So here’s how it happened. I took the bus to my women’s group – which was really no more than a handful of us sipping instant coffee in a church hall and talking about the lack of good, meaningful, fulfilling sex – and got off at the high street. I waited in line for the man on his crutches to negotiate the cashpoint. It was not raining yet but it would start soon, the forecast said.
I headed down Eastleigh Avenue and took a right at St Mary’s church. Here, on the eastern side, the high stone wall was choked with ivy and star jasmine. The perfume cloaked the evening air, so thick I could almost touch it.
Round at the back of the old church an ugly, flat-roofed prefab building had been tacked on, used for the youth club and neighbourhood meetings. The spaces beneath the windows were stained with rust, which ran like teardrops down the pale walls. Inside it smelt like damp towels and sour milk, the hot metal of the tea urn. It’s a smell I find at once repulsive and comforting. When I reached the door, however, the first thing I noticed was the sign, handwritten and covered with clear plastic so the ink did not run in the rain.
Women’s Group Cancelled Tonight due to illness – Call Kath for details of next week
Below that was drawn a smiley face in a large, irregular circle. The smile had been formed out of the word ‘sisterhood’.
‘Bollocks,’ I said, turning up the collar of my denim jacket as the rain fell harder. The sky had darkened to a dull chrome. It felt like winter had arrived already and it was only August. I turned to leave and that’s when I saw him. Standing beneath the towering gingko in the middle of the churchyard. He was wearing a dark overcoat and wellington boots and was staring right at me, his face as pale and round as the moon. I felt a shiver of discomfort. The man was holding a bag in his hands, swinging it as he started to walk towards me, his expression as still as a stopped clock. I lifted my hand.
‘Hi, I’m here for th—’
‘It’s closed.’
‘I know. I just saw the sign.’
He looked me up and down. There was a smell coming off him, like old clothes in a trunk, mothballs. He had pink scar tissue stretched thin across his neck, fine lines cobwebbing his eyes.
‘I got the keys here. You come in, out the rain.’
I stared at him. His eyes were silvery blank pennies. ‘No thanks. I have to get back.’
‘I’d better draw the curtains. Getting dark. More storms rolling in.’
‘Yes.’
We stood there silently as he rifled through the ring of keys he’d produced from his pocket. The keyring had a little pink plastic bird attached to it, rubbed almost smooth with age. It was the kind of trinket you’d find in a Christmas cracker and it was so incongruous, given the man holding it – broad and stooped with only a clutch of brown teeth still left in his mouth – that I almost burst out laughing. The caretaker pulled at the handle and the door wheezed open. I took a step back, calculating the distance between me and the iron gates. I couldn’t tell you why I was so nervous, but the one thing I’d learned from my women’s group had been written on a T-shirt Kath had worn one evening: ‘Trust your gut – that bitch knows what’s up.’
I looked over at the gates again. They were a long way away but I could make it, if I sprinted. If I needed to. If he reached for me with his big, callused hand.
‘The graves’ll flood.’ He was looking up at the sky. ‘Sink right into the ground.’
I was looking at the white plastic bag he was holding, the handles stretching with the weight of what was inside. And what is inside? I thought, with a feeling of creeping horror. My stomach somersaulted as I caught a glimpse of dark wet fur and a glassy, staring eye. There was a smear of blood on the wall of the bag like a streak of brown paint on canvas. He looked down at it, then up at me.
‘We’ve got a rabbit problem,’ he said, ‘but they’re too clever for traps. Don’t like the poison, though, no sir. They come out the ground to die, because they want to see the stars.’
‘Do you have to poison them? Can’t you find a more humane way?’
It was as if he hadn’t heard me. He had a strange, faraway expression, looking past me, back towards the trees. ‘You’d want to see the stars too, wouldn’t you? In your last moments. Better than down there, in the earth. In the dark.’
My eye was drawn again to that bag, bulging with small leporine corpses. There was the faint smell of blood, a coppery tang, and something else too, carried on the wind. Sweet and awful at the same time, a rot like overripe fruit. Fear tasted glassy and metallic in my mouth. I pulsed with it, feeling his shadow creep over me like a cold wind. There was something wrong with this man. I knew this as simply as I did my own name.
‘Bagged a whole warren,’ he continued, as I started moving away, walking backward through the long grass. ‘You know rabbits scream when they know they’re close to death? It’s like they see it coming. Sends all the others into a fr-fr-frenzy.’ He was starting to stutter. There was spittle collecting on his lips. ‘First time I heard it I screamed right back.’
‘I have to
