The Constant Rabbit Page 7

  The fifty-fifth anniversary would be later on this summer, but it was unlikely anyone would celebrate, least of all the rabbits to whom the Event elicited mixed feelings. Some thought humanness a boon, others a lament. Most agreed on one thing, however: it was better to have a mind capable of philosophising over the question of their existence than not. And chocolate eclairs. They were definitely worth having.

  ‘Well,’ I said, taking a deep breath and making to leave, ‘I dare say Mr Mallett and his brother have already formed an action committee.’

  ‘Those Malletts,’ said Mrs Griswold fondly, looking down and touching her hair absently, ‘always so concerned about our welfare.’

  Pippa & Pasta

  ‘Rabbit Underground’ was the broad term used to describe any clandestine rabbit direct action protest group. Many suggested it might not actually exist at all, and simply be an invention by the Minister for Rabbit Affairs to further demonise the rabbit – and to justify extra funding for the Taskforce.

  ‘Is it the self-same rabbit who was so disrespectful to dear wifey in the library?’ asked Victor Mallett when I found him handing out poorly photocopied leaflets in the public bar of the Unicorn.

  ‘It looks like it.’

  ‘I told you she looked like trouble – we should regard that library book she borrowed as stolen, and that clearly shows a pattern of criminal behaviour that we can only ignore at our peril. I thought you said she was just passing through?’

  ‘I thought she was. Major Rabbit served with the British Army,’ I added, in order to win Victor over, as I knew he was a supporter of the forces, but had not served himself. ‘They both strike me as decent people.’

  ‘Obviously we are grateful for his committed service in defence of our nation,’ said Mr Mallett, ‘and yes, they might be individually good neighbours and in time make a positive contribution to the community. There are always the good ones. But you’re missing the big picture. Once you let a single family in, then the downward spiral begins. Other rabbits of less scrupulous morals move in – and following them, the criminal element.’

  ‘Criminal element?’ I asked. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘stealing library books, for one. But make no mistake,’ he added with renewed enthusiasm, ‘this is the thin end of the wedge. Let one family in and pretty soon they’ll all be here, filling up the schools, attempting to convert us all to their uniquely aggressive form of veganism, undermining our worthy and utterly logical religion with their depraved and nonsensical faith – and then placing an intolerable burden on our already weakened infrastructure. Also,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘it could negatively impact on our chance to win a Spick & Span award.’

  ‘And once they’ve established themselves,’ added Norman Mallett, who had been sitting at the bar and up until now had remained silent, ‘their friends and relatives start to swarm in. Pretty soon you won’t be able to move in Much Hemlock for rabbits. House prices will tumble, and we’ll be strangers in our own community. It will be like Ross-on-Wye all over again.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Victor, shaking his head, ‘a plague.’

  ‘Are you thinking of raising a petition?’ I asked, fully aware of Mr Mallett’s usual modus operandi.

  ‘Already started one,’ he replied cheerfully, waving one of the flyers at me, which screamed of a ‘potential disaster of massive proportions’ in the village.

  ‘As a member of the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce,’ I said, trying to de-escalate the situation, ‘I should point out that legal off-colony rabbits have a right to live anywhere, and we could be making a whole heap of trouble for ourselves if we break the law. Harassing the widow of someone who was jugged in error by TwoLegsGood isn’t going to play well if the newspapers get hold of it.’

  ‘I fully appreciate what you’re saying, Peter,’ he said, which was Mallett shorthand for ‘I would utterly reject what you’re saying if I were listening, which I’m not’, ‘and all I want to do is raise awareness,’ which was, again, Mr Mallett’s shorthand for ‘I think I’ll stir up a whole heap of trouble and hope that in the ensuing scrum I’ll get what I want but not be held accountable for it’. He went on: ‘We must remain utterly vigilant at all times, and I’ll be honest, Peter, I didn’t have you pegged as a friend to rabbits.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said, ‘I just want to caution you against any extreme behaviour that might not reflect well upon the village.’

  ‘But the good news,’ said Norman, also not listening, ‘is that MegaWarren is on schedule, and will give rabbits what they need most of all: a place of their own. With a bit of luck all the legals will want to go there too – rabbit nirvana, I heard someone call it. Freedom to burrow and grow lettuce and … do whatever it is rabbits like to do. I think you’ll find that Rehoming them all in Wales is the best and most lasting solution to the rabbit issue. Besides, it was all agreed by referendum, then properly debated in the House. The nation has spoken.’

  MegaWarren had always been controversial, but after the referendum never in doubt, even though the ‘Rehoming rabbits in Wales’ policy was won on a slender majority and with half the country not voting at all. But Norman was right. The ten-thousand-acre site located just to the west of Rhayader was nearing completion, although moving the regional colonies to one centralised home was decidedly not something the rabbits much liked the sound of, especially those with a grounding in human history, which generally presented a ‘low to extremely low’ expectation of anything turning out well where enforced removals were concerned.

  ‘But,’ said Victor, returning to the question of Hemlock Towers, ‘we have one thing in our favour: the old Beeton place is only to be rented. If they move in, they can just as easily move out. Can I rely on your support to not support them? You’ll be living next door, after all.’

  ‘I’ll take a leaflet,’ I said diplomatically, ‘but I have to remain neutral due to my work at RabCoT.’

  ‘Stout fellow. Give my very best to Pip, won’t you?’

  ‘I shall.’

  Pippa was at the kitchen table when I got home and had her nose in a book while at the same time eating yoghurt, texting someone – probably Sally – and keeping a watchful eye on a Netflix series on her iPad. When I was twenty I had trouble doing one thing at a time. I still do.

  ‘Hey, Dad,’ she said.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m learning HR jargon and can’t decide which phrase I dislike more: Game changer, Onboarding or Going forward.’

  ‘Blue sky thinking was always the one I disliked most.’

  ‘That became too clichéd even for management-speak,’ she replied, ‘along with Thinking out of the box and We need a paradigm shift. They were all officially retired last year. How was your day?’

  ‘Usual fun and games. But more importantly: rabbits are moving in next door.’

  ‘I heard something about that,’ said Pippa, ‘but if I was a rabbit family moving anywhere, it wouldn’t be to the sort of village that sent troops to fight in the Spanish Civil War – on General Franco’s side.’

  ‘The village is not that bad,’ I said, ‘and I think mostly it’s just bluster. How many residents do you suppose have even spoken to a rabbit who wasn’t a barista, room cleaner or shelf-stacker?’

  ‘Prejudice is best lubricated with ignorance,’ said Pippa. ‘What do you think the bigot-in-chief is going to say about it?’

  I placed Mr Mallett’s leaflet in front of her, then stared out of the window at Hemlock Towers opposite. ‘I think he’s going to whip up some anti-rabbit feeling and make life so unbearable they’ll move out.’

  ‘I dislike his politics but can’t fault him on his use of the semi-colon,’ said Pippa, scanning the pamphlet. ‘It’s a good job he rarely travels farther than Hereford. Containment is the best policy for people like him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It also works wonders with Ebola. Did you hear anything else about the rabbits? Mrs Griswold’s intel was pretty sketchy
.’

  ‘Mr Rabbit is a retired army major and Mrs Rabbit an actress,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Really? Was she in anything I might have seen?’

  ‘I don’t know – commercials, someone said, a small part in Pulp Fiction but she didn’t make it to the final cut.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I said, as I knew Connie had been keen on drama. She’d done a cracking audition as Shelley Levene in Barnstaple Uni’s production of Glengarry Glen Ross, but was rejected as the director wanted someone ‘more male and less furry’.

  ‘And Major Rabbit, is it?’ I added.

  ‘Yup. Almost served in Afghanistan, they say.’

  Next Sunday, Next Door

  DNA testing revealed that the rabbits were not some weird human/rabbit hybrid but were, in fact, rabbits – genetically indistinguishable from their dim field-cousins. Whatever gives the humanlike rabbits their humanness, it isn’t in their DNA.

  The Rabbits arrived the following Sunday amidst the buzz of motor mowers and the snip-snap-snip of garden shears. Everyone was eager to have the village neat and tidy, shipshape and perfectly just-so on the off chance that the Spick & Span judges might drop by, as they had been seen mooching around Pembridge on Wednesday.

  I was in the garage tinkering with my Austin-Healey when a 1974 Dodge Monaco22 pulled up in front of Hemlock Towers. Rabbits liked large American cars as they were better suited to their physique and limited levels of dexterity. Bench seats, auto transmission, feather-light power steering and large pedals. They also took great care of the cars, as rabbits viewed obsolescence as the arrogant cousin of waste and thus incompatible with the fourth tenet of their faith: sustainability. There was a rabbit saying: ‘Nfifnfinnfiifnnfifnfn’, which roughly translates as: ‘Only a fool buys twice’.

  I hurried upstairs to see more easily over the dividing hedge. The kids got out first and, I noted, were traditionally dressed yet with modern trappings: the boy-rabbit was in a blue sailor-suit and Nikes, and listening to a cassette Walkman. He moved languidly as though either deep in thought or consumed by idleness, and was also wearing an ankle monitor of the type used by the probation services. The girl-rabbit was more animated, wore a flowery summer dress and bounced into the house with one or two excited hops while her father climbed out the driver’s side. He was dressed in a green Harris tweed over a matching waistcoat, shirt and tie. Rabbits rarely wore any clothes from the waist down as it restricted movement and the ability to hop. This was of little consequence to the females, who routinely wore skirts, dresses and, if no bouncing was planned, culottes, but to the males, who in one very notable respect were extremely humanlike indeed, had to disguise their trouserless modesty beneath a series of discreet items of apparel whose ingenious complexity is not within the scope of this book.23

  Major Rabbit consulted a fob watch that he kept in his waistcoat pocket and then moved to take the cases from the boot of the car. At the same time the front passenger door opened and Connie Rabbit climbed out, took a sniff of the air and looked around. She was wearing a leather jacket over a spotted summer dress and her ears were tied loosely at the base with a red bandana. Unusually, a small part of her tail peaked out from beneath her dress, the rabbit equivalent of a plunging neckline. Shocking in polite rabbit circles a decade ago, but mostly acceptable today.

  The Spontaneous Anthropomorphic Event had taken place before I was born, so rabbits talking, wearing summer dresses or driving cars never seemed that unusual to me. Their appearance in 1965 had not been reported immediately as the whole thing was dismissed as an elaborate hoax, right up until the moment Franklin Rabbit chatted to Charles Wheeler live on the BBC’s Panorama Special.24 After that, every news station on the planet wanted to ‘talk to the rabbit’ and find out how this all came about, something which still remains elusive today. The initial scepticism and disbelief then turned to curiosity, celebration and acceptance before taking a downward spiral during the knotty issues regarding status and rights before changing, as their numbers rose, to suspicion, condemnation, hatred and fear. The journey from celebration to rejection had taken less than two decades.

  I was startled by the phone ringing. I picked it up too fast, fumbled, dropped, then answered the phone. It was Norman Mallett.

  ‘It’s arrived!’ he said, as though announcing an outbreak of the bubonic plague. ‘Can you see them?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, returning to the window with the phone. ‘Two adults, two children. Why don’t you come round and talk to them?’

  ‘What? Don’t be ridiculous. Do they look as if they’ll be staying only a few nights?’

  I looked out of the window as a large removals lorry reversed down the narrow lane, reverse warner beeping.

  ‘No, I think they’re here for a while.’

  There was a pause on the phone and then the muffled sounds of people conversing. After a moment, Norman came back on the line, his voice sounding more strident.

  ‘Listen here, Knox. We’ve had our differences in the past, but there is a moment in everyone’s lives where they have to step up to the plate, be counted, grit their teeth and do the right thing for the community.’

  ‘And what is that thing?’ I asked, impressed he could cram five clichés into one sentence.

  ‘You’ve got some seriously objectionable centrist views, Knox, so you’ll be perfect cover. We need you to go in and … talk to the Rabbits. Get their confidence. Make friends if such a thing is possible. And when you think the moment is right, tell them they can have five grand in cash to shove off.’

  ‘She’s already got a lot of money,’ I said. ‘Compensation from the Compliance Taskforce after they leaked her husband’s address to TwoLegsGood.’

  ‘Conspiracy theory, Knox – unproved and untrue.’

  It was a well-known fact around RabCoT that not only was this absolutely true, but the Senior Group Leader was the one who did it – and even boasted about it at the Christmas party the same year.

  ‘I really don’t think,’ I said slowly, ‘a measly five grand would be nearly enough.’

  ‘Bloodsuckers,’ he muttered. ‘Hasn’t she milked enough cash out of the public purse already? OK, Knox, you drive a hard bargain. We can go all the way up to seven, but not a penny more – unless they turn you down, then get back to me ASAP. Will you do that for us?’

  I didn’t need to give it much thought. If there was a peaceful solution to the problem where everyone could be happy, I should probably try and make it happen. It wasn’t the only reason I was content to go over there – I wanted to see Connie again. If I reminded her who I was, it was possible she might remember me.

  ‘OK, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll let them settle for half an hour and then go and say hello.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Norman in a friendlier tone. ‘I’ll get a progress report from you later. Keep your eyes peeled and best leave your wallet and mobile phone at home. You know what they’re like.’

  I went down to the kitchen, dumped a bag of carrots into a wicker basket and then covered them with a gingham tea towel. I gave the Rabbits thirty minutes and walked across to the house, heart thumping, and knocked on the door. After a few seconds Connie opened it, and looked mildly shocked. She stared at me with her large, odd-coloured eyes for a moment then sniffed the air and looked at the basket. I noted that one of her ears – the top third of the left, actually – was tilted forward, and she smelled very faintly of warm, freshly turned earth.

  ‘Oh,’ she said with a timid smile, ‘is this a moving-in Carrot-o-gram? If so, it’s the first time I’ve seen a human do it. Are you really going to try and sing the Nhfiiihhnirff25 song?’

  ‘N–no,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’m … your next-door neighbour. We met a few weeks back during the library Buchblitz.’

  She stared at me for a moment, head sideways, one large eye faced towards me, the way rabbits usually did when scrutinising a person or object.

  ‘Actually,’ she said in a quiet voice, ‘we met before that. A long ti
me ago. It’s Peter Knox, isn’t it?’

  I suddenly felt an odd sense of warmth that she remembered me, mixed with a sense of what I’d felt towards her back then.

  ‘Hello, Connie,’ I said, feeling myself start to tremble ever so slightly, ‘yes, it’s me. How have you been?’

  ‘Oh, generally favourable,’ she replied with a smile. ‘Lost a couple of husbands, gained a few children. Jobs here, jobs there – that sort of thing. Never did finish my degree, though. What about you?’

  ‘I got my degree but never used it,’ I said, trying to make my voice sound nonchalant and chatty instead of stilted and knotted. ‘I got married, had a daughter, came back to the family home to look after Dad. Worked for a while with the post office. I’m now an accountant, Library Blitzing on the side. Y’know. Stuff.’

  ‘I can see you live only for pleasure,’ she said, smiling agreeably. ‘Are you here to ask for that book to be returned? To be honest, I haven’t even started it. I used to read a lot when younger, but, well, time just gets away from us, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not here about the book. I came over to say … welcome to Much Hemlock.’

  ‘A welcome?’ she said, staring at me intently. ‘I thought everyone in this village would have pictures of Nigel Smethwick on their walls and stuff.’

  ‘Some may do,’ I said, ‘but not all.’ I paused for a moment then asked: ‘Is a Carrot-o-gram actually a thing?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replied with a chuckle, ‘totally a thing.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘How did you recognise me from the library visit?’ she asked suddenly, and I felt a flush rise in my cheeks. I was under express orders not to reveal my skill. Outed Spotters occasionally went missing. And not ‘missing’ as in ‘went on a bender and turned up three days later’, but as in ‘missing and no one knows what happened to them’.