Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

I AM WEARING A WIRE

She pointed to a message on the fridge constructed out of magnetic letters:

I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT BE

She smiled, winked at me and squeezed my hand.

Once we were all seated and grace had been said – in Rabbity this time, as I think they thought I was a good enough friend not to take offence – Connie ladled out the stew and we ate, the Rabbits making slurpy noises with the occasional clinking of spoons against teeth, as cutlery and their dentition didn’t really work very well together. During dinner we spoke briefly of the latest episode in The Archers , the first time a storyline had featured rabbits, with the Grundys employing a rabbit stockman named Tim who was embroiled in some off-colony politics. Kent said that Rabbit TV was a lot better, even though How Deep Was My Warren had recently been plunged into controversy.

‘A recent shake-up has reduced the ensemble cast to barely six thousand,’ explained Connie, ‘which makes it all a little easy to follow.’

‘Dumbing down for a young rabbit’s short attention span,’ added Doc in a huffy manner. ‘Kids today can barely follow six hundred simultaneous storylines. I blame the fad for board games, personally.’

Connie, in what I realised later was an effort to steer the conversation to where she needed it, mentioned that Fortean Times had reported that a moose shot dead by a hunter was later found to have amassed a considerable library of George Eliot novels, critical appraisals, biographies and poetry, and had been attempting to write a dissertation on how Eliot’s life could be viewed from the viewpoint of even-toed ungulates singled out for their lack of apparent good looks.

‘I think moose are rather handsome,’ said Doc thoughtfully, ladling out seconds. ‘They just need to keep their chins up a little.’

‘It’s the weight of the antlers,’ said Kent, who had taken on the young male human trope of being an expert on absolutely everything.

‘Probably a sense of low self-esteem,’ added Connie. ‘Maybe that’s why they always look so gloomy.’

‘Was it really another Event?’ I asked. ‘One hears stories like this, but it might simply have been another hoax.’

‘Goulburn,’ said Connie and Doc together.

It had been a contentious subject since the stories first emerged, but the Event in the UK was decidedly not the only one. They were either rare or commonplace, depending on your interpretation of events, and how open to evidence of conspiracies you were. Eleven years after the UK Event and near a town called Goulburn in Australia, there were reports of the usual overly dramatic conditions that presaged all of the alleged Events across the globe: power surges, electrical storms, dogs howling, showers of fish, a full moon. There had also been talk of a mobilised armed fast-response team appearing in the area within two hours, leading to questions in the Australian parliament to determine whether the government, in line with many others, had a covert ‘Extermination at First Discovery’ policy towards potential Anthropomorphic Eventees. The government denied a cover-up, so what had occurred remained in the sphere of conjecture, but urban legend told of ‘a dozen or so man-sized wombats wearing singlets and shorts’ being bulldozered into a mass grave with a shedload of empty beer cans. The apparent sole survivor was a merino ram named Rambo, who gave several lengthy interviews over the phone, interspersing what he knew of the affair with exhortations to drop in and visit Goulburn, which was ‘really jolly nice’. The interviews abruptly stopped the same day a ram was found shot dead behind the bandstand. There was no evidence that he was the Eventee, but the townspeople, annoyed at the government intervention and pleased by the publicity, put up a statue in his honour anyway. 57 57. It is still there, by the side of the road as you drive into town having left the Hume Highway from the Canberra direction.

‘Stories come out from time to time,’ said Doc, ‘but the only places we know that have entertained an Event are the UK, Kenya and Oregon. But we think there might have been more.’

Only Kenya had accorded the Eventees full human status. But since they were elephants and had a gestation period of two years, their numbers were never likely to be high and they were entirely unthreatening – and, as it turned out, very funny, charming and good on wind instruments. Firyali Elephant, the spokesphant of the group, now worked as the minister of the interior, and was tipped as a possible PM, even after the scandal involving the bootlegged copies of Dumbo .

The bears in Oregon generally kept to themselves, but had recently been given Second Amendment rights, so were legally allowed to shoot hunters in self-defence – and did so quite frequently, much to the annoyance of hunters, who considered it ‘manifestly unfair’ because the bears, now suitably armed, were actually better hunters than they were.

‘The unspoken policy is eradication at first appearance,’ said Connie. ‘No one wants what has happened here to happen anywhere else.’

‘Has anyone looked for a link between the Events,’ I said, ‘to get an idea of what is causing it?’

‘Nothing concrete so far,’ said Kent, ‘just bundles of speculation. In that manner it’s a little like trying to explain Lost .’

‘There could be another reason for the move to MegaWarren,’ mused Connie, ‘that is nothing to do with incarceration, population control or the exploitation of the rabbit workforce.’

‘Such as?’ I asked, playing my part as best as I could, given that we were being listened to by the Taskforce right now.

‘Clearing the colonies will flush the Venerable Bunty out, but they don’t want her so the other rabbits will fall into line – they suspect the Venerable Bunty might be behind the Events. That she’s a physical manifestation of the Ancestral Earth Mother Gaia, here to cause trouble for the dominant species, who, let’s face it, have been getting a little too big for their own frontal lobes recently.’

We all fell into the sort of silence one adopts when a friend previously thought of as sober and clear-headed suddenly announces that the world is flat.

‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ said Doc in a scoffy sort of voice. ‘Gaia is a myth, sweetheart, like Zeus and Bacchus and Loki and Yoda and—’

‘And Lago?’ said Connie.

Doc fell silent.

‘Faith and religion and spiritual belief are one thing,’ I said, ‘but creating anthropomorphised animals out of thin air is quite another. You think all this was somehow divinely inspired? It doesn’t seem very likely.’

‘Actually,’ said Kent slowly, ‘if you think about it, talking rabbits spontaneously anthropomorphised have a chance-factor ratio of around 1 x 10 89, which, while not totally impossible, is about as likely as the universe spontaneously turning into cottage cheese. The fact that we’re here suggests that tremendously unlikely things can happen – which would make Gaia reappearing to tweak a few things for the better not so very daft at all.’

‘You’re formulating a mathematical proof for the existence of the primordial earth mother based on talking-rabbit probability?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t that make everything possible?’

‘Within the multiverse,’ said Kent, ‘everything is possible.’

‘That … is … enough!’ said Doc, jumping to his feet. ‘This conversation is just getting, well, too, too … metaphysical .’

And he stormed out of the room, muttering something about the standard model.

‘Doc is more of an empiricist,’ explained Connie, then added: ‘Kent, darling, would you put on the kettle for coffee?’