I am still screaming, looking at the reflection of the thing in the mirror. I recognize it immediately, of course.
I ought to. I bought it.
I’d run out at lunchtime for a sandwich. Five months not-pregnant. Can’t eat Brie. Is there raw egg in the mayonnaise? No coffee for me. No alcohol.
Idiot.
It was in the window of a toy shop I’d walked past a million times and never really noticed. Pale blue velvet and black crinkly eyes that made it look like it was telling you a tremendous joke. And the longest, softest ears. I’d gone in and bought it, even though Danny had made me promise to stop buying baby things. ‘It’s tempting fate,’ he’d said. But still I couldn’t resist showing Danny the cuddly rabbit that evening. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head, but said nothing. Later, I saw him in Emily’s room; he’d picked it up and stared at it for a good long time.
And now it’s here on my bed, a reminder of all the things I’d once hoped for.
Except where the ears used to be there are now just two little blue stumps through which the white stuffing shows obscenely.
I fall silent and turn around. My hand is trembling when I reach out to pick up the mutilated rabbit. I haven’t touched any baby things since that night in hospital. Instantly I’m engulfed by a tidal wave of grief that seems to travel up from the toy through my fingers and into my bloodstream. I curl up on the bed, as if I can make myself small enough to disappear.
Darren arrives, alerted by my scream. He’s on the late shift this week, the punishing hours coating his skin in a pasty, unhealthy-looking sheen.
‘What happened?’ he asks, out of breath.
Still keening, I hold up the soft toy by way of reply.
‘It’s a message,’ I babble, incoherent. ‘From her. My baby.’
When I’ve calmed down, I let Darren examine the rabbit. I search his face, looking for evidence that he’s finding the whole thing funny, but I don’t find any.
‘Somebody left it here for me to find,’ I say, calm at last. ‘To upset me.’
Not a message then, from the baby I’d made up, as I’d originally decided.
‘Could it just have been a present?’ suggests Darren. ‘Might someone have been wanting to cheer you up?’
‘By chopping off its ears?’
Now I look at it closer, I can see it’s not exactly the same one as was in the nursery at home. It’s bigger, for a start, and not velvet at all but a kind of fluffy fake fur. Still, it’s too similar to be a coincidence. I want to know how it got in my room. By now, one of the night orderlies is here too. Janice. An older woman with plump wrists and a kind face. They’re supposed always to come in twos, but Janice is out of shape and arrives minutes after Darren, red-cheeked and breathing heavily.
‘What happened to its ears?’ she wants to know.
Janice has no idea how the earless rabbit came to be on my bed, but then she’s only been on duty a couple of hours. She thinks it’s a crying shame someone has done that to a brand-new toy. ‘There’s plenty of sick kiddies in hospital who would have loved that rabbit,’ she says.
They leave, with Darren promising to make enquiries to find out how the toy got into my room as soon as the daytime staff arrive. He’s respectful and reassuring. But I know what he’s thinking. At the end of the day, it’s just a toy, right?
They leave, taking the rabbit with them, Janice clutching it to her bosom as if it were a real pet.
I listen to the soft pad of their footsteps in the corridor. The clanging of the door to the stairwell. Then I lie down on the far edge of my bed, careful not to touch the bit in the middle where the rabbit was.