Black Rabbit Summer Read Free Page A

‘A fine sky this evening…’
    ‘What?’ I said.
    ‘That’s what Black Rabbit said last night. He told me it was a fine sky this evening.’
    ‘A fine sky this evening?’
    ‘Yeah… and green is fresh like water. He said that, too. Green is fresh like water. And the other day he said This good wooden house and Straw smell blue sky. He says all kinds of things.’
    Raymond went quiet then, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so we just sat there for a while, not doing anything, just staring in silence at the murky brown waters of the river.
    After a minute or two, Raymond turned and looked at me. ‘I know it doesn’t make any sense, Pete, and I know it’s kind of weird… but I really like it. It’s like when I get home from schoolevery day and I go down to the hutch at the bottom of the garden and I feed Black Rabbit and give him fresh water and let him out for a run and clean his hutch… it’s like I’ve got this friend who tells me stuff that’s OK. He says stuff that doesn’t hurt me. It makes me feel good.’
    Two years later, when Black Rabbit died of a fungal infection of the mouth, Raymond cried like he’d never cried before. He cried for three days solid. He was still crying when I helped him bury Black Rabbit’s body in an empty Cornflakes packet in his garden.
    ‘He told me not to cry,’ Raymond sobbed, filling in the hole, ‘but I just can’t help it.’
    ‘Who did?’ I asked him, thinking he meant his dad. ‘Who told you not to cry?’
    ‘Black Rabbit…’ Raymond sniffed hard and wiped the snot from his nose. ‘I know what to do… I mean, I know he’s not gone.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘He told me to bring him home.’
    I didn’t know what Raymond was talking about at the time, but when I went round to see him the next day and found out that he’d been down to the pet shop and bought himself another black rabbit… well, I still didn’t understand what he was talking about, but I kind of realized what he meant. Because, as far as Raymond was concerned, the rabbit he’d got from the pet shop wasn’t just another black rabbit, it was the same Black Rabbit. Same eyes, same ears, same jet-black fur… same whispered voice.
    Raymond had done as he was told – he’d brought Black Rabbit home.
    ∗
    I shivered again. The sweat had dried on my skin now, and I was beginning to feel cool enough to get back into bed. I stayed at the window for a while longer, though, thinking about Raymond, wondering if he was out there… sitting in the darkness, listening to the whispers in his head.
    A fine sky this evening.
This good wooden house.
Straw smell blue sky.
    I thought about what Nicole had said – about Raymond not wanting to go to the funfair on Saturday – and I knew she was probably right. I was pretty sure that he’d want to go if it was just me and him, but I didn’t know how he’d feel about meeting up with the others. I didn’t know how I felt about it myself either. Nicole and Eric? Pauly Gilpin? It just seemed so… I don’t know. Like stepping back into the past: back to junior school, sitting together at the back of the class; back to middle school, watching out for each other in the playground, hanging around after school, spending our weekends and school holidays together…
    We were friends then.
    We had connections: Nicole and Eric were twins, Nic and me pretended we loved each other, Pauly looked up to Eric, Eric looked after Nic…
    Connections.
    But that was then, and things were different then. We were different. We were kids. And we weren’t kids any more. We’d moved on to secondary school, we’d turned thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen… and things had gradually changed. You know how it is – the world gets bigger, things drift apart, your childhood friends become people you used to know. I mean, you still know them, you still see them at school every day, you still say hello to them… but they’re not what they were any