Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

She stopped at the entrance to the barn. The oak lintel had rotted and was partly collapsed, and several bricks hung precariously above the doorway.

‘Come on in,’ she said.

‘Do you know what,’ I said with great difficulty, ‘I’m really not sure that’s a good idea.’

‘I respect you for it,’ she said, ‘but it’s not for what you think. I want you to meet someone.’

‘Who?’

‘Trust me.’

A human male and a doe rabbit were waiting for us inside, both seated on the remains of a haywain that was now just a partially collapsed chassis, but had been almost intact when I’d played here as a child. As I drew closer I could see the man was Patrick Finkle of the Rabbit Support Agency, and he stood up as we approached, smiled and stepped forward to shake my hand. The rabbit with him was snowy white, wore thick horn-rimmed glasses and was dressed in Potter chic, a light blue flowery dress with a pinafore, and a large matching bow between her ears. They were both wearing hiking boots, and two knapsacks were on the ground beside them.

‘Hello, Mr Knox,’ said Finkle, ‘good to meet you at last. I see you quite often on the way to work at RabCoT.’

He squeezed my one hand in his two; I could feel the lack of opposability and it sent an odd chill up my back. Finkle had been the first to voluntarily remove his thumbs in order to show oneness with the rabbit cause, and given that one might argue opposability and tool use were as indicative of our species as ears are for a rabbit, there was something more than just a levelling of the dexterous field – it was a comment about our humanness, and the rejection thereof. In an instant my odd sense of revulsion turned to understanding and, in some measure, admiration. I took a deep breath and stood up straighter.

‘Call me Peter,’ I said. ‘I face instant dismissal for even talking to you.’

He gave me a half-smile.

‘I won’t tell if you won’t. You want to stare at my absent thumbs, don’t you?’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘I’m afraid so. Don’t feel bad – everyone wants to.’

He held up his hands so I could look and get it out of my system. These days the surgery could be done so precisely a lopped human would appear as if they’d never had thumbs, but Finkle had used a bandsaw on himself, so the stumps were ragged and mismatched. There must have been a lot of blood.

‘Miss them?’ I asked stupidly, not knowing how to open a conversation with a lopped.

‘Every day,’ he said evenly, ‘but sacrificing something you don’t need isn’t a sacrifice.’

At the last count there were eight hundred others who had lopped themselves, all living in the colonies or in the Isle of Man safe haven, having adopted rabbit ways. It was a controversial move: a few had even been snatched back by the same companies that did cult interventions, but every individual returned to the colonies as soon as they could. Once you were lopped, you’d made your choice and would stick by it.

‘And this,’ said Finkle, turning to introduce his female rabbit companion, ‘is the Venerable Bunty Celestine MNU-683, my mentor, spiritual guide and romantic life partner.’

‘Oh!’ I said, suddenly taken aback, not just at meeting her, but at the trust in which I must have been held to be allowed to do so. ‘Hello.’

If I had been expecting some sort of mystical experience upon meeting her – an aura of righteousness or spirituality or something – I was disappointed. She looked just like any other Labstock rabbit, although the spectacles were a giveaway as to her heritage: the test animal known as MNU-683 from the tag on her cage had been used for shampoo eye irritation tests before the Event, and her descendants always had poor eyesight, although I wasn’t sure how this was heritable.

‘Hello!’ she said with a bright smile as she held my hand in her paws. ‘Pleased to meet you. Goodness: what happened to your eye?’

‘Little bit of foxing,’ I said, ‘nothing serious.’

‘Did he threaten to take it out and eat it?’

‘He did.’

She grimaced, then made the circular sign of Lago around my eye and laid her paw upon it for a couple of seconds. I thought this might have been a miracle or something, but it wasn’t. When she lifted her paw, my eye seemed no better than before.

Once all the introductions were over we perched on the remains of the haywain while the bees buzzed merrily around, the morning beginning to heat up. The Venerable Bunty passed round tin cups 56 56. Rabbits routinely avoided single-use plastics. Knowing that rabbits adored their tea cakes, Tunnock’s – in an inspired move – shipped their goods to rabbits in wooden crates of two hundred. of Vimto and offered us a cucumber sandwich.

‘I could so murder a whopping great carrot right now,’ said Connie, who had just done the equivalent of fifteen one-hundred-metre sprints.

‘I’ve taken a vow of abstinence,’ said the Venerable Bunty, ‘so didn’t bring any. Sorry.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Connie, mildly embarrassed that she’d forgotten rabbit clergy denied themselves ‘the pleasure of the orange’ to detach themselves better from the distracting indulgences of the material world.

‘Aren’t there some peaches?’ said Finkle. ‘And I think I’ve got a bar of Fruit & Nut somewhere.’

‘Hang on,’ said the Venerable Bunty, rummaging in her knapsack, ‘there are some banana sandwiches, but they got a bit squashed – and some walnut cake, I think …’

‘Well, Peter,’ said Finkle once we’d had something to eat, ‘tell me about the deal you made with Mr Ffoxe.’

‘I’ve only just told Connie about that,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’

‘It was pretty obvious as soon as Constance was released,’ said Finkle. ‘I can’t see why else they’d be so generous.’

I told them everything I knew, and they both listened quietly, speaking only to ask a question or to clarify a point. The Venerable Bunty asked me to describe the layout of MegaWarren, which I furnished as best as I could, and what sort of security clearance I had on the Taskforce mainframe.

‘One up from the lowest,’ I said, ‘but I won’t be able to access it. Mr Ffoxe and the weasel will simply want to know what you’ll ask me to find out, and use that to figure out your plans.’

‘Hmm,’ said Finkle, ‘we should accept that Mr Ffoxe assumed you would tell us everything, so it’s difficult to see his precise play.’

‘He was very eager to find out your whereabouts,’ I said to the Venerable Bunty, ‘and was very interested in the subject of “completing the circle”.’

‘Ah,’ said the Venerable Bunty, ‘that’s very interesting.’

‘It is?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Finkle, ‘it is.’

I looked at Connie, who was, I think, still musing about the ‘whopping great carrot’ she wanted.

‘Ultimately,’ I said, ‘Mr Ffoxe wants leverage to move you all to MegaWarren without any trouble, and thinks that with the Venerable Bunty in custody it will be a lot easier.’

‘Even with the VB under lock and key, he’ll still have trouble,’ said Finkle. ‘The Grand Council of Coneys have ratified the plans for civil stubbornness, so each rabbit will have to be carried all the way to Wales one by one, which will be prohibitively expensive, not to mention a PR nightmare.’

‘Since Smethwick and Mr Ffoxe have staked their reputations on the Rehoming,’ added the Venerable Bunty, ‘they’ll want to have it completed in whatever way they can – and with over fifteen hundred foxes and ten thousand Compliance Officers at the Taskforce, it might all turn rather unpleasant.’