The Death of Bunny Munro (5 page)

There is a simple service for Libby Munro at St Nicolas Church in Portslade. Bunny and Bunny Junior stand in the church, heads bowed. They are dressed in the brand new black suits Bunny had found hanging, side by side, in the otherwise empty closet in his bedroom. A receipt he discovered in the jacket pocket showed that Libby had bought the suits from Top Shop in Churchill Square, two days before her suicide. What was that about?

Every day a newer, weirder and sadder aspect to Libby’s demise reveals itself. A neighbour had said that she had seen Libby burning pieces of paper and dropping them over the balcony a couple of days before her death. They had turned out to be the love letters Bunny had written her before they were married. He found little burnt pieces of them under the stairwell with the syringes and the condoms. What had got into her? She must have been crazy.

The whey-faced and effeminate Father Miles, with a cumulus of white hair banked around his skull, delivers his eulogy in a pneumatic whisper that Bunny has to crane his head to fully hear. He refers to Libby as ‘full of life and loved by all’ and later ‘selfless and generous beyond measure’, not once mentioning her medical condition and her subsequent mode
of departure, Bunny notices, other than to say ‘she had joined the angels prematurely’.

Bunny gives a cursory scope of the congregation and sees, squeezed into the same pew, on the other side of the church, a small number of Libby’s friends.

Patsy ‘Bad Vibes’ Parker throws Bunny incriminatory looks every so often, but Bunny expects nothing less. Patsy Parker has never liked Bunny and at every opportunity she can find alerts him to the fact. Patsy is short, with an over-developed backside, and to compensate for her low stature wears high heels much of the time on her tiny undersized feet. When she would come to visit Libby, she would walk down the gangway in an obscene and purposeful trot, reminding Bunny of one of the three little pigs, probably the one who made its house out of bricks. This is particularly pertinent, as she had once, in a fit of pique over some porny comment she had overheard him make about the walking fuck-fest Sonia Barnes from No. 12, called Bunny a wolf. Bunny assumed she meant the cartoon wolf, all drooling tongue and bulging eyeballs, and had actually taken this remark as a compliment. Each time he’d see her he would do his ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down’ routine. Bunny considers rolling out his tongue and bugging his eyeballs at her but realises with a certain satisfaction that he can’t be fucked.

Next to Patsy Parker, Bunny sees, is Rebecca Beresford, who Libby would refer to at any given time as ‘the older sister she never had’, ‘her soul mate’ and ‘her best friend in the world’. Rebecca Beresford stopped talking to Bunny years ago after an incident at a barbecue on Rottingdean beach that involved a half bottle of Blue Label Smirnoff, an uncooked chipolata, her fifteen-year-old daughter and a serious
misreading of the signs. This led to a furore that a year of contrition could not defuse. Eventually an unspoken agreement was forged that mutual disdain was the only way forward. Whatever. Rebecca Beresford shoots scowling broadside glances at Bunny from the other side of the church.

Next to her is the seriously sexy Helen Claymore, who also gives Bunny nasty little looks, but Bunny can see that her heart isn’t in them and that she is clearly up for it. This is not an opinion but a statement of fact. Helen Claymore is dressed in a tight, black tweed suit that does something insane to her breasts, militarises them, torpedoes them, and something out of this world to her depth-charged rear end. Helen Claymore has been transmitting signals to Bunny in this way for years and Bunny takes a deep breath and allows himself to open up to her vibes like a medium or spiritualist or something. He gives vent to his imagination and realises for the millionth time that he has none and so he pictures her vagina. Bunny marvels at this for an unspecified moment. He sees it hovering before his eyes like a holy apparition and intuits the wonder of it and feels his dick harden like a bent fork or a divining rod or a cistern lever – he can’t decide which.

Then he hears a release of hissed gas and turns to see Libby’s mother, Mrs Pennington, staring straight at him with a look of horror and sheer hatred on her face. She actually bares her teeth at him. Caught in the act – thinks Bunny – and bends his head in prayer.

The boy looks up at his father and then over at Mrs Pennington and smiles at her and raises his hand in a sad, little wave. His grandmother looks at him and shakes her head in rage and grief, and a great sob breaks from her chest. Her husband, a good-looking guy who had a stroke a year ago and
is now consigned to a wheelchair, lifts a convulsive hand and places it over that of his despairing wife.

Suddenly, Father Miles is talking about ‘those left behind’, and when he mentions Libby’s ‘loving husband’, Bunny thinks he can hear an audible groan from the congregation – a boo and a hiss for the bad guy. He thinks he may well be imagining this but, just in case, he repositions himself, giving them his back, as if to shield himself from their collective disdain by facing the wall.

When he opens his eyes his attention is grabbed by a painting of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus cradled in her arms. Underneath there is a lacquered plaque that reads
Madonna and
Child
, which makes him close his eyes and incline his head again and think about Madonna and her waxed pussy (probably) and how he’d read in some interview that she liked having her yoga-toned bottom spanked.

Behind all this imagining he can hear the low whisper of his wife’s eulogy and suddenly he feels a kind of imminent sense of her presence and, weirdly, his own doom. He can stand it no longer.

‘Wait here,’ he whispers to his son.

Bunny sidles from the pew and, head bent, sneaks out of the church. He ducks across the green square of lawn and, in a little public toilet made out of bricks, shaded by an implausible palm tree, he rests his head against the graffitied wall of the cubicle and beats off. He remains in this position for a time, then gloomily bats at a toilet paper dispenser, cleans himself up and exits the cubicle.

With eyes downcast, he stands before the reflective square of stainless steel screwed to the wall above the sink. After a while Bunny finds the courage to raise his head and look at
himself. He half expects some drooling, slack-jawed ogre to greet him there in the smeared mirror and is pleasantly surprised to see that he recognises the face that stares back at him – warm, loveable and dimpled. He pats at his pomaded forelock and smiles at himself. He leans in closer. Yeah, there it is – that irresistible and unnameable allure – a little bashed and battered, to be sure, but who wouldn’t be?

Then, on closer inspection, he sees something else there, looking back at him. He leans in nearer still. Something grievous has resided in his face that he is amazed to see adds to his general magnetism. There is an intensity to his eyes that was not there before – a tragic light – that he feels has untold potential and he shoots the mirror a sad, emotive smile and is aghast at his new-found pulling power. He tries to think of a papped celebrity who has been visited by some great tragedy and come out the other side looking better as a result, but can’t think of one. This makes him feel mega-potent, ultra-capable and super-human, all at the same time.

But most of all, Bunny feels vindicated. Despite everything, he’s got his mojo back. He feels he is ready to face the scowling disdain of this church full of uptight women. He even contemplates knocking out another one there at the sink. He sticks a Lambert & Butler in his mouth and lights it and blows a trumpet of smoke at his own reflected image.

Then he notices that the shadows behind him have begun to bleed and smudge and reposition themselves. They seem to be growing longer and taking on personalities that would not normally be attributed to them, as if they were advancing upon him from the spirit world. Bunny has the unforeseen feeling that he is going to die – not today, necessarily, but soon – and is puzzled to realise that he experiences a certain
comfort in that. He feels, in an intuitive way, that the shadows are those of the dead, rearranging themselves, rolling over and making room for him.

He finds himself going weak at the knees and he rolls his head back and looks at the ceiling. He notices a white clump of perforated mud in the upper corner of the toilet block, the size and shape of a human heart. In time, Bunny realises he is looking at a wasps’ nest and that it is alive and humming with malign industry. The wasps are preparing themselves – he thinks. He remembers the burning West Pier and his blood runs cold and he thinks – the starlings are circling. He closes his eyes and imagines for a split second a rush of perilous and apocalyptic visions – planes falling from the sky; a cow giving birth to a snake; red snow; an avalanche of iron maidens; a vagina with its mouth stapled shut; a phallus shaped like a mushroom cloud – and Bunny shudders, checks his teeth in the mirror and thinks – Man, where did that come from?

He centres his quiff, with a light tapping of the hands, then flicks his cigarette at the wasps’ nest and, in a shower of sparks, exits the toilet block.

As he crosses the green and dandilioned lawn he sees Bunny Junior sitting on the steps of the church. The boy has taken his jacket off and draped it over his head.

‘Is that you in there, Bunny Boy?’ asks Bunny, looking this way and that.

‘Yes,’ says the boy, flatly.

‘Why aren’t you inside?’ asks Bunny.

‘Everybody left ages ago. They’ve gone to the cemetery. What happened to you?’

Bunny looks at his watch and, with a rush of blood to the head, wonders how long he has been in the toilet.

‘Nature called,’ says Bunny. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘What?’ says the boy.

‘If you took the bloody jacket off your head, you might be able to hear me,’ says Bunny. ‘I feel like I’m talking to a mushroom.’

Bunny Junior removes his jacket and squints up at his father. His eyes are shot with blood and rimmed in a pink crust.

‘The sun hurts my eyes, Dad.’

‘Come on, you’ll be all right. Get in the car. We’re late,’ says Bunny, already moving across the lawn towards the Punto. Bunny Junior follows his father.

They climb into the dazzling yellow Punto, with its polka dots of seagull shit, and Bunny starts it up and swings into the mid-afternoon traffic.

‘Christ, it’s hot,’ says Bunny, and father and son roll down the windows.

Bunny hits the radio and a super-authoritative female voice comes out.

‘Cool,’ he says.

‘What?’ asks the boy.

‘
Woman’s Hou
r
.’

‘Is it, Dad?’

‘It’s educational,’ says Bunny, turning up the volume.

The boy allows the air gusting through the window to blow across his face.

‘I don’t feel so great,’ he says and closes his eyes.

Bunny Junior hears his dad say, ‘You’ll be all right, Bunny Boy,’ and that makes him feel better because everybody knows that not knowing whether you are going to be all right is often the worst part of when you don’t feel all right. He keeps his eyes closed and he listens to the radio. He hears a lady talking
about the sexualising or something of children through advertising. She starts talking about Barbie dolls and in particular a new doll called Bratz that looks like it has just had sex or taken a whole lot of drugs or something. When she says, ‘Our children are having their childhoods stolen from them,’ he hears his father repeat the line and then say it again as if he is storing it away in his memory. He feels the car slow and grind and squeal to a stop.

‘We’re here,’ says Bunny. ‘Are you all right?’ He hears a tremor of irritation in his father’s voice – not at him, probably, but at the whole world.

Bunny Junior opens his eyes and gives his dad a tight little smile and together they climb out of the Punto and make their way down the gravel path to the small collection of people that has gathered around what will be his mother’s final resting place. Bunny and Bunny Junior ease their way in and, with muttered apologies, make their way to the graveside.

Bunny Junior hops from foot to foot and tries to listen to the vicar, but can’t really hear him and anyway it is hard to concentrate because two squabbling seagulls that seem to be in the throes of some mating dance or something are becoming a major distraction. Bunny Junior hates seagulls. He always has and he always will. He keeps his head inclined but can see out of the corner of his eye that the seagulls are getting dangerously close. He read in the
Argus
only recently that a seagull attacked an old age pensioner in Hove. The man had a heart attack and died, and if his wife hadn’t chased it away it would have definitely pecked the old man’s eyes out and probably his guts as well.

Bunny Junior notices that Poodle, a friend of his father’s from work, is standing at the back of the crowd, tapping his foot and wiggling his hips and secretly puffing on a cigarette that is cupped in his right hand. He notices that Poodle is wearing headphones. Bunny Junior smiles at Poodle and Poodle gives him the secret thumbs-up sign. Poodle is skinny, wears tight stonewashed jeans (even to a funeral) and sports a yellow, lacquered quiff. This makes him look a bit like, well, an evil poodle and Bunny Junior wonders which came first – the name or the ’do. The boy sees Poodle eyeball the seagulls,
then flick his cigarette butt and, with an uncanny accuracy, hit one of them in the side of the head. Poodle punches the air and says, ‘Yes!’ loud enough for other people to turn around and look at him. His girlfriend, who has something grape-coloured on her top lip, elbows Poodle in the ribs. Poodle hangs his head in prayer. Then he winks at Bunny Junior and rolls his eyes, and when he smiles, he looks like a grinning dog. Of all his father’s friends, Bunny Junior likes Poodle best. No contest.

The seagull, meanwhile, squawks horribly and snaps up the cigarette in its beak and flies off. Bunny Junior feels it was probably an incident like this that caused the West Pier to burn down – man drops cigarette butt, seagull picks it up thinking that it is food, takes it to the West Pier and drops it in a nest full of baby seagulls. The nest, built in the roof of the old, disused ballroom, bursts into flame, the pier catches alight and the pier burns down. Bunny Junior loves the West Pier because his mother took him on a special guided tour of the pier for his eighth birthday, then they walked all the way to Marrocco’s for an ice cream. Bunny Junior loves the West Pier and he hates seagulls. He thinks they are bastards. In the world famous Booth Museum in Dyke Road there are a couple of stuffed ones and Bunny Junior remembers reading somewhere that the seagulls on the south coast of England are particularly large, perhaps the largest in the world. They are also amongst the most aggressive. Another thing he remembers about seagulls is that when they crap they actually target humans. This is a proven fact. They also attack light-reflecting colours like yellow, and this is why the Punto is always such a mess. His father hates seagulls almost as much as Bunny Junior does. They are big, aggro bastards. This is a proven fact.

He can see his mother’s coffin being lowered into a hole in the ground. The casket seems much too small. He thinks for a moment that maybe there has been a terrible mistake and that they are burying the wrong person – a child, maybe, or a midget, or even an animal, like a German Shepherd or a Red Setter or something.

He half expects his mother to roll up and say to him, ‘What are you doing here, dressed up in that fine suit?’

Bunny Junior would shake his head incredulously and say, ‘I don’t know, Mum.’

‘Well, let’s go home then, Bunny Boy,’ she would say.

The boy senses a heat coming from his father, who stands next to him. His father looks down and says out of the corner of his mouth, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘Jesus Christ, Bunny Boy, what’s wrong with you? Stop jiggling around!’ Bunny Junior stops moving and hangs his head once more and closes his eyes.

Bunny looks across the crowd and notices, with a certain relief, that Poodle, Raymond and Geoffrey have all turned up to the burial. He sees that Poodle and Raymond have brought their current girlfriends with them. He is not quite sure why. He vaguely recalls suggesting, in a brain-fried phone call with his boss, Geoffrey, that they come back to his house for a few drinks after the funeral. He had forgotten about this.

Bunny notices that Poodle’s girlfriend, tall and leggy in a dress the colour of weedkiller, is, by Poodle’s usual standards, pretty fucking hot. Bunny can see, even from where he is positioned at the grave, that Poodle’s girlfriend has a small, florid birthmark on her upper lip that makes her look as though she has been licking a blueberry ice cream. Bunny is surprised to
find that this arouses him, because anything out of the ordinary usually turns him right off.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Raymond’s girlfriend. Raymond’s girlfriend is definitely not hot. Raymond’s girlfriend is called Barbara or something, and has been Raymond’s girlfriend for about ten years and is, well, Raymond’s girlfriend. Her body and her face are so completely uneventful that if it weren’t for the fact that she is wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘I’m not 40, I’m 18 with 22 years experience’, she would be more or less invisible. Raymond and Barbara make a good couple, though, as Raymond also has no real personality to speak of.

Geoffrey, Bunny’s boss, is travelling solo. He has parked his enormous rear end on a canvas foldstool and dabs at his face with his white handkerchief. Bunny thinks for a moment that he can see real tears on Geoffrey’s bloated cheeks, but is not sure. Bunny feels a swell of emotion rise inside him and this makes him want to cry or something. He looks back to the burial and realises that the business of intoning over the grave is done and that Father Miles is looking at him with a perplexed expression on his face. Father Miles wants Bunny to do something. Bunny moves to the grave, picks up a handful of earth and drops it onto the lid of the simple, mahogany coffin. As he does this, he feels a kind of darkness spread over him.

Bunny sits on a bench under a little oak tree.

‘Are you OK, Dad?’ says the boy.

Bunny looks around him and sees the world slip back into focus.

He notices Poodle, Raymond and Geoffrey making their way towards him. Bunny motions to them with a flick of his
head in the general direction of home and the three men and the girlfriends turn and head for the car park. Then he clocks Libby’s mother, Mrs Pennington, pushing her wheelchair-bound husband along the gravel path with an air of steely determination.

‘Wait here,’ says Bunny to his son. ‘Go and … um … play.’

‘OK, Dad,’ says the boy, looking up at his father with concern. He walks off, giving the remaining seagull, with its horrible yellow eye, a wide berth.

Bunny stands and follows Mrs Pennington down the path, and as he does so an abutment of cumuli tumble across the sun and an ominous shadow, accompanied by a cold breeze, moves visibly across the graveyard. Bunny sees Mrs Pennington’s gloved hand reach down and turn up the collar of her husband’s jacket. Bunny’s pomaded forelock unravels and whips around his eyes as he calls out, ‘Mrs Pennington! I need to speak to you!’

Mrs Pennington stops suddenly, then spins her husband around and Bunny is almost blown off his feet by the force field of hatred that envelops her. Her body visibly shakes, her black-gloved hands grip the handles of the wheelchair.

‘Um … Mrs Pennington,’ says Bunny.

‘Have you any idea how much I despise you?’ spits the woman.

‘Mrs Pennington, I wanted to speak to you,’ says Bunny, thinking – Man, this woman is
angry
.

‘What?’ she hisses. Her voice is educated, cultured and distorted with malice. ‘Can you even comprehend the depth of my contempt?’ She releases the wheelchair, screws her hands into small, black fists and pounds emphatically at her own grieving bosom. ‘It runs to the
core
,’ she snarls.

‘I need your help,’ says Bunny and knows, there and then, that he has made a fundamental mistake. The plan he had conceived last night on the sofa (he still could not bring himself to sleep in the master bedroom) seemed at the time nothing short of brilliant but now seems to have gone to sea in a sieve. This was not a good idea.

‘My baby lies dead in her grave and you want something from me?!’

But Bunny perseveres.

‘It’s about your grandson, Mrs Pennington,’ he says, and even though the temperature has dropped dramatically a trickle of perspiration runs down the side of Bunny’s face and dark wet rings form in the armpits of his shirt.

Mrs Pennington stamps on the brake of the wheelchair and, in a freakish contra-zoom, moves towards Bunny and gets right up into his face.

‘You tore her heart out. You wrung the life right out of her. My sweet, smiling baby girl … you killed her everyday … you and your
whores
… killed her like you throttled her in her sleep …’

Bunny takes a faltering step back and catches his heel on the pebbled border of the path and stumbles backward and the world tips and he thinks – This was not a good idea at all.

‘She would call me and weep her little heart out. That happy, happy girl, look at what you did to her!’ hisses Mrs Pennington, tears running unchecked down her face.

Her husband, with a surprising fleetness, shoots out his hand and grabs Bunny by the wrist with a rigid, cramped claw. The skin of his hand is red and silken and Bunny looks at it in horror.

‘You were no kind … of … husband,’ he says, and his
once-handsome face judders frantically on the tired spring of his collapsed and wattled neck.

Bunny rights himself, leans down and addresses Mr Pennington. ‘You can talk,’ he says.

‘What?’ screeches Mrs Pennington. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Bunny, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender and shaking his head. ‘Mrs Pennington, I just thought that you could look after Bunny Junior, your grandson, for a while.’ He takes a step forward and says something that has been playing out there on the farthest reaches of his consciousness for days and that now sends a vague signal of alarm through his body. ‘I can’t do it. I’m not capable. I don’t know how.’

Mrs Pennington shakes he head. ‘That poor, poor boy,’ she says with real feeling. ‘All he has is you … the great Bunny Munro …’

‘That may be so, Mrs Pennington, but …’

Mrs Pennington takes a small tartan lap rug from a leather accessory bag that hangs from the back of the wheelchair and drapes it over her husband’s knees. She rests her gloved fingers lightly on his shoulder and Mr Pennington places his hand, jumping and twitching, on top of hers.

‘The problem is,
Bunny
, I look at him and all I see is you,’ says Mrs Pennington, spitting Bunny’s name out of her mouth like it was something putrid.

A worming headache has lodged itself directly over Bunny’s right eye.

‘Mrs Pennington, I implore you,’ he says, but knows he is wasting his time.

The woman points at Bunny, her eyes as cold and as hard as flint, and says, ‘You pig … you disgusting, fucking pig,’
then turns her face away as if she can no longer bring herself to look upon him a moment longer.

Bunny is suddenly sick of all this – the sideways glances, the accusatory looks, the open hostility – the great tidal wave of blame that he has been forced to endure on this of all days and he says to Mrs Pennington, super-pissed-off. ‘Well, thanks a lot,
Grandma
.’ Then he turns to the chair-bound Mr Pennington, who is in the process of raising an outraged finger in Bunny’s direction, and says, ‘So long, Romeo.’

‘You are a disgrace,’ says Mr Pennington, from the corner of his mouth.

‘At least I can wipe my own arse,’ says Bunny, and turns and makes his way back down the gravel path, dabbing at the chilled sweat on his face with the sleeve of his jacket.

He sees Bunny Junior attempting unsuccessfully to squirt a seagull with water from a drinking fountain. The boy stops when he sees his father lurching towards him. Bunny Junior looks down the path at Mrs Pennington, a black hump of grief folded over her husband, and gives her a little wave.

‘Don’t waste your time,’ says Bunny, sticking a cigarette in his mouth and furiously patting his pockets for his Zippo.

‘What’s wrong with Grandma?’ says the boy.

‘You want the truth?’

‘OK, Dad,’ says the boy. He follows his father down the path towards the Punto.

‘She’s a fucking bitch,’ says Bunny, and torches his cigarette.

Bunny Junior wishes he had sunglasses like his dad, black wraparounds that made him look ‘insectile’. His granulated eyelids cause him to blink more than other people do and he
thinks he should remind his father that he needs to get the special eye drops before he goes completely blind or something. The boy can see the pulsing, scarlet band across his father’s neck and the violence with which he is puffing his fag and blowing the smoke out of his nose. He looks like an animated Looney Toons bull or Mexican Toro or something – thinks the boy – and understands that now is not the time to ask him about such things as eye drops.

Bunny pulls open the door of the Punto and drops into the driver’s seat and slams the door shut with such finality that it feels almost premonitory – like it’s the end of things. He starts up the Punto and takes a blind and near-suicidal swerve into the traffic and the six-axle concrete mixer that bears down on him, horn blaring, could have been the very event that ruptured Bunny’s mortal coil and sent him to his death – but it is not. The concrete mixer, oxblood-coloured with ‘DUDMAN’ painted in capitals across the front, blasts past with a tanned and tattooed arm hanging out the window as it makes its way to the depot at Fishersgate. Bunny doesn’t even blink.

Instead Bunny punches the radio and a bombast of classical music pours out and Bunny hits it again – this radio with a mind of its own – and lucks out on a commercial station and wondrously, miraculously, there, pouring from the speakers in all its thrilling optimism and sexual emancipation and gold hotpants comes
that song
– and all the aggrieving rage hisses out of Bunny like a leaky valve, the boiling heat drains from his face and he turns to his son, knuckles his head and says, ‘Whoever said that there isn’t a God is full of shit!’