The Constant Rabbit

Connie & Caution

Rabbit playwrights have rewritten Shakespeare to appeal to more rabbit audiences for a long time. The performance of Seven Thousand and Eighty-Three Noble Kinsmen was met with great acclaim in 1973, and 1982’s A Comedy of Ears is considered a benchmark adaptive literary work. Not all were so successful: A Winter’s Cottontail was panned by rabbit critics, all of whom thought it was simply an ‘excuse for a feeble pun’.

‘Oh,’ I said, feigning surprise, ‘hello, Doc. I thought you were away?’

‘I was,’ he said, gazing at me dangerously, ‘and now I’m back. Kent said the increasingly poorly named Constance was over here running some lines from her new play or something.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘she was. But then she left.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes,’ I said, a hot stickiness starting to crawl up my back, ‘really. Something to do with Diane.’

‘Is that her new play there?’ he asked, pointing towards where the script was still lying on the hall table.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we were going to do some more later. Tomorrow, I think, or the day after.’

I thought about having to face Doc in a duel.

‘Or if you’d prefer it, never.’

I suddenly realised that her shoes were still where she’d left them, right there in plain sight, barely a yard from where we were standing. Although rabbits had outstanding peripheral vision for signs of movement, peripheral relevance was harder for them – one of the reasons they drive slowly. In high-rabbit-concentration driving areas, road signs have a small logo of a fox in the bottom left-hand corner to ensure they are noticed.

‘You’d better take the play with you,’ I said, reaching for the script while at the same time pushing her shoes underneath the umbrella stand with my foot. He didn’t take the proffered script and instead leaned closer to me.

‘I wasn’t sure if they were her shoes or not,’ he growled, ‘until you pushed them under the stand.’

‘Did I?’

‘You did,’ said Doc in a threatening murmur, ‘and if I know Connie she’ll be hiding in a cupboard somewhere with a Victor Hugo novel. Am I right?’

‘Not at all,’ I said with perfect deniability. She was hiding in a cupboard, sure, but with a novel by Dumas, not Hugo.

Irrespective, he pushed past me into the hall.

‘I know you’re in here!’ he yelled, lolloping through to the kitchen. I was going to follow him in but was distracted by two people outside, strolling towards me from the direction of the lane. It was Victor and Norman Mallett, and this was exceptionally bad timing.

‘Good evening, Peter,’ said Victor with thinly disguised aggression as soon as they were standing in my doorway, ‘we’d like a word.’

‘Can’t it wait?’ I said. ‘This is really not the best time.’

‘Line of Duty ended twenty minutes ago,’ said Norman, ‘so what can you be doing that’s so important—’

Norman abruptly stopping talking as Connie, still wrapped only in my bedsheet, ran down the stairs. She gave me a smile and a shrug but then slid to a stop on the hall rug when she came face to face with Victor and Norman, whose eyes opened wide in surprise.

‘Back to the burrow!’ yelled Doc, who had seen her from the kitchen, ‘I’ll deal with you later!’

‘No!’ she said defiantly, her voice rising. ‘You can take your “back to the burrow” alpha-buck anthropocentric possessive misogynistic honcho machismo bullshit and shove it right up your pellet slot. You got a problem with me, you tell it to my face.’

‘Problem?’ he yelled back as they squared off to one another in the hall. ‘I’ll tell you the problem. You shagging the next-door neighbour is the problem. He’s a human, for Lago’s sake – have you not even a single shred of decency?’

Victor and Norman turned to stare at me with a look of utter revulsion etched on their features.

‘I can explain,’ I said.

‘Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do!’ yelled Connie as I saw two more people appear behind the Mallett brothers outside. They looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t at first place them. They were immaculately turned out, held a clipboard each and in their free hand expensive pens poised mid-air in a dramatic fashion.

‘Can’t we all just keep our voices down?’ I said.

‘Is this what you usually do?’ said Doc, turning to me. ‘Take advantage of vulnerable does when their husbands are out of town?’

‘I’m anything but vulnerable,’ yelled Connie. ‘I’m quite capable of making up my own mind, and let me tell you, Major Clifford Rabbit, Peter here gave me twice as good a time as anything you’ve ever handed out.’

‘Disgusting,’ said Victor.

‘Reprehensible,’ said Norman.

‘But—’ I said as Doc made a lunge towards Connie. She ran off with a giggle but Doc – maybe accidentally, maybe on purpose – stood on the bedsheet and she was suddenly completely naked, right there on the IKEA rug in the hall. In front of everyone.

There was a sudden hollow and very empty moment in time that seemed to hang for an eternity.

‘Whoops,’ she said with an embarrassed grin, then bounced out of the door past the Mallett brothers to spring with the utmost of elegance over the dividing fence. Within two more bounds she was back inside her house, her husband close behind. There was a crashing of furniture, some breaking of crockery – then silence.

I looked back at Victor and Norman. They were all staring at me in shocked silence, mouths open.

‘This isn’t what it looks like,’ I said.

‘It seems abundantly clear to us that this is exactly what it looks like,’ said Victor.

‘Is this how Much Hemlock disports itself?’ said one of the people holding the clipboards, who I now recognised as Reginald Spick, one half of the Herefordshire Spick & Span award team. ‘As a hotbed of base, lewd and depraved behaviour?’

‘You would come around right now,’ said Victor, who had also just recognised him.

‘The judges appear randomly to maintain fair play,’ said Mr Spick in a haughty manner.

‘For a very good reason,’ said Mrs Span, Mr Spick’s partner.

‘Can’t you just pretend this never happened?’ said Norman. ‘Just go away and come back later?’

‘Nothing whatsoever happened,’ I said, partly for the judges, partly for me and partly for the Mallett brothers, ‘and even if it did, what is it to you?’

‘Quite a lot, actually,’ said Victor. ‘This is a good village, and we have a respectable way of doing things – and that generally excludes lying down with vermin.’

‘Connie’s not vermin.’

‘Not to you, obviously.’

‘I think we’ve seen enough,’ said the judges, making to leave. ‘This sort of thing never happens in Pembridge. Winning a Spick & Span award is not just about a fine herbaceous border, roses to die for and local honey of impeccable quality, it’s about cultural propriety. Why do you think Slipton Flipflop has never won a prize, when they have the finest hanging baskets in the county?’

‘But just a minute,’ said Norman, the issue over Connie and me momentarily forgotten, ‘this is emphatically not what we discussed – and considering the sum we paid you, we expect at the very least a fair shake of the stick.’

‘We’re bribed by everyone,’ said Mrs Span in a tart manner. ‘Don’t think we owe you any special treatment because of it.’ She paused. ‘But I suppose we could be persuaded to rejudge so long as your current issues have been … dealt with. Do we understand one another?’

Norman said that they definitely understood, thanked them for their patience and forbearance and Spick & Span made their exit as Victor and Norman turned back to me.

‘I think the course of action is clear,’ said Norman. ‘The well-being of the village comes before you and your little bunny chums. But since you were once a friend and we are reasonable people who embrace proportionality and fair play, we’ll throw you a bone. Forty-eight hours to get out, and you can take your fickle daughter and long-eared chums with you. It’s non-negotiable, Knox. And if you can’t persuade the Rabbits to go, then we will – using whatever means at our disposal.’

Since I now knew Toby was TwoLegsGood, it stood to reason that his father and uncle were too. This wasn’t an empty threat.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘perhaps we can start a dialogue or—’

‘Forty-eight hours,’ said Norman, glaring at me in the sort of way I imagine a psychopath might do, just after they unchain you from the radiator, but just before they remove your liver with a spoon, ‘is that enough dialogue for you?’

‘Yes, OK,’ I said.

And they left. I thought of going over to the Rabbits’ and warning them of the impending shitstorm, but instead locked the door, waited until the wash cycle finished, then put Connie’s dress in the tumble dryer. I waited until midnight for Pippa to come home, but when she didn’t, I turned in.