‘I am damned,’ thinks Bunny Munro in a sudden moment of self-awareness reserved for those who are soon to die. He feels that somewhere down the line he has made a grave mistake, but this realisation passes in a dreadful heartbeat, and is gone – leaving him in a room at the Grenville Hotel, in his underwear, with nothing but himself and his appetites. He closes his eyes and pictures a random vagina, then sits on the edge of the hotel bed and, in slow motion, leans back against the quilted headboard. He clamps the mobile phone under his chin and with his teeth breaks the seal on a miniature bottle of brandy. He empties the bottle down his throat, lobs it across the room, then shudders and gags and says into the phone, ‘Don’t worry, love, everything’s going to be all right.’
‘I’m scared, Bunny,’ says his wife, Libby.
‘What are you scared of? You got nothing to be scared of.’
‘Everything, I’m scared of everything,’ she says.
But Bunny realises that something has changed in his wife’s voice, the soft cellos have gone and a high rasping violin has been added, played by an escaped ape or something. He registers it but has yet to understand exactly what this means.
‘Don’t talk like that. You know that gets you nowhere,’ says Bunny, and like an act of love he sucks deep on a Lambert & Butler. It is in that instance that it hits him – the baboon on the violin, the inconsolable downward spiral of her drift – and he says, ‘Fuck!’ and blows two furious tusks of smoke from his nostrils.
‘Are you off your Tegretol? Libby, tell me you’ve been taking your Tegretol!’
There is silence on the other end of the line then a broken, faraway sob.
‘Your father called again. I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know what he wants. He shouts at me. He raves,’ she says.
‘For Christ’s sake, Libby, you know what the doctor said. If you don’t take your Tegretol, you get depressed. As you well know, it’s dangerous for you to get depressed. How many fucking times do we have to go through this?’
The sob doubles on itself, then doubles again, till it becomes gentle, wretched crying and it reminds Bunny of their first night together – Libby lying in his arms, in the throes of some inexplicable crying jag, in a down-at-heel hotel room in Eastbourne. He remembers her looking up at him and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I get a little emotional sometimes’ or something like that, and Bunny pushes the heel of his hand into his crotch and squeezes, releasing a pulse of pleasure into his lower spine.
‘Just take the fucking Tegretol,’ he says, softening.
‘I’m scared, Bun. There’s this guy running around attacking women.’
‘What guy?’
‘He paints his face red and wears plastic devil’s horns.’
‘What?’
‘Up north. It’s on the telly.’
Bunny picks up the remote off the bedside table and with a series of parries and ripostes turns on the television set that sits on top of the mini-bar. With the mute button on, he moves through the channels till he finds some black-and-white CCTV footage taken at a shopping mall in Newcastle. A man, bare-chested and wearing tracksuit bottoms, weaves through a crowd of terrified shoppers. His mouth is open in a soundless scream. He appears to be wearing devil’s horns and waves what looks like a big, black stick.
Bunny curses under his breath and in that moment all energy, sexual or otherwise, deserts him. He thrusts the remote at the TV and in a fizz of static it goes out and Bunny lets his head loll back. He focuses on a water stain on the ceiling shaped like a small bell or a woman’s breast.
Somewhere in the outer reaches of his consciousness he becomes aware of a manic twittering sound, a tinnitus of enraged protest, electronic-sounding and horrible, but Bunny does not recognise this, rather he hears his wife say, ‘Bunny? Are you there?’
‘Libby. Where are you?’
‘In bed.’
Bunny looks at his watch, trombones his hand, but cannot focus.
‘For Christ’s sake. Where is Bunny Junior?’
‘In his room, I guess.’
‘Look, Libby, if my dad calls again…’
‘He carries a trident,’ says his wife.
‘What?’
‘A garden fork.’
‘What? Who?’
‘The guy, up north.’
Bunny realises then that the screaming, cheeping sound is coming from outside. He hears it now above the bombination of the air conditioner and it is sufficiently apocalyptic to almost arouse his curiosity. But not quite.
The watermark on the ceiling is growing, changing shape – a bigger breast, a buttock, a sexy female knee – and a droplet forms, elongates and trembles, detaches itself from the ceiling, freefalls and explodes on Bunny’s chest. Bunny pats at it as if he were in a dream and says, ‘Libby, baby, where do we live?’
‘Brighton.’
‘And where is Brighton?’ he says, running a finger along the row of miniature bottles of liquor arranged on the bedside table and choosing a Smirnoff.
‘Down south.’
‘Which is about as far away from “up north” as you can get without falling into the bloody sea. Now, sweetie, turn off the TV, take your Tegretol, take a sleeping tablet – shit, take two sleeping tablets – and I’ll be back tomorrow. Early.’
‘The pier is burning down,’ says Libby.
‘What?’
‘The West Pier, it’s burning down. I can smell the smoke from here.’
‘The West Pier?’
Bunny empties the tiny bottle of vodka down his throat, lights another cigarette, and rises from the bed. The room heaves as Bunny is hit by the realisation that he is very drunk. With arms held out to the side and on tiptoe, Bunny moonwalks across the room to the window. He lurches, stumbles and Tarzans the faded chintz curtains until he finds his balance and steadies himself. He draws them open extravagantly and vulcanised daylight and the screaming of birds deranges the room. Bunny’s pupils contract painfully as he grimaces through the window, into the light. He sees a dark cloud of starlings, twittering madly over the flaming, smoking hulk of the West Pier that stands, helpless, in the sea across from the hotel. He wonders why he hadn’t seen this before and then wonders how long he has been in this room, then remembers his wife and hears her say, ‘Bunny, are you there?’
‘Yeah,’ says Bunny, transfixed by the sight of the burning pier and the thousand screaming birds.
‘The starlings have gone mad. It’s such a horrible thing. Their little babies burning in their nests. I can’t bear it, Bun,’ says Libby, the high violin rising.
Bunny moves back to the bed and can hear his wife crying on the end of the phone. Ten years, he thinks, ten years and those tears still get him – those turquoise eyes, that joyful pussy, ah man, and that unfathomable sob stuff – and he lays back against the headboard and bats, ape-like, at his genitals and says, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow, babe, early.’
‘Do you love me, Bun?’ says Libby.
‘You know I do.’
‘Do you swear on your life?’
‘Upon Christ and all his saints. Right down to your little shoes, baby.’
‘Can’t you get home tonight?’
‘I would if I could,’ says Bunny, groping around on the bed for his cigarettes, ‘but I’m miles away.’
‘Oh, Bunny… you fucking liar…’
The line goes dead and Bunny says, ‘Libby? Lib?’
He looks inexplicably at the phone as if he has just discovered he is holding it, then clamshells it shut as another droplet of water explodes on his chest. Bunny forms a little ‘O’ with his mouth and he shoves a cigarette in it. He torches it with his Zippo and pulls deeply, then emits a considered stream of grey smoke.
‘You got your hands full there, darling.’
With great effort Bunny turns his head and looks at the prostitute standing in the doorway of the bathroom. Her fluorescent pink knickers pulse against her chocolate-coloured skin. She scratches at her cornrows and a slice of orange flesh peeps behind her drug-slack lower lip. Bunny thinks that her nipples look like the triggers on those mines they floated in the sea to blow up ships in the war or something, and almost tells her this, but forgets and draws on his cigarette again and says, ‘That was my wife. She suffers from depression.’
‘She’s not alone there, sweetheart,’ she says, as she jitters across the faded Axminster carpet, the shocking tip of her tongue protruding pinkly from between her lips. She drops to her knees and takes Bunny’s cock in her mouth.
‘No, it’s a medical condition. She’s on medication.’
‘Her and me both, darling,’ says the girl, across Bunny’s stomach.
Bunny seems to give this reply due consideration as he manoeuvres his hips. A limp, black hand rests on his belly and looking down Bunny sees that each fingernail has the detailed representation of a tropical sunset painted on it.
‘Sometimes it gets really bad,’ he says.
‘That’s why they call it the blues, baby,’ she says, but Bunny barely hears this as her voice comes out in a low, incomprehensible croak. The hand twitches and then jumps on his stomach.
‘Hey? What?’ he says, sucking air through his teeth, and he gasps suddenly and there it was, blowing up from his heart, that end-of-things thought again – ‘I am damned’ – and he folds an arm across his eyes and arches slightly.
‘Are you OK, darling?’ says the prostitute.
‘I think a bath is overflowing upstairs,’ says Bunny.
‘Hush now, baby.’
The girl lifts her head and looks fleetingly at Bunny and he tries to find the centre of her black eyes, the tell-tale pinprick of her pupils, but his gaze loses its intent and blurs. He places a hand on her head, feels the damp sheen on the back of her neck.
‘Hush now, baby,’ she says again.
‘Call me Bunny,’ he says and sees another droplet of water tremble on the ceiling.
‘I’ll call you any damn thing you want, sweetie.’
Bunny closes his eyes and presses on the coarse ropes of her hair. He feels the soft explosion of water on his chest, like a sob.
‘No, call me Bunny,’ he whispers.
Bunny stumbles in the dark, groping along the bathroom wall for the light switch. It is somewhere in those dead hours, the threes and fours, and the prostitute has been paid and packed off. Bunny is alone and awake and a mammoth hangover finds him on a terrifying mission for the sleeping pills. He thinks he may have left them in the bathroom and hopes the hooker didn’t find them. He locates the switch and fluorescent tubes buzz and hum awake. Bunny moves towards the mirror and its merciless light and despite the hot, toxic throb of his hangover – the dry, foul mouth, the boiled skin, blood-blown eyes and his demolished quiff – he is not displeased with what greets him.
He is afforded no insights, no illuminations, no great wisdoms but he can see immediately why the ladies dig him. He is not a toned, square-jawed lover boy or cummerbunded ladies’ man but there’s a pull, even in his booze-blasted face, a magnetic drag that has something to do with the pockets of compassion that form at the corners of his eyes when he smiles, a mischievous arch to his eyebrows and the little hymen-popping dimples in his cheeks when he laughs. Look! There they are now!
He throws down a sleeping tablet and for some spooky reason the fluorescent light short-circuits, and flashes on and off. Bunny sees, for a split second, his face X-rayed and the green bones of his skull leap to the surface of his skin. Bunny says to the grinning death’s head, ‘Oh, man!’ and throws down a second tablet and makes his way back to bed.
Showered, quiffed and deodorised, Bunny hunches over a tabloid in the breakfast room of the Grenville Hotel. He wears a fresh shirt patterned with oxblood lozenges and feels like shit, but he is relatively optimistic. You’ve got to be, in this game. He sees the time is 10.30 a.m. and curses to himself as he remembers a promise he had made to his wife that he would be back early. The sleeping pills still course around his system and he is finding that it is taking a certain amount of effort to turn the pages of the newspaper.
Bunny feels a ticklish interest around the back of the neck, a feathering of the hackles, and realises he has earned the attentions of the couple breakfasting on the other side of the dining room. He clocked them when he came in, sitting in the striped light of the louvred window. He turns his head slowly and deliberately and their eyes meet in the manner of animals.
A man with reptilian teeth, the bright spot of his scalp blinking through his thinning hair, strokes the jewelled hand of a woman in her mid-forties. He meets Bunny’s gaze with a leer of recognition – they’re both on the same game. The woman looks at Bunny and Bunny checks out her expression-free eyes, cold beneath her Botox-heavy brow. He takes in her bronzed skin, peroxided hair and gelatinous lips, the freckled cleavage of her vast modified bosom, and experiences a familiar tightening in his crotch. Bunny zones out for a while and then in a flash remembers the woman, a year ago, maybe two, in a hotel on Lancing seafront, pre-surgery. He recalls waking in a horror of confusion, his body smeared alarmingly in her orange fake tan. ‘What?’ he cried, slapping at his discoloured skin. ‘What?’ he cried, in panic.
‘Do I know you?’ says the man across the breakfast room, glassy-eyed and adenoidal.
‘What?’ says Bunny.
The muscles around the corners of the woman’s mouth retract causing her lips to stretch laterally, and it takes Bunny a moment to realise that she is smiling at him. He smiles back, his dimples doing their thing, and Bunny feels a full-boned, bubonic erection leap in his tiger-skin briefs. The woman throws back her head and a clogged laugh escapes her throat. The couple rise from the table and the man moves closer to Bunny, like a skeletal animal on its hind legs, patting the breadcrumbs off the front of his trousers.
‘Oh, man, you’re a trip,’ he says, in the manner of a wolf. ‘You really fucking are.’
‘I know,’ says Bunny.
‘You’re out of this fucking world,’ says the man.
Bunny winks at the woman and says, ‘You look good,’ and means it.
The couple exit the dining room leaving a sickly ghostage of Chanel No. 5 that compounds Bunny’s hangover and makes him wince and bare his teeth and return to the newspaper.
He licks an index finger, flips a page and sees a full-page CCTV grab of the guy with the body paint, the plastic devil’s horns and the trident.
‘HORNY AND ON THE LOOSE’, says the headline. Bunny tries to read the article but the words just don’t want to do what they were invented to do and keep breaking formation, reordering themselves, scrambling, decodifying, whatever, generally fucking around, and Bunny gives up and feels a mushroom cloud of acid explode in his stomach and blow up his throat. He shudders and retches.
Bunny looks up and becomes aware of a waitress standing over him holding in front of her a full English breakfast. Cheeks, chin, breasts, stomach and buttocks – she looks like she has been designed solely with a compass – a series of soft, fleshy circles, in the middle of which hover two large, round, colourless eyes. She wears a purple gingham uniform, a size too small, with white collar and cuffs, her hair raked back in a ponytail and a nametag that says ‘River’. As Bunny disimagines her clothes he thinks for a fraction of a second of a pile of custard-injected profiteroles, then a wet bag of overripe peaches, but settles on the mental image of her vagina, with its hair and its hole. He says, closing the newspaper with a careful, disbelieving shaking of the head, ‘This world, I tell you, it gets weirder every day.’
Bunny taps at the tabloid with a manicured nail and looks up at the waitress and says, ‘I mean, have you read this? Jesus.’
The waitress looks at Bunny blankly.
‘Well, don’t. Just don’t.’
She gives her head a little jaded jerk. Bunny folds the paper in half and moves it out of the way, so that she can put the breakfast down.
‘It’s not something you want to read over breakfast, particularly when you’ve got a bloody cement mixer in your skull. Christ, I feel like someone actually dropped the mini-bar on my head.’
Bunny notices obliquely that a shaft of yellow sunlight has crawled across the dining room and moved up the inside of the waitress’s leg, but because the waitress has started to jiggle impatiently, it gives the surreal impression that a light is short-circuiting up inside her dress or that there is a sort of seepage of luminance over the pale dough of her inner thighs. Bunny can’t decide which.
He stares down at his breakfast, adrift in its sullage of grease, picks up his fork and with a sad poke at a sausage says, ‘Jesus, who cooked these eggs? The bloody council?’
The waitress smiles and covers her mouth with her hand. Around her neck, hanging on a delicate chain, is a dragon’s talon made of pewter holding a small glass eyeball. Bunny catches her smile, unguarded in her enormous, toneless eyes.
‘Ah, there we go. A little drop of sunshine,’ says Bunny, squeezing his thighs together and feeling a pulse of pleasure register around the perineum or wherever.
The waitress fingers her necklace and says, ‘You want tea?’
Bunny nods, and as the waitress moves away, he clocks the sudden and self-conscious seesawing of her retreating haunches and Bunny knows, more than he knows anything in the whole world, that he could fuck this waitress in the blink of an eye, no problems, so that when she returns with his cup of tea, Bunny points at her nametag and says, ‘What’s that? Is that your name? River? Where did you get that?’
The waitress places her hand over the nametag. Bunny notices the frosted, achromatic nail polish she is wearing corresponds in a suppositional way with the non-colour of her eyes. They both have something to do with the moon or the planets or something.
‘My mother called me that,’ said the waitress.
‘Oh, yeah? It’s pretty,’ says Bunny, bisecting a sausage and forking it into his mouth.
‘Because I was born near a river,’ she says.
Bunny chews and swallows and leans forward and says, ‘Good job you weren’t born near a toilet.’
A crease of ancient pain ruckles around the waitress’s eyes, diminishing them, then they clean-slate, blank-out, and she turns her back and begins to walk away. Bunny laughs, apologetically.
‘I’m sorry. Come back. I was joking.’
The breakfast room is empty and Bunny clasps his hands together in panto-supplication and says, ‘Oh, please,’ and the waitress slows.
Bunny zones on the afterpart of her lilac gingham uniform and a glitch in the pixels of the crosshatched pattern causes time to deregulate. He begins to see, in a concussed way, that this moment is a defining one for this particular young lady and a choice is presenting itself to her. It is a choice that could mark this waitress’s life for ever; she could continue to walk away and the day would roll on in all its dismal eventuality or she could turn around and her sweet, young life would open up like, um, a vagina or something. Bunny thinks this, but he also knows, more than he knows anything in the world, that she will, indeed, turn around and willingly and with no coercion step into the slipstream of his considerable sexual magnetism.
‘Please,’ he says.
He contemplates getting down on one knee but realises that it is unnecessary and that he probably wouldn’t be able to get up again.
River, the waitress, stops, she turns and in slow motion lies back in the water’s drift and floats towards him.
‘Actually, River is a beautiful name. It suits you. You’ve got very beautiful eyes, River.’
Bunny recalls hearing on Woman’s Hour, on Radio 4 (his favourite show), that more women prefer their men to wear the colour maroon than any other colour – something to do with power or vulnerability or blood or something – and is glad he has worn his shirt with the oxblood lozenges. It just makes things that bit easier.
‘They go deep,’ he says, spiralling an index finger hypnotically. ‘Way down.’
He feels a simple shift inside him, and the miserable machinery that has been grinding mercilessly in his brain all morning suddenly and effortlessly self-lubricates and moves into something sleek and choreographed and he almost yawns at the inexorable nature of what he is about to do.
He throws out his hands and says, ‘Guess what my name is!’
‘I don’t know,’ says the waitress.
‘Go on. Guess.’
‘No, I don’t know. I’ve got work to do.’
‘Well, do I look like a John?’
The waitress looks at him and says, ‘No.’
‘A Frank?’
‘No.’
Bunny limps his wrist, goes ham-homo, and says, ‘A Sebastian?’
The waitress cocks her head and says, ‘Well… maybe.’
‘Cheeky,’ he says. ‘All right, I’ll tell you.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘It’s Bunny.’
‘Barney?’ says the waitress.
‘No, Bunny.’
Bunny holds up his hands at the back of his head and waggles them like rabbits’ ears. Then he crinkles his nose and makes a snuffly sound.
‘Oh, Bunny! Suddenly River don’t seem so bad!’ says the waitress.
‘Oh, she’s got a mouth on her.’
Bunny leans down and picks up a small suitcase by his chair. He puts it on the table then shoots his cuffs and snaps the locks. Inside the case are various beauty product samples – miniature bottles of body lotion, tiny sachets of face cleanser and little tubes of hand cream.
‘Here, take this,’ says Bunny, giving River a sample of hand cream.
‘What’s this, then?’ says River.
‘It’s Elastin Rich, Extra Relief Hand Lotion.’
‘You sell this stuff?’
‘Yeah, door to door. It’s bloody miraculous, if you must know. You can have it. It’s free.’
‘Thanks,’ says River, in a small voice.
Bunny glances up at the clock on the wall and everything slows down and he feels the thunderous journey of his blood and his teeth throb at their roots and he says, quietly, ‘I can give you a demonstration, if you like.’
River looks at the tiny tube of lotion cradled in the palm of her hand.
‘It’s got Aloe Vera in it,’ he says.
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.
Bunny stands on the balcony outside his flat and leans out over the railing. He drinks from a can of lager and watches as two attendants push the gurney across the car park and deposit his wife into the back of the ambulance. There is no urgency to this act and it seems to Bunny, in an oblique way, eerily casual and routine. A summer breeze blows through the wind tunnels of the estate, collecting upon itself, growing stronger and flapping the edges of the sheet that hangs over the gurney. Bunny thinks he can see the side of his wife’s foot but he is not sure. He draws on a cigarette and drinks from the can of lager.
As he leans out over the balcony railing and feels the pulse of his blood collecting in his face, he remembers by way of a gravitational swoon lying with Libby on a hotel bed in Eastbourne. He recalls her rising from the bed and walking to the bathroom, and somewhere between the retreat of those high blushing buttocks and the return of her yellow, freshly-douched bush, Bunny made a reckless and vertiginous decision and said, ‘Libby Pennington, will you marry me?’ and as he said these words the room spun wildly and he found himself gripping the sides of the bed, as if he may be jettisoned away.
Libby stood there, bold, naked, fists on hips and said, with a skewed smile, ‘You’re drunk.’ (which was true) ‘Ask me in the morning.’ Bunny picked up his watch from the bedside table, made a show of holding it to his ear and tapping on the glass.
‘It is morning,’ he said, and Libby laughed in that wild, girlish way she had and sat down on the bed, next to Bunny.
‘Will you honour and obey me?’ (She was also drunk.)
‘Um, yes,’ said Bunny. He groped for a cigarette and put it in his mouth. Libby placed her hand between his legs and squeezed.
‘In sickness and in health?’
‘Um, OK,’ said Bunny, lighting up and expelling a plume of grey smoke into the room. He closed his eyes. He heard her rustling about in her handbag and when he opened his eyes, she was writing something in lipstick on his chest.
‘I got to take another pee,’ she said and once again, through a veil of discharged smoke, he scoped that glorious, goodbye backside. Bunny stood up, the floor spongy and uncertain, looked at his image in the dressing-table mirror. Then the room tilted suddenly and blood rushed from his extremities and thundered in his face and his heart hammered in his chest and he held on to the dressing table as he read, in reverse, the single word, ‘YES’.
As the spell retreated he looked up to see, standing in the doorway of the bathroom and smiling at him, his future wife.
Now, propped against the railing of the balcony, he feels, but does not cogitate, that this memory of his departed wife – her moving away from him through the haze of cigarette smoke in a down-at-heel hotel in Eastbourne – will forever dream-float in his consciousness. It will hang like a protective veil in front of the other memories, as the very happiest of them all and safeguard him from any hardboiled questions like how the fuck did it all come to this.
Bunny watches the unhurried ambulance drive away from the flats, followed by the police car.
They are taking my wife away, he thinks.
He drains the can of lager and crushes it in his fist, and hears his son ask, out of nowhere, ‘Do you want another beer, Dad?’
He turns slowly and looks down at his son. (How long had he been there?) The boy seems diminished in stature and wears a pair of filthy complimentary hotel slippers about ten sizes too big for him that Bunny had brought home from a trip a million years ago. Bunny Junior presses his lips together in a wonky impression of a smile, making him look uncannily like his departed mother.
‘I’ll get you one, if you like.’
‘Um, OK,’ says Bunny and hands the crushed can to his son. ‘You can put that in the bin.’ The boy disappears.
Bunny holds on to the metal railing for a moment as he experiences a fresh attack of vertigo and wishes that everything would stop happening so fast. He feels as if his string has been severed and he is floating free beyond anything that would even vaguely resemble realness, without a single clue or idea or notion as to what on earth he is going to do now. What is he going to do?
He looks down at the forecourt below and sees a small contingent of residents who stand smoking in the great stretched slab of late afternoon shadow cast by the block. They have been drawn outside by the presence of the ambulance and the police car. They are, he realises, all women and they talk quietly amongst themselves but cast secret glances up at Bunny every now and then. Bunny notices Cynthia, in her yellow mini-skirt and cotton vest, talking to a young mother who has a baby welded to one salient hip. Cynthia drops her cigarette on the ground and grinds it with a neat swivel of her flip-flop. Bunny notices the muscle leap in her young thigh. Cynthia looks up at Bunny and smiles with her long metallic teeth. Then she waves at Bunny by lifting her right hand and wiggling her fingers and from where Bunny is standing he can actually see the subtle rise of her young mound beneath the taut fabric of her mini-skirt. How old is she, anyway?
What is he going to do?
Bunny thinks, as he returns Cynthia’s sad little wave and feels a gathering of manpower in his crotch, that maybe, in one way, he knows the answer. But he also thinks, on a wholly different level, that maybe, in another way, he does not know the answer at all. He thinks that he should work this question out, but he also thinks, with a sense of relief, that he can’t be fucked. He feels a major decampment of stamina, of energy from his person, but notices paradoxically that his dick is hard, and as he turns and heads inside, he feels sad and lonely.
Bunny Junior sits on the sofa, tranced out in front of the television, a huge bottle of Coca-Cola clamped between his knees. He has a medical condition called blepharitis or granulated eyelids or something and he has run out of steroid eye drops. His eyes are puffy and sore and rimmed in red and he thinks at some point he should tell his father so that he can buy some more drops. He is glad all the people have cleared out. The police. The ambulance men. He was tired of the way they kept looking at him, whispering in the hallway like he couldn’t hear or something. They kept making him think of his mum and every time he thought of his mum he felt like he was going to drop through the middle of the world. They wouldn’t stop asking him if he was all right, when all he was trying to do was watch the television. Can’t anyone get any peace around here?
He notices his dad walk into the living room at approximately the same time as he remembers that he has forgotten to get him a beer from the fridge. How come he forgot to do that? His dad’s face looks like grey felt. He walks differently, like he is not quite sure whose living room he is entering, like he’s in a bit of a daze.
‘What happened to my beer?’ says Bunny, in slow motion, as he sits down next to Bunny Junior on the sofa.
‘I forgot, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior. ‘The TV was on.’
The sleeve of a discarded sweater hangs over the top of the TV screen, partially obscuring what seems to be a news broadcast involving a giraffe that lies motionless, on its side, in its enclosure at the London Zoo. It is surrounded by a number of attendants and medical staff in Wellington boots and arabesques of smoke rise from its body.
‘What are you watching that for?’ asks Bunny, meaning the news, unable to think of anything else to say.
The boy rapid blinks to cool his eyes and wipes at his forehead with the back of his hand and says, ‘The giraffe was struck by lightning, Dad, at the zoo. It’s quite common on the veldts of Africa. They cop it all the time. They act like lightning rods. One minute they are minding their own business, the next minute they’re jelly.’
Bunny hears his son, but his voice seems to come from a vast distance and his stomach makes a hollow, rumbling sound and he realises he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast and thinks he may be hungry. He takes one of the pizza boxes from the stack on the coffee table and opens it. He waves it under his nose.
‘How long have these been here?’ says Bunny.
‘I don’t know, Dad,’ says the boy. ‘Maybe a million years?’
Bunny sniffs it.
‘Smells all right,’ he says and folds a slice in half and stuffs it in his mouth.
‘Tastes all right, too,’ he says, but it comes out sounding incomprehensible.
Bunny Junior reaches over and takes a slice.
‘Very nice, Dad,’ he says, and for a moment the fuzzed tones of the TV weld the boy to his father and they sit together on the sofa and say nothing. After some time Bunny points at the towering stack of pizza boxes on the coffee table in front of them, a cigarette burning between his fingers. His mouth is full of pizza and there is a questioning expression on his face and he is about to say something and he chews vigorously and continues to point at the pizza boxes.
Bunny Junior says, ‘I think mum left them for us, Dad’ and as he says this he feels the fiery centre of the world drag at his insides and he paddles his feet over the edge of the sofa so violently that his slippers fly off his feet. Bunny looks at his son and responds by nodding and swallowing and zoning in on the TV.
Later that night Bunny Junior says to his father, ‘I better go to bed now, Dad.’
Bunny, zomboid, says, ‘Ah, yeah’, and a bit later on says, ‘OK, then.’
The boy puts on his outsized slippers and says to his father, ‘I’m usually in bed ages ago.’ He rubs at his raw, bleared eyes with the back of his hands. ‘My eyes are sore,’ he says.
‘OK, Bunny Boy, I’ll just sit here then,’ says his father and makes a vague, circular gesture with his hand, which Bunny Junior finds impossible to interpret.
‘Well, I’ll just go to bed then, now, Dad,’ says the boy and stands and looks down at his father and sees he has returned to the thrall of the television. Two greased and roided gladiators, dressed in Lycra shock-absorbers, beat each other with Styrofoam-capped staves. They wear facemasks so there is nothing to suggest whether they are men or women as they bat and snarl at each other. Bunny Junior thinks he might sit down again and check this out but instead says, ‘Goodnight, Dad.’
With exaggerated care, the boy steps over the piles of trashed clothes that lie about the living room like sleeping animals, as if they may, if he wrong-foots, awaken. He moves into the hall, the Coco Pops now ground into the carpet by the day’s dismal traffic, and makes his way towards his room. He sees, in terror, from the corner of his eye, the closed door to the master bedroom and the key hanging from the lock like a reproach. Bunny Junior presses his lips together and squeezes shut his eyes. He decides he will not open them again until he is safe within the confines of his room. He makes the rest of the journey feeling along the hallway wall like a blind man until he arrives at the door to his room. He touches with his hand the poster of the cartoon rabbit flipping its middle finger that is Blu-tacked to the door and feels the plastic letters arranged along the top of it. They spell B-U-N-N-Y J-N-R. He pushes open his door and enters his bedroom and only then does he open his eyes.
Bunny Junior changes into his pyjamas, pulls back the sheet on his bed, lies down, then reaches over and turns off his bedroom light. He is comforted by the canned applause that emanates from the living room and is happy his dad is close by. Above him a mobile of the nine planets of the solar system, painted in Day-Glo, rotates slowly, put into motion by the bedtime movements of the boy. As each planet turns and spins, Bunny Junior runs through the information he has collected about each one. For example – Saturn’s interior is similar to Jupiter’s, consisting of a rocky core, a liquid metallic hydrogen layer and a molecular hydrogen layer. Traces of various ices are present – stuff he has remembered from the encyclopaedia his mother gave him when he was seven. He wishes, vaguely, that his father would come in and sit with him while he tries to sleep. He feels like it will take two thousand light years before he will be able to get to sleep. He sleeps.
Back in the living room Bunny watches the TV without interest, without judgement or without any visible cognitive response whatsoever. Occasionally his head falls back and he drains a beer. He opens another. His eyes glaze over. He sucks a cigarette, like a machine. Like a robot, he does it all again. Yet, as the blue evening, framed in the window, darkens into nighttime, little pockets of emotion twitch at the corners of his eyes and his forehead creases and his hands begin to tremble.
Then without warning Bunny leaps to his feet, and as if he has been girding himself for this moment all evening, moves to the sideboard (procured by Libby from a garage sale in Lewes) and opens its frosted glass front. Bunny reaches inside and returns to the sofa with a bottle of malt whisky and a short, heavy glass.
He pours himself a drink, and then up-ends it down his throat. He gags and throws his body forward, shakes his head and repeats the action with the bottle and the glass again. Then with little stabs of his index finger punches a number into his mobile phone. The line engages and before there is even time for the purr of the ringtone, he hears an awful, protracted bout of coughing, deep and wet, that forces Bunny to hold the phone at arm’s length from his ear.
In time, Bunny, clearly disturbed, says, ‘Dad?’ with an unintended and violent emphasis on the initial letter – not a stammer as such, but the beginnings of one, as if the word has been wrenched from his mouth like a stinking tooth.
‘Dad?’ he says again, jamming the phone under his chin and firing up another fag.
The coughing stops and Bunny hears a vicious intake of air sucked through oversized dentures that actually sounds like a nest of aggrieved snakes. Then the seething, bilious enquiry, ‘What?’
‘Dad? It’s me,’ says Bunny as he reaches for the bottle and slops another shot into the glass, his hand jumping about in agitation.
‘Who?’ shouts his father.
‘Dad, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Who the fuck is this?’ says his father and Bunny hears him chopping his dentures. His voice sounds murderous and mad.
‘It’s me.’ Bunny’s hand is jumping around on the end of his wrist so much he appears like he is waving or has epilepsy or he’s just washed his hands and found there is no towel to dry them or something. He throws down the whisky, grimaces, shudders, sucks on his cigarette and finds that his whole body has started to shake.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ says the old man and the coughing starts up again, raking deep into the lungs.
‘D-dad?’ says Bunny, and he hears himself stutter and curses under his breath and tongs shut the phone. He tries to stick a fresh cigarette in his mouth but his head and his hand are jumping so much he finds it near-impossible. He lights it by steadying one hand with the other, then falls back against the sofa, expels the smoke violently and says, ‘Fuck!’
He pictures his father, momentarily, as a medical skeleton sitting in an ancient leather armchair, tubercular lungs sucking at white powdery ribs, fag in hand, snarling into the telephone. The image terrifies him and he squeezes shut his eyes but the dread skull of his father continues to dance before his eyes. I’ll try him again some other time – he thinks.
Later on, and a bottle of whisky gone and nothing else going down, Bunny lurches along the hallway and leans against the door to the master bedroom. He takes a breath and opens the door, his face tensed and inclined to the side, the way an amateur may defuse a large bomb.
With every intention of entering the room cautiously, Bunny stumbles and half-falls and staggers across the room and sits down on the unmade marital bed. He undresses down to his briefs. He turns and sees the curled inscription of his wife’s body still trapped within the sheets and considers reaching out and placing his hand on it. He feels he would do this but is still spooked from having just visited the bathroom where he was confronted with the sight of his wife’s collection of ‘special’ Ann Summers underwear hanging like lace bunting from the retractable clothesline above the bath. He had not seen these particular panties in years and he understood that they had been hung there as a kind of clue to something he was too drunk to fully fathom. Was his wife trying to tell him something? When he reached out and touched them with his fingers, the room swooned dramatically and the walls turned to Silly Putty and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back between the toilet and the bath. He let himself rest there for a moment and looked up at the line of pastel-coloured underwear that waved and danced above him, their gussets open wide like mouths, and Bunny was struck with a sudden and almost palpable sense of his wife’s presence there in the bathroom. The room felt chilled and Bunny thought he could see query marks of vapour rising from his lips. He stood up and got the hell out of there.
Now, sitting in his briefs on the edge of the bed, Bunny pulls the drawer out of Libby’s bedside table and dumps the contents – half-a-dozen little brown medicine bottles and pill packets – on the bed. Bunny locates the trusty Rohypnol, those pretty purple dissectible diamonds, and pops one, and then another, from their foil pockets and swallows them.
Bunny falls, in slow motion, backward and lies upon the bed. He closes his eyes and squeezes his genitals and tries to bring to mind a celebrity vagina but finds that his brain keeps bringing forth images of the day’s horror – the empurpled face of his wife, the imagined death’s head of his father, the screaming crotches of his wife’s ouvert panties. He opens his eyes and finds his attention drifting to the security grille on the window and the room dervishes and Bunny, with an impressive display of both self-control and alcoholic paralysis, remains where he is, on this fucked-up magic carpet ride.
He does this until he can do it no more, whereupon he rises from the bed and returns, bombed-out, to the living room.
He stumbles over the dumped piles of his clothes. Is that ink? Has ink been poured over his clothes? He falls heavily on the sofa and fumbles with the remote and zaps at the TV. He finds the Adult Channel and a televised phone-in sex-line and he allows an East European girl named Evana, who has a tight, hot, wet pussy and the bedside manner of a mallet or something, to coax Bunny through the most forlorn wank, he thinks, in the history of the world.
Then Bunny falls back against the sofa, and before he can surrender to his drugged sleep he manages with a near-super-human act of will to press the ‘OFF’ button on the remote and see, for an instant, the TV go dead, so that for a few short hours the Munro home seems peaceful – no phantoms or ghosts, no clanking of chains, no voices calling from beyond the grave – just a father and his son sleeping, the night hushed and respectful, in a manner fitting a man who will quite soon be dead.
When Bunny Junior enters the living room, he squints into the light that pours through the window. A mop of bed-hair crowns his sleep-seamed face, and his pyjamas are runkled and a Spiderman web-blaster is attached to his forearm. He screws up his nose at the cloying odour and waves his hand in front of his face.
Then he sees, with a gasp and a rush of energised wind through his body, his father sprawled motionless on the sofa, grey as a kitchen glove and coated in a patina of cold grease. The metallic, outsized TV remote is still cradled banally in his dead hand like an anachronism. It looks antique and obsolete and somehow responsible for Bunny’s condition, as if it had failed in its sole responsibility of keeping Bunny alive.
‘Dad?’ says the boy, quietly, then louder, ‘Dad!’
He begins to hop from one foot to the other in his complimentary bathroom slippers. Bunny does not respond, and if he is breathing, then it is too shallow and inconsequential to produce any noticeable movement in his body.
Bunny Junior actually jumps up and down and screams ‘Dad!’ with such force that his father rears wildly up, batting at himself with his hands.
‘What?!’ he says.
Bunny Junior says, ‘You didn’t move!’
‘What?’
‘You just didn’t move!’
‘Hey? No, I fell asleep,’ says Bunny and tries to recognise his son.
Bunny Junior turns and jabs his finger angrily towards the hall and the master bedroom, still hopping weirdly from foot to foot.
‘Didn’t you want to sleep in there?!’ he says, in a loud voice, rubbing at his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Didn’t you want to go and sleep in there?!’
Bunny sits up and wipes at the slick of drool on his bristled cheek.
‘No. What? No, I fell asleep. What time is it?’ says Bunny.
The boy does not actually move closer to his father but when Bunny looks at him he seems to hard-zoom into focus, which gives the impression of an almost supernatural forward motion, and Bunny rears back reactively.
‘I should have used the key,’ says Bunny Junior, anxiously.
Bunny feels the events of the previous day collect about him, stealing the air. He is, on an abstract level, shocked by the realisation that his life is now different. It has become tragic and lamentable. He has become pitiable. A widower. But more explicably he also understands that the Rohypnol and the whisky he consumed the night before still course through his system and this makes him feel, in a very real way, pretty good.
‘What?’
‘The key, Dad, I should have used it!’
‘When? What?’
Bunny Junior looks at his father, his face twisted in rage, his granulated eyeballs raw and alive in their sockets, his little fists clenched at his sides, and shouts, ‘I just should have used the fucking key!’
Bunny, who has no idea of what is going on, does a kind of cabaret grab with his arm and ducks and weaves to avoid a slice of sunlight that scythes the room in two.
Grimacing, he says, ‘Christ, keep your voice down.’
Then he raises himself up, wavers on new legs and feels all the love thunder through his bloodstream.
‘Jesus, I’m loaded,’ he says, and he stands there in his briefs. ‘Is there anything to eat?’
Bunny Junior opens and closes his mouth and throws his arms out to the sides in a gesture that means ‘I don’t know’ and says, in a sad, grief-modulated voice, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, let’s take a look then!’ says Bunny. ‘I could eat a bloody cow!’
Bunny Junior, who loves his father, compresses his lips into a skew-whiff smile and says, ‘Me too, Dad!’ and follows him into the farragoed kitchen, where, like the living room, stuff has been up-ended, flung around and scattered about.
‘Yeah, well, I could eat two bloody cows!’
Bunny opens the cupboard door and reels back in mock-horror.
‘Jesus Christ, there’s a fucking monkey in here!’ and pulls out a box of Coco Pops and, rattling them to his ear, turns towards the fridge and opens it. He notices that the coloured magnetic alphabet that has decorated the fridge in a nonsensical scramble of letters for the last five years has been arranged to say ‘FUCK YR PUSSY’ and he wonders, as he snaps the seal on a pint of milk and sniffs it, who would have done that.
‘Actually, Bunny Boy, I could eat the whole fucking flock,’ he says.
‘Herd,’ says the boy.
‘Yeah, and them too.’
They sit opposite each other, bent over their bowls, and with a much-exaggerated display of appreciation, they eat their cereal.
‘What key?’ asks Bunny.
Bunny spends the following days organising the funeral arrangements and taking calls of enquiry and commiseration from God knows whom, all with a zoned-out, robotic insentience.
The phone call to Libby’s mother, Doris Pennington, was made with all the sweat-soaked stupor of a man standing on a trapdoor with a rope around his neck. The woman’s complete contempt for her son-in-law went way back, almost nine years, to the first time Libby walked out on him and made her tearful way back home to mother – cum-stained knickers (not hers) in the back seat of Bunny’s old Toyota. The roaring silence that greeted the tragic news broke upon Bunny like a great wave and he sat there, heavy-lidded with the phone pressed to his ear, listening to the phantoms and ghosts inside the phone long after the line had gone dead. Bunny became convinced that he could detect the faraway rhythms of his wife’s voice deep in the phone lines. He felt she was trying to tell him something and a chill ran through his bones and he castaneted the phone and sat there, gulping lungs of air like a fish.
Through these days Bunny made increasingly frequent and protracted visits to the bathroom, beating off with a single-minded savagery, intense even by Bunny’s standards. Now, sitting on the sofa with a large Scotch, his cock feels and looks like something that has been involved in a terrible accident – a cartoon hotdog, maybe, that has made an unsuccessful attempt to cross a busy road.
The boy sits beside him and the two of them are locked in a parenthesis of mutual zonkedness. Bunny Junior stares blankly at the encyclopaedia open in his lap. His father watches the television, smokes his fag and drinks his whisky, like an automaton.
After a time, Bunny turns his head and looks at his son and clocks the way he stares at his weird encyclopaedia. He sees him but he can’t really believe he is there. What did this kid want? What is he supposed to do with him? Who is he? Bunny feels like an extinct volcano, lifeless and paralysed. Yeah, he thinks, I feel like an extinct volcano – with a weird little kid to look after and a mangled sausage for a dick.
Bunny scopes the living room. He has made some attempt at clearing up the debris and bringing some order back to the flat. In doing so he has uncovered the extent of the damage his wife had brought down upon the house. For example, he had found his Avril Lavigne (drool) and Britney (drool) and Beyoncé (drool) CDs floating in the toilet cistern; the entrails of his bootleg Tommy and Pamela video (a gift from his boss, Geoffrey) had been torn out and gallooned around the ceiling light in the bedroom; several unsuccessful attempts had been made to fasten to the wall a headshot of himself, taken at a company bash in the bar of The Wick, by way of a fork through the face, the tines leaving an hysterical Morse code on the woodchip of the bathroom – dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot – fuck you.
Bunny feels this was all done in a private language of blame. He feels a surge of guilt, but he doesn’t know why. He feels victimised. She had a medical condition, for Christ’s sake. She was depressed. The doctors said so. It had to do with a misfiring of her synapses or something. Still, it all feels so fucking personal and then there is a knock on the front door.
Bunny opens the door and is greeted by two social workers – Graeme somebody and Jennifer somebody – making an unannounced and unsolicited visit to monitor how Bunny and his son are coping. Bunny is glad he has made some effort to put right his house. He wishes, though, that he were a little more sober.
‘Hello, young man,’ says Jennifer to Bunny Junior and the boy offers a tight, little smile. ‘Do you think we could talk to your dad for a minute?’
Bunny Junior nods and picks up his encyclopaedia and disappears into his bedroom.
‘He’s adorable,’ says the woman and takes a seat opposite Bunny. She brings with her the ghost of a scent that Bunny remembers with absolute familiarity but cannot identify.
‘We don’t want to take up too much of your time,’ says Graeme, but something in his tone makes this statement seem unsympathetic and accusatory.
Graeme is a tall man with a huge, round, aggressive head and a seriously sunburned face – a human stop sign – and he places himself behind Jennifer, stiff-legged, feet apart, in a sad parody of a Stasi thug. He says he is there as a moderator or a mediator or something, but Bunny is not really listening. He is looking at Jennifer, who is, no matter how you cut it, seriously hot. Barelegged and new on the job, she has dressed herself in a linen skirt and cotton blouse in an attempt to demonstrate a sort of conservative and professional remove – but who is she kidding? Bunny knows, almost psychically, that the bra she is wearing is anything but standard issue, and her panties, well, who knows, but by the way she is sitting in the chair in front of him, and wiggling her knee, he wonders if she is wearing any at all. He considers this for a protracted period of time and comes to believe that her glistening and moisturised lower leg is, as anyone who is into this sort of thing knows, suggestive of a waxed pussy. Bunny feels his eyes closing and realises, from a million miles away, that Jennifer is recommending he seek some emotional support and is running through a list of grief councillors, local twelve-step meetings and support groups. He remembers with a dreadful spasm what has happened to his wife and then he catches the social worker squeezing her thighs together. Jennifer kind of peters out and dries up.
Bunny offers little but monosyllabic responses. He becomes increasingly wary of Graeme, who keeps eyeballing him in an ultra-threatening way, like he was doing something wrong. His crimson face pulses with an aura of something malign and barely suppressed, and Bunny notices a sprinkling of dandruff, like ash, on his dark blue jacket. He tries to concentrate on the possibilities of Jennifer’s vagina by defabricating her outfit. Then Bunny surprises himself by letting forth an ancient groan, a roar torn from the depths, and falling to his knees and flinging his face into Jennifer’s lap.
‘What am I going to do now? What am I going to do now?’ he bellows and fills his lungs with her salty, summer smell. He feels, in an indirect way, that he has not smelt a woman for what seems like an eternity. He presses his face deeper into her lap and thinks – What is that smell? Opium? Poison?
Jennifer rears back and says, ‘Mr Munro!’ and Bunny wraps his arms around her cool, bare legs and sobs into her dress.
Graeme, her gallant protector, steps forward and says, all business but clearly unnerved, ‘Mr Munro, I must ask you to sit back in your seat!’
Bunny releases Jennifer, and says, quietly, ‘What am I going to do?’ and in saying that, reaches up and, to his surprise, finds his face is wet with real tears. And although he has to arrange himself to disguise the advent of a full-blown hard-on that has tented in his trousers, the question still hangs in the air, just the same. What is he going to do?
He hangs his head and wipes his face and says, ‘I’m so sorry. Please excuse me.’
Jennifer roots around in her handbag and hands Bunny a Kleenex.
‘It may not seem like it now, Mr Munro, but things will get better,’ she says.
‘Do you always carry these?’ asks Bunny, waving the tissue.
Jennifer smiles and says, ‘They are a much-needed tool of the trade, I’m afraid.’
She straightens her skirt and makes to stand.
‘Is there anything else you would like to discuss, Mr Munro?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ says Bunny, and he feels a bead of perspiration collect in the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
Jennifer instinctively looks to Graeme for the official line on this question. Bunny thinks he can feel the heat coming off Graeme’s barbecued face and he turns his head to look at him and glimpses Graeme rolling his eyes.
‘What if you are not sure whether your wife has actually completely died?’ asks Bunny, balling the tissue in his fist and flicking it across the room.
The social workers leave and Bunny takes his place on the sofa and watches the television.
‘Can I come back in now?’ asks Bunny Junior, appearing at the door.
‘Well, yeah,’ says Bunny, opening a beer.
The boy sits down next to his father and starts flip-flopping his feet.
‘What is it with you and your feet?’ says Bunny.
‘Sorry, Dad.’
Bunny points at the television.
‘Have you seen that?’ he says.
‘I didn’t think you liked watching the news,’ says the boy.
On the TV there is more CCTV footage of the devil guy who paints himself red, wears plastic joke-shop horns and attacks women. He has struck again. This time fatally. He has followed a young office worker named Beverly Hamilton into an underground car park and murdered her with a garden fork. He stabbed her hundreds of times. The car park is in Leeds, which, thinks Bunny, is further south. The public are in a state of shock. Later that day the Horned Killer, as the press have tagged him, had paraded in front of CCTV cameras at a nearby mall, panicking the shoppers. Then he disappeared. The police are ‘baffled’.
‘Do you believe this guy?’ says Bunny.
‘No, Dad, I don’t!’ says the boy.
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 Hour.’
‘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!’
‘Full of craperoo!’ says the boy, smiling, and rubbing his eyes.
‘Full of about ten tons of steaming manure!’ says Bunny. ‘I mean, what a song!’
‘Full of a big bucket of faeces!’ says the boy.
Bunny thrusts his hips forward in the seat and jerks back and forth to that joyous techno beat and feels the music reach purposefully down to the base of his spine and then mushroom outwards with a warmth that makes him feel like he has pissed himself or given birth or come in his pants or something.
‘Oh, man,’ says Bunny, and he presses the heel of his hand into his crotch and the day’s images of murderous grandmothers and scornful cripples and poncey vicars and gaggles of sneering fucking bitches evaporate into the ether and he says, ‘It’s a bloody wonder this song is legal!’
Bunny opens the front door. He has removed his jacket and now wears a cornflower blue shirt with a design that looks like polka dots but is actually, on more careful inspection, antique Roman coins that have, if you get right up close, tiny and varied vignettes of copulating couples printed on them. By some miracle Libby missed this item of clothing when she decided to redesign Bunny’s wardrobe with a kitchen knife and a bottle of Indian ink. She did, however, do irrevocable damage to the famous ‘Greek’ shirt that Poodle had given Bunny for his wedding anniversary. Poodle had picked this up on the Internet on a site for modern-day Lotharios, cocksmen and bedroom-hoppers called seducer.com. It had a not-so-discreet pattern involving a Grecian sex god or something – a dude with an olive wreath around his head and an appendage so impressive it had to be supported in a sling by two plump-cheeked cherubim. Bunny found this particular shirt stuffed down the waste-disposal unit and he had sat down on the floor of the kitchen and wept into its shredded remains.
‘Hey, fuck-face,’ said Poodle, entering the flat with a canine grin and a drugged sheen to his eyes.
‘Jesus, Poo. Mind your manners,’ says the leggy blonde hanging on to Poodle’s arm, and kicks him in the shin.
‘Wo! Steady, girl!’ says Poodle, and hops up and down on one stonewashed leg while Bunny notices, with an electrical libidinous stirring, that the purple birthmark on the blonde’s top lip is shaped a bit like a rabbit.
Raymond, jacketless, moves around Poodle with a carton of lager cradled in his arms and an imitation smile on his face. Through a miasma of alcohol fumes that Bunny finds vaguely comforting, Raymond says, blandly, ‘All right, Bun?’
Raymond’s girlfriend, who is almost certainly called Barbara, pops her head up from behind Raymond like an idea-free think-bubble and says, ‘Hi, Bun.’
Bunny says, ‘Hi… um…’ and thinks maybe her name isn’t Barbara after all and Raymond says, in a stage whisper, ‘Barbara’ and Bunny says, ‘OK, yeah, Barbara… sorry, Barbara.’
Whatever Barbara says by way of a reply is lost in the clamorous and stentorian advent of Geoffrey, who bursts through the door, a litre of Scotch poking from each pocket of his vast linen jacket. Wheezing frighteningly from his trip up the stairs, he waves his ever-present handkerchief in the air and bellows, ‘Bunny… Bunny… Bunny’ and follows this with a perfect landslide of sweating flesh and not so much embraces Bunny as digests him.
‘That was a lovely service, Bun,’ says Geoffrey and everyone agrees.
The blonde with the birthmark moves forward and says to Bunny, ‘It really was special.’
Bunny turns to Poodle and says, ‘And Poodle, your friend is…’ but Poodle is nowhere to be seen. Bunny looks down the hall in time to see the surreptitious closing of the bathroom door. Things are looking up, thinks Bunny.
The leggy blonde smiles at Bunny and introduces herself.
‘My name is River,’ she says.
Bunny looks momentarily confused and then is hit by a brief but intense moment of vertigo, where the floor buckles and the walls tilt and Bunny is forced to hold on to Geoffrey’s shoulder for support.
‘You all right, Bun?’ asks Geoffrey, throwing a wing of pillowed flesh across Bunny’s shoulder.
‘Shit, that’s weird, I just met…’ says Bunny, and then he flashes on the dumpy waitress from the Grenville Hotel – her plump, white buttocks, the pounding headboard, her mantra of attenuated moans – and the whole scenario threatens to overwhelm him.
‘I just wish everything would slow down,’ says Bunny, ‘I wish everything would just level out,’ and immediately wonders why he said this.
‘Um,’ says Raymond, embarrassed.
‘Of course you do, Bun,’ says Geoffrey, patting Bunny on the back, sympathetically.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ says River, extending her hand, the tips of her long, thin fingers painted in coral pink varnish. Bunny, who has pulled himself together, takes her hand and feels an electro-magnetic exchange of such force that he jumps back and shakes his hand vigorously and says, ‘Did you feel that?!’ He looks aghast at River, whose head is tilted to the side, her brow furrowed. ‘Did you feel that?’ he says. ‘Oh, baby, I am the Duracell Bunny!’ and he does a fair imitation of the pink, battery-powered, drumming rabbit, up and down the hall.
River looks at Bunny with her large, liquid eyes and unconsciously touches the birthmark on her lip.
Bunny says, blowing on his hand, ‘Next you’re going to tell me you were born near a river!’ and starts laughing and patting at the creases on the front of his trousers. There is general bafflement at this remark and everyone looks at the floor and Bunny hopes Poodle hasn’t vacuumed up all the whiz.
‘And who is this?’ says River.
Bunny Junior has appeared like a little wraith in the hall and stands with his fists jammed up under his armpits. River reaches down and messes his hair and when she has finished the boy tries to rearrange it as it was.
‘That’s Bunny Junior,’ says Bunny. ‘He’s my son.’
The boy points a thumb at his father and, with a narrow smile, says, ‘And he’s my dad.’
Everyone laughs at this, which confounds Bunny Junior because what he says is true. This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride – he’s my dad – and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.
‘Oh, my God, he is so cute,’ says River and messes up his hair again. ‘If you were just a few years older…’
The door to the bathroom bursts open and Poodle barrels out, teeth bared and eyes glittering. He rubs at his nose with the back of his hand and says, ‘Jesus Christ, River, the kid is nine years old.’
River pinches the boy’s cheek and says, ‘I know. I was just saying…’
‘Well, don’t,’ says Poodle. His yellow quiff has somehow taken on an even more lustrous sheen – it actually sparkles, as he swivels around and says, ‘Check this out, River! Think of a country… any country…’
‘What?’ says River.
‘Just think of a bloody country. Jesus…’ says Poodle and winks at Bunny Junior.
‘OK,’ says River, ‘Mongolia.’
‘OK, Bunny Boy, don’t let your Uncle Poodle down. What’s the capital of Mongolia?’
Bunny Junior screws up his face in mock concentration, looks at the ceiling, strokes his chin and scratches his head.
‘Ulaanbaadar,’ says the boy and the guests all applaud.
‘And he’s got brains,’ says River and places her hand on the back of the boy’s neck and he feels an oily and unfamiliar heat pulsing from it.
‘It used to be called Urga,’ says Bunny Junior, quietly.
‘Brains?’ says Poodle. ‘The boy’s a fucking genius!’
River claps her hot hands over Bunny Junior’s ears and says, ‘Wo! Language!’
‘Shall we go in then?’ says Bunny.
As the grown-ups move into the living room, Bunny Junior hears Poodle whisper to River, ‘Christ, it’s fucking dark in here. Where are all the light bulbs?’
He sees River elbow Poodle in the ribs and whisper back, ‘Jesus, Poo, the guy just lost his wife. What do you expect, a fucking disco ball?’
Later that night Bunny Junior lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling and watches the green glow of the planets revolve above his head. He trances on the spectral refractions of light that move across the ceiling and journey down the wall. He runs through the things he knows about Pluto – for example, how it is composed primarily of rock and ice and is relatively small, approximately a fifth the mass of the Earth’s moon and a third its volume – and after he has done that for a while, he brings his wristwatch up to his ear and listens to the ticking, loud and unstoppable, of time passing. It occurs to him that with each tick of the clock the memory of his mother fades, and she slips away. He feels, with a rush of iced wind across his heart, that even by just lying there he is losing her, little by little. He closes his eyes and attempts with reasonable success to ransack his memory and conjure up images of her. He hopes by doing this that he will prevent her from melting away completely. He wants, deep down, to remember her back into existence.
He remembers her picking him up from school in her pink velour tracksuit, the prettiest of the mums, he remembers her attending, with much sympathetic cooing, to a bloody nose, and further back he thinks he can remember her applauding him when he rode his bike no-hands. He recalls receiving his encyclopaedia for no other reason than ‘she loved him to bits’, and further back he has a distant, colour-bleached memory of crawling across the kitchen floor and attaching himself to her long, smooth leg and feeling a surprising strength as she dragged him around the kitchen floor. He pictures himself – is this a memory? – lying newly born and swaddled in a blanket with his mother’s cool hand on his forehead and the dark proximity of what must have been his father.
In time, the boy feels his mother return to him, and becomes aware of her presence in the room with him. He feels a general stirring of the air and he notices that the glow-in-the-dark planets are spinning with a renewed energy and the fairy refractions of light move down the walls with the speed of ghostly, green rain.
‘Can’t a guy get some sleep around here?’ says Bunny Junior, out loud.
Then he hears a raucous burst of laughter coming from the living room, so he says it again, leaving three second gaps between the words.
‘Can’t… a… guy… get… some… sleep… around… here?’
Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers.
Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey’s Scotch and Poodle’s cocaine. His mood has soured and he is not sure why. He has been trying to imagine Poodle’s River’s pussy but is having great difficulty doing so. River sits opposite him and every time she laughs at Poodle – who is wearing a plastic Viking helmet on his head that most likely belongs to Bunny Junior – the knee of her left leg swings open like old Farmer John’s broken gate and Bunny can see the bright flag of her canary yellow panties. This would usually be enough to send Bunny into a near religious state of rapture but his ever-faithful one-track mind keeps taking unsolicited detours down the dread length of memory lane. This means that even though he is gazing heavy-lidded and slack-jawed between River’s tanned, toned legs and clocking the embossed stereotype of her pussy displayed on the crotch of her panties, his mind takes him to, say, the time he sat with his new and heavily pregnant wife, Libby, on the pebbled beach at Hove. Under a full and yellow moon, and leaning against a concrete groyne, she lifts up her blouse and exposes the taut, neat bump of her condition and the heel of the unborn child sliding eerily across its purple-veined and pearly surface.
‘Jesus, Bun, are you ready for this?’ asked Libby.
Bunny pinched the foetal heel between thumb and forefinger and said, ‘You’re talking to Bunny Munro, babe, you haven’t seen me when I get going!’
Maybe it is because of the Libby-centric nature of the day but this memory leaves Bunny feeling sad and deflated.
He becomes conscious of the fact that Barbara, who is well into her second bottle of Spumante, is saying something to Raymond, who is completely shit-faced and quite possibly asleep.
‘A boy needs his father. Jesus Christ, Raymond, it’s more than some kids have got,’ she says, slurring her words.
Raymond, with mouth open and eyes closed, unexpectedly raises an index finger as if to make some crucial point and rotates it enigmatically and then possibly obscenely and continues to rotate it as Barbara diverts her attention to Bunny and says, ‘At least he’s got you, Bunny.’
River nods in agreement, licks the purple birthmark on her upper lip, looks directly at Bunny and lets her gate swing wide.
‘You poor man,’ she says.
Bunny feels his eyes tear up and hears himself say, in a dreamy, disconnected way, ‘My dad raised me pretty much on his own. Taught me everything I know.’
Poodle starts to stand, a near-empty bottle of Scotch in his hand, and then freezes in a comic semi-crouch as he forgets why he has stood up. He looks about him suspiciously, then flops back onto the sofa beside Bunny.
‘Yeah, and look how you turned out,’ he says, and exposes his needle-like teeth in a sub-human grin.
Bunny, in slow motion, registers this remark and says with a sudden influx of meaning, ‘Say another thing about my dad, Poodle, and I’ll fucking slap you.’
Poodle’s head has fallen over the arm of the sofa, the Viking helmet cleaving miraculously to his yellow hairdo, and does not hear this. His eyes have rolled back into their orbits and his lids flutter weirdly.
‘Bum coke,’ he mutters.
River says, ‘You poor man’ again, and does the thing with her left knee and Bunny resumes his gaze and again his mind takes him elsewhere.
He remembers Libby lying in bed in the maternity ward of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, the newborn infant in her arms. He remembers her looking down at the child and holding the bundle to her breast with a love that involved the whole of her heart. She looked up at Bunny with a question in her eyes. Bunny registered a single, cold bead of perspiration journey down the side of his face and soak into his collar. He knew, at that moment, that everything had changed. Nothing would be the same again. He couldn’t think of anything to say to his wife except maybe goodbye as he stared down at the tiny being in her arms. There was just too much love. He felt that the infant had secretly flipped the switch on an ejector seat that had flung him, unmanned, into the outer limits of his marriage. He didn’t say goodbye, of course, but rather, ‘God, babe, I need a cigarette,’ and approximated a smile and slipped out of the hospital into the rain-filled street.
Bunny responds to this memory by rearing forward, slapping the table and shaking his head to release the thought.
‘I got one!’ he says, with a sudden, unaccountable enthusiasm.
Raymond’s eyes pop open and he produces an insipid smile and Barbara giggles and River cleavages forward. Geoffrey, who is sitting alone and wedged into Bunny’s armchair, like he has been there all his life, rubs his hands together (he loves a joke) and says, ‘OK, here we go!’ His little round eyes glisten in anticipation.
Bunny says, ‘Excuse me, ladies, if this may be a little…’
‘Offensive,’ says Geoffrey, with a low chuckle.
‘Yeah… offensive,’ says Bunny and snaps open his Zippo and torches a cigarette.
‘Well…’ he says and Bunny tells a joke about a guy who decides to have a ‘mood’ party. He gets everything ready, the decorations, the nibbles, the booze, makes everything real nice, and there is a knock on the door and the first guy arrives and he’s all dressed in green and the host says, ‘What are you?’ and the guy in green says, ‘I’m jealousy.’ Then there is another knock on the door and the next guy arrives and he is dressed in pink. The guy in pink sticks one hand on his hip, minces in, saying, ‘I’m pretty in pink.’ A few minutes later there is a loud knock on the door and our host opens it and sees two huge black guys standing there, buck-naked, and one of them has his dick in a bowl of custard and the other one has his dick shoved in a stewed pear. The guy having the party says, ‘What have you two come as?’ and the first black guy says, ‘Ah’m fucking dis custard!’ and then the other black guy says, ‘An ah cum in dis pear!’
The room erupts into laughter, Barbara and Raymond almost clutching each other in glee, Geoffrey chuckling into his handkerchief and looking at Bunny with what amounts to a kind of paternal pride, and River’s leg is banging back and forth so hard and fast that it appears like she is trying to send out some sort of super-urgent semaphore signal with the crotch of her canary-coloured panties. Even Poodle manages what may be interpreted as a thumbs-up sign. Bunny has come back to us!
‘That’s my dad!’ says a small voice and the laughter dies out.
Bunny Junior stands in the doorway in his pyjamas and his oversized slippers, tiny blue shadows under his red-rimmed eyes.
‘All right, Bunny Boy, back to bed,’ says his father.
‘That was a funny one, Dad!’ says Bunny Junior, hopping up and down.
River, whose hair has become unpinned and hangs over one eye, flattens her skirt and stands unsteadily, and in doing so knocks the coffee table, sending cans and bottles flying.
‘Oops. Sorry,’ says River and Bunny sees the outline of her long, taut thigh and a blur of tanned flesh between the top of her skirt and her blouse. She turns and bends over and reveals to Bunny the golden arches of her exposed thong, rising from between her buttocks like the McDonald’s logo.
‘She knocked the cans off the table, Dad!’ says the boy, in a big, loud voice, pointing at River.
Bunny tries to stand but cannot and falls back into the sofa.
‘And Poodle’s got my Viking helmet on!’
River weaves across the living room and Bunny feels the last kinetic twinge of cocaine behind his right eye. His guts feel tight and overdriven and he sees with a palpable sense of horror the possibility of daylight through the window.
‘Oh, you poor little darling. Come on, sweetheart, let’s get you back to bed,’ says River and takes the boy by the hand.
‘Dad?’ says Bunny Junior as River leads him away. ‘Dad?’ he says.
Poodle, whose head still hangs over the edge of the sofa, opens one eye in time to witness their upside-down departure.
‘Good kid,’ he says, as the Viking helmet tumbles from his head. ‘And a real nice arse.’
‘In you go,’ says River, and the boy crawls into bed. He lies there in the dark, rigid and covered with a sheet. River smells smoky and sickly sweet and forbidden and not a bit like his mother. He sees the outline of her giant-sized breasts rising above him and is aware of the proximity of her bottom to his hand. He is afraid to move it. He experiences an acute physical stirring and, as a consequence, feels a flush of shamed blood to his face and he squeezes shut his eyes in anguish.
‘That’s right, sweetheart, close your eyes,’ she says and the boy feels her hot, damp hand on his forehead and he wants to cry so much that he secretly bites into his lower lip.
‘Everything will be all right,’ says River, her voice slurred and booze-modulated. ‘Try to think of nice things – only nice things. Don’t worry about your mummy. She will be fine now. She is in heaven with the angels. Everybody is happy there and they smile all the time because they don’t have to worry any more. They just float around and play and have fun and be happy.’
Bunny Junior feels a suffocating heat emanating from River’s body and thinks he can hear her bones rolling inside her flesh. He feels sick with it.
‘First she will meet Saint Peter, and Saint Peter is a beautiful, wise old man, with a big white beard, and he is the keeper of the gates of heaven, and when he sees your mummy coming he will take out his big golden key and open up the door for her…’
Bunny Junior feels the bed fall away and a sudden darkness close on him and he thinks he hears his mother appear at the door and say, ‘Who is this person sitting next to you on the bed?’
Bunny Junior will shrug his shoulders and say, ‘I don’t know, Mum.’
And his mother will say, ‘Well, maybe we should tell her to just go away?’
And he will say, ‘Yeah, maybe we should just do that, Mum.’
Bunny Junior smiles and tastes the salt of his blood and, in time, sleeps.
River enters the kitchen and finds Bunny standing in the middle of the floor, wavering from side to side with a box of Coco Pops in his hand. His shirt hangs open and he is looking out the window in terror at the granulated light of morning. Somewhere, in one of the adjoining flats, a dog yaps and above him there is the unsettling sound of someone dragging furniture around.
‘He’s asleep now. He’s such a sweet kid. He sure loves his dad, that boy.’
Bunny turns towards her, and then looks bewildered at the cereal box in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. He puts it on the counter.
‘Where are the others?’ asks Bunny, his voice sounding far away, like it is coming from the room where the yapping dog is.
River looks at the magnetic alphabet on the door of the fridge and says, ‘They’ve all gone. They said to say goodbye.’
‘How’s Poodle?’
‘They had to carry him out.’
‘That’s our Poo,’ says Bunny, weakly.
‘Did you write this?’ says River, pointing at the obscene message in coloured letters on the fridge.
‘I think maybe my wife did,’ says Bunny.
River turns her back to Bunny and he spies a blue varicose vein, like a reptile’s tongue, behind her knee. River takes a yellow plastic ‘M’ and makes a small amendment to the phrase so that it says ‘FUCK MY PUSSY’, then turns back to Bunny, her hair hanging over one eye, her large, round breasts rising and falling. Bunny leans forward and inspects the letters on the fridge, moving back and forth in an unsuccessful attempt to bring the letters into focus. The phrase warps and blurs before his eyes and it looks to Bunny like some abecedary from Arabia or Mars or somewhere and he says, ‘What?’
Then he stands up straight and throws his arms out to the side and the air in the kitchen kaleidoscopes and fragments and Bunny opens his mouth like a fish and says, ‘What?’ again, only this time rhetorically.
River puts her arms out in front of her, zombie-style, and glides towards Bunny, as if she is on a travelator with no apparent evidence of any ambulatory action whatsoever. She says, with a great swell of feeling, ‘Oh, you poor man.’ And before Bunny can say ‘What?’ a third time, she throws her long, athletic arms around his neck and pulls him to her and he cries genuine tears into her great, heaving, augmented breasts.
Bunny lies on his back on the sofa. He is naked and his clothes sit in sad, little heaps on the living room floor. River, also naked, straddles him and with enormous verve moves piston-like over his unresponsive body. Bunny’s considerable member retains a certain curiosity – it must be said – but the rest of him feels wholly disembodied, as if it attaches no intrinsic value to the matter at hand. He feels like the flenched blubber a butcher may trim from a choice fillet of prime English beef and, as the song says, he has never felt this way before. This is completely new territory for him. He can see that the hard globes of River’s breasts are perfect and better than the real thing and he attempts to lift his arm in order to pinch her nipples, which are the size and texture of liquorice Jelly Spogs, or stick his finger in her arsehole or something, but realises with a certain amount of satisfaction that he can’t be fucked and he lets his arm drop to the side.
River squeezes Bunny’s cock with her muscular vagina.
‘Wow,’ says Bunny, from the depths of space.
‘Pilates,’ says River.
‘Huh?’ grunts Bunny.
‘Cunt crunches,’ says River, and contracts her pelvic floor again.
The remote is lodged under Bunny’s left buttock and as he shifts his weight the television turns on. Bunny’s head lolls off the edge of the sofa and he sees (upside-down) CCTV footage of the Horned Killer with his trident terrorising shoppers in a Tesco car park in Birmingham. The bad-news ribbon that runs along the bottom of the screen informs Bunny that the guy has struck again. Earlier that day he had walked into a shared accommodation in Bordesley Green and butchered two young nurses asleep in their beds, with a garden fork. There is general panic in the Midlands. The police continue to be baffled.
‘He’s just getting started,’ mutters Bunny, the flicker of the TV reflecting in his upside-down eyes. ‘And he’s coming this way.’
River, however, is lost to her gesture of altruism and does not hear. Bunny lifts his head and looks at her and sees that River’s visage has changed somehow – there is a pout of hubris and self-admiration as she picks up the rhythm of what she would consider to be, come morning’s sober light, basically a sympathy fuck.
‘Oh,’ she says, as she pounds her bullet-proof pussy down.
‘You,’ she says, her pistons firing,
‘Poor,’ (down)
‘Poor,’ (yum)
‘Man.’
Bunny is about to close his eyes when he sees, by the window, hidden in the folds of the rose-coloured chenille curtains, what appears to be his deceased wife, Libby. She is dressed in her orange nightdress and she is waving at him. Spooked, Bunny makes a hopeless, wounded sound and opens his mouth and releases a hiss of gas as if his very soul was escaping and then bucks frantically at River in an attempt to dislodge her, which is just what River needs to send her over the edge. Bunny, trapped in the vice of her climaxing haunches, squeezes shut his eyes. River screams and digs her nails into his chest. Bunny opens his eyes again, looks wildly around, but Libby has gone.
‘My wife was there,’ he says to River or somebody. ‘She was watching.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ says River, disimpaling herself. ‘You might want to see somebody about that. I know a guy in Kemp Town you could talk to.’
Bunny jabs his finger at the news bulletin on the TV. ‘And he is coming down!’
‘Uh huh? Look, I’ve got to go,’ says River and raises the perfect orbs of her rear end, slick with her various juices, into the early morning air and looks under the sofa for her canary yellow panties.
River leaves soon after, closing the front door behind her as Bunny feigns sleep on the sofa. But his mind is alert to all manner of things. He thinks, for instance, that he should get up and put on a pair of trousers or something before his son wakes up. He wonders also what his wife wants from him and hopes that he will not be the subject of any further hauntings and supernatural visitations. He wonders, with a shudder, if the disconnectedness he felt while screwing River is a permanent condition and he considers the idea that perhaps he is all washed-up as a world-class cocksman. Maybe Libby’s suicide has jinxed him. Cursed him, maybe. It is certainly possible. Stories abound about people being put off their game by seemingly innocuous and unconnected events. Poodle told Bunny only recently about a local pussy-hound from Portslade who went from stud to dud after attending a Celine Dion concert. He just couldn’t get it up any more. He told Poodle it was like trying to stuff a dead canary in a cash dispenser. In the end he hung up his tackle and became a landscape gardener in Walberswick. Chilling stuff. Whatever. Bunny knows that there are things going on in this world – great mysteries – that he will never be able to work out. He wonders, also, with a gnawing, abdominal anxiety, whether he will ever get it together enough to go and visit his ailing father. And then he starts thinking, in an abstract kind of way, about his son, Bunny Junior, and what the fuck he is going to do with him. What do you do with a kid who can barely locate his own backside? But most of all he wonders how he is going to spend another night in this spooked-out, three-roomed council flat, with its crummy vibe and its deeply fucked-up juju. Bunny realises, lying there on the sofa, that he can’t fucking handle it.
But even though these questions whirl around Bunny’s mind like rooftops and tractors and farm animals in a tornado or twister or something, another part of Bunny’s mind – the plotter, the designer, the maker-of-plans, works quietly away, sifting through the data to find a way forward.
And in time it comes to him, not in a blinding flash, but rather in a shift of the gears of the heart, or perhaps a release of dread from his body, or a stabilising of his internal chemistry. He feels, in that instant, that he knows what he has to do, and with that knowledge comes an enormous sense of relief. The answer, as is so often the way, has been staring him in the face all along.
Bunny smiles, then drapes River’s canary yellow panties over his face and sucks on the crotch and happily jerks off, then falls into a deep and uncluttered sleep, thinking – Easy, no problem, vagina, vagina.