Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked. He seemed almost amiable, which immediately made me suspicious.

‘Nothing yet.’

‘Keep at it,’ he said, then: ‘Oh, I reviewed those Labstock names you submitted to Mr Ffoxe last night and made a few changes.’

I suddenly came over all cold.

‘Changes? What sort of changes?’

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, knowing I would, ‘but none of the ones you suggested were remotely suitable to be used as an example of what happens when you piss around with the Taskforce. Half of those rabbits haven’t been seen at all for over three years, and are probably unregistered dead – and the other half haven’t been off-colony for six months. No, I went for four who were happily living here in the city and would be easier to pick up for questioning. They’re in the cells downstairs at the moment. They won’t have anything to tell us, but we’ll have a go nonetheless. The message to the Underground and to the rabbit at large will be abundantly clear.’

I stared at him coldly.

‘But don’t worry,’ added Lugless with a grin, ‘I won’t steal your thunder – I made sure your name was still on the memo. Here.’

And he placed the new list in front of me, patted me on the shoulder and went back to his desk. I stared at the small group of Labstock that Lugless had chosen. The only name I recognised was Fenton DG-6721, who was the prominent charity organiser. The DG-6721s were the largest group in the Labstock community. Their ancestor had been used to study the effect of unsaturated fat on the liver prior to the 1965 anthropomorphising. A troubled pre-Event life had left all Labstocks with an indelibly etched propensity to devote themselves to the service of others. While I sat there, feeling hollow and sick, Whizelle looked up from his computer.

‘Do you want to prepare a report on your dinner at Major and Mrs Rabbit’s last night,’ he asked, ‘or go for a verbal debrief?’

‘You know about that?’ I asked with dismay. I had achieved relevance at RabCoT, but not the way I’d hoped.

‘There’s not much we don’t know,’ said Whizelle in a smug manner, ‘so what about that report?’

‘I’m still getting to know them,’ I said, not wanting to talk to anyone about anything, ‘there’s nothing to report.’

‘You should know that Constance Rabbit is flagged,’ put in Lugless. I turned to face him. He had his rear paws up on the desk and was idly using the eraser end of a pencil to extract an ear-bogey. He stared at the jammy brown object for a moment, then ate it. Toby and I looked at one another. Rabbits have very few objectionable habits, but eating their ear-bogeys was definitely one of them.

‘Flagged?’ I echoed.

‘Yup,’ said Whizelle, ‘as someone ripe for radicalisation by the Rabbit Underground. The Dylan Rabbit connection kind of makes her someone with a potential axe to grind, and those sorts of rabbits should always be watched very closely.’

It would have been cheaper and easier and better for human/rabbit relations for Mr Ffoxe not to have outed Dylan Rabbit to TwoLegsGood in the first place, but I didn’t say so.

‘This is important,’ said Whizelle, walking over to sit on the edge of my desk, ‘so we’re keeping you in the loop: the Rabbit Hostility Evaluation Action Team have declared the LitterBomb threat to have amplified from Amber, “Attack Probably Planned, We Think”, to Red, “Attack Imminent, We’re Guessing”, and whilst we’re not saying Constance Rabbit is involved, she’s ripe to play a part. She’s just rented a house with seven bedrooms and even the most cursory of glances at her Co-op loyalty card buying patterns reveals a strong propensity for two-for-one offers – an act that is long associated with stockpiling.’

‘Really?’ I asked.

‘We have also observed Major Rabbit at B&Q,’ added Lugless, mistaking my comment as interest rather than scepticism, ‘looking at spades and forks and seeds and suchlike.’

‘Right,’ said Whizelle, as though their guilt had already been established, ‘potentially growing extra food for those hungry, outnumbering mouths – the red flags are fluttering right under our noses and we’d be idiots to ignore them. Like the Senior Group Leader said, you’re to keep your ear to the ground as regards your next-door neighbours and report back if you see or hear anything suspicious. Get it?’

‘Got it.’

‘Good.’

He returned to his desk to pick up a paper bag of sugared woodlice, something weasels found particularly tasty, then left the office. Lugless carried on staring at me for a while. It was one of those hard stares, the sort a hungry spaniel might use to bore holes in a fridge once known to have contained a single sausage. 39 39. If you’ve ever owned a spaniel, you’ll know exactly what this looks like.

He only stopped staring when the phone rang. He picked it up and, after listening for a few seconds, told the caller he would be there presently, then chose the heaviest hammer from his desk drawer and trotted out of the office. I gave him two minutes, then left the office myself to see whether Fenton DG-6721 actually was in custody, and if so, whether there was anything I could do. I headed towards the canteen first, the most likely place to find someone ‘in the know’ regarding who was in custody, but I didn’t need to go that far as the rabbit riot had already begun.

Rabbits are especially good at crowd-crunching calculations. Most of the team are used as memory, with key calculators doing sums, and three others dividing the mechanics of the calculation amongst the others. With a little practice, a team of two hundred rabbits can calculate the square root of any given four-digit number to fifty-four decimal places in under six minutes.

To be honest, it was only dubbed a ‘riot’ later, by the leader writer of The Actual Truth , UKARP and the Compliance Taskforce. To anyone else, the rabbit themselves and even a dispassionate observer, ‘super non-violent silent protest with maths’ would be closer to the mark. Outside the building were eight rabbits standing in a line and staring impassively at the Taskforce headquarters.

‘What’s up?’ I asked someone in the lobby.

‘Some complete and utter twat put Fenton DG-6721 on an arrest list, and it’s kicked off a riot. Pisses me off totally. The building will be put on lockdown, and I have the finals of the all-Hereford bell-ringing competition this evening.’

‘There’s only eight of them,’ I said, looking out of the one-way glass into the street, ‘probably just a flash in the pan. No, wait, I can see some more.’

To the right and left more rabbits were arriving, alerted over the grapevine as to what was going on. They’d dropped everything, tied the traditional protest bandana loosely around the base of their ears and taken their place next to their colleagues.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Whizelle, who had just appeared from the records office. The disappointed bell-ringer – I think he was from Ethics – told Whizelle what was happening and I decided to creep back to the office and keep my head down. My name was on this. I’d been stitched up by Lugless good and proper.

Toby was already watching the riot unfold when I got back upstairs as our office gave an unimpeded view down Gaol Street to the left and right. In ten minutes there were twenty rabbits and that doubled in another half an hour.

‘It will be impossible to get a decent cup of coffee in town right now,’ said Toby, who always thought of practicalities, ‘let alone a sandwich.’

Within an hour there were certainly a hundred or so, all standing in the road outside, ears flat on their backs. I could hear them murmuring, too, but not words – numbers . Rabbits weren’t fond of glib and pithy yet ultimately meaningless political slogans so used protest longevity as their chief tool. Since that could get very boring, they took to crowd-crunching extremely tricky mathematical calculations to pass the time, which was oddly disconcerting as the murmuring made little sense to non-mathematicians and at a distance sounded soft and restful, like falling water. The rabbits remained fairly motionless during a riot, but would eventually start to keel over from dehydration or lack of sleep after a couple of days. At which point they would be removed to a tent to be revived – and then replaced by a fresh rabbit, who would have been queuing patiently to have the honour of participation.