When God Was a Rabbit Read Online Free PDF Page A

for urination but on that night, Nancy said, there was only the smell of romance in the air. They were walking side by side, carrying props back to the van when Katherine Hepburn suddenly pushed Nancy into the pebble-dashed wall and kissed her, tongues and all, and Nancy dropped her box of machetes and gasped at the speed of this feminine assault. Describing it afterwards, she said, ‘It felt so natural and sexy. Just like kissing myself’ – the ultimate accolade for an award-winning actress.
    My father had never met a lesbian before, and it was unfortunate that K. H. should be his first, because his liberal cloak was pulled away to reveal an armoury of caricatured prejudice. He could never understand what Nancy saw in her, and all she ever said was that K. H. had amazing inner beauty, which my father said must be extremely hidden, since an archaeological dig working round the clock would probably have found it hard to discover. And he was right. She was hidden; hidden behind a birth certificate that said Carole Benchley. She was a self-confessed cinephile whose knowledge of films was surpassed only by her knowledge of mental health care within the NHS; a woman who frequently tiptoed across the celluloid line that kept Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road and the rest of us tucked up safely in bed.
    ‘Sorry I’m late!’ shouted Nancy one day, as she rushed into a café to meet her.
    ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’ said K. H.
    ‘That’s all right then,’ said Nancy, sitting down.
    Then looking round, and with raised voice, K. H. said, ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.’
    Nancy noticed the people in the café staring at them.
    ‘Fancy a sandwich?’ she said quietly.
    ‘If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.’
    ‘I’ll take that as a yes then,’ said Nancy, picking up a menu.
    Most people would have instantly recognised the joyous pact that had been made with lunacy, but not Nancy. She was young and ever the adventurer, and went with the excitement of her first stirrings of lesbian love.
    ‘She was a great lover, though,’ my aunt used to say, at which point either my mother or father would stand up and say, ‘Anyway . . .’ and my brother and I would wait for the rest, but there never was any more, not until we were older, anyway . . .
     
    I’d never known my father to cry before, and the night after my mother left would be his first. I sat at the bottom of the stairs eavesdropping on the conversation, and I heard his tears stutter between his words.
    ‘But what if she dies?’ he said.
    My brother crept down the stairs and sat next to me, wrapping us both in a blanket still warm from his bed.
    ‘She’s not going to die,’ Nancy said commandingly.
    My brother and I looked at each other. I felt his heart beat faster, but he said nothing; held me tighter.
    ‘Look at me, Alfie. She’s not going to die. Some things I know. You have to trust. This is not her time.’
    ‘Oh God, I’ll do anything,’ my father said, ‘ anything . I’ll be anything, do anything, if only she’ll be all right.’
    And it was then that I witnessed my father’s first bargain with a God he never believed in. The second would come nearly thirty years later.
     
    My mother didn’t die and five days later she returned to us looking better than we’d seen her in years. The biopsy had been a success and the benign lump quickly removed. I asked to see it – I’d imagined it black like coal – but my brother told me to shut up, said I was being weird. Nancy cried the moment my mother walked through the door. She cried at odd times and that was what made her a good actress. But in his room later that night, my brother told me it was because she had been secretly in love with my mother since the first time they had met.
    He told me that she had gone to Bristol to spend the weekend with her brother (our father, of