Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) Read Online Free Page A

I squinted at Bobby who squinted right back, snapping his mouth tight shut. There was another baby by then: Vera, a big fat jowly kind of baby who looked just like a Baby Grumpy doll, and who was lying in her fancy white crib, a little distance from the sofa, staring up at the colored balls of string which on one of her rare visits here Nan had pegged above her head.
    The policeman soon gave up, straightening up and taking his notebook out of his top pocket, and we watched as he and another man tried to manhandle our dad and get him out of the room. They told him to get a shirt. We held our breath, wondering what Dad would do. No one spoke to him like that! Even Mum stopped sobbing for a minute, to peep from behind her hands, and watch.
    When he wouldn’t move, the policeman made a noise with his tongue and went wandering round our house. We listened in hot silence as he thudded up the stairs and came down with a white shirt, from the airing cupboard. The room crackled with the smell of Dad’s anger, with the feeling I always had when I knew Dad was angry. But to my surprise—to everyone’s surprise—Dad just put the shirt on, grinning all the while, taking the longest time to do up every button, fiddling at his cuffs to do them up really, really carefully, right up to the top collar, and then gave a short laugh. He had this weird laugh. It wasn’t when he found things funny. That laugh frightened me, in fact, because he’d put his face too close to you when he did it, and sort of bark at you, right at you until you could feel the spray. He did this now, and the room felt very silent and small, like being in a cupboard.
    Dad had turned rigid, stood with his legs apart, pretending not to notice what they were doing as the two men got his arms behind him, put cuffs on him, and attached him to one of them.
    I covered my face with my hands.
    But I had to look, I had to glance, as I saw the two policemen move behind him, give him a poke in the back. The one he was locked to had to sort of stumble behind him, like this toy I had once, a little walking toy with a rod between the two wooden characters. Dad looked proud, then, with his ice-blue eyes staring straight ahead, his sweet-scented hair, his strange smile not wobbling at all. They kept on pushing him, shoving him in the back, and they got him to move in the end.
    Just as he was leaving he wheeled around, and ducked his head over the top of the sofa to say to me (and only me), “That’s right, my gel. Don’t you ever go and be a grass. Worst thing in the world. Rather die than be a grass, eh?” I thought he might be about to smack me, he looked so furious, but instead he gave me this whoppa of a kiss, a big hard kiss landing like a fist on my head, and that was it: in a whirl of smoke and the sound of Vera wailing, he was gone.
    That night I took Bunny to bed with me and sniffed it, trying to breathe some enchantment, something of Dad—the feelings he always brought, the sense that something good might happen to us at last. That rabbit was magic. Dad had produced it, a magician conjuring it from a hat. Dad could snatch at your nose and pretend to pinch it, and then—puff!—it would reappear between his fingers. So maybe Dad would reappear, if I longed for him enough? I slept with Bunny’s pink silky ribbon under my cheek, and in the morning there was a red strip there. I ran my finger along it, the strange ridge on my skin, thinking: if only it would never fade.
    I knew we were going to be hungry then. Where would the money for food come from, if Dad wasn’t around? Moll could survive on cigarettes, on “air-pie and a walk around,” as Nan used to say. We often felt hungry, we were used to it, but it started up that night, a more desperate, clawing feeling than I’d had before, and I knew it was here to stay, for a long, long time.
    Dad got nine months. The prison was in the country and we never went to