Maisie

Maisie was our second rabbit. She turned up in the garden of some friend of my wife. They weren't able to catch her so they called us, because apparently we're bunny experts now. The thing was, they were moving and the new occupants were bringing a couple of large dogs with them. Bess went over and said that Maisie hopped right up to her.

We already had one rabbit, namely Charlie, so we kept Maisie in the growing frame in which we'd kept Charlie while I was building him a hutch. Charlie had been named Maisie until we realised he was a boy, and Bess had liked the name. I'd made the growing frame of wood and chicken wire so it was fairly hutch-like anyway. Charlie was male and hadn't been fixed, and Maisie was female so we had to keep them separate. Occasionally they would snoof each other through the chicken wire, and I imagined a happy future for the two of them playing together outside, hopping about in the run and doing bunny stuff once they had been fixed; but as I wrote in Farewell to Charlie, it wasn't to be.

Charlie's death was devastating, but Maisie helped us through the worst of it. That said, we were worried about her. She had pasteurella, a respiratory condition in rabbits which can either be fatal or never really amount to anything, but is something they're stuck with and which can be passed on if they have it. She suffered sneezing fits and seemed to be putting on weight only very slowly. She was about eight months old when we got her, so the vet had reckoned. Her fur was a testimony to her time spent living rough and the individual vertebrae of her spine could be felt in her back.

A month or so passed and it seemed like she was sneezing less and less, and she started to fill out and seemed happier until, one day I noticed I could no longer feel the knobbly bits of her spine, and her fur was softer, and she seemed livelier and would tear around like crazy in the run outside, sometimes so fast she'd popcorn up into the air, as it's termed. She had about two good weeks, then we heard a sneeze. Her appetite went right down and she seemed listless.

Bess took her to the emergency vet and came back with a course of antibiotics. It was an infection of some description. Another couple of days passed and we found blood in her urine. Bess found another vet specialising in bunnies, because we weren't going back to the fuckers who had killed Charlie.

The vet said it was her heart. It stopped and started, which was unknown. They x-rayed her and found her insides were all messed up, congenital deformities of such severity that it seemed incredible that she could have lasted so long as she did. She was probably never destined to have a long or happy life.

Two months after Charlie, at the close of an unusally shitty year, this really stuck it in and twisted it around.

She helped us though the death of Charlie. She was a delight and had a completely different personality to him, more gentle and she liked to run up my chest and lick my nose with her tongue, which was weird but adorable.

She was our chocolate bunny and she was beautiful.