Black Rabbit Summer (3 page)

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.

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
any
one 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 him 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.

I looked at Raymond now. He was watching his rabbit, just sitting there watching it, perfectly content. And part of me envied him for that. I knew it was wrong of me, because I knew that Raymond’s peace of mind wasn’t quite normal – whatever that means – and I knew that he had stuff going wrong in his head, but every now and then I couldn’t help thinking how nice it must be to find such contentment in the simplest of things.

A lawnmower had started droning away in the distance now, and I could smell the drift of freshly cut grass in the air.
Green is fresh like water
, I found myself thinking.
A fine sky this evening…

I wiped a bead of sweat from my brow.

‘Nicole rang me last night,’ I said to Raymond.

He looked at me. ‘Nicole?’

‘Yeah… she was asking if we wanted to go to the fair tomorrow night. You know, the funfair up at the recreation ground?’

Raymond didn’t say anything, he just gave me a puzzled look.

‘Yeah, I know,’ I told him. ‘I was a bit surprised to hear from her myself. What it is, though, she’s got this idea about us all meeting up again, you know, the old gang… like a going-away party kind of thing.’

‘Who’s going away?’

‘Nicole and Eric… they’re moving to Paris in September.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘And Pauly’s not going on to college –’

‘Pauly?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Pauly’s going to the fair?’

Raymond’s eyes were starting to look troubled now.

‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘We don’t have to go if you don’t want to. I mean, I’m not really sure I want to go myself.’

‘She likes you,’ Raymond said.

‘What?’

‘Nicole – she likes you.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘She likes you too. She always has.’

‘Not like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like she likes you,’ he said, smiling at me.

I frowned at him. ‘
What
?’

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just carried on smiling at me, but then his eyes blinked stiffly, his face suddenly dropped, and his smile disappeared. ‘Is Pauly going to be with Wes Campbell?’ he asked.

It was a good question, a question I’d been asking myself ever since Nicole had phoned me – if Pauly Gilpin was going to be there, did that mean that Wes Campbell and his boys were going to be there too?

Wes Campbell was two years older than the rest of us, and when we were kids, he used to scare the shit out of us. Him and his boys – a bunch of tough kids from the Greenwell Estate – they were the ones we were always running away from. I remember once, when me and Raymond were riding our bikes back from town… I suppose we must have been
about ten or eleven at the time, or maybe a little bit older. Anyway, we were riding along this little lane by the river, a short cut back from town, and suddenly I heard this whizzing sound, like something had just cut through the air, then a quick dull pop, and then something
ping
ed off the frame of Raymond’s bike. Raymond heard it too, and we both pulled up and looked around, and that’s when we saw one of Campbell’s boys. He was standing in a little copse beside the lane, pointing an air rifle at us. As he grinned and pulled the trigger again, we hit the pedals and got going, and then Campbell and some other kids suddenly appeared from further down the lane, and some of them had air rifles too, and they were shouting and laughing and chasing the shit out of us, scaring us both to death…

Christ, I’d never been so frightened in my life. And Raymond… well, Raymond was so terrified that he pissed himself. I’ve never forgotten it. I was pedalling along like a madman behind him, my legs pumping, my lungs bursting, and when I first heard the splashing sound I didn’t realize what it was. I was so intent on getting away from the kids behind us that I barely even noticed it. It wasn’t until Raymond’s bike started to slow down in front of me, and I looked up to see what he was doing… and I saw him standing up awkwardly on his pedals, kind of squirming around and fiddling with his flies… and even then, it took me a moment to realize that his trousers were soaked and a stream of yellow liquid was spraying out into the air behind him.

There were other bad times with Campbell too. And it wasn’t just me and Raymond who suffered either. Campbell had it in for all of us – Eric, Nicole, Pauly… anyone who was smaller than him, basically. Smaller or different. Weaker or younger…
whatever. I’m sure you know how it is. I mean, we all have our Wes Campbells when we’re eleven years old, don’t we?

That kind of stuff was mostly in the past now. None of us had had any trouble from Campbell recently, but we’d all been scared shitless of him at the time. Which was why it was so strange that in the last couple of years or so, Pauly had started hanging around with Campbell and the others. I’d seen him in town with them, mobbing it up in the high street, and I’d heard rumours that he went out drinking with them too.