Thwack!
The stone from Simon’s catapult hits the rabbit between its ears. A perfect aim!
He crouches back on his heels, heart thudding. At last! He’s done it! But there’s something wrong. Why hasn’t it just keeled over, dead? He watches, horrified, as the rabbit starts to twitch and jerk its body around, and scream: a high, shrill squeal like a stuck pig might make. The noise is a shock. Rabbits are silent, aren’t they? Pet ones in hutches, they never make a sound, however miserable they are, noses pushed up against the wire mesh. He’s never heard a sound like this. You must be able to hear it for miles.
This rabbit is badly hurt, but not badly enough. It’s writhing in agony, and Simon knows he’s going to have to do it: go up close and kill it properly. He looks about for a heavy stick, or a rock or something, but the field is perfectly bare – a hayfield, recently mown.
He glances over his shoulder, as if someone might be there suddenly. Someone who could take over. It’s not that he doesn’t know what to do – he’s read it often enough in the survival handbook: The way to dispatch a rabbit humanely and certainly. It’s just that it’s different now, here. For real. And of course there isn’t anyone around to help. No one for miles. Just him and the wounded rabbit on the grass.
He could run home, the sound of the rabbit’s cry ringing in his ears. A fox would find it soon enough, wouldn’t it? With that racket.
The rabbit’s looking at him. Dark pained eyes boring into his own. Why won’t it die? He takes a step forward, crouches over the rabbit, reaches out his hand. The terrified animal trembles violently, tries to run, can’t. Simon grabs it, one hand round its neck, the other round the hind legs. A smart, firm, stretching action. He breaks its neck. Feels it crunch.
Now the rabbit is silent, limp, a small grey-brown strip of fur, unbearably soft. Its eyes have glazed over. His throat tightens, aches. No, not here, not now. Ridiculous to feel like this. Dry sobs rise in Simon’s throat but he won’t let them out, even though no one is watching, no one could possibly know. He swallows and swallows until they’ve gone.
He’s killed his first rabbit. He’s a hunter, a survivor. He picks it up by its feet and starts to walk back across the hayfield to the stile and the lane. It feels so light, swinging as he walks, the soft fur brushing the bare skin of his leg. He starts to shape the story in his mind, the story of the day he caught his first rabbit, ready to tell to Johnny and Pike and Dan.
Friday 10 July.
He doesn’t know it now, but later he’ll look back and realize that this was how it all started. The death of the rabbit was the first thing. It marked the beginning of a summer that changed everything.
It’s one thing telling his mates. It’ll be different at home. He braces himself as he pushes open the back door.
‘Hi, Mum. I’m back!’ he calls out.
‘Good,’ she calls. ‘Supper’s almost ready. Ellie’s been asking for you; it’s her bedtime. Go up, will you?’
Simon dumps the bag on the scullery floor, lays the dead rabbit carefully on the draining board, washes his hands unasked. Then he thuds upstairs.
Ellie’s calling him. He stands in the doorway to her room. She’s sitting in bed, in stupid spotty dalmation pyjamas, sucking her thumb. Ellie’s only six.
She’s in tears.
‘What?’ he asks her, irritated.
‘I saw,’ Ellie sobs. ‘In your hand. When you were coming up the garden.’
‘What?’
‘The baby rabbit,’ Ellie wails. ‘How could you do that?’
‘It’s just the same as the meat you eat,’ Simon says. ‘You eat chicken, don’t you? And sausages? What’s the difference?’
‘It is different, it is. It’s not the same. You are so horrible. I hate you!’
Simon pulls a face. He turns to go downstairs.
‘Get Mum. I want her to come and tuck me up,’ Ellie whines after him.
He clatters noisily down the bare wooden stairs. They haven’t got a carpet yet. He waits in the scullery until he’s heard Mum go up to Ellie. He scoops up the rabbit and takes it into the kitchen. Now he needs the survival book, to check what you do next.
Mum reappears. She stands in the doorway, staring at him.
‘I didn’t think I’d hit it, but when I did I thought it was better to bring it home and eat it.’ He doesn’t look at her directly. The small furry animal is now lying on the kitchen table, too near the salad.
‘You deal with it, then,’ she hisses between clenched teeth, ‘while I sort out Ellie.’
What’s all the fuss about? She knows about the catapult; he showed it to her in the catalogue before he sent off the money, and she didn’t stop him. She’s already said no to the BB gun, and the crossbow, and the air rifle.
It isn’t fair. No one else has a mother like her. Or if they do, they have a father to water it down. Mostly, the dads like the idea of air rifles and catapults. Johnny’s does, anyway. He had stuff like that when he was a kid. He knows how to make arrowheads and all sorts. Johnny’s dad has got an air rifle of his own and sometimes he lets them have a turn when they go round there after school.
Still, he wore her down with arguing eventually, and she said he could have the catapult if he paid for it with his own money, but he must never ever aim it at a person blah blah blah. He hadn’t listened to the rest. And he didn’t tell her what the catapult could do. It’s made of stainless steel and rubber and leather. With a large enough stone as shot and a perfect aim, you could kill a person.
For a moment, Simon catches the image of the rabbit again, twitching and jerking about in agony, and he pushes and pulls the picture till it becomes a person, a sort of soldier, covered in blood and mud and aiming a gun at Simon’s head so he just has to shoot in self-defence…
The rabbit’s fur is so soft. The way it’s lying on the table, it could just be sleeping. It’s not very big, hardly enough for a meal for one. Just a baby really.
He could just bundle the whole thing into a plastic bag and tip it in the bin. He hates the way she just gives him that look, without saying anything. But he really wants to see the whole thing through. If you don’t eat it, then there’s no point. You’re just some sort of evil person, killing stuff for no reason. Like the boys down the park, cycling over frogs and laughing when their insides spurt out. That’s just sick.
Simon pushes the salad bowl to one side and leans The SAS Survival Guide up against it, turned to the page about skinning and jointing a rabbit. If he does it step by step, like a sort of operation, just looking at one bit at a time, he can stop himself thinking about it being a baby rabbit. The first cut is the worst.
Once the skin’s finally off, it’s just a lump of meat. Pale pink. He puts it in a glass casserole dish in the oven to cook. It looks too small, so he takes it out again and adds some onions and a carrot, a sprinkle of basil leaves from the pot on the window sill and some water. He quite likes cooking because it’s science really. When they did a survey way back in primary school, about sixty per cent of the boys said they wanted to be chefs when they grew up. The teacher said it was because of Jamie Oliver and all those other TV celebrity chefs. The real reason was, they’d all copied Rick Singleton, the richest, coolest kid in class, who’d only written it down for a laugh.
That’s one of the good things about moving to this new house: it’s much further away from Rick Singleton’s house. Rick goes to a different secondary school now too; a private one. It’s a relief not having to watch over your shoulder on the walk home in case Rick’s lurking behind a wall ready to get you. He gets you with words, not fists or stones, or broken glass. The words, though, are sharp enough to tear you up inside. He’s got it in for Simon for some reason. Or maybe no reason.
Sometimes, his new catapult in his pocket, he still thinks about Rick Singleton in his navy-blue uniform with a crest on the blazer pocket.
Simon hears his mother’s footsteps padding downstairs. She stands for a moment in the doorway, surveying the scene. What’s she thinking?
‘Clear that mess off the table. Now. Supper will be ruined.’
Upset and angry, then.
Simon puts the knives and the chopping board into the sink, wipes the table with the cloth on the draining board, rinses it half-heartedly.
She won’t come into the kitchen until it’s all completely cleared away.
‘And open the window. The smell makes me feel sick.’
He can tell she’s almost ready to cry, but he won’t let it get to him. He hums the theme music from The Great Escape under his breath, just to show her how relaxed and happy he is. It’s just natural, catching your own food. It’s total hypocrisy, eating meat and making such a fuss about the killing of it. Even if the fuss is a silent one.
She’s looking at him as if he’s a stranger. Not her son. She keeps telling him how different he is these days. Sometimes when you’re upstairs talking to Ellie, I think for a moment there’s a strange man up there.
And it’s not just his voice.
Fourteen! You’re growing up, Si. You’re almost taller than me.
‘Pasta and sauce?’ she asks him once she’s back in the kitchen. She’s thrown the cloth in the bin, run boiling water over the bloodied knife.
‘Nah. I’ll wait for the rabbit to cook.’
‘As you like.’
He’s vaguely aware of her serving herself a small bowl, hardly eating anything.
‘Ellie cried and cried,’ she says, as if it’s all his fault.
Why does she have to go on? It’s what she always does. As if crying about things makes you morally right or something. He goes out of the kitchen, turns the television on in the front room. Friday night. Comedy night. He flips the channels. Fragments of news blast out into the quiet room:
‘… Warplanes, guided by special forces soldiers on the ground, began an intense bombardment… pockets of strong resistance…
‘… A second suicide bomb exploded in a busy restaurant in the centre of the city…
‘… Aeroplane officials are considering the introduction of anti-missile protection for all planes…
‘… A youth involved in a death crash was jailed today…’
He flips channels again. There’s a preview of some Scottish stand-up comedian telling jokes about men and sex. He won’t be watching that later, unless Mum’s already in bed. It doesn’t get dark till really late. It’s partly because it’s midsummer – well, July – and also because of being so far west. He read somewhere that real local time is twenty minutes later than Greenwich Mean Time.
He can hear owls outside in the trees. It’s one of the things he likes about the house. He likes his room too, and the garden, and the fact that although their road is at the top of the town, it’s also really close to the fields. You are never more than about three miles from the sea wherever you are. It’s almost like living on an island.
Mum goes to bed early. He eats the rabbit stew in front of the telly. It tastes good. Like chicken, but with more small bones. He watches one programme after another, the comedian, and then a film, and by the time he drags himself up to bed his mind’s just a fuzz, a blur.
Whooo. Whoooo. The owls again. They will be hunting over the garden, swooping silently over the fields. He goes to sleep thinking about the soft wings, and the sharp beak, and the claws.