The Constant Rabbit Read online

  ‘Weasels fight duels too?’

  ‘No, but if they did.’

  ‘We’re not having an affair, Doc, I promise you.’

  He stared at me and blinked.

  ‘I wish I could believe you,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Why don’t we have a pint after dinner at the Unicorn and thrash it out there?’

  ‘OK,’ I said, glad to move away from the subject for a couple of hours.

  We walked the rest of the way in silence, and inside my pocket I clicked the Parker pen to activate the listening device.

  ‘Two more in the burrow,’ called out Doc as we walked in the door, using a traditional rabbit greeting.

  ‘Hello,’ said Connie, popping her head round the kitchen door. ‘How did the council meeting go?’

  ‘They were eating out of my paw,’ said Doc.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No, not really – it was a charade. They despised me with a vengeance.’

  ‘Same old same old,’ said Connie.

  While Doc went off to lay the table, I went into the kitchen and passed Connie a note I had prepared. It was written in block capitals because their visual cortex was not so attuned to reading as ours, but was absolutely clear:

  I AM WEARING A WIRE

  She pointed to a message on the fridge constructed out of magnetic letters:

  I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT BE

  She smiled, winked at me and squeezed my hand.

  Once we were all seated and grace had been said – in Rabbity this time, as I think they thought I was a good enough friend not to take offence – Connie ladled out the stew and we ate, the Rabbits making slurpy noises with the occasional clinking of spoons against teeth, as cutlery and their dentition didn’t really work very well together. During dinner we spoke briefly of the latest episode in The Archers, the first time a storyline had featured rabbits, with the Grundys employing a rabbit stockman named Tim who was embroiled in some off-colony politics. Kent said that Rabbit TV was a lot better, even though How Deep Was My Warren had recently been plunged into controversy.

  ‘A recent shake-up has reduced the ensemble cast to barely six thousand,’ explained Connie, ‘which makes it all a little easy to follow.’

  ‘Dumbing down for a young rabbit’s short attention span,’ added Doc in a huffy manner. ‘Kids today can barely follow six hundred simultaneous storylines. I blame the fad for board games, personally.’

  Connie, in what I realised later was an effort to steer the conversation to where she needed it, mentioned that Fortean Times had reported that a moose shot dead by a hunter was later found to have amassed a considerable library of George Eliot novels, critical appraisals, biographies and poetry, and had been attempting to write a dissertation on how Eliot’s life could be viewed from the viewpoint of even-toed ungulates singled out for their lack of apparent good looks.

  ‘I think moose are rather handsome,’ said Doc thoughtfully, ladling out seconds. ‘They just need to keep their chins up a little.’

  ‘It’s the weight of the antlers,’ said Kent, who had taken on the young male human trope of being an expert on absolutely everything.

  ‘Probably a sense of low self-esteem,’ added Connie. ‘Maybe that’s why they always look so gloomy.’

  ‘Was it really another Event?’ I asked. ‘One hears stories like this, but it might simply have been another hoax.’

  ‘Goulburn,’ said Connie and Doc together.

  It had been a contentious subject since the stories first emerged, but the Event in the UK was decidedly not the only one. They were either rare or commonplace, depending on your interpretation of events, and how open to evidence of conspiracies you were. Eleven years after the UK Event and near a town called Goulburn in Australia, there were reports of the usual overly dramatic conditions that presaged all of the alleged Events across the globe: power surges, electrical storms, dogs howling, showers of fish, a full moon. There had also been talk of a mobilised armed fast-response team appearing in the area within two hours, leading to questions in the Australian parliament to determine whether the government, in line with many others, had a covert ‘Extermination at First Discovery’ policy towards potential Anthropomorphic Eventees. The government denied a cover-up, so what had occurred remained in the sphere of conjecture, but urban legend told of ‘a dozen or so man-sized wombats wearing singlets and shorts’ being bulldozered into a mass grave with a shedload of empty beer cans. The apparent sole survivor was a merino ram named Rambo, who gave several lengthy interviews over the phone, interspersing what he knew of the affair with exhortations to drop in and visit Goulburn, which was ‘really jolly nice’. The interviews abruptly stopped the same day a ram was found shot dead behind the bandstand. There was no evidence that he was the Eventee, but the townspeople, annoyed at the government intervention and pleased by the publicity, put up a statue in his honour anyway.57

  ‘Stories come out from time to time,’ said Doc, ‘but the only places we know that have entertained an Event are the UK, Kenya and Oregon. But we think there might have been more.’

  Only Kenya had accorded the Eventees full human status. But since they were elephants and had a gestation period of two years, their numbers were never likely to be high and they were entirely unthreatening – and, as it turned out, very funny, charming and good on wind instruments. Firyali Elephant, the spokesphant of the group, now worked as the minister of the interior, and was tipped as a possible PM, even after the scandal involving the bootlegged copies of Dumbo.

  The bears in Oregon generally kept to themselves, but had recently been given Second Amendment rights, so were legally allowed to shoot hunters in self-defence – and did so quite frequently, much to the annoyance of hunters, who considered it ‘manifestly unfair’ because the bears, now suitably armed, were actually better hunters than they were.

  ‘The unspoken policy is eradication at first appearance,’ said Connie. ‘No one wants what has happened here to happen anywhere else.’

  ‘Has anyone looked for a link between the Events,’ I said, ‘to get an idea of what is causing it?’

  ‘Nothing concrete so far,’ said Kent, ‘just bundles of speculation. In that manner it’s a little like trying to explain Lost.’

  ‘There could be another reason for the move to MegaWarren,’ mused Connie, ‘that is nothing to do with incarceration, population control or the exploitation of the rabbit workforce.’

  ‘Such as?’ I asked, playing my part as best as I could, given that we were being listened to by the Taskforce right now.

  ‘Clearing the colonies will flush the Venerable Bunty out, but they don’t want her so the other rabbits will fall into line – they suspect the Venerable Bunty might be behind the Events. That she’s a physical manifestation of the Ancestral Earth Mother Gaia, here to cause trouble for the dominant species, who, let’s face it, have been getting a little too big for their own frontal lobes recently.’

  We all fell into the sort of silence one adopts when a friend previously thought of as sober and clear-headed suddenly announces that the world is flat.

  ‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ said Doc in a scoffy sort of voice. ‘Gaia is a myth, sweetheart, like Zeus and Bacchus and Loki and Yoda and—’

  ‘And Lago?’ said Connie.

  Doc fell silent.

  ‘Faith and religion and spiritual belief are one thing,’ I said, ‘but creating anthropomorphised animals out of thin air is quite another. You think all this was somehow divinely inspired? It doesn’t seem very likely.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Kent slowly, ‘if you think about it, talking rabbits spontaneously anthropomorphised have a chance-factor ratio of around 1 x 1089, which, while not totally impossible, is about as likely as the universe spontaneously turning into cottage cheese. The fact that we’re here suggests that tremendously unlikely things can happen – which would make Gaia reappearing to tweak a few things for the better not so very daft at all.’

  ‘You’re formulating a mathemat
ical proof for the existence of the primordial earth mother based on talking-rabbit probability?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t that make everything possible?’

  ‘Within the multiverse,’ said Kent, ‘everything is possible.’

  ‘That … is … enough!’ said Doc, jumping to his feet. ‘This conversation is just getting, well, too, too … metaphysical.’

  And he stormed out of the room, muttering something about the standard model.

  ‘Doc is more of an empiricist,’ explained Connie, then added: ‘Kent, darling, would you put on the kettle for coffee?’

  Kent dutifully went off to the kitchen.

  ‘Listen,’ said Connie in a quiet voice, ‘the Venerable Bunty is key to the Rehoming. With her at liberty, a stand-off between the rabbit and the Taskforce would be a long and torturously expensive affair. There’s lots of food: half of the colonies are laid to market gardening, and the growing season is only half done. We can keep the Bunty moving around, but ultimately they’ll find her – which is why we have formulated … a plan.’

  ‘A plan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She didn’t elucidate further as Doc had walked back in, his half-finished apple crumble a greater draw than talk of impossibilities. Connie didn’t mention the Venerable Bunty again, but didn’t need to. I think she’d said what she wanted, and to the audience she wanted to hear her – not me, but Whizelle and Ffoxe and Smethwick and anyone else who was listening.

  ‘Well,’ said Doc, once the dinner things were washed up and I had said that I should probably make a move, ‘it’s still early. Do you want to have that swift bevvy in the Unicorn so we can talk about … y’know?’

  I was hoping he’d leave the subject alone for longer, but pre-mating season wife appropriation issues were a big thing to rabbits.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go to the Unicorn? Despite indications to the contrary, we’re still both social pariahs in the village right now.’

  ‘And a swift bevvy with the locals,’ replied Doc cheerfully, ‘will be just the ticket to change it. Wait there and I’ll get my coat.’

  Cordiality Collapse

  … Even after eight years, I am still undecided whether the rabbit were the instigators of the Event, victims of it or simply part of a larger plan laid by a higher power. Even now, there are more questions than answers …

  The sun had long sunk below the horizon when we stepped out of Hemlock Towers, and the skies were a deep navy blue, the stars bright, the air clear – a perfect summer’s night. We walked down the lane in silence, took a left and then a right into the main street. Doc chatted amiably about how when in the forces he was always popular on forward operations as he could bounce vertically upwards about twenty feet, good for reconnaissance, although not without mishap as it made him a target – albeit a brief one – for enemy snipers.

  ‘See that one here?’ he asked, pointing at a bullet hole in his ear that was smaller than the others.

  ‘Tikrit?’

  ‘Kidderminster. Saturday nights can get pretty insane. Hang on.’

  His mobile phone had just rung.

  ‘That’s odd,’ he said, staring at the screen, then putting the mobile to his ear. ‘Yes, Honeybounce?’

  He listened intently for a while, looked at me, then hung up.

  ‘You go ahead,’ he said, ‘mine’s a pint of Rancid Bishop,58 and get me some Tyrrells – sea salt flavour.’

  And he bounced back off in the direction of his house. I stood there for a moment, hesitant, but carried on since I’d come this far already. A few minutes later and I was in the lounge bar of the Unicorn, all seventies decor, beer-stained carpets and Constable prints on the walls faded to pallid variations of the colour green.

  Worryingly, it all went quiet as I walked in. If someone had been playing the piano, it would have stopped. There were about a dozen people present. Victor Mallett was sitting with his brother and a couple of others I only vaguely recognised. The room was staring at me silently. The recent entente cordiale seemed to have evaporated as swiftly as it had arrived.

  I walked up to the bar.

  ‘A half of Guinness and a pint of Rancid Bishop, please, Janice.’

  ‘Right-o.’

  She began the slow pour of the Guinness and then started to pull the Rancid Bishop.

  ‘Who’s the Bishop for, Peter?’ asked Norman from the other end of the bar.

  ‘Your new parish councillor,’ I replied.

  ‘That post was rescinded eight minutes ago,’ said Victor, ‘as was minding the bottle stall at the village fete.’

  ‘We negotiated up from bottle stall to judging the vegetables,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Whatever. It doesn’t matter, Peter old chap. I could have promised her the tombola and the opening ceremony – she was never going to do any of it.’

  I felt the chill in the room. Villagers stuck together; it was what they did. That would have been all well and good if it was about the church roof fund appeal or the Spick & Span awards, but not if you were the recipient of their combined outrage. I took the bugged Parker pen out of my pocket and placed it on the counter.

  ‘Major Rabbit won’t be joining you,’ said Norman. ‘Pour the ale away, Janice.’

  Janice looked at me. She and I went back a long way. I’d let her copy my schoolwork when we were nine, because I knew she was having a rotten home life.

  ‘Pour it, Janice.’

  Janice continued to pour the ale, and a dull, portentous silence filled the room.

  ‘Look here, Peter,’ said Victor, ‘we were once good friends and we’ll be good friends again. There’ll be a place in the village for you, once everything’s back to normal. Sit down and drink your Guinness, and … take your time.’

  I didn’t at first understand what he was trying to say, but then my eyes fell upon the table in the far corner, the one where Dicky the drunk had sat before his life hobby finally caught up with him. There was an unfinished glass of whisky on the table, a smouldering Sobranie in the ashtray and a folded-up copy of Fox and Friends.

  I stood up, but so did Victor.

  ‘Peter,’ he said more seriously and, oddly, it was about the only time he had shown me a shred of empathy or concern, ‘don’t get involved. Not with this. You can look the other way.’

  I headed towards the door but found my way blocked by Norman, who pushed me hard in the chest. He was a heavy man, and while tall, I’m not that weighty, and he easily put me off balance and I found myself sprawled on the floor, to several shocked intakes of breath from the people in the bar. Bullying coercion was one thing, physical violence quite another.

  Before I knew it I was on my feet and made a wild sprint towards Norman. I put out a fist where I thought his face might be and placed my full weight behind the blow. I surprised myself by actually connecting with his chin in a quite forceful manner – fluke, I think, as I’d never fought anyone, not ever – and we both went rolling out of the door into the street. I picked myself up and made off towards Hemlock Towers, the sound of Victor saying ‘Let the silly sod go, Norm’ echoing in my ears as I ran.

  I took a leaf from the Rabbits’ book and ran straight into the house without knocking, reasoning to myself that Mr Ffoxe’s actions might be postponed or at least softened into mere threats by my presence. I stumbled into the oak-panelled hall to find Doc and Connie standing there, seemingly unconcerned. Of Mr Ffoxe, there was no sign.

  ‘Hello,’ said Doc with a smile. ‘What do I owe you for the Rancid Bishop?’

  ‘Mr Ffoxe is in the village,’ I said, breathless after the run.

  ‘D’you know, I thought I could smell Old Spice on the air,’ said Doc, apparently with little concern.

  ‘You’re not worried?’

  ‘Constance told me everything. She’s a member of the Underground, y’know.’

  There was a hint of pride in his voice.

  ‘And Bobby and Harvey,’ I said, ‘and now probably Pippa, too. Look, I saw some unfamiliar cars parked up o
n the way here. I think there might be other Taskforce officers about, and the faces I didn’t recognise in the Unicorn looked blandly middle-class enough to be members of TwoLegsGood. You’re in a lot of danger and you need to get out. I never thought they’d act this fast.’

  ‘We’re not running,’ said Connie. ‘It all ends here and now. He’ll ask me what I know of the Venerable Bunty’s greater plans and movements, I’ll tell him nothing, and that will be it.’

  ‘You don’t have a chance,’ I said, ‘he’s a fox, for Christ’s sake, a four-legged multi-fanged rabbit-killing machine.’

  Doc and Connie’s ears popped up as a rapid series of thumps were heard on the upstairs floor.

  ‘In the back garden between the runner beans and cabbages,’ said Doc, reading Kent’s lookout thumps perfectly. ‘They like to sneak up in an unannounced assault so they can paralyse us with fear before they pounce. I think it excites them. The vixens too,’ he added. ‘In fact, I think they’re worse.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘you’ve got to leave. He’ll kill you all. Kent and Bobby and everyone you ever knew.’

  There was another series of rapid thumps on the floor upstairs, and Doc and Connie moved so they were with me, at the far end of the hall facing the door to the kitchen. Connie’s hind leg quivered anxiously. As we watched, the door to the kitchen opened a crack and a whiskery snout sniffed the air cautiously. We were about twenty feet away, with Doc taking up a defensive position a couple of yards in front of us and to the right.

  ‘Hello, Doc,’ said Mr Ffoxe.

  ‘Hello, Torquil.’

  ‘Been a while.’

  ‘Never long enough. Haven’t seen you at any regimental get-togethers.’

  ‘I’ve moved on,’ said Mr Ffoxe. ‘Dwell in the past and you’re stuck in the past. Your wife has some intel about the Bunty that I want, and she’s going to give it to me. We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the exceptionally unpleasant way.’

  ‘Far as I recall there’s only ever an unpleasant way between your kind and mine.’