Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

‘ Bother ,’ she said, ‘I just heard a car door slam.’

‘It won’t be Pippa back yet – probably a neighbour.’

‘It was the Dodge. A highly distinctive sound. Doc probably came back for the night. Rabbits become uneasy when not in their own bed at night.’

‘But … but the Middle East is a ten-hour flight away.’

‘No, no,’ she said, ‘not that Middle East – Nottingham.’ She pulled the sheet from my bed and wrapped it around herself while I went to the bedroom window and looked out. Sure enough, Doc had parked the Dodge and was hopping towards the front entrance of the house. Even though evening, being summer it was still quite light.

‘Well?’ asked Connie.

‘He’s gone into the house. No, hang on, he’s come out again.’

Doc stood there, sniffed the air and then began to stride in our direction.

‘He’s walking over here,’ I said, a tremor of fear in my voice.

‘Does he have a purposeful stride in his walk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘It’s just possible he’ll get the wrong idea about this.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he will definitely get the wrong idea about this. What are we going to do?’

‘Well,’ she said, looking thoughtful, ‘he’s already suspicious, so he’ll interpret this as an appropriation and challenge you to a duel.’

‘That’s fine; I can just refuse.’

‘Not really,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘If he challenges you then it’s a goer – only a spineless reptile of the very worst sort would try and back out.’

‘A spineless reptile?’

‘Of the worst sort.’

‘I’ve a better idea,’ I said. Her Dumas novel and torch were lying on the bed, so I handed them to her and opened the wardrobe door. She half climbed in, then stopped and turned back to me.

‘Doc is very big on honour and duelling and you may have no choice in the matter, so this is something you need to know: his set of duelling pistols is decorated with animals, and you’ll be given the choice of which to use. The one that has a picture of a lark tends to shoot off to the left, while the one with the engraving of the crocodile on the handle is pretty much straight on the money.’

‘I’ll never remember all that.’

‘It’s easy: the shot hits the spot if you’ve a croc on the stock, while the mark of the lark shoots wide of the mark.’

‘The shot hits the spot,’ I repeated slowly, ‘if you’ve a lark on … no, wait, a croc on the stock, while the lark with the mark … er, mark with the lark shoots wide of the mark.’

‘Don’t forget that,’ she said, ‘it could save your life.’ She smiled, gave me a kiss and closed the door.

The doorbell rang. Doc, it seemed, had a better idea of front-door etiquette than Connie or Bobby. I ran downstairs mumbling the rhyme, then composed myself for a few seconds, and opened the front door.

Rabbit playwrights have rewritten Shakespeare to appeal to more rabbit audiences for a long time. The performance of Seven Thousand and Eighty-Three Noble Kinsmen was met with great acclaim in 1973, and 1982’s A Comedy of Ears is considered a benchmark adaptive literary work. Not all were so successful: A Winter’s Cottontail was panned by rabbit critics, all of whom thought it was simply an ‘excuse for a feeble pun’.

‘Oh,’ I said, feigning surprise, ‘hello, Doc. I thought you were away?’

‘I was,’ he said, gazing at me dangerously, ‘and now I’m back. Kent said the increasingly poorly named Constance was over here running some lines from her new play or something.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘she was. But then she left.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ I said, a hot stickiness starting to crawl up my back, ‘really. Something to do with Diane.’

‘Is that her new play there?’ he asked, pointing towards where the script was still lying on the hall table.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we were going to do some more later. Tomorrow, I think, or the day after.’

I thought about having to face Doc in a duel.

‘Or if you’d prefer it, never.’

I suddenly realised that her shoes were still where she’d left them, right there in plain sight, barely a yard from where we were standing. Although rabbits had outstanding peripheral vision for signs of movement, peripheral relevance was harder for them – one of the reasons they drive slowly. In high-rabbit-concentration driving areas, road signs have a small logo of a fox in the bottom left-hand corner to ensure they are noticed.

‘You’d better take the play with you,’ I said, reaching for the script while at the same time pushing her shoes underneath the umbrella stand with my foot. He didn’t take the proffered script and instead leaned closer to me.

‘I wasn’t sure if they were her shoes or not,’ he growled, ‘until you pushed them under the stand.’

‘Did I?’

‘You did,’ said Doc in a threatening murmur, ‘and if I know Connie she’ll be hiding in a cupboard somewhere with a Victor Hugo novel. Am I right?’

‘Not at all,’ I said with perfect deniability. She was hiding in a cupboard, sure, but with a novel by Dumas , not Hugo.

Irrespective, he pushed past me into the hall.

‘I know you’re in here!’ he yelled, lolloping through to the kitchen. I was going to follow him in but was distracted by two people outside, strolling towards me from the direction of the lane. It was Victor and Norman Mallett, and this was exceptionally bad timing.

‘Good evening, Peter,’ said Victor with thinly disguised aggression as soon as they were standing in my doorway, ‘we’d like a word.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ I said. ‘This is really not the best time.’

‘ Line of Duty ended twenty minutes ago,’ said Norman, ‘so what can you be doing that’s so important—’

Norman abruptly stopping talking as Connie, still wrapped only in my bedsheet, ran down the stairs. She gave me a smile and a shrug but then slid to a stop on the hall rug when she came face to face with Victor and Norman, whose eyes opened wide in surprise.

‘Back to the burrow!’ yelled Doc, who had seen her from the kitchen, ‘I’ll deal with you later!’

‘ No!’ she said defiantly, her voice rising. ‘You can take your “back to the burrow” alpha-buck anthropocentric possessive misogynistic honcho machismo bullshit and shove it right up your pellet slot. You got a problem with me, you tell it to my face.’

‘Problem?’ he yelled back as they squared off to one another in the hall. ‘I’ll tell you the problem. You shagging the next-door neighbour is the problem. He’s a human , for Lago’s sake – have you not even a single shred of decency?’

Victor and Norman turned to stare at me with a look of utter revulsion etched on their features.

‘I can explain,’ I said.

‘Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do!’ yelled Connie as I saw two more people appear behind the Mallett brothers outside. They looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t at first place them. They were immaculately turned out, held a clipboard each and in their free hand expensive pens poised mid-air in a dramatic fashion.

‘Can’t we all just keep our voices down?’ I said.

‘Is this what you usually do?’ said Doc, turning to me. ‘Take advantage of vulnerable does when their husbands are out of town?’

‘I’m anything but vulnerable,’ yelled Connie. ‘I’m quite capable of making up my own mind, and let me tell you, Major Clifford Rabbit, Peter here gave me twice as good a time as anything you’ve ever handed out.’