‘To gnaw on,’ I repeated.

He understood before I did, and couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Not for you. For Hoppy!’

More presents followed: a ball, a mirror for the hutch, a baby-blue clutch bag (for me, so I wouldn’t feel left out). And one day, I got home from work to find half the garden dug up.

‘What’s going on? Have you murdered someone?’

But the truth wasn’t much more palatable – Garv was making something called a run, because he felt it was cruel to confine the boyos to a hutch.

In a way, it was a relief that Garv had dug up the garden to make the run: at least we’d never have to worry about cutting the grass again. But in another way, it wasn’t a relief at all. I thought he was getting too fond of Hoppy and Rider. But when I mentioned it to Donna, she told me to cop on to myself. Who ever heard of anyone being jealous of a pair of rabbits?

Not long after, Hoppy got sick and Garv was clearly worried. He took a morning off work to take her to the vet, who diagnosed an infection due to – of all the weird things –misaligned teeth. It was no big deal: the vet clipped her teeth and prescribed a course of antibiotics. But a few days later, we went out for dinner with Donna and Robbie, and Garv began telling them about Hoppy’s bout. About how he’d known something was wrong, because she was normally alert and reactive, but she wouldn’t even gnaw on her new bit of wood. Donna and Robbie made sympathetic noises, and Garv went on about Hoppy’s high temperature and how Rider had tried to tempt her to eat a bite or two of onion bhaji. (One very busy week, when we hadn’t had time to go to the supermarket, we’d discovered that they actually quite liked them.)

As Garv went on, Donna and Robbie’s indulgent expressions faded and hardened, and I had a tight place in my stomach that no amount of wine-swallowing would dissolve.

‘How’s work?’ Donna eventually cut across Garv.

‘Work?’ He sounded confused. ‘My work? But you never let me talk about my work, it’s too boring.’ As enlightenment dawned, he began to laugh. ‘Oh right, I see. I’ll shut up about them, so.’

Donna rang me early the next day and said, ‘Maggie, I think you might be right, he is a bit too devoted. Stick him on to me there, I’ll tell him myself.’

The crunch came not long after, when my sister Claire came to visit and remarked on the amount of rabbit paraphernalia lying around. Garv was putting them into their travelling baskets to bring them to the vet for their jabs.

‘Jabs?’ Claire exclaimed. ‘It’s almost as bad as having a child!’

17

SCENE: Sunny day. White clapboard house, with small front yard. Front door opens. Two women emerge. One, tall, carrying an empty folder and wearing a jacket that bags slightly in the chest area. The other, short, skinny, well-dressed, smoking manically.

SHORT GIRL. I need to go to the bathroom again.

TALL GIRL. No, Emily, you don’t!

They cross the lawn, just as the sprinklers spurt high jets of water from the ground, catching the short girl and extinguishing her cigarette. She shrieks. Like a reaction in a scientific experiment, her glossy, shiny hair immediately begins to fuzz and bulk.

Cue laughter.

Oh, stop!

I couldn’t stop thinking in screenplay speech. Emily had practised on me long and hard into the night, and, between appointments at the hairdresser’s and reiki practitioner, through the morning also.

We were both in shreds.

I was literally having a bad-hair day. As usual, I’d woken up feeling like it was the end of the world. And that was even before I went to the bathroom and saw my hair – what remained of it. When I thought of all the hair I’d lost, the eight or nine inches which had dropped to the floor and been peremptorily swept away, I cried. Interestingly enough, I wasn’t crying because my haircut was symbolic of the end of my marriage. I’m fairly sure I was crying because in all my excitement at Dino’s I’d only gone and signed up for a high-maintenance cut, and now it was too late.

Fecking hairdressers. It always looks great when you leave the salon. (Well, it doesn’t, but let’s not get into the times when we’ve been fighting back tears even while we’ve been shoving them a tip. I’m talking about the rare occasions when we’re actually happy with what they’ve done.) Everything is dandy until the first time we wash it, and then for love nor money we cannot re-create that just-out-of-the-salon look. Despite all the hype, there is one way and one way only to achieve that just-out-of-a-salon look and that’s when you’re just out of a salon. Even now, all I’d done with my hair was sleep on it funny and already I’d lost control of it. It took water, styling wax and a hairdryer at its highest setting before I could bring it to heel.

Emily had taken the precaution of bringing her own hair to the hairdresser’s. She returned briefly and walked around the house saying, ‘… camera pans over a pair of breasts in a T-shirt…’ Then she went out again.

While she was gone, the sweet, squeaky girl from Mort Russell’s office rang for her.

‘I’m afraid she’s away from her desk right now.’ She’d gone to her reiki – now I knew what that was – practitioner. ‘Can I help?’

This time she wanted to know, for identification purposes, what our DNA make-up was. Well, almost. She needed me to fax over copies of our driving licences, because she needed to see our photos.

‘I’m sorry to bother you like this,’ she said. ‘But we’ve got to be security conscious.’

I could well believe it. There was every chance that crazed scriptwriters, desperate for an appointment, could try to break in, hold studio chiefs hostage and force them to listen to their pitch.

‘See you at three-thirty,’ she said.

She’d been so lovely every time we’d spoken that, on impulse, I sked her her name.

‘Flea,’ she replied.

Instantly I realized my mistake. I’d been far too friendly. Crossed professional boundaries. Stung, I mumbled a goodbye and hung up. Flea, indeed! Oh, make fun of the poor Irish eejit just off the plane. And what’s your surname, lovey? Pit? Bite? Bag?

‘… Camera pans over a pair of breasts,’ I heard. Emily was back.

‘My chakras were in a terrible state,’ she announced. ‘Good job I went.’

Then she started muttering to herself in the mirror. ‘The universe is benign, they will option my script, the universe is benign, they will option my script…’ She varied this affirmation with, ‘The perfect pitch is twenty-five words or less, the perfect pitch is…’