The Constant Rabbit

Dinner & Deity

Thumping the hind leg upon the ground was a good method of non-verbal communication with a range of about four hundred yards, sort of like rabbit WiFi. Using Morse code, entire books could be transmitted to a large group of rabbits while occupied on assembly-line work. It is the origin of the phrase ‘a thumping good tale’.

I drove straight home, my head still throbbing. The bugging device that Whizelle had given me was a plain Parker ballpoint that required me only to click it once to switch on, once to switch off. The battery, he’d said, would last for six hours and transmit up to a mile away.

The thing was, I was under no illusion that I was fooling Mr Ffoxe. He’d know I’d tell them I was wired, so he’d also know they’d only give up intel that they wanted him to hear. Was I a bunnytrap-trap trap, or a bunnytrap-trap-trap trap? It was impossible to know. I gave up on trying to figure it all out and instead went and fed Finkle’s owl, who stared back at me blankly.

The clock was indicating six when there was a knock on the door. It was Doc. He was returning the Henry vacuum cleaner with an apologetic ‘sorry, don’t know why she keeps pinching them when I’m the one that does the cleaning’ and also wanting to know whether I fancied watching him make a fool of himself at the Parish Council. I told him I wouldn’t miss it for anything as council meetings were often closer to live cabaret than the first tier of democracy. We walked the short distance to the village hall, talking about how all of his security consultancy contracts had been withdrawn or cancelled without explanation.

‘The Rehoming is putting a spanner in the works for legal off-colony rabbits,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling we won’t be off-colony for long.’

Doc’s initiation into the Parish Council all seemed to go fairly well. Victor had been the chairman for decades, and although Norman was not on the council he was there with the public, sitting next to me, and I saw him nod imperceptibly while listening to Doc’s robust arguments regarding the best strategy to improve traffic calming, and how the local playground could be upgraded with minimum outlay. There was an embarrassing moment when Article 15 on the agenda was read out, which related to the council contributing to the ‘leaving payment’ the village had been gathering to buy the Rabbits out. With true professionalism Doc recused himself from the argument and went to smoke his pipe outside until recalled to discuss allocating more funds to tidying up the churchyard for when the Spick & Span judges returned – something Councillor Wainwright thought would be next Tuesday at three, although when pressed he gave no answer as to why he should think that. When the meeting finished and the usual post-meeting talks were going on, Victor had a call on his mobile and rapidly departed, along with his brother.

I would find out why later.

‘I think that all went fairly well, don’t you?’ said Doc as we walked back from the village hall an hour later.

‘They’re being pleasant because they’ve been told to,’ I said; ‘it won’t last.’

‘True,’ said Doc, ‘but let’s enjoy it while we can, eh?’

I’d had a brief call earlier from Pippa saying she was fine and that Bobby and Harvey had been looking after her at Colony One, and not to worry about her as she had found the place and the person she wanted to be, and the rabbit who she wanted to share that with.

I asked Doc whether Bobby had been in touch with her or Connie, and he said she hadn’t.

‘Constance always remarked that Bobby was a little headstrong,’ he said, ‘and watched a lot of ’Allo ’Allo when she was young, so I suppose it was inevitable she’d end up doing all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Her Underground name is Bridgette, apparently.’

‘Do you think she’s in any danger at Colony One?’ I asked, more out of concern for Pippa.

‘Who knows? It’s really down to whether Smethwick and Mr Ffoxe order the enforced clearance of the colonies and exercise all their powers to do so. I know the citizens of the UK are not wildly pro-rabbit, but oddly, they can become very interested – albeit for a short period of time – if there is any cruelty to animals involved. It’s always been their soft spot.’

He stopped walking at the bus stop, turned and looked at me.

‘Look here, Peter, old chap,’ he said, ‘I think we need to talk. Cards on the table and all that. I think you and Constance are having an affair, and unless you can give me a solemn promise to keep your grubby paws off my wife, I’m going to have to challenge you to a duel.’

‘I can assure you we are not,’ I said.

‘That’s what she says, and I gave her the benefit of the doubt during that incident with the bedsheet, but, well, I asked Kent to put a tracker on her phone and she’s been to the Green Dragon Hotel a couple of times, and I saw you both in All Saints.’

‘We just met up for coffee,’ I said.

‘That’s how it always begins. Coffee, dinner, going out for a bounce, basket of scrubbed carrots, Scrabble. What were you two doing in that dilapidated barn? I was watching for an hour and you didn’t come out – I would have stayed for longer, but I had to get home to watch the cricket.’

‘We were meeting with Patrick Finkle and the Venerable Bunty,’ I said.

‘Oh, sure,’ said Doc, ‘and I suppose Victor Lewis-Smith and the Pope were there too? If you want to be together, Pete, then do the decent thing, stop inventing silly stories and make a challenge – waiting for me to challenge you is really the coward’s way, how weasels would do it.’

‘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 mathematical 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.’