Birmingham Blitz by Annie Murray Page B

were a couple of knives that needed sharpening and the kitchen scissors. It was a wild, brown rabbit with a white belly, and heavier than I expected. Its back legs were tied with string and it was sticky with a smear of blood where I touched it on one side. Its eyes looked like rotten grapes.
    Before I got started I went and switched Gloria on and heard a band playing.
    ‘What time is it?’ Mom called through.
    ‘Five to eleven.’
    There was a ring of blood like lipstick round the rabbit’s mouth. The ears felt very cold and there was a pong coming off it like fermented fruit.
    It was a hell of a job to get the head off. Our knives sunk in deeper and deeper but wouldn’t break the pelt. In the end I snipped at the neck with the scissors, but it took so long it made me feel panicky, as if I was fighting with it.
    The news came on on the hour. There was a knock at the front door.
    ‘Get that, will you Genie?’
    ‘Can’t – I’m all in a mess.’
    I heard her sigh, like she always did if I asked her to do anything. Peeping into the hall I saw Molly and Gladys Bender from across the road. I knew Mom’d be thinking, oh my God. They both stood there with big grins on their faces, each of them the size of a gasometer, still in their pinners. Gladys was Molly’s mom and by far the sharper of the two. They lived together and both did charring and you almost never saw them without a pinner or an overall. They both wore glasses and both had their hair marcelled and probably had done since it was fashionable sometime round the year I was born. Molly looked the image of Gladys except that Gladys, being twenty years older, had hair that wasn’t exactly grey, but dusty looking, and Molly’s cheeks weren’t full of red wormy veins.
    They were beaming away like a couple of mad March hares. ‘We was wondering,’ Gladys said in her blaring voice, ‘Mr Tailor said there’s to be an announcement – only, we haven’t got a wireless . . .’
    So all Mom could really say was, ‘Why don’t you come in then?’ and called to me, ‘Genie – get the kettle on, love.’
    Love? That was a sign we had company.
    ‘Don’t mind Genie,’ Mom said. ‘She’s doing our dinner.’
    I caught a whiff of Molly and Gladys. There were grey smudges down their pinners and they always reeked of disinfectant and Brasso and sweat. Especially sweat, but it was always mixed in with all these cleaning fluids and polish. They sat down, filling the two chairs. Molly craned to see out to the garden.
    ‘Oooh,’ she said. ‘Your Len’s busy, in’t he? We could do with borrowing him.’
    They chattered away to Mom, who was as polite as she could manage. I got into the rabbit by snipping up from under its tail with the scissors – tricky with me being left-handed – along the soft white belly. With the first cut a round hole appeared like a little brown mouth and the smell whooshed up and hit me. Lola. I opened it up and there was a pool of muck inside, and round it, holding everything in, a glassy film of pink, grey and white, tinged with yellow. The kettle whispered on the stove. It was ten past.
    ‘Shall I call Len in for you?’ Molly asked eagerly.
    ‘You stay put,’ Gladys bossed her.
    I called down the garden. Len dropped the spade and loped up to the house. I don’t know if he knew why he was hurrying but he’d caught the atmosphere, something in my voice. He stamped his feet on the step outside.
    ‘It’s all right – nothing yet.’
    I pushed my knife into the thin, tough film of the rabbit’s insides. There was blood everywhere suddenly. Soft jelly shapes slumped into my hand, cold trails of gut like pink necklaces, rounded bits with webs of yellow fat on them, green of half-digested grass when I pulled on its stomach and it tore. I knew which bit the liver was, rich with blood, four rubbery petals like a black violet.
    When I’d got everything out it had gone quiet next door. Nice of them to call me, I thought, washing my