Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

I left the Palace of Creative Joy and walked across to the Lago meeting house. The circular building was of tiered seating on six levels that surrounded a central area where a large circular void in the roof bathed the interior with natural light. I paused for a moment, having never been in such a place before, then stepped back outside and looked around. Beyond the admin blocks, factory units and large multilingual call centres, the land stretched away to the steep hills opposite, four or five miles distant. I could see the perimeter fence undulating softly with the contours of the land, and a river wended its way out from the hills through a narrow gorge and what looked like productive farmland, criss-crossed by hedges, spinneys and the odd oak tree in cheerful abundance. It was, I had to admit, a very lovely area of the world. The soil good, the climate pleasant. If you took away the sense of menacing coercion, it was somewhere any rabbit might want to live.

‘Hello!’ said a young woman, one of the Pandora Pandora clones – dressed all in black, with an aggressive attitude of chatty bonhomie and the mandated blond hair, ‘I’m Miss Robyns. Want to see the burrows?’

‘OK,’ I said.

We walked down one of the access roads while Miss Robyns regaled me with all the high points of the facility. About how beautiful it was, how clean, and how there was space to roam and even a sixteen-mile perimeter bouncing track for early-morning jaunts and for beta-bucks to ‘blow off excess humours during the inevitable disappointments of the mating season’.

We stopped where a six-foot-wide concrete pipe was sticking out of the ground with ‘Section 87D’ stencilled on the side. She led the way into the ground by way of some steps but the tunnel soon levelled out and after fifty feet or so made a sharp right turn.

‘Although no ferret was anthropomorphised during the Event,’ said Miss Robyns, ‘the rabbit still like to have defensible bends in their burrows.’

As we walked, I noted that every ten feet or so a panelled wooden door complete with doorknob, brass knocker and letterbox slot was set into the wall of the concrete pipe. We stopped opposite one marked ‘87D-237’ and I opened the door to find that it led nowhere – facing me was a wall of soft earth, with the imprint of the back of the door neatly impressed upon it.

‘The rabbit like to dig their own home,’ explained Miss Robyns, and I closed the door.

‘There must be a lot of doors,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Robyns, suddenly looking bored, ‘thousands.’

We turned the anti-ferret corner and could see the long tunnel stretch out in front of us, doors off to left and right. We also surprised Harvey, whose hearing, I thought later, was probably greatly diminished. He was staring into one of a series of ventilation grilles set into the tunnel wall, each one above a telephone point, postbox and WiFi transmitter.

‘Very interesting,’ he said, secreting in his coat what looked like a camera. I was walking in front, so Miss Robyns didn’t notice.

‘Oh!’ she said, startled by his appearance. I told her who he was and how he disliked rabbits more than almost anyone I knew, and she shook hands with him, but was at pains to point out that she was only doing this job because it was her job, and not because she was leporiphobic.

‘I believe you,’ said Harvey/Lugless in an ambiguous manner, and he joined us as we viewed the communal kitchens, rest, play and nursery areas. We then retraced our steps to the entrance and blinked as we came out into the warm sunshine. Almost immediately we noticed some sort of commotion near by, where Mr Ffoxe was talking to Whizelle and Section Officer Flemming.

‘… when did you hear about this, Weasel?’ asked Mr Ffoxe.

‘Just now, and it’s pronounced “Whizelle”.’

The fox then caught sight of our small group.

‘You!’ said the Senior Group Leader, jabbing a paw in our direction. ‘You’re in some big f***ing trouble.’

The game, it seemed, was up, and I think Harvey knew it too as I heard a faint ‘pop’ as he dropped a pellet. 52 52. Up until that moment, I thought this was a leporiphobic slur. Apparently it wasn’t.

If Mr Ffoxe knew Harvey wasn’t Lugless he’d be tortured and killed at the hands of the Senior Group Leader – probably here, right in front of us. But to my shame, I wasn’t really thinking of that. I was thinking that they’d figure out that I knew too – I’d vouched for Harvey’s identity to get him in here. But things didn’t quite turn out that way. As the fox, weasel and human drew closer I realised that the focus of their anger was not Harvey/Lugless at all – but me .

‘That’s right, Knox,’ said Whizelle as they encircled me, ‘we’ve heard about your lewd and unnatural associations with your rabbit next-door neighbour. Taskforce guideline 68/5b forbids it. You’re suspended from work and will have all security privileges withdrawn pending an internal investigation.’

‘Well now,’ said Mr Ffoxe with a chuckle. ‘I know I asked for deep infiltration, but this is definitely not what I had in mind. In partibus lagomorphium , eh? Mind you,’ he added with a smile, ‘anyone who threatens a fox with a flick-knife does show spirit.’ 53 53. Literally ‘among the rabbits’, but I’m not sure where the quote came from, nor who he was paraphrasing.

And he turned to Whizelle.

‘Weasel, have Knox debriefed back at the office. Tease out the truth, but courteously – Knox remains a valuable asset and one that we would wish to be able to re-educate.’

‘Certainly,’ said Whizelle, ‘but you pronounce my name “Whi—”’

‘So, Tamara,’ said Mr Ffoxe, cutting Whizelle dead and taking Miss Robyns by the arm in a courteous manner, ‘been working for the Taskforce long?’

‘How did you know my name?’

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘aren’t you all called Tamara?’

‘Personally,’ said Whizelle to me, ‘I don’t give a monkey’s what you get up to in your spare time, but rules are rules. Lugless, find a car and get Knox back to the Hereford office. I’ll be a couple of hours behind you, and just in case: no phone calls, no visits, no solicitor.’

‘Why me?’ said Harvey, remaining in character.

‘You’ll do as you’re told,’ said Whizelle, and Harvey shrugged and flicked his head, indicating I should follow him.

‘Bother and blast,’ he said once we were safely out of earshot. ‘That didn’t go as planned. I got barely an hour inside. Even so.’

He looked at me.

‘You want to know what’s going on, don’t you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I do not want to know what’s going on. I didn’t see anything, I don’t know anything, and as far as anyone is concerned, for now and ever more you are Lugless AY-002.’

‘Probably quite wise,’ said Harvey as we walked towards where Lugless’s car was parked, the same late-seventies Eldorado Lugless had used while on Ops in Ross-on-Wye. I started to ask Harvey how it came to be here, but he silenced me, took the keys from where they had been hidden on the top of the rear tyre, unlocked the doors, and told me to hop in the back. He then started the car and reversed out of the parking lot. He drove quite fast – for a rabbit – but I didn’t want to ask him anything because I didn’t want to know anything. I wanted to resign, go home and devote my life to Speed Librarying – a life choice that I made official by designating it with a code: 12-345.

We took the main road back towards Hereford, picked up some more speed and as soon as the road was clear in both directions, Harvey hauled hard right on the wheel and the car swerved and left the road. There was a double thump as the wheels struck the verge and then everything felt smooth and quiet as we became airborne. There was a steep escarpment beyond the verge and I watched the litter and discarded junk food cartons inside the car suddenly become weightless as we gracefully went into a brief free fall that ended with a teeth-juddering thump, a cracking of wood and the soft implosive noise that toughened windscreens make when they burst. I was thrown hard forward into my seat belt, bounced back into the door pillar and everything went black.