Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

‘Shocking.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Doc, getting ready to leave and seemingly quite chirpy again, ‘shocking. You will tell me about Connie, though, won’t you? I need to keep my marriage together without having to fight any duels.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’

‘Stout fellow,’ said Doc. ‘By the by, you haven’t seen Bobby, have you? She packed her bags and left when I was in Hereford picking Connie up from the clink.’

‘No,’ I said, figuring that if she knew Harvey had been identified, she would probably be in for questioning next. It seemed odd that both our daughters were on the run from the Taskforce.

‘Jolly good,’ he said, gave me a smile, bounced clean out of the back door and was back gardening in under ten seconds.

I heard the news of the TwoLegsGood demonstration over at Colony One just as I was making a casserole for supper. About two hundred Hominid Supremacists had converged at the entrance to the colony, angry that ordinary hard-working humans were being denied basic benefits while rabbits were being rehomed in ‘the lap of luxury’. While the demo was aggressively voluble it was not illegal, and the police and Taskforce seemed unwilling to move them on. Given Mr Ffoxe’s connections to TwoLegsGood, I couldn’t help wondering whether this was a lockdown by another name – to keep the Venerable Bunty from moving around the country, spreading, as Smethwick put it, ‘her dangerous message of insurrection’.

I’d just popped the casserole in the oven when the doorbell rang. I thought it might have been Connie – ringing so as not to appear too forward – but it wasn’t. It was Victor and Norman Mallett.

‘Ah,’ I said warily, ‘good afternoon.’

‘Good afternoon, Peter. What happened to your eye?’

‘I caught it on a nail.’

‘Oh. May we come in?’

‘Actually, no. You told me I had forty-eight hours to leave the village and then shopped me to the Taskforce. I’ve still got eight hours until I default on your request, so you can leave me alone until then.’

Victor and Norman looked at one another.

‘I think our comments might have taken been out of context when we gave you forty-eight hours to leave,’ said Victor. ‘I think what we actually meant was that you had forty-eight hours to stay.’

‘That explanation makes no sense.’

‘Yes – we came over to clarify.’

‘OK, so let me ask you something: what was the context when your son daubed “bunnyshagger” on my garage door?’

‘He did apologise and paint over it,’ said Victor. ‘If you look on the plus side you’ve got a repainted garage door.’

‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘I really should be thanking you. Look, I’ve lived in this village for fifty years. I was born here. I know everyone who lives here, and everyone knows me. And while Much Hemlock is a little right-wing, I thought we could all get along irrespective of political affiliation. But add a family of rabbits and everyone goes nuts.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Victor, ‘that’s what we were thinking. Norman and I feel we might have been … in a rush to judgement over you and the Rabbits and we’d like to make amends.’

‘Would that be word-amends or actions-amends?’ I asked suspiciously, as the first was abundantly common, and the second almost vanishingly rare.

‘Action-amends, naturally.’

‘OK, then,’ I said, eager to see how this might pan out as the Mallett brothers were famed throughout the county for their false platitudes. ‘A full apology to the Rabbits, a dropping of all hostilities, if anyone from UKARP or 2LG turns up you tell them to go home – and a position for Major Rabbit on the Much Hemlock Parish Council.’

It was a ridiculous demand, and I fully expected them to laugh in my face. But they didn’t.

‘We can do that,’ said Victor, who’d controlled the council almost since the dawn of time.

‘And,’ I continued, wondering how far I could push this, ‘Mrs Rabbit is to cut the ribbon at the Much Hemlock Village Fete next weekend.’

‘Impossible,’ said Norman. ‘Mrs Griswold and the vicar always do the opening. But while cutting the ribbon is plainly an insane suggestion, I could probably have Mrs Rabbit put in charge of the bottle stall.’

‘I was thinking of something more prestigious,’ I replied, as the bottle stall was by long tradition the entry point for volunteers, lunatics or people out of favour in the village. Less well thought of, even, than the shove ha’penny and whack-a-mole. ‘How about if she runs the tombola?’

Victor and Norm laughed – the idea was, we all knew, preposterous. Mrs Fudge-Rigby had overseen the tombola at least since the sixties, and physically attacked the last person to suggest she might want to ‘take a break’.

‘OK, then,’ I said, having a bright idea, ‘what about judging the vegetables in the home produce tent?’

Victor and Norman looked at one another.

‘Deal,’ said Victor.

We shook hands on it and Victor and Norman, a day ago my mortal enemies, were now once again my friends, presumably courtesy of a discreet call from Mr Ffoxe, requesting them to leave us alone so my bunnytrap-trap efforts could continue unimpeded. I shut the door behind them, then watched out of the window as they walked away, patting each other on the back, a job, they thought, well done. They’d been like this from the moment I became aware of them aged eight, and they’d not changed one iota over the years: always trying to play people for their own advantage – and never once any good at it.

Bouncing was the sport of rabbits, and the mainstay of the Rabbit Games: Long Bounce, Vertical Bounce, Marathon, Sprint and Synchronised. It always looked unusual as rabbits before the Event never really did this – the bouncing they expressed now was more akin to kangaroo motion, and was a quirk of the process that brought them from all rabbit to mostly human.

I rang in sick the following morning as my eye still hurt badly. My sleep was punctuated by nightmares – mostly about Mr Ffoxe clamping his jaws around my throat and squeezing so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Once I’d made the coffee and put on the toast, I tuned into the news on the radio to see what had happened in Colony One overnight. The answer, as it turned out, was ‘not much’. TwoLegsGood had stayed outside the gates until 2 a.m., shouting their trademark anthem: ‘Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run, here comes a farmer with a gun gun gun’. While clearly offensive and an incitement to violence, an earlier court hearing had decided the words were from a ‘humorous ditty predating the Event’ so had historical precedent – and was thus allowable. The upshot of all this activity was that Colony One remained closed to all movement and would remain so, a Compliance Taskforce spokesman said, ‘until the safety of the rabbit population can be assured’.

At about nine, the doorbell rang and there was Connie, bright as a button, all smiles and wearing a sports crop top and short skirt, brand new Nikes and a sweatband looped around the base of her ears.

‘Hello!’ she said in a chirpy voice. ‘Fancy a bounce?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A bounce. I’m in training for the Herefordshire double marathon bounce next month, and I’m a little rusty on pace and rhythm. If you bounce too high on each cycle then you tire too quickly, and if you try to overstretch a bounce, the landing can be awkward. I need a safe twenty-four-mile-per-hour bouncing average to beat my PB, or even to have a hope of finishing in the top five.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘But I need to tell you something first. You remember the duelling pistols I was telling you about?’