The Constant Rabbit

‘Really? Was she in anything I might have seen?’

‘I don’t know – commercials, someone said, a small part in Pulp Fiction but she didn’t make it to the final cut.’

‘That’s interesting,’ I said, as I knew Connie had been keen on drama. She’d done a cracking audition as Shelley Levene in Barnstaple Uni’s production of Glengarry Glen Ross, but was rejected as the director wanted someone ‘more male and less furry’.

‘And Major Rabbit, is it?’ I added.

‘Yup. Almost served in Afghanistan, they say.’

Next Sunday, Next Door

DNA testing revealed that the rabbits were not some weird human/rabbit hybrid but were, in fact, rabbits – genetically indistinguishable from their dim field-cousins. Whatever gives the humanlike rabbits their humanness, it isn’t in their DNA.

The Rabbits arrived the following Sunday amidst the buzz of motor mowers and the snip-snap-snip of garden shears. Everyone was eager to have the village neat and tidy, shipshape and perfectly just-so on the off chance that the Spick & Span judges might drop by, as they had been seen mooching around Pembridge on Wednesday.

I was in the garage tinkering with my Austin-Healey when a 1974 Dodge Monaco²² pulled up in front of Hemlock Towers. Rabbits liked large American cars as they were better suited to their physique and limited levels of dexterity. Bench seats, auto transmission, feather-light power steering and large pedals. They also took great care of the cars, as rabbits viewed obsolescence as the arrogant cousin of waste and thus incompatible with the fourth tenet of their faith: sustainability. There was a rabbit saying: ‘Nfifnfinnfiifnnfifnfn’, which roughly translates as: ‘Only a fool buys twice’.

I hurried upstairs to see more easily over the dividing hedge. The kids got out first and, I noted, were traditionally dressed yet with modern trappings: the boy-rabbit was in a blue sailor-suit and Nikes, and listening to a cassette Walkman. He moved languidly as though either deep in thought or consumed by idleness, and was also wearing an ankle monitor of the type used by the probation services. The girl-rabbit was more animated, wore a flowery summer dress and bounced into the house with one or two excited hops while her father climbed out the driver’s side. He was dressed in a green Harris tweed over a matching waistcoat, shirt and tie. Rabbits rarely wore any clothes from the waist down as it restricted movement and the ability to hop. This was of little consequence to the females, who routinely wore skirts, dresses and, if no bouncing was planned, culottes, but to the males, who in one very notable respect were extremely humanlike indeed, had to disguise their trouserless modesty beneath a series of discreet items of apparel whose ingenious complexity is not within the scope of this book.²³

Major Rabbit consulted a fob watch that he kept in his waistcoat pocket and then moved to take the cases from the boot of the car. At the same time the front passenger door opened and Connie Rabbit climbed out, took a sniff of the air and looked around. She was wearing a leather jacket over a spotted summer dress and her ears were tied loosely at the base with a red bandana. Unusually, a small part of her tail peaked out from beneath her dress, the rabbit equivalent of a plunging neckline. Shocking in polite rabbit circles a decade ago, but mostly acceptable today.

The Spontaneous Anthropomorphic Event had taken place before I was born, so rabbits talking, wearing summer dresses or driving cars never seemed that unusual to me. Their appearance in 1965 had not been reported immediately as the whole thing was dismissed as an elaborate hoax, right up until the moment Franklin Rabbit chatted to Charles Wheeler live on the BBC’s Panorama Special.²⁴ After that, every news station on the planet wanted to ‘talk to the rabbit’ and find out how this all came about, something which still remains elusive today. The initial scepticism and disbelief then turned to curiosity, celebration and acceptance before taking a downward spiral during the knotty issues regarding status and rights before changing, as their numbers rose, to suspicion, condemnation, hatred and fear. The journey from celebration to rejection had taken less than two decades.

I was startled by the phone ringing. I picked it up too fast, fumbled, dropped, then answered the phone. It was Norman Mallett.

‘It’s arrived!’ he said, as though announcing an outbreak of the bubonic plague. ‘Can you see them?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, returning to the window with the phone. ‘Two adults, two children. Why don’t you come round and talk to them?’

‘What? Don’t be ridiculous. Do they look as if they’ll be staying only a few nights?’

I looked out of the window as a large removals lorry reversed down the narrow lane, reverse warner beeping.

‘No, I think they’re here for a while.’