Victor and Norman looked at one another.
‘Deal,’ said Victor.
We shook hands on it and Victor and Norman, a day ago my mortal enemies, were now once again my friends, presumably courtesy of a discreet call from Mr Ffoxe, requesting them to leave us alone so my bunnytrap-trap efforts could continue unimpeded. I shut the door behind them, then watched out of the window as they walked away, patting each other on the back, a job, they thought, well done. They’d been like this from the moment I became aware of them aged eight, and they’d not changed one iota over the years: always trying to play people for their own advantage – and never once any good at it.
Bouncing with Constance
Bouncing was the sport of rabbits, and the mainstay of the Rabbit Games: Long Bounce, Vertical Bounce, Marathon, Sprint and Synchronised. It always looked unusual as rabbits before the Event never really did this – the bouncing they expressed now was more akin to kangaroo motion, and was a quirk of the process that brought them from all rabbit to mostly human.
I rang in sick the following morning as my eye still hurt badly. My sleep was punctuated by nightmares – mostly about Mr Ffoxe clamping his jaws around my throat and squeezing so hard I couldn’t breathe.
Once I’d made the coffee and put on the toast, I tuned into the news on the radio to see what had happened in Colony One overnight. The answer, as it turned out, was ‘not much’. TwoLegsGood had stayed outside the gates until 2 a.m., shouting their trademark anthem: ‘Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run, here comes a farmer with a gun gun gun’. While clearly offensive and an incitement to violence, an earlier court hearing had decided the words were from a ‘humorous ditty predating the Event’ so had historical precedent – and was thus allowable. The upshot of all this activity was that Colony One remained closed to all movement and would remain so, a Compliance Taskforce spokesman said, ‘until the safety of the rabbit population can be assured’.
At about nine, the doorbell rang and there was Connie, bright as a button, all smiles and wearing a sports crop top and short skirt, brand new Nikes and a sweatband looped around the base of her ears.
‘Hello!’ she said in a chirpy voice. ‘Fancy a bounce?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A bounce. I’m in training for the Herefordshire double marathon bounce next month, and I’m a little rusty on pace and rhythm. If you bounce too high on each cycle then you tire too quickly, and if you try to overstretch a bounce, the landing can be awkward. I need a safe twenty-four-mile-per-hour bouncing average to beat my PB, or even to have a hope of finishing in the top five.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘But I need to tell you something first. You remember the duelling pistols I was telling you about?’
‘Yes, but it’s irrelevant – I’m not going to duel with your husband.’
‘The Venerable Bunty thinks you will,’ she said, ‘and she’s rarely wrong.’
‘Why is she suddenly so interested in me?’
‘She’s interested in everybody. So, you remember the rhyme I told you?’
‘The one about how “the shot hits the spot if you’ve a croc on the stock, while the mark of the lark shoots wide of the mark”?’
‘Yes, but here’s the thing: he doesn’t use the pistol with the mark of the lark any more.’
‘He doesn’t?’
‘No – he replaced it with one that has an engraving of a rabbit.’
‘A gun with a bun?’
‘Yes. But you don’t want that.’
‘I don’t?’
‘No. The gun with the bun has the aim that is lame.’
‘What does the lark have?’
She sighed deeply, as if I were an idiot.
‘I’ll go through it once again, so listen very, very carefully: 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.’
I repeated it back more or less correct, then said:
‘But look, I can’t duel him unless you give our union your permission.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘the Venerable Bunty has foreseen that, too.’
‘Does she predict useful things, like the 4.15 at Kempton Park?’
‘All the time – but it would be unethical to use that information for material gain. Now: to bouncing. Since you’re a human and thus hobbled with the puniest of leg muscles, you could not possibly hope to keep up – so I suggest you drive alongside me. I’ve drawn a route that’s almost exactly eight miles. If I can do a lap in under twenty minutes, then I’m in with a chance of beating Penelope Rabbit, who’s way too full of herself and really needs to be taken down a hop or two.’
‘Is Doc OK with this?’
‘If he knew I’m sure he’d be totally fine about it.’
‘Really?’
‘Sort of.’
‘OK, then.’
I opted to take the Austin-Healey as it was a convertible, and once I’d reversed out, Connie laid a map on the bonnet to brief me. There was a long straight road between Much Hemlock and Squiffton Coachbolt that she suggested taking, then a left by the church of St Julius of the Swollen Glands, then following the disused railway along a three-mile stretch of road before arriving in Syon Kapok, where a left past the old tithe barn would return us to Much Hemlock via Slipton Flipflop.
‘I’ll give you a head start,’ she said. ‘Keep to a steady twenty-four if you can.’
I had an accurate speedo on the car, so set off in the direction she had indicated, holding as steady a speed as I could. She soon caught up with me and managed to hold station with the car using a series of powerful leaps in the field next to me, expertly negotiating walls, fences, a small spinney, a sheep and the occasional cow. When she was mid-leap it looked as though she were hanging in the air next to me, then she would land and in a burst of energy and a sharp cry that put me in mind of tennis players during a rally, she would launch herself into the air and was once again momentarily airborne, at which point she had a second or two to speak.
‘I’m really sorry for what happened,’ she said, sailing over a dry-stone wall. ‘I didn’t plan for you to get hauled up in front of the Taskforce. You told them nothing happened, right?’
‘Nothing did happen,’ I said, having to shout to be heard in the breeze. ‘What did you tell Doc?’
‘The same,’ she said, taking another leap. ‘He’s insanely suspicious, gets very stressed in the pre-mating season and has a temper, so I just said that you and I were out of the question because you were, well—’
‘Uncharismatic?’
‘My word was boring, actually.’
‘Thanks. He wants me to spy on you.’
She landed just before a row of trees, jumped, then expertly tucked herself into a ball and passed through the foliage with a crack of broken twigs and a burst of leaves.
‘He’s frightened of losing you to another buck in a duel,’ I said. ‘He told me he doesn’t want the only memento of you to be a hole in his ear.’
This, I think, was news to Connie.
‘He said that?’
‘More or less.’
She landed, gave out a cry and leapt clear across a small herd of Friesians, who looked as though they’d suddenly realised that it was a Tuesday and would have to reconfigure their plans. We took a left by the church in Squiffton Coachbolt, which Connie undertook by a series of bounds around the graveyard, then she disappeared behind the tea rooms and caught up with me, bouncing along the relative flatness of the disused railway. I told her how Flemming and Whizelle had initially tried to make me testify against her but that the Senior Group Leader had intervened.