The Constant Rabbit

Fudds and Flopsies

‘Fudd’ – as in ‘Elmer Fudd’ – was the usual pejorative rabbit term for a human. There were also: Pinko, Fleshy, Homo, Bingo and Rupert. There were others in Rabbity, too, usually reproductive slurs regarding evolutionarily disadvantageous rates of ovulation and shockingly low litter sizes.

The new rabbit Intelligence Officer had a startled look which made it appear that he’d been caught in car headlamps some time in the seventies and was still suffering the trauma. He would have been Labstock owing to his white fur which looked matted and ill-kempt, and he was dressed in an embroidered waistcoat covered by a long duster jacket that had been patched several times with brown corduroy. Rabbits abhorred waste and would often use an item of clothing until it fell off them.

More shockingly, when he removed his battered brown derby hat, there were only two healed-over stumps where his long ears would have sprouted from his head. He’d been, in rabbit terminology, ‘cropped’. His fellow rabbits had meted out the worst possible punishment for his unknown and presumably heinous crime and banished him from the rabbithood. Most rabbits took the honourable way out and dug themselves a lonely burrow in which to expire – but a few, consumed by humiliation and loss, wandered the country as outcasts, attempting to find absolution in any way they could. Some, like this one, flipped to the other side, knowing they could not be hated any more than they were already, but still knowing they would have to wear the burden of their sins for all to see, every day, for ever.

‘A rabbit without ears,’ a rabbit would say, ‘is less of a rabbit than nothing.’

One of the officers might have stared for longer than was polite, for the earless rabbit said in a low and unusually threatening growl: ‘What are you staring at, Fudd?’

‘Nothing,’ said the officer.

‘This is Agent Douglas AY-002,’ said Flemming, introducing the cropped rabbit warmly and to low gasps of recognition from the room, ‘vouched for by the Senior Group Leader, no less, and transferred from the Swindon office. Treat him as you would a human,’ she added, enthused by having a rabbit onside against the rabbit, ‘his record is exemplary, his dislike of rabbits well known.’

I too had heard of this rabbit before, though I had not met him. All rabbits who had turned against their own were cropped, but that wasn’t in itself enough. To be fully trusted, rabbits in the employ of the Taskforce would be expected to demonstrate their anti-rabbit credentials, and in this respect AY-002’s reputation preceded him. It was said his usual method for extracting intelligence from any recalcitrant brethren was via a hammer – varying sizes, from toffee all the way up to claw, to match levels of coercion.

‘Agent Whizelle,’ said Whizelle, introducing himself, ‘Intel, Identity Fraud. We met at the interrogation training weekend last year. I enjoyed your talk immensely – the one where you expounded on your “tie the suspect into a hessian sack and beat them with sticks” technique for extracting information.’

‘Morris dancer’s sticks,’ corrected Douglas. ‘It’s an important point, and I thank you. I thought your talk with the Senior Group Leader about the MegaWarren project saving upwards of a hundred million a year by bringing all five colonies together was particularly enlightening, and not before time.’

‘Kind,’ said Whizelle, ‘very kind.’

‘This is Peter Knox,’ said Flemming, beckoning me over, ‘our Spotter today.’

Douglas AY-002 gazed at me suspiciously.

‘I’ve seen your file,’ he said after a pause. ‘They say you’re talented, but hobbled by an unwarranted sense of fair play.’

‘I think it’s important to play the safe game,’ I managed to mumble, ‘to stop RabCoT making a fool of itself.’

He stared at me for a moment.

‘Is that all it is?’

‘That’s all it is.’

He paused again, then clasped my one hand in his two paws, the traditional human/rabbit greeting, as handshakes were tricky to accomplish without thumbs.

‘I won’t let you down, Mr AY-002.’

‘I hope not,’ said the earless rabbit, ‘and you can call me Lugless; every other Fudd does.’

‘I’d be happy to call you anything you want,’ I said, trying to be accommodating.

‘And I’d be happy if you didn’t speak to me at all,’ said Lugless, ‘but I have a feeling I’m going to be disappointed. The Senior Group Leader told me to report directly to him if you get pointlessly sentimental over our little furry friends.’

‘Lugless is a straight talker,’ said Flemming in the awkward silence that followed. ‘Agent AY-002, let me introduce you to the rest of team.’

‘You come highly recommended,’ said Sergeant Boscombe as they shook hand/paws. ‘Your kind loathe you.’

‘They aren’t my kind,’ said Lugless in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They took everything from me and I owe them nothing.’

‘Good to hear,’ said Boscombe, and introduced the others. Lugless greeted them all in a distant yet businesslike manner, but didn’t direct any terse words towards any of the others. I had the sudden worrying realisation that I was on Operations today to be tested. If my loyalty to the department remained in question, I was probably finished, in spite of my skill at spotting.

‘Take a seat, everyone,’ said Lugless, switching on the overhead projector and pulling a bundle of acetate sheets from his case. Rabbits – all rabbits, not just ones who worked in Compliance – despised PowerPoint presentations, and not because it meant fiddling around with paw-unfriendly keyboards or pointers. No, it was rather the rabbit’s wholly practical approach to technology. If something worked perfectly adequately and did not actually need to be replaced, they’d stick with it. Most of the colonies still used fax machines, printing presses and manual telephone switchboards, although this was probably not just a technological issue, but the fact that rabbits like to gossip, and manual switchboards made eavesdropping not only easy, but irresistible.

‘An unidentified Labstock rabbit,’ said Lugless placing the first acetate on the projector, ‘similar to thousands like him. For the purposes of this operation, he’ll be known as John Flopsy13 7770.’

We stared at the nondescript white rabbit that had come up on the screen.

‘What’s he done?’ asked one of the compliance officers.

‘It’s not what he’s done,’ said Lugless, ‘or about what he will do. It’s about what he knows. Deep intel says the Bunty might be hanging out in Colony One, not twenty-five miles from where we’re standing right now.’

The ‘Bunty’ to whom he referred would be the Venerable Bunty,14 the rabbit’s spiritual leader for the past decade and a rabbit of considerable influence. Her whereabouts were a closely guarded secret as Smethwick had once said in public that ‘if we had Bunty in our hands, the rabbits would do anything we asked of them’. She remained a rabbit of great interest to the authorities, but had always evaded capture. Quite how she had done this was a mystery, as she routinely moved from colony to colony in order to offer spiritual and culinary guidance, as Lago, the Grand Matriarch, was as big on home cooking as she was on metaphysical well-being. It didn’t help that no one knew what she looked like, and she usually gave sermons in disguise so few rabbits knew either – insurance against any rabbits who could be turned by the Compliance Taskforce.

‘She has a pernicious influence on the rabbit,’ said Flemming, ‘and the Senior Group Leader wants her in custody to more fully ascertain her motives.’

By this he probably meant that it was actually Smethwick who wanted her for questioning, but the PM liked to stay one step removed from anything too controversial.

‘Are we thinking of snatching the Bunty from inside the colony?’ asked Boscombe, seemingly quite excited about the idea as it probably involved several helicopters, lots of hardware and a totally knock-out cool code name.

‘Eventually,’ said Whizelle, ‘but in truth it’s only rumoured she’s in Colony One, figuring out ways to “Complete the Circle”.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Boscombe.

‘We think,’ said Flemming in the manner of someone more comfortable with conjecture than truth, ‘that it may relate to the rabbit’s plan to weaponise their reproductive capabilities in order to overrun the UK.’

‘Quite,’ said Whizelle. ‘The geographically restricting environment of MegaWarren is needed now more than ever to curb the ugly spectre of a sustained campaign of LitterBombing.’

Everyone in the room nodded sagely at this; it was an ongoing concern, but with little evidence to support it. The Council of Coneys branded the LitterBomb notion ‘patently ridiculous’, along with other leporiphobic conspiracy theories, such as a desire for ‘Universal Veganism’, a change to running the country ‘the Rabbit Way’ and a wholesale switch to the worship of Lago, the rabbit goddess.

‘The point is,’ continued Flemming, ‘that there are at least fifty miles of warren inside the colony, and we need to narrow down the search. The Rabbit Underground Movement are doubtless in constant communication with the Bunty, and that’s why we’re eager to capture and interview this individual. Get to him and we get to her. Get her and we’ve got the rabbit where we want them.’

After we’d all stared pointlessly at the Flopsy for a few minutes Lugless replaced the picture on the projector with another, this time of the high street in Ross.

‘Intel tells us Flopsy 7770 visits the post office in Ross-on-Wye every Tuesday to post letters to the other colonies. He uses the exterior pillar box and ensures he is there at the time of the four p.m. postal collection so he can add them to the mailbag directly. It’s not exactly a freshly pulled carrot,15 but I think Flopsy 7770 is acting suspiciously enough to warrant further investigation.’

‘Labstocks are almost impossible to break,’ murmured Boscombe.

This was true. When your kind were vivisected before the Spontaneous Anthropomorphising Event, it kind of made the ‘continuous application of harsh coercive force’ indistinguishable from ‘last Tuesday’. Anyone in the Rabbit Underground who held sensitive material and had to go off-colony was usually Labstock for this precise reason.

‘I haven’t met a rabbit I couldn’t turn,’ said Lugless in an ominous manner. Gathering intel in the old days had been easy because rabbits were so trusting, but they had wised up over the years and now adopted a ‘blank expression while blinking’ approach to law enforcement questions which was devastatingly effective. But rabbits knew how to get to other rabbits, especially if they could feign dominance and had no ears, which was about as creepy and shocking to them as seeing someone with half a face might be to us.

‘OK then,’ said Lugless, laying another sheet of acetate on the overhead projector with his very precise plan on it, ‘this is how we’re going to do it.’

It was pretty much a standard sharp arrest. Always unexpected, always fast. An escaping rabbit might take three to five seconds to get up to a fast enough run to initiate the first bounce – and after that only an officer with a powerful net-gun could bring one down, and that was a weapon that had limited range and required the team to know in which direction the rabbit might go – an almost impossible task. ‘Trounce before Bounce’ was the guiding policy.

As Lugless outlined the plan everyone took notes. All the officers were to be in civilian clothes and ready to pounce on Flopsy 7770 the moment he posted the letters. There were questions and answers until most of the officers were satisfied. Whizelle wouldn’t be coming as he was easily recognised, but Lugless would be present, coordinating the grab – but in disguise, he said, which I was intrigued about. Rabbits had a hard time looking like anything but rabbits.

‘What’s my function in all this?’ I asked.

‘You’re our plan B,’ said Lugless. ‘You’re to get a good look at the Flopsy before the arrest, just in case he slips through our fingers. You can ID him later.’

‘I can’t guarantee that,’ I said. ‘He’s a Labstock.’

Lugless stared at me in a dangerous sort of way.

‘… but I’ll do my best,’ I added.

‘I really hope so,’ said Lugless, ‘for your sake.’

The briefing broke up ten minutes later.