The first carer Leah met was a pinched Polish woman who didn’t offer her name and acted as if Leah were not in the room. She treated Bunny like a recalcitrant child with whom she’d been saddled for half an hour. Leah could see him flinching as she dried his hair. The second, Deolinda, was a big woman from Zimbabwe who kept up a steady stream of stories about the latest episode of MasterChef, about her uncle who had been tortured by the police back home, about the proposed landfill site in Totton…Then they were replaced by two different carers who were quickly replaced in their turn, and Leah could see that Bunny would prefer someone dour and ill-tempered if only they stuck around and knew where the shampoo was kept, took care of the models and made him a mug of sugary tea without being asked.
Her father went to the Wainwright and drank a half of Guinness three nights a week. Her father played the Blackbyrds and the Contours. Her father wore a green V-neck sweater or a red V-neck sweater. Her father smoked thirty cigarettes a day standing under the little awning outside the back door. Her father put the big plates on the right and the smaller side plates on the left and insisted that all knives pointed downwards in the cutlery basket. Her father recorded TV travel programmes and watched them at convenient times — the Great Wall of China, the Atacama Desert, the Everglades.
She hadn’t hated him when she was little. If anything she had thought of him as an elder sibling who was keeping a low profile for the same reasons she was. But now, looking back? How could you turn away from your own child? She said, “You never stuck up for me.”
Her father said, “Your mother was a difficult and troubled woman.”
She said, “That’s not the point.”
Her father said, “I think something went wrong after you were born.”
She said, “That’s not the point, either.”
He never understood that she was asking for an apology. Or perhaps he understood but didn’t feel an apology was appropriate. Either way, if you had to ask then it counted for nothing.
One morning Bunny’s mother crouched on the far side of his bed and retrieved a crackly, transparent punnet which had once contained twenty Tesco mini flapjack bites and which Leah must have forgotten to remove the night before. “What in God’s name is this?”
He said, “I’ve got a friend.”
She said, “Do you know how hard I try to keep you healthy?”
After washing up and hoovering she returned to the living room and said, “Who?”
He said nothing. He had leverage for once and wanted to savour it briefly.
“Well?”
“I used to go to school with her.”
“What’s her name?”
He was surprised by how upset his mother was, and worried that she might go to Leah’s house and confront her.
“How often does she come round?”
“Now and then.”
“Every week?”
“I have a friend. She brought me some biscuits. There’s no reason to be upset.”
She punished him by not coming round for five days but found, on her return, that Leah had done the housework in her absence, and marked her territory by leaving four crumpled Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut wrappers on the draining board.
She should have gone to London with Abby and Nisha and Sam straight after college. She’d be living in a flat in Haringey now, taking the Piccadilly Line to an office in Farringdon or Bank, winding down on a Friday evening with Jägerbombs and chicken tikka skewers in the Crypt. She might be married to someone halfway human. She might have children.
There was jubilation on Facebook when she confessed that her marriage was over, perhaps a little more jubilation than she wanted. She didn’t go into detail. Nisha said, “Get your arse down here. You are going to die in that place.”
Why didn’t she pack her bags? Was she dead already? Did the memory of that close-knit foursome at school seem less rosy now that there was a real possibility of her joining them? Or was it Bunny? He was funny, he was kind, he was grateful. For the first time in her life she had someone who needed her, and she couldn’t imagine sitting by the boating lake in Ally Pally or walking down Shaftesbury Avenue knowing she’d abandoned him to a life that was shrinking rapidly to a single room four hundred miles away.
Bunny liked her to read the paper out loud. He liked to beat her at chess and lose to her at Monopoly. They watched DVDs she picked up from the bargain box in Blockbuster. Often she would bring a cake, take a small piece for herself and make no comment as he worked his way through the rest. Sometimes she would go into the back garden to smoke and come back ten minutes later smelling of cigarettes. He yearned for her to lean over one day and push her dirty tongue into his mouth. Could you ask someone to do that kind of thing? Just as a favour? Because the thought of never being kissed again tore open a hole in his chest.
One evening when they were watching a documentary about Bletchley Park Bunny’s mother let herself in. She called out a casual hello, hung up her coat, came into the living room and said, “So we meet at last,” as if this were a surprise. “I don’t think Bunny has ever told me your name.”
“Leah.” She didn’t hold out her hand.
The two women swapped pleasantries for a couple of scratchy minutes then his mother said, “You bring him biscuits.”
“Sometimes,” said Leah.
“You know you’re killing him.”
“They’re just biscuits.”
“I’ve looked after my son for nearly thirty years.”
“You don’t like me coming here, do you?” said Leah. “You want him all to yourself.”
His mother straightened her back. “I just don’t want him spending his time with someone like you.”
Bunny knew he should intervene but he was not in the habit of telling either of them what they should or should not do, and in truth he was flattered to find himself being fought over.
“Someone like me?” said Leah. “What does that mean, precisely?”
Bunny had imagined this argument many times. He had always wanted Leah to win, but now that it was happening he wondered if his mother might be right after all. Leah was not his wife, not his girlfriend, not a part of his family. She could abandon him tomorrow.
His mother stepped close to Leah and said, quietly, “You little bitch. I’ve got your number.”
On the table beside the sofa there was a diorama of five British soldiers surrounding a crashed Messerschmitt, the dead pilot slumped forward in the smashed cockpit. Bunny had spent five weeks making it. His mother swept it off the table and walked out of the house, slamming the door behind her.
It was the end of summer, but instead of cool winds and rainy days a thick grey cloud settled over the town so that the air felt tepid and second-hand. Two children at the end of the street were killed by a police car chasing a stolen van. Nasir Iqbal and Javed Burrows. The rear wheels lost traction on the bend and the vehicle mounted the pavement knocking over a brick wall behind which the boys were playing cricket. He knew their names because they were painted on the street in big white letters. The driver of the car and his colleague were spirited away before the family and neighbours fully understood what had happened. The next police officers at the scene were greeted by a volley of stones and glass bottles and one of their cars was rolled onto its roof.
There was a small riot every evening for a fortnight. Through the curtains Bunny saw the blue lights of police vans and heard whoops and explosions which sounded to him more like people celebrating a victory than mourning a loss.