The Death of Bunny Munro (15 page)

The boy thinks his father looks weird, sitting there eating his breakfast in the dining room of the Empress Hotel, but it’s hard to really know for sure as it seems a long time since he has looked anything else. His eyes keep darting all over the place – no sooner have they looked over there, than they look over here, and as soon as they look over here, they are looking somewhere else. Sometimes he is rubbernecking over his shoulder, or searching under the table, or checking who is coming through the door, or squinting at the waitress like he thinks she is wearing a disguise, like a mask or veil or something. He keeps holding his ribs and sucking air through his teeth and wincing and generally making strange faces. Sometimes he does these things sped-up and sometimes he does them slowed-down. Bunny Junior feels time is playing tricks on him. For example, it feels like he could grow from a little boy into a wrinkly old man in the time it takes his father to lift his cup, bring it to his lips and take a slurp of tea, and other times it seems like his father is doing everything revved-up and super-fast, like racing around the breakfast room or running off to the bathroom. Bunny Junior feels like he’s been ‘hitting the road’ for a million years but realises with a chilly, drizzly feeling that this is only the third day.

His dad keeps saying something about the client list but as far as Bunny Junior can see the list is pretty much finished. He wonders what will happen when there are no more names left on the list. Will they go home? Will they just get another list? Does this just go on and on for ever? What did life have in store for him? What will he amount to? Is there some alternative life waiting to be lived? Then his dad forks an entire sausage into his mouth and the boy can’t help but smile at this truly impressive display. That’s the thing with his dad – thinks the boy – just when you’re about to get really angry with him, he goes and does something that leaves you completely awestruck. Well – he thinks – I love my dad and that’s a good thing. I mean – he thinks – you’ve got to hand it to him.

Bunny Junior watches a glob of ketchup run down his father’s chin and land on his father’s tie. This particular tie is sky-blue and there are cartoon rabbits printed on it, with little stitched crosses for eyes, lounging around on white cotton clouds. Bunny is too busy scanning the breakfast room to notice the mess he is making, so the boy reaches across the table and dabs at the spot with a damp napkin.

‘That’s better,’ says the boy.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ says Bunny, looking around the place like his head was on some kind of crazy, floppy spring.

‘You’d be a bit of an old pig,’ says the boy.

Bunny stands up and looks under his chair.

‘I said, “You’d be a bit of an old, fucking pig”,’ says Bunny Junior, a bit louder.

The boy has been reading his encyclopaedia at the breakfast table and, as well as ‘Apparition’ and ‘Visitation’, he has looked up ‘Near-Death Experience’.

The boy looks at his father and, for no particular reason, says, ‘Hey, Dad, it says in my encyclopaedia that a Near-Death Experience is a striking occurrence sometimes reported by those who have recovered from being close to death.’

His father stands abruptly and bumps the table and there is a rattle of crockery and the little white porcelain vase falls over with its sad and solitary flower and they both watch, in slow motion, the water soak into the tablecloth. Bunny Junior picks up the flower (a simulated pink English daisy) and puts it in the buttonhole of his father’s jacket.

‘There you go,’ says the boy.

‘We’ve got work to do,’ says Bunny. He scrapes back his chair and says, ‘We’ve got important business to attend to.’

Bunny pulls up the collar of his jacket and wraps his arms around himself.

‘Is the air conditioning up too high in here?’ he says, with a shudder.

‘I guess,’ says the boy, and he picks up his encyclopaedia and follows his father out of the breakfast room of the Empress Hotel.

At the reception desk, Bunny hears a pretty Australian backpacker chick with pink highlights in her hair and a dusting of translucent powder on her freckles say to her friend, ‘Hey, Kelly, did you see this?’

She points to a tabloid newspaper on the counter.

Kelly has blue hair and wears a loose cheesecloth dress and Tibetan beads around her neck. She looks at the tabloid and sees a photograph of the Horned Killer, flanked by two overweight policemen. The killer is shirtless and six-packed and
smeared in red paint, his hands are cuffed, his fake joke-shop horns still perch on his head. He stares resolutely into the camera. The headline reads, ‘GOTCHA!’

‘Wow, Zandra, they got the guy,’ she says.

Zandra traces the contours of the killer’s body with one plum-coloured fingernail and says, ‘Looks kind of cute, though.’

Kelly looks over her shoulder at Bunny, who has moved in close and is craning his neck and trying to see the front page of the newspaper.

‘Who?’ she says, distracted.

‘The devil guy,’ says Zandra.

Kelly elbows Zandra and says, under her breath, ‘My God, girl, you are incorrigible!’ then looks over her shoulder at Bunny again.

‘Wash off the body paint. Lose the plastic horns …’ says Zandra.

‘Girl, you are
rampant!
’ says Kelly, from the side of her mouth.

‘Yeah,’ says Zandra, ‘I know,’ and with a little grunt adjusts her backpack, adding, ‘I wouldn’t mind his shoes under my bed
at all!
’

‘Sssh,’ says Kelly, under her breath.

‘Sorry,’ says Zandra, ‘I mean,
hooves!
’

Kelly turns around and faces Bunny.

‘Could we have a little room here, please?’

Bunny raises his hands in the air and takes a step backwards.

‘Sorry, Kelly,’ says Bunny, ‘It’s just that I think we are having our childhoods stolen from us.’

Bunny moves across to the receptionist, with his wisps of white hair and his catastrophic hinged nose, and pays his bill, and as he turns away the receptionist shoots out his hand and
grabs Bunny by the wrist. He looks at Bunny through his ‘Mystic Eye’ and points at the newspaper.

‘Did you see this? They are saying here that this devil guy’s horns aren’t fake. They’re real.’

As the automatic door hisses open Bunny Junior feels a sense of relief to be leaving the Empress Hotel and he says to his father, ‘A Near-Death Experience generally includes an out-of-body event in which people travel through a dark void or tunnel towards the light.’

The sun beats down and steam rises from the wet and dazzling streets. The glare hurts the boy’s eyes and he slips on his shades and wonders if he is actually dead. He thinks – Is this why I keep seeing my mother? He pinches the flesh on his thigh until his eyes water, and out on the sea a bank of condensed mist moves across the water towards them, like an unsolicited memory.

‘In a Near-Death Experience people have reported encountering religious figures!’ shouts Bunny Junior, jumping up and down, and rubbing the bruise on his thigh and thinking – ouch, ouch and
ouch!
‘One may even encounter deceased loved ones!’

His father keeps walking in a peculiar way and beating at his clothes with his hand and looking over his shoulder, and the sea mist continues to roll towards them, like a great white wall, blurring the line between the real world and its fogbound dream or something.

‘There you go,’ says the boy, helping his father, who has fallen over on the sidewalk, to his feet. ‘Look what you’ve gone and done,’ he says, pointing to a little triangular rip in the knee of his trousers.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ says his father as he takes a long drink of something from a bottle, opens the door of the Punto and, face first, falls in.

When the Punto doesn’t start, his father pounds the steering wheel, then actually clasps his hands together in supplication and petitions God and all His saints for assistance, and the insubordinate Punto, as if taking pity on him, coughs and splutters into life with a promise of taking him where he wants to go.

‘A Near-Death Experience is often accompanied by strong feelings of peacefulness, Dad,’ says the boy.

‘Grab the client list,’ says Bunny, resting his head on the wheel and playing with the hole in his trousers.

The boy says, ‘It … is … often … accompanied … by … strong … feelings … of … peacefulness,’ and he leans over and takes a tissue from the glove compartment and together they dab at the messy little scrape on his dad’s knee.

‘There you go,’ says the boy.

Bunny parks the Punto outside a tumbledown bungalow on the hill between Peacehaven and Newhaven – the residence of Miss Mary Armstrong, the last name on the list. The front yard is overgrown and littered with all manner of junk – used appliances and broken machines – a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, a bathtub full of yellowed newspapers, a ruptured kayak, a ruined Chesterfield settee and a motorcycle, dismantled and forgotten. Standing in the centre of the yard is a grotesque sculptural abstraction made from welded steel and strips of brightly coloured, spray-painted plastic.

‘What a shit-hole’ says Bunny. ‘They just get worse and worse.’

There had been three names left on the client list, but the other two names had turned out to be non-starters and a complete waste of time.

The first was a Mrs Elaine Bartlett, who lived on the fourth floor of a block of flats in Moulsecombe. Lying on the floor of its only working elevator was a bombed-out kid with a can of air freshner in one hand and a Tesco bag in the other and a Burberry cap on his head. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem, except the boy had emptied the contents of his bowels into his shorts and these were pulled down around his skinny, little ankles. The boy had managed, rather heroically, thought Bunny, to graffiti in green spray paint on the elevator wall, ‘I AM A SAD CUNT’. Bunny had stepped into the elevator, then stepped out and allowed its doors to judder shut. He contemplated momentarily climbing the four flights of stairs to Mrs Elaine Bartlett’s flat and realised, to his credit, that there was no way he was going to make it up them in his present condition, so he staggered back to the Punto.

The next name on the list, a Mrs Bonnie England, living over the hill in Bevendean was not at home in her semidetached brick-clad box, or so the guy who answered the door and claimed to be her husband maintained. Bunny could see this was clearly untrue, as the woman in the grease-stained pinafore, standing next to the guy who opened the door was obviously Mrs Bonnie England. Bunny didn’t press the point, primarily because Mrs Bonnie England was the animate equivalent of the fouled elevator in Moulescombe – a prime stomach-churner with the
proportions and sex appeal of a Portakabin. Bunny had simply made a deferential apology for inconveniencing them (the husband was the red-faced, super-pissed-off type, and Bunny was tired of being beaten up) then backed respectfully away and fell over her rubbish bins. Lying on his back on the concrete walkway, Bunny watched Mrs Bonnie England and her husband hold each other’s hands and laugh at him.

‘Ouch,’ said Bunny.

As Bunny limped back to the Punto, he noticed, to his complete surprise, the ripe and rotund figure of River – the waitress from the breakfast room at the Grenville Hotel – walking down the street in her purple gingham uniform with the white collar and cuffs. He rubbed his eyes as if he were seeing things, like she were a mirage or a visual fallacy of some sort or something. She seemed like she had walked out of another lifetime, a less complicated and happier age, and his cock leapt at the memory of her, and his heart pounded like a military drum and he started to cry.

‘Hey!’ said Bunny, running up to her, dabbing at his cheeks. ‘What are you doing, River?’

River took one look at Bunny and screamed. She veered savagely in a wide and reckless arc and sped up, taking wild glances over her shoulder.

‘Hey!’ said Bunny. ‘It’s me! Bunny!’

River broke into a run, the various parts of her body pumping and pulsating beneath her uniform.

‘Hey, I’ve been having a really hard time!’ said Bunny, his hands thrown out to the sides.

‘Stay away from me!’ she cried. ‘Just stay away from me, you fucking maniac!’

‘But, River, didn’t we have a good thing going?!’ shouted Bunny, but he could hear her sobs as she charged away, her footsteps like gunshots down the street.

‘What was wrong with that girl, Dad?’ asked Bunny Junior, when his father got back in the Punto.

‘I think she has a medical condition,’ said Bunny.

Outside Mary Armstrong’s bungalow, Bunny leans across and says to Bunny Junior, with a belch of inflammable breath, ‘All right, wait here, I won’t be long.’

‘What are we going to do, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

Bunny takes a slug from his flask and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘Well, son, we’re going to shake the money tree, OK? We’re going to shaft some mugs and milk the jolly green cow,’ says Bunny, jamming a Lambert & Butler into his mouth. ‘We’re grubbing the mullah and gleaning the beans. We’re divesting the greater public of their spondulics. We are, as they say in the trade, raping and looting.’ Bunny torches his cigarette with his Zippo, scorching his quiff and filling the car with the stench of singed hair. ‘We’re trying to make some fucking boodle! Are you with me? And I’ve got a very good feeling about this one.’

‘Yes, Dad, but what are we going to do with ourselves
after
we make the boodle?’

‘We are vampires, my boy! We are vultures! We are a frenzy of piranha flenching a fucking water buffalo or a caribou or something!’ says Bunny, with a madman’s grin on his face. ‘We are fucking
barracuda!
’

The boy looks at his father and a stone-cold realisation hits
him – he sees in the appalling orbits of his father’s eyes a resident terror that makes the child recoil. Bunny Junior sees, at that moment, that his father has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. The boy realises, suddenly, that for some time he has been the passenger on an aeroplane and that he has walked into the cockpit only to find that the pilot is dead drunk at the controls and absolutely no one is flying the plane. Bunny looks into his father’s panic-stricken eyes and sees a thousand incomprehensible dials and switches and meters all spinning wildly and little red bulbs flashing on and off and going beep, beep, beep and he feels, with a nauseating swoon, the aeroplane’s nose tip resolutely earthward and the big blue fiendish world come rushing up to annihilate him – and it scares him.

‘Oh, Daddy,’ he says, and straightens the little pink daisy in his father’s lapel.

‘We just have to open our great jaws and all the little fish will swim in,’ says Bunny, trying with great difficulty to extricate himself from the Punto. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one.’

Bunny Junior gets out of the Punto, moves around to the driver’s side, opens the door and helps Bunny out and his father performs a little shuffling two-step and starts to laugh out loud for no reason. Everything goes whoosh as the boy falls out of the sky.

Bunny walks up the oil-splattered concrete drive. He opens his flask of Scotch and empties it down his throat, then tosses it over his shoulder and it lands among the strew of garbage that lies about the overgrown yard. He mounts the steps to the bungalow, with its grimy pebbledash walls and shattered windows, and knocks on the front door.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ says Bunny, and the door creaks open but there is no one there. Bunny strokes the hank of hair that lies, limp and doomed, over one eye and feels compelled to enter.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ calls Bunny, and takes a furtive step across the threshold. ‘Anybody home?’ he says.

Inside, the atmosphere of dread and desolation in this dilapidated old house is so powerful Bunny can taste it, like rot, in his mouth, and he whispers to himself, ‘I deal in high-quality beauty products,’ and closes the door behind him.

The kitchen is dark, the blinds drawn, and Bunny breathes in a sour, animal stench. The door to the refrigerator has been left open, and a pulsing, jaundiced light emanates from it. Bunny notices the refrigerator contains a solitary, diseased lemon, like a premonition, and over by the sink he sees a dog of an indeterminate breed lying motionless on the grimy linoleum floor. He moves through the kitchen and realises, dimly and without concern, that he has left his sample case in the Punto, and finds that at some point in that prat-fall of a morning he has skinned the palms of his hands and that they are slick with watery blood. He wipes them on his trousers and enters the darkened hallway and, as he does so, Bunny becomes aware of a strange, atonal, squealing sound.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong? Miss Mary Armstrong?’ he calls out and squeezes his penis through his trousers, tugging at it, and letting it grow large and hard in his hand.

‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one,’ he says to himself and, in that instant, experiences a kind of weariness of the soul and sits down on the floor and leans back against the wall. He pulls his knees up to his chest and puts his head
between them and does a drawing of something with his index finger in the accumulated dust on the floor.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ he says to himself and closes his eyes.

He remembers a crazy night he’d had at the Palace Hotel in Cross Street, not that long ago, with a cute, little blonde chick he’d picked up at The Babylon. He remembers himself standing by the bed, huffing and puffing, his barked cock feeling like he’d been fucking a cheese-grater or something, and cursing the fact that he hadn’t had the foresight to bring any lubricant with him. He remembers giggling to himself and thinking what a crazy party he was having and that he might go one more time, even though it looked like the Roofies were wearing off and the girl was showing signs of waking up. I mean, how much punishment can one swinger take! Then there was a knock on the door – three simple, unassuming raps – and to this day Bunny can’t work out what possessed him to open the door. The coke, maybe. The booze, probably. Whatever.

‘Room service,’ he had said to himself, with a giggle.

He opened the door and standing there was his wife, Libby. She looked at Bunny, naked and glazed in sweat, and then looked at the comatose girl spread-eagled on the bed, and all the years of aggrieved rage seemed to drain from her eyes and her face became as inanimate as a wax mask and she simply turned and walked off down the hall. When Bunny returned home the next morning, Libby had changed; she didn’t mention the night before, she stopped giving him a hard time, and she just kind of floated around the house, watching TV and sitting around and sleeping a lot. She even had sex with him. I mean, who would have guessed it, he thought.

‘Women,’ Bunny says, shaking his head and he starts to cry again.

After a while, Bunny stands up and slaps the dust from his trousers, then moves down the darkened hall as if he is walking into a great wind and, in time, he arrives at a black door. The piercing sonic oscillation is louder here and Bunny puts his hands over his ears and peers closely at a large poster of an extremely sexy girl taped to the door, and even before he realises who it is – the curtain of ironed hair, the zany black-rimmed eyes and the pornographic cupid-bow mouth – he feels new tears scald his cheeks and he reaches out and traces, with his finger, the tender contours of her infinitely beautiful face, as if by doing so he could bring her miraculously to life. He says, in the manner of a mantra or prayer or incantation or something, ‘Avril Lavigne. Avril Lavigne. Oh, my darling, Avril Lavigne.’

And without even considering what may exist on the other side of that black-painted door, Bunny pushes it gently open and addresses the room as though it were an alternate and mysterious universe, saying, through his sobs, ‘Hello, I am Bunny Munro. I represent Eternity Enterprises.’

Bunny Junior closes the encyclopaedia. He has been reading about the ‘Midwife Toad’ and is astounded to think that the male carries the eggs on his legs until they hatch! What a world we live in – he thinks. What an amazing world.

He picks up the client list that lies on the seat beside him and, holding it out in front of him, carefully and deliberately, tears it into strips. He puts one strip of paper into his mouth, sucks it to a soft pap and swallows it, then repeats the action
until he has ingested the entire list. That – he thinks – puts an end to that.

Wisps of mist curl around the Punto and Bunny Junior watches the monstrous, swallowing fog roll down the street towards him, like an imagined thing, making phantoms of everything in its path. The boy leans back and closes his eyes and allows himself to be devoured by it.

Later, when he opens them again, he sees his mother sitting in her orange nightdress on a low cream brick wall opposite the Punto. She is smiling at him and beckoning him to come join her. Fiddleheads of mist play around her face and when she moves her hands the fog trails from her fingers like purple smoke. Bunny Junior opens the door of the Punto and steps out, like a tiny cosmonaut, into the vaporous air. He floats around the front of the Punto, down along the footpath, and sits on the wall next to his mother. Immediately, he feels a pulsing warmth and he looks up at her.

‘I’m so sorry, Mummy,’ he says.

His mother puts her arm around him and the boy rests his head against her body and she is soft and smells of another world and she is truly his mother.

She says, ‘Oh, my darling child, I am sorry too,’ and presses her lips into his hair. ‘I wasn’t strong enough,’ she says, and then, taking the boy’s face in her hands, says, ‘But you’re the strong one. You always were,’ and the boy feels the splash of his mother’s tears like they were real.

‘I just miss you so much, Mummy.’

‘I know,’ she says,

‘Don’t cry,’ says the boy.

‘You see?’ says his mother. ‘You are the strong one.’

‘What will we do about Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

His mother runs her fingers through the boy’s hair, then says, not unkindly, ‘Your father cannot help you. He is truly lost.’

‘That’s OK, Mummy,’ says the boy. ‘I am the navigator.’

His mother plants a kiss in the boy’s hair and whispers, ‘You have a such a good little heart.’

‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’ says the boy.

‘No, I am here to tell you something else,’ she says.

‘Can I ask you something first?’

‘OK,’ she says.

‘Are you alive, Mummy? You feel like you are. I can hear your heart beating,’ says the boy, and he holds his mother tight.

‘No, Bunny Boy, I am not,’ she says. ‘I died.’

‘Is
that
what you wanted to tell me?’

‘Yes, but I want to tell you something else. I want to tell you this. That no matter what happens, I want you to persevere. Do you understand?’

The boy looks up at his mother.

‘Yes, I think so,’ he says. ‘What you are saying is that something really bad is going to happen and you want me to be strong.’

His mother puts his arm around him and smiles and says, ‘You see?’

Bunny steps into the room at the end of the hall. A single naked bulb burns dimly overhead and in this airless hideaway the squealing note is violent and invasive, and Bunny squints into the dark to find its source. Over by the far wall an electric guitar leans against an amplifier, feeding back. It takes Bunny some time to notice a young lady sitting on a ruined
settee in the middle of the room. She does not seem to be moving. She is very thin and wears a pale yellow vest and a pair of pastel-pink panties and nothing else. Bunny can see the outline of the cobbled bones of her shoulders, the exaggerated angles of her knees, her elbows and her wrists. One spidery hand sits cupped in her lap, a cigarette burning down between her fingers. Her head is slumped forward and her straight, brown hair hangs like a curtain over her face.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ says Bunny taking a step towards her.

The girl jerks suddenly upright and raises her head, and says, in a slow and hollow croak, ‘She don’t live here no more. Do you want to see Mushroom Dave?’

The girl’s eyelids close and her head falls forward again.

‘Mushroom Dave … isn’t … here …’ she mutters to herself.

Bunny crosses the room and throws the switch on the guitar amp and the room is suddenly silent and magic. He sees suspended around the light bulb glittering motes of dust and he moves across the room and stands before the girl, a ribbon of blue cigarette smoke at her fingertips.

The girl lifts her head and all the muscles of her forehead are employed in an attempt to raise the lids of her eyes. Her hand flutters in mid-air and Bunny can see the fine, bird-like bones of her fingers through her paper-thin skin. The ash from her cigarette falls away and lands intact on the front of her vest. Her eyes are a green of ferocious, chemical intensity and her pupils are non-existent, and Bunny takes a step backward and says tenderly, ‘Oh, baby, look at you.’

The girl lowers her head again, in short, sharp increments, until her chin rests on her chest, and her hair falls across her
face. Bunny reaches down and puts his fingers under her jaw and raises her head again and sees that the poster on the door was not Avril Lavigne at all but a picture of this sad girl before him – the same pert nose, kohled eyes, straight brown hair, nymphomaniacal upper lip and slender, puppyish body. Bunny feels, in the most obscure of ways, that the resemblance to Avril Lavigne is not just fortuitous, but supernatural. Bunny finds himself sucked, with a great rush of blood, into a vortex of association; where the fairy girl before him – with her blueing lips and trickle of bright blood in the crook of her arm, the mortal weaponry of hypodermic syringe and blackened spoon on the table in front of her – was indeed the accelerated collision of time and desire, the coalescence of all the spinning particles of need, like the motes of dust around the light bulb, brought into being by Bunny’s corrupted griefs. In this dim, sequestered room Bunny had walked through the looking glass, into death itself, hers and perhaps his own.

‘Let me take that,’ says Bunny and removes the cigarette butt from between her fingers and drops it into an overflowing ashtray. ‘We don’t want to burn the house down,’ he says.

He kneels before her and gently brushes the cigarette ash from the looped fabric of her faded yellow vest.

‘Oh, dear,’ he says, and lights a cigarette of his own, takes a puff or two and then crushes it out in the ashtray.

He slips his hands under her cotton vest and her body spasms and slackens and he cups her small, cold breasts in his hands and feels the hard pearls of her nipples, like tiny secrets, against the barked palms of his hands. He feels the gradual winding down of her dying heart and can see a bluish tinge blossoming on the skin of her skull through her thin, ironed hair.