Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) Read Online Free

my life, like the Tizer and coconut ices he suddenly bought us, and the little shilling knife he bought Bobby, with the bone handle and the leather sheath. The car was a buttery yellow color, with a top that peeled back and these little canvas flaps in the windows that you could coil up around the window rails when the roof was off and big sweeping curves over the wheels and it was so delicious I used to think it was like one giant ice-cream cone when Dad rolled up outside our house.
    It was money which had made this magic, I knew that much. Dad would produce a silver sixpence from behind my ear and pop it on my tongue, or fold a ten-bob note up and poke it in the top pocket of my pinafore dress, patting it and telling me to “go buy myself something nice.” Silver coins tasted bitter and pennies tasted like blood, but the inky tang of folded notes when I slipped out my tongue and tried it was the best taste on earth. Rule Britannia, two tanners make a bob, Dad used to sing. He’d throw me up in the air when I was still small enough and there would be breath-holding seconds before he caught me again, where my heart would sail through the air with me, but he always did, and then he’d laugh, and snuggle my face with his, brushing me with his prickly chin.
    Those early days in Lauriston Road I’d stand at the corner shop with Bobby, mouth watering over the coconut ice and licorice sticks and know that we could choose them and take them home, where there’d be coal in the fire and Sally Lunn’s from Smulevitch’s bakery in Well Street and our lives would be different, full of calm. I knew that money did this: made our lives into those of children in books—safe and good, with kind parents. I even saw myself differently during this time: I was a girl with auburn ringlets, reading a book in a broderie anglaise dress, under a cherry tree, in a garden full of light.
    But being magic, it went up in a puff soon enough. After the thrill of the move and Mum’s joy in riding round the streets in the Chrysler, with her conker-colored hair pinned tightly into a pale pink scarf patterned with rosebuds and wearing a white dress with thin straps and a sweetheart neckline—well after that there was a dreadful ugly night, when we had a spin. The police, the cozzers, came round, opening drawers and cupboards and pulling out things, until our spanking-new place looked just like a hamster’s hutch with all its stuffing pulled out.
    Dad sat all through it, glowering on his brand-new red sofa, wearing a vest where hair snaked out from under his armpits, and around the neck, smoking and refusing to say anything. Mum was crying, Bobby was crouching behind the sofa, and I was right next to him. Bobby and me stared right into each other’s eyes, but said nothing. Bobby had the sweetest little face, with cropped black hair and round, sticking-out ears: his nickname was Monkey. Also, because he was cheeky and a scamp and always dangling from some tree or rung of a ladder or something. His favorite game was to go over to Vicky Park with his shilling knife with the bone handle—all the boys had knives in those days—and practice throwing it at trees, while the crows tottered on the grass like fat vicars and the Jewish boys chased each other around Vicky Fountain, throwing their black caps in the air.
    Bobby sat now, with his knees up and long arms dangling. I could smell him: a sweaty-socks-and-shoes smell and the smell of these hard sweets he loved—black hard licorice pips, which Nan would give him from a tin and sometimes stuck to his teeth so that he could pretend to be a toothless pirate. I had the strongest feeling that to say anything, I mean a word , not just the wrong word, could make the worst thing ever happen. Could make my dad disappear. So when this policeman’s face looms over the sofa and says, “Hello there, and who have we got here?” I wouldn’t answer him, and