They found him through an advertisement on Gumtree.
For sale: nine-week-old fawn-coloured male mini lop in search of his forever home. Lovely temperament, well handled. Comes with transition feed, nails trimmed, worm and lice treatment.
The breeder was a hairdresser with a husband in the army. She laughed when she told Jin she had eleven kids of her own, as if having that many children were some kind of joke. She also dismissed the need to immunise the bunny against calicivirus. ‘But I’m not an antivaxxer or anything.’
It was the middle of spring. The curfew for metropolitan Melbourne had been lifted but restrictions were still in place. Now, midafternoon, the deserted freeway was flooded with apricot light. Jin had been driving for forty minutes, alone, first through country vineyards and later through graffitied outer suburbs, with the cardboard box containing the rabbit strapped into the passenger seat. A couple of ragged holes in the lid provided the only airflow. As he drove, he imagined one of the hairdresser’s wild-eyed children attacking the box with a sharp stick.
On exiting the freeway and stopping at a set of lights, Jin thought about lifting the lid to check on the thing. The animal hadn’t made a sound since they’d left the breeder’s ramshackle house. For all Jin knew, he was already dead. Only yesterday, Lucie—who had been researching nonstop ever since he and Amy had caved in to her pleading—had informed him that as little as a dog’s bark could give a skittish bunny a heart attack.
But then the lights changed and Jin turned his attention back to the road, relieved. While he wouldn’t admit it to Amy or Lucie, animals made him nervous. He’d never owned a pet as a child. His parents weren’t keen about sharing their home with an animal, or even (Jin sometimes thought) a fellow human being. He remembered how, soon after they’d migrated, his mother had seen him pat a friend’s labrador on the way home from school and made him take a shower with a giant bar of Dettol soap.
While he wouldn’t admit it to Amy or Lucie, animals made him nervous.
But Lucie had been nagging them. It was the first thing she had shown real enthusiasm about since the accident—how could they even contemplate depriving the poor child of a pet after everything she had endured? He and Amy had spent long nights lying side by side in bed, analysing the pros and cons. What if it died? That would be devastating. For her. For all of them. Rabbits were not exactly renowned for their resilience. And a baby one, too. A baby. On those nights, in the darkness, Jin could tell Amy was weeping—he didn’t need to see the tears to know that they were seeping like drops of blood into the soft feathers of her pillow. For a long time he had been absorbing her sobs like a thready pulse through the mattress.
There was no blood, of course, when Ruby died. In that sense, Jin thought, drowning had to be the cleanest death. By the time he had arrived on the scene, rather than the crumpled, prune-like texture one might expect after such an accident, Ruby’s face had a smooth, near-translucent sheen. In the midst of his shock and confusion, Jin noticed the peacefulness of his baby daughter’s face—a stillness unaffected by the frantic puffing of lips and frenzied pumping of ribs. When the paramedics arrived to take over the resuscitation, all Jin wanted to do was surrender to that obliteration too.
As he made a left turn, he felt a familiar twinge in the centre of his chest. When the cardiologist had asked him to describe it, Jin had likened the pain to a toothache. If it was an imprecise comparison, it did hint at something truthful—how the sensation resembled the pang of an absence. The incessant gnaw of a cavity or an ulcer or a necrotic wound. A hole, like hunger or homesickness or unrequited love, that insisted on being filled.
Jin pressed the big red button for the hazard lights and pulled over. He killed the engine and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. Reluctantly, he commenced his breathing exercises. In, two, three. Out, two, three. In, two, three. Out, two, three. During their last visit, the psychologist had told him, in a soft and condescending voice, that breathing would be his new superpower. Jin hadn’t booked another appointment. But he had continued with the exercises.
A hole, like hunger or homesickness or unrequited love, that insisted on being filled.
The discomfort eased and Jin leaned back. He still couldn’t hear any sound from the box—not a scratch or a whimper or a scuffle. He felt as if he were alone, which offered a kind of relief, until an unwanted image popped up: Lucie’s pale face, above a furry carcass in the early stages of rigor mortis. He nudged the box and lifted the lid.
Inside was a makeshift nest of hay and shredded newspaper. The rabbit was crouched in one of the corners, making himself very small. For several minutes, he stared at Jin, side-on, through his cartoonishly large eye. He didn’t move until Jin extended a finger to stroke him, at which point he shrank even further into himself to avoid Jin’s touch.
Seeing his meaty palm beside the rabbit’s cottonball head, Jin felt the pain in his chest rise up and burst forth from his mouth in—of all things—a chuckle. He laughed. He laughed because, having witnessed the rabbit in all his naked helplessness, he suddenly found his own fear—of the animal and everything else—absurd. The vulnerable one was in the cardboard box beside him. Jin had a choice, and the animal knew it. He could caress the rabbit’s head, or he could snap his tiny neck. Jin removed his hand and closed the lid.
When Lucie was a baby, she hated the car and Amy had played classical music to calm her down. Now Jin searched the radio for some soothing instrumental sounds. On finding what he was looking for, he closed his eyes and fell deeply into the music. So deeply that he didn’t notice the police motorcycle pull up behind him. It was a surprise to behold the helmeted face like an apparition in the middle of the windscreen. The officer motioned for Jin to roll down the window.
‘Sorry, sir,’ Jin said as he searched for a surgical mask in the glove box.
‘Do you have a permit to travel?’
He contemplated showing the officer his hospital lanyard, but then he remembered the bunny. He watched the policeman’s eyes scan the cabin and finally settle on the box.
‘On my way home after picking up a pet.’
The policeman flicked up his visor.
Jin tried to imagine what the officer saw: a slight Chinese man in his early forties with thick hair and panicky eyes.
‘I think that’s allowed?’ Jin continued, desperate to fill the silence. ‘That it’s within the public health orders?’
The officer looked unmoved. ‘What kind of pet?’
‘A rabbit,’ Jin replied, surprised by the question. ‘It’s for my daughter. Lucie. The rabbit doesn’t have a name yet.’
The officer shielded his eyes against the sun, which was throwing long beams towards them as it sank behind the trees. ‘I had a rabbit when I was a kid.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Jin exhaled. There was an unexpected softness in the officer’s voice that gave him hope.
‘Brutus. I’d wanted a German shepherd, but Mum was anaphylactic to dogs.’
Jin suppressed a smile at the thought of a rabbit named Brutus.
‘Myxomatosis got him.’ The officer pulled down his mask to scratch the grooved tip of his nose. ‘Brought my mates home from school one arvo and when I lifted the lid of the hutch, there he was, stiff as a cricket bat.’
Jin wondered if he should convey his condolences, but the pet was so long dead and the conversation so unusual that he couldn’t be sure of the etiquette.
‘Mum said she was still finding his shit behind the couch, dried and hard as BB bullets, ten years later.’
Jin forced a laugh that, when it erupted, sounded more like a cough.
The officer threw him a suspicious look. ‘Do you have your licence on you?’
Jin retrieved his wallet from his back pocket and pulled out a plastic card.
The policeman gave it a cursory glance. ‘Go straight home. No more stopping.’
‘Of course.’
Jin watched the policeman ride away before following the motorcycle’s bright red tail-light like a guiding star through the empty inner-city streets. As he drove, he practised his breathing exercises and listened to the pounding piano chords of The Carnival of the Animals, unsure what or how to feel.
This is an edited extract from The Burrow by Melanie Cheng, (Text Publishing), available now at your local independent bookseller.
