time ago, told by a friend of Big Jacky’s who called in to see us one night. His son had been given a pet rabbit, not one of the little dwarf rabbits that are as limp as an old fur glove, but the real article: a big buck number with restless ears and a prominent will of its own. This rabbit was a source of great pride to the son. The father had watched the son building a run for the rabbit in the back garden, where the boy had made plans to observe it frolicking and chomping grass to its heart’s content.
The boy was assembling the run from loose bricks, cardboard boxes and bits of wire all shambled together, and the father saw that the rabbit could easily escape from it. So he warned the son: ‘Your rabbit will break out that run, and you’ll not see it again.’ And the son ignored him, and went on fixing up the flimsy pen.
The preparations continued, and the father saw that the moment was approaching when the rabbit would be released into the run. He said again: ‘I’m telling you now, the rabbit will be able to escape from that run,’ and then off he went to work.
When he came back that night, the house was soaked in tears. The sobbing son told him what had happened. The rabbit had duly spent a few minutes enjoying its new run, amiably grazing, and then it had suddenly bolted over a cardboard box and disappeared. He had searched everywhere for it, in neighbours’ gardens and out on the road, but it was gone. And the father, although pained by his son’s misery, couldn’t help himself from saying: ‘Son, I told you the rabbit could break out of that run.’
But the son didn’t say meekly ‘I know you did, Dad,’ or simply let the unwelcome reminder wash over him. He turned on his father with something approaching rage, and said: ‘Well, if you knew it would happen, why didn’t you stop me?’
The father laughed guiltily, telling it: the boy was right, in a way. The father could have stopped him, but he hadn’t. The boy had never owned a rabbit before, or seen one escape, so how could he be expected to believe how easily this predicted disaster would happen? Yet if the father had actually stopped him, the rabbit would never have got away; his warning would never have been proved right, and the resentful boy would have despised his father’s bullying caution. And so, the price of knowledge: one lost rabbit.
But Titch – what good had it done him, to see his judgement proved wrong? In his way, he had even been right to laugh at the thought that he might end up in pieces after a row with old McGee over a packet of biscuits. For wouldn’t it have been laughable anywhere else but here? He was the sane one, really: the rest of us were the headcases, to expect such an event and plan for it, cravenly. He had thought the world a funny, benign place. He was wrong. His uncomplicated vision had now been blackened, like burned glass. Mine had been tested and proved clear. But none of that explained why a voice inside my head, coming from a patch of waste ground, kept repeating with sorrowful insistence: ‘If you knew it would happen, why didn’t you stop it?’
Every morning, I opened my eyes to the rhythm of the creaking floorboards as Phyllis padded towards the bathroom. She had a habit of clearing her throat loudly en route to the basin. I had long ago concluded that this was partly from necessity and partly a vocal tribute to the new day. When this emanation reached my ears, I shut my eyes once again.
Phyllis’s preparations for her daily appearance at the newsagent’s were as follows: the procedures of washing and dressing, the teasing of her fine mouse-brown hair into a respectable cloud, the careful application of powder and a rose-tinted lipstick, and the ingestion of two pieces of toast washed down with a cup of tea. The execution and conclusion of these matters took approximately forty-five minutes. Then, for fifteen minutes after Phyllis shut the front door, I would lie in a fitful haze, wallowing in solitude.
After that, I got up. To be honest, I had sort of lost my way since Big Jacky’s death. I had few bearings left. I’d studied English at Queen’s University after school, but dropped out before finishing the degree. I somehow couldn’t dissect the books in the style I thought my tutors wanted. My approach seemed in some obscure manner to be frustrating them, or so it felt to me. I began to lose heart – and anyway, by the time you had prodded and tugged everything out of a book it had often quietly died on you, like a patient left open for too long on an operating table.
Before Big Jacky died, I had spent much of my time helping him in the newsagent’s shop. People used to ask me questions about the university course and whether I was returning to it, but their curiosity had receded now. They had come to accept my apparent lack of ambition as a fact of life, something which relieved and depressed me. Now day ran into day in a kind of purposeless fog. My usefulness had fallen away since Phyllis took over the shop, although I still helped her shift heavy deliveries when she asked. There were a couple of other people who helped us out sometimes, and when she saw I wasn’t handling things too well in there without Big Jacky, Phyllis had quietly upped their hours.
Phyllis had changed since she first came to live with me; she was no longer the bowed plant she had seemed in Carrickfergus. The submissive droopiness, assumed as a protective mantle under the domineering shadow of Mary, had been cast off. She was swelling into a larger, more exuberant presence, in the house and in the shop.
Well, good for Phyllis. She was waxing. I was waning. I had anorexia of the soul. I got a bit of money from the dole: that did for my food, some of the bills, and the occasional drinks I spun out across my evenings in town. My books sustained me, but erratically. I would read the same one, again and again, for hours, and yet it seemed to lead me nowhere but in a large, loose circle, like some clapped-out oul donkey on a beach.
Anorexia of the soul. Would I ever even have thought of exactly those self-pitying words, if I hadn’t drunk in so much daytime television? I watched it a lot of the time now, especially the chat shows. They drifted before me, an endless string of enormously fat people, bulimics with bad perms, shameless adulterers, weeping adulterees, feckless spendthrifts, part-time prostitutes, busted drunks and heartbroken gamblers. I applauded them all, every one, the whole limping chorus line of flawed humanity.
The American shows were the best by far. There, at least, they were all going to hell in flamboyant style, spurting out fierce jets of accusation. They were pouring the energy that built the American dream into wreaking the American nightmare. I admired that. Here at home, I was just fading into the soft Irish mud as the rain fell on me.
Take Kimberley, for example, a blowsy, bleached blonde with a mouth that raced in several directions at once, most of them ill-advised. She was fighting for the affections of Charlie, her philandering boyfriend with a long, rodenty face. But Charlie was in love with the misnamed Chastity, a sixteen-year-old minx.
Then Kimberley explained that she intended to stick by Charlie ‘because of stuff that happened in our childhoods that we’re both having a tough time getting over’. But the audience were hollering and chanting with their prissy, pleased little mouths. And then one of them stood up, a smug woman in an appliquéd top, and said triumphantly, ‘I just wonder what trailer park y’all came out of!’
Everyone laughed and yahooed. For a split second, Kimberley’s face collapsed in genuine dismay. I fell back on the sofa and started to weep, the tears soaking my face and neck.
It was then that I realised I really had to get out of the house.
Mr Murdie was a short man, with sharp eyes that had totted up a million bar bills and a stainless steel brain that never failed – ping! – to calculate exactly the right change. If a cannibal had killed and eaten Mr Murdie, he would probably have detected an unusual flavour permeating the leathery meat, for as Mr Murdie had spent his entire working life steeped in the nicotine fug of Belfast bars, his flesh
