The Constant Rabbit Read online

  ‘You wouldn’t do that,’ I whispered.

  ‘Ever wonder how Flemming lost hers?’ he asked. ‘We had a disagreement a while ago. I think it was over company policy – or who was the best Batman. I forget which, but she’s totally on board now.’

  I think I started to sob then, quietly and without moving.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Now: are you going to be a good little human and tell me what I want to know? In return, you get a pension, fifty K, and you get to keep both your peepers.’ He paused, then added: ‘This is where you say, “Yes, Sir, Mr Ffoxe, sir, Mr Knox agrees with the fox, Sir”.’

  ‘Yes Sir, Mr Ffoxe sir,’ I whispered.

  ‘Close enough.’

  And in an instant, I was suddenly alone on the floor with Mr Ffoxe back in his seat. I climbed shakily to my feet, sat down and placed the monogrammed handkerchief the fox handed me to my eye.

  ‘So,’ he said in a quiet voice, ‘talk to me.’

  And I did. I told him everything.

  Bunnytrap Trap

  After the Battle of May Hill and as part of the government inquiry, it was found that Mr Ffoxe had plucked out and eaten eighteen human eyes in total, and the ensuing compensation claims were estimated to have cost £17.4 million.

  I explained pretty much everything about me and Connie and the Rabbits as accurately as I could while the vision slowly clouded in my right eye, the action of the blood seeping into the eyeball. He wanted to know every word Harvey uttered, every exchange we made. ‘What did he mean by that?’ ‘What was your impression of him as he looked in the ventilation ducts at MegaWarren?’ ‘Have you ever spoken to Patrick Finkle?’ ‘Do you think Constance Rabbit works for the Underground?’ ‘Do you think you’ll be seeing Harvey again?’

  ‘Actually,’ I answered in response to the last question, ‘I think I might. He said we’d meet again, at the time and place where the Venerable Bunty completes the circle.’

  For the briefest moment I saw a flicker of consternation pass over the Group Leader’s face. His eyes, I think, although small at the best of times, opened just a little bit wider – but then it was gone, and he was as poker-faced as ever, giving nothing away. He sat and stared at me again for some time, Tamara rubbing his shoulders.

  ‘OK,’ he said finally, ‘with the Rehoming imminent, the biggest fly in the ointment is the Bunty false prophet and the Underground. I need you to work for me. Be my eyes and ears.’

  ‘The deal was to tell you everything I know for my pension and fifty K.’

  The fox said nothing, pointed at my eye and grinned.

  ‘Let’s just suppose I agree,’ I said after a pause; ‘what would you have me do?’

  Mr Ffoxe outlined his plan. I was to keep office hours but sit them out in an interview room – bring crayons and a colouring book, he told me – and let my relationship with Mrs Rabbit develop; she would be released without charge. If she asked me to access the Taskforce’s databases, I was to report back and hand over the intel that Mr Ffoxe permitted. I was basically to report everything I heard, and especially the time and place I would meet with the Venerable Bunty.

  ‘I might not meet her,’ I said.

  ‘If she has foreseen it,’ said the fox, giving more credibility to Bunty’s powers than I thought possible of him, ‘then it will happen. And I want to be there to stop it.’

  Within ten minutes I was outside, blinking stupidly in the sunlight. I took a deep breath and made my way into town, gathering my thoughts. I was working out a plan of my own: to never speak to Connie again and avoid her at every opportunity.

  But that didn’t happen, of course.

  I texted Pippa as soon as they returned my phone and met her in the café at All Saints.

  ‘Shit, Dad,’ she said, ‘what happened to your eye?’

  ‘Mr Ffoxe threatened to take it out and eat it.’

  She winced and stared at me for a moment.

  ‘You’re not kidding, are you?’

  I told her how I was now acting as a bunnytrap trap for Mr Ffoxe and that both Bobby and Harvey were prominent members of the Rabbit Underground. As I spoke, her demeanour changed from simple concern to the panicky realisation that this was bigger and deeper and more serious than she might possibly have imagined.

  I also told Pippa that her relationship with Harvey was something I hadn’t mentioned, but given Mr Ffoxe’s powers of deduction, he either already knew or it wouldn’t be a secret for long – and that it would be a really good idea if she were to lay low for a while.

  ‘The last time Harvey spoke to me it was about you,’ I added. ‘He said to tell you it was real – and I don’t think he was lying.’

  ‘Rabbits rarely lie,’ said Pippa. ‘They take their greatest pride in preserving most strongly the parts of them that aren’t us.’

  I thought about her words carefully, and also about Connie. If rabbits rarely lied, then it stood to reason they didn’t misrepresent what they felt, either. If Connie was a bunnytrap then she might have been selected precisely because she did like me. One less subterfuge.

  Pippa departed within ten minutes after giving me a long hug. I asked her where she would go, and she said ‘she had somewhere safe in mind’, but I didn’t ask her any more questions. Best not, really. Once she was gone I sat there for an hour, then headed home. As I was passing the village of Slipton Flipflop I had a sudden thought that if Connie was a bunnytrap then she’d have probably guessed that I’d tell Mr Ffoxe everything – and I half expected them to be gone by the time I arrived home. Indeed, I was actually hoping they would be gone. It would give me licence to do nothing, and I so wanted to do nothing.

  I didn’t get my wish. Their Dodge was in the driveway and Major Rabbit was clipping the privet hedge while smoking his pipe. It was a warm afternoon, so he had draped his jacket over a garden fork and was working in his waistcoat. He gave me a cheery wave as I climbed out of the car, and I noticed that Connie was watering the large vegetable patch that had now replaced most of the lawn. If she was worried about being arrested and questioned all day, she wasn’t showing it. Connie’s apparent normality wasn’t the only surprise in store. Toby Mallett was busy repainting my garage door.

  ‘I’m ever so sorry, Mr Knox, for daubing obscenities on your garage door the other night,’ he said in an obsequious tone as soon as he saw me, ‘but I was very drunk and wasn’t fully in command of my senses. Papa told me the error of my ways, so I’m here making amends.’

  ‘Really?’ I said somewhat doubtfully. Apology and contrition really weren’t in the Malletts’ range of character traits. ‘Are you wanting to see Pip again?’

  ‘No!’ he said, eyes open wide in shock and making one of several nervous glances towards the Rabbits’ house. ‘I mean, no, thank you – that’s all past history. Has she found out about me sleeping with Arabella down at the pony club?’

  ‘Has she beckoned you down to her level and then thumped you in the eye?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Then that’ll be a no.’

  After discussing what colour to repaint the garage door over the primer he had already applied, he hastily departed with another nervous glance towards Hemlock Towers. Something was going on.

  I unlocked the door and went into my house, checked the post in the hall – bills and circulars, mostly – and then jumped in fright when I found Doc waiting for me in the kitchen.

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t do that,’ I said, ‘popping up like a jack-in-the-box. It’s very disconcerting.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but I need to talk to you about the trouble and strife.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The ball and chain. She-who-must-be-obeyed. Y’know, the missus.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, expecting trouble, ‘it was all a huge misunderstanding.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he said with a smile, laying a powerful paw on my shoulder. ‘Connie explained to me what happened and we had
a good laugh about it. Can I speak candidly?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He looked down and absently clicked his claws against the linoleum.

  ‘My aim with a pistol is not as true these days, and sooner or later I’m going to find myself at dawn on a foggy heath somewhere, staring down the barrel of a pistol held by some know-it-all young buck with a steadier hand while my seconds assure me everything will be all right when I know that it won’t.’

  He sat down at the kitchen table.

  ‘I don’t want to end up as one of those sad ex-alphas who live alone, their ears so full of holes you could use them to strain cabbage, each puncture a constant reminder of a love hard fought and eventually lost.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow.’

  ‘You and Connie seem to be quite chummy, and I’d like you to keep me in the loop about any affairs she’s having that you think might be truly serious. I know it’s a long time till the spring mating season, but spouse appropriation starts earlier and earlier these days, and if forewarned, I could chase off the competition with some hard-hitting rhetoric, cash or a pantomime display of male aggression – and in that way avoid a challenge.’

  ‘I get what you’re saying,’ I said, ‘but I’m not totally happy spying on your wife.’

  ‘It’s not spying when you love someone. I’d ask Bobby but those two are thick as thieves, and Kent, well, that boy is an inveterate burrower. Do you know I have to keep all the shovels hidden when he’s about?’

  ‘Shocking.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Doc, getting ready to leave and seemingly quite chirpy again, ‘shocking. You will tell me about Connie, though, won’t you? I need to keep my marriage together without having to fight any duels.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Stout fellow,’ said Doc. ‘By the by, you haven’t seen Bobby, have you? She packed her bags and left when I was in Hereford picking Connie up from the clink.’

  ‘No,’ I said, figuring that if she knew Harvey had been identified, she would probably be in for questioning next. It seemed odd that both our daughters were on the run from the Taskforce.

  ‘Jolly good,’ he said, gave me a smile, bounced clean out of the back door and was back gardening in under ten seconds.

  I heard the news of the TwoLegsGood demonstration over at Colony One just as I was making a casserole for supper. About two hundred Hominid Supremacists had converged at the entrance to the colony, angry that ordinary hard-working humans were being denied basic benefits while rabbits were being rehomed in ‘the lap of luxury’. While the demo was aggressively voluble it was not illegal, and the police and Taskforce seemed unwilling to move them on. Given Mr Ffoxe’s connections to TwoLegsGood, I couldn’t help wondering whether this was a lockdown by another name – to keep the Venerable Bunty from moving around the country, spreading, as Smethwick put it, ‘her dangerous message of insurrection’.

  I’d just popped the casserole in the oven when the doorbell rang. I thought it might have been Connie – ringing so as not to appear too forward – but it wasn’t. It was Victor and Norman Mallett.

  ‘Ah,’ I said warily, ‘good afternoon.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Peter. What happened to your eye?’

  ‘I caught it on a nail.’

  ‘Oh. May we come in?’

  ‘Actually, no. You told me I had forty-eight hours to leave the village and then shopped me to the Taskforce. I’ve still got eight hours until I default on your request, so you can leave me alone until then.’

  Victor and Norman looked at one another.

  ‘I think our comments might have taken been out of context when we gave you forty-eight hours to leave,’ said Victor. ‘I think what we actually meant was that you had forty-eight hours to stay.’

  ‘That explanation makes no sense.’

  ‘Yes – we came over to clarify.’

  ‘OK, so let me ask you something: what was the context when your son daubed “bunnyshagger” on my garage door?’

  ‘He did apologise and paint over it,’ said Victor. ‘If you look on the plus side you’ve got a repainted garage door.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I really should be thanking you. Look, I’ve lived in this village for fifty years. I was born here. I know everyone who lives here, and everyone knows me. And while Much Hemlock is a little right-wing, I thought we could all get along irrespective of political affiliation. But add a family of rabbits and everyone goes nuts.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Victor, ‘that’s what we were thinking. Norman and I feel we might have been … in a rush to judgement over you and the Rabbits and we’d like to make amends.’

  ‘Would that be word-amends or actions-amends?’ I asked suspiciously, as the first was abundantly common, and the second almost vanishingly rare.

  ‘Action-amends, naturally.’

  ‘OK, then,’ I said, eager to see how this might pan out as the Mallett brothers were famed throughout the county for their false platitudes. ‘A full apology to the Rabbits, a dropping of all hostilities, if anyone from UKARP or 2LG turns up you tell them to go home – and a position for Major Rabbit on the Much Hemlock Parish Council.’

  It was a ridiculous demand, and I fully expected them to laugh in my face. But they didn’t.

  ‘We can do that,’ said Victor, who’d controlled the council almost since the dawn of time.

  ‘And,’ I continued, wondering how far I could push this, ‘Mrs Rabbit is to cut the ribbon at the Much Hemlock Village Fete next weekend.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Norman. ‘Mrs Griswold and the vicar always do the opening. But while cutting the ribbon is plainly an insane suggestion, I could probably have Mrs Rabbit put in charge of the bottle stall.’

  ‘I was thinking of something more prestigious,’ I replied, as the bottle stall was by long tradition the entry point for volunteers, lunatics or people out of favour in the village. Less well thought of, even, than the shove ha’penny and whack-a-mole. ‘How about if she runs the tombola?’

  Victor and Norm laughed – the idea was, we all knew, preposterous. Mrs Fudge-Rigby had overseen the tombola at least since the sixties, and physically attacked the last person to suggest she might want to ‘take a break’.

  ‘OK, then,’ I said, having a bright idea, ‘what about judging the vegetables in the home produce tent?’

  Victor and Norman looked at one another.

  ‘Deal,’ said Victor.

  We shook hands on it and Victor and Norman, a day ago my mortal enemies, were now once again my friends, presumably courtesy of a discreet call from Mr Ffoxe, requesting them to leave us alone so my bunnytrap-trap efforts could continue unimpeded. I shut the door behind them, then watched out of the window as they walked away, patting each other on the back, a job, they thought, well done. They’d been like this from the moment I became aware of them aged eight, and they’d not changed one iota over the years: always trying to play people for their own advantage – and never once any good at it.

  Bouncing with Constance

  Bouncing was the sport of rabbits, and the mainstay of the Rabbit Games: Long Bounce, Vertical Bounce, Marathon, Sprint and Synchronised. It always looked unusual as rabbits before the Event never really did this – the bouncing they expressed now was more akin to kangaroo motion, and was a quirk of the process that brought them from all rabbit to mostly human.

  I rang in sick the following morning as my eye still hurt badly. My sleep was punctuated by nightmares – mostly about Mr Ffoxe clamping his jaws around my throat and squeezing so hard I couldn’t breathe.

  Once I’d made the coffee and put on the toast, I tuned into the news on the radio to see what had happened in Colony One overnight. The answer, as it turned out, was ‘not much’. TwoLegsGood had stayed outside the gates until 2 a.m., shouting their trademark anthem: ‘Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run, here comes a farmer with a gun gun gun’. While clearly offensive and an incitement to violence, an earlier court hearing had decided t
he words were from a ‘humorous ditty predating the Event’ so had historical precedent – and was thus allowable. The upshot of all this activity was that Colony One remained closed to all movement and would remain so, a Compliance Taskforce spokesman said, ‘until the safety of the rabbit population can be assured’.

  At about nine, the doorbell rang and there was Connie, bright as a button, all smiles and wearing a sports crop top and short skirt, brand new Nikes and a sweatband looped around the base of her ears.

  ‘Hello!’ she said in a chirpy voice. ‘Fancy a bounce?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘A bounce. I’m in training for the Herefordshire double marathon bounce next month, and I’m a little rusty on pace and rhythm. If you bounce too high on each cycle then you tire too quickly, and if you try to overstretch a bounce, the landing can be awkward. I need a safe twenty-four-mile-per-hour bouncing average to beat my PB, or even to have a hope of finishing in the top five.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘But I need to tell you something first. You remember the duelling pistols I was telling you about?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s irrelevant – I’m not going to duel with your husband.’

  ‘The Venerable Bunty thinks you will,’ she said, ‘and she’s rarely wrong.’

  ‘Why is she suddenly so interested in me?’

  ‘She’s interested in everybody. So, you remember the rhyme I told you?’

  ‘The one about how “the shot hits the spot if you’ve a croc on the stock, while the mark of the lark shoots wide of the mark”?’

  ‘Yes, but here’s the thing: he doesn’t use the pistol with the mark of the lark any more.’

  ‘He doesn’t?’

  ‘No – he replaced it with one that has an engraving of a rabbit.’

  ‘A gun with a bun?’

  ‘Yes. But you don’t want that.’

  ‘I don’t?’