Read Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) for Free Online

away, maybe even worse. That something too bad to say has happened.
    And it has, because now Nan is in the front room and screaming, a sound I’ve never heard before, and Glenda is crying jesus christ almighty and they’re pushing us back outside into the front garden, and trying to block our eyes and not let Bobby squeeze under their legs and run back into the front room. I think that it’s Mum—Mum must be dead—and I start screaming, too, until Nan stops and her skin is the color of ash from the fire and she says sshh ssshhh and I do at last push past Nan’s knobbly knitted shape into the front room and I see then Mr. Barry is helping Mum up from the bed on the floor and she’s not dead, and I rush to her, and try to cuddle her; I bury my face in her legs in her shiny stockings, but she smells bad, really bad, like petrol or beer or something, but the crying is now from Nan, and Nan is holding my baby sister Vera, wrapped mostly in a sopping wet blanket, and the baby is all wrong, I can see that, with her head over to one side like a chicken when its neck is broken. Nan takes the baby and sits on the stairs, and now Mr. Barry is helping Mum over to their house, but I hear Glenda is asking if we have a telephone, does anyone have a telephone (we don’t) in the street? And I know she’s going to ring the Old Bill, that she’s going to tell them, to “grass,” which can only be a Terrible Thing.
    That night we spend at Nan’s, back at Canada Buildings. Mum is in hospital, and the cozzers are waiting to talk to her.
    Vera is in heaven. No one tells us why or what happened. Whenever I think of it, of what they were all trying to hide from us—we kept getting shooed back outside, onto the street, like we were chickens—I remember the kettle, and the fire in the grate, and then I have a funny surprise: Mum lit a fire? Mum got some coal from somewhere? Then I picture the kettle on its side, lying on the floor with no whistle in it, and remember there was water everywhere, as if it had been dropped from a long way. Mum’s mattress was on the floor in the front room where she always sleeps in the day and I saw that the bed was wet. Did she drop boiling water on Vera? Would that be enough to kill a baby? Vera did look terrible, her head a blackened red color—that was all I saw.
    But no one tells us. That night we sleep high up in Nan’s big bed, in her bedroom, the bed with the great black snaky springs, bursting through one little hole in the mattress at the bottom sometimes to poke at your foot. I usually loved Nan’s candlewick spread with the patterns to pluck at, and the tickly tassels that Bobby likes hiding under, and chewing. But I hardly sleep at all, because every time I close my eyes Vera rolls up, and she’s crying, and scolding me, and won’t stop.
    The next morning Nan says the welfare lady is coming to talk to us because Mum is going to be in a special hospital for a while and that we should be glad because it could be worse. We wonder how it could be worse.
    â€œYour dad’ll have to be told . . . and there’ll have to be a bleedin’ funeral for poor little Vera . . . and that ain’t no place for you nippers,” Nan says, eyes wet. The old tortoise seems older than ever—she hasn’t even done her hair, which bounces out from her ears like tufts of cotton wool now that it isn’t caught in a net, and I stare into her old blue eyes thinking: how many times has her face folded up that way, like a nice clean handkerchief, crumpled and crumpled in your hand? The welfare lady wants to send us to Elephant and Castle to be with a foster family, Nan says, but she—Nan—has a better idea and will do her “bleedin’ best” for us. Nan’s legs are gnarly like a tree with veins and don’t work so well, and the dirt at our house is too much these days, even for her, she says, and