LOVE IS AN AWKWARD CHILD

Bunny pushed back in his chair and looked out through the grime to the familiar trees beyond. If it did not stop raining soon he would either shit his pants or get very wet. There was one cracked print hanging lopsided on the caravan wall. It was someone else’s broken dream. Bunny had forgotten it was there.
He had grown used to the mildewed smell of the place but its mood inveigled itself into his soul, like the proverbial rotten apple in a barrel.
Outside there was a Christmas tree, now ten foot tall. It had appeared one January from the big house as a sideboard decoration and had prospered from neglect.
Last year a couple of men had arrived while Bunny was rolling asphalt, patching roads for the English. They ran a pale wood fence all round ‘his’ field just skimming his home by a hairs breadth. But it was no more his field than was the tired green caravan. He was a guest of the family that lived in the white house on the far side of the gravel drive. He had wondered at the fencing. After a couple of days a horse box arrived for the daughter of the house, the little girls birthday present, soon to be forgotten to wander disconsolately round it’s too small plot. That first night it had butted the window of his caravan frightening the bejesus out of him. After that he stopped using the back room and slept in his chair. Bunny was a small man and the equestrian beast was massive.
You might have thought that Bunny was born in his late fifties and died there too. But he was born young and died old like so many. He had not always lived like this: alone and during the winter months, cold as stone. Before he lost his teeth, apart from the ‘Bunny’ tagged front two, he had had a full set, the complete mouth and face of a younger man, the possibility of a home, independent of his mother and room enough for love.
But love is an awkward child and once when the little girl from the big house had been playing by the bonfire outside Bunny’s door, Bunny had invited her in. The child had stood in the doorway unable to discern a place where she might be, a patch of floor or a stool, and so had remained standing there, blocking some of the late afternoon light with her small frame. Eventually she asked Bunny how he was and Bunny had replied that he was ‘fine’ and then went on to say:
“You see those blues over there?” The child had looked at his work overalls hanging on a peg on the wall. “Well,” said Bunny. “They’re mine.” She had not been able to digest this piece of information and after a while had backed out of the caravan like it had been an indecent proposition. With studied casualness she had made her way back to the big house. Bunny had sat there a full hour after that, keeping his mind a resolute blank. Just once he had asked himself what he had said so wrong but then stopped before the tumult of answers that came, rushing down the years to break him up.
For almost as long as he could remember he had looked at life through the bottom of a bottle but had found no answers there, no message, not even a cry for help. Now it had become pure habit and a Guinness could last him all evening during winter, maybe three during summer.
Life had held out more to him once, many years before the caravan, even before the roads, though he had always laboured. He came to England for work. Maybe his soul had been washed over board somewhere between Cork and Fishguard. Maybe leaving Mary behind to live amongst Protestant wealth was the greatest mistake of his life. But back then it was a gallant move to win her with his foreign money and tales of work abroad. Little Mary. Not even a photo to warm his frozen heart.
The rain beat so hard on the caravan roof now that he could not hear himself regret and that was better than a Christmas whiskey or an extra bottle of beer. Even so it was as relentless as a bad idea, and Bunny’s anus was aching.
He picked up a sheet of news and took it into the back room. Squatting over it he crapped and wrapped it to a neat parcel. He placed it in one corner. The rain thundered and he wondered why he had never thought of it before.

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