Jasper Fforde - The Constant Rabbit

‘I think it’s in our nature.’

‘I disagree,’ she replied. ‘Humans have a very clear idea about how to behave, and on many occasions actually do. But it’s sometimes disheartening that correct action is drowned out by endless chitter-chatter, designed not to find a way forward but to justify petty jealousies and illogically held prejudices. If you’re going to talk, try to make it relevant, useful and progressive rather than simply distracting and time-wasting nonsense, intended only to justify the untenable and postpone the real dialogue that needs to happen.’

Sometimes it takes a non-human to say what it is to be a good human. In the ultimate hypocrisy, Smethwick and UKARP and 2LG and all the others that accused the rabbits of unsustainable overpopulation should have turned the accusation on themselves. The rabbits weren’t the rabbits – we were.

‘So what circle are you completing?’ I asked as the meeting house suffered a direct hit and erupted in a ball of fire.

‘We’re going home,’ she said simply. ‘We’ve done about all we can for the moment.’

I looked at Pippa, who had her arms wrapped tightly around Harvey, and I knew then what their play was. Whatever had given them their humanness could just as easily remove it. The anthropomorphised rabbits were indeed going home, back to the way they were.

They’d seen enough. They were going to revert.

Connie clasped my hand tightly in her paws.

‘Why don’t you come with me?’ she said. ‘I can’t guarantee that it’ll be intellectually challenging and there certainly won’t be any scones and raspberry jam and Panorama and Coen brothers movies, but there will be gambolling in the meadows, lots of it, which is kind of special – and you and I will be together.’

I looked around. The rabbit were retreating from the forward positions as they sensed the circle was about to close, and I saw the first of the tanks come into view. It paused for a second then fired, and a shell whistled above our heads and ripped through the treetops.

‘I’m not sure I’d make a very good rabbit,’ I said. ‘Besides, I’ve not done enough to earn it. I didn’t kill Mr Ffoxe; all I did was take the rap – and there’s nothing brave, noble or exceptional in doing the right thing. I could have done more earlier, and of my own free will. But I didn’t.’

‘You did something ,’ said Connie. ‘Incremental change comes from incremental action.’

‘Incremental is enough?’

‘It’s the most most people can do. We’re not all revolutionaries, but enough people challenging the problem can make a difference. So, you coming?’

‘Someone has to tell this story,’ I said. ‘You’re going to have to go home on your own.’

‘Then maybe another time?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe another time.’

And she smiled, and she kissed me, there amongst the smell of cordite and the whistle of projectiles as they flew over our heads. The mortars had just started, and the whompa of exploding shells filled the air.

‘Goodbye, Peter,’ she said, glancing towards where the full moon had risen above the horizon. ‘I’ll come and find you. Might take a while, but I shall.’

I opened my mouth to say goodbye, but she and all the other rabbits had already gone. Not entirely gone, of course, just back to the part of themselves they had chosen to be, rejecting everything that made them human. I looked down at my feet, and there she was – a small brown-furred field rabbit no bigger than a cat and now covered by a draped mass of mud-streaked summer dress, the same one, in fact, she had been wearing when she turned up in the library all those weeks ago, blinking innocently and asking for a copy of Rabbit and Rabbitability . She looked startled and ran away, zig-zagging as though her life depended upon it until she was lost to sight within a furry carpet of other panicked rabbits eager to escape. The attack faltered as the Taskforce quickly realised that the enemy had gone, and they were now simply using their power and might against field rabbits. I stood there feeling empty and lost and broken. Everything I had thought I was, everything I thought my nation stood for, had been wrong. I wasn’t anything special, I hadn’t ultimately made a difference. I had been complicit in crimes against rabbits and betrayed my own sense of natural justice. I thought I had been one of the good guys. I hadn’t been forgiven, I wasn’t repaired, I was the same flawed person I had been before Connie chanced back into my life. The only difference between the me now and the me then was that I had achieved a sense of awareness, and the measure of Peter Knox was what he’d do with that knowledge in the months and years ahead. I stood there for quite a few minutes, listening to the confused yells of foxes, and the artillery quieten and stop.

‘Knox?’ said a fox I didn’t recognise who had just run up the hill, searching in vain for rabbits. ‘Is that you, the one that killed Torquil?’

He was with five others. They were stripped to the waist, the orange of their fur accentuated by the fires now blazing in the colony.

‘Yes,’ I said, no longer in denial, ‘Peter Knox, ex-Spotter, RabCoT office, Hereford.’

They started to move towards me, but I didn’t budge. There would have been no point. I knew how fast foxes could move.

‘We are so going to enjoy this ,’ said the first fox, grinning fit to burst, his fangs wet with saliva. ‘I’ve always wanted to know what killing a human felt like. But don’t feel bad. It’s not simply payback for Torquil – but for all those hunts.’

I didn’t think I’d mention that I’d never been on a fox hunt, and instead murmured ‘guilty on all counts’ and closed my eyes.

The circle hadn’t only been completed in Colony One. Every single anthropomorphised rabbit had gone home by the time the full moon had risen. Despite this, Nigel Smethwick ordered the attack to continue, just in case it was some sort of a rabbit trick. It wasn’t, and the press mocked him for his ‘war on rabbits’ before they moved on to other matters, such as the shock cancellation of Casualty , whether the new Dr Who was as good as the old one, or reporting on what someone on Twitter said about someone else who was also on Twitter. By the end of the month all the colonies were smoking ruins, the network of burrows mined by the Royal Engineers. In a year the land had been cleared and returned to farmland.

As a parting gesture and to refute detractors who said that rabbits had no sense of humour, the rabbits took the foxes with them. The timing was, for me at least, impeccable. My five foxy executioners reverted within one pace of me, and swiftly ran off into the hedgerows, confused and nervous. But unlike the rabbits, the foxes retained memory traces of their former life and made repeated attempts to sneak into exclusive London restaurants and hotels. The Savoy had to employ a gamekeeper who killed fifty-eight of them in a single six-week period, and foxes can often be seen at Glyndebourne, staring wistfully at the performers from the safety of a near by wood.

Not all animals reverted. Firyali Elephant was sworn in as Kenya’s president three years later, a job she has done spectacularly well over the past sixteen years – the model for elephantine governance that is currently transforming Africa. Back in the UK the Dalmatian and the badger were untouched by the deEventing, and last I heard were still doing their ‘Spots and Stripes’ comedy routine, which remains unfunny, but still unique, to this day. The surviving guinea pigs were released on licence after a decade, reoffended in under a week and are now back inside. Adrian Whizelle changed his name to Arthur Bulstrode, but it didn’t help: he, like all the other weasels, was found dead in suspicious circumstances by the time the year was out. The caterpillar is still in the Natural History Museum and s/he has yet to change into a butterfly. And the bees? No one has any idea what happened to the bees.