The Constant Rabbit Page 32

  ‘You’re on sandwich-making duty,’ said Doc. ‘It’s important everyone gets to eat before the attack.’

  ‘You wanted me in the colony to make cucumber sandwiches?’

  ‘Each contributes according to the level of their abilities. Besides, we were getting low on doilies. You can’t serve cucumber sandwiches on a plate without doilies.62 It’s just not the done thing.’

  I opened the box Lance had given me, and it was indeed full of doilies. Quite nice ones, too. Plain white. Ornate.

  ‘Hello, Mr Knox,’ said Kent, who seemed to be in charge, ‘you can be on cucumber-slicing duty. It’s more efficient with fingers – even without thumbs you’re more dexterous than us. We can slice, but not slice thin, and that’s the secret of really good cucumber sandwiches.’

  I turned to say goodbye to Doc, but he had already gone. I think he removed himself quietly on purpose. The dialogue between us was done, our understanding was complete. I wouldn’t see him again, nor ever know what happened to him, although it was likely he faced his death with more courage than I would ever possess. I took my place next to a young woman who was also missing her thumbs, and she nodded politely, gave me a sharp knife and I started slicing, although not without some difficulty. I’d only recently lost my thumbs and it was the first knife I’d handled since getting out of custody.

  ‘You came prepared,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The chef’s hat.’

  We were, I learned later, only one of twenty-six work gangs making cucumber sandwiches, the snack of choice for rabbits when nerves need to be calmed and the future is in doubt. Carrots are more for pleasure and everyday eating, dandelion leaves for when you just want to shoot the breeze – equivalent to a cup of coffee and a Danish. Radishes are for a hangover, parsnips for when you need a boost, turnips when there’s nothing left in the larder. There were gallons of tea, too, but that was handled by someone else.

  I worked for ninety minutes, and must have sliced several hundred cucumbers. The finished sandwiches – once given a sprinkling of salt and with the crusts cut off – were taken off by waiter rabbits who plied backwards and forwards between us and the troops with the sandwiches on trays. It all worked in a rota system, so everyone got to go outside and offer words of encouragement, and to say their farewells. The news that filtered back was not good. Numerous drones had been seen overhead, and more artillery pieces had been observed moving into position and then waiting at readiness. Tanks and bulldozers were massed at the main gate, and infantry had moved up behind the tanks in case the rabbit had weapons of which they were unaware. And everywhere, ahead of everything, were the foxes, hundreds and hundreds of them, grunting and howling and yelping in their excitement, a murderous carpet of orange-coloured hate.

  Most of this I found out much later on when researching for my book. It was Smethwick who had first encouraged, then begged the use of flame-throwers to clear the warrens, as rabbits, he said, ‘are full of surprises’. The ranking army officer, to his credit, told Smethwick that ‘if you want to do that kind of shit, old boy, you can get your own people to do it. There’ll be no unnecessary suffering to rabbits on my watch. I’m not sidestepping the ICC63 on taxonomic grounds only to be collared by the RSPCA. It’s conventional force only. Any overreach is on your shoulders – and don’t you forget it.’

  Although I was busy and quite swept up in an odd shared sense of destiny, at the back of my mind was also survival – which involved surrendering to the first human I met. A fox, I knew, would probably be after revenge. They’d know who I was, not least because of the fox claw that was still around my neck.

  The Battle of May Hill

  The rabbit’s ‘Circle of Lifefullness’ has since been adopted by humans, and the movement is growing. Some say it was what the rabbits were here to do in the first place, to deliver a new faith, a new way of doing things. I try to adhere to the Five Circles as much as my human wiring allows, the same as the rest of us.

  ‘Take a break, Mr Knox,’ said Kent when I was down to my last cucumber. ‘Why not take a tray up to Mum? She’s with the Venerable Bunty and the commanders at the top of the hill.’

  I glanced at the clock. It was half past seven. Thirty minutes to the attack.

  I loaded up a tray, dispensed with the chef’s hat and made my way out of the meeting house and into the colony. All seemed quiet, the only movement from those who were wielding trays piled high with cucumber sandwiches and offering up refills of tea. The rabbits seemed to have lined themselves up ten deep around the entranceways, ready to defend themselves, wherever the first wave of foxes would arrive.

  I walked to the top of May Hill from which there was a commanding position to view the battle. It took me a while to get up there, and it was five to eight by the time I arrived.

  ‘I brought up some refreshments,’ I said once there was a suitable lapse in the conversation. I noted that they were all does, all Wildstock, and all speaking in Rabbity. Connie noticed me and walked over to help herself, accompanied by the Venerable Bunty.

  ‘Just the ticket,’ said Connie, eating several sandwiches in quick succession. ‘Glad you could make it. Lance did a good job, I hear.’

  I told her he had and then thanked them both for leaving a back door from which I could escape. The Venerable Bunty told me it was the least they could do, but when I said I would leave them to their battle, Connie asked me to stay.

  ‘You need to be here,’ she said simply. ‘Did you and Doc duel it out?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And?’

  ‘He let me win.’

  ‘I thought he might.’

  ‘This battle,’ I said, ‘can you win?’

  ‘In a traditional sense, no,’ said Connie, ‘but sometimes, when the long game is played, you can lose a battle and still win a war.’

  ‘Did killing Mr Ffoxe actually make a difference?’

  ‘It showed that foxes could and should be subject to justice. Mr Ffoxe killed over three thousand rabbits that we know of, and wouldn’t have stopped.’

  ‘But wasn’t he just the shill?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t Smethwick have been the target?’

  ‘We needed to delay and escalate things all at the same time. The timing had to be just right. You’ll see.’

  They went back to talking tactics and I stood there, feeling spare and useless.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  It was Pippa, the billiard-smooth grass of the hill no impediment to her movement.

  I gave her a hug and she said she was with Harvey, who waved to me from the communications table set up under an oak tree. He had a dozen or so field telephones in front of him which rang occasionally and were answered by a clerk, who then wrote down a report on a piece of paper and presented it to the Venerable Bunty’s aide-de-camp.

  ‘They can’t win,’ I said to Pippa.

  ‘I think they know that, Dad – but then much depends on your definition of winning.’

  ‘But you’re OK?’

  She looked across at Harvey, then back to me, and smiled the most radiant of smiles.

  ‘I have never been happier.’

  I was about to tell her that I’d wanted to hear that for a long, long, time, but I was interrupted by a large explosion as one half of the entranceway collapsed into a pile of rubble. The attack had begun. There was a loud rasp of coordinated artillery fire as a volley of shells flew into the colony and exploded amongst the cucumber frames and runner-bean poles. I heard the revving of tank engines as they advanced through the damaged gateway behind the bulldozers. More chilling than all this, however, were the whoops, cries, yelps and barks of the excited foxes, and the screams of terrified rabbits.

  As we watched and listened, the smoke now drifting up and across the hill, there was a second explosion at the northern gateway, and another volley of artillery fire that tore up the gardens, revealing the lights in the tunnels beneath.

  I could see Connie staring out across
the swirling smoke at the rich fertile land of Gloucestershire. Soft earth, and abundant grass. The summer was not yet over, and there were still long evenings for rabbits to gambol. On the horizon the rim of the rising full moon was just beginning to show. Connie turned to the Venerable Bunty and they both nodded in agreement.

  ‘I’m going to complete the circle before we have too much suffering,’ said Bunty. ‘I thought our presence would at the very least give humans pause for reflection, but it seems not, or at least, not yet. It may happen, we live in hope. Best say your goodbyes.’

  Connie turned to me.

  ‘It’s not working out for us, Pete. Driving cars and talking and having TV was kind of fun, and clothes and eating out totally rock. But the hate, the fear, the greed. It just doesn’t make any sense. You’re trying to run a twenty-first-century world on Palaeolithic thoughts and sentiments.’

  ‘I think it’s in our nature.’

  ‘I disagree,’ she replied. ‘Humans have a very clear idea about how to behave, and on many occasions actually do. But it’s sometimes disheartening that correct action is drowned out by endless chitter-chatter, designed not to find a way forward but to justify petty jealousies and illogically held prejudices. If you’re going to talk, try to make it relevant, useful and progressive rather than simply distracting and time-wasting nonsense, intended only to justify the untenable and postpone the real dialogue that needs to happen.’

  Sometimes it takes a non-human to say what it is to be a good human. In the ultimate hypocrisy, Smethwick and UKARP and 2LG and all the others that accused the rabbits of unsustainable overpopulation should have turned the accusation on themselves. The rabbits weren’t the rabbits – we were.

  ‘So what circle are you completing?’ I asked as the meeting house suffered a direct hit and erupted in a ball of fire.

  ‘We’re going home,’ she said simply. ‘We’ve done about all we can for the moment.’

  I looked at Pippa, who had her arms wrapped tightly around Harvey, and I knew then what their play was. Whatever had given them their humanness could just as easily remove it. The anthropomorphised rabbits were indeed going home, back to the way they were.

  They’d seen enough. They were going to revert.

  Connie clasped my hand tightly in her paws.

  ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ she said. ‘I can’t guarantee that it’ll be intellectually challenging and there certainly won’t be any scones and raspberry jam and Panorama and Coen brothers movies, but there will be gambolling in the meadows, lots of it, which is kind of special – and you and I will be together.’

  I looked around. The rabbit were retreating from the forward positions as they sensed the circle was about to close, and I saw the first of the tanks come into view. It paused for a second then fired, and a shell whistled above our heads and ripped through the treetops.

  ‘I’m not sure I’d make a very good rabbit,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’ve not done enough to earn it. I didn’t kill Mr Ffoxe; all I did was take the rap – and there’s nothing brave, noble or exceptional in doing the right thing. I could have done more earlier, and of my own free will. But I didn’t.’

  ‘You did something,’ said Connie. ‘Incremental change comes from incremental action.’

  ‘Incremental is enough?’

  ‘It’s the most most people can do. We’re not all revolutionaries, but enough people challenging the problem can make a difference. So, you coming?’

  ‘Someone has to tell this story,’ I said. ‘You’re going to have to go home on your own.’

  ‘Then maybe another time?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe another time.’

  And she smiled, and she kissed me, there amongst the smell of cordite and the whistle of projectiles as they flew over our heads. The mortars had just started, and the whompa of exploding shells filled the air.

  ‘Goodbye, Peter,’ she said, glancing towards where the full moon had risen above the horizon. ‘I’ll come and find you. Might take a while, but I shall.’

  I opened my mouth to say goodbye, but she and all the other rabbits had already gone. Not entirely gone, of course, just back to the part of themselves they had chosen to be, rejecting everything that made them human. I looked down at my feet, and there she was – a small brown-furred field rabbit no bigger than a cat and now covered by a draped mass of mud-streaked summer dress, the same one, in fact, she had been wearing when she turned up in the library all those weeks ago, blinking innocently and asking for a copy of Rabbit and Rabbitability. She looked startled and ran away, zig-zagging as though her life depended upon it until she was lost to sight within a furry carpet of other panicked rabbits eager to escape. The attack faltered as the Taskforce quickly realised that the enemy had gone, and they were now simply using their power and might against field rabbits. I stood there feeling empty and lost and broken. Everything I had thought I was, everything I thought my nation stood for, had been wrong. I wasn’t anything special, I hadn’t ultimately made a difference. I had been complicit in crimes against rabbits and betrayed my own sense of natural justice. I thought I had been one of the good guys. I hadn’t been forgiven, I wasn’t repaired, I was the same flawed person I had been before Connie chanced back into my life. The only difference between the me now and the me then was that I had achieved a sense of awareness, and the measure of Peter Knox was what he’d do with that knowledge in the months and years ahead. I stood there for quite a few minutes, listening to the confused yells of foxes, and the artillery quieten and stop.

  ‘Knox?’ said a fox I didn’t recognise who had just run up the hill, searching in vain for rabbits. ‘Is that you, the one that killed Torquil?’

  He was with five others. They were stripped to the waist, the orange of their fur accentuated by the fires now blazing in the colony.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, no longer in denial, ‘Peter Knox, ex-Spotter, RabCoT office, Hereford.’

  They started to move towards me, but I didn’t budge. There would have been no point. I knew how fast foxes could move.

  ‘We are so going to enjoy this,’ said the first fox, grinning fit to burst, his fangs wet with saliva. ‘I’ve always wanted to know what killing a human felt like. But don’t feel bad. It’s not simply payback for Torquil – but for all those hunts.’

  I didn’t think I’d mention that I’d never been on a fox hunt, and instead murmured ‘guilty on all counts’ and closed my eyes.

  The circle hadn’t only been completed in Colony One. Every single anthropomorphised rabbit had gone home by the time the full moon had risen. Despite this, Nigel Smethwick ordered the attack to continue, just in case it was some sort of a rabbit trick. It wasn’t, and the press mocked him for his ‘war on rabbits’ before they moved on to other matters, such as the shock cancellation of Casualty, whether the new Dr Who was as good as the old one, or reporting on what someone on Twitter said about someone else who was also on Twitter. By the end of the month all the colonies were smoking ruins, the network of burrows mined by the Royal Engineers. In a year the land had been cleared and returned to farmland.

  As a parting gesture and to refute detractors who said that rabbits had no sense of humour, the rabbits took the foxes with them. The timing was, for me at least, impeccable. My five foxy executioners reverted within one pace of me, and swiftly ran off into the hedgerows, confused and nervous. But unlike the rabbits, the foxes retained memory traces of their former life and made repeated attempts to sneak into exclusive London restaurants and hotels. The Savoy had to employ a gamekeeper who killed fifty-eight of them in a single six-week period, and foxes can often be seen at Glyndebourne, staring wistfully at the performers from the safety of a near by wood.

  Not all animals reverted. Firyali Elephant was sworn in as Kenya’s president three years later, a job she has done spectacularly well over the past sixteen years – the model for elephantine governance that is currently transforming Africa. Back in the UK the Dalmatian and the badger were untouched by the
deEventing, and last I heard were still doing their ‘Spots and Stripes’ comedy routine, which remains unfunny, but still unique, to this day. The surviving guinea pigs were released on licence after a decade, reoffended in under a week and are now back inside. Adrian Whizelle changed his name to Arthur Bulstrode, but it didn’t help: he, like all the other weasels, was found dead in suspicious circumstances by the time the year was out. The caterpillar is still in the Natural History Museum and s/he has yet to change into a butterfly. And the bees? No one has any idea what happened to the bees.

  Aftermath

  The Reversion created as many questions as the Event, and as the years went by, the possibility of another Event filled the imagination of all those who understood the quiet simplicity of the Rabbit Way. With each full moon, there is hope of another. We watch, and we wait.

  – Event Rabbits by Peter Knox, 326 pages, Hodder & Stoughton, first published Oct. 2028

  Without rabbits to be the focus of his hatred, Nigel Smethwick directed his ire at ‘anyone different’, and the followers of UKARP followed suit, using a simple word substitution to change their party constitution and mission statement quickly and efficiently. He was defeated at the next general election, his message of Hominid Supremacism diluted by the loss of the rabbits. He retired from politics but remains active as a talk-show pundit. The language of division can always be monetised.

  The Rabbit Compliance Taskforce was disbanded, the employees made redundant with generous payouts. Owing to an oversight, the paperwork regarding my firing hadn’t gone through, and I was paid off like the rest. I never went back to Much Hemlock, but I understand it’s much the same. Wing Commander Slocombe took over my Speed Librarying duties and is the new Mr Major. He still uses my system of codes, for which I am grateful. To this day, Much Hemlock have still not won a Spick & Span award.