When God Was a Rabbit Read Online Free PDF

course) who was in his last year at university there. They had gone walking along the Mendip Hills, and when the numbing cold had entered their bones, they in turn entered a pub and sat, dazed, in front of a roaring hearth.
    Nancy was at the bar ordering a beer and a lemonade when a young woman, soaked to the skin, barrelled through the door, and headed over to where she was standing. Nancy was transfixed. She watched the young woman order a Scotch, watched her down it in one. Watched her light a cigarette. Smile.
    They were soon in conversation. Nancy learnt that the woman’s name was Kate, and her pulse flared at the solid sound of her name. She was in her second year, studying English, and had just finished with a boyfriend the previous week – bit of a dullard, she said – and she laughed and threw her head back, revealing the soft down of her neck. Nancy gripped the bar and blushed as the sudden weakness in her legs moved north. And that was the exact moment she decided that if she couldn’t have this woman, then her brother should.
    ‘Alfie!’ she screamed. ‘Come here and meet someone really nice!’
    And so it was Nancy who did the courting for my father during his final break from university. It was Nancy who delivered the flowers to my mother, Nancy who made the phone calls and Nancy who made the reservations for the clandestine dinners. And finally it was Nancy who wrote the poems that my father never knew about, the ones that made my mother fall in love with him and ‘reveal’ the hidden depths to his oft stagnant emotions. By the time the new term started, my father and mother were head over heels in love, and Nancy was a confused fifteen year old limping away on the uneven surface of a bruised heart.
    ‘Is she still in love with her?’ I asked.
    My brother sighed. ‘Who knows?’

 
     

     
    ‘Good morning,’ said Nancy, opening her eyes to the dull November morn.
    ‘Hello,’ I said.
    ‘What’s up?’ she said, rolling over and meeting my face.
    ‘It’s the auditions today,’ I said to her quietly, placing my red and blue school tie over my head.
    ‘What auditions?’ she said, quickly sitting up.
    ‘For the Nativity play,’ I said.
    ‘I didn’t know you were interested in that.’
    ‘I wasn’t, but Jenny Penny persuaded me.’
    ‘What part are you going up for?’ Nancy asked.
    ‘Mary, Joseph, the usual,’ I said. ‘The lead .’ (Omitting baby Jesus since it was a nonspeaking part and also I didn’t know if I’d been forgiven for saying he was a mistake.)
    ‘What do you have to do in the audition?’ she asked.
    ‘Just stand there,’ I said.
    ‘Nothing more?’
    ‘Nope,’ I said.
    ‘You sure?’
    ‘Yes, Jenny Penny said so,’ I said. ‘She said they can tell star quality just by that. She said it’s in my jeans.’
    ‘OK then. Well, good luck, angel,’ she said, leant across to her bedside table and opened the drawer.
    ‘Take these,’ she said. ‘For luck. They exude star quality and always work for me.’
    I’d never heard her use the word exude before. I would use it later that day.
     
    I walked briskly to the end of the road where a large privet hedge had made its home. It was where I always met Jenny Penny to walk to school; we never met at her house because it was difficult at her house, something to do with her mum’s new boyfriend. She got on OK with him, she said, when her mum was there. But her mum wasn’t always there, you see; she was often at funerals now, a new hobby that she had recently embraced. I guessed her mum simply liked to cry.
    ‘Laughing? Crying? It’s all the same really, isn’t it?’ said Jenny Penny.
    I didn’t think it was but I didn’t say anything. Even then I knew her world was different from mine.
    I looked up the road and saw Jenny Penny running towards me with a shimmering line of moisture hanging off her plump upper lip.
    ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said.
    She was always late because she had unmanageable