The Constant Rabbit Page 2

  ‘Let me show you,’ I said, handing the returned books to Neville, who hurried off to shelve them quickly so she could return, presumably, to air her anti-rabbit sentiments more fully. For my part I led Connie quickly towards the foreign language section.

  ‘Hey,’ she said with a giggle, ‘isn’t naming the team after former prime ministers a direct lift from that Kathryn Bigelow heist-gone-wrong movie?’

  ‘I … don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Sure you do,’ she said. ‘The one with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves. What’s its name again?’

  ‘Point Break,’ I said, suddenly remembering that I’d seen it first with her at the Student Union cinema. We’d sat in the back row, a place usually reserved for lovers, but we weren’t there for that reason. Rabbit cinema-goers, acutely conscious of how their often expressive ear movements can ruin a movie for anyone sitting behind, politely migrated to the back. Our upper arms had touched as we sat, which I remembered I quite liked; it was the sum total of any physical contact.

  ‘And,’ I concluded, ‘it’s more a homage, really.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ she said with a smile, ‘Point Break. You could have disguised everyone in rubber masks, again, like in the movie.’

  ‘Not very practical and we don’t actually need to be disguised,’ I said, ‘and besides, while Mrs Thatcher and John Major masks are still obtainable, those of Neville Chamberlain and David Lloyd George are almost impossible to come by.’

  ‘I heard you could paint William Shatner masks to represent almost anyone.’

  I’d heard that too, but didn’t say so.

  ‘There’s issues of being able to see out clearly enough,’ I said.

  ‘Ninety seconds!’ called out Mrs Thatcher.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ I said, picking a couple of dusty volumes from the shelves. ‘Are either of these the ones you wanted?’

  I showed her the covers, which were written in Rabbity script,1 and unintelligible to me, or indeed any humans. Even after fifty-five years, no human had ever mastered anything but the most basic tenets of their language, verbal or written. Attempts by humans to converse in their mother tongue were usually met with peals of hysterical laughter, and remain one of the mainstays of rabbit comedy stand-up, along with jokes about ears, litter sizes, the broader etymological impact of ‘cuniculus’ and the hilarity that ensues when entering the wrong burrow by accident, at night, slightly drunk, during the mating season.

  ‘Oooh!’ said Connie, grasping one of the books tightly. ‘Planet of the Lagomorphs. That’s a find.’

  I wasn’t an expert on the whole Rabbit Literature Retelling Project of the early eighties, but I did know that out of the hundred or so titles, only one was ever banned. When you retold Planet of the Apes the dominant life form was the rabbit. It became something of a political hot potato, but not, crucially, amongst rabbits. The fledgling United Kingdom Anti-Rabbit Party declared the novel’s central theme to be ‘not conducive to good human/rabbit relations’ – and lobbied successfully to have it withdrawn and pulped.

  ‘Must have missed the dragnet,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll give it a read to the family,’ said Connie with a smile, ‘might give us some ideas.’

  Rabbits rarely read to themselves as they saw books more as a performance than a solitary occupation. Why, they asked, do anything by yourself that could be shared with others?

  ‘Banned book?’ said Neville Chamberlain, her shelving complete and now back on the scene. She clasped hold of the volume and tried to take it away, but Connie didn’t relinquish her grip, and they both stood there, each with their hands/paws on the book, tugging backwards and forwards.

  ‘It was on the shelf,’ said Connie Rabbit, ‘so free to be loaned. That’s how libraries work.’

  ‘Don’t tell me how libraries work,’ said Neville Chamberlain, who was now talking less like someone eager to appease, and more like the Mrs Mallett reactionary she was, ‘I’ve been a library volunteer since before you munched your first carrot.’

  It was a dumb insult, and they both knew it.

  ‘Wow,’ said Connie, ‘you got me.’

  ‘Forty-five seconds!’ called out Mrs Thatcher, and I was now in a quandary. If Connie now was anything like the Connie I knew then, she wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and if we overran it would be a Code 4-22: ‘Opening Time Deficit’, which meant anything over the six minutes would be docked on the next library opening. I glanced towards where the two Library Opening Times Compliance Officers were staring at us from the door, in the same manner vultures might regard an unwell zebra.

  ‘Mr Major?’ said Neville Chamberlain, using her Seventeenth-Century-School-Ma’am-That-Must-Be-Obeyed voice. ‘Our library is a special place and not to be disrespected.’

  ‘How is it being disrespected?’ asked Connie in an even tone. ‘Really, I’d like to know.’

  ‘You have a serious attitude problem,’ said Mrs Mallett, taking instant umbrage at being questioned directly by a lower animal.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Connie, ‘how is the library being disrespected – ma’am?’

  There was a sudden unpleasant hush. Shock, anticipation of violence, confusion – maybe all three. I took a deep breath. Upset one Mallett and you upset them all. Mind you, the Malletts were always upset about something. Politics, local government, socialists, the price of onions. When How to Cook a Wild Potato went from the BBC to Channel Four they couldn’t talk about anything else for months. Irrespective, I took my Librarying seriously and I’d never been a huge fan of the Malletts – and a chance to piss them off with the added bonus of plausible deniability should never be missed. I paused for a moment, then turned to Connie.

  ‘Do you have a library card?’

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  ‘Then the loan goes ahead.’

  ‘Terrific,’ said Mrs Mallett, shedding all vestiges of Neville Chamberlain completely, ‘so we’re just going to start handing out books to every bunny that walks in the door?’

  ‘It’s a library, Isadora,’ I said, ‘we loan out books. And “bunny” isn’t really an acceptable term any more.’

  She laughed in a mocking fashion.

  ‘C’mon, Peter, it’s only a name, a word, a label – like a hat or a car or an avocado or something. It means nothing.’

  ‘What about “leporiphobic”?’ I asked. ‘I suppose that’s just a word too?’

  I felt Isadora rankle at the riposte. I shouldn’t really have said it, but oddly, I think I might have been grandstanding in Connie’s presence. But I was, in fact, correct. They were very hot on acceptable rabbit terminology down at the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce, and while RabCoT’s relationship with the rabbit community was strained, we had to appear even-handed and without bias. Even referring to rabbits collectively as ‘The Rabbit’ was a little iffy these days.

  ‘Twenty-five seconds!’ said Mrs Thatcher with increased agitation. ‘We have to be out of here, Mr Major.’

  Before Mrs Mallett had time to argue, I beckoned Connie to the front desk. The Sole Librarian stared at her library card, then at Connie.

  ‘Your name’s Clifford Rabbit?’

  ‘It’s my husband’s.’

  ‘That’s a Code 4-20 infraction right there,’ said Mrs Mallett in a triumphant tone – it turned out she had been studying my codes after all – ‘“Misuse of library property”.’

  ‘The book’s for my husband,’ said Connie. ‘Customers may collect books on others’ behalf. True?’

  She directed the last word at the Sole Librarian, who confirmed her agreement by stamping the library card and the book and handing them back.2

  ‘Ten seconds!’ yelled Mrs Thatcher, and we all hurried towards the door. The other members of the team had already made their way out, and as the door closed and the lock clunked, Mrs Thatcher and the Compliance Officers compared stopwatches. We had made it with only three seconds to spare.

  ‘Well done, everyone,’ I said, trying
to inject a sense of cheeriness into the proceedings, but only Stanley Baldwin and Mrs Thatcher were standing beside me. The others had instead congregated around the observers outside, and in particular Norman and Victor Mallett, presumably to question them on how they let a rabbit slip past them and into the library in the first place, and then figuring out the next move. Already I could see Norman’s neck turning a nasty shade of purple, and several of the villagers directed frosty glances in my direction.

  I looked around to see whether Connie was still about and caught sight of her as she leapt in a series of energetic bounds down the street towards the Leominster road, her library book in one hand and a mobile phone clamped to her ear in the other.

  She hadn’t recognised me at all.

  ‘Why was there a rabbit in the village?’ asked Mrs Thatcher, following my gaze.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, it was a good Blitz, Peter,’ she said, then hurriedly moved away as she saw Victor and Norman Mallett approach.

  ‘Now then,’ said Norman in the lofty tones of someone who believes, despite bountiful evidence to the contrary, that they have the moral high ground, ‘let’s have a little chat about whether bunnies are welcome in the library, shall we?’

  But he didn’t get to vent his anger. At that precise moment Mr Beeton gave out a quiet moan and collapsed in a heap. We called an ambulance while Lloyd George and Mrs Thatcher took turns in giving him CPR, but to no avail. We found out later he suffered a heart attack, which was the first and last time I’d had a Code 2-22: ‘Unavoidable death while Librarying’.

  ‘I told you he looked unwell,’ said Stanley Baldwin.

  Toast & TwoLegsGood

  RabCoT or the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce was originally named the ‘Rabbit Crime Taskforce’, but that was deemed too aggressive, so was quietly renamed, much to Mr Smethwick’s annoyance. He had wanted the original name to send a clear message that Cunicular Criminality would not be tolerated.

  ‘So Mr Beeton just keeled over?’ asked Pippa at breakfast on Monday morning. She’d been out all day and the night before and I hadn’t heard her come in, but that wasn’t unusual. I like to turn in early in order to read, and her bedroom was on the ground floor and she could totally look after herself these days. Sometimes it’s better not to know when daughters don’t come home for the night. She was twenty, but even so, still best not to know.

  ‘Yup,’ I said, ‘went down like a ninepin. Mind you, he was eighty-eight, so it’s not like it wasn’t expected.’

  I looked out of the kitchen window at Hemlock Towers opposite, where up until Saturday Mr Beeton had been a long-term resident. We lived in what had once been the stables to the old house, but unlike the Towers, it had been modernised over the years and was considerably more comfortable.

  ‘I wonder who will take it over?’ I mused – the impressively turreted building was the jewel in Much Hemlock’s not inconsiderable collection of fine buildings. Parts of it dated back to the fourteenth century and some say that the pockmarks in the façade were the result of erratic musket-fire during the Civil War. The marksmanship of parliamentary forces, I figured, was little better than that of Star Wars stormtroopers.

  ‘Someone like Mr Beeton, I should imagine,’ said Pippa, ‘lots of money, an imperviousness to cold.’

  ‘… and insanely suspicious of modern plumbing,’ I added, ‘with a fondness for mice and rising damp.’

  Pippa smiled and handed me a slice of toast with marmalade before pouring herself another coffee.

  ‘I was over at Toby’s yesterday evening,’ she said.

  ‘Ah.’

  My relationship with the Malletts, always strained, had become immeasurably more complex since Toby Mallett, Victor’s youngest, had been seeing Pippa on a regular basis. Despite his somewhat difficult family, Toby was handsome and generally well mannered, but I’d never entirely warmed to him. He’d professed vaguely liberal views, but I felt that was for Pip’s benefit, as I knew for a fact his opinions were really more in tune with his father’s. When the village put on a production of The Sound of Music, it was Toby who volunteered most enthusiastically to play Rolf. He told everyone it was so he could sing ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ opposite Pippa’s Liesl, but when in a less generous frame of mind I thought it was probably because he got a free pass to dress up as a Nazi.

  My own feelings aside, she could do a lot worse. She had done a lot worse. But there was Daughter Rule Number Seven to consider: don’t have opinions over boyfriends unless expressly asked, and then – well, play it safe and sit on the fence.

  ‘Did you get any feedback over Mr Beeton’s death?’ I asked.

  ‘No one blamed you,’ she said, as the Malletts would often use Pippa as a conduit of information in my direction. ‘He’d done the Blitz at least fifteen times and understood the risks of high-impact Librarying.’

  ‘I hope everyone else thinks the same.’

  ‘Aside from us, Mr Beeton wasn’t particularly well liked,’ observed Pippa. ‘D’you remember when he scandalised the village by publicly announcing: “the poor aren’t so bad”?’

  ‘I liked him for that,’ I said, chuckling at the memory.

  ‘So did I. But he’ll be forgotten in a couple of weeks. The village takes its grudges seriously. Remember when old Granny Watkins kicked the bucket? I’ll swear most people in the church were only there to personally confirm she was dead.’

  Pippa moved herself to the kitchen table and took a sip of coffee.

  ‘The Malletts had a few choice words over what they saw as your overly generous treatment of the rabbit,’ she added, ‘and within earshot of me so they wanted it repeated.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ I said, having expected something like this would happen.

  ‘Yes. Something along the lines of how they generally tolerated your left-wing views, but if you were going to start being “troublesomely ambivalent” towards undesirables there might be consequences.’

  I turned from the window to face her.

  ‘Would you describe me as left-wing, Pip?’

  I considered myself centrist, to be honest. Apolitical, in fact. I had no time for it.

  ‘Compared to the rest of the village,’ she said with a smile, ‘I’d say you’re almost Marxist.’

  Much Hemlock had always been a hotbed of right-wing sentiment, something that had strong historical precedent: the village had the dubious distinction of having convicted and burned more witches than any other English town in history. Thirty-one, all told, right up until a dark night in 1568 when they burned a real one by accident, and all her accusers came out in unsightly black pustules and died hideously painful deaths within forty-eight hours. Zephaniah Mallett had been the magistrate during the trials, but in a dark day for evolution he’d had children before dying so four centuries later Victor and Norman were very much in existence. They liked to keep family traditions alive, even if witch-burning was currently off limits.

  ‘I’m not troublesome, am I, Pip?’ I asked.

  She looked up and smiled, and I recognised her mother. She’d been gone ten years but I’d still not really got used to it.

  ‘You’re not troublesome, Dad. The Malletts are troublesome. I think Victor thought you’d been unduly accommodating to the rabbit, and that kindness might be misinterpreted as welcoming, and you know what they think about preserving the cultural heart of the village.’

  ‘Preserving the cultural heart of the village’ was the Malletts’ byline, mission statement, excuse and justification for their strident views all in one. Victor and Norman’s ‘cultural heart’ speech was really more to do with justifying their desire to block undesirables, a definition that was so broad it had to be broken down into numerous sub-categories, each of which attracted their ire in a distinctly unique way. It wasn’t just foreigners or rabbits, either: they had an intense dislike for those whom they described as ‘spongers’ – again, a net that could be cast quite broadly but conveniently excluded those on a gover
nment pension, taken early – and other groups that they felt were deeply suspect, such as VW Passat drivers: ‘the car of smug lefties’. Added to that was anyone who was vegetarian, or wore sandals, or men with ‘overly vanitised’ facial hair – or women who wore dungarees, spoke loudly and had the outrageous temerity to suggest that their views might be relevant, or worse, correct.

  ‘I think I let Connie borrow the book to piss them off,’ I said.

  ‘And I applaud you for it.’ She paused for a moment, then said: ‘How did you know her name?’

  ‘It was – um – on her library card.’

  I managed to lie quite convincingly, although I wasn’t sure why I was so quick to deny our friendship.

  ‘Short for Constance, I imagine. They often have Victorian names. Part of the whole Beatrix Potter3 Chic thing.’

  Pippa nodded, and there was a double beep from a car horn outside. Sally Lomax had been Pippa’s partner-in-crime since they first met in toddler group, and they were closer than sisters. Sally was at Nursing College too and could give her a lift – but was training in paediatrics, not management. Pippa finished her coffee and gathered up her stuff.

  ‘I put in a good word for you with the Malletts,’ she said, giving me a peck on the cheek. ‘I told them your offensive level of toleration would have been solely due to Library Rules Applying, and you weren’t a friend to rabbits any more than they were.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘See you this evening.’

  And she was gone out of the door.

  I tidied up, set the dishwasher, and at precisely nine o’clock gathered together my case, jacket and car keys and walked outside. Toby Mallett was waiting for me by the garage – we worked in the same office in Hereford and I often gave him a lift. Annoyingly – yet unsurprisingly – his father, Victor Mallett, was with him. We all wished each other cordial good mornings.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Victor.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said.