He stopped walking at the bus stop, turned and looked at me.
‘Look here, Peter, old chap,’ he said, ‘I think we need to talk. Cards on the table and all that. I think you and Constance are having an affair, and unless you can give me a solemn promise to keep your grubby paws off my wife, I’m going to have to challenge you to a duel.’
‘I can assure you we are not,’ I said.
‘That’s what she says, and I gave her the benefit of the doubt during that incident with the bedsheet, but, well, I asked Kent to put a tracker on her phone and she’s been to the Green Dragon Hotel a couple of times, and I saw you both in All Saints.’
‘We just met up for coffee,’ I said.
‘That’s how it always begins. Coffee, dinner, going out for a bounce, basket of scrubbed carrots, Scrabble. What were you two doing in that dilapidated barn? I was watching for an hour and you didn’t come out – I would have stayed for longer, but I had to get home to watch the cricket.’
‘We were meeting with Patrick Finkle and the Venerable Bunty,’ I said.
‘Oh, sure,’ said Doc, ‘and I suppose Victor Lewis-Smith and the Pope were there too? If you want to be together, Pete, then do the decent thing, stop inventing silly stories and make a challenge – waiting for me to challenge you is really the coward’s way, how weasels would do it.’
‘Weasels fight duels too?’
‘No, but if they did.’
‘We’re not having an affair, Doc, I promise you.’
He stared at me and blinked.
‘I wish I could believe you,’ he said with a sigh. ‘Why don’t we have a pint after dinner at the Unicorn and thrash it out there?’
‘OK,’ I said, glad to move away from the subject for a couple of hours.
We walked the rest of the way in silence, and inside my pocket I clicked the Parker pen to activate the listening device.
‘Two more in the burrow,’ called out Doc as we walked in the door, using a traditional rabbit greeting.
‘Hello,’ said Connie, popping her head round the kitchen door. ‘How did the council meeting go?’
‘They were eating out of my paw,’ said Doc.
‘Really?’
‘No, not really – it was a charade. They despised me with a vengeance.’
‘Same old same old,’ said Connie.
While Doc went off to lay the table, I went into the kitchen and passed Connie a note I had prepared. It was written in block capitals because their visual cortex was not so attuned to reading as ours, but was absolutely clear:
I AM WEARING A WIRE
She pointed to a message on the fridge constructed out of magnetic letters:
I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT BE
She smiled, winked at me and squeezed my hand.
Once we were all seated and grace had been said – in Rabbity this time, as I think they thought I was a good enough friend not to take offence – Connie ladled out the stew and we ate, the Rabbits making slurpy noises with the occasional clinking of spoons against teeth, as cutlery and their dentition didn’t really work very well together. During dinner we spoke briefly of the latest episode in The Archers, the first time a storyline had featured rabbits, with the Grundys employing a rabbit stockman named Tim who was embroiled in some off-colony politics. Kent said that Rabbit TV was a lot better, even though How Deep Was My Warren had recently been plunged into controversy.
‘A recent shake-up has reduced the ensemble cast to barely six thousand,’ explained Connie, ‘which makes it all a little easy to follow.’
‘Dumbing down for a young rabbit’s short attention span,’ added Doc in a huffy manner. ‘Kids today can barely follow six hundred simultaneous storylines. I blame the fad for board games, personally.’
Connie, in what I realised later was an effort to steer the conversation to where she needed it, mentioned that Fortean Times had reported that a moose shot dead by a hunter was later found to have amassed a considerable library of George Eliot novels, critical appraisals, biographies and poetry, and had been attempting to write a dissertation on how Eliot’s life could be viewed from the viewpoint of even-toed ungulates singled out for their lack of apparent good looks.
‘I think moose are rather handsome,’ said Doc thoughtfully, ladling out seconds. ‘They just need to keep their chins up a little.’
‘It’s the weight of the antlers,’ said Kent, who had taken on the young male human trope of being an expert on absolutely everything.
‘Probably a sense of low self-esteem,’ added Connie. ‘Maybe that’s why they always look so gloomy.’
‘Was it really another Event?’ I asked. ‘One hears stories like this, but it might simply have been another hoax.’
‘Goulburn,’ said Connie and Doc together.
It had been a contentious subject since the stories first emerged, but the Event in the UK was decidedly not the only one. They were either rare or commonplace, depending on your interpretation of events, and how open to evidence of conspiracies you were. Eleven years after the UK Event and near a town called Goulburn in Australia, there were reports of the usual overly dramatic conditions that presaged all of the alleged Events across the globe: power surges, electrical storms, dogs howling, showers of fish, a full moon. There had also been talk of a mobilised armed fast-response team appearing in the area within two hours, leading to questions in the Australian parliament to determine whether the government, in line with many others, had a covert ‘Extermination at First Discovery’ policy towards potential Anthropomorphic Eventees. The government denied a cover-up, so what had occurred remained in the sphere of conjecture, but urban legend told of ‘a dozen or so man-sized wombats wearing singlets and shorts’ being bulldozered into a mass grave with a shedload of empty beer cans. The apparent sole survivor was a merino ram named Rambo, who gave several lengthy interviews over the phone, interspersing what he knew of the affair with exhortations to drop in and visit Goulburn, which was ‘really jolly nice’. The interviews abruptly stopped the same day a ram was found shot dead behind the bandstand. There was no evidence that he was the Eventee, but the townspeople, annoyed at the government intervention and pleased by the publicity, put up a statue in his honour anyway.57
‘Stories come out from time to time,’ said Doc, ‘but the only places we know that have entertained an Event are the UK, Kenya and Oregon. But we think there might have been more.’
Only Kenya had accorded the Eventees full human status. But since they were elephants and had a gestation period of two years, their numbers were never likely to be high and they were entirely unthreatening – and, as it turned out, very funny, charming and good on wind instruments. Firyali Elephant, the spokesphant of the group, now worked as the minister of the interior, and was tipped as a possible PM, even after the scandal involving the bootlegged copies of Dumbo.
The bears in Oregon generally kept to themselves, but had recently been given Second Amendment rights, so were legally allowed to shoot hunters in self-defence – and did so quite frequently, much to the annoyance of hunters, who considered it ‘manifestly unfair’ because the bears, now suitably armed, were actually better hunters than they were.
‘The unspoken policy is eradication at first appearance,’ said Connie. ‘No one wants what has happened here to happen anywhere else.’