I sighed.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said.
Victor Mallett smiled broadly. He liked it when he got his own way, and could do a passable imitation of a pleasant person once he did. It took a half-hour to get into Hereford, and I dropped Victor at Bobblestock.
‘Well, cheerio, old chap,’ he said once he’d climbed out of the car. ‘You and Pip must come round for dinner one day.’
He didn’t really mean it, and I said that would be very nice, again not really meaning it.
‘Sorry about Dad,’ said Toby as we drove the remaining short distance into town, ‘but he only wants the best for the village.’
‘I’m sure Pol Pot only wanted the best for Cambodia,’ I replied, ‘but it didn’t really work out that way. Joke,’ I added, as I could see Toby about to raise the curtains on some theatre of umbrage, something the Malletts often did when even mildly challenged.
‘So,’ I said, wanting to change the subject, ‘who do you think’s replacing Daniels?’
Daniels had been our Intelligence Officer, and about the most pleasant we’d had. But the job was stressful, and ‘pleasant’ wasn’t really a winning strategy when it came to working in RabCoT.
‘No idea,’ said Toby, ‘someone easy to work with, I hope.’
I parked up outside the regional Rabbit Compliance Taskforce headquarters, a blocky building built in the thirties with half-arsed art-deco pretensions, and renamed the Smethwick Centre by Prime Minister Nigel Smethwick himself, who was very conscious of crafting his own legacy while he still wielded enough power to do so.
Smethwick had begun his steep political climb as the Minister for Rabbit Affairs fifteen years before, when UKARP were only a coalition partner, and to celebrate his promotion greatly increased the number of things a rabbit could do wrong. He personally drafted the ‘Regularity Framework for Subterranean Construction’ and ‘The Orange Root Vegetable Licensing Act’. The new laws naturally increased rabbit arrest and incarceration rates, which Smethwick duly blamed on ‘increased cunicular criminality’, which was then, predictably and unashamedly, used to justify a greatly increased budget and workforce.
‘Oh dear,’ I said as I noticed a small crowd of people across the entrance to the Taskforce headquarters, ‘looks like TwoLegsGood are upset about something again.’
There were only four of them, and the gathering seemed more of a presence than an active demonstration. Despite the Hominid Supremacist group’s record of leporiphobic attacks, they generally stayed one step ahead of the law, and by a curious quirk of inverted stereotyping were not a bunch of semi-skilled neckless tattooed hooligans with IQs barely into double figures, but were predominantly middle class: retail, middle management, C of E fundamentalists, unemployed furriers and hatters, several doctors and barristers as well as a few strident environmentalists who saw the rise of the rabbit as ‘a potentially greater threat to biodiversity on the planet than humans’.6
‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said one as we walked past. ‘Please don’t waver from the bold and righteous anthropocentric path.’
Another was holding a banner exhorting that MegaWarren be opened sooner, and a third made some comment suggesting that the rabbit maximum wage was too high as it ‘placed an unseemly burden on industry’. We said nothing in reply as Taskforce guidelines forbade membership of, or association with, any Hominid Supremacist group. To be honest, the Taskforce and UKARP and 2LG all pretty much had the same views: the difference lay in legality, accountability and sanity.
‘Ah!’ said another voice from a smaller group who had been until now hidden from view on the other side of the street. ‘Can we speak to you about our work at the Rabbit Support Agency?’
They were a group of only two, and positioned a hundred metres from the Smethwick Centre, legally speaking the closest they could get. The human was Patrick Finkle, who had been a founder member of RabSAg and was currently the Regional Chief. He had a pinched, haunted look about him, as though the last twenty-five years had been spent waiting for a dawn raid. I knew of him, and had seen him around a lot, but we’d never spoken. We weren’t allowed to chat to this bunch either.
‘Can we talk to you about the Rabbit Way?’ asked the second, a rabbit well known to the Taskforce named Fenton DG-6721. He was tall, snowy white and with piercing red eyes as befitted his Labstock heritage. He habitually wore dungarees and had half a dozen bullet holes in his ears. His charity work spoke volumes, and he would have been seen as the ‘acceptable face of rabbit/human integration’ if it wasn’t for his propensity for speaking out over rabbit issues with visiting dignitaries, something which had him labelled ‘troublesome’.
‘The Rabbit Way is bullshit,’ said one of the 2LG group from across the road. ‘You can take your gimcrack religion, vegan fundamentalism and lame idealism and poke it up your pellet slot.’
‘That’s what I enjoy most about Hominid Supremacists,’ returned Fenton in an easy manner, ‘their eloquence.’
‘We believe in hominid superiority not supremacy,’ he replied, parroting a legal ruling that had the latter deemed illegal, yet the former an acceptably realistic view, given the dominance of the species on the planet. ‘It’s an important distinction.’
‘It’s the same turd in a different wrapper,’ said Fenton, ‘but at least we have a workable policy regarding our sense of being, place within the biosphere and relationships with others of the same species. How’s the Declaration of Human Rights working out for you?’
It had always been a contentious issue that one of the most lauded documents of the past fifty years was regarded with almost laughable derision by rabbits, whose own Way was based on a bill of responsibilities, whereby each individual was morally obliged to look after the well-being of others, rather than a bill of rights, where, the rabbit had decided, the onus was incorrectly laid upon the individual to demand that their rights were respected.
The comment was returned by the 2LG group’s spokesman with an argument regarding primate hierarchy and the role of planet husbandry as a form of lofty paternalism, since it ‘had worked so dazzlingly well in Victorian-era factories’. We didn’t hear Finkle or Fenton’s reply as we were soon lost to earshot. The argument, the demonstration, our emotional distance from both – very much business as usual.
‘Did you see Finkle’s hands?’ said Toby.
‘Lopped,’ I replied, referring to the practice of voluntarily removing one’s own thumbs to show unequivocal non-opposable unity to the rabbit cause. ‘I heard he keeps them in a jar of vinegar at home.’
It was a controversial move and had been met with overwhelming surprise and revulsion, but achieved what Finkle desired: the ongoing trust of the Grand Council and rabbits in general. To UKARP, Nigel Smethwick, the Ministry of Rabbit Affairs and the Taskforce, he was entirely the opposite: the reviled poster-boy for dangerous human/rabbit relations.
‘I once gave a thumbs-up sign to a bunch of teenage rabbits,’ said Toby, ‘before I understood how offensive it was. They caught me after a seven-mile chase.’
‘Should have tried to escape in your car.’
‘I was in a car. They can hop pretty fast when they want to.’