The Death of Bunny Munro (16 page)

‘Oh, my dear Avril,’ he says.

He puts his hands under her knees and manoeuvres her carefully so that her bottom rests on the edge of the settee. He slips his fingers underneath the worn elastic of her panties that are strung across the points of her hips, slips them to her ankles and softly draws apart her knees and feels again a watery ardour in his eyes as he negotiates a button and a zipper. It is exactly as he imagined it – the hair, the lips, the hole – and he slips his hands under her wasted buttocks and enters her like a fucking pile driver.

The great bank of mist has rolled by and Bunny Junior sits alone on the low brick wall and plays with his Darth Vader figurine, and although the ghost of his mother has gone, he can still feel the cool imprint of her farewell kisses on his eyelids like tiny twin promises. She is, like the song says, within him and without him and all about him. He is the strongest one and he is protected – that was her promise. Ah, promises, promises – he thinks – and he swings his feet and smiles and hums to himself and jumps his Darth Vader along the wall and watches an old black BMW roll down the street and turn into the driveway of the house with all the rubbish in the yard.

Bunny Junior sees the driver’s door open and a tall lean man leporello from the car like a set of dirty postcards. His hair is bleached blonde and he wears tight faded jeans, a black T-shirt and pink loafers. The boy notices a cool tattoo of a scorpion on the man’s neck, and thinks he looks like a very tough customer indeed – a real barracuda.

The man scopes the street, to the left and to the right, with a reflexive, practised regard, and Bunny Junior watches as he drops his bunch of keys, curses, bends down and picks them up. Then he mounts the steps, flicks his cigarette into the yard and enters the house, slamming the door behind him.

Bunny Junior swings his legs on the wall and thinks about what his mother told him, and he smiles to think that after all he is just a kid, and that’s all he has to be … a kid. A kid who likes Darth Vader, a kid with an amazing memory and who could retain all sorts of fascinating facts, a kid who was interested in the world, a kid with ‘a good little heart’, a kid who could even talk to ghosts. The adult world he was moving about in didn’t have to make sense to him – why everyone looks like zombies, why his mother died, why his father acts like a mental case half the time.

He remembers with a quickening of the heart the girl on the bicycle, and he wishes he could tell her that this is what she was – just a little girl – and as she grows up maybe she doesn’t have to turn into one of them – cock-a-doodling up the street all the time.

He knows something terrible is going to happen, but for some reason it doesn’t worry him all that much. He feels he has become immune to this crazy grown-up world like you do to influenza or leprosy or radiation or something. He feels like he has been given an antidote and he could be bitten by every snake on the planet and he would still be able to walk away. He thinks that ghosts are better protection than real people, and he wishes he could tell the girl on the bicycle that as well.

Bunny Junior hopes nothing really bad happens to his dad, because even though his mother said that he was lost, and even though he probably wasn’t very good at being a father in the way he has seen other fathers be on TV and in magazines and in parks and stuff – for example, when they buy the ointment to stop the child from going blind or throw a Frisbee around in the public gardens or something – he loves his dad
with all of his heart and he wouldn’t in a million years swap him for another one. Who would? Like when he is funny, he is an absolute scream – like look at him now as he jumps down the steps of that run-down old house with all the busted refrigerators and bathtubs and junk, with his trousers around his ankles. Tell me a dad who’d do that!

A few seconds later, the front door of the house flies open and the man called Mushroom Dave rockets out of that forlorn little house with the sole intention of burying a golf club into the back of Bunny’s head. Bunny knows this because Mushroom Dave has a nine iron cranked in the air and is screaming, in a voice full of slaughter, ‘You’re a fucking dead man, you freak!’

Bunny intuits, as he charges across the yard, that to run is most likely a waste of time and that, in all probability, the catastrophe that had been seeking him out his entire life has finally found him and the Day of Judgement is at hand.

But he also thinks, as a matter of good policy, that he should just get the fuck out of there.

But as he crosses the front yard loaded with all that useless impedimenta, Bunny finds that every old washer, bathtub and refrigerator has conspired to punk his progress and, with each tumble and fall, he senses, in a premonitory way, the apocalyptic whisper of the death-dealing nine iron ruckle the air around his cranium. He knows, more than he knows anything in the world, that Mushroom Dave is right, he
is
a fucking dead man.

But, in an act of athletic agility that surprises even him, Bunny leaps over an old cast-iron, clawfoot bathtub (actually
worth a few bob), pulling up his trousers at the same time, scrambles across the footpath, yanks open the door of the Punto, piles in and slams the door behind him. He hits the lock buttons, and with his heart thundering in his chest he turns the key in the ignition and the Punto does not cough and does not wheeze – and does not start.

‘You fucking piece of shit!’ cries Bunny, and then to Bunny Junior, ‘Lock your fucking door! We’re all gonna die!’

Bunny looks up and sees Mushroom Dave’s murderous face, like a terrible melted mask, and he clocks the horizontal sweep of the golf club and hears the gun-crack explosion of his side window and the bright shattering of cubed glass as it implodes inwards and showers Bunny in vicious little zircons.

Bunny tries the key again and the Punto, as if outraged by this attack upon its person, roars perversely into life at exactly the moment that Bunny realises that the boy is actually not in the car at all and that Mushroom Dave is screaming and bringing the club around again.

Bunny hits the accelerator, veers crazily into the street, just as Bunny Junior appears out of nowhere, in his shorts and his T-shirt, and walks almost casually into the path of the Punto.

‘Dad,’ he says.

Bunny slams on the brake and the Punto screeches to a halt and Bunny Junior stands motionless in front of the car and in that instant there is a moment of true intimacy between the father and his son. Their eyes lock and nobody moves and nobody says anything, yet a current of understanding passes between them, obscure and intangible, but that has something to do with shame and terror and death.

Mushroom Dave moves towards Bunny Junior, with polyps erupting across his brain and scarlet mayhem in his face and
a black scorpion writhing on his neck. He raises the club above his head and says, ‘You’re fucking dead, you little cunt.’

But Bunny Junior stands there and does not move. He feels his mother’s kisses on his eyelids and he remembers her promise – that she is within him and without him and all about him – and he feels protected and he realises that his granulated eyelids no longer hurt and that the light of the day feels less painful and he feels that this man before him is just one more ugly customer in one more insane episode in an endless parade of demented incidents that collect around the affairs of adults like limescale or something. He feels it is just another part of the great rain of seagull shit that pours for ever over the doings of grown-ups – with their destructor faces and homicidal golf clubs and their filthy violent mouths and squirming black scorpions – and he simply does not feel impelled to move – and still Mushroom Dave draws closer and time grinds down and everyone floats like motes in space and Bunny starts screaming something inaudible and despairing but the boy cannot hear it because Bunny is hammering the Punto’s horn at the same time – and still the boy does not move – and with a great adult grunt, Mushroom Dave brings the nine iron around and the boy reflexively shifts a fraction to the left and feels the sting of the club whiffle against his ear, followed by an immense crack of metal on metal as it slams against the bonnet of the Punto. Bunny Junior places his hand to his ear and when he draws it away and looks at it he sees a smudge of blood on his fingers and the boy makes a kittenish cry and evaporates into the thin and menacing air then reappears in the passenger seat of the Punto.

Bunny roars off down the empty street as the golf club comes down again and blows out the rear window of the
heroic little Punto. Bunny Junior rubs his ear, turns around and sees through the hole in the back window Mushroom Dave turn and run towards the house, tossing the nine iron into the yard and disappearing inside.

‘He was what you might call one of the crazy guys, wasn’t he, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

The boy reaches into the glove compartment and extracts a Kleenex and touches it against the tip of his ear and looks at the blood and says, ‘He got me, Dad.’

Bunny says nothing, the wind blowing through the nonexistent side window, his forelock whipping around his eyes, his jacket glittering with sequins of shattered glass. Bunny pulls into the side of the road, turns off the ignition and stares straight ahead, his hands locked around the steering wheel. He takes a series of breaths. He reaches under his seat and pulls out his emergency quarter-bottle of Scotch. He twists off the cap and swallows half of it. He shoves a Lambert & Butler into his mouth, lights it and takes a deep drag, and says to Bunny Junior, ‘Don’t ever fucking do that again.’

‘Do what, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

‘Leave the fucking car.’

‘Mum wanted to talk to me,’ says the boy.

‘Christ! Look what that bastard did to the Punto!’ says Bunny, brushing the shattered glass from the dashboard. Bunny eyeballs the boy and says through clenched teeth, ‘This is not some fucking game we’re playing here.’

‘I know it’s not, Dad.’

‘This is the real fucking deal!’ he says.

Bunny realises then that, in all the commotion, the car radio has turned itself on and Kylie Minogue’s ‘Spinning Around’ is playing and he hears that crazy throbbing synthesiser and Kylie
singing all achy about how she is up for fucking
anything
and he begins to tremble all over, shake and tremble, shake and tremble and jitter all over and his heart begins to palpitate like a jackhammer and his teeth start chattering like some clockwork skull and he draws back his arm, opens his mouth and with a great existential moan, puts his fist through the car radio.

‘That fucking song!’ he screams.

And then his mobile phone goes off.

‘Christ!’ he shrieks and claws his phone from his jacket pocket, flips it opens and screams, ‘What!’

‘Bunny?’

‘What!
’

‘It’s Geoffrey, are you all right, my man?’

‘No, Geoffrey, I’m not fucking all right! I’m not fucking all right, at all!’

‘Listen, Bun, a Miss Lumley called the office. She says she’s your dad’s carer. She sounds … well … super-pissed-off. She says you’ve got to go to your dad’s place, pronto. She says it’s real urgent. She reckons, and I quote, that it’s “a matter of grave importance”,’ says Geoffrey.

‘What? Now?’ says Bunny.

‘She says your dad’s really sick or something.’

There is a silence at Bunny’s end of the line.

‘Just passing on the message, bwana,’ says Geoffrey.

Bunny lobsters the phone, tosses it on the dashboard and pounds at the steering wheel till his hands ache.

‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck! Fuck! And
fuck!
’

‘Where are we going, Dad?’

Bunny starts the Punto.

‘We’re going to see your granddad,’ says Bunny. ‘My father.
The great Bunny Munro the First,’ he says, and Bunny slams his foot on the accelerator and careens off, jemmying the Punto into the early-afternoon traffic that flows along the coastal road. ‘That’s where we’re fucking going,’ he says.

Bunny Junior sees a great band of bruised thunderheads garnering together over a grey and swollen sea and flocks of seagulls like scraps of shredded newspaper thrown across a sky so full of insult and injury that it looks like it is about to burst into tears or piss its pants or something. He can smell the fish and the salt on the wind, and hear the breakers erupting over the sea wall, and he turns to his father and touches the tip of his ear and says, ‘I think it’s gonna rain, Dad.’

And sure enough Bunny Junior sees the first fat drops of rain thud on the dented bonnet of the Punto, and then the sky rips open and it all comes pouring down.

In a run-down terrace off the Old Steine, the carpets are threadbare and the light bulbs don’t work and on the faded ruined wallpaper there is a willow pattern of frotting Chinamen or Chinamen blowing each other or something – Bunny can’t quite work out which – as he mounts the stairs like it’s the last place on earth he wants to be. His ribs ache and his knees are skinned and his hands are barked and his nose resembles a poisonous red toadstool and there are holes in the knees of his trousers and his quiff looks intestinal, flopping across his forehead like something from the stomach of something.

Bunny Junior follows close behind, and as he passes each landing he sees the storm lashing at the windows and prays that the bin liners that his father gaffer-taped to the blown-out windscreen of the Punto hold fast because he has left his encyclopaedia on the back seat and if anything happened to that he doesn’t know what he’d do.

Coming down the stairs of the building, Bunny runs into Miss Lumley, dressed in a blue nurse’s uniform, with a satchel in one hand and a bunch of keys in the other and her little upside-down watch bobbing on her starched bosom.

‘Just the man I want to see,’ she says.

‘What happened to the lift?’ says Bunny, gasping for air
and sweating into his shirt so profusely that it clings to his ribs.

‘It’s broken,’ says Miss Lumley, dryly. ‘It’s been that way for months, Mr Munro.’

Miss Lumley is in her fifties, with a pleasing and compassionate face that has been temporarily disfigured – reddened and soured and frazzled – by being employed in the execution of some unpalatable duty. She peers over the top of a pair of black-framed spectacles and dangles the keys out in front of her.

‘I quit,’ she says.

‘What?’ says Bunny.

‘Your father is dying, Mr Munro. He needs continuous professional care.’

‘I thought that’s what you were doing,’ says Bunny.

‘He needs to be in hospital, Mr Munro.’

Miss Lumley takes a step forward and presses the keys into Bunny’s hand and looks him up and down.

‘What happened to you?’ she asks.

‘He won’t go into hospital, you know that,’ says Bunny, leaning against the wall for support, the weight of the last few days hanging across his shoulders like bags of cement.

‘Perhaps you could both go in,’ says Miss Lumley, reaching up and gently touching the side of Bunny’s nose. ‘You look worse than he does.’

‘You don’t look too hot yourself,’ says Bunny, and smiles and reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out his flask of Scotch.

‘Drink?’

Miss Lumley smiles back. ‘It’s not been easy. I am a patient woman, Mr Munro. I have tried my best. I simply will not subject myself to the level of abuse I have been receiving.
I’m sure you understand. Your father is a very sick man,’ she says, placing her hand on her chest. ‘Here,’ she says, then taps her head, ‘… and here.’

Bunny takes a hit from the flask, sticks a Lambert & Butler in his mouth and Zippos it as Miss Lumley looks down at Bunny Junior.

‘Hey, darling,’ she says.

Bunny Junior waggles his Darth Vader figurine.

‘I got hit in the ear,’ he says.

Miss Lumley bends down and, pushing her spectacles up the bridge of her nose, examines the boy’s tiny wound.

‘I’ve got something for that,’ she says and opens her satchel and produces a small tube of antiseptic cream and a box of plasters. She dabs a small amount of the cream on the tip of his ear and covers it with a tiny circular, flesh-toned plaster.

‘You have been in the wars,’ says Miss Lumley, closing her satchel.

‘You should see the other guy,’ says Bunny Junior, and looks up at his dad and smiles.

Miss Lumley turns to Bunny.

‘He’s a sweetheart,’ she says.

Bunny sucks on his Lambert & Butler, his hand trembling, an electrified nerve jumping under his right eye, a rivulet of perspiration trailing down the side of his face.

‘Seriously, Mr Munro, are you OK?’

‘Hey,’ says Bunny, ‘it’s visiting day.’

‘I understand your pain,’ says Miss Lumley, placing her hand on his arm. She picks up her satchel. ‘Get your father to a hospital, Mr Munro,’ and she disappears down the stairs.

Bunny jiggles the bunch of keys in his hand, wraps his fingers around them and looks at Bunny Junior.

‘Oh, man,’ he says. ‘Here we go.’

The boy looks back at him with his dismantled smile, his head angled to the side, and then together – father and son – they mount the final set of stairs.

Bunny tucks in his shirt and rearranges his hair and straightens his tie and drains the remainder of his flask of Scotch and sucks the last gasp out of the Lambert & Butler and turns to Bunny Junior and says, ‘How do I look?’ and without waiting for an answer knocks three times on the door of Flat 17 and takes a precautionary step backward.

‘Piss off, you bitch!’ comes a roar, from inside. ‘I’m busy!’

Bunny leans close to the door and says, ‘Dad! It’s me! Bunny!’

Bunny hears a terrible hacking from within. There is a clacking sound and scrape of furniture, a chain of raw expletives and the door opens and Bunny Munro the First stands in the doorway, small and bent, dressed in a brown Argyll jumper with snowflakes and a white polar bear on the front, a nicotine-coloured shirt and a mangled pair of brown corduroy slippers. The zipper gapes open in his trousers and faded blue tattoos peek from the sleeves of his jumper and the open neck of his shirt. The skin on his face is as grey as pulped newspaper and the gums of his dentures are stained a florid purple, the teeth bulky and brown. A sullage of colourless hair spills down the back of his egg-shaped skull, like chicken gravy. He brings with him an overpowering stench of stale urine and medicinal ointment. In one hand he holds a heavy cleated walking stick and in the other, a grimly unpleasant handkerchief. He looks at Bunny and clacks his dentures.

‘Like I said,
piss off!
’ He slams the door in Bunny’s face.

‘Oh, man,’ says Bunny, putting the key in the door and turning it. ‘Just don’t say anything,’ he says to Bunny Junior out of the side of his mouth, and together they enter the room.

The bedsit is small and unventilated and filled with a layer of stale cigarette smoke. The storm hammers at the windows behind lace curtains yellow with age, and in a tiny kitchen to the side, a kettle shrieks. The old man has sat himself in a sole leather armchair in front of the TV, his walking stick resting across his knees. Behind him a mahogany standard lamp with a tasselled shade casts a fierce light on the back of the old man’s elongated skull. On the TV, a pornographic video involving a teenage girl and a black rubber dildo plays out in colour-saturated reds and greens. The old man pushes his gnarled fist into the lap of his rancid grey trousers, claws at his crotch and proclaims, ‘The fucking thing don’t work!’

The old man looks up from his chair and rubs at his jaw and out of one shrewd eye he scrutinises Bunny’s unfortunate demeanour. He sucks air through his psychedelic dentures, points at Bunny’s red rosette nose and says, ‘How did you get that? Raping an old lady?’

Bunny touches Mrs Brooks’ rings in his jacket pocket and with a twinge of shame or something says, ‘What you need is a nice cup of tea, Dad,’ and walks into the kitchen and turns the screaming kettle off.

‘No, I don’t,’ says the old man. ‘What I need is to get my fucking rocks off!’ and he scrabbles at the flies of his trousers again.

Bunny crosses the room and hits the switch on the TV.

‘Perhaps we can turn this off, Dad,’ he says.

‘Give us a fag, then,’ snorts the old man and wipes at the foam in the corners of his mouth. ‘That fucking bitch stole mine.’

Bunny crosses the room and hands his father his pack of Lambert & Butlers and the old man sticks one between his lips and puts the pack in the top pocket of his shirt. Bunny lights his father’s cigarette as Bunny Junior walks across the room to a little birdcage sitting on an antique Sutherland end-table by the window. Inside it, on a perch threaded with ivy, sits a tiny mechanical bird with red and blue wings. Bunny Junior runs his fingers along the gilded bars of the cage and the little automata rocks on its perch.

‘Come on, Dad, let’s make you a nice cup of tea,’ says Bunny.

‘I don’t want a
nice cup of tea
,’ sneers the old man and drags on his cigarette, then presses his handkerchief to his mouth and embarks on a seemingly endless bout of coughing that bends his old body double and brings dark, yellow tears to his eyes.

‘Are you all right, Dad?’ asks Bunny.

‘Eighty fucking years old and I go and get lung cancer,’ he says and spits something unspeakable into his handkerchief. ‘Yeah, I’m just fucking great.’

‘Is there anything I can do, Dad?’ says Bunny.

‘Do?
You?
You must be fucking joking,’ says the old man.

Bunny Junior turns the gold key in the front of the bird cage and the automata jumps to life and sings a song in a series of short sweet notes, its beak clacking open and shut, its red and blue wings lifting and falling. A look of immense pleasure passes across the boy’s face.

‘Don’t break that thing. It’s worth a bloody fortune,’ says
the old man who is attempting to pull the zipper up on his flies, working at it with his twisted fingers.

‘Sorry, Granddad,’ says the boy.

The old man stops what he is doing and looks up at Bunny, the cigarette clamped between his dentures, threads of skin like worn rubber bands looping at his throat.

‘What did he call me?’ he says, jabbing a finger at the boy. ‘Is he taking the piss?’

‘He’s your grandson, Dad. You know he is,’ says Bunny. The old man turns to Bunny Junior, who watches the little mechanical bird as it sings and dances on its perch.

‘Leave that bloody bird alone and come over here to Grandpa.’

With small, cautious steps Bunny Junior moves towards his grandfather, but the old man beckons him closer and leans towards the boy and cocks a thumb at Bunny, who stands clicking his Zippo and pointlessly patting at the pockets of his jacket for a cigarette. The old man says conspiratorially to the boy, ‘I hope you break his heart. I hope you break it like he broke mine.’

‘Leave him alone, Dad,’ mutters Bunny, ‘and give us a fag.’

‘Fuck off and buy your own,’ says Bunny Senior and looks at Bunny from the corner of one yellow, dewy eye, then rolls his tongue around his mouth and hawks into his handkerchief. Bunny Junior turns to the birdcage and twists the key again.

‘I just spoke to the woman who looks after you. Miss … What’s her name?’ says Bunny.

‘Cunt-face.’

‘She says you need to go to the hospital, Dad.’

Bunny Senior raises his walking stick above his head, his face purple with rage.

‘You tell that bloody bitch if she ever sets foot in my place again, I’ll break this fucking stick over her back! You hear me? I’ll poke her …’ and the old man makes an obscene penetrative gesture with the walking stick and bares his dentures, ‘… in the anus. I’ll pull her fucking guts out.’

‘Jesus, Dad,’ says Bunny.

‘I’ll fucking
eviscerate
the bitch,’ and rolls his huge round tongue around his lips. He hacks into his handkerchief again and holds it up for Bunny Junior to see. He shouts, ‘See that? That’s my fucking lung!’ then points at Bunny with his walking stick. ‘Your fucking dad, I tried to teach him the business,’ he snarls. ‘I showed him the most lovely things a boy could see …’

‘Come on, Dad,’ says Bunny.

‘And he ends up peddling toilet brushes!’

‘Beauty products.’

‘Door to fucking door,’ snarls the old man, contemptuously.

‘By appointment,’ says Bunny.

‘Fucking amateur.’

‘I work through a reputable company,’ says Bunny.

‘You’re the bloody Bog Roll Man,’ says the old man and puts his head between his legs, moans mortally and coughs his guts out. He wipes at his eyes with his handkerchief and sucks on the cigarette.

‘Dad, you need proper medical attention,’ says Bunny.

‘You broke my heart. You dashed the cup from my lips, you little cunt.’

‘Dad, you need …’

‘Don’t you come round here telling me what I need.’

The old man addresses Bunny Junior, with one raised finger, taps the pocked bulb of his snout and says, ‘I was an
antique
dealer
, boy. I had a nose for it.’

‘Dad …’ says Bunny.

‘You want to end up a bloody nobody like him?’

‘Dad …’

The old man looks at Bunny and sneers.

‘Shut your fucking hole. You are beyond recall. You are a lost cause. But we might just be able to save the kid,’ and the old man slams the arms of his leather chair. ‘If he’d just use his ears …’

Bunny Senior hacks into his handkerchief. His face grows purple with the effort and he takes some time to compose himself and then his eyes glaze, dimmed in memory and loss, and he speaks in a sly, soft voice.

‘Down on Tom Tiddler’s ground, we were, picking up gold and silver.’

‘We should go, Dad,’ says Bunny to the old man. ‘Come on, Bunny Boy.’

‘I had a nose for it. I could smell a piece of Chippendale, the box of Georgian silver under the stairs … a pretty little bit of French, a tasty little bon du jour. Those old girls, give them a few words, and that special look … well, can we do business, then, madam? I’d have the Sheraton escritoire off the old bitch for a song … yes, a lovely bit of serpentine … and there would be not a straight line on it …’

Bunny Senior makes gentle curves in the air with his hand and says in a state of awe, ‘I was a fucking master of the art.’

Bunny finds himself wavering on his feet, the whisky hitting him from all different directions at the same time, and he looks around for somewhere to sit but he can’t find anywhere and anyway he feels if he doesn’t have a cigarette soon then he will gnaw his bloody arm off, and he says to the old man, who has now closed his eyes and is reeling in his seat and
making motions in the air like he is describing the contours of a well-endowed woman, ‘You sure you don’t want me to make you a cup of tea before we go, Dad?’