Free When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman Page A

younger, and when she stood in front of my father and said, ‘Well?’ we knew immediately that he’d lost. He said nothing, and after that afternoon we never saw the car again. In fact, we were never allowed to talk about the car again without my father falling into an abyss of shame and a sudden selfinduced amnesia.
     
    My parents were writing Christmas cards together in the dining room and, bored by my own company and lack of my brother’s, I decided to go to the shed instead and look at the remaining pages of the magazine I’d carefully put back for another day.
    The garden was dark and shadows of trees bent towards me in the breeze. There were bright hard berries on the holly and everyone said it would snow soon. The anticipation of snow was as good as the reality at that age. My father had made me a new sledge in preparation and I could see it propped up by the side of the shed, its metal runners waxed and shining ready for the glide. As I passed by the shed window, I saw flickering torchlight within. I picked up a stray cricket stump and slowly made my way to the door. It was hard to open the door quietly because it stuck halfway on the concrete step, and so instead I pulled the door quickly towards me and saw the fractured image of Charlie on his knees in front of my shivering, naked brother. My brother’s hand caressing his hair.
    I ran. Not because I was scared, not at all – I’d seen that interaction in the magazine; a woman was doing it that time and maybe someone was watching, though I couldn’t be sure – but I ran because I’d trespassed on their clandestine world, and I ran because I realised it was a world that no longer held a place for me.
     
    I sat in my room and watched the clock rotate a slow languid hour as the carols from downstairs grew loud. My mother was singing along as if she was in a choir; being rich made her sing more confidently. I was asleep when they came in. My brother woke me up; he only did that when it was important. Budge up, they said, and they both squeezed into my bed, bringing the cold from outside.
    ‘You can’t tell anyone,’ they said.
    ‘I won’t,’ I said.
    ‘Promise?’
    ‘Promise,’ I said, and I told my brother I’d seen it all before anyway, in the magazines in the shed. He said they weren’t his and together we said, ‘Oh,’ as the awful realisation dawned on us that they were probably the quiet consolation of our father. Or our mother. Or maybe both. Maybe the shed had been the scene of the amorous lead-up to my conception, and I suddenly felt guilty about the uncontrollable urges that hid in the tree of my genealogy.
    ‘I want to go to sleep now,’ I said, and they kissed me good night and crept away.
    In the darkness I thought about the images, and about Mr Golan, and I felt old. Maybe this was what my father meant when he said that Nancy had grown up too quickly; I suddenly started to understand.

 
     

     
    The bunting was up and the mercury slowly rising, and capes made from Union Jacks rose and fell against the contours of our young backs. It was the last weekend in May. 1977. Our Queen had never been so popular.
    The Sex Pistols blared out from the record player that Mrs Penny had held hostage ever since her dramatic arrival at the street party, half an hour before.
    She’d cut a towering figure as she’d tottered up the road in an unbuttoned silk shirt that reminded our neighbour Miss Gobb ‘of a pair of jammed curtains. And no one needs to see what’s going on in her living room’.
    Mrs Penny stopped at the first trestle table and handed over the box she was carrying.
    ‘Made it myself,’ she said.
    ‘You didn’t?’ asked Olive Binsbury nervously.
    ‘No, I nicked it.’
    Silence.
    ‘Joke. Joke ,’ said Mrs Penny. ‘It’s a Victoria sponge – after the old Queen,’ and everyone laughed. Too loudly. As if they were scared.
    She pogoed and spat and flexed her studded fist, and came close to electrocution when her