Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The chef’s hat.’

We were, I learned later, only one of twenty-six work gangs making cucumber sandwiches, the snack of choice for rabbits when nerves need to be calmed and the future is in doubt. Carrots are more for pleasure and everyday eating, dandelion leaves for when you just want to shoot the breeze – equivalent to a cup of coffee and a Danish. Radishes are for a hangover, parsnips for when you need a boost, turnips when there’s nothing left in the larder. There were gallons of tea, too, but that was handled by someone else.

I worked for ninety minutes, and must have sliced several hundred cucumbers. The finished sandwiches – once given a sprinkling of salt and with the crusts cut off – were taken off by waiter rabbits who plied backwards and forwards between us and the troops with the sandwiches on trays. It all worked in a rota system, so everyone got to go outside and offer words of encouragement, and to say their farewells. The news that filtered back was not good. Numerous drones had been seen overhead, and more artillery pieces had been observed moving into position and then waiting at readiness. Tanks and bulldozers were massed at the main gate, and infantry had moved up behind the tanks in case the rabbit had weapons of which they were unaware. And everywhere, ahead of everything, were the foxes , hundreds and hundreds of them, grunting and howling and yelping in their excitement, a murderous carpet of orange-coloured hate.

Most of this I found out much later on when researching for my book. It was Smethwick who had first encouraged, then begged the use of flame-throwers to clear the warrens, as rabbits, he said, ‘are full of surprises’. The ranking army officer, to his credit, told Smethwick that ‘if you want to do that kind of shit, old boy, you can get your own people to do it. There’ll be no unnecessary suffering to rabbits on my watch. I’m not sidestepping the ICC 63 63. Evidence suggests he was referring to the International Criminal Court and not the International Cricket Council. on taxonomic grounds only to be collared by the RSPCA. It’s conventional force only. Any overreach is on your shoulders – and don’t you forget it.’

Although I was busy and quite swept up in an odd shared sense of destiny, at the back of my mind was also survival – which involved surrendering to the first human I met. A fox, I knew, would probably be after revenge. They’d know who I was, not least because of the fox claw that was still around my neck.

The rabbit’s ‘Circle of Lifefullness’ has since been adopted by humans, and the movement is growing. Some say it was what the rabbits were here to do in the first place, to deliver a new faith, a new way of doing things. I try to adhere to the Five Circles as much as my human wiring allows, the same as the rest of us.

‘Take a break, Mr Knox,’ said Kent when I was down to my last cucumber. ‘Why not take a tray up to Mum? She’s with the Venerable Bunty and the commanders at the top of the hill.’

I glanced at the clock. It was half past seven. Thirty minutes to the attack.

I loaded up a tray, dispensed with the chef’s hat and made my way out of the meeting house and into the colony. All seemed quiet, the only movement from those who were wielding trays piled high with cucumber sandwiches and offering up refills of tea. The rabbits seemed to have lined themselves up ten deep around the entranceways, ready to defend themselves, wherever the first wave of foxes would arrive.

I walked to the top of May Hill from which there was a commanding position to view the battle. It took me a while to get up there, and it was five to eight by the time I arrived.

‘I brought up some refreshments,’ I said once there was a suitable lapse in the conversation. I noted that they were all does, all Wildstock, and all speaking in Rabbity. Connie noticed me and walked over to help herself, accompanied by the Venerable Bunty.

‘Just the ticket,’ said Connie, eating several sandwiches in quick succession. ‘Glad you could make it. Lance did a good job, I hear.’

I told her he had and then thanked them both for leaving a back door from which I could escape. The Venerable Bunty told me it was the least they could do, but when I said I would leave them to their battle, Connie asked me to stay.

‘You need to be here,’ she said simply. ‘Did you and Doc duel it out?’

I nodded.

‘And?’

‘He let me win.’

‘I thought he might.’

‘This battle,’ I said, ‘can you win?’

‘In a traditional sense, no,’ said Connie, ‘but sometimes, when the long game is played, you can lose a battle and still win a war.’

‘Did killing Mr Ffoxe actually make a difference?’

‘It showed that foxes could and should be subject to justice. Mr Ffoxe killed over three thousand rabbits that we know of, and wouldn’t have stopped.’

‘But wasn’t he just the shill?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t Smethwick have been the target?’

‘We needed to delay and escalate things all at the same time. The timing had to be just right. You’ll see.’

They went back to talking tactics and I stood there, feeling spare and useless.

‘Hello, Dad.’

It was Pippa, the billiard-smooth grass of the hill no impediment to her movement.

I gave her a hug and she said she was with Harvey, who waved to me from the communications table set up under an oak tree. He had a dozen or so field telephones in front of him which rang occasionally and were answered by a clerk, who then wrote down a report on a piece of paper and presented it to the Venerable Bunty’s aide-de-camp.

‘They can’t win,’ I said to Pippa.

‘I think they know that, Dad – but then much depends on your definition of winning.’

‘But you’re OK?’

She looked across at Harvey, then back to me, and smiled the most radiant of smiles.

‘I have never been happier.’

I was about to tell her that I’d wanted to hear that for a long, long, time, but I was interrupted by a large explosion as one half of the entranceway collapsed into a pile of rubble. The attack had begun. There was a loud rasp of coordinated artillery fire as a volley of shells flew into the colony and exploded amongst the cucumber frames and runner-bean poles. I heard the revving of tank engines as they advanced through the damaged gateway behind the bulldozers. More chilling than all this, however, were the whoops, cries, yelps and barks of the excited foxes, and the screams of terrified rabbits.

As we watched and listened, the smoke now drifting up and across the hill, there was a second explosion at the northern gateway, and another volley of artillery fire that tore up the gardens, revealing the lights in the tunnels beneath.

I could see Connie staring out across the swirling smoke at the rich fertile land of Gloucestershire. Soft earth, and abundant grass. The summer was not yet over, and there were still long evenings for rabbits to gambol. On the horizon the rim of the rising full moon was just beginning to show. Connie turned to the Venerable Bunty and they both nodded in agreement.

‘I’m going to complete the circle before we have too much suffering,’ said Bunty. ‘I thought our presence would at the very least give humans pause for reflection, but it seems not, or at least, not yet. It may happen, we live in hope. Best say your goodbyes.’

Connie turned to me.

‘It’s not working out for us, Pete. Driving cars and talking and having TV was kind of fun, and clothes and eating out totally rock. But the hate, the fear, the greed. It just doesn’t make any sense. You’re trying to run a twenty-first-century world on Palaeolithic thoughts and sentiments.’