The Constant Rabbit

Sue Rabbit easily made it through to the next round, and I then fell asleep while watching the director’s cut of While You Were Sleeping, and was woken by a car door banging and the unmistakable burble of a large V8 engine. I looked at the clock. It was two in the morning. The front door creaked open; we never locked it.

‘Still up?’ asked Pippa once I’d walked to the hall.

‘I fell asleep in front of the TV.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, realising I’d stayed up for her. ‘I would have texted but my phone got stolen.’

I leaned down to give her a hug. She smelled of soil, brandy and dandelion tobacco.

‘Not a problem,’ I said. ‘Hello, Sally.’

‘Hello, Mishter Knoxsh,’ slurred Sally, who was leaning against the door frame, much the worse for wear and with her skirt on backwards.

‘So,’ I said, ‘anyone want tea?’

‘No thanks,’ said Pippa, and made for her room, pushing Sally in front of her with a foot. ‘Sal needs a shower and then we’re going to bed. We’ll tell you all about it during breakfast.’

‘I’d like to pre-order a bucket of coffee,’ mumbled Sally, ‘and a paracetamol the size of a dustbin lid.’

I waited until I heard the shower turn on, then called Mrs Lomax to tell her Sally was OK and she could pick her up tomorrow. We’d actually spoken three times that evening already. She’d suggested coming over with a Lancashire hotpot that was ‘way too much for one’. This wasn’t the first time she’d proposed a cosy late-night tête-à-tête since Mr Lomax passed away, and it wasn’t the first time I’d quietly refused, even though Pippa and Sally had both suggested on numerous occasions I invite her around. ‘You won’t be disappointed,’ Sally had told me in a comment not really awash with ambiguity.

‘Colony One?’ Mrs Lomax had said when I’d told her where they were going. Traditionally, she had little to no idea of what her daughter got up to. Sally was the same age as Pippa, and Mrs Lomax, like me, often had difficulty coming to terms with the fact that the little girls we remembered so fondly were now fully grown-up women who did fully grown-up woman things.

Tittle-Tattle and Toast

Buttons are tricky for rabbits to manage with paws; zips ditto. Velcro would be usable, but is regarded by rabbits as: ‘a hideously inelegant method of clothes fastening’. Buttons can be done up by them, but it’s a two-rabbit job and requires specialist tools. The human equivalent would be ‘trying to mend an aneroid barometer in boxing gloves’.

The following morning over coffee they told me about the previous evening. Rabbit parties, I learned, were pretty wild. There was loud music, booze, fights, impassioned political discourse, more fights, more music, more booze – and a lot of sex, usually in cosy side burrows at regular intervals. But it was the music that impressed Pippa the most.

‘It’s kind of like swing and jazz and mambo all at the same time,’ she said, ‘and played with such gusto. The trombonist actually died of a brain haemorrhage during his solo and the next number was dedicated to him – then everything just carried on as before. They have a zest for life that we don’t possess; as though they need to pack as much fun and good living into their lives as possible.’

‘Rabbits have high mortality issues what with disease, foxes, industrial accidents and trombone solos,’ said Sally, who was now wearing dark glasses, avoiding all sudden movements and speaking in a quiet voice, ‘so have to live life to the full, just in case.’

‘Makes sense, I guess,’ I said. ‘What’s it like inside Colony One?’

‘Like you see on the documentaries,’ said Pippa, ‘centred around May Hill but mostly below ground, and highly ordered. Tidy, neat, zero crime and not a speck of litter anywhere. We were in a subterranean club called The Cottontail Club. While everyone danced bits of dry earth fell from the ceiling. I asked Bobby about whether there were ever any collapses, and she said there were – frequently – but they just burrowed themselves out, and to keep close to her, just in case.’

‘So she looked after you?’ I asked.

‘She was great. Sally and I were being given some verbal over the ecological impact of our toxic anthropocentric agenda, and Bobby led a robust discussion group in which we concluded that the notion of “ownership” needs to give way to “custodianship”, and that individuals must shoulder responsibility for groupcrime – even if they do not know they are doing it or even agree with it – and should atone for their de facto complicity by working ever harder to effect change, and consider restorative justice options. It was quite humbling, but empowering, too.’

‘Can you stop talking so loudly?’ said Sally. ‘Or just stop talking? I’m really not feeling so well.’

I poured her a glass of water and put it next to her. She groaned, and took the tiniest of sips.

‘Who drove you in?’ I asked as casually as I could. ‘Was that a RabCab?’

‘An ex-boyfriend of Bobby’s named Harvey,’ replied Pippa.