The Constant Rabbit

‘That’s bullshit, Mr Knox. This is our planet, and we’ll do with it what we wish. You’re just an … apostate of your species.’

‘I’m not sure that word works outside a religious context, you unbelievable twat.’

I’d have liked to boast that I’d said that last line, but I hadn’t. It was said by the larger of two other prisoners who’d just turned up. They were muscly, bald, bearded, and both looked as though they could comfortably strangle a tractor. Their tattoos – of which they had many – were not Elmer Fudd-related or anti-rabbit slogans, but normal sort of stuff: Celtic thingummies, skulls and the dates of their children’s births. Significantly, they were both staring at the fox sympathisers in a way I emphatically would not like them to be staring at me.

‘Another time, Knox,’ said one of the supremacists, and they left, grumbling about how they never served quinoa in the canteen, and how much they missed the GQ lifestyle awards.

‘Upper-middle-class entitled parasites,’ said the first new arrival as he sat down. ‘Tristran Reeves there is doing six years for rebadging Rayburns as Agas and flogging them off to unsuspected buyers, and his associate, Jeremy Fink-Grottle, had been forging National Trust membership cards.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘middle-class crime.’

In another inversion of generally accepted stereotypes, the heavily tattooed prisoners with what would be termed back in Much Hemlock ‘a rough manner of speech’ had no issue with my friendship with rabbits at all.

‘My sister was seeing a rabbit until they rescinded his work permit,’ continued the prisoner, whose name I learned was ‘Razors’ McKay, on account of his hobby of collecting seashells. ‘Nice lad and looked after our Stacey well. Don’t see the harm in it myself – love is love – and to be honest, anything that knob Smethwick is against is totally fine by me.’

‘Yeah,’ said his friend in a Liverpudlian accent, ‘we’ll see youse all right, man. Friend o’ the rabbit is a friend of ours.’

His name, I learned, was ‘Bonecrusher’ Malloy, which related to his previous employment making bonemeal for the pet food industry. They were both inside for employing undocumented rabbit labour, and then illegally paying them above the maximum wage. They’d both been warned six or seven times, and prosecuted twice each. They’d carried on regardless and eventually were given custodial sentences.

After I found all that out, we got on really well. For the most part they were curious about what had happened to me, agreed that, yes, twenty years was likely for murder and intimate association, then asked me what it had been like.

‘Killing a fox?’ I asked.

‘No,’ they said, ‘the other thing.’

The first three days were relatively uneventful, but on the fourth I lost both my thumbs to Reeves and Fink-Grottle, who came to my cell, gagged me with a towel and then removed both thumbs with a bolt-cutter. I only remembered them cutting off the first; I was unconscious by the time they took the second. I was found an hour later in a pool of blood and rushed to hospital.

The Trials of Lance deBlackberry

Only three rabbit lawyers were ever called to the bar, the longest serving for sixteen years until anti-rabbit legislation forced her to quit. ‘If things had been different,’ ex-Attorney General and pro-rabbit advocate Lord Jefferson said, ‘she would have been the finest judge this nation would ever have produced.’

By the time of my trial, my hands had more or less healed. My assailants had flushed my severed thumbs down the toilet, so the surgeons had suggested a series of operations that would have put a little finger or toe where my thumb had been, but success was not guaranteed, so I asked them to make the repair as neat as they could and that would be it.

Lance enquired several times whether I wanted to postpone the sentencing. I asked him whether that would change anything, and he said that it probably wouldn’t. The story of my lopping had got out, and while hardcore leporiphobic fox-friends saw it as my just deserts for killing Mr Ffoxe, most thought it was a cruel and unusual punishment, given that I was already facing a life sentence. The only upside to my incarceration was that without me, the Buchblitz overran twice in a row and had to be placed in ‘special measures’.

My hearing was held in the Gloucester law courts. I’d heard nothing from Pippa as the mobile phone masts around Colony One had been disabled, along with all the landlines. She did manage to get a message out to me, though. A scribbled note hidden inside a hollowed-out carrot left in my cell exhorted me to ‘be strong’ and informed me that she, and everyone else, ‘were fine’.