The Constant Rabbit Page 13

  ‘What about the Spick & Span awards?’ I said, suddenly having a brainwave. ‘The judges are due any day now, and a thuggy TwoLegsGood presence in the village wouldn’t look very good.’

  It was a good argument, but Norman, always apt to weigh arguments carefully, eventually remarked after a long pause:

  ‘We can win the Spick & Span award next year or even the year after,’ he said, ‘depending on how damaged the wisteria and planters are in the town square. But if the village is overrun with rabbits, it’ll never be ours.’

  Toby and I said nothing, so he continued, this time his voice more threatening.

  ‘You get one more chance to buy them out, Knox, then we go to TwoLegsGood. Rabxit is happening – no ifs or buts – and in whatever fashion we deem necessary. Be smart and do a good job with the bunnies. Forty grand is our final offer, but come in under that figure and we’ll give you ten per cent. You can drop me here and I’ll walk home.’

  I stopped the car, let him out and we drove to Hereford in silence, arriving at RabCoT half an hour later. We picked up a coffee each from the canteen, then wandered up to the office and started work: Toby on his usual work-a-day spotting, and me trying to find our rogue Labstock 7770. Flemming said little to either of us when she got into the office, being busy, apparently, with an open day planned at the MegaWarren building site next week, and Lugless and Whizelle turned up at ten. Whizelle sat down at his desk and occupied himself with the endless form fillery that was part and parcel of Rabbit Compliance, but Lugless walked over to me.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ he asked. He seemed almost amiable, which immediately made me suspicious.

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  ‘Keep at it,’ he said, then: ‘Oh, I reviewed those Labstock names you submitted to Mr Ffoxe last night and made a few changes.’

  I suddenly came over all cold.

  ‘Changes? What sort of changes?’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, knowing I would, ‘but none of the ones you suggested were remotely suitable to be used as an example of what happens when you piss around with the Taskforce. Half of those rabbits haven’t been seen at all for over three years, and are probably unregistered dead – and the other half haven’t been off-colony for six months. No, I went for four who were happily living here in the city and would be easier to pick up for questioning. They’re in the cells downstairs at the moment. They won’t have anything to tell us, but we’ll have a go nonetheless. The message to the Underground and to the rabbit at large will be abundantly clear.’

  I stared at him coldly.

  ‘But don’t worry,’ added Lugless with a grin, ‘I won’t steal your thunder – I made sure your name was still on the memo. Here.’

  And he placed the new list in front of me, patted me on the shoulder and went back to his desk. I stared at the small group of Labstock that Lugless had chosen. The only name I recognised was Fenton DG-6721, who was the prominent charity organiser. The DG-6721s were the largest group in the Labstock community. Their ancestor had been used to study the effect of unsaturated fat on the liver prior to the 1965 anthropomorphising. A troubled pre-Event life had left all Labstocks with an indelibly etched propensity to devote themselves to the service of others. While I sat there, feeling hollow and sick, Whizelle looked up from his computer.

  ‘Do you want to prepare a report on your dinner at Major and Mrs Rabbit’s last night,’ he asked, ‘or go for a verbal debrief?’

  ‘You know about that?’ I asked with dismay. I had achieved relevance at RabCoT, but not the way I’d hoped.

  ‘There’s not much we don’t know,’ said Whizelle in a smug manner, ‘so what about that report?’

  ‘I’m still getting to know them,’ I said, not wanting to talk to anyone about anything, ‘there’s nothing to report.’

  ‘You should know that Constance Rabbit is flagged,’ put in Lugless. I turned to face him. He had his rear paws up on the desk and was idly using the eraser end of a pencil to extract an ear-bogey. He stared at the jammy brown object for a moment, then ate it. Toby and I looked at one another. Rabbits have very few objectionable habits, but eating their ear-bogeys was definitely one of them.

  ‘Flagged?’ I echoed.

  ‘Yup,’ said Whizelle, ‘as someone ripe for radicalisation by the Rabbit Underground. The Dylan Rabbit connection kind of makes her someone with a potential axe to grind, and those sorts of rabbits should always be watched very closely.’

  It would have been cheaper and easier and better for human/rabbit relations for Mr Ffoxe not to have outed Dylan Rabbit to TwoLegsGood in the first place, but I didn’t say so.

  ‘This is important,’ said Whizelle, walking over to sit on the edge of my desk, ‘so we’re keeping you in the loop: the Rabbit Hostility Evaluation Action Team have declared the LitterBomb threat to have amplified from Amber, “Attack Probably Planned, We Think”, to Red, “Attack Imminent, We’re Guessing”, and whilst we’re not saying Constance Rabbit is involved, she’s ripe to play a part. She’s just rented a house with seven bedrooms and even the most cursory of glances at her Co-op loyalty card buying patterns reveals a strong propensity for two-for-one offers – an act that is long associated with stockpiling.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked.

  ‘We have also observed Major Rabbit at B&Q,’ added Lugless, mistaking my comment as interest rather than scepticism, ‘looking at spades and forks and seeds and suchlike.’

  ‘Right,’ said Whizelle, as though their guilt had already been established, ‘potentially growing extra food for those hungry, outnumbering mouths – the red flags are fluttering right under our noses and we’d be idiots to ignore them. Like the Senior Group Leader said, you’re to keep your ear to the ground as regards your next-door neighbours and report back if you see or hear anything suspicious. Get it?’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Good.’

  He returned to his desk to pick up a paper bag of sugared woodlice, something weasels found particularly tasty, then left the office. Lugless carried on staring at me for a while. It was one of those hard stares, the sort a hungry spaniel might use to bore holes in a fridge once known to have contained a single sausage.39

  He only stopped staring when the phone rang. He picked it up and, after listening for a few seconds, told the caller he would be there presently, then chose the heaviest hammer from his desk drawer and trotted out of the office. I gave him two minutes, then left the office myself to see whether Fenton DG-6721 actually was in custody, and if so, whether there was anything I could do. I headed towards the canteen first, the most likely place to find someone ‘in the know’ regarding who was in custody, but I didn’t need to go that far as the rabbit riot had already begun.

  Rabbit Riot

  Rabbits are especially good at crowd-crunching calculations. Most of the team are used as memory, with key calculators doing sums, and three others dividing the mechanics of the calculation amongst the others. With a little practice, a team of two hundred rabbits can calculate the square root of any given four-digit number to fifty-four decimal places in under six minutes.

  To be honest, it was only dubbed a ‘riot’ later, by the leader writer of The Actual Truth, UKARP and the Compliance Taskforce. To anyone else, the rabbit themselves and even a dispassionate observer, ‘super non-violent silent protest with maths’ would be closer to the mark. Outside the building were eight rabbits standing in a line and staring impassively at the Taskforce headquarters.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked someone in the lobby.

  ‘Some complete and utter twat put Fenton DG-6721 on an arrest list, and it’s kicked off a riot. Pisses me off totally. The building will be put on lockdown, and I have the finals of the all-Hereford bell-ringing competition this evening.’

  ‘There’s only eight of them,’ I said, looking out of the one-way glass into the street, ‘probably just a flash in the pan. No, wait, I can see some more.’

  To the right and left more rabbits were arriving, a
lerted over the grapevine as to what was going on. They’d dropped everything, tied the traditional protest bandana loosely around the base of their ears and taken their place next to their colleagues.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Whizelle, who had just appeared from the records office. The disappointed bell-ringer – I think he was from Ethics – told Whizelle what was happening and I decided to creep back to the office and keep my head down. My name was on this. I’d been stitched up by Lugless good and proper.

  Toby was already watching the riot unfold when I got back upstairs as our office gave an unimpeded view down Gaol Street to the left and right. In ten minutes there were twenty rabbits and that doubled in another half an hour.

  ‘It will be impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in town right now,’ said Toby, who always thought of practicalities, ‘let alone a sandwich.’

  Within an hour there were certainly a hundred or so, all standing in the road outside, ears flat on their backs. I could hear them murmuring, too, but not words – numbers. Rabbits weren’t fond of glib and pithy yet ultimately meaningless political slogans so used protest longevity as their chief tool. Since that could get very boring, they took to crowd-crunching extremely tricky mathematical calculations to pass the time, which was oddly disconcerting as the murmuring made little sense to non-mathematicians and at a distance sounded soft and restful, like falling water. The rabbits remained fairly motionless during a riot, but would eventually start to keel over from dehydration or lack of sleep after a couple of days. At which point they would be removed to a tent to be revived – and then replaced by a fresh rabbit, who would have been queuing patiently to have the honour of participation.

  The longest riot in history took place in Runcorn over the arrest of two juvenile rabbits accused of stealing a packet of Ryvita, which might have ended without drama but for a stubborn regional commander who refused to give in. It lasted ninety-six days. Mass-arresting the rioting rabbits, waiting until they dropped or even using water cannon and tear gas made no difference – they were simply replaced by more rabbits. Even cordoning off the location of the riot didn’t work as the rabbits just shifted the protest a hundred yards to the left, and carried on as before.

  The Runcorn Ryvita Riot was a resounding win by the rabbits and, as a mathematical crowd-crunching side note, led to the discovery of a fifteen-hundred-digit prime number that someone had missed. More importantly, it made the authorities concede, with great reluctance, that any rabbit riot had to be dealt with using dialogue and compromise if any useful resolution could be achieved.

  The first mass email arrived within the hour, informing the building what we’d already been told fifty-five minutes before: we were on lockdown. The despondency soon gave way to a cheery school-end-of-term atmosphere, with everyone gathering in the corridors to look out of the windows, knowing that since they were semi-silvered, none of the rabbits could see in. While I tried to get some work done, we were interrupted by Dennis, the Taskforce employee who always organised the office sweepstakes: pick a rioter and if your rabbit falls over first, you win the kitty.

  ‘The only slots that are left are the fifth, ninth and seventeenth rabbit from the right,’ he said, a bag of tenners in one hand and a clipboard in the other. ‘Can I put you down for one each?’

  Toby obliged but I didn’t. I made some excuse about having no cash.

  After an hour of tantalisingly complex three-body gravitational mathematics, Patrick Finkle turned up with a Labstock that I recognised as Ansel DG-6721, a cousin of Fenton and the local representative of the Grand Council of Coneys. They both came to the front door of the Taskforce HQ and demanded the release of the four prisoners. They were told that this was quite impossible as, firstly, they weren’t ‘prisoners’ but ‘guests’, and secondly, the release would require confirming who was in custody – which would be a potential breach of the rabbit’s data protection rights. Finkle replied that if the Senior Group Leader wouldn’t negotiate within sixty minutes they’d have a thousand rabbits outside within twenty-four hours and five thousand within the week – and an unwanted and potentially embarrassing civil disobedience on their hands.

  ‘Do you think Finkle is kidding?’ asked Toby when the news filtered back to us.

  ‘No,’ I replied, having heard numerous tales of Finkle’s unswerving dedication to rabbits. It was rumoured he was in a relationship with one, but if he was, he kept it secret. Not out of shame, but because his partner’s liberty would rapidly become a bargaining chip. The Senior Group Leader was already on his way in, and arrived fifteen minutes after Finkle and Ansel’s ultimatum. I got the call I was dreading ten minutes after that, demanding I attend a meeting in the fox’s office.

  Mr Ffoxe was already there when I arrived, still dressed in his Sparco overalls as he’d been track-testing his racing Bentley when he got the call. He didn’t look very happy. Lugless and Whizelle had been called down to join us along with heads of departments, Legal, Sergeant Boscombe and the local representative of RabToil, the government-owned company that oversaw the many work contracts the rabbit fulfilled. Nigel Smethwick was also there – coincidentally, as it turned out. Although he was prime minister, his constituency had always been Hereford East, and he still liked to maintain strong links with his core supporters.

  His physical appearance, I noted, was at odds with his power and influence. He was a small and ineffectual-looking man without height, charisma or any memorable features. The sort of person you’d fail to recognise if you met him out of context, the sort of person who was pushed around a lot at school and who classmates remembered – if they could at all – as ‘the quiet one’. These days he was about as cold and calculating as anyone you would ever meet, and his quiet demeanour and outwardly vanilla presence hid a steely commitment to task. He spent years at UKARP in the policy unit and barely anyone knew his name until he’d wrested control of the party in a surprise coup.

  ‘So what are the numbers?’ asked Smethwick who was accompanied by a small retinue of staff which included Pandora Pandora,40 the Taskforce’s public relations guru. She was tall and thin, habitually dressed in black and with her blond hair pulled aggressively tight into a ponytail. She had the sort of cultured voice that can only be acquired through wise investment in parents, and her assistants – she had many – all looked pretty much the same: blonde, slender, dressed in black. I think they popped them out of a factory somewhere in Shoreditch.

  ‘We’ve got about three hundred outside right now,’ said Pandora Pandora, consulting an iPad, ‘and with a disgustingly aggressive threat from the Grand Council of Coneys and that loser Finkle to mobilise a thousand of them within twenty-four hours if their demands are not met.’

  ‘Can they do that?’ asked Smethwick.

  ‘Almost certainly, Prime Minister,’ said Whizelle. ‘From Colony One via the free movement rule. I think we’ll have to hunker down for a long wait given Fenton DG-6721’s popularity. Of all the rabbits to arrest, Fenton was probably the worst choice of all.’

  ‘The way in which he was detained might be interpreted by an unsympathetic judge as illegal,’ added the in-house legal representative, ‘and to the left-leaning public at large as extrajudicial overreach. They’re not human, which is legally useful, but they’re cuddly with big eyes, something the otherwise apathetic general public often finds irresistible. We’re keeping a careful eye on the platforms to see what develops.’

  ‘Social media?’ said Lugless with a sneer. ‘Balls. This morning it was something about a celebrity insulting another celebrity, at lunchtime it was a video of a piglet in gumboots. By this evening it will be someone you’ve never heard of saying something vaguely controversial on a subject that until now you knew nothing about. The hashtag #rabbitinperil barely trends at all these days, and every bunny outside on the street mumbling about standard deviation is one less bunny causing trouble.’

  Smethwick had been staring at Lugless, probably because he hated rabbits and here, standing c
loser than he’d ever been to a rabbit, was a rabbit who also hated rabbits. I think it was kind of confusing for him.

  ‘Why was he arrested anyway?’ asked Smethwick. ‘Even I’d think twice about having Fenton detained. Justin Bieber and the Dalai Lama follow him on Instagram for Christ’s sake. None of this will play well with the leftie press, who are already winding themselves into a lather over MegaWarren.’

  ‘It was part of an ongoing investigation into the Rabbit Underground,’ said Flemming, who, like her or loathe her, looked after her team. ‘The threat of a LitterBomb has been raised to Alert Red status, and Labstocks recently came under suspicion.’

  ‘Whose investigation?’ asked Smethwick.

  Lugless put up his paw and Smethwick, who I think was about to hand out a serious bollocking, decided not to. I think it wasn’t so much that he hated rabbits, than he was frightened of them.

  ‘Oh,’ he said instead, ‘and what evidence do you have Fenton actually is involved?’

  ‘He was identified by one of our Spotters as a rabbit of interest, Prime Minister. One who might have Underground connections.’

  And Lugless turned to face me. All eyes swivelled in my direction and my mouth went dry. I wanted to make a run for it, but I didn’t think I’d get very far. I’d seen how fast Mr Ffoxe could move.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked Smethwick. It was the first time he had acknowledged me, even though I had seen him on numerous occasions, and been introduced twice.

  ‘Peter Knox – Spotter Grade V, fifteen years’ service.’

  Pandora Pandora tapped a note into her iPad.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Smethwick, unimpressed. ‘And just how sure are you that Fenton DG-6721 was the same rabbit as that involved with the Underground? Give me a figure,’ he added, as he knew how Spotters worked, ‘a percentage likelihood of identification.’

  I paused, then:

  ‘Less than two per cent,’ I said, truthfully enough.