Black Rabbit Summer Read Free Page B

more.
    The world gets bigger.
    Not everything changes, though.
    Raymond and me had never changed. Our world had never got any bigger. We’d always been friends. We’d been friends before the others, we’d been friends with the others and apart from the others, and, in lots of ways, we’d been friends in spite of the others.
    We were friends.
    Then and now.
    And so the idea of us all getting together again on Saturday… well, it just felt really strange. A bit scary, I suppose. A bit pointless even. But at the same time it was sort of exciting too. Exciting in a strangely-scary-and-pointless kind of way.
    I’d turned away from the window now and was gazing over at a black porcelain rabbit that I keep on top of my chest of drawers. It was a sixteenth birthday present from Raymond. A black porcelain rabbit, almost life-size, sitting on all fours. It’s a beautiful thing – glossy and smooth, with shining black eyes, a necklace of flowers, and a face that seems to be frowning. It’s as if the rabbit is thinking about something that happened a long time ago, something saddening, something that will always prey on its mind.
    I don’t usually get all emotional about stuff, but I was really quite touched when Raymond had given me the rabbit. Everyone else had given me the kind of presents you expect on your sixteenth birthday – Mum and Dad had given me money, a girl I’d gone out with a couple of times had given me a night to remember, and I’d got a few cards and jokey little things from friends at school – but this, Raymond’s rabbit… well, this was a proper present. A serious present, given with thought and feeling.
    ‘You don’t have to keep it if you don’t want to,’ Raymond had mumbled awkwardly as he’d watched me unwrap it. ‘I mean, I know it’s a bit… well, you know… I mean, if you don’t like it…’
    ‘Thanks, Raymond,’ I’d told him, holding the porcelain rabbit in my hands. ‘It’s wonderful. I love it. Thank you.’
    He’d lowered his eyes and smiled then, and the way that’d made me feel was better than all the best Christmas and birthday presents rolled into one.
    I looked at the rabbit now – its porcelain body shimmering in the moonlight, its black eyes shining and sad.
    ‘What do you think, Raymond?’ I said quietly. ‘Do you want to go to the funfair, take a trip down memory lane? Or should we both just stay where we are, hiding away in our own small worlds?’
    I don’t know what I was expecting, but the porcelain rabbit didn’t say anything back to me. It just sat there, black-eyed and sad, gazing at nothing. And after a while I began to feel pretty stupid – standing by the window in the middle of the night, naked and alone, talking to a porcelain rabbit…
    Mum was right – I definitely needed to get out a bit more.
    I shook my head and got back into bed.

Two
    The houses in our street, Hythe Street, are all pretty much the same – flat-fronted terraced houses with small front yards and walled back gardens. The gardens on my side of the street back on to a scrubby little hill that leads down to the river, while the back gardens of the houses on Raymond’s side of the street look out over a shared alleyway and a dilapidated church to the main road that runs parallel to Hythe Street. This main road, St Leonard’s Road, runs south from the town centre all the way down to the docks at the bottom of the hill, about half a mile or so from Hythe Street.
    The alleyway that leads round to the back of Raymond’s house isn’t the nicest place in the world. It’s quite cramped, for a start, kind of narrow and poky, and it has high brick walls on either side that shut out the light, so even in the middle of summer it’s always pretty gloomy and damp. The crumbly old walls are topped with barbed wire and broken glass, and for some strange reason the bricks have always been stained with layers of grimy black soot. The alleyway is also the place where everyone leaves