The Constant Rabbit

Endgame

It was dubbed ‘a battle’ to make it sound as though the opponents had been equally powerful and that there had been some sense of doubt over the outcome. A more realistic word would have been ‘slaughter’ had the engagement gone the way it had been intended.

But it didn’t.

I paused inside the gate, suddenly aware that I had stepped into a world that until recently had been closed to me. I still felt a stranger, and knew I could never belong, but I also knew that somewhere close by would be Connie and Pippa, and that I was not alone.

I looked around, expecting to see a massed group of rabbits or something, all armed with whatever was to hand, but there was nobody. The area between the first gates and the second, a place usually reserved for where articulated lorries brought components in and trucked completed goods out, was deserted. I walked towards the second set of gates, which I noticed were ajar.

‘Hello?’ I said as I put my head around the door. There didn’t seem to be anyone around so I stepped inside. To my left and right were the call centres and factories, and straight on was a single thoroughfare that led on to rows and rows of allotments under which there would be a network of tunnels. Beyond this the ground rose to the top of May Hill itself, where a circular grove of trees punctuated the skyline. On the air was the heady scent of meadowfield stew, and on the breeze I could hear the distant strains of jazz.

‘Is that Peter Knox?’ came Doc’s voice from somewhere close at hand. ‘Your shape and walk give me only a 42% cenrtainty.’

I said that I was indeed Peter and he stepped out of the shadows.

I smiled, but instead of shaking hands/paws, he gave me a hug.

‘You got out of Hemlock Towers, then,’ I said.

‘Singed a few whiskers when I went back for the Kyffin Williams painting in the downstairs loo,’ he said. ‘Nearly forgot. What a twit. But otherwise no ill effects. I heard they took your thumbs?’

I showed him my hands.

‘That’s what comes of playing with scissors,’ he said, grinning broadly.

‘Is Pippa here?’ I asked.

‘Safe and well. We followed your court case on the wireless. Lance deBlackberry has quite a mind, hasn’t he?’

‘The best. He said you wanted my help.’

‘Yes indeed. Follow me, and bring the box.’

We walked towards the Lago meeting house.

‘When are they planning on attacking?’ asked Doc.

‘Eight o’clock.’

‘Yes, we heard the same. So long as they attack first and we are defending ourselves, then everything is fair game.’

He flicked his incisors with a claw and they pinged like expensive porcelain.

‘They have guns,’ I said, ‘big ones.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘None of us have high expectations of the outcome, although that’s not to say Constance and the Venerable Bunty don’t have a few ideas up their sleeves. Smarter rabbits than I, those two. Which reminds me,’ he said, ‘there is still the question of our duel. Constance said it was OK, so do you want to challenge me, or shall I challenge you? It’s traditional as the appropriating husband for you to do it, but I’m flexible.’

‘Is this really the time and place?’ I asked. ‘Besides, nothing happened.’

‘Even if it didn’t,’ he said with a sigh, ‘I’ve seen you look at each other in that way. You think it might be doing no harm, but when you’ve lusted after bacon and eggs, my friend, you’ve already committed breakfast in your soul.’

‘That’s amusingly deep.’

‘It was C.S. Lewis,’ mused Doc. ‘Terrific writer but for one thing: did you know there’s not a single talking rabbit in all of the Narnia series? He didn’t think we were deserving enough, clearly. And don’t get me started on Gus Honeybun or the Duracell Bunny: demeaning stereotypes and patronising beyond belief. Br’er Rabbit and Bugs Bunny are about the closest you’ll get to a genuine rabbit, although in film and theatre, Harvey is the gold standard. Just the right mix of compassion, erudition and insouciance.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said, glad that, for the moment at least, the subject of duels seemed to have slipped his mind. ‘What about Roger Rabbit?’

‘My uncle? Runs a hookah den in Ross that specialises in readings of Voltaire.’

‘No, I meant the film.’

‘Ah – the jury’s still out on that one. Rabbit psychologists hold entire conferences based on him, and we still have no idea what he saw in Jessica. So, do you have a duelling pistol, or do you want to borrow my spare?’

‘It’s less than two hours before you get hit with every fox RabCoT can muster, backed up by thousands of Compliance Officers and the British Army,’ I said. ‘Is this really the time to be duelling?’

‘Mais oui, my little furless friend. You’re in love with my wife so it’s about you and me making this right. Don’t be afraid, I’m an excellent shot: you fire, you miss really badly, I fire, I miss by a hair. Honour is restored, simple. Here.’

He opened his jacket to reveal his duelling pistols, both stuffed inside his belt.

‘Loaded,’ he said, ‘and since it’s my challenge, you get to choose.’

I looked at the pistols. One had a silver crocodile on the handle, and the other a mother-of-pearl rabbit elegantly set into the stock. The gun with the bun has the aim that is lame, but the shot’ll hit the spot if you’ve a croc on the stock. If I hadn’t been a good shot myself, all of this would have been academic. But I’d won prizes at school with a .22 pistol, and once represented the county and got a bronze.

‘Is this why you wanted me in Colony One?’ I asked.

‘Unfinished business,’ he said, ‘so yes, partly.’

He was right in that I was in love with Connie. I think I always had been, and I think she felt the same. But she was a warrior and so was Doc – fearless and focused, utterly committed to the cause. They belonged with each other. But Doc was a good rabbit, and I would have to go through with this for the sake of his honour, so I chose the gun with the bun, the aim that was lame. If I was about to lose a duel, I needed Doc’s marksmanship to be as good as possible.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said, realising that to win a rabbit duel one has to hit the opponent’s ears without actually killing them, ‘I’ve got no ears – well, none to speak of.’

‘I thought of that,’ said Doc, handing me a folded chef’s hat from his jacket pocket.

‘If it’s OK with you,’ he said, quite enthused by the idea of a duel, ‘we’ll dispense with the foggy heath at dawn and just get on with it. Twenty paces sound all right?’

I put on the chef’s hat and we stood back to back, paced off and then turned to face one another. A .22 pistol has very little kick, but a duelling pistol – which I’d never fired – would be loaded with heavy ball, and the kick would make the shot run high. Plus I had the gun whose aim was lame. I couldn’t possibly hit him.

‘You first!’ yelled Doc, holding his pistol at his side. He was almost in silhouette, his ears tall and erect, his stomach quite large.

I pulled back the hammer, aimed just above Doc’s head and fired. The muzzle of the pistol erupted in a ball of fire but, annoyingly, the charge was weaker than I expected and my aim not as errant as I’d thought. I saw a nick appear in the very top of Doc’s right ear where the ball just caught it.

‘Good shot, sir!’ cried Doc. ‘My turn.’

I held my breath as he pointed the pistol in my direction, then, at the very last moment, he pointed it to the left of me, and fired. The ball thudded harmlessly into the door frame of a shop that sold second-hand hookahs. He lowered the pistol and smiled.

‘Honour is restored,’ he said. ‘Connie is yours. Pick up your cardboard box and let’s get you to the meeting house. We have some vital work we need you to undertake.’

I ran to catch up with him as he strode off.

‘What was that all about?’ I said. ‘You deliberately shot wide.’

‘I most certainly did not,’ he said in a shocked tone, ‘and to suggest I had would impugn my good name. Besides,’ he added, ‘I volunteered to lead first wave against the attack this evening and it will all end for me tonight. Some of us won’t get to go home.’

He stopped and turned to look at me.

‘There are unsuitable bucks about, and I’d rather you and she had a chance. I know she loves you, always has, and she’ll want you to go home with her. She’d like that, and I’d like it too, knowing she was in good hands.’

He put out his paw and I passed back the pistol.

‘I worked at the Taskforce for fifteen years,’ I said. ‘I enabled their appalling work. I’m not a good person.’

‘But you proved that you can be,’ said Doc, ‘and that’s what’s important. You took the heat off Constance, and a thousand rabbits were spared. You’re repaired, Peter. Not everyone gets that. Count yourself fortunate.’

We had reached the door of the circular Lago meeting house.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘this is where we need your help.’

‘You want me to address the Grand Council of Coneys?’ I said. ‘And try and broker some sort of eleventh-hour deal? I can take offers back and forth to Smethwick, and even, perhaps, have a few ideas of my own.’

‘Perish the thought,’ he said, finding my comments somehow amusing. ‘Better rabbits than you have tried and failed on that score. You’re not here to help us, rescue us, lead us to freedom or otherwise give us the benefit of your wisdom. We’re not going to see any hoary old “Hominid Saviour” bullshit this evening, thank you very much – we’ve got troubles of our own.’

‘Then what am I here to do?’

Doc opened the meeting-house door to reveal a large room with about two hundred rabbits inside, all either elderly, young or infirm. There was also a smattering of humans, but Pippa was not amongst them. The tables were arranged seven long in five rows, and in the centre of each table was a huge pile of sliced bread. On the table in front of each workstation were tubs of dandelion-oil margarine, and the air was full of gossip in English and Rabbity.

‘You’re on sandwich-making duty,’ said Doc. ‘It’s important everyone gets to eat before the attack.’

‘You wanted me in the colony to make cucumber sandwiches?’

‘Each contributes according to the level of their abilities. Besides, we were getting low on doilies. You can’t serve cucumber sandwiches on a plate without doilies.62 It’s just not the done thing.’

I opened the box Lance had given me, and it was indeed full of doilies. Quite nice ones, too. Plain white. Ornate.

‘Hello, Mr Knox,’ said Kent, who seemed to be in charge, ‘you can be on cucumber-slicing duty. It’s more efficient with fingers – even without thumbs you’re more dexterous than us. We can slice, but not slice thin, and that’s the secret of really good cucumber sandwiches.’

I turned to say goodbye to Doc, but he had already gone. I think he removed himself quietly on purpose. The dialogue between us was done, our understanding was complete. I wouldn’t see him again, nor ever know what happened to him, although it was likely he faced his death with more courage than I would ever possess. I took my place next to a young woman who was also missing her thumbs, and she nodded politely, gave me a sharp knife and I started slicing, although not without some difficulty. I’d only recently lost my thumbs and it was the first knife I’d handled since getting out of custody.

‘You came prepared,’ she said with a smile.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The chef’s hat.’

We were, I learned later, only one of twenty-six work gangs making cucumber sandwiches, the snack of choice for rabbits when nerves need to be calmed and the future is in doubt. Carrots are more for pleasure and everyday eating, dandelion leaves for when you just want to shoot the breeze – equivalent to a cup of coffee and a Danish. Radishes are for a hangover, parsnips for when you need a boost, turnips when there’s nothing left in the larder. There were gallons of tea, too, but that was handled by someone else.

I worked for ninety minutes, and must have sliced several hundred cucumbers. The finished sandwiches – once given a sprinkling of salt and with the crusts cut off – were taken off by waiter rabbits who plied backwards and forwards between us and the troops with the sandwiches on trays. It all worked in a rota system, so everyone got to go outside and offer words of encouragement, and to say their farewells. The news that filtered back was not good. Numerous drones had been seen overhead, and more artillery pieces had been observed moving into position and then waiting at readiness. Tanks and bulldozers were massed at the main gate, and infantry had moved up behind the tanks in case the rabbit had weapons of which they were unaware. And everywhere, ahead of everything, were the foxes, hundreds and hundreds of them, grunting and howling and yelping in their excitement, a murderous carpet of orange-coloured hate.

Most of this I found out much later on when researching for my book. It was Smethwick who had first encouraged, then begged the use of flame-throwers to clear the warrens, as rabbits, he said, ‘are full of surprises’. The ranking army officer, to his credit, told Smethwick that ‘if you want to do that kind of shit, old boy, you can get your own people to do it. There’ll be no unnecessary suffering to rabbits on my watch. I’m not sidestepping the ICC63 on taxonomic grounds only to be collared by the RSPCA. It’s conventional force only. Any overreach is on your shoulders – and don’t you forget it.’

Although I was busy and quite swept up in an odd shared sense of destiny, at the back of my mind was also survival – which involved surrendering to the first human I met. A fox, I knew, would probably be after revenge. They’d know who I was, not least because of the fox claw that was still around my neck.