Black Rabbit Summer Read Free

occasional passing car, late-night clubbers going home, a distant shout, drunken voices…
    The sounds of the night.
    I gazed down the street at Raymond Daggett’s house. It was dark, the curtains closed, the lights all out. In the pale glow of a street light, I could see the alleyway that leads round to the back of his house, and I could see all the crap that littered his front yard – bike frames, boxes, pallets, bin liners. I stared at Raymond’s bedroom window, wondering if he was in there or not.
    Raymond didn’t always spend the night in his room. Sometimes he’d wait until his parents were asleep, then he’d creep downstairs, go outside, and spend the night in the garden with his rabbit. He kept the rabbit in a hutch by a shed at the bottom of the garden. If the night was cold, he’d take his rabbit into the shed with him and they’d snuggle up together in some old sacking or something. But on a warm night, like tonight, he’d let the rabbit out of its hutch and they’d both just sit there, quietly content, beneath the summer stars.
    I wondered if they were out there now.
Raymond and his Black Rabbit.
    It all started for Raymond when he was eleven years old and his parents gave him a rabbit for his birthday. It was a scrawnylittle thing, black all over, with slightly glazed eyes, a matted tail, and big patches of mangy fur down its back. I think Raymond’s dad bought it off someone in a pub or something. Or maybe he just found it… I don’t know. Anyway, wherever his dad got it from, Raymond was pretty surprised to get a rabbit for his birthday. Firstly, because he hadn’t asked for one, and this was the first time in his life he’d ever got anything from his parents without asking for it. Secondly, because his parents usually forgot his birthday. And thirdly, as Raymond admitted to me later, he didn’t even like rabbits at the time.
    But he didn’t let his parents know that. They wouldn’t have been pleased. And Raymond had learned a long time ago that it wasn’t a good idea to displease his parents. So he’d thanked them very much, and he’d smiled awkwardly, and he’d held the rabbit in his arms and stroked it.
    ‘What are you going to call him?’ his mother had asked.
    ‘Raymond,’ said Raymond. ‘I’ll call him Raymond.’
    But he was lying. He wasn’t going to call the rabbit Raymond. He wasn’t going to call it anything. Why should he? It was a rabbit. Rabbits don’t have names. They don’t need names. They’re just dumb little animals.
    It was probably about a year or so later that Raymond first told me his rabbit had started talking to him. I thought at first he was just messing around, making up one of his odd little stories – Raymond was always making up odd little stories – but after a while I began to realize he was serious. We were down at the river at the time – just the two of us, hanging around on the bank, looking for voles, skipping stones across the river… the usual kind of stuff – and as Raymond started telling me about his rabbit, I could tell by the look in his eyes that he believed every word he was saying.
    ‘I know it sounds really stupid,’ he told me, ‘and I know he’s not really talking to me, but it’s like I can hear things in my head.’
    ‘What kind of things?’ I asked him.
    ‘I don’t know… words, I suppose. But they’re not really words. They’re like… I don’t know… like whispers floating in the wind.’
    ‘Yeah, but how do you know they’re coming from the rabbit?’ I said. ‘I mean, it could be just some kind of weird stuff going on in your head.’
    ‘He tells me things.’
    I stared at him. ‘What kind of things?’
    Raymond shrugged and lobbed a pebble into the river. ‘Just things… he says hello sometimes. Thank you. Stuff like that.’
    ‘Is that it? Just hello and thank you ?’
    Raymond gazed thoughtfully across the river, his eyes kind of glazed and distant. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange.