The Constant Rabbit

I looked out of the window to see whether the danger was imminent, but there was nothing to be seen. I concluded that the implied sense of threat was vague and intangible. The most dangerous kind, to my mind.

‘Who?’

‘Them,’ she added, no more helpfully.

‘Vegans?’

‘No, not vegans,’ she said, eyes opening wide, ‘worse than that.’

‘Foreigners?’ I asked, catching sight of that morning’s copy of The Actual Truth, whose leader column’s outrage du jour was that unwashed foreign beggars were taking much-needed panhandling jobs from their hard-working British counterparts.

‘Worse.’

‘Vegan foreigners who are also … socialist?’

‘No,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘rabbits!’

This startled Mr Wainwright, who was leafing through the magazine display, part of his one-man quest to read an eighteen-year run of Champion Marrow Monthly without once paying for a copy.

‘What’s that?’ he said.

‘Rabbits,’ repeated Mrs Griswold, ‘in the village.’

Mr Wainwright looked shocked and, I think, a little afraid.

‘Better not be some of those modern, bolshie, in-your-face rabbits who like to cause trouble and have unrealistic views on equality.’

Actually, I thought to myself, any rabbit – even compliant, easygoing ones who kept themselves to themselves and didn’t overbreed – would not find an easy home in Much Hemlock.

‘They’re off-colony legals,’ said Mrs Griswold. ‘Major Rabbit is retired ex-army. There are two children but I didn’t hear what Mrs Rabbit did. I’m not sure she even speaks English, to be honest – they were speaking in Rabbity when they walked in.’

‘What does this Rabbity sound like?’ asked Mr Wainwright.

‘Hnfffy noises, mostly,’ said Mrs Griswold, ‘hniff-niff-nfhhf-niffh, that sort of thing – and a lot of nose and whisker movements.’

And they both laughed at Mrs Griswold’s impersonation of the rabbit: nose wrinkled, upper teeth on lower lip, hands masquerading as ears. Mrs Griswold was, however, quite wrong – all rabbits speak English and, owing to their traditional work in call centres, often three or four other languages²¹ too.

‘I heard they’re moving into Mr Beeton’s old place,’ said Mrs Ponsonby, who had caught the end of the conversation as she arrived. ‘Waste of a good house – but someone has to live in it. Hello, Peter.’

Mrs Ponsonby was my aunt, and had an odd habit of contradicting herself in every sentence. Pippa called it ‘a demonstration of the duality of our species’. I called it ‘just plain annoying’.

‘They must have come into some serious cash,’ said Mr Wainwright, ‘to afford the old Beeton place.’

‘If they have they’ll probably blow the lot on lettuce,’ said Mrs Ponsonby, adding: ‘but that would be their choice.’

‘I think Mrs Rabbit’s name was Constance,’ said Mrs Griswold.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Constance,’ she replied. ‘I’ve never heard of a rabbit called Constance.’

I had, and it stood to reason Connie and Constance were the same rabbit, and I suddenly felt a little odd inside. A sense of interest, obviously, that I might be seeing her more regularly after all these years – but also a sudden paralysing fear that she might find out what I did for a job. But if I was having a conflicting moment right now, it suddenly got a whole lot worse, and very quickly.

‘I heard she was the widow of that rabbit mistakenly jugged by TwoLegsGood,’ said Mrs Griswold, and it felt as though iced water had been suddenly pressed into my veins. I had never connected the two. Why should I? But the truth was that I was partially responsible for Dylan Rabbit’s death, even if the Compliance Taskforce was not the agency that killed him. He was released by RabCoT within twenty-four hours and dead in another five: TwoLegsGood activists dragged him from his house in the middle of the night and upended him in a forty-gallon drum of cheap gravy that had been seasoned with bay leaves, celery, thyme, juniper berries and red wine. The mistake was only discovered when the rabbit we were actually after died of myxomatosis three months later. Controversially, the BBC’s News & Views had suggested that the Rabbit Compliance Taskforce had tipped off TwoLegsGood and had him released him only to be killed ‘as a warning’. The Senior Group Leader vehemently denied the accusation as ‘just another manufactured lie from the biased pro-rabbit media’.