T H E     R A B B I T

One year in the winter, when our children were still very young, I decided that we were long overdue for a holiday. My husband disagreed. Our youngest was only two at the time, and a handful. We’d had any number of embarrassing experiences with her already; when she got crossed, she had the distressing habit of throwing herself backwards onto the ground in an amazingly realistic-looking imitation of a grand mal seizure, complete with rolling eyes, frothing mouth, gnashing teeth and pouring sweat. He wasn’t anxious to spend good money on showing perfect strangers her antics, and I honestly couldn’t blame him. But we hadn’t had a proper holiday in ages and I was desperate.

‘Why not try a baby hotel?’ suggested one of the secretaries at work. ‘They’re pricey, but some people think they’re worth it. They’ve got everything: nappies, kid-sized toilets, in-house babysitters, a restaurant with a kids’ corner and an adults’ section, games, balloons – the whole works.’ I didn’t really care about the games, balloons and babysitters, but I have to admit the separate kid and adult dining facilities took my fancy. I wheedled, begged and whined until my husband at last gave in. I booked us into a baby hotel half a day’s drive away, and off we went.

I want to say that it was perfect, because it really should have been. The facilities could not have been better: there really were kid-sized toilets, so our five-year-old could actually go on her own and we didn’t have to worry that she would fall in. Our room was clean and pretty, and we even had a decent view. There was a children’s playroom, scrupulously clean and full of wonderfully bright, interesting toys, and our kids had a blast there. The woman who ran the hotel was welcoming and friendly and endlessly helpful. The problem was, in a word, her husband. He was drunk.

At first I tried to pretend that it wasn’t much of a problem. He didn’t seem like a bad guy, just an obviously drunk one. But then this fellow actually started to follow us around, showing entirely too much interest in both of our kids. ‘Peek-a-boo!’ he would cry out to them, rushing up from behind, uncovering his blood-shot eyes with his hairy hands and blasting us all with 80-proof breath. It was creepy. Did we need a baby-sitter? he kept wanting to know. No, we’d be fine on our own, I assured him; we didn’t need a babysitter. And we never will, if you’re what’s on offer I thought.

Downstairs, there was a communal hot springs for mothers and babies to go into together. It was lovely: the water was a perfect temperature and the bath looked out onto a garden with sculptured pine trees and stone lanterns. I got us all undressed and, in Japanese fashion, washed, then I climbed into the bath with the two-year-old while our five-year-old sat in a corner and played with one of the taps.

No sooner had we settled into the water, however, when the door opened and in came a giant rabbit.

Well, not a rabbit, obviously, but someone dressed up in a rabbit suit. Now I am one of those un-fun people who loathes seeing grown-ups dressed up as great big floppy animals. As a child, I ran shrieking from Mickey Mouse on my first trip to Disneyland, and I stared in repelled fascination as Clarabelle the Cow walked up to happy children and shook their hands – no way would I let her or Mickey anywhere near me. As an adult, I still feel exactly the same, and this person-sized rabbit stirred no tender feelings in me whatsoever. But quite apart from that, knowing that a drunk was wandering the premises, a great, hulking, mute rabbit in the bath was just about the last thing I wanted to see. We were all naked and unprotected, after all, and how did I know who was in that rabbit suit?  Straight away my imagination started working overtime.

Oddly enough, my kids didn’t like the rabbit either. With its bobbly over-sized head and great furry paws, it seemed to intimidate them. Or maybe it was just that they looked at me and saw my reaction and copied it. We all huddled together in the bath and eyed the bunny with real unease.

The bunny approached us and extended a paw. We shrunk back into the hot water. Just how long would it stay, I wondered, once it realized it was not welcome?

‘Hello,’ I offered inanely. ‘We’re just having a bath.’ The bunny nodded.

‘We didn’t actually expect to see a giant rabbit,’ I began again, hoping that my Japanese didn’t sound too ridiculous.  The bunny nodded again. Inside that bunny suit whoever it was must have thought that we were terribly unappreciative. No doubt happy shrieks and friendly cuddles must have been the anticipated response. 

‘Usagi-san’ my two-year-old offered timidly. ‘Yes,’ I answered cautiously, ‘It’s a rabbit.’  The rabbit nodded again and bowed (definitely a Japanese rabbit), and, giving us a friendly wave, backed its way out of the bath. Thank God.

Back in our room when I told my husband about the giant rabbit, he laughed himself silly. There hadn’t been any rabbits on his side, after all – just a lot of fathers slacking off while the mothers on the ladies’ side had all the hard work of taking care of the children.

I was exhausted. You try getting two kids and yourself ready for the bath at the same time when one of them isn’t even properly toilet trained. It’s nerve-wracking. All of that work just to be able to relax. And after it all, I didn’t even have the pleasure of a leisurely soak. All that time and effort just to relax, and I am, instead, menaced by a person-sized rabbit.

Later, the woman who ran the hotel told me that Momoe, a high school girl, was the person in the rabbit suit. Which may well have been the case, but then why didn’t Momoe speak to me in a high school girl’s voice? That would have been a load off my mind at the time. Especially if she’d been close enough that, even through the rabbit suit, I could have been sure that her breath wasn’t 80-proof.