The Rabbit Girls(29)

‘You were never warm, were you?’ she asks, tucking the knitted blanket closer around him.

‘Can you remember how Mum would click her tongue, not in a tut, but more in disbelief every time you wore a cardigan to the beach on holiday?’ She smiles.

‘Can you not wear a short-sleeved shirt, at least?’ Miriam says in a higher tone like her mother’s, but then stops her imitation.

Dead.

She sees her mother saying those same words, standing in the hallway of their holiday rental in a flowery dress and enormous hat.

‘No.’ And, ‘I’m a lizard, me, can’t absorb heat from the sun, even when I sit in it. Hey, Miriam? Your papa’s an old reptile!’ He would look to her to laugh, which she duly did to break the thread of strain pulled taut between them.

When the cardigans lost their shape and holes emerged through the elbows, her mother would darn them and buy another, so he could transition to the next one and the next. Never without. An evolving wheel of green and brown cardigans, all in some form of disarray, and the watch, she realises now, hidden underneath.

On their summer holidays, Miriam would walk up the beach from the sea and drip salt water on to hot sands. Dad would be sitting under an umbrella, a kerchief knotted on his head, socks on his feet and more often than not, the cardigan. All the other dads were wearing shorts, their bellies large and brown.

‘I loved you, Dad,’ Miriam says, walking to his old wooden chest. She rummages around for a cardigan in the worst shape she can find. Green. Holes in the elbows and a threadbare sleeve.

‘I’m moving you,’ she says, turning his body on to first the right side, sliding the fabric of the cardigan under him, then rolling him back over before manoeuvring his other arm into the sleeve. It isn’t an easy task. His arms are stiff and unyielding.

Yet, although wonky, he is in his cardigan. The small change brings out the man he was, rather than the body he is confined in.





12





MIRIAM


The next letter. A page of text, maybe from a French book, but the handwriting, in German, runs in the margins and across the blank back too. She moves the lamp slightly to try to illuminate the page as the room darkens.

Henryk,

I have become numb; numb to humanity, indifferent to loss.

They held me down, hard at first then less when they realised I was in too much shock to move. And a woman, like me, shaved the hair from my head.

She had no hair. Recently shaved too. She wore a white kerchief, prisoner stripes and a black triangle.

I knew at that moment all was lost. Do the guards even force them? Will I be doing this soon? Volunteering even?

It took a surprisingly long time to cut my hair off. The scissors pulled and sliced through my thick locks, fistfuls at a time. All we heard was the metallic scraping, metal to metal, cutting through hair.

And Miriam recalls the sensation of scissors cutting through her hair . . .

It was the end of her first work Christmas party, when she was employed by a large school as their administrator. She had worn a wrap-around red dress. Black tights and black heels.

Unbelievable, now, to think she had dressed up in such a way, her hair curled and in a scrunchy. Incredible to think back on herself as impossibly carefree; a life of before, when she could have a great time, laughing and dancing with her colleagues.

Being employed and being Axel’s girlfriend and very quickly his wife had happened all at the same time. It was a whirlwind romance: love at first sight, just like her parents. He had taken most of her attention, right from the beginning. He was attentive, charming, funny and sensitive. Having lost his father when he was small and been raised by a callous and cold mother, Axel needed her and she loved the feeling of being needed by him.

She stumbled into the house later than she had intended, after bouncing her way around at a dance where a rather sullen DJ played the new Bowie record repeatedly until asked to stop. Her feet ached and her face hurt from smiling as her co-workers got more and more drunk.

She entered the quiet house, trying not to make noise. Slipped her feet out of her shoes without putting on the light and was about to take her coat off.

‘Had a nice evening?’ Axel said, coming out of the living room and making her start. He switched on the light.

‘Oh, Axel, it was so much fun,’ she laughed, shaking her coat off and sprinkling him with rain.

‘So much fun, you say?’

His eyes were dark and he stood under the light so she couldn’t see his face.

‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘It’s late, I am sorry.’

‘I have been sick with worry,’ he said, monotone.

‘You have? You knew I was out with the girls.’

‘The girls?’

She nodded, feeling guilty without cause, and hoping the schnapps she had drunk wasn’t too noticeable on her breath.

‘The girls,’ he said, and left the room.

She stood still, waiting, for what she wasn’t sure.

‘You know,’ he said, returning with something in his hand that she could not see. ‘Dane’s wife used to say that she had been out with the girls. But it turned out she was fucking another man behind his back.’

‘What?’ Miriam stepped back, alarmed, and saw his eyes were red, from crying, she imagined. ‘Axel, it was a Christmas party, you were invited. I haven’t . . . I wouldn’t . . .’ she said stunned.