Mary and the Rabbit Dream

content warning: body horror pertaining to birth and animals

It’s January 27th and I finally have the assessment for PIP that has been looming for the past 5 months. A benefit for sick and disabled people, I first tried for Personal Independence Payments in 2021 when my Long Covid began. Didn’t happen. The rejection letter said I was too articulate. Too articulate to be sick? Too articulate to articulate just how sick I am to an assessor who could not see inside my body and who, I thought, needing articulating to. I had wished back then that I wasn’t a writer.

On January 27th, I was scared to say a single word incase a single word was too much. But January marked 4 years of tachycardia and post-exertional malaise and widespread pain and orthostatic headaches and nausea and cognitive dysfunction and — I told the assessor exactly the same shit I had 4 years ago because nothing inside me has changed.

The week after that, I am supposed to travel to Drogheda in Ireland to interview two artists. Sometimes I am well enough to do those kinds of things if I rest before and after, and spin around three times, and kiss the ground, and do them even if I’m not well enough, because I need to earn money to live. But I couldn’t stay out of bed long enough to do the packing and taxiing and flying and working and all those same verbs in reverse.

I think I am a wheel plucked off a rusty spoke, rolling forever.

I pull out of the job this time because my body doesn’t feel right. In fact, I cancel the next three weeks of work because I am scared about how wrong I feel.

My boyfriend makes me promise him I will rest. I agree, I have to stop. He hands me a book called ‘Mary and the Rabbit Dream’ by Noémi Kiss-Deáki even though I don’t think I have a book in me.

He shows me that this one is written in small clusters. Not paragraphs, more like bullet points. Like something revealed inch by inch. A shadow or an answer. A body in low tide.

I read some lines and stop. He reads more out loud to me. I wait for energy to continue the reveal and when I see what it is showing me, I don’t think I want to go on. Because ‘Mary and the Rabbit Dream’ is a creative account of a real incident from the 1700s. It’s about a very poor woman in Surrey who secretly pushed rabbit parts up into her womb, and then birthed them bit by bit in front of doctors and other high society.

She tried to escape poverty by becoming her own hard-won miracle. Bits and pieces of all these pink, hairless animals. I put the book back on the shelf.

I sit on the couch. I lie in bed. I do not look at emails. I do not wash or dress. I just crash.

I start letting the kitten play in the yard out back. One of us is free.

A week and a half after the assessment, I get a text from the Department of Work and Pensions that starts, ‘We have awarded you PIP. We have sent you a decision letter explaining the award. Please allow 2 weeks to receive this. You only need to contact us if your circumsta…’

I believe the minimum PIP award allocated is £72.65 per week. I dream of the £72.65 worth of health I am going to save every week by resting instead of holding my body at knife point. I celebrate.

My boyfriend begged me to rest but it’s only when I get this text that I feel like I’ve been given permission. I lie down in the crash site. I make a nest in the wreckage.

I sleep in the wreckage like a bird. Or a rabbit.

When you get sick with a virus and then stay sick instead of doing the normal thing of recovering, it is very hard to envision anything changing for the better ever again.

I stay on the couch. I spread out in bed. No emails, still. A long bath. I pre-emptively start a meal delivery service with the money coming to me. All these new ways to survive.

Another week passes. I have an appointment at the Long Covid clinic. When there are no new ideas to discuss, my doctors just repeat the things we all know to be the case. I think it is actually quite helpful, like saying the alphabet a lot as a kid. My nervous system is damaged by Covid and so when I try to live like other people, my nervous system drops the ball. It might drop the blood pressure ball, or the immune system ball. Heart rate, digestion, temperature regulation, hormones, sleep, whatever. If I do too much, the machine inside my body comes up short.

I am smiling when the appointment begins but 20 minutes in, my nervous system is struggling with me being here and my face goes flat again.

At the end of the hour, the doctor asks if I’ve heard the bad news. All the Long Covid clinics across the country are closing in March. My boyfriend, sitting next to me, asks if that’s because everyone has been cured.

I don’t want to cry in the doctor’s.

He explains that the government has stopped funding the clinics. He tells me they’re having to reject new referrals — they’re still getting new referrals. I ask how many people are losing this support. Just over 800 people in Liverpool.

There are 450,000 of us here. Just my luck to be one of the 800. I have always been jammy.

I’m four years into Long Covid. I wonder if I have a few more years or a lifetime to go.

I go back to the couch. I go back to bed. There is a knock on the door. The meal delivery service has started. I don’t know how to feel.

I hear new noises, check the bedroom window, and see the kitten on the back wall up against a huge cat who is running at her sideways. The kitten’s ears are folded back like origami. The kitten runs back into the house.

And it’s the day after that I get the letter from PIP explaining the award they text me about. I wail like somebody has just died when I open it because they’re not giving me £72.65 a week. They’re giving me £28.70 instead.

I shouldn’t have paid for the meal delivery service.

In the afternoon when my face is dry, I post a picture of the PIP letter on Instagram stories. 11,000 people view the story, so I do check emails that day. There are two from new people signing up to our Patreon. I don’t think things are ever going to change.

The kitten stays in all day.

The kitten stays upstairs.

That night, I get a call telling me someone I know has been given three months to live. When I was going through the process for PIP, I read that it is automatically given to those with a terminal diagnosis. I didn’t know what to say to the person on the phone, never mind the person who is going to die soon. Suddenly, I don’t feel so articulate.

A guardian angel spends four hours helping me write a ten page letter that challenges the PIP decision. Ten pages of all the ways I have lost my independence and I keep thinking, they can’t argue with this. But when the DWP texts me to confirm receipt, saying I’ll receive a response within 15 weeks, I am sure they will find a way.

I don’t know what happens that weekend — slowly, inch by inch, revealing — my energy returns with a jolt. Three weeks of doing very little leave me with a lot. It’s a nervous system reset. It’s still a surprise.

I finally wash my hair, I reply to a few emails, and then I pull that book back off the shelf.

I read the rest of ‘Mary and the Rabbit Dream’ fast, like I’m falling up the stairs.

I read about the dire situation a group of women find themselves in, belonging to their husbands, not knowing how to read or write, no food except for what they can grow or catch — what they’re allowed or expected to catch, anyway. Miscarriages, pain, no relief.

The women have an idea.

They think that ‘if the poorest of the poorest suddenly find a woman in their midst with the ability to give birth to rabbits’ — that small thing that fills the bellies of the rich, and keeps the rich so warm — then they’ll have a trump card, a weapon, and a powerful asset that means the rich will be forced to listen to these small-town women who cannot send a message any other way.

Maybe it will even make the women rich.

Women as life-giving. Women seizing the means of production. Women as the means of production.

God, I wish none of us had to produce shit.

Kiss-Deáki titrates the entire story of ‘Mary and the Rabbit Dream’ to the reader line by line with so much care and lucidity so we don’t just hear this tale as gossip — as this unbelievably squeamish thing someone once did. Instead we are given the time and detail to grasp the systemic rot her actions were born out of.

The writer builds a wall of bricks without cement; a strong wind, or elbow, could have the whole thing come crashing down, as tense as it must have been for the women when their rabbit breeding hoax was in full swing.

When I had the energy to face the book, I felt bereft for Mary. When I woke up after her dream was over, I just felt bereft for every person past and present who has made their body sick for money.

I am sick of this permanent inequality, of the same story, of not being able to rest.

I thought about my £28.70 and the eugenic implication of the Long Covid clinics closing. It is like they are saying well, we might as well kill the unprofitable meat.

‘Mary and the Rabbit Dream’ is a story for every person who is sick to death of the rich eating the poor.

It’s funny because I want the £72.65 so bad that I have cried and cried, but it’s not going to fix my life, is it? Money not like a rabbit in this instance, but more like a carrot on a stick.

£72.65 is not going to fix me. I’d need a miracle for that.

I’d need to give birth to rabbits.

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