‘Police raid?’

‘No, the other next door. Loads of them, not moving. They look dead! Should I call 911?’

‘They’re meditating,’ she said. ‘They do it every Tuesday night. Listen, Mammy Walsh rang.’

‘She’s worried about me and I’m to come home?’

‘She’s worried about you and if it doesn’t stop raining soon she’s going to wind up in the mental hospital.’

‘Nothing about me coming home?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Good.’

‘So did Lara give you a suit for tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’ I picked a shirt off the floor. ‘Come on, I’ll help you hang up some of this stuff.’

‘All right,’ she sighed, grabbing a bundle of hangers. ‘Lara has a great apartment, hasn’t she?’

‘Yeah.’ Then I thought of those porn film titles again. ‘You know, Lara’s the first lesbian I’ve ever met,’ I admitted. ‘At least, knowingly.’

‘Me too.’

‘I wonder…’ I trailed off.

‘What they get up to in bed?’

‘No!’ Well, yes.

‘Dildos, I imagine. Oral sex. Christ, I wouldn’t be into it myself,’ Emily said with distaste. ‘It’d be like licking a mackerel.’

I hung up a few more items, then I said, ‘But everyone is a little bit bi, aren’t they? That’s what scientists say.’

Emily paused in her hanging-up and she gave me a forbidding look. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Don’t even go there.’

16

When the real rabbits had finally showed up, at least Garv hadn’t pretended they were a present for me. I’d heard stories of other men doing that – buying a kitten or a puppy which they’d really wanted for themselves and presenting it to their girl. Thus adding insult to injury, because the girl not only has to share her home with an unwanted animal, but has to feed and clear up after the little shagger also.

Garv arrived home from work one evening carrying a cardboard box lined with straw, which he placed on the table.

‘Maggie, look,’ he whispered, clearly about to burst with excitement.

Torn between dread and curiosity, I looked in, to see two pairs of pink eyes looking up at me, two little noses twitching.

‘Funny-looking pizzas,’ I said. He was supposed to have brought home our dinner.

‘Sorry,’ he said, full of good nature. ‘I forgot. I’ll go back out.’

‘They’re rabbits,’ I accused.

‘Baby ones,’ he grinned. A girl at work had had some going spare, he said. ‘We don’t have to keep them if you don’t want, but I’ll do all the taking care of them,’ he promised.

‘But what about when we –’

‘– Go on holiday? Dermot will mind them.’

Dermot was his younger brother. Like most younger brothers, he’d do anything for a couple of bob.

‘You’ve thought it all through.’

Instantly, his glow began to fade. ‘I’m sorry, baby. I shouldn’t have just landed them on you like that. I’ll give them back tomorrow.’

Then I felt awful. Garv loved animals. He was affectionate and indulgent and he wasn’t just saying he’d return them so that I’d relent. His contrition was genuine.

‘Wait, ‘I said. ‘Let’s not be hasty.’

And so began the Year of the Rabbit.

The black and white one was a boy and the pure white one was a girl.

‘What’ll we call them?’ Garv asked, holding them both on his lap.

‘I don’t know.’ Bloody nuisance? ‘ Hoppy? What else do rabbits do?’

‘Eat carrots? Ride rings around each other?’

Eventually we decided that the girl would be Hoppy and the boy would be Rider.

I would have preferred not to have had two (well, I would also have preferred not to have had one), but Garv said it would be cruel to keep just one, that he’d be lonely. And because I didn’t want them breeding like… well, rabbits, I insisted that they got done. The first of many visits to the vet.

Before we did anything else, though, we had to buy them a hutch.

‘Can’t we just keep them in the garden?’ I asked. But apparently not. They’d burrow under the garden wall and into the next-door neighbours’, then off out into the wide, blue yonder. So we bought a hutch, the biggest in the pet shop.

Most days, after work, Garv let them out for a run around the garden, to give them a taste of the wild. Although trying to catch them to put them back in the hutch was like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube. They were impossible. I remember standing at the kitchen window watching Garv belting around outside in his sober charcoal suit. Each time he’d almost caught up with one, it would spring away from his outstretched arms and the chase would begin again. All we needed was the Benny Hill theme music and for someone to fling a sack of ball bearings at them. It was hilarious. Sort of.

Don’t get me wrong, they were very cute in their way. And when they hopped over to see me when I got home from work, it was sweet. And Garv had a way of carrying them, with their head over his shoulder, the way you’d burp a baby, that used to have me in convulsions. Especially, for some reason, when it was Hoppy: she did a great wide-eyed expression of surprise that was very funny. We ascribed them personalities, the way we had with the slippers. Hoppy was a mischievous flirt, Rider a smooth ladies’ man with an arsenal of cheesy chat-up lines.

But on one of their turns around the garden the little bastards ate my lupins, the lupins that I’d planted myself, with my bare hands (nearly), and I’m afraid I slightly took agin them. I also resented having to shop for them – if we hadn’t managed to get to the supermarket for ourselves we could just get an Indian delivered. But we couldn’t get away with ordering a couple of extra onion bhajis for them. Instead, we were obliged to make regular trips to the Bad Place for their bags of carrots, bunches of parsley and funny pellet yokes.

Then came the day when Garv marched in, waved something at me and declared, ‘Present!’

I whipped it from his hand, tore off the paper bag… and stared. ‘It’s a bit of wood,’ I said.

‘To gnaw on,’ he said, like he thought he was making sense.