Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

I made my way downstairs and into the main Taskforce office. The room was large, open plan and harshly lit by strip-lights. There were about sixty workers in the office, most of whom were either on the phone or hunched over their screens, figuring out movement orders, chasing up errant rabbits, keeping tabs on labour assignments, suspected spikes of criminality and rigidly enforcing the rabbit maximum wage.

As I walked slowly across the room, all eyes were upon me. It felt as though the entire office were heavy with doom-laden apprehension. No one liked the Senior Group Leader being here, and the arrival of someone with a fat brown envelope was good news all round. The sooner he was paid off, the sooner he would be away.

I didn’t have to state my business to the Group Leader’s assistant. He simply announced my arrival on the intercom and hurriedly waved me in. I stepped up to the door, took a deep breath, knocked and walked in.

The office was tidy and neat, the walls covered with photographs of the Group Leader along with mementos of his many achievements in vintage motor racing. There were trophies littered about, polished engine parts masquerading as clocks and ashtrays, and mounted on the wall was the spare bonnet of one of the Le Mans D-Type winners. The blinds were down so the interior was quite dark, and hanging in the air was a curiously fuggy blend of whisky, cigar smoke and Old Spice aftershave.

Sitting in the darkness was a figure only faintly illuminated by an orange glow as he pulled on a cigar. I cleared the nervousness from my throat and held up the envelope.

‘Agent AY-002 suggested I give you an update on the hunt for Flopsy 7770, and I’ve something for you from the accounts department.’

There was a pause, then:

‘Top notch, old boy, top notch.’

His voice was smooth and low and sounded well educated. It put me in mind of my English master at school, whose mellow tones were nourished by a long-standing yet ultimately fatal relationship with Monte Cristo and Glenmorangie.

‘ Bono malum superate , 30 30. ‘Overcome evil with good’. ’ he added. ‘Be a good chap and leave it on the desk, hmmm?’

I bit my lip. I knew from office gossip that this was usually how it went down regarding the petty cash. Whoever delivered it tried to get the Group Leader to sign for it, and he always tried not to.

‘I have to have it signed.’

‘And you will, old boy, when I decide. Wait a moment, is that Mr Knox?’

I felt sweat prickle my back as he stood up and moved into the light.

The Senior Group Leader was impeccably dressed in a finely cut woollen three-piece suit of a handsome large check. He wore red socks inside brown leather brogues, and a scarlet tie was perfectly knotted and secured with a bejewelled tie-pin. He was a dark shade of orangey sandstone, over six feet tall, and his tail – sorry, brush – poked out from the back of his suit, where the white tip flicked the air in an impatient manner. There was also a lumpy hessian sack at his feet, which had dark stains in several places.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ he said. ‘You are Mr Knox? I can tell male from female, young from old and dumb from not-so-dumb, but that’s about as far as it goes.’

‘Y-yes,’ I stammered, and then watched with increased nervousness as he raised his lip to reveal a large canine that had been filed to a point. There seemed to be a clump of hair stuck between his fangs, to which there was attached a pink sliver of gristle.

‘Yes … what?’

‘Yes, sir, Mr Ffoxe, sir,’ I said, ‘that’s my name – it’s Mr Knox, sir.’

Rabbits had not been the only animals caught up in the 1965 Spontaneous Anthropomorphising Event. There had also been six weasels, five guinea pigs, three foxes, a Dalmatian, a badger, nine bees and a caterpillar.

The badger and the Dalmatian, after numerous failed careers as chat-show hosts, royal reporters and pool hustlers, embarked on a career as comedy duo Spots and Stripes, whose routine, while variable in quality, was certainly unique.

The guinea pigs had all been male, which was problematic for any long-term survival possibilities. They were pretty much inseparable, and after a failed career in novelty cake baking had formed a crime syndicate dubbed ‘Pig Iron’ by the press. After a series of gangland-style hits, bank jobs and jewel heists, their luck finally ran out when their getaway car was boxed in by the police on the M4. But instead of going quietly, they elected to shoot their way out using an array of automatic weapons and even a rocket-propelled grenade launcher while yelling clichéd statements such as: ‘No bastard copper’s gonna bung me in chokey’.

The battle was described by a seasoned front-line firearms officer as ‘the most terrifying half-hour of my life, and substantially worse than anything we faced in Iraq’. After a protracted gunfight, two car chases and a twenty-seven-hour stand-off in a KFC, the two surviving guinea pigs were arrested and eventually handed a twenty-six-year sentence each.

The weasels all worked in the intelligence community and in what could be described as either nominative determinism or simply playing up to their own stereotype were weaselly sorts of creatures. The only one I knew reasonably well was Adrian Whizelle, who had tried to sapienise his name 31 31. Until you actually met one in the flesh, you might never know they were a weasel – which surprises many a prospective date as they spend a disproportionate amount of time using dating apps. Inexplicably, with a young Anthony Eden or Unity Mitford as their profile picture. to appear less weaselly.

The caterpillar, in contrast, had taken to the Event badly and immediately formed into a chrysalis from which s/he was yet to emerge. S/he is currently hanging up in a large cupboard inside the Natural History Museum; you can view her/him on live webcam.

No one knows what happened to the bees.

‘How’s that delightful daughter of yours?’ asked Mr Ffoxe, his comment relating to the ‘bring a child to work day’ that soured soon after his unplanned arrival in the office. Pippa had been fourteen at the time and became the focus of Mr Ffoxe’s attentions, which were inappropriately suggestive and, had he been human, grounds for instant dismissal and possibly a criminal investigation.

‘She’s well,’ I said, trying to seem cold and disdainful but actually sounding plaintive and apologetic.

‘Is she still exceptionally pleasing to the eye?’ he asked. ‘We must reacquaint ourselves now those tiresome consent rules are past us.’

His small yellow eyes bored into me, and a dribble of saliva oozed from the side of his mouth. ‘Repellent’ couldn’t even begin to describe him.

‘I think I can speak for Pippa when I say she despises you,’ I replied.

He grinned again.

‘Quite the little minx. Well, her loss.’

Owing to small litter sizes and an impenetrably long and complicated mating ritual that required Michelin-starred dinner dates and visits to Glyndebourne, foxes had not reproduced nearly as well as rabbits. From the two vixens and a dog at Event Zero there were now a shade under six thousand individuals. They had become increasingly urbane over the years and insisted on sending their cubs to public schools, quoting Latin in a fatuous and pretentious manner whenever possible and respelling their surnames with a dazzling array of ridiculous affectations. There was plain ‘Mr Fox’, then about forty other permutations that included: Foxe, Ffoxe, Phocks, Phoxse, Forcks, Fforkse, Fourks, Fourxe, Foix, Fux, Foxx and Phourxes. All, without exception, were pronounced ‘Fox’.

Unlike the rabbit, the foxes had secured British citizenship on the dubious legal grounds that the then Home Secretary liked ‘the cut of their jib’, but they also retained, in a unique legal ruling, dual taxonomic status. They were legally human but also allowed to be fox when the mood took them, or the job required it. They were also notoriously, painfully, cunning . There was a saying: you can never outfox the fox.