what I meant to him – although I’m sure that was part of it – but basically I think she just liked him for what he was. She cared for him.

And then I recalled the fortune-teller’s words:
You have great kindness
, she’d told Raymond.
You care for others without thinking of yourself.

‘Did you see him at all last night?’ I asked Nic.

She ran her hand through her hair again and sighed. ‘Christ, Pete… I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember
any
thing about last night.’ She blew out her cheeks and shook her head. ‘I don’t know… it’s really strange. I mean, I can sort of remember some of it, you know, like blurred flashes of things, but most of it’s just a blank.’

‘What about Raymond? Do you remember seeing him?’

‘Well, yeah… when he was in the den…’ She glanced awkwardly at me for a moment. ‘But after that… I’m not sure. I think I saw him
somewhere
at the fair… but I can’t remember when or where.’

‘Was he on his own?’

She closed her eyes and put her hand to her head, trying to remember. ‘I don’t know… I think I might have seen him twice. Or maybe that was someone else…’ She sighed heavily and opened her eyes again. ‘I’m sorry, Pete… I really can’t remember.’

‘That’s OK,’ I told her. ‘If you do remember anything, though –’

‘Yeah, I’ll give you a ring.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll be out for a while, so call me on my mobile. Have you got my number?’

‘I’ve got your old one somewhere, but I don’t suppose that’s any good.’

She was right – the number she had was at least three or four mobiles out of date.

‘Have you got a pen?’ I asked her.

She pulled a tube of lipstick out of her pocket, passed it over, and offered me her arm. I paused for a moment, watching as a police car moved slowly past us, then I took hold of her hand,
twisted the lipstick, and started writing my mobile number on her arm.

‘Listen, Pete,’ she said quietly, ‘about last night…’

A drop of sweat dripped from my head on to her arm.

‘I know this is a stupid question,’ she went on, ‘but we didn’t actually
do
anything, did we?’

‘No,’ I said, pretending to concentrate on the lipstick in my hand. ‘No, we didn’t do anything. Don’t you remember what happened?’