The Constant Rabbit Read online

  ‘Good morning,’ said Toby.

  Once this complex ritual was over, Victor said:

  ‘Can I cadge a ride into the big smoke? The Zephyr’s in the garage at the moment. Carbon on the valves.’

  I agreed as I couldn’t not agree, while knowing full well this was less about getting a lift into Hereford, and more about me copping a bollocking for the Connie incident. We hadn’t got to the edge of the village before he began.

  ‘Sorry about getting out of my pram at the library,’ said Victor, ‘what with the memsahib giving you the ugly prawn over that stray member of the public. You were right – the rabbit was allowed to be there.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said, knowing this was usually how it worked. The charm, the flattery, the faux bonhomie – then the attempt to get what he actually wanted. Victor was as transparent as air, but nowhere near as useful. He’d probably ask me whether I knew who ‘that rabbit’ was next.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘do you know who that rabbit was?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The one in the library.’

  I’d been thinking about Connie most of the weekend. Back at uni we’d only met up for coffees and a few movies. Ten occasions, tops – and romance had never been mooted, much less acted upon – but she had made an impression on me, and I think, perhaps, I had a little on her. A demonstration had been planned when a review of university admission rules retrospectively forbade her attendance. The whole thing was precipitated by UKARP, when they were still agitators rather than serious political players. The anti-rabbit group had attempted to enrol eight goats, four earthworms and a pony named Diddy into various university courses, arguing that if rabbits could attend then so, logically, could any animal – even dumb, non-anthropomorphised ones. A High Court ruling agreed with them and Connie, along with all rabbits in higher education, was out. We’d never said goodbye, and had not kept in contact. I’d thought of looking her up on the work database, but never had.

  ‘I didn’t catch her name.’

  ‘Seen her before?’

  ‘I … don’t think so.’

  ‘It helps,’ said Victor, ‘to better manage broad policy in the village if we know whether events are a one-off or part of a pattern, especially with the judges of the Spick & Span awards due any week now. I don’t want what happened in Ross4 to happen here. You can’t move for bunnies, the whole town smells of lettuce and you barely hear English spoken at all.’

  ‘I went into the Poundland there the other day,’ added Toby, ‘and it was stuffed with rabbits all chattering in Rabbity. I swear they were not understanding me on purpose, just to make me feel unwelcome.’

  I made no answer, as there was no answer to make. What happened in Ross wasn’t to everyone’s liking, but it was all legal. I should know: it was a hot topic at work.

  ‘Could you run a few enquiries for us when you get into RabCoT?’ continued Victor. ‘I heard the rabbit said the book was for her husband Clifford, and there can’t be that many off-colony rabbits around here named Clifford who hold library cards.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s an appropriate use of resources,’ I said, not wanting to be a lackey of the Malletts, ‘and we only work in the accounts office. If the rabbit or her husband are legally off-colony, then it’s not a RabCoT matter anyway.’

  I glanced across at Victor. He was staring at me in an empty, unblinking fashion – something that was usually the early portent of a lost temper.

  ‘OK then,’ he said, ‘we can always ask TwoLegsGood to make some enquiries.’

  Of the three Hominid Supremacist groups currently active in the UK, TwoLegsGood were the largest, best organised – and most violent. I understood Victor Mallett’s gambit.

  ‘TwoLegsGood are thugs, pure and simple,’ I said. ‘Escalating the situation helps no one.’

  ‘They’re not thugs, they’re patriots of their species,’ replied Victor in a sniffy tone, ‘and while we applaud their enthusiasm and politics, I do admit they need to show a little restraint on occasion. A jugging makes them look like right-wing reactionaries and leporiphobics,5 which they’re not – merely realists with a legitimate concern over multispecism.’

  I sighed.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said.

  Victor Mallett smiled broadly. He liked it when he got his own way, and could do a passable imitation of a pleasant person once he did. It took a half-hour to get into Hereford, and I dropped Victor at Bobblestock.

  ‘Well, cheerio, old chap,’ he said once he’d climbed out of the car. ‘You and Pip must come round for dinner one day.’

  He didn’t really mean it, and I said that would be very nice, again not really meaning it.

  ‘Sorry about Dad,’ said Toby as we drove the remaining short distance into town, ‘but he only wants the best for the village.’

  ‘I’m sure Pol Pot only wanted the best for Cambodia,’ I replied, ‘but it didn’t really work out that way. Joke,’ I added, as I could see Toby about to raise the curtains on some theatre of umbrage, something the Malletts often did when even mildly challenged.

  ‘So,’ I said, wanting to change the subject, ‘who do you think’s replacing Daniels?’

  Daniels had been our Intelligence Officer, and about the most pleasant we’d had. But the job was stressful, and ‘pleasant’ wasn’t really a winning strategy when it came to working in RabCoT.

  ‘No idea,’ said Toby, ‘someone easy to work with, I hope.’

  I parked up outside the regional Rabbit Compliance Taskforce headquarters, a blocky building built in the thirties with half-arsed art-deco pretensions, and renamed the Smethwick Centre by Prime Minister Nigel Smethwick himself, who was very conscious of crafting his own legacy while he still wielded enough power to do so.

  Smethwick had begun his steep political climb as the Minister for Rabbit Affairs fifteen years before, when UKARP were only a coalition partner, and to celebrate his promotion greatly increased the number of things a rabbit could do wrong. He personally drafted the ‘Regularity Framework for Subterranean Construction’ and ‘The Orange Root Vegetable Licensing Act’. The new laws naturally increased rabbit arrest and incarceration rates, which Smethwick duly blamed on ‘increased cunicular criminality’, which was then, predictably and unashamedly, used to justify a greatly increased budget and workforce.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said as I noticed a small crowd of people across the entrance to the Taskforce headquarters, ‘looks like TwoLegsGood are upset about something again.’

  There were only four of them, and the gathering seemed more of a presence than an active demonstration. Despite the Hominid Supremacist group’s record of leporiphobic attacks, they generally stayed one step ahead of the law, and by a curious quirk of inverted stereotyping were not a bunch of semi-skilled neckless tattooed hooligans with IQs barely into double figures, but were predominantly middle class: retail, middle management, C of E fundamentalists, unemployed furriers and hatters, several doctors and barristers as well as a few strident environmentalists who saw the rise of the rabbit as ‘a potentially greater threat to biodiversity on the planet than humans’.6

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said one as we walked past. ‘Please don’t waver from the bold and righteous anthropocentric path.’

  Another was holding a banner exhorting that MegaWarren be opened sooner, and a third made some comment suggesting that the rabbit maximum wage was too high as it ‘placed an unseemly burden on industry’. We said nothing in reply as Taskforce guidelines forbade membership of, or association with, any Hominid Supremacist group. To be honest, the Taskforce and UKARP and 2LG all pretty much had the same views: the difference lay in legality, accountability and sanity.

  ‘Ah!’ said another voice from a smaller group who had been until now hidden from view on the other side of the street. ‘Can we speak to you about our work at the Rabbit Support Agency?’

  They were a group of only two, and positioned a hundred metres from the Smethwick Centre, legally speak
ing the closest they could get. The human was Patrick Finkle, who had been a founder member of RabSAg and was currently the Regional Chief. He had a pinched, haunted look about him, as though the last twenty-five years had been spent waiting for a dawn raid. I knew of him, and had seen him around a lot, but we’d never spoken. We weren’t allowed to chat to this bunch either.

  ‘Can we talk to you about the Rabbit Way?’ asked the second, a rabbit well known to the Taskforce named Fenton DG-6721. He was tall, snowy white and with piercing red eyes as befitted his Labstock heritage. He habitually wore dungarees and had half a dozen bullet holes in his ears. His charity work spoke volumes, and he would have been seen as the ‘acceptable face of rabbit/human integration’ if it wasn’t for his propensity for speaking out over rabbit issues with visiting dignitaries, something which had him labelled ‘troublesome’.

  ‘The Rabbit Way is bullshit,’ said one of the 2LG group from across the road. ‘You can take your gimcrack religion, vegan fundamentalism and lame idealism and poke it up your pellet slot.’

  ‘That’s what I enjoy most about Hominid Supremacists,’ returned Fenton in an easy manner, ‘their eloquence.’

  ‘We believe in hominid superiority not supremacy,’ he replied, parroting a legal ruling that had the latter deemed illegal, yet the former an acceptably realistic view, given the dominance of the species on the planet. ‘It’s an important distinction.’

  ‘It’s the same turd in a different wrapper,’ said Fenton, ‘but at least we have a workable policy regarding our sense of being, place within the biosphere and relationships with others of the same species. How’s the Declaration of Human Rights working out for you?’

  It had always been a contentious issue that one of the most lauded documents of the past fifty years was regarded with almost laughable derision by rabbits, whose own Way was based on a bill of responsibilities, whereby each individual was morally obliged to look after the well-being of others, rather than a bill of rights, where, the rabbit had decided, the onus was incorrectly laid upon the individual to demand that their rights were respected.

  The comment was returned by the 2LG group’s spokesman with an argument regarding primate hierarchy and the role of planet husbandry as a form of lofty paternalism, since it ‘had worked so dazzlingly well in Victorian-era factories’. We didn’t hear Finkle or Fenton’s reply as we were soon lost to earshot. The argument, the demonstration, our emotional distance from both – very much business as usual.

  ‘Did you see Finkle’s hands?’ said Toby.

  ‘Lopped,’ I replied, referring to the practice of voluntarily removing one’s own thumbs to show unequivocal non-opposable unity to the rabbit cause. ‘I heard he keeps them in a jar of vinegar at home.’

  It was a controversial move and had been met with overwhelming surprise and revulsion, but achieved what Finkle desired: the ongoing trust of the Grand Council and rabbits in general. To UKARP, Nigel Smethwick, the Ministry of Rabbit Affairs and the Taskforce, he was entirely the opposite: the reviled poster-boy for dangerous human/rabbit relations.

  ‘I once gave a thumbs-up sign to a bunch of teenage rabbits,’ said Toby, ‘before I understood how offensive it was. They caught me after a seven-mile chase.’

  ‘Should have tried to escape in your car.’

  ‘I was in a car. They can hop pretty fast when they want to.’

  ‘What did they do to you? Ironic taunts, sarcasm, species-shaming?’

  ‘No, more of a round-table discussion where they suggested I confront the shortcomings of my species, then told me how rabbit governance was not so much based on laws as we understand them, but a mutually agreed set of understandings and customs where non-compliance would be a suboptimal approach to peaceful coexistence.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’ I asked, wanting to see whether Toby’s politics had changed.

  ‘Same old holier-than-thou rabbit bullshit.’

  His politics, I noted, had not changed.

  We accessed the building through the main entrance on Gaol Street, showed our IDs to the guard who diligently checked them as she’d done every morning, fifteen years for me, two for Toby, then opened the inner glass security doors, and we made our way past the Compliance Officers working on the large, open-plan ground floor. There were estimated to be just under a million anthropomorphised rabbits in the country, and only a hundred thousand or so had the legal right to live outside the fence. The rest, by well-established statute, remained inside the colonies, their rights to travel strictly controlled by a series of permits.

  ‘Have you heard if the Senior Group Leader is due in today?’ asked Toby.

  ‘I heard not,’ I replied, ‘but the word will get around if he is.’

  ‘He frightens me,’ said Toby.

  ‘I heard he even frightens Nigel Smethwick, and that must take some doing.’

  This was indeed true. Even the most strident and voluble leporiphobics in the building regarded the Senior Group Leader as ‘somewhat inclined towards uncontrollable anger’. It didn’t seem to dent his general support, though.

  Here at the Western Region Rabbit Compliance Taskforce we had responsibility for the 150,000 residents living on the hill above Ross, about twenty-five miles away. Rabbit Colony One was a large and sprawling warren of tunnels constructed beneath allotments, laundry rooms, sandwich-making factories and the ubiquitous call centres and assembly plants7 for electrical goods, the whole encircled by a rabbit-proof fence which the Taskforce declared was to ‘protect the most vulnerable rabbits from dangerous Hominid Supremacists’. No one believed them, least of all the rabbit.

  We walked through the connecting corridor to the newer part of the building, up to the third floor and into our office, which was spacious and scrupulously tidy, walls painted a calming green shade, pot plants scattered about and a large framed poster of a mountain reflected in a lake in New Zealand that was meant to be ‘motivational’, but to me looked like a mountain reflected in a lake. Despite the large windows the office wasn’t particularly bright and airy. The windows didn’t open and the glass was semi-silvered to render us invisible to eyes outside. It was said they were bulletproof, too, installed when the concept of violent rabbit direct action groups had still been just about believable.

  Agent Whizelle had not yet arrived but Section Officer Flemming was sitting in her office, one of the two glass-fronted cubicles that looked into the shared space, but which afforded her and Agent Whizelle privacy if required. Susan Flemming was smiley and good-looking, which made her appear considerably more pleasant than she actually was. Her strident views on hominid superiority mixed with an incurious intellect and moral detachment made her almost ideal for a long and successful career in the Rabbit Compliance industry. On her office wall was not a picture of family, but a picture of herself, Prime Minister Nigel Smethwick and the Senior Group Leader, presumably at the time Flemming was made Section Officer. But despite her good looks, Flemming had an expressionless demeanour and her one eye – she never explained how she lost the other – didn’t blink much or seem to have free movement in its socket; she rotated her head to look about, which reminded me of a poorly operated marionette.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Knox,’ she said.

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘You’re on Operations today,’ she said, without preamble. ‘The new Intelligence Officer is bringing an ongoing case with him. Whizelle and he have been planning it all weekend and I don’t want you to disappoint.’

  I didn’t like the sound of this.

  ‘I have an exemption from doing Ops on account of my fallen arches.’

  I swayed a little on my feet by way of confirmation.

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Flemming.

  ‘No, I really do. Signed by the Company Doctor.’

  ‘I wasn’t saying “bullshit” to you having the note,’ explained Flemming. ‘It’s the fallen arches that’s bullshit. Look, Toby doesn’t have the experience or the training, and no one else is available. RabC
oT needs field-worthy Spotters, not ones who spend their days cooped up like chickens.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘—you need to step up to the plate, Knox. Some of us have the distinct feeling your enthusiasm for the job might be waning. If you don’t get out and about, we might decide on a performance review.’

  ‘I had one not two months ago.’

  ‘I was thinking more of a personal review from the Senior Group Leader.’

  She tapped her long fingernails on the desk and cocked her head on one side.

  This was different. A ‘performance review’ by the Group Leader was less of a cosy chat about one’s work, and more a sustained and very personal profanity-laden rant.

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘I would. He said you should drop by and discuss things if you refuse to go on Ops.’

  I felt my palms go damp and a knot seemed to form in my stomach. No one liked to upset the Senior Group Leader. Operatives more senior than me had resigned rather than face a dressing-down, and bold men and women were known to come out of his office in a state of traumatic shock at his verbal threats and intimidation. Few but the brave even made eye contact, and I knew for a fact that Toby had taken a day off work after a particularly aggressive encounter in the elevator.

  ‘I’ll go on Ops,’ I said. I needed at least another ten years’ employment before I could even think about retirement.

  ‘Good,’ said Flemming. ‘You can meet our new Intelligence Officer in the briefing room at midday; he’ll tell you what he wants you to do.’

  I sat down at my desk and was about to start work when Adrian Whizelle walked in.

  The best you could say about him was that on a good day he was hardly obnoxious at all, which made him seem like Julie Andrews in comparison to the Senior Group Leader or Nigel Smethwick. He’d been co-opted into Rabbit Identity Fraud from the intelligence-gathering arm of RabCoT and had a useful coping mechanism in the often stressful compliance industry: a deep and very powerful loathing for rabbits.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Whizelle.

  We returned his salutation, Toby more enthusiastically as the two of them played squash or racketball or something. Whizelle was tall and dark, as thin as a yard-broom with long arms and legs that gangled like those of a clumsy teenager as he walked. His pointed features gave little away and his small black eyes seemed to constantly dart about the room. He also had a massive twin-tracked scar down his cheek that ended in a wonky jaw, the result of a rabbit bite following a snatch squad op that went south; the rabbit’s teeth had been scaled up during the Anthropomorphising Event and now had a sharpness and muscular strength that could go through flesh as though it were wet paper.