The Death of Bunny Munro (2 page)

Bunny turns the key in the ignition and his yellow Fiat Punto splutters sickly to life. A low-level guilt, if you could call it that, a nagging consternation that it was now 12.15 and he was still not home, rankles at the borders of his consciousness. He has a vague, unsettling memory of Libby being particularly upset the night before but he can’t bring the reasons to mind and, anyway, it is a beautiful day and Bunny loves his wife.

It is testament to Bunny’s irrepressible optimism that the glory days of their courtship refuse to relinquish their hold on the present so that it does not really matter how much shit intersects with the marital fan, when Bunny brings his wife to mind, her arse is always firmer, her breasts are shaped like torpedoes and she still possesses that girlish giggle and those happy lavender eyes. A bubble of joy explodes in his belly as he emerges from the car park into the glorious seaside sunshine. It is a beautiful day and, yes, he loves his wife.

Bunny manoeuvres the Punto through the weekend traffic and emerges onto the seafront, and with a near swoon Bunny sees it – the delirious burlesque of summertime unfolding before him.

Groups of scissor-legged school-things with their pierced
midriffs, logoed jogging girls, happy, rumpy dog-walkers, couples actually copulating on the summer lawns, beached pussy prostrate beneath the erotically shaped cumulus, loads of fucking girls who were up for it – big ones, little ones, black ones, white ones, young ones, old ones, give-me-a-minute-and-I’ll-find-your-beauty-spot ones, yummy single mothers, the bright joyful breasts of waxed bikini babes, the pebble-stippled backsides of women fresh from the beach – the whole thing fucking immense, man, thinks Bunny – blondes, brunettes and green-eyed redheads that you just got to love, and Bunny slows the Punto to a crawl and rolls down the window.

Bunny waves at an iPodded fitness freak in Lycra shock-absorbers who maybe waves back; a black chick bouncing across the lawns on a yellow moon-hopper (respect); a semi-naked schoolgirl with a biscuit-sized fucksore on the base of her spine, that turns out, wonderfully, to be a tattoo of a ribbon or a bow – ‘Gift wrapped,’ yells Bunny. ‘Can you believe it?’ – then he wolf-whistles at a completely naked chick with a full Brazilian wax job, who Bunny realises, on closer inspection, is actually wearing a skin-coloured thong as anatomically integrated as sausage skin; he waves at a threesome of thunder-thighed Amazonian goddesses in Ugg boots volleying an outsized blow-up ball (they wave back in slow motion). Bunny hits the horn at a couple of surprisingly hot dykettes, who flip him the finger, and Bunny laughs and imagines them dildoed-up and going for it; then sees a knock-kneed girl in pigtails licking a red-and-blue striped stick of Brighton Rock; a girl wearing something unidentifiable that makes her appear as though she has stepped into the skin of a rainbow trout; then a nanny or something bending over a pram and the bright
white spot of her panties and he blows air through his teeth and hammers the horn. Then he clocks a forlorn-looking, big-boned office girl that has been separated from her hen party, zigzagging drunkenly across the lawns, alone and disorientated, in a T-shirt that says ‘SQUEAL LIKE A PIGGY’ and carrying a large, inflatable penis. Bunny checks his watch, considers it, but cruises on. He sees a weird, veiled chick in a bikini with a Victorian bustle and then waves at a cute little junkie who looks a lot like Avril Lavigne (same black eyeliner), sitting on a pile of
Big Issues
in the doorway of the crumbling Embassy apartments. She stands and shuffles towards him, skeletal, with giant teeth and black, panda-like rings under her eyes, and then Bunny realises she is not a junkie chick at all but a famous supermodel at the peak of her success whose name he can’t remember, which makes Bunny’s hard-on leap in his briefs, and then on closer inspection he realises that she is a junkie chick after all and Bunny cruises on, even though everybody who is into this kind of thing knows, more than anything in the world, that junkies give the best head (crack whores, the worst). Bunny turns on the radio and Kylie Minogue’s hit ‘Spinning Around’ comes on, and Bunny can’t believe his luck and feels a surge of almost limitless joy as the squelching, teasing synth starts and Kylie belts out her orgiastic paean to buggery and he thinks of Kylie’s gold hotpants, those magnificent gilded orbs, which makes him think of riding River the waitress’s large, blanched backside, his belly full of sausages and eggs back up in the hotel room, and he begins singing along, ‘I’m spinning around, move out of my way, I know you’re feeling me ’cause you like it like this’, and the song seems to be coming out of all the windows of all the cars in all the world, and the beat is pounding like
a motherfucker. Then he sees a group of pudgy mall-trawlers with their smirking midriffs and frosted lipstick, a potentially hot Arab chick in full burka (oh, man, labia from Arabia), and then a billboard advertising fucking Wonderbras or something and he says, ‘Yes!’ and takes a viscous, horn-blaring swerve, rerouting down Fourth Avenue, already screwing the top off a sample of hand cream. He parks and beats off, a big, happy smile on his face, and dispenses a gout of goo into a cum-encrusted sock he keeps under the car seat.

‘Wo!’ says Bunny and the deejay on the radio is saying ‘Kylie Minogue, don’t you love those hotpants!’ and Bunny says, ‘Oh, yeah!’ and points the Punto into the traffic and drives the ten minutes it takes to get to his flat at Grayson Court in Portslade, still smiling and laughing and wondering if his wife Libby might be up for it when he gets home.

As Bunny turns into Church Road, the deejay is still talking about Kylie’s gold lamé hotpants – how they are housed in a temperature-controlled vault in a museum in Australia and have reportedly been insured for eight million dollars (more than the Turin Shroud). Bunny feels his mobile vibrate and he flips it open, takes a deep breath and releases a measure of air and says, ‘What?’

‘I got one for you, Bunny.’

It is Geoffrey calling from the office. Geoffrey is Bunny’s boss and he is also, in Bunny’s view, something of a sad case, gone to fat in that mouse-sized office of his on Western Road, almost welded into a tortured swivel chair that he rarely seems to leave. A good-looking guy once upon a million years ago – there are framed photos of him on the back wall of his office, fit and almost handsome – but now an outsized, treacly-voiced pervert who sweats and sniffs and laughs into the handkerchief he forever waves theatrically in his fist. Geoffrey is a sad case, in Bunny’s view, but he likes him all the same. Sometimes Geoffrey exudes a kind of paternal, Buddha-like wisdom that Bunny, on occasion, finds himself responding to.

‘I’m listening, fat man,’ says Bunny.

Geoffrey tells Bunny a joke about a guy who is having sex with his girlfriend and tells her to get down on her hands and knees because he wants to fuck her up the arse and the girl says that’s a bit perverted and the guy says that’s a big word for a six-year-old and Bunny says, ‘I’ve heard it.’

Out of the radio comes a song that Bunny cannot identify and suddenly the whole thing is lost in a blast of static and Bunny rabbit-punches the radio, saying, ‘Fuck!’ whereupon heavy classical music blasts out. The music sounds like it is trumpeting the advent of something way beyond the bounds of terrible. Bunny looks askance at the car radio. He feels spooked by it – the way it seems to choose at random what it wants to hear – and he turns the volume down.

‘Fucking radio,’ says Bunny.

‘What?’ says Geoffrey

‘My car radio is …’ and Bunny hears the tortured squeal of the chair and Geoffrey open a can of lager on the other end of the line.

‘… fucked.’

‘You coming to the office, bwana?’ says Geoffrey.

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because your boss is lonely and I’ve got a fridge full of beer.’

‘Got to check on the missus first, Geoffrey.’

‘Well, send her my love,’ says Geoffrey and he belches deeply.

‘Yeah,’ says Bunny.

‘Listen, Bun, a woman called the office, says she’s your dad’s carer or something. She says you’ve got to go to your dad’s place. It’s urgent.’

‘What now?’

‘Hey, man, I’m just the messenger.’

Bunny turns the Punto into the forecourt of Grayson Court, snaps shut his phone and parks. He steps out of the car, with his sample case and his jacket slung over his shoulder. Hoops of sweat have formed under the arms of his canary yellow shirt (he’d put on a clean one after fucking River) and as he strides across the courtyard he feels a familiar and not unpleasant tightening in his groin.

‘Maybe. Just maybe,’ he singsongs to himself, thinking of his wife and patting at the pomaded curl that sits, coiled and cocky, on his forehead.

He enters the stairwell and launches himself up the concrete steps, passing on the first floor a young girl in a brief, penicillin-coloured mini-skirt and a white stretch cotton vest that says ‘FCUK KIDS’. She has a pimply fourteen-year-old boy in grimy grey tracksuit trousers attached to her face. Bunny clocks her small, erect niplets jutting through the stretch weave of her vest and he leans in close to her throat as he moves past.

‘Careful, Cynthia, that doggie looks infected,’ he says.

The boy, his body fish-belly white and six-packed, with a mantle of acne across his shoulders, says, ‘Fuck off, you cunt.’

Bunny lets out a series of dog barks.

‘Arf! Arf! Arf!’ he goes, leaning out over the stairwell and taking the steps two at a time.

‘Come here, you wanker!’ says the boy, clenching his face and making to go after him.

The young girl named Cynthia says to the boy, ‘He’s all right. Leave him alone,’ then bares her long, braced teeth and, like a lunar probe or a lamprey, sinks down hungrily upon the boy’s neck.

Bunny roots in his pocket for his key as he strides down the gangway to his door. The front door is painted the same canary yellow as Bunny’s shirt and Bunny flashes for an unacknowledged instant an image of Libby, ten years ago, in Levis and yellow Marigolds, crouched by the door painting it, smiling up at him and wiping a strand of hair from her face with the back of her hand.

When he opens the door, the interior of the flat is dark and strange, and as he enters, he drops his sample case and attempts to hang his jacket on a metal peg that is no longer there. It has been snapped off. The jacket falls to the floor in a black heap. He flips the switch on the wall and nothing happens and he notices that the light bulb in the ceiling has been removed from its socket. He shuts the front door. He takes a step forward and, as his eyes adjust to the dark, he observes with a feeling of confusion a deeper disorder. A single bulb burns in a standard lamp, the tasselled shade cocked at an improbable angle, and in this pale uncertain light he sees that the furniture has been moved; his armchair, for instance, turned to face the wall like a naughty schoolboy and buried beneath a yoke of discarded clothes, the laminated dresser upended, its legs snapped off bar one from which a pair of Bunny’s briefs hangs like a sorry flag.

‘Jesus,’ says Bunny.

On the coffee table is a towering stack of pizza boxes and about a dozen unopened two-litre bottles of Coke. Bunny understands, in slow motion, that it seems to be
his
clothes, in particular, that have been thrown about the place. There is a sour and cloying smell that Bunny remembers, on some level, but cannot identify.

‘Hi, Dad,’ comes a small voice, and a nine-year-old boy, in
blue shorts and bare feet, emerges suddenly out of the particled darkness.

‘Fuck me, Bunny Boy! You scared the shit out of me!’ says his father, spinning this way and that. ‘What happened here?’

‘I don’t know, Dad.’

‘What do you mean, “You don’t know”? You bloody live here, don’t you? Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s locked herself in her room,’ says Bunny Junior and rubs at his forehead, then scratches at the back of his leg. ‘She won’t come out, Dad.’

Bunny looks around him and is pole-axed by two parallel thoughts. First, that the state of the flat is personal to him, that it is a message – he sees now that some of his clothes have been slashed or torn apart – and that he is in some way responsible. An unspecified guilt, from out there on the boundaries of his psyche, pops its head over the fence, then ducks back down again. But this uneasiness is superseded by a second, more urgent, mood-altering realisation – that sex with his wife is almost certainly off the agenda and Bunny feels super-pissed off.

‘What do you mean, “Won’t come out”?!’ he says, marching through the living room and down the hall and shouting ‘Libby! Lib!’

In the hall, a box of Coco Pops has been evenly and deliberately emptied across the carpet and Bunny feels them exploding beneath his feet. He yells louder, incensed, ‘Libby! For fuck’s sake!’

Bunny Junior follows his father down the hall and says, ‘There are Coco Pops everywhere, Dad,’ and stomps about on them in his bare feet.

‘Don’t do that,’ says Bunny to the boy. He rattles the door handle vigorously and yells, ‘Libby! Open the door!’

His wife does not respond. Bunny presses his ear to the door and hears a peculiar high-toned vocal sound coming from inside the room.

‘Libby?’ he says quietly. There is something not unfamiliar about the weird, alien mewling and it affects Bunny in such a way that he lets his head loll back and sees that there are great lengths of Crazy String hanging from the empty light socket in the hall like the electric-blue entrails of an alien or something. He points, incredulously, and says, ‘Wha-a-a?’ and, after a time, drops in slow motion to his knees.

‘Oh, that was me,’ says Bunny Junior, pointing at the Crazy String. ‘Sorry.’

Bunny presses his eye to the keyhole.

‘Ha!’ he exclaims, coming back to life.

Through the keyhole he can see his wife, Libby, standing by the window. Unbelievably, she is wearing the orange nightgown that she wore on their wedding night, which Bunny has not seen in years. In an instant, in a flash, he remembers, in dreamtime, his brand new wife walking towards him in their honeymoon hotel, the sheer near-invisible material of the nightgown hanging perilously from her swollen nipples, the phosphorescent skin beneath, the smudge of yellow pubic hair, veiled and dancing before his eyes.

Kneeling among the Coco Pops, his eye pressed to the keyhole, Bunny thinks, with an unannounced wave of euphoria, that the chances of a mid-afternoon fuck look decidedly better.

‘Oh, come on, baby, it’s your Bunnyman,’ he says, but Libby still does not respond.

Bunny leaps to his feet, hammers at the door with his fists and screams, ‘Open the fucking door!’ as Bunny Junior says, ‘I’ve got a key, Dad,’ but Bunny pushes the boy to one side, takes a few steps back and slams himself into the door. The boy says, ‘Dad, I’ve got a key!’ and Bunny hisses, ‘Get out of my way!’ and this time flies at the door like a maniac, full force and grunting with the effort, and still the door does not open.

‘Fuck!’ he screams in frustration and drops to his knees, pressing a furious eye to the keyhole. ‘Open the fucking door! You’re scaring the kid!’

‘Dad!’

‘Stand clear, Bunny Boy!’

‘
I’ve got a key
,’ says the boy, holding the key out to his father.

‘Well, why didn’t you say so? Christ!’

Bunny takes the key, puts it in the keyhole and opens the bedroom door.

Bunny Junior follows his father in. He sees that
Teletubbies
is on the TV but the TV, small and portable, is on the floor over by the window. The red one named Po, with the circular antenna on its head, is saying something in a voice that the boy no longer has the ability to understand. Without taking his eyes off the TV, the boy senses his father has stopped moving and he perceives an orange smear of stillness in the corner of his vision. He hears his father say the word ‘Fuck’, but in a quiet, awestruck way, and decides not to lift his head. Instead, he looks at the carpet and keeps looking and notices a Coco Pop has lodged itself between the toes of his left foot.

Bunny curses quietly a second time and brings his hand up to his mouth. Libby Munro, in her orange nightdress, hangs
from the security grille. Her feet rest on the floor and her knees are buckled. She has used her own crouched weight to strangle herself. Her face is the purple colour of an aubergine or something and Bunny thinks, for an instant, as he squeezes shut his eyes to expunge the thought, that her tits look good.