Bunny Junior lies on the floor of his bedroom reading his encyclopaedia. The carpet is thin and his knees and elbows and hip-bones hurt from lying in the same position for so long and he keeps thinking he should get up off the floor and lie on his bed but he knows that the discomfort he feels keeps him awake and alert and his memory keen. He is in the process of storing information. He is well into the letter ‘M’ and is reading about Merlin, who was a wizard or sage in the Arthurian legends, whose magic was used to help King Arthur. His mother bought the encyclopaedia for him, just because ‘she loved him to bits’, the boy likes to remember. Bunny Junior thinks it is an elegant-looking book with a jacket the exact colour of one of those citronella-impregnated mosquito candles. Merlin was the son of an incubus and a mortal woman, and the boy looks up ‘incubus’ and finds that an incubus is a malevolent spirit who has intercourse with women in their sleep, then he looks up ‘intercourse’ and thinks – Wow, imagine that – as he gradually intuits the presence of his father standing in the doorway of his room.
His father has showered and shaved and his ornamental curl that sits in the middle of his forehead has been artfully arranged into something musical, like a treble clef or a fiddlehead, and even though his eyes are a shocking scarlet colour and his hands tremble so much that he has had to keep them in his pockets, he looks, on the face of it, dynamic and handsome. He is wearing a navy blue suit and a shirt that is covered in little maroon diamonds and he is wearing his favourite tie – the one with the cartoon rabbits on it. He is staring down at Bunny Junior and smiling. Bunny Junior thinks – Well, what’s going on? He thinks – Boy, something good must be coming down!
‘Hi, Dad!’ says the boy.
‘You got a suitcase?’ says Bunny.
‘I don’t know, Dad.’
‘Well, find one!’ says Bunny, flinging his arms out to the sides in mock-exasperation. ‘Jesus! Haven’t I taught you anything?’
‘What for, Dad?’
‘What do you mean, “What for?”’
‘What do I need a suitcase for?’ says the boy, thinking – He’s sending me away – and he feels the wind rush out of him.
‘Well, what do you think you need a bloody suitcase for?’ says Bunny.
‘Am I going somewhere?’ says the boy, jumping from foot to foot and wiping at his forehead with the back of his hand.
‘Not I,’ says Bunny, ‘We…’
‘We?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where are we going, Dad?’
Bunny Junior is dressed in a pair of shorts and flip-flops. He wears a faded T-shirt that has a picture of an orange crazy-paved mutant called The Thing printed on it. The T-shirt is a couple of sizes too small for Bunny Junior and is covered in holes, but the boy wears it for reasons of nostalgia that only he can understand.
‘We are hitting the road!’ says Bunny, cocking a thumb and jerking it over his shoulder in the general direction of the outside world.
‘Really?’ says the boy, smiling so much that his teeth show.
‘Really,’ says Bunny. ‘But you can’t go looking like a bloody hobo. It’s the first rule of salesmanship. Be presentable.’
‘Just you and me, Dad?’ says the boy, peeling off the T-shirt, balling it up and pitching it across the room.
‘Just you and me, Bunny Boy.’
Outside the morning sun is resplendent, the sky is blue, and white clouds scud optimistically overhead. A breeze, with the faintest of Arctic memories riding on it, blows from the northeast. Bunny and Bunny Junior launch themselves down the stairwell and haul their suitcases across the terrace of the estate. Bunny feels, just by stepping out of the flat, a renewed optimism and strength. He smiles. He whistles.
Bunny sees Cynthia sitting like an omen on the swing in the tiny children’s play area. She wears white-cuffed sailor’s shorts, a white vest and her frosted-white toenails glow opal-like against the black, rubberised tarmac.
‘Where are you going?’ she says and smiles at Bunny and her orthodontic braces flash in the sun.
‘We’re so outta here,’ says Bunny Junior, who has found himself a pair of shades. He cocks his thumb at the Punto sitting in the car park. ‘Like, gone,’ he says.
Bunny, who has tranced out on the bunched intersection of Cynthia’s shorts, says, ‘Yeah, we’re out of here.’
‘Shame,’ says Cynthia and leans forward to reveal a pure white thong rising from the sweet arcuation of her creamy buttocks.
‘Fuck me,’ says Bunny, under his breath. He looks up to the third floor and sees the yellow front door of his flat like a hex or a curse or something. He feels a cold whirl in his intestines. ‘Yeah, Cynthia, we are definitely out of here.’
‘Hitting the road,’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Shame,’ says Cynthia, unnecessarily, and snaps her gum. She lifts her legs and leans back on the swing, setting it in motion.
‘Come on, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior and together they walk across to the car park. Bunny thinks – That wasn’t so hard – as he pops the boot on the Punto and they throw in their bags. They climb into the car and Bunny inserts the ignition key and the engine coughs and strains and in time turns.
Bunny Junior puts his head out the window and makes an unsolicited observation. ‘The sky looks like a giant swimming pool, Dad,’ he says.
‘Oh, yeah?’ says Bunny, decommissioning Cynthia’s shorts and imagining the hello and goodbye of her oscillating, playground pussy.
‘Olympic-sized,’ says the boy.
Bunny drives out of the estate and a boy with dirty yellow hair sticking out from under a bright red baseball cap and various chrome labrets inserted into his sensory organs appears out of nowhere, riding a skateboard. He wears a green T-shirt that says ‘Lick My Kunst’ and cuts recklessly in front of the Punto. Bunny hits the horn and the boy responds with a sharp upward movement of the middle finger. Bunny rolls down the window and yells, ‘Sk8ter boi,’ and immediately thinks of Avril Lavigne and then Avril Lavigne’s vagina. He recalls Poodle saying that he had seen on the Internet that Avril Lavigne was ‘a real crazy chick’. She must be, with that zany black eyeliner, thinks Bunny.
He hits the traffic on the roundabout and blasts his horn again, this time at a maroon ‘DUDMAN’ concrete mixer truck that bears down heavily on the Punto. It roars past, a tattooed arm hanging from the driver’s window, its middle finger extended.
‘Man,’ says Bunny, ‘everyone’s gone crazy!’ and he pulls into a petrol station and fills the Punto. Then he heads for the offices of Eternity Enterprises that operates out of a cramped room on Western Road, above a video store that doubles as a cut-rate off-licence. Bunny pulls into a disabled parking bay and kills the motor.
‘Wait here, Bunny Boy, I’ll be back in a minute,’ he says and he hauls himself out of the car. Bunny thinks his dad looks like a real go-getter, with his sample case and his suit.
‘OK, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior and he adjust his sunglasses. ‘I’ll wait here.’
Bunny makes to cross the road, then turns back and sticks his head through the driver’s seat window.
‘If a traffic warden comes by, pretend you’re a spastic or something.’
‘OK, Dad.’
The boy watches his father cross the road and thinks there is something about the way his dad moves through the world that is truly impressive. Cars screech to a halt, drivers shake their fists and stick their heads out the windows and curse and blow their horns and Bunny walks on as if radiating some super-human force field, like he has walked off the pages of a comic book. The world can’t touch him. He seems to be the grand generator of some hyper-powerful electricity.
‘It’s clobbering time!’ says Bunny Junior, completely to himself.
Bunny crosses the road and sees a young mother or an au pair or something looking trance-like at a poster for the movie Seabiscuit in the video shop window. In a buggy a little girl, her face smeared in something chemical-green, holds a Barbie doll or a Bratz doll or something and writhes in her safety harness.
‘Excellent,’ says Bunny.
The woman has a sprinkling of freckles on the back of her neck and a prominent ridge of cartilage along the top of her nose. She wears a logo-free T-shirt and black Havaianas and her toenails are painted the colour of plums. She turns and looks at Bunny, dark smudges under her eyes.
‘Eh?’ she says.
Bunny nods at the poster.
‘The film,’ he says.
‘Yeah?’ says the woman.
Then Bunny looks at the child, squirming in her loculus of havoc, the Bratz doll clutched in her podgy little fist.
‘These children are having their childhoods stolen from them,’ he says. He leans down and touches the little girl on the top of her head with his fingers and smiles at the woman. ‘Poor things.’
The woman bends over the buggy and moves away and Bunny clocks her hunched and hurried retreat.
‘Definitely a mummy,’ he says to himself.
He presses the intercom of ‘Eternity Enterprises’.
‘Who is it?’ says a distorted, robot voice through the intercom and Bunny looks up at the video cam mounted above the doorway and flips it the finger. The monitor squawks and Bunny enters. He bounds up the stairs two at a time and continues down a dank, low-ceilinged hall until he comes to a door that says, in a Gothic demi-bold font, ‘ETERNITY ENTERPRISES’. Without knocking, he opens it and enters.
Geoffrey sits in his swivel chair like some infernal cyber-experiment gone horribly wrong – the unholy welding of too much man with too little machine. He is a circus elephant on roller-skates or a semi-deflated Michelin Man in a Hawaiian shirt. He looks up at Bunny with his implausibly wise, button-like eyes and says, ‘What’s green and smells like bacon?’
Bunny rolls his eyes at Geoffrey, faux-bored.
‘Kermit’s finger,’ says Geoffrey.
There is a painful screech of tortured springs as Geoffrey leans back in his chair. Then, with an air of satisfaction, he steeples his fingers over his riotous girth and smiles.
‘I’ve heard it,’ says Bunny.
‘Yeah, but it’s a stone classic.’
‘If you say so, Geoffrey.’
‘Always worth reviving, I say, lest we forget,’ says Geoffrey.
Geoffrey seems supremely at home in this environment, as if everything he needs is here in this pinched and cut-rate room – and indeed it is – his fridge full of lager, his Swedish porn collection, his telephone and his little swivel chair; but the office is hot and airless and Bunny feels, almost immediately, a rivulet of perspiration wind its way between his shoulder blades. With a watery redistribution of weight, Geoffrey leans his garish bulk forward and all the little grass-skirted hula dancers slip and slide. His face is laddered by the sunlight that pours through the half-open Venetian blinds and he is forced to squint and his bright, little eyes sink into his face.
‘I’ve got a question for you, Bun,’ he says. ‘What are you doing here?’
Bunny hooks one finger into his collar and says, ‘I’m ready to go.’
Geoffrey gestures to the single wooden chair in the corner and says, ‘Take a seat, bwana, you’re making me nervous.’
Bunny drags the chair to the desk and sits down and is about to say something but Geoffrey raises one massive paw in the air.
‘Are you sure, my man? There is no pressure here. Shouldn’t you take a little time just to, you know, sort some things out?’
‘I’m all right, Geoffrey. Just give me the list and some samples. I’m all out of samples.’
‘When I lost my Hilda, Bun, you know, it took a while.’
Bunny feels a wobble in the room’s atmospherics and a vague acceleration of his blood. This is pissing him off. He slaps his palm down on the desktop.
‘What am I gonna do? Sit around the house all day, tugging at my dick? Now, Geoffrey, give me the fucking list.’
Bunny entertains the idea of asking his boss if he was ever visited by his wife after she died, but thinks better of it. That is all behind him now.
‘OK, Bunny, you’re the boss,’ says Geoffrey, handing Bunny a list of names and addresses that he folds in two and slips into the inside pocket of his jacket. Bunny realises he has been sweating so heavily that drops of perspiration have soaked into the fabric of his tie.
‘No, Geoffrey, you’re the boss. I just happen to be the only guy in this two-bit operation that has the faintest fucking idea how to sell anything.’
The door flies open and Poodle enters with his leering grin, his stonewashed jeans and his yellow, architectural ’do. His booze-blown eyes are a terrifying Virgin red.
‘I rest my case,’ says Bunny, standing.
‘Christ!’ says Poodle, ‘What happened last night?’
‘I think you may have been a little excessive in your libations,’ says Geoffrey. ‘You brought shame upon the house of Eternity Enterprises.’
Then Geoffrey looks at Bunny and says, ‘What do you want?’
‘The lot. Hand shit. Face shit. Body shit. Hair shit.’
Geoffrey reaches down under the desk and produces a collection of various sachets, tubes and miniature bottles of lotions and creams, and Bunny sweeps them into his sample case.
Then Bunny turns to Poodle, who is looking sideways at Bunny, his eyes glinting, his needle-like teeth bared in a peerless impression of a happy velociraptor. He moves the flat of his hand slowly across the considerable bulge in his stonewashed jeans and raises an eyebrow.
‘I fucked your lady friend last night,’ said Bunny.
‘I know. She told me. She said it was a little… sad,’ says Poodle.
‘Oh, yeah? Can you ask her for my dick back?’
Poodle emits a low chuckle and with the tips of his manicured fingers tugs at the gold sleeper in his ear.
‘I know. Incredible, eh? She’s a yoga-nut. She’s training to become an instructor.’ Poodle rubs his hands together then performs a Jackoesque swivel of his hips. ‘Fun and games!’ He squeezes his genitals. ‘Coming down to The Wick for a drinky-poo?’
‘No,’ says Bunny, ‘I’ve got my kid in the car.’
Poodle moves to the window in a lewd creep. He wears tight jeans and a clean, white Polo shirt that accentuate his broad shoulders and small, compact buttocks but give him the proportions of a hyena. He peers through the slatted blinds, the sunlight jazzing the pale irises of his eyes.
‘Fuck, Bun, some cunt’s giving you a ticket!’
‘Shit,’ says Bunny, and he snaps shut his sample case.
‘Hey, Bun,’ says Poodle, squinting in the light as though he can’t believe what he sees.
Bunny, who is halfway out the door, turns.
‘Your kid looks like he is having some kind of fit!’
Bunny slams the door and Geoffrey moves his great weight to the fridge and tosses Poodle a beer.
‘I’m worried about that guy,’ he says.
Bunny grabs the parking ticket that is taped to the windscreen of the Punto and for the benefit of the traffic warden, who is walking down the street, tapping away at his electronic ticket dispenser, his hat angled ironically on his head, Bunny performs an impressive porno-panto of a man fucking a traffic warden up the arse. The traffic warden watches Bunny expression-free for a moment, which inspires Bunny to do his famous impersonation of a traffic warden sucking his own dick. Then he watches the traffic warden curse under his breath and start marching down the street towards the Punto, whereupon Bunny performs a basic risk-assessment exercise – he is big and he is black – and climbs in the Punto and starts the car. The traffic warden stops, shakes his head and walks away.
‘The nerve of that guy,’ says Bunny, looking over his shoulder. ‘And with a retard in the car and everything!’
‘He was a bit of a bastard, wasn’t he, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
Bunny looks at his son and smiles.
‘You said it, Bunny Boy.’
There is a loud and sudden knock on the roof of the Punto and Bunny jumps and looks everywhere at once. Poodle’s face appears in the window and he mimics rolling it down.
‘It’s Poodle,’ says the boy.
‘I can see that,’ says Bunny and winds down the window.
Poodle slips two fingers into the breast pocket of his Polo shirt and extracts a small piece of notepaper and hands it to Bunny.
‘My gift to you. She lives in Newhaven,’ he says out of the corner of his mouth, running a buffed fingernail along his cheekbone. He licks his lips and says, ‘Ouch!’
Bunny rolls his eyes towards the boy and then back to Poodle, who is unconsciously dabbing at the raw and flaky entrance to his right nostril with his finger.
‘Oh, yeah,’ says Poodle. He crouches down and says to the boy, ‘Hey, Bunny Boy. Nice shades.’
‘Hi,’ says the boy.
‘No school today?’ says Poodle, clamping a Mayfair Ultra Light between his teeth and torching it.
The boy shakes his head.
‘Lucky you,’ says Poodle.
Then he looks at Bunny, and his face elongates into something sleek and lupine, and the transformation is so convincing that Bunny can almost hear the bones snap in his face.
‘You’ll find her a most accommodating customer,’ says Poodle in a stage whisper, and then leans through the window. Bunny can feel his breath, hot and excited, against his ear. ‘It will help with the grieving process,’ he says.
Bunny stares blankly at Poodle, the nerve under his right eye contracting. Poodle stiffens and tiny beads of sweat appear on his upper lip. He tries to smile but cannot, overrun by a kind of rigor.
‘Sorry, Bun, that was out of line.’
Bunny reaches up and pinches Poodle’s shaved and polished cheek and says quietly, ‘You’re a cunt, Poodle. Did you know that?’
Poodle grins sheepishly and draws on his fag, his hand betraying the faintest of tremors, ‘Ah… yes, actually I do.’
Bunny pats Poodle’s cheek gently, almost strokes it.
‘But I love you,’ he says.
‘And I love you,’ says Poodle.
‘Now, fuck off,’ says Bunny and rolls up the window.
Bunny screws up the piece of paper that Poodle has given him and tosses it on the floor at Bunny Junior’s feet. Poodle stands on the pavement, hand raised in a sardonic goodbye, and then fucks the air lewdly, the shape of his penis curled and visible against the inside leg of his jeans. Bunny guns the engine and veers blindly into the traffic on Western Road.
‘He’s a funny one, isn’t he, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Poodle, my boy, is a bloody idiot,’ says Bunny.
‘What are we going to do now, Dad?’
But Bunny barely registers his son’s question because suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, Bunny is experiencing something beyond the realms of anything he has experienced before. The simple act of crumpling up Poodle’s ‘gift’ and casting it aside has filled Bunny with a belief that he is in command of his life. He is also registering, in an unprecedented way, a feeling of virtuousness. He feels a momentary wave of euphoria course through his system, a cup of love in his bowels, and he turns left at Adelaide Crescent and heads down towards the sea.
‘I am in control of my appetites,’ says Bunny, quietly, to himself.
‘Me, too, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior.
They pass the majestic downward sweep of Regency terraces along Adelaide Crescent and watch in silence as a father tosses a Frisbee to his young son in the public gardens, while the mother lays down a tartan rug, then bends over a wicker picnic basket. Ouch – thinks Bunny.
‘What are we going to do now, Dad?’ says the boy.
‘Now, we are going to shake the old money tree, that’s what we’re going to do,’ says Bunny.
Bunny Junior takes off his shades and screws up his face.
‘What?’ he says.
‘We are going to relieve a few boobs of their cabbage.’
The boy smiles at Bunny, but the smile is the kind of smile that looks like it has fallen off the child’s face, shattered on the ground and then been glued back together at random – it’s a zigzag smile, a seesaw smile, a wonky little broken smile. Bunny registers this but also the look of unknowing on the child’s face, the total lack of comprehension, the giant cartoon question mark floating over his head, and thinks – This kid doesn’t understand a fucking thing. And what’s with that smile?
‘We’re gonna sell some stuff!’ says Bunny, exasperated.
‘You’re good at that, aren’t you, Dad?’ says the boy, shifting in his seat and spinning his sunglasses around like a propeller.
Bunny leans in close to him and says, with a flush of awe and wonder, ‘Bunny Boy, I am the best!’
Bunny hears the boy say, ‘Everybody thinks you’re the best, don’t they, Dad?!’ but they are passing a bus shelter, advertising Kylie Minogue’s brand new range of lingerie for Selfridges called ‘Love Kylie’, and Bunny tries to remember what Poodle told him he had seen on the Internet about Kylie but draws a blank. Instead he feels a rush of blood, viral and urgent, throb in his extremities, his fingers pulsing on the steering wheel. He looks at the boy.
‘I could sell a bicycle to a barracuda!’ says Bunny, and the boy laughs.
‘No… no… I could sell two bicycles to a barracuda!’
The boy looks up at his father and, seeing the ease with which he moves in and out of the traffic, one hand on the wheel, his elbow out the window and his brilliant sense of humour and how he can make everybody like him, even complete strangers, his world-class smile, his wraparound shades, his tie with the cartoon rabbits on it, his amazing curl, his fags and the whole thing with his sample case, he shouts, ‘You’re fantastic, Dad!’
Bunny throws back his head and shouts back, ‘Shit, Bunny Boy, I could sell the whole bloody bike shed!’ and laughs and then remembers what it was that Poodle had said about Kylie Minogue – how he had read a blog somewhere saying that Kylie went off like a fucking firecracker in the sack and that there was, like, nothing she wouldn’t do! She was insatiable!
Bunny glances at the crumpled piece of paper that rolls around Bunny Junior’s feet and bares his teeth and wrenches his eyes away and makes an emphatic change of gear and presses on, and says, ‘You’ve got a lot to learn.’
‘I know, Dad,’ says the boy.
‘It’s like this, Bunny Boy, if you walk up to an oak tree or a bloody elm or something – you know, one of those big bastards – one with a thick, heavy trunk with giant roots that grow deep in the soil and great branches that are covered in leaves, right, and you walk up to it and give the tree a shake, well, what happens?’
Bunny drives the Punto super-slow through the Wellborne estate in Portslade and looks at the customer list Geoffrey has given him. The towers cast long, dark shadows across the courtyard and Bunny hunches down in the Punto and peers up through the front windscreen searching for the flat with the corresponding number.
‘I really don’t know, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior, listening intently, retaining the information and knowing, in time, he will probably understand.
‘Well, nothing bloody happens, of course!’ says Bunny and slows the Punto to a halt. ‘You can stand there shaking it till the cows come home and all that will happen is your arms will get tired. Right?’
The boy’s attention is diverted momentarily by three youths that perch on the back of a wooden bench, smoking. Depersonalised in their massive jeans and their oversized sneakers, the ends of their cigarettes flare from deep within the dark recesses of their hoods and Bunny Junior slips on his shades and shrinks down in his seat.
‘Right, Dad,’ he says.
Bunny rolls down the window, sticks his head out and looks up at the flats.
‘Jesus! They could put fucking numbers on the doors, at least,’ he says.
Then he adjusts the rear-view mirror and looks at his reflection and manipulates the waxed curlicue of hair that sits on his forehead like the horn of some mythological beast.
‘But if you go up to a skinny, dry, fucked-up little tree, with a withered trunk and a few leaves clinging on for dear life, and you put your hands around it and shake the shit out of it – as we say in the trade – those bloody leaves will come flying off! Yeah?’
‘OK, Dad,’ says the boy, and he watches as one of the youths pulls back the edge of his hood and reveals a white hockey mask with a human skull printed on it.
‘Now, the big oak tree is the rich bastard, right, and the skinny tree is the poor cunt who hasn’t got any money. Are you with me?’
Bunny Junior nods.
‘Now, that sounds easier than it actually is, Bunny Boy. Do you want to know why?’
‘OK, Dad.’
‘Because every fucking bastard and his dog has got hold of the little tree and is shaking it for all that it’s worth – the government, the bloody landlord, the lottery they don’t have a chance in hell of winning, the council, their bloody exes, their hundred snotty-nosed brats running around because they are too bloody stupid to exercise a bit of self-control, all the useless shit they see on TV, fucking Tesco, parking fines, insurance on this and insurance on that, the boozer, the fruit machines, the bookies – every bastard and his three-legged, one-eyed, pox-ridden dog are shaking this little tree,’ says Bunny, clamping his hands together and making like he is throttling someone.
‘So what do you go and do, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Well, you’ve got to have something they think they need, you know, above all else.’
‘And what’s that, Dad?’
‘Hope… you know… the dream. You’ve got to sell them the dream.’
‘And what’s the dream, Dad?’
‘What’s the dream?’
Bunny Junior sees his father adjust his tie, then reach into the back seat of the Punto and grab his sample case. He unlocks it, checks its contents, and closes it again. He looks at Bunny Junior, squares his shoulders, opens the door to the Punto, points his thumb at his chest and says, ‘Me.’
Bunny climbs out of the car then leans back in through the open door.
‘I won’t be long. Stay in the car,’ he says, and closes the door.
Bunny Junior looks around nervously, then thinks – Well, nobody is going to hurt a nine-year-old, especially one who is wearing shades – but as a precautionary measure slides down a little further in his seat and, over the top of the window, watches his father approach the juveniles – who are probably responsible for about one hundred heinous murders between them and have intercourse all the time – sitting on the bench.
‘Any of you guys know which is flat ninety-five?’ asks Bunny.
The youth in the middle – although Bunny is not completely sure – says ‘Fuck off’, then executes an unconscious variation on the Mos Def Wave but with the middle finger extended.
Bunny smiles deferentially and says, ‘Well, yes, OK, but do you think number ninety-five is in this block?’ He points west. ‘Or in this block?’ He points east.
The young men suck on their cigarettes, jets of nostril smoke issuing from the obscurity of their hoods. No one says anything, but there is a general ratcheting-up of the potential for violence as the youths realign their bodies inside their giant, comic-book clothes. The youth in the middle propels a bead of spittle into the air and it lands at Bunny’s feet.
Bunny takes a step closer and addresses him.
‘You know what you remind me of, son?’
‘What’s that, granddad?’
‘A clitoris.’
‘A what?’
‘I think it’s the hood.’
Bunny turns and walks towards the first of the buildings. The lit butt of a cigarette flies past his ear and Bunny calls out, without looking back, ‘They’ll kill you, those things! You’ll get cancer and die!’
He reaches the stairwell of the building and waves his arms theatrically, as if addressing the world, and yells, ‘Think of the great loss to humanity that would be!’
Then Bunny disappears into the sunless vestibule of the stairwell. He hop-skips over a condom full of dead teenage spunk that lies among the debris that has collected around the steps. He heads up the stairs, the acrid chemical tang of bleach and urine hitting him in the face like a slap, and for no particular reason at all he thinks of the sexy-surreal dichotomy between Pamela Anderson’s furry Ugg boots and her (almost) shaved pussy. By the time he reaches the top of the staircase, there is a radical teepeeing of the front of his trousers. To his surprise he finds, as if by some miracle, that he is standing outside No. 95. He turns and looks over the balcony and concentrates on the galactic pattern of seagull shit that decorates the roof of the Punto until his erection subsides.
He notices that the youths have left the wooden bench and in their place is a fat guy in a floral dress growling like a beast and pulling the price tag off what looks like a large potted orchid.
Bunny hopes, in a peripheral way, that Bunny Junior has locked the car door. Then he turns around and knocks on the door of No. 95.
Bunny Junior opens his encyclopaedia at the letter ‘M’ and reads about the mantis, an insect with a well-camouflaged body, mobile head and large eyes. He reads that the female eats the male head-first during copulation, then looks up ‘copulation’ and thinks – Wow, imagine that. He commits this to memory by putting it in a virtual colour-coded box and storing it in the shelved data bank of his mind. He has hundreds of these boxes that relate and interrelate and can be drawn upon at will, in an instant. Ask him about the Battle of Britain or about the deathwatch beetle and he can tell you. If you want to know about Galapagos Islands or the Heimlich manoeuvre, then Bunny Junior is your man. It’s a talent he has.
But two things worry Bunny Junior as he sits slumped in the front seat of the Punto.
First, when he tries to call to mind his mother he finds her image is still disappearing. He can remember the year they started building the Eiffel Tower but he finds it increasingly difficult to recall what his mother looked like. This makes him feel bad. He tries to arrange his memories of the things they did together in the form of exhibits, frozen in time, like the stuffed birds in the glass cases in the world-famous Booth Museum. He arranges them in his memory as if they were waxwork statues or something. But the image of his mother is vanishing, so that when he goes to look at the scene of, say, the day his mother pushed him on the swing in the playground of St Ann’s Well Gardens, he can see himself vaulted high into the air, his legs kicking out, his face alive with laughter – but who is doing the pushing? A slowly dissolving ghost-lady as incomplete as a hologram. He feels, in this instance, forever suspended on the swing, high in the air, never to descend, beyond human touch and consequence, motherless, and after he has stopped crying and dabbing at his tears with the sleeve of his shirt, he worries about the other thing.
On the bench where the juvenile delinquents were sitting is a fat guy in a dress, playing with a pot plant. He wears a lilac wig. Every now and then he looks up at the boy and makes a noise like some kind of monster – maybe a werewolf or a hellhound or something. This scares Bunny Junior and very secretly he reaches across and pushes down the lock on the car door. As he does this, he looks over at the entrance to the stairwell where his father disappeared and standing there, with her back turned towards him and partially lost in shadow, is a woman with blonde hair, dressed in an orange nightdress. Bunny Junior puts his hands up to his face and before his eyes he sees her step deeper into the shadows and disappear or dematerialise or atomise or something, he can’t decide which.
‘Now, let’s see what we’ve got here,’ says Bunny, the oiled spiral of his hair – his lovelock – relaxing attractively on his forehead. ‘Zoë, I’ve got you down for the Replenishing Hand Cream, the Elastin Extra Relief Hand and Body Lotion, the Almond, Honey, Milk and Aloe Mask, the Phytocitrus Hair Masque, the Re-Nutriv Lifting Cream and Morrocan Rose Otto Bath Oil, very nice, that one, the ladies tell me…’
Bunny sits at a circular table in a neat kitchen with three women in their mid-thirties. Zoë is dressed in chocolate-brown velour tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt from LA Fitness on North Road. She is tall, with auburn hair and dark brown eyes and a little pink butterfly tattooed on the inside of her right wrist. Crazy – thinks Bunny – as he leans towards her and reads from his order form. He notices, momentarily, that the miniature crystal snowflakes that dangle from her ears refract diamonds of light unflatteringly on the underside of her jaw.
Amanda, on the other hand, is small and reminds Bunny of Kylie Minogue, except that she is goblinned by a mass of candy-coloured hair extensions and has enormous breasts, tiny hips and practically no rear-end at all. She also wears the same chocolate-brown velour tracksuit bottoms as Zoë and jiggles an infant on her lap that gurgles and points at things that are not there or that are there but only it can see.
Georgia, whose home it is, wears a peach-coloured T-shirt with what appears to be a metallic-silver representation of a mushroom printed on the front. She wears blue jeans and matching denim espadrilles, has violet eyes and is overweight, and although each of the women has the high-hearted but baby-blasted look of new mothers, there is an air of jeopardy about Georgia that produces a nervous, tinkling giggle.
Zoë gestures at the order form and says, ‘If that doesn’t sort me out, nothing will!’
Tiny Amanda has a large and guttural laugh while big Georgia’s laugh sounds like the ringing of little bells and, in an oblique way, this weird mismatch amuses Bunny and his cheeks dimple. He turns his attention to Amanda and touches her briefly on the wrist with his index finger. The infant lets forth a wail of protest at this intrusion and, without taking her eyes off Bunny, Amanda works a dummy into the child’s mouth.
Bunny consults his order form.
‘Now, Amanda, I’ve got you down for the same as Zoë but not the Hair Masque because of your…’
‘Hair extensions!’ say Zoë and Amanda, craning forward. They are on their second bottle of red and Amanda, in particular, appears a little flushed. On the table in front of them sits Bunny’s open sample case, displaying the little bottles and sachets of lotions and creams.
‘… Hair extensions. And very nice they are too. Plus, you wanted the Dermo-expertise Eye Solace,’ says Bunny. ‘And… a bottle of Scotch and a good night’s sleep.’
The women laugh and Amanda says, ‘Oh, for a good night’s sleep!’ and mock-throttles her baby.
Bunny clocks the way Georgia tugs at her T-shirt and squirms in her chair as he turns to her and says, in a playful voice, ‘Now, Georgia, I am very disappointed in you.’ He takes note of the flush of colour that rises at her throat.
‘Ooh, Georgia, the man is disappointed!’ says Zoë and reprimands Georgia with a gentle slap to the back of the hand. Georgia bows her head, sips her wine and tugs at her T-shirt, all at the same time.
‘You’ve ordered the hand cream, the body lotion, the Almond and Aloe Mask, the Hair Masque and the Lifting Cream but you have not… and it hurts me to say this… you have not ordered the Moroccan Rose Otto Bath Oil.’
‘Georgia!’ scolds Zoë. ‘You complete fiend!’
‘Now what baffles me is why a woman as fine as yourself feels it justifiable to deny her body the very thing it aches for… liquid heaven… one hundred per cent plant oils and natural fragrance… romantic, old-fashioned, sensuous… Barry White in a bottle, this stuff… with a hint of the East. Slip into this at the end of the day and it will waft you to paradise…’
Bunny places his hand on the underside of Georgia’s wrist and presses on the soft dough of her flesh and believes he can feel her pulse quicken. He leans in close and whispers, ‘I am very, very disappointed.’
‘Georgia, buy the bloody bath oil!’ screams Amanda or Zoë, and once again they shriek with laughter. The baby on Amanda’s lap jettisons the dummy from its mouth and bares the glazed ridges of its gums and makes a noise impossible to interpret.
Minute beads of perspiration have formed under Georgia’s eyes, as she says, ‘All right. I’ll have the bath oil!’ and then releases her fraught and silvery giggle.
Bunny shoots his cuffs and writes on the order form.
‘One bottle of Moroccan Rose Oil for the lovely Georgia.’
Bunny smiles at Georgia and Georgia, in time, meets his eyes, and smiles back at him and Bunny knows, without arrogance or hubris, more than he knows anything in this world, that he could fuck Georgia in a heartbeat. Amanda too, he thinks. Zoë would need a little more work but it was Georgia that would give out and give out all the fucking way.
‘Now, ladies, I have some rather special Men’s products. A gift for the hubby, perhaps?’
The three women look at each other and then collapse into laughter.
Zoë says, ‘Got any facial scrub with ground glass in it?!’
Amanda says, ‘How about a Moroccan Acid Bath!’
‘Do I detect a little husband trouble?’ he says.
‘Not any more!’ says Amanda or Zoë, and they hi-five each other in solidarity.
Bunny looks at Georgia and says, ‘Not you too?’
Georgia nods. ‘Gone,’ she says.
‘What? Gone, gone?’ says Bunny.
‘Yep. Gone, gone,’ says Georgia.
Bunny leans forward and the lubricated forelock snakes on his brow as though it possesses its own heartbeat. He says, conspiratorially, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, ladies, they must be out of their fucking minds.’
At this point two small girls waddle into the kitchen, something incomprehensible having severed the hypnotic pull of the vast plasma-screen TV in the living room. With zombied eyes, they stop and look up at the adults and one of the children reaches around and pulls her bikini bottom out of the crack in her arse. Then she turns and disappears back into the living room, the other child following close behind.
‘Charming,’ says Bunny, and the women laugh their different laughs, then lapse into a weighted silence as if the course of their lives were altering before their eyes – old skins falling away, weeping wounds healing, new and hopeful horizons opening.
Zoë picks a piece of lint from the leg of her chocolate velour tracksuit.
‘You got any kids, Mr Munro?’
Bunny realises he was wrong about Zoë and he could fuck her too and a small, grey kitten enters the kitchen through a cat-flap and walks nonchalantly through the room.
‘Call me Bunny,’ he says and puts his hands behind his head and waggles them like rabbits’ ears. He creases his nose and makes a snuffling sound.
‘You got any kids, Bunny?’ says Zoë.
‘One. A boy,’ he says and experiences an uncomfortable intestinal spasm as he remembers his son waiting in the car. He looks at his watch.
‘What’s his name?’ asks Georgia.
‘Bunny Junior,’ says Bunny with a disarming pathos that fills the room with a gentle heartfelt ache. ‘He’s the light of my life, that little guy. The sun rises and sets with him.’
‘And Mrs Munro?’ says Zoë, craning forward and breathing deep into her lungs. Bunny notices, with a specialist’s eye, that Zoë’s breasts make no concessions to any gravitational bias whatsoever, as if they were hewn from granite or flint or something.
‘Gone,’ says Bunny, feeling an unexpected constriction of the throat.
‘How?’
Georgia bats Zoë on the arm and says, ‘Don’t be so nosey.’
‘She passed away,’ says Bunny. ‘Recently.’
‘No,’ says the chorus of mothers.
Georgia’s hand goes to her mouth and she says, ‘Oh, you poor man,’ and wants to put her hand over Bunny’s but resists the impulse.
‘I’m not going to tell you it’s been easy,’ says Bunny, looking over his shoulder.
‘No,’ say the women, ‘of course not.’
Bunny raises his glass of wine and has the eerie feeling that this scenario is not his alone, or even that of the three women, but rather they are players in somebody else’s observance and he looks over his shoulder again to see if anybody is there.
‘Do you feel that?’ says Bunny, bringing his shoulders up around his ears.
The women look at him questioningly.
‘A kind of chill in the room?’ he says and looks over his shoulder again, but then lifts his glass and says, ‘To life!’ His hand trembles and the wine slops from the glass and seeps into the cuff of his shirt.
‘To life,’ say the women, looking at each other.
‘And all the crap that goes with it,’ says Bunny and empties the glass down his throat, then says, ‘Are you sure you don’t feel that?’
Bunny shudders and looks behind him. He checks his watch but the numbers blur. He pulls on his jacket.
‘I’ve got to go, ladies,’ he says and this remark is greeted with a clamour of protest. ‘Now, now, girls, I’m a working man,’ says Bunny and pulls up the collar of his jacket. He notices a whorl of fog curl from his lips like a question mark.
‘Did you see that?’ he says, looking this way and that.
He reaches into the top pocket of his jacket and produces some business cards. He hands one each to Zoë and Amanda.
‘Your products will be with you within ten working days. If there is anything you need, don’t… um… hesitate to call. OK? It’s been… um… an absolute pleasure,’ he says.
Bunny turns to Georgia and he sees her through a bleared film. Georgia looks at Bunny, her violet eyes, wells of sympathy.
‘Are you all right?’ she says.
‘Um… here is my card. Now, please don’t lose it… ah… and if there is anything and I… um… mean anything I can… ah… do for you, please don’t hesitate to call. Night or… um… you know… day.’
Georgia puts her hand over Bunny’s and says, ‘What is it?’ then reaches into her purse and hands Bunny a Kleenex. Bunny realises, with a shiver, that the metallic mushroom on the front of Georgia’s T-shirt is not a mushroom at all but a mushroom cloud.
‘You have the most… ah… extraordinary eyes, Georgia,’ says Bunny and dabs at his cheeks. ‘Um… they go way… um… down.’
‘Oh, you poor man,’ whispers Georgia to herself.
‘To the depths… um…’
Zoë puts her hand to her mouth and blows a tiny sprite of vapour across the pink butterfly tattooed on her wrist. She looks at Amanda and, with an intake of breath, says, ‘Oh, my God.’
Bunny snaps shut his sample case and scrapes back his chair and he stands and says, ‘Goodbye, ladies.’
He looks all around him, opens the door and disappears, leaving behind him an atmosphere of incredulity and sadness.
‘Wow,’ says Zoë.
Bunny stands on the gangway, then leans out over the balcony and realises, in a tentative way, that some sort of demand is being made of him from the other side – the dead side – but has no idea what. He descends the stairs and marches across the windblown courtyard of the estate, through its boxy, black shadows and towards the Punto.
The fat man in the dress and the lavender wig sees Bunny and rears up from the bench and, with the pot-plant held out in front of him like he’s holding a child who had fouled its nappy or a pack of nitro-glycerine or something, lurches towards Bunny, a low growl rising from his throat.
Bunny stops, plants his feet on the ground and says, ‘Don’t come near me, you fucking nut-job!’
The guy looks at Bunny and sees something in him sufficiently impressive to inspire an urgent rethink as to the wisdom of his current course of action. He performs a comic, under-cranked retreat and sits back down in his hunched and plaguey position on the bench.
‘Fucking wacko,’ says Bunny and crosses the courtyard to the Punto and climbs in.
‘Are you all right, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
‘What?’ says Bunny. ‘Fucking what?’
The boy closes his encyclopaedia and says to his father, ‘I don’t really like it here, Dad.’
Bunny starts the Punto and says, more to himself than to his son, ‘Well, let’s get the f-u-c-k out of here, then.’
‘Where to, Dad?’
Bunny reaches into the pocket of his jacket and produces the client list and shoves it into Bunny Junior’s hand.
‘This is the client list,’ says Bunny.
‘OK,’ says Bunny Junior.
Then Bunny reaches across the boy and punches the glove compartment and it springs open. He pulls out a street directory.
‘This is an A to Z,’ he says.
‘OK,’ says the boy.
‘OK. Now, you’re the navigator,’ says Bunny, and the Punto lurches into the street.
‘The navigator?’ says the boy.
‘The navigator!’ says Bunny.
Bunny Junior looks at the list and executes a flourish of his hand that he hopes will impress his father and make him like him, or at least not be angry with him. He points at the names.
‘Next stop, Shoreham!’ he says, optimistically.
Bunny Junior sits in the Punto and watches a little Sun beetle land on the windscreen and, from his unique vantage point, admires its black jewel-like underbelly as it moves about the glass. He marvels too at its mysterious, coppery sheen and wonders how anything so common could be so beautiful. He reaches into his pocket and removes a black marker and places it against the windscreen and traces the meandering trajectory of the Sun beetle on the glass. He wonders if there is any order or system to it. Bunny Junior loves beetles – always has and always will. When he was smaller he had a cigarette box full of dead beetles and he tries to remember what he did with it. He had all sorts of beetles – Devil’s Coach-horses, Black Clocks and Brown Chafers, Whirligigs, Sun beetles (like this one), Malachites, Red Soldiers and Sextons, Red Cardinals and Stag Beetles and his favourite, the Rhino Beetle. The Rhino Beetle is the strongest creature in the world and has three horns on its head and can lift 850 times its own weight. If a human could do this, it would mean he could lift 65 tons. He runs through all the beetles he knows quietly and to himself, and as he does so, he traces the now clearly random wanderings of this most ordinary of beetles, making the patch of windscreen look like the outer surface of a slowly expanding human brain. He is managing the job as navigator really well, he thinks – he has a knack for reading the maps and giving clear instructions and his dad, who can be a tough customer to please if you aren’t up to scratch, says he is doing really well. Part of him wonders what he is actually doing, though, sitting in the car all day and missing school. ‘Learning the ropes,’ he guesses.
The air is turning a coral pink and candy-coloured clouds have been hung about the sky like shredded banners and the sun is falling behind the houses and he can hear the starlings creating their late-afternoon racket. His father has promised that this is the last job of the day, and the Sun beetle crawls its anarchic and pointless beat and before his raw and crusted eyes, the great black brain expands.
‘The Replenishing Cream with Rose Flower has almost magical restorative powers,’ says Bunny.
He is sitting on a calico-covered sofa in the living room of a modest but well kept home in Ovingdean. He feels exhausted, wrung out and, above all, spooked. He is coming to believe that there are forces at work, within and around him, over which he has little or no control. He feels, obliquely, as though he is playing second banana in somebody else’s movie and that the dialogue is in asynchronous Martian and the subtitles are in Mongolian or something. He is finding it exceedingly difficult to ascertain who the first banana is. The optimism of the morning has given way to the notion that he is, in short, basically all over the fucking shop. On top of this, he is finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that there is a very real possibility his wife is observing him from the dead side and that he should, in some way, behave himself. This is close to impossible when the woman sitting in front of him, a Miss Charlotte Parnovar, is a bone fide, died-in-the-wool melon farmer who is giving off such serious and incontestable signals that Bunny can practically see the sparks leaping back and forth between them. Bunny, it should be said, has always considered himself a prize conductor of electricity and, as he massages lotion into staticky Charlotte’s hands, he begins the process of erecting a finial or air terminal or strike-termination device in his zebra-skin briefs.
‘This collagen-and elastin-rich cream can improve moisture up to two hundred per cent,’ says Bunny.
‘Oh, yeah?’ says Charlotte.
Charlotte has an interestingly high forehead that is, in a sexy way, completely void of expression except for the fact that there is a strange dry cyst, like a white whelk, in the centre of it. She has a soft powdering of near-invisible down on her upper jaw and her stiff, peroxide-ravaged hair is pulled back and clamped to the back of her head with a metal clip. This is done with such severity that it actually elongates her subtly derisive eyes. Charlotte sits across from Bunny on a matching calico sofa, wearing loose-fitting towelling shorts and a pink cotton vest stretched across large, pillowy breasts. She wears a tiny diamanté charm on a silver chain around her neck, like a glittering treasure washed up on a coral shelf.
On the far wall hangs a framed picture from a West End musical and on the opposite wall a poster of a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, dressed as a gypsy and holding a little brown monkey. On the coffee table in front of him – a homemade affair of stressed brick and smoke-grey Perspex – sits Bunny’s sample case beside an incongruous bowl of stale potpourri.
Bunny squeezes more lotion into Charlotte’s hands, kneading them and tugging on her fingers.
‘Its unique healing powers penetrate deep into the skin, leaving your hands feeling supple and… blissed out,’ he says, and he can see, if he adjusts his sight line fractionally, Charlotte’s inner thigh muscle jump and spasm in the gaping leg of her shorts. Her fingers are bony and strong and lubricated and, as he squeezes and unsqueezes them, he imagines her vagina barely an arm’s length away.
‘It’s… um… miraculous,’ says Bunny.
‘I don’t doubt it for a second,’ says Charlotte.
Her voice has a super-sexy masculinity to it, and Bunny frets for a second but shortly after realises the folly in this – if she were a dyke, she wouldn’t be sitting here letting him do his thing with her hands, and he relaxes and presses his thumb into her open palm and slowly rotates it.
‘They’ve done actual tests,’ says Bunny, emphasising the last word, elongating it, softening it.
‘What kind of tests?’ says Charlotte, imitating him, gently mocking him.
‘Scientific ones,’ says Bunny.
‘Hmmm,’ says Charlotte and Bunny can see a secret and slightly sardonic smile find its way into the corner of her mouth.
‘Yeah, does wonders for the wrists too,’ he says, moving up and feeling hard, ribbed muscle in her forearms.
Charlotte closes her eyes. ‘Hmmm,’ she says again.
‘Sexy lady,’ says Bunny, under his breath.
‘What did you say?’
Bunny nods at the poster of Frida Kahlo, who looks down at them from under her one bizarre and conjoined eyebrow with flat expressionless eyes.
‘In the picture,’ says Bunny.
Bunny registers the hint of condescension in Charlotte’s smile.
‘Oh, Frida Kahlo. Yes, she’s beautiful, isn’t she? I think that was painted in the 1940s,’ she says, looking up at the picture.
Bunny thinks he feels a surge of electricity pass through Charlotte’s fingers into his, moving through his bones and straight into the base of his spine. He is overwhelmed by a multitude of tantalising things he can say but for some reason he says, ‘Didn’t they have tweezers back then?’
Charlotte’s features shift infinitesimally, but in doing so her face becomes angular and severe.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘What do you mean?’
Bunny holds a finger up to his forehead, and even as he does so, he feels a sense of things unravelling and of having lost control.
‘The mono-brow,’ he says, regretting it instantly.
‘The what?’ says Charlotte.
‘Makes you wonder what her legs looked like,’ he says before he can stop himself.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow you,’ says Charlotte, extracting her hand from Bunny’s and staring at him with a fierce disbelief.
‘I can see why the monkey likes her,’ he says, jamming a knuckle into his mouth.
Charlotte leans forward and connects with Bunny’s eyes.
‘I don’t know if you can follow this, but Frida Kahlo was involved in a terrible accident that left her severely handicapped. I think she was hit by a truck, if you must know!’
Bunny picks up a towel and wipes the excess moisturiser from his hands. He feels disorientated and he can almost see the words as they tumble from his mouth, as if someone else was filling in his speech bubbles – someone with a deviant love of catastrophe.
‘Really? To be perfectly honest, I find the picture a little depressing. But what would I know? Still, if she painted it with her foot…’
Then, effortlessly and seamlessly, Bunny says, ‘Speaking of which, I have a sensational balm that is just heaven for the tootsies… Miss… may I call you Charlotte?’
Charlotte looks at Bunny, her head angled as though she were trying to decode the anarchic scribblings of a child.
‘You can call me Bunny,’ says Bunny, and he waggles his hands behind his head like rabbits’ ears.
A low, unpleasant chuckle escapes Charlotte’s throat and she picks at the cyst on her forehead and says, ‘You’re kidding, right?’
Bunny feels, suddenly, that although all evidence points to the contrary, he may have a chance of pulling this exchange back from the abyss and says, ‘I’m deadly serious, Charlotte.’
‘That’s the kind of name I’d give to my…’
‘Rabbit?’
Charlotte softens and, despite herself, smiles and says, ‘Yeah… Rabbit.’
Bunny sees the super-toned muscle in Charlotte’s thigh twitch and thinks he sees, carried on the happy, ozonic air, golden sparks of love jumping out of the legs of her pink towelling shorts. Emboldened, Bunny leans in and wiggles his eyebrows and says, suggestively, ‘Well, Charlotte, you know what they say about rabbits?’
‘No, I don’t. What?’
‘Well, they’re… um… well, you know…’ says Bunny.
‘No, I don’t know what they say,’ and then Charlotte adds something that sees this entire episode slip through Bunny’s fingers like the string of a child’s fly-away balloon.
‘Does this routine actually work on the ladies, Bunny?’
Charlotte waggles her hands behind her head, mocking him, and Bunny feels a spike of umbrage worm its way through his bowels.
‘You’d be surprised,’ he says and, before he can check himself, winks at her.
Charlotte shrieks with laughter and says, ‘Did you just wink at me?’
Bunny thinks – Did I? – then feels her laughter scrape its fingers down his spine.
‘I might have,’ he says, ‘or I might have had something in my eye.’
What the fuck? – he thinks. What the fuck!
Charlotte howls and cups her hands over her mouth, then points at Bunny and shouts, ‘You are beyond belief!’
‘So I’ve been told,’ says Bunny.
‘Where have you crawled from? The tar pits?’
‘The what pits?’
‘You should be embalmed and have a sign hung around your neck saying, “extinct”.’
‘I resent that,’ says Bunny. ‘I take personal hygiene very seriously,’ but even as he says this he can sense the faintest odour of flophouse sweat rising from his armpits.
‘Not stink… Ex-tinct … like a dodo.’
‘Wo, steady on,’ says Bunny, and with a kind of wounded awe watches Charlotte’s features vulcanise before his eyes; the dry blonde hair take on the appearance of a steel helmet and her eyes, a fierce, warring, metallic sheen.
‘You ridiculous man.’
‘Hey, I’m just trying to do my job here.’
‘You sad, ridiculous little man,’ she says.
‘What is this? Jesus!’ says Bunny as he grabs handfuls of beauty samples and throws them into his case. A shadow falls across his face and he looks devastated and injured. ‘Jesus,’ he repeats to himself.
Then Charlotte’s face changes again, and without warning she puts her soft, greased fingers over Bunny’s hand and says, with a fair approximation of genuine concern, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Munro. I’ve gone too far. I’ve wounded you. That wasn’t fair.’
Bunny feels a sudden and excruciating pressure on his bladder. He holds up his hand and shakes it as if to ward off further comment.
‘No, it’s all right, I just need to use your bathroom.’
‘What?’ says Charlotte.
‘Yeah,’ says Bunny, ‘I’ve been on the road all day. I need to go so much I can taste it!’
Charlotte shrieks with laughter and a nerve twitches under Bunny’s right eye.
‘Oh, man, you’re a class act! It’s down the hall!’ she says and cocks a thumb in the direction of the bathroom.
Charlotte’s laughter follows Bunny as he quick-marches towards the bathroom. He feels a violent and boiling rage towards her but is not completely surprised to see visions of her sparky vagina strobe before his eyes. He enters the bathroom in a fury, scrabbles at his flies and passes a stream of urine with such puissance that it makes the bones in his face ache. A glaze of sweat covers Bunny’s brow and his quiff lies on his forehead as limp and insentient as roadkill. Bunny hears a renewed shriek of laughter come from the living room and he bares his teeth.
‘Fucking bitch,’ he says and he pisses on her carpet. Then he pisses on her lilac-coloured walls, then on the rack full of magazines, then on the hand towels and with a grand flourish he rises up on his toes and pisses on her electric toothbrush that sits in a glass next to the basin. Then he zips himself up, opens the door and strides back down the hall, full of a renewed and unobstructed purpose, and says, ‘All right, do you want to buy any of this shit or not?’
‘I detect a note of hostility, Mr Munro,’ says Charlotte, standing up from the sofa and rolling her head around on her neck in order to release some pent-up tension. Bunny notices that she is tall and broad across the shoulders, and the shell-like furuncle on her forehead seems to have morphed into a tiny tusk or horn or something.
‘Well, we fucking dodos get like that sometimes,’ says Bunny, and the corner of his eye flutters.
Charlotte stands firm, hands clasped benignly in front of her, and says, as if imparting a simple, incontrovertible fact, ‘For your information, Mr Munro, I am a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ says Bunny, ‘Well, I just pissed all over your bathroom…’
‘You what?’ says Charlotte, taking a step closer.
‘That’s right. The walls, the carpet, your Hello magazines.’
‘You what?!’
‘Your fucking toothbrush!’ says Bunny, showing his straight, white teeth.
Suddenly, and without discussion, Charlotte begins to jump up and down on the balls of her feet, her muscular arms relaxed and loose at her sides. Bunny is immediately and completely transfixed by the sight of the diamanté charm being tossed around on its happy pink bolster like a child on a trampoline. He notices that Charlotte is not wearing a bra and that, before his very eyes, her nipples are stiffening and now jut through the thin cotton of her T-shirt, hard and fierce and unusually protracted. He sees, incredibly, what appear to be tiny cartoon sparks shooting from them and he thinks, for a sweet moment, that maybe, just maybe, all is not lost. He feels his cock roar awake. Meanwhile, Charlotte Parnovar steps forward, and with a solitary rabbit-punch, busts Bunny’s nose. There is an audible crack, a supernova of light, a geyser of blood, and Bunny tumbles backwards over the calico sofa and lands in a stunned heap on the floor by the front door.
‘Hai!’ says Charlotte.
There is a great pumping of blood from Bunny’s nose that splashes down his tie and his jaw yawns open and he makes a sucking noise like a fish. In slow motion, he allows his head to fall forward and watches the bright blood pool in his cupped hands and says, not loudly but with the purest kind of outrage, ‘Fuck!’
Charlotte continues to hop up and down, her nipples as hard as bone.
‘The foundations of Tae Kwon Do are built on integrity, peace and respect. You ought to try some, Rabbit Man.’
Painfully, Bunny climbs to his feet, points one trembling finger at her and says, ‘You horrible, fucking slag.’ He says, ‘You mad… ugly… diseased…’ and Charlotte Parnovar grins and swivels and tilts her hip to the side.
Bunny Junior looks at his watch and wonders what is taking his father so long. He looks towards the small semi-detached house that Bunny entered and sees, but does not hear, the front door burst open and his father launched backwards through the air, arms by his sides, like he has been shot from a cannon. The boy watches his father crash land on the garden path and lie there. He sees, but does not hear, the door slam shut. Then, before he has even considered what he should do, the door opens again and his father’s sample case flies out approximating much the same trajectory as its owner, exploding on the path and disgorging its cargo of tiny bottles and sachets all over the tattered lawn.
The boy sees his father lift his head, then roll over and raise himself up on his hands and knees and grasp wildly at the scattered samples, tossing them in his case. He tries unsuccessfully to close it.
Then his father stands, sample case clutched to his chest, but the time it takes to perform this relatively simple act is horrible in its despairing retardation. The boy watches his father stumble down the footpath, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers and clamping it to what appears to be a very bloody nose.
Then the door to the Punto flies open and, with a muffled moan, Bunny drops into the driver’s seat. The boy looks on in horror but then has a sudden and overwhelming urge to laugh – the crazy crimson face, the handkerchief, the busted sample case – until he sees that his father’s rabbit tie is spotted with blood. The urge to laugh vanishes and the boy feels a cold grief roar through his chest. He rubs at his forehead with the back of his hand and paddles the air frantically beneath his feet, even though he doesn’t really know why.
‘Dad,’ he says, pointing at the tie.
‘Just don’t ask,’ says Bunny and hurls the sample case into the back seat, but as he does so the case springs open and its contents fly all over the inside of the car. He grabs at them futilely and makes the word ‘fuck’ sound like the worst word in the world.
‘Fuck,’ he roars.
Then Bunny looks at himself in the rear-view mirror and actually screams.
‘That muff-munching dyke broke my fucking nose!’
‘Dad,’ says the boy, still pointing his finger at his father’s tie.
Bunny notices that the inside of the windscreen has been decorated with a strange and intricate web of black markings. They draw him in like a spell.
‘What the fuck,’ he says, but his voice has turned breathy and remote.
His outraged body achieves, in that instant, a kind of drugged laxity and he sinks back into his seat, hypnotised. A fresh ribbon of blood unravels from his nose.
Bunny says, again, ‘What the fuck.’
Then Bunny Junior realises what it is about his father’s tie that makes him feel so unhappy and he starts thinking about Rhino beetles and how they are part of the Scarab family and that the males use their horns in mating battles against other males and that they are among the largest beetles in the whole fucking world.
‘Pick up that piece of paper, down there, on the floor,’ says Bunny, after a while. The boy thinks his father sounds like a robot or Cyberman or something.
‘Are we going home now, Dad?’ says the boy.
‘Do as you’re told.’
The boy reaches down and picks up the piece of crumpled paper.
‘Here it is, Dad,’ says the boy.
‘Read what it says,’ says Bunny.
Bunny Junior makes a great show of straightening out the piece of paper by flattening it on his knee and then, with a certain ostentation, says, ‘Pamela Stokes, Meeching Road, Newhaven.’ Then the boy looks at his father with a clamped and idiot-sweet smile.
Bunny reaches over and snaps a tissue from the glove box and rolls it into twin plugs and inserts them up his nose. With the sleeve of his jacket he rubs at the dark tracery on the windscreen. Then he stops and looks at the boy.
‘Well?’ he says.
‘Well, what, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Well, are you the bloody navigator or what?’
Bunny Junior opens the A-Z.
‘Is Newhaven a nice place, Dad?’
Bunny rotates the plugs in his nostrils, pats at his bloodstained tie, smoothes down his hair and enacts a bizarre performance with his fingers that the boy is unable to interpret.
‘Bunny Boy, you’re gonna love it.’
On an enormous plasma-screen TV that sits in the far corner of a living room in a small maisonette in Newhaven, Bunny thinks he can see, at the very edge of his vision, new CCTV footage of the Horned Killer careening through a stampede of shoppers with his trademark trident. But Bunny cannot be completely sure as a wedge of late-afternoon sunlight has moved across the screen and obliterated the image. He can detect, however, in the colour-bleached pixels, a now familiar sense of terror – he recognises the crowd’s horrified screams – and he wonders, for a split second, how close to Brighton this crazy fucker actually is, as he says to Pamela Stokes, ‘We offer a line of highly indulgent, high-performance skin care that combines the best of over a century of achievements in dermatological research with sensually pleasing, luxury formulations.’
Bunny thinks that Pamela Stokes looks like she has walked out of the all-time fucking Mr Whippy of one of Poodle’s wet dreams. She wears a blood-coloured halter-neck top stretched over a boob job from Mars and a black denim skirt with an arabesque of emerald glitter on each thigh. Her eyebrows are fine and perfectly arched. The look on her face suggests that there is nothing she hasn’t seen, her eyes, bottomless wells of experience. On her left cheek she has a tiny V-shaped scar, as if a small bird had pecked her there.
‘What happened to your nose?’ she says.
‘You don’t want to know,’ says Bunny, and he touches gently the plugs of blood-soaked toilet paper. ‘Suffice to say the other guy looks a lot worse,’ he says and waves away further comment except to say, ‘at least I still have a nose.’
Bunny leans forward in his armchair and continues his pitch.
‘This comprehensive collection works in synergy with the skin’s natural rhythms to help defend against signs of premature aging and provides unprecedented skincare benefits…’
‘Are you all named after cute little animals at…’ and Pamela points at the logo on Bunny’s sample case with a hot pink Day-Glo fingernail, ‘… Eternity Enterprises?’
‘Hey?’ says Bunny.
‘He told you where I lived, didn’t he?’ says Pamela, looking directly at Bunny.
‘Well…’
‘What was his name?’
‘Um… Poodle,’ says Bunny, as he twists the cap off a miniature tube of hand cream. He sighs. What a fucked-up day, he thinks. Had all of womankind had the painters in on the same fucking day?
‘What did he say about me?’ says Pamela.
‘He said that you were a most accommodating customer.’
‘Did he now?’ says Pamela, and Bunny’s eyes mist at the drama of her lungs filling with weary air and releasing a compunctious sigh.
‘Most obliging, he said. Generous, even.’
Bunny notices a giant baby-blue rabbit wrapped in cellophane perched on the mantelpiece, but before he has even had time to contemplate the extraordinary synchronicity of this, Pamela, who looks as though she has been forced to make some unpleasant and ill-fated decision, sinks back into the sofa and says, ‘Tell me more about the hand lotion.’
‘Well, Pamela, this rich, hydrating, age-targeting lotion softens the skin and exfoliates surface cells for a smoother…’
Pamela reaches under her skirt and with a subtle upward shift of her hips slips off her panties. They are as white and blank as a snowflake.
‘… Um… younger look. It is formulated with a relaxing fragrance…’
Pamela hitches up her skirt and opens her legs.
‘… that inspires feelings of… comfort and… calm,’ says Bunny and he notices a sculpted domino of black fuzz balanced on top of her gash like a pirate flag or a Jolly Roger or something. He closes his eyes for a moment and imagines Avril Lavigne’s vagina and tears run down his cheeks.
‘Are you all right?’ asks Pamela.
‘It’s been a hard day,’ says Bunny, wiping his face with the back of his hand.
‘I’ve got a feeling about you,’ she says, not unkindly.
‘Yeah,’ says Bunny.
‘I think things are going to get a whole lot worse.’
‘I know,’ he says, with a sudden and dizzying awareness. ‘That’s what scares me.’
Pamela pushes her hips forward.
‘Do you like pussy, Bunny?’
There is a soft, sucking sound as Bunny’s bottom lip drops open. He experiences a great, cinematic rushing-away of the years.
‘I do,’ he says.
‘How much do you like it?’
‘I love it.’ He feels the evaporating of a massive psychic weight as his life tunnels backwards.
‘How much do you love it?’
‘I love it beyond all things. I love it more than life itself.’
Pamela readjusts the position of her hips.
‘Do you love my pussy?’ she says
She slips a long curled finger into her vagina.
‘Yes, I do. I love it beyond measure,’ says Bunny, in a tiny, uncomplicated voice. ‘I love it till the cows come home.’
Pamela chides him gently.
‘You wouldn’t lie to me, Bunny?’ she says, her left hand splayed and circling like a pink, amputated starfish.
‘Never. It is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Cross my heart and hope to die.’
Pamela slips her finger out and it glistens as she beckons to Bunny and says from deep in her throat, ‘Well, come and get it.’
Bunny slides from the armchair and drops to his hands and knees and with movements that seem newborn and unpractised he crawls across the worn carpet of her maisonette – a tube of hand cream clamped in his fist, a fucking rocket in his briefs and a little trail of plashed tears behind him.
Quasar – a distant compact body far beyond our galaxy, which looks star-like on a photograph but has a red shift characteristic of an extremely remote object. The distinctive features of quasars are an extremely compact structure and high red shift velocity corresponding to velocities approaching the speed of light. They are the most luminous objects in the universe – thinks Bunny Junior – and he brings his knees up to his chest. The boy believes that if he remains where he is, in the Punto on Meeching Road, Newhaven, his mother will eventually find him, and even as he thinks this he becomes aware of a shift in the air and the smell of his mother’s hand cream. He feels the feathery touch of her hand on his brow. He can feel her trace his profile with an index finger, down his forehead, between his sleeping eyes, along the length of his nose and onto his lips, where she presses her finger down in the approximation of a kiss. Bunny Junior hears a voice – either his or hers, he is not sure which – that says, ‘You… are… the… most… luminous… object… in… the… universe,’ and he feels a gentle folding of the air around him.
‘What’s the capital of China!?’
Bunny Junior awakes to the smell of hand cream and the retracting flutter of his mother’s fingers. His father sits beside him, panting and super-charged, his jacket off, his shirt open, his powerful pomaded hair crazy and all over the shop. White foam has collected in the corners of his mouth, his nose looks like a small, injured tomato and his eyes are energised with a wild joy.
Bunny Junior sits up and grabs at the empty air in front of his face.
‘Mummy?’ he says. ‘Mummy?’
‘Eh?’ says Bunny.
The boy rubs the sleep from his face. ‘Beijing,’ he says.
Bunny enacts a little stunt with his index fingers.
‘What’s the capital of Mongolia?’
The boy opens and closes boxes in his mind, but he is groggy with sleep and this takes time.
‘Come on! The clock’s ticking,’ says Bunny, who is now frantically combing his hair in the rear-view mirror.
‘Ulaanbaadar,’ he says, ‘formerly Urga.’
Bunny stops combing his hair and for some reason does an impersonation of Frankenstein’s monster, then mimes electricity coming out his ears and exclaims, ‘Ulaanbaa… what?!’
‘Ulaanbaadar, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior.
Bunny lets forth a great infectious laugh and slaps his thighs and lurches over, grabs his son in a headlock and knuckles the top of his skull.
‘My son, the bloody genius! You ought to be on the telly!’ shouts Bunny as he twists the key in the ignition and veers into the road. There is a blare of car horns and Bunny says, pulling at the crotch of his trousers, ‘Fuck, it’s good to be back on the road!’
‘That took a really long time, Dad,’ says the boy.
‘What?’
‘You were in there a really long time.’
Bunny turns into the Brighton Road and says, ‘Yeah, I know, but if you want to come on the road with me, the first thing you got to learn is patience. That is the first and fundamental law of salesmanship, Bunny Boy. Patience.’
Bunny guns the engine and overtakes a maroon cement truck.
‘It’s like those bloody Zulu warriors in Africa or wherever.’
‘Natal,’ says the boy.
‘What?’
‘South Africa.’
‘Yeah, fuck, whatever. The thing is – if a Zulu warrior wants to spear an antelope or a zebra or something, he doesn’t go stomping through the bush with his boots on and hope the antelope is gonna stay put. Right? He has to employ, what is known in the trade as stealth. Stealth and…’
‘Patience,’ says Bunny Junior and compresses a smile.
Bunny begins to beat on his chest a solemn tattoo with his fist and his face gathers in intensity.
‘You become one with your prey… and move quietly, stealthily, towards it and then… Wham!… you stick your spear right through its bloody heart!’
Bunny slams his hand on the dashboard for dramatic emphasis, and then he looks at the boy and says, ‘Why are you doing that loopy thing with your feet?’
‘You left your tie behind, Dad.’
Bunny’s hand rises to his throat.
‘Shit,’ he says, softly.
‘You left it back at the last house,’ says the boy.
Bunny punches his son playfully on the arm.
‘Ah, well, Bunny Boy, you tell me a Zulu warrior that ever wore a bloody tie!’
The Punto is now heading west along the coastal road and the boy watches the sun as it falls beyond the horizon and casts the sea in yellow gold, then pink gold, and then an ethereal, sorrowing blue.
‘Aren’t you going to go back and get it?’
‘Shit, no, I’ve got a suitcase full of ties!’
‘Mum gave you that tie,’ says Bunny Junior.
Bunny scratches his head and turns to the boy.
‘OK, son, this is serious. This is the real deal. This is one of those moments in life when you’ve really got to listen and, young as you are, try to understand. There is another law of salesmanship that I haven’t told you about. It is the absolutely crucial law. It’s even more important than the patience law. Any salesman worth his salt will tell you the same thing. Now, do you want to know what it is?’
‘OK, Dad.’
‘Well, stop flopping your feet around and I’ll tell you.’
‘OK, Dad.’
‘Never go back. All right? Never, ever, go back. Now, do you want me to tell you why?’
‘OK,’ says the boy, and all down the coastal road the streetlights come on and the boy sees an awesome, mystical majesty in it.
Bunny looks gravely at the boy and says, ‘They may renege on the order.’
‘Might they?’ says the boy.
‘Yes, believe me, it happens,’ says Bunny. ‘OK?’
‘OK, Dad,’ and they smile at each other.
Bunny turns his headlights on and they pass a billboard – a topless Kate Moss, in a pair of Calvin Klein jeans – and he recalls a conversation between Poodle, Geoffrey and himself, down The Wick. Poodle, who kept throwing back tequilas, sucking a lemon and licking the armpit of the girl sitting next to him, said, ‘Well, if you include the haunches, I am definitely a leg man.’ Geoffrey, who was sitting there like King Tut or Buddha or somebody, cupped his own considerable breasts and said, ‘Tit man, no contest.’ Then they looked at Bunny, who pretended to give it some thought, but didn’t really need to. ‘Vagina man,’ said Bunny, and his two colleagues went quiet and nodded in silent agreement. Bunny loves Kate Moss, thinks she’s cool, vanishes her Calvin Kleins, hammers the car horn and thinks, ‘I’m fucking back.’
‘I know where she bought that tie, if you want to get another one,’ says the boy.
Bunny slams his hands on the wheel of the Punto and looks all around him and says, ‘Close your eyes. Go on, close your eyes and don’t open them till I tell you.’
The boy puts his hands in his lap and closes his eyes.
The Punto takes a sudden, violent swerve into a roadside McDonald’s and screeches to a halt.
‘Now open them,’ says Bunny, and the boy can hear the trembling madness in his father’s voice. The light from the giant McDonald’s sign illuminates the boy’s face, coating it in gold, and Bunny can see a little yellow ‘M’ reflected in each of his son’s eyes as he throws open the door of the Punto and steps monstrously out and into the early evening light.
‘Now, tell me you don’t love your dad!’ he roars.
Bunny sits in McDonald’s with a defibrillated hard-on due to the fact that underneath the cashier’s red and yellow uniform she hardly has any clothes on. The cashier wears a nametag that says ‘Emily’ and she keeps glancing across at Bunny with huge vacant eyes and wiggling all around. She has a black lacquered beehive, a conga-line of raw acne across her forehead and a vagina. Bunny thinks she is similar to Kate Moss, only shorter, fatter and more ugly. He bites deep into his Big Mac and says to his son, ‘I fucking love McDonald’s.’
He knows fundamentally, as if it is carved into his very bones, that he could fuck Emily the cashier without any real resistance, but he also understands, in a sorrowful way, that there is a time issue, a problem with the venue (although it wouldn’t be the first time he had slipped it to a waitress in the ladies’) and, of course, he has his nine-year-old son sitting opposite him, flip-flopping his feet, smiling his wonky smile and playing with a plastic Darth Vader figurine that came free with his Happy Meal.
‘Me too,’ says Bunny Junior.
Bunny takes another bite of his Big Mac and knows what everybody knows who is into this sort of thing – that with its flaccid bun, its spongy meat, the cheese, the slimy little pickle and, of course, the briny special sauce, biting into a Big Mac was as close to eating pussy as, well, eating pussy. Bunny put this to Poodle down The Wick one lunchtime, and Poodle, self-proclaimed sexpert and barracuda, argued that eating a tuna carpaccio was actually a lot more like eating pussy than a Big Mac, and this argument raged all through the afternoon, becoming increasingly hostile as the pints went down. Finally Geoffrey, in his near-Godlike wisdom, decided that eating a Big Mac was like eating a fat chick’s pussy and eating a tuna carpaccio was like eating a skinny chick’s pussy, and they left it that. Whatever. Bunny wipes at a blob of special sauce that runs down his chin with the back of his hand. He licks his lips as Emily the cashier throws Bunny another look and scratches at her acne. Bunny can see her nipples actually harden under her uniform, and the effect this has on him is so monumental that Bunny hardly registers that his son is asking him a question.
‘Are you all right, Dad?’
Bunny was thinking that if Emily the cashier took a ten-minute smoko and went downstairs to the toilet, and if he bought Bunny Boy another Coke or Sprite or something – well, who knows? – nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say in the trade. Bunny starts making surreptitious signals, a subtle jerking of the cheekbone towards the customer bathrooms and a kind of egging of the eyeballs, and he hears the boy say, in an anxious little voice, ‘Dad?’
He hopes that his son doesn’t blow the whole thing for him, so he whispers, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Stay cool, Bunny Boy, just stay cool.’ Then he says, in the voice of a replicant or something, his eyes glued to the waitress, ‘Do you want another Coke or Sprite or something?’
Bunny Junior says, ‘Um,’ and then the manager, a fucking teenager with braces on his teeth and with a nametag that says ‘Ashley’, walks over and asks Bunny to leave. The skin on Ashley’s face has actually turned a shade of green and is peppered with blackheads the size of confetti. He has grease spots on his company tie.
‘I come here a lot. I’m a loyal customer,’ says Bunny.
‘Yeah… um… well, I know you do,’ says Ashley the manager.
Outside, under the golden arches, Bunny opens the door of the Punto and flops into the driver’s seat. The boy climbs in and Bunny says, ‘I fucking hate McDonald’s.’
Bunny Junior wants to ask his father why they had to leave the McDonald’s in such a hurry, but way back in the sub-caverns of his mind, stirring like some hideous, hibernating beast, the answer is already taking shape.
The boy whispers, ‘What are we going to do now, Dad?’
Bunny kicks over the engine of the Punto and the car comes reluctantly and cantankerously to life. He turns out of the McDonald’s car park and merges into the night traffic on the coastal road and all the crouched cars move past.
‘We are gonna get as far away from this place as possible,’ he says.
The boy yawns deep and shudders.
‘Are we going home now, Dad?’
‘Shit, no!’ says Bunny, checking his rear-view mirror. ‘We’re on the road!’
‘What are we gonna do, Dad?’
‘You, me and Darth Vader there are checking into a hotel!’
Bunny checks his mirror again – he’s looking for any police action, the wail of a siren, the flashing blue light looming up behind him – but there is nothing but the somnambulant creep of the evening traffic. He turns off the seafront road, though, just in case, and disappears down a side street. The last thing he needs is to be nicked in breach of his Antisocial Behaviour Order. That would be a serious bummer. Bunny looks at his son, who for some reason has an extremely deranged smile on his face.
‘Really, Dad?’ he says. ‘A hotel?’
‘That’s right! And you know what we are going to do when we get there?’ Blocks of yellow light move across the boy’s face and his eyes are round and wild as Bunny adds, with due reverence, ‘Room service.’
‘What’s room service, Dad?’
‘Jesus Christ, Bunny Boy, you know the capital of Mongolia but you don’t know what room service is?’
Bunny has been banned for life from three McDonald’s, one Burger King and thrown out of the Kentucky Fried on Western Road with such force that he fractured two of his ribs. This was on a busy Saturday in the middle of the afternoon. Bunny also has four separate ASBOs in the Sussex area.
‘Room service is when you lie on your bed in a hotel room, close your eyes and think of anything in the world that you want, and I mean anything, then you ring up reception, ask for it and some jobber in a bowtie brings it up for you.’
‘Anything, Dad?’ says the boy, twisting his Darth Vader and realising at the same time that he didn’t actually have anything to worry about all along.
‘Sandwiches, cup of tea, fish and chips, a bottle of vino… um… fags… a massage… anything. And another thing, Bunny Boy…’
The Punto passes a shadowy man with tattoos on his arms changing the back tire on a maroon cement truck (with the word ‘DUDMAN’ painted across the bonnet in giant cream letters) parked in a lay-by at the side of the road. Bunny Junior notices with a jolt of panic that its windscreen wipers are moving back and forth at a tremendous rate, but it isn’t raining.
‘When we get to the hotel, I’m gonna show you the weirdest thing in the world!’
The boy looks up at his father and says, ‘What, Dad?’
Bunny rolls his eyes and says, ‘I’m talking fucking completely Wacko Jacko!’
‘What’s that, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior again, stifling a yawn.
‘I mean seriously off the planet, Janet!’
‘Da-ad!’ says the boy.
‘I mean bananas in fucking pyjamas!’
The boy laughs and says, ‘Da-a-ad!’
Bunny changes lanes, looks awed and leans in close to Bunny Junior for dramatic effect.
‘The tiniest fucking soaps you’ve ever seen in your life.’
‘Soaps?’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Yeah, smaller than a matchbox, they are.’
‘Really,’ says the boy and squeezes his lips together in a smile.
‘And individually wrapped,’ says Bunny.
Bunny Junior’s face glows gold, then tarnishes, and then glows gold again, and goes on like that for a while. He holds out his hand, his thumb and forefinger extended to suggest the size of a matchbox.
‘Really? This big?’ he says, amazed.
‘What?’
‘The soaps,’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Smaller.’
Bunny holds his thumb and forefinger about an inch and a half apart and whispers to his son, ‘They are tiny.’
Bunny Junior can smell the fish on the salted air blowing up from the sea. A mist rolls up from the dark waters and curls about the Punto, a ghostly white. He waggles his black plastic figurine.
‘Soap for Darth Vader,’ says Bunny Junior.
Bunny flips on his high beams and says, ‘You got it, Bunny Boy.’
Bunny remembers the day he and Libby arrived home from the hospital with the baby. The tiny child’s eyes, yet to find their colour, peered out of his scarlet, Claymation face as they laid him in the cot.
Bunny said to Libby, ‘I don’t know what to say to him.’
‘It doesn’t really matter, Bun. He is three days old.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘Tell him he’s beautiful,’ said Libby.
‘But he’s not. He looks like somebody stepped on him.’
‘Well, tell him that then,’ she said. ‘Only, in a nice voice.’
Bunny leaned into the crib. The child seemed to Bunny both terrifyingly present and a thousand light years away, all at the same time. There was something about him that he just couldn’t handle, so full of his mother’s love.
‘You look like somebody put you through the mincer, little guy.’
Bunny Junior jerked his tiny bunched fingers in the air and changed the shape of his mouth.
‘See? He likes it,’ said Libby.
‘You look like a bowl of Bolognese,’ said Bunny. ‘You look like a baboon’s arse.’
Libby giggled and placed her raw and swollen fingers against the baby’s head and the baby closed its eyes.
‘Don’t listen to him. He’s jealous,’ she said.
That was also the day that Sabrina Cantrell, Libby’s workmate and ‘oldest friend’, came to pay her a visit. While Libby nursed the baby in the living room, in their tiny kitchenette Sabrina made the exhausted new mother a cup of tea. Bunny, who offered to help her, was suddenly and unexpectedly visited by a venereal compulsion that involved Sabrina Cantrell’s arse and both his hands – something midway between a slap and a full-blown squeeze. It came out of nowhere, this compulsion, and even as he groped up great handfuls of her backside he wondered – What the fuck am I doing? Nothing came of it, of course, and it was the last time he ever saw Sabrina Cantrell, but a chain of events was set in motion that Bunny felt was beyond his control. There was a voice and a command, there was an action and there was indeed a consequence – shock-waves reverberated through the Munro household for weeks. Why had he done it? Who knows? Whatever. Fuck you.
Bunny rarely thought about that first marital miscalculation – what it was that guided his hands inexorably towards their forbidden resting place – but he did often think about the feel of Sabrina Cantrell’s backside under the thin crepe skirt, that wonderful contracting of the buttocks, the jump of outraged muscle, before the shit and the fan had their fateful assignation.
As he lies on his back, in his zebra-striped briefs at the Queensbury Hotel in Regency Square, working his way through a bottle of Scotch and watching with ancient eyes the tiny TV that blithers in the corner of the room, Bunny places a finger gently on the bridge of his nose and two thin rivulets of new dark blood emerge and run down his chin and drop soundlessly onto his chest. He curses to himself, rolls a Kleenex into plugs and inserts them up each nostril.
The room is a riot of psychedelic wallpaper and blood-coloured paisley carpet that appears to be designed around the ghosted, Technicolor nightmares of an Australian backstreet abortionist. The scarlet curtains hang like strips of uncooked meat and a paper lightshade that hangs from the ceiling writhes with fierce, whiskered Chinese dragons. The room reeks of bad plumbing and bleach and there is no room service and there is no mini-bar.
Bunny Junior lies on the other bed, in his pyjamas, engaged in an epic battle with his tormented eyelids – nodding off, then jerking awake, then nodding off again – a little yawn, a little scratch, a little folding of the hands to sleep.
‘Daddy?’ he mutters, rhetorically, sadly, to himself.
Bunny stops thinking about Sabrina Cantrell’s backside and starts thinking about her pussy instead and quite soon he is thinking about Avril Lavigne’s vagina. He is almost positive that Avril Lavigne possesses the fucking Valhalla of all vaginas, and in response to this late-night meditation he carefully folds a copy of the Daily Mail over his semi-tumescent member. There is, after all, a child in the room.
Bunny lights a Lambert & Butler and focuses on the television. A woman on a ‘confessional’ talk show is admitting to being sex addict. This holds no special interest to Bunny except that he finds it difficult to see how this woman, with her triplicate chins, flabby arms and lardy rear-end, could find enough guys willing to indulge her rank appetites. But apparently this was not a problem, and she gives a lurid and detailed account of her nympho-sploits. In time they bring on her husband, beaten-down and camera-shy, and she asks him to forgive her. The camera does a slow zoom on her tear-sodden face as she says, ‘Oh, Frank, I have done bad things. Terrible, terrible things. Could you please find it in your heart to forgive me?’
Bunny pours himself another Scotch and lights up a Lambert & Butler.
‘Kill the bitch,’ he mutters.
Bunny Junior opens his eyes and, in a faraway voice that rises up from the soft curds of sleep, says ‘What did you say, Dad?’
‘Kill the bitch,’ answers Bunny, but the boy’s eyes have closed again.
Then the sound seems to drop out of the television and the face of the host, a guy with a floppy yellow fringe and a salad-green suit, seems to morph into that of a braying cartoon horse or laughing hyena or something and Bunny, appalled, closes his eyes.
He recalls, with a shudder, Libby standing in their kitchenette, red-eyed with confusion and disbelief, holding the baby and the telephone, and asking Bunny, point-blank, ‘Is it true?’
She had been on the phone with Sabrina Cantrell, who had rung up to inform Libby that her husband had groped her in the kitchen and was, in all probability, a sexual pervert or something.
Bunny did not answer but hung his head and examined the monochromatic checkerboard linoleum on the floor of the kitchenette.
‘Why?’ she sobbed.
Bunny, in all honesty, had no fucking idea and he said this to her, shaking his head.
He remembered, quite distinctly, the baby, sitting like a little prince in his wife’s arms, lift one well-sucked fist and uncurl his index finger and point it at Bunny. Bunny recalls looking at the child and having the overwhelming desire to go down to the Wick with Poodle. After half a dozen pints Poodle put a comforting arm around Bunny and bared his shark-like teeth and said, ‘Don’t worry, Bun, she’ll get used to it.’
Bunny opens his eyes and sees the boy has raised himself up and is sitting on the edge of his bed, a look of concern on his face.
‘Are you all right, Dad?’ says the boy.
But before Bunny can think of what to answer, the TV comes alive with a urgent blast of music and a voice that cries, ‘Wakey-wakey!’ and the boy and his father look at the screen and see an advertisement for Butlins Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis. Various photographs framed in yellow cartoon stars cartwheel across the screen, showing the range of activities offered at Butlins – the Tiki Bar with its simulated electrical storms, the Empress Ballroom with its crimson curtains and tuxedoed band, the indoor and outdoor swimming pools, the world-famous monorail, the putting green, the adult quiz nights, the giant fibreglass rabbit that stands sentry by the pool, the Apache Fort, the Gaiety Building and amusement arcade. Smiling staff members in their trademark red coats show smiling patrons to their individual chalets and finally, in pink neon, blinking hypnotically across the screen, the Butlin’s Holiday Camp mission statement, ‘Our true intent is all for your delight.’
Bunny’s eyes grow wide, his mouth drops open and says with genuine feeling, ‘Fuck me. Butlins.’ He sits straight up and jams another Lambert & Butler in his mouth. ‘Are you watching this, Bunny Boy? Butlins!’
‘What’s Butlins, Dad?’
Bunny Zippos his cigarette and points at the TV, expels a noisy trumpet of smoke and says, ‘Butlins, my boy, is the best fucking place in the world!’
‘What is it, Dad?’
‘It’s a holiday camp,’ says Bunny. ‘My father took me there when I was a kid,’ and with the mention of his father, Bunny feels a butcher’s hook twisting in his bowels. He looks at his watch and screws up his face and says to himself, ‘Christ, my old dad.’
‘Why is it the best place in the world?’ asks the boy.
‘Has anyone ever mentioned you ask a lot of fucking questions?’
‘Yes.’
Bunny reaches across to the bedside table and grabs the Scotch and, waving the bottle with an extravagant flourish, says, ‘Well, let me just pour a little drink and I’ll tell you.’
Bunny slops whisky into his glass, then lies back against the headboard and says, with emphasis, ‘But you’ve got to listen.’
Bunny Junior’s head suddenly wobbles dramatically on his neck and he falls back on the bed, arms splayed. He closes his eyes.
‘OK, Dad,’ he says.
‘Don’t bloody ask me why Dad took me to Butlins. He no doubt had some raunchy tête-à-tête or some liaison kangaroo with some slapper or something, I don’t know, he was a squire of the dames, my old man, and he loved a bit of the fluff. Not bad-looking either, in his day,’ says Bunny.
‘When we arrived he changed his shirt, had a shave, put pomade in his hair, you know, then sent me down the pool, for a swim. He said he’d come by and get me later on.’
The boy’s breath deepens and he brings his little square knees up to his chest and appears to sleep. Bunny pours the Scotch down his throat, then attempts to place the glass back on the bedside table but he misses and the glass rolls around the shrieking paisley carpet. He retreats deep into his memory and he sees the throbbing terraced lawns and the turquoise water churning with screaming children. He sees the fifteen-foot bucktooth rabbit that stands by the swimming pool. His voice comes out tired and sad.
‘So I went down to the pool, and I was doing this thing that I liked to do. I’d crouch down with just my eyes looking over the top of the water and glide around like a crocodile or a bloody alligator and watch all the kids jumping around and doing bombs and cavorting about. I used to feel like nobody could see me but, you know, I could see them.’
Bunny attempts to make some gesture with his hand to illustrate a point and for a brief moment he wonders how on earth he ever ended up this way.
‘Anyway, on this particular occasion I started to get the feeling that someone was watching me and I turned around and there, sitting on the edge of the pool, was a girl… about my age… I was just a kid…’
Bunny sees, in his mind, the girl with her long wet hair and her nut-coloured limbs, and he finds that hot tears are running down his face, and once again he circles his hand in the air, his cigarette dead between his fingers.
‘And she was smiling at me… watching me… and smiling at me and, Bunny Boy, I got to tell you, she had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen and she wore a tiny yellow polka-dot bikini and she was all caramel-coloured from the sun… with these violet eyes… and something came over me, I don’t know what, but all the bloody emptiness I felt as a kid seemed to evaporate and I filled with something… a kind of power. I felt like a bloody machine.’
Bunny can see, in his mind’s eye, the afternoon sun spinning in the sky and the glare of it as it touched the surface of the pool. He can see the water part as he floated slowly through it.
‘So I kind of glided towards her and the closer I got the more she smiled… and I don’t know what came over me, but I stood up and asked her what her name was… fucking twelve years old I was…’
The cigarette falls from Bunny’s fingers and lands on the scarlet carpet.
‘… and she said her name was Penny Charade… I kid you not. Penny Charade… I’ll never forget it… and when I told her my name she laughed and I laughed and I knew that I had this power… this special thing that all the other bastards who were flopping around in the pool trying to impress the girls didn’t have… I had this gift… a talent… and it was in that moment that I knew what I was put on this stupid fucking planet to do…’
Bunny Junior, incredibly, opens one raw eye and says, ‘What happened then, Dad?’ and closes it again.
‘Well, it was getting late and her mum and dad came and got her and I stayed at the pool, happier than I’d ever been, just floating around… all full of this gift until I was the last person in the pool…’
Bunny could see, deep in his memory, the night fall over Butlins and a spray of stars spritz across the sky, and he wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.
‘Then it began to get dark and the stars came out and I started to get cold so I went back to our chalet.’
This time the boy keeps his eyes closed when he says, ‘What happened to the girl, Dad?’
‘Well, the next day my dad sent me down to the pool again and I looked for Penny Charade but she wasn’t there, and I was moving through the water feeling sorry for myself when I noticed another girl who was smiling at me, then another one, and suddenly the whole pool was heaving with Penny Charades… on the side of the pool… swimming in the water, on the fucking diving board, waving and smiling and laying on their towels, playing with blow-up balls and there it was again… that feeling… that power… and me with the gift…’
Bunny gropes around on the bed until he finds the remote and, with a crack of static, it implodes into nothingness and he closes his eyes. A great wall of darkness moves towards him. He can see it coming, vast and imperious. It is unconsciousness and it is sleep. It moves like a great tidal wave but before it breaks over him and he is away, before he renders himself completely to that oblivious sleep, he thinks, with a sudden, terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne’s vagina.
‘Is that your dad in my house?’ says the little girl on the bicycle.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ says Bunny Junior, who has been trying to read about Mata Hari in his encyclopaedia, but can’t concentrate on the words because he is so worried about his father. In the breakfast room at the Queensbury, his dad was jumping around like his pants were on fire. He’d eat a bit of sausage, get up and rabbit into his phone, then sit back down and spill his coffee everywhere. He’d disappear into the bathroom and not come out for ages, then follow the waitress around the breakfast room and talk to her a mile a minute about who knows what – Bunny Junior sure didn’t know. The boy ate his breakfast quickly and, anxious to leave, pulled out the client list and said, ‘Where to now, Dad?’ but his dad told him they were going to visit a loyal customer in Rottingdean – one they could tap into at any time. She just loved that body cream! Then he was stuffing his mouth with eggs and toast and chasing the waitress around the breakfast room again, waggling his hands behind his head like a rabbit. He had put on a new shirt with brown and orange diagonal stripes and a tie with a little picture of a floppy-eared rabbit sticking his head out of a magician’s hat, but he hadn’t shaved and his hair was sticking up like nobody’s business.
Bunny Junior was not used to worrying about his dad. He was more used to worrying about his mum. Once, when his father was away, she had come into the bedroom and sat on the bed and put her arms around him and cried her eyes out and he hadn’t known what to do but wonder where the old mum had gone.
Now he is sitting in the Punto outside a large, newly built house in Rottingdean, and a girl who looked about the same age as him, maybe a little older, is asking him a question. She is straddling a bicycle and has a small brown mole on her cheek. She rings the bell three times before she speaks to him again.
‘Your dad is giving my mum a fuck,’ she says.
She wears a strawberry tankini with the word ‘TOXIC’ written in little silver studs across her chest. Bunny Junior notices, when she turns to look back at her house, that one side of her bikini bottom has ridden up the crack in her bum.
‘He’s my dad,’ says Bunny Junior, screwing up one eye and sticking his head out the car window and looking up and down the street but not knowing what it was he was looking for.
‘Yeah, I know,’ says the girl. ‘He’s sticking his dick in her.’
The boy responds with a tilt of the chin but his feet start flip-flopping furiously.
‘Yeah, well, he’s the best salesman in the world,’ he says.
The girl rocks back and forth on the bicycle and says, ‘She makes me go out of the house. But you can hear her from miles away. She sounds like a strangled chicken. Cock-a-doodle-do!’ The little girl flaps her elbows for emphasis.
‘You mean a rooster,’ says the boy.
‘Yeah, whatever. You can hear her for miles.’
Bunny Junior points at the girl’s bicycle and says, ‘My dad could sell your bicycle to a barracuda.’
The girl pushes her fringe out of her eyes and says, ‘A what?’
‘It’s a predatory fish,’ he says. ‘Its jaws are armed with hundreds of razor-like teeth.’
‘Oh,’ says the girl.
She rings the bell on her bicycle and says, ‘My dad bought me this.’
‘The bicycle?’ says the boy.
‘No, the bell.’
The little girls rocks some more and grimaces for no particular reason. Bunny Junior likes this girl. He thinks she is very pretty and he hasn’t really spoken to a girl before. He paddles his feet for a while and thinks about something to say.
‘My mum died,’ he says without warning and he experiences a sudden thundering of his blood to his face and he pushes himself back into the seat of the Punto, mortified and ashamed.
‘Yeah?’ says the girl, then wheels her bicycle up to the window and Bunny Junior sees that she has crimson glitter nail polish on her fingers and a smear of blue shadow over each eye.
‘I wish my mum would die,’ she says. ‘She’s a fucking bitch-face.’
The surge of blood subsides and the roaring in his ears abates and Bunny Junior takes his sunglasses from the glove box and slips them on.
‘I don’t have to go to school,’ he says.
The young girl smiles, realigns her bikini bottoms, pushes her fringe out of her eyes and says, ‘Cool.’
‘My dad says I don’t have to.’
They say nothing for a minute and Bunny Junior adjusts his shades and the girl cocks her head and looks at the boy sitting in the car, and the sun beats down and she rings her bell twice. Bunny Junior reaches over to the driver’s side and taps the car horn two times in response. They smile at each other and together they both look down the road somewhere. They see Bunny exit the house and march across the sun-scorched lawn, tucking his shirt into his trousers.
‘Here he comes,’ says Bunny Junior quietly, ‘my dad.’
The boy wishes his dad would turn around and go back inside because he doesn’t want to see his dad – although he looks a lot better coming out of the house than he did going in. On the way here, his dad kept turning the radio on and off and moving around in his seat and sounding the horn and swigging from his bottle and driving like a mental case, and when he arrived at the house he actually hopped across the lawn like a rabbit. Most of all, though, he wanted his dad to go back into the house because all of a sudden he could think of a million and one things he wanted to tell this girl on the bicycle – about outer space, the veldts of Africa or the microcosmic world of insects or something, and he didn’t even know her name.
‘Excuse me, young lady,’ says Bunny as he marches up to the Punto.
Bunny is thinking that there is nothing like getting your pipes cleaned first thing in the morning to set you up for the rest of the day. He had woken gloomy and hungover and full of dirty water, and had probably hit the bottle a little heavy in recompense. He thought he may have set something up with the cute little waitress from the breakfast room at the Queensbury Hotel, but he was not completely sure. Then he remembered Mylene Huq from Rottingdean, and a quick call to Poodle was enough to secure her address. The story goes that Mylene Huq’s husband took off with someone half his age and that Mylene Huq has been involved in an epic revenge-fuck ever since. Meanwhile, the word has spread around the local studs and everyone was getting in while the going was good. This kind of opportunity is usually short-lived and always ends in tears, but there is no denying that in the throes of their particular brand of wild justice these bitches go off like fucking firecrackers.
‘Excuse me, young lady,’ he says again.
‘Finished giving my mum a fuck?’ says the young girl on the bicycle.
‘Eh?’ says Bunny, opening the door of the Punto.
‘Finishing sticking your dick in my mum?’
Bunny leans in close to the girl and rings the bell on her bike and says, ‘Actually, yes, I have, and it was very nice, thank you very much.’ Then he folds himself up and drops with a contemptuous grunt into the driver’s seat. He turns the key in the ignition and the Punto makes its noises and, insolently and unwilling, starts first time.
‘Jesus, who’s your girlfriend?’ says Bunny. ‘What a little ball-breaker.’
Wisps of sea mist curl around the Punto as Bunny moves onto the ocean road.
‘She just came and talked to me, Dad.’
‘Fancy you, did she?’ said Bunny, popping a fag between his teeth and patting the pockets of his jacket for his Zippo.
Bunny Junior fingers his Darth Vader and says, ‘Da-ad.’ He feels a kind of rising heat.
‘No, she did, I can tell. She had that special light in her eyes!’
‘Da-ad!’
‘I’m telling you, Bunny Boy, I can spot it a mile off!’
Bunny turns to his son and punches him on the arm. Bunny Junior is happy that his dad is happy and he is happy that his dad is not mental and he is also just happy and he says, in a loud voice, ‘Maybe I should go back and give her a fuck!’
Bunny looks at his son as if for the first time and then throws out a great laugh. He knuckles the boy’s skull.
‘One day, Bunny Boy, one day!’ he exclaims, and with the blue sea on one side, and green fields on the other, Bunny Junior waves the client list in the air and holds up the A-Z and laughs, ‘Where to now, Dad?’
Soon Bunny Junior will sit back in his seat and stare out at the white, weather-bitten cliffs and the flocks of seagulls that feast on the newly turned earth in the fields that line the coastal road. He will think that even though his mother would come into his room and hold him and stroke his forehead and cry her eyes out, her hand was still the softest, sweetest, warmest thing he had ever felt, and he will look up and see a flock of starlings trace the angles of her face in the sky. He will think that if he could just feel that soft, warm hand on his forehead again then he would he didn’t know what.
On the television mounted on the wall of a small café in Western Road there is a special report on the Horned Killer. A young mother has been murdered with a garden fork in her home in Maida Vale. The attack was so vicious that the authorities initially had difficulties identifying the sex of the victim. The same afternoon, the killer had done his diabolical streak for the CCTV cameras through a shopping complex in Queensway. Then, as always, he disappeared. On the TV, Bunny sees a stylised map of England that reminds him of a cartoon rabbit (without ears) and shows, with a red line, the dismal, southbound trajectory of the murderer’s infernal journey. Some part of Bunny takes all this personally, but he is not sure why.
The guy serving behind the counter has shaved and oiled his head and leans towards Bunny and cocks his thumb at the TV and says, ‘Can you believe this guy?’ He wears a tight red T-shirt and Bunny, who sits eating a ketchup-smothered Cornish pasty and sucking a pink milkshake through a straw, notices the ringed contours of his nipple piercings through the fabric.
‘He’s working his way to Brighton,’ says Bunny, ominously.
‘What makes you say that, man?’
‘I can feel it in my guts,’ says Bunny. ‘He is coming down.’
Bunny Junior looks around the café and sucks his milkshake and moves back and forth on his swivel-topped stool. He watches a couple nearby, hunched over bowls of spaghetti Bolognese and involved in some heated, whispered altercation. The woman throws furtive glances around the restaurant and the boy tries to decode the nature of their dispute by reading the man’s lips but this proves impossible as he keeps covering his mouth with his hand. Then his attention is drawn to a lone man eating from a plate of chips. He wears a black shirt and has thick white hair and a silver zodiac symbol on a chain around his neck and he is looking directly at the boy. He dips a chip in mayonnaise, puts it in his mouth and smiles at the boy with genuine warmth.
‘All the freaks wash down here,’ says Bunny to the guy behind the counter, but he has turned away and is now serving someone else, so Bunny directs his attention to his son.
‘In this business, Bunny Boy, you meet all kinds of crazy people. It’s the nature of the game. You get a certain understanding for them,’ he says.
The man in the black shirt and the pendant counts some money into a tiny tin plate. He gives Bunny Junior a secret wave, licks the salt off the ends of his fingers, then picks up his jacket, turns his back and leaves.
‘You’ve got to live by your wits. It’s an instinct,’ says Bunny. ‘Always keep one eye open. You turn your back on someone for a second and the next minute they’re boiling your head in a saucepan. It’s something you learn over time, Bunny Boy…’
Through the lunchtime crowd Bunny Junior glimpses a woman in an orange dress with blonde hair standing in the queue across the café at the sandwich counter. Her head is inclined away from him, her face hidden in her hair, and sometimes he can see her and sometimes he can’t.
‘Be bloody prepared,’ says Bunny.
‘For the crazy guy,’ says Bunny Junior, distractedly.
‘You got it, Bunny Boy. One eye on the nutter.’
Bunny Junior stands and ducks and weaves and tries to get a glimpse of the woman who could well be his mother, but he can’t see her any more and he hears his dad say, ‘Once I did this job in Hastings and there was a little girl there that had tiny flippers for hands and her tongue was so long she had it pinned to the lapel of her jacket.’
Bunny Junior climbs back up on his stool and sits very still, hands folded in his lap. The blood has drained from his face and when Bunny looks at his son, he registers his haunted expression.
‘Tell me about it, Bunny Boy! It gives me the creeps just thinking about it!’
Bunny takes out his wallet and the man behind the counter, with his lubricated dome and his erotic accoutrements, says to Bunny as he takes his money, ‘You in town long?’
Bunny delivers a disdainful look and, with Bunny Junior close behind, leaves the café. Outside he stops, throws out his hands in outrage and says to the boy, ‘Do I look like I’ve got a mangina? Do I look like I’ve got a munt?’
‘Um,’ says the boy.
‘Tell me the truth. Do I look like a fucking fag to you?’
Bunny Junior, who realises he has forgotten to finish his pasty, looks up and down the street and forgets to answer his father as he sees what appears to be a triangle of orange fabric slip around a corner and disappear.
Bunny stands outside a ground-floor flat in Charles Street, Kemp Town, and wonders what he is doing. He turns and sees his son’s face watching him through the window of the Punto – the boy squeezing out his jinked smile – and he wonders what he is doing. At the front door, he presses the buzzer and sees a dark shape wobble, mirage-like, on the other side of the frosted glass – icing sugar sunset with powdered palm trees – then rattle a series of locks and chains, and he wonders what he is doing. He looks at the name on the client list and it says Mrs Candice Brooks and he experiences in the base of his spine a thrill of sexual anticipation that brings clarity of purpose to his mind. But the door opens and a tiny, bent and impossibly ancient lady in dark glasses appears before him and says in a surprisingly youthful voice, ‘Can I help you?’
Bunny sighs and wonders what he is doing. Then it comes to him – he is here to sell stuff. He closes his eyes and composes himself and approximates a person who has charm and who is in control. This is not as easy as it sounds because Bunny feels, in an oblique way, that a kind of lunacy has come to visit and decided to stay until all the lights go out. ‘I’m looking for a Mrs Candice Brooks,’ he says.
With an arthritic and bejewelled hand, the old lady adjusts her glasses and says, ‘Yes, I’m Mrs Brooks. What can I do for you, young man?’
Bunny thinks – Young man? Jesus, is she blind? – then realises that actually she is. He silently cogitates whether this is, for him, an advantage or a disadvantage. He decides on the former due to his inherent optimism.
‘Mrs Brooks, my name is Bunny Munro. I am a representative of Eternity Enterprises. You have contacted our central office and asked for a free demonstration of our range of beauty products.’
‘I did?’ says the old lady, her ringed fingers tapping and clacking around the edge of the door.
‘Your name is on our list, Mrs Brooks.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it, Mr Munro. Daresay I will forget to turn up to my own funeral,’ says the old lady, with a grim chuckle.
Mrs Brooks invites Bunny in and leads him through a small, sunless kitchen. Bunny thinks, as he checks out her swollen ankles and her support stockings, that chances are Mrs Candice Brooks will turn out to be a classic time-waster – a lonely old bird that just wants to talk. He remembers when he used to go out with his dad, who was in the antique business, and it was precisely this kind of good-natured biddy that his old man could really get his teeth into – that he could really squeeze. He was a master of it – a true charmer. But extorting them of their antique furniture was one thing, trying to sell them beauty products was another thing altogether.
‘I hope the new girl who comes to clean has left the place looking nice. I never really know. They come and go, these young things. They cost the earth and none of them really wants to be looking after a dotty old bat like me.’
‘Hired hindrance, Mrs Brooks,’ says Bunny, and Mrs Brooks chuckles as she taps her way through the kitchen with her white, cleated stick.
‘Exactly, Mr Munro,’ she says, as Bunny remembers, with a sudden plasmatic surge in his leopard-skin briefs, Mylene Huq from Rottingdean, bucking and screaming and begging Bunny to come on her face.
Bunny follows Mrs Brooks into the living room and it is heavy with dead air as if time itself had ossified into something immobile and unyielding. The shelves are crammed with ancient books covered in a patina of dust and there is the terrible spectral absence of a television set. The open-lidded, upright Bösendorfer along the far wall, with its rictus of flavescent teeth, would be a nice little earner for some enterprising antique dealer in a couple of years – thinks Bunny – and he gestures pointlessly at the piano and enquires of the old blind lady, ‘Do you play?’
Mrs Brooks makes monster claws of her arthritic hands and giggles like a little girl. ‘Only on Hallowe’en,’ she says.
‘You are a very trusting lady. Do you always invite strangers into your home?’ asks Bunny.
‘Trusting? Nonsense! I have one foot firmly planted in the grave, Mr Munro. What would anyone want from me?’ and with her antenna-like stick clicking against the furniture, the old lady makes her way to the chintz-covered armchair and lowers herself into it.
‘You’d be surprised,’ says Bunny, looking at his watch and suddenly remembering an alcoholic dream he had had the night before that involved finding a matchbox full of celebrity clitorises – Kate Moss’s, Naomi Campbell’s, Pamela Anderson’s and of course Avril Lavigne’s (among others) – and trying unsuccessfully to stab holes in the lid with a blunt knitting needle while the little pink peas screamed for air.
‘I may be blind, Mr Munro, but my other senses have yet to desert me. You seem like a nice man.’
Mrs Brooks offers Bunny the chair opposite her and Bunny has the sudden urge to turn around and make a run for it – he feels a kind of foreboding in the room – but instead he sits and places his sample case on the little Queen Anne table in front of him. Bunny realises to his surprise that there is an oversized transistor radio on the table that has been playing classical music the whole time he has been there.
Mrs Brooks swoons dramatically, and then rocks back and forth and says, with great reverence, ‘Beethoven. Next to Bach, no one does it better. Streets ahead of Mozart. Beethoven understood suffering in the most profound way. You can feel his deep belief in God and his raging love for the world.’
‘It’s all a bit over my head,’ says Bunny. ‘I’m just a working stiff.’
‘Auden said it all. “We must love one another or die.”’
Mrs Brooks’ misshapen hands twitch on the armrests of her chair like alien spiders and her rings make an unsettling clicking sound. Outside Bunny can hear the bitching squawk of seagulls and the low drone of the seafront traffic.
‘Have you read Auden, Mr Munro?’
Bunny sighs and rolls his eyes and snaps open his sample case.
‘Bunny,’ he says. ‘Call me Bunny.’
‘Have you read Auden, Bunny?’
Bunny feels a needle of irritation tweak the nerve over his left eye.
‘Only on Hallowe’en, Mrs Brooks,’ says Bunny, and the old lady laughs like a little girl.
The Punto is parked on the Marine Parade and Bunny Junior rests his head on the window and watches the steady stream of people walking past and wonders exactly what it is he is doing. He feels like he has learned the Patience Law and wonders when his dad is going to teach him how to actually sell something. The boy thinks there may be a chance that not only is he going blind with advanced blepharitis, but he is going insane as well, and has looked up the word ‘Mirage’ in his encyclopaedia and it says ‘An optical illusion resulting from the refraction of light causing objects near the horizon to become distorted.’ He has also found ‘Apparition’ and it says ‘The visual experience of seeing a person (living or dead) not actually present,’ but none of this makes much sense to him. He has come to believe that his mother is looking for him and that she has something important to tell him, and he thinks that if he remains where he is she will, in time, find him. He is glad he has learned the Patience Law. It has been helpful. He also thinks that there is something that he has to tell his mother but he can’t think of what it is because he is too hungry. He wishes he had eaten his Cornish pasty in the café at lunchtime. He sees a group of youths mooch by, stuffing handfuls of chips into the holes in their hoods, and a hungering noise issues from the pit of his stomach.
He looks behind him and can see, across the road on the promenade, a booth with ‘FISH AND CHIPS’ written in large letters on its candy-striped awning. The sea breeze brings down a delirious waft of fried potatoes and vinegar and Bunny Junior closes his eyes and inhales and, once again, whatever the animal is that’s trapped in his guts lets out a demonstrative moan.
The boy knows he is not allowed to get out of the car but he is becoming increasingly worried that if he doesn’t eat something soon, he is going to die of hunger. He knows that he has three one-pound coins in the pocket of his trousers. He imagines, with a certain amount of pleasure, his father returning and finding him dead in the Punto. What would that say about his Patience Law? The boy sits there and counts to one hundred. He looks over one shoulder then the other. He opens the door of the Punto and climbs out, jiggling the coins in his pocket.
Down to the pedestrian crossing – he thinks – then over the road, two minutes tops. He feels a sudden surge of panic move up the nerves in his legs and explode in his stomach and he puts his hand on his chest and feels his heart pounding through his shirt. Then he puts his head down and sets off.
He arrives at the pedestrian crossing just as the red man blinks on and he waits a full three minutes for the green one. In that time, a man dressed in white tracksuit bottoms and a white polo shirt sidles up to him. He has plucked eyebrows and thinning black hair,
‘No school today?’ says the man, smiling and playing with the little embroidered polo player on the breast of his shirt. The man’s eyes are so blue and clear, and his teeth so straight and white, that Bunny Junior has to squint when he looks at him.
‘Taking a sickie?’ enquires the man – but it is not a question, rather the naming of some perverse and diabolical act.
The light changes and Bunny Junior charges across the street and doesn’t look back, saying the word ‘fuck’ under his breath over and over again because now he doesn’t feel hungry in his stomach any more, now he wants to shit his pants. He feels to his core the terrible knowledge that he should never have left the refuge of the Punto.
At the fish and chip booth there is a small queue and he joins it and stands there, hopping from foot to foot. He turns his head tentatively in the way you do if you think there may be a monster or ogre or something behind you, and sees the guy in the tracksuit on the other side of the road fiddling with the polo player on his shirt. He seems to have forgotten about Bunny Junior until he raises his head and smiles and lifts up his index finger and moves it back and forth.
Bunny Junior turns away and watches the man in the fish and chip booth with the wire mesh basket and Popeye arms until it is his turn to order. He notices that the man’s arms are covered in thick, black fur.
‘Chips, please,’ says the boy.
The man behind the counter fills a small waxed-paper cone with chips and says, ‘One pound.’
The boy says, ‘Salt, please.’
The man sprinkles salt on the chips from a large, stainless steel saltshaker.
The boy says, ‘Vinegar, please.’
The man puffs on his cigarette and pours vinegar from a bottle onto the chips. He hands the paper cone to the boy and the boy gives him the money and turns around and sees his mother walking away from him down the promenade. She wears an orange dress and her blonde hair is tied back in a ponytail.
‘Maybe I should report you to the authorities,’ says the man in the white tracksuit bottoms, who is suddenly standing next to the boy, talking out the side of his mouth and twisting the little polo player on his shirt. Bunny Junior swings away from the man because he thinks the man wants to eat him. He sees his mother get swallowed up by the crowd and, with a roaring in his ears, takes off after her, wishing his mother would stop disappearing all the time.
The boy notices that the people look like the undead or aliens or something as he weaves his way through the crowd. Everybody seems a foot taller and their arms have grown longer and their faces are mask-like and their jaws are slack. He looks this way and that and cannot see his mother and under his breath says that word again. He stops, looks up and down the promenade and stuffs a handful of chips in his mouth. He looks over the wrought-iron railing, down to the lower promenade, and sees, with a burst of love, his mother talking to a group of people who are sitting in an outdoor café. She is smoking a cigarette and Bunny Junior wonders when she started doing that. He thinks the first thing he’ll do when he is reunited with his mother is tell her to just put that cigarette out. He stuffs another handful of chips into his mouth and descends the stairs, two at a time, the paper cone held above his head like he was the Statue of Liberty or an Olympic torch-bearer.
It is hotter down on the lower promenade and hellishly bright. The boy wishes he had brought his shades because his eyes are itching like nobody’s business and everyone has got hardly any clothes on. The boy recoils at the mass of hairy arms and dead flaky skin and congealed make-up and stinky rings of sweat and cadaverous age spots and rolls of white fat as he winds his way through the crowd towards his pretty mother.
He walks up to the café, gasping for air and wondering what to do with his chips. Sensing the boy’s presence, his mother turns around.
‘Hello,’ she says, in a warm, familiar voice.
Bunny Junior can see that her features have been slightly modified.
‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ she says and puffs on her cigarette.
There is something in the way she says this that makes the boy step forward and wrap his arms around his mother’s waist and rest his head against her stomach. He feels, at this moment, a vast sense of sad love for his mother, and at the same time wonders why she is not nearly as soft as he remembered her to be. Her stomach seems full of rocks and when he touches her breasts they feel small and hard.
‘Excuse me?’
The boy can hear something extrinsic in her voice – an unrecognisable and alien quiver of agitation maybe, or embarrassment, he isn’t sure, and it makes him want to let go of her, but he doesn’t know how to, so he clings on harder. The woman – whoever she is – squirms and pulls at him and little stabs of pain shoot up his arms as she manages to prise herself free.
‘Stop that,’ she says. ‘Where is your mother?’
The boy looks up at her and sees that she has a nose like a little brown hook and that her hair is not really blonde at all, but mouse-coloured, and her dress, which is actually pink, smells of cigarettes and old coconuts.
The woman reaches out to touch the boy on the head but he rears back and she accidentally knocks the cone of chips flying. The chips scatter across the floor of the restaurant.
‘Oh, dear, I am sorry,’ she says.
But the boy is spinning now, spinning and turning and running for his fucking life.
‘This Replenishing Hand Cream has almost magical restorative powers. The effects are instantaneous,’ says Bunny. ‘Allow me to show you.’
‘On these fossilised old things, I doubt it,’ says Mrs Brooks. She removes her rings and holds out her monstrous claws. Bunny squeezes some cream into his hands and reaches across the table and takes hold of the old lady’s fingers and gently massages the cream into her knotted knuckles. Her arthritic hands actually creak under Bunny’s touch. Mrs Brooks rocks back and forth, marking the space around her with her metronomic sway.
‘It’s been many years since someone has done this to me, Mr Munro. You have certainly charged an old girl’s batteries!’
Bunny says, in mock surprise, ‘My God, Mrs Brooks! Your hands look like a young girl’s!’
Mrs Brooks laughs a tinkling, happy laugh.
‘Oh, you silly man,’ she says.
Bunny Junior charges up the steps and along the promenade, doing his best not to touch the killer zombies, past the fish and chip man with his fuzzy blow-up arms and over the zebra crossing where the child-eaters operate, and when Bunny Junior sees the yellow, shit-splattered Punto he feels a palpable sense of relief, like he is back where he belongs. He pulls open the door and flops into the passenger seat, his feet doing their lunatic dance, his heart as heavy as an anvil or an anchor or a death. He presses down the lock on the door and rests his head on the window and screws up his eyes and remembers how his mum used to get pretty nutty some days – like the time he found her sniffing his dad’s shirts and throwing them around the bedroom or sitting on the kitchen floor crying with crazy lipstick smeared all over her face. But even though she had what his dad told him was a ‘medical condition’, she always smelled nice and she always felt soft.
There is a sudden rapping on the window as loud as gunshots. The boy’s blood turns to ice. His blood turns to ice and he covers his eyes with his hands and says, ‘Please don’t eat me.’
He hears the sound again and looks up to see a female police officer tapping on the glass.
The police officer is young, with cropped hair and a pretty face, and as she mimics winding down the window, she smiles at Bunny Junior and the boy notices, to his relief, attractive indentations appear at the corners of her mouth. He winds down the window. He sees she has an almost invisible frosting of soft blonde hair on her top lip, and when she leans in the window he hears the new leather of her utility belt creak. Bunny Junior smells something shockingly sweet as she says, ‘Are you all right, young man?’
The boy presses his lips together in the imitation of a smile and nods his head.
‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ she says, and Bunny Junior guesses the ogre in the white tracksuit has turned him in and he has no idea how to answer this question. He fiddles with his Darth Vader and shakes his head.
‘Why not?’ says the police officer, and Bunny Junior hears a little blurt of static come from her radio transmitter that sounds so much like a fart that he giggles for a second.
‘My dad says I don’t have to go to school today,’ he says, and suddenly he is sick to death of adults – police officers with truncheons and creeps in white tracksuits, zodiac-symbol-wearing wackos and women who crow like roosters, fat men in dresses and mothers who go and kill themselves, and he wonders, with fury, where his fucking father is. Almost immediately Bunny Junior feels bad for thinking that and erases it from his mind.
‘Why is that?’ says the police officer.
‘I’m sick,’ says Bunny Junior and sinks back in his seat and, with a dramatic flourish, approximates what he considers to be a reasonable imitation of a boy dying a million deaths.
‘I see. Well, shouldn’t you be in bed then?’
Bunny Junior shrugs and says, ‘I guess.’
The police officer points into the car and says, ‘Who’s that?’
The boy waggles his Darth Vader and says, ‘Darth Vader.’
The police officer stands up straight and claps her hand to her chest and says, in a mock-serious voice, ‘May the Force be with you.’
Bunny Junior notices the little indentations appear in the corners of her mouth. Then they disappear and she puts her head back in the window and says, ‘Where’s your dad, then?’
The silver bracelet that Bunny wears on his left wrist clinks, then echoes quietly around the room. Mrs Brook’s hands twitch in her lap and they do indeed look younger. She wears a blissed-out smile on her tiny, wrinkled face, and as Bunny licks the stub of his pencil and finishes filling in the order form, he feels, in a remote way, vindicated. He thinks he has outdone himself. He has sold this elderly lady a vast amount of beauty products that she will never use, but in doing so, he has made the old trout happy. But Bunny also feels a jittery discomfort in his body, a caffeinated restlessness to the order of his blood. He has felt this way all afternoon, and has assumed it was a basic quotidian hangover (he had overdone it a bit this morning), but through the window he can see a dark menace of starlings falling and ascending above the gusting sea and he understands, suddenly, that the discomfort he is feeling is actually a rising terror of sorts – but a terror of what?
‘You will receive the products within ten working days, Mrs Brooks,’ says Bunny.
‘It’s been an absolute pleasure, Mr Munro.’
It hits Bunny then and he realises he has known it was coming all along. He feels it moving up through his bones and he feels his heart adjust itself in preparation. He notices that the radio has inexplicably stopped transmitting and the room has darkened a fraction and the temperature has dropped. He experiences a lack of feeling in his fingertips and a lifting of the hair on the back of his neck. There is a brief crackling of the electrics in the overhead light. He knows more than he knows anything that if he raises his head and looks over at the living room wall, he will see his dead wife, Libby, sitting on the brocaded piano stool by the Bösendorfer. She will be wearing the nightdress that she wore on her wedding night and the night she hanged herself. He can see a smudge of orange in the far corner of his vision and an accusatory upward motion of an arm or something. He hears the starlings begin to twitter manically and peck and scratch at the window. The air begins to throb and warp, and when he hears great, heavy, doom-laden chords being hammered out on the piano, he throws his hands over his ears and makes an unsuccessful attempt to scream.
Mrs Brooks begins raking the air with her claws.
‘Beethoven!’ she shouts, deliriously, a curlicue of fog at her lips.
‘She had a medical condition,’ pleads Bunny.
‘What?’ says Mrs Brooks.
‘Eh?’ he says, keeping his head lowered.
Bunny feels an unsolicited and volcanic rage rip through his insides – a rage towards everything – this wife of his, who even beyond the grave hunts him down in order to wag a defamatory finger; this arthritic old bitch with her lacks and loopy needs; his spaced-out kid waiting in the car; his father dying of cancer; all the rapacious, blood-sucking women; the fucking bees and the starlings – What does everybody want from me?! He curses his own insatiable appetites, but even as he does so he tries, with a Herculean act of will, to divert his thoughts onto the shiny genitalia of a starlet or celebrity or anything, but can’t think of one because the starlings are dive-bombing against the window and the piano chords are so loud now he thinks his head is going to split in half. Mrs Brooks grabs his hand with her mangled claw and says, ‘We must love one another or die!’
‘Eh?’ says Bunny, keeping his eyes averted, keeping them down, keeping them closed.
He hears Mrs Brooks say, ‘It is just that you seem so sad.’
‘Eh? What? Sad?’ says Bunny and wrenches his arm away and slams shut his sample case. The old lady looks about blindly, her outstretched hand uselessly scraping the air.
‘Forgive me,’ she says, full of self-reproach. ‘I’m terribly sorry to have upset you.’ Her hands pound at the aggrieved space in front of her. ‘I’ll see you out,’ she says.
Bunny stands, head still inclined, his hands over his ears.
‘Don’t bother, Mrs Brooks,’ he snarls and reaches down and deftly and noiselessly scoops up the old lady’s wedding rings from the table and slips them into the pocket of his jacket. ‘I’ll make my own way,’ he says.
Bunny turns defiantly towards the Bösendorfer just in time to see the empty brocaded piano stool and the air wobble with his ghost-wife’s departure. He turns away, pats his pocket, flicks his pomaded forelock from his eyes and thinks – Fuck you all.
Outside Bunny stands on the footpath and allows the pale remnants of the afternoon sun and the gentle sea breeze to pass across his face and take with it the cloying atmospherics of the old lady’s dust-covered home – a place where ghosts appear. His shirt is soaked in sweat and he shivers as he looks around and notices that the starlings have gone. He still thinks he can hear the pounding, funereal piano chords coming from Mrs Brooks’ flat, but he can’t be sure.
He walks down to Marine Parade and as he turns the corner he becomes aware of several things at the same time. First, a female police officer is standing by the Punto talking into a radio transmitter or walkie-talkie or something. Second, she is wearing a blue gaberdine uniform that makes her tits hum with a custodial authority that hits Bunny right in the dick, and finally that she is definitely not a dyke because her arse is high-up and unbelievably fit. It is only as he strides towards her, the piano booming in his head, that he wonders what the fuck she is doing there.
‘Can I help you, officer?’ says Bunny.
The police officer stops talking into her radio transmitter and there is a squelch of static. Bunny clocks the weighty, hardcore accoutrements – handcuffs, truncheon, mace – hanging from her belt, and also her torpedo-like breasts and, despite his grim disposition, he experiences a kind of alchemical transmutation in his leopard-skin briefs where a mild-mannered mouse morphs into a super-powered hard-on from Krypton and he wonders, obscurely, if society would not be better served if they kept this particular officer away from the general public – like a desk job in a place where it was freezing cold all the time or something.
‘Is that your son?’ says the police officer.
‘Yes, it is,’ says Bunny, draping a practised hand over the front of his steepled trousers and clocking the number on her epaulette – PV388.
‘He tells me…’
‘You spoke to him?’ interrupts Bunny and looks in the window of the Punto and sees Bunny Junior slumped in the passenger seat looking decidedly out of sorts, his head lolled back, the tip of his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
‘He tells me he is feeling ill,’ says the police officer.
‘And?’ says Bunny. But he’s had enough of this.
The police officer says, all business, ‘What is your name, sir?’
‘My name is Bunny Munro,’ he says, leaning in and snuffling like a rabbit. ‘Is that Chanel?’
‘Excuse me?’ says the police officer.
Bunny leans in closer and sniffs again.
‘Your scent,’ he says. ‘Very nice.’
‘I will ask you to stand back, sir,’ says the police officer and her hands drop to her belt and hover around the can of mace snug in its little holster.
‘That must have knocked you back a few bob.’
The police officer repositions herself, planting her feet firmly on the ground. Bunny senses that she is new on the job and notices an activated, keyed-up gleam in her eye and a fleck of foam on her lower lip, as if this was the moment she had been waiting for all her professional life, and indeed, beyond.
‘Take a step back,’ she says.
‘I mean, how do you afford that on a policeman’s wage?’ says Bunny, thinking he may have got that thing about her not being a dyke wrong, and thinking he would probably be best served if he kept his mouth shut.
‘Would you like to continue this conversation down the station, sir?’ says the police officer, her hands dancing around her belt as if she can’t decide whether to mace him or club him.
Bunny steps forward, blood flushing at his throat.
‘The thing is, officer, that boy you just questioned in the car is frightened. He is scared out of his fucking wits. His mother just died in the most terrifying of circumstances. I can’t begin to describe the effect that this has had on him. It’s a fucking tragedy, if you must know. Right now, my son needs his father. So, if you don’t mind…’
Bunny notices the muscles relax in the police officer’s thighs as she softens her stance. He notices a slight incline of the chin and a twinge of humanity around the edges of her eyes. Bunny thinks – No, he was right the first time, she is definitely not a dyke, and under another set of circumstances things might have panned out differently. He actually feels a throb of sadness as the police officer steps aside and permits Bunny to pass, open the door of the Punto, get in and drive away.
As he negotiates the late-afternoon traffic, Bunny pats Mrs Brooks’ wedding rings in his pocket, registers the after-scent of the police officer’s perfume and is almost blown out of the driver’s seat by a blizzard of imagined pussy, glittering and sleek and expensive and coming at him from every direction – Jordan’s, Kate Moss’s, Naomi Cambell’s, Kylie Minogue’s, Beyoncé’s and, of course, Avril Lavigne’s – but spinning up through all of that, in an annulus of tiny handcuffs and resting on a cartoon cloud of Chanel, comes the humble vagina of the police constable, number PV388.
Back on top – thinks Bunny, obscurely, as he turns into a Pizza Hut and hits the men’s room with a vengeance.
Bunny folds a slice of pizza in half and stuffs it into his mouth. Bunny Junior, shades on, does the same. There are so many jalapeños on the pizza that tears run down the side of Bunny Junior’s face and his nose streams.
‘She wanted to know why I wasn’t in school. I think it’s, like, illegal, or something,’ says the boy with a barb of irony his father does not detect.
‘And?’ he says.
‘I told her I was sick, Dad.’
‘And?’ says Bunny.
‘And she wanted to know where my mother was!’ shouts the boy and drops his piece of pizza, gulps down his Coke and rubs at his forehead. ‘And she wanted to know where my father was!’ Tears well in the boy’s eyes.
‘Bitch,’ says Bunny and stuffs another piece of pizza in his mouth.
‘Why aren’t I in school, Dad?!’ shouts Bunny Junior and wipes a great streak of snot from his nose with the back of his hand. Bunny looks at his son, flat-eyed, and rotates the bracelet on his wrist. He sucks his Coke and says nothing for a while.
‘Take those glasses off,’ says Bunny.
The boy does so, and in the hard-boiled light his swollen eyes itch and dazzle. Bunny pushes the pizza tray to one side and speaks in a voice so quiet the boy has to crane forward to hear him.
‘I’ll ask you straight up, Bunny Boy. What would you rather do? Be with your dad or hang out with a bunch of snotty-nosed little fuckers at school? You want to amount to something? You want to learn the business or walk through life with your arse hanging out of your trousers?’
‘Can I put these glasses back on? It hurts in here. I think I might be going blind,’ says the boy, squinting up at his father. ‘I think I need some eye drops or something.’
‘Answer the question,’ says Bunny, ‘because if you want to go back to school, just say the fucking word.’
‘I want to be with you, Dad.’
‘Of course you do! Because I’m your dad! And I’m showing you the ropes! I’m teaching you the trade. Something some mummified old bitch with a bloody blackboard and a piece of chalk wouldn’t have the faintest idea about.’
The boy’s eyes stream in the people-hating glare and he dabs at them with a napkin and slides his shades back on and says, ‘I think I might need a white stick and a dog soon, Dad.’
Bunny doesn’t hear this, as his attention has been drawn to an adjacent table where a mother sits eating pizza with what must be her daughter. The young girl is wearing gold hipster hotpants and a lemon yellow T-shirt that says ‘YUMMY’ and shows her belly. She wears fluorescent pink nail polish on her fingers and toes. Bunny is thinking that in a few years’ time the girl would be seriously hot, and the thought of this has Bunny considering revisiting the bathroom, but then the girl’s mother says to Bunny, ‘I don’t like the way you are looking at my daughter,’ and Bunny says, aghast, ‘What do you think I am?!’ and then says, ‘Jesus! How old is she?’ and the woman says, ‘Three.’ Bunny says, ‘That’s not to say that in a few years… well, you know…’ and the woman picks up a piece of cutlery and says, ‘If you say one more word, I’ll stick this fork in your face,’ and Bunny replies, ‘Wo! You suddenly got very sexy,’ and the woman scoops up her daughter and moves away, saying, ‘Arsehole,’ and Bunny waggles his rabbit ears at her and says to Bunny Junior, ‘I learned the trade with my old man, out on the streets, you know, the front line. We’d drive around in his van, find some rundown old place, a real drum – flaky paint, overgrown garden – owned by some rich biddy with fifty fucking cats, and in he’d go, and before I had time to eat my sandwich, out he’d come with a nice little Queen Anne dressing table. He had a gift, my old man, the talent, and he taught me the art – how to be a people person. That’s what we are doing, Bunny Boy. You may not be able to see it right now, but I am handing down the talent to you. Do you understand?’
Bunny Junior says, ‘Yes, Dad.’
His father stands and says, ‘OK, then.’
‘I might have to learn Braille,’ says the boy.
‘Bitch,’ Bunny says under his breath.
There is a crack of thunder, a flash of lightning and it begins to rain.
In the corner of the room, on a small black television, a bull elephant fornicates epically with its mate. Bunny, who lies on the bed fully clothed and wholly drunk, can’t quite believe what he sees. A storm wails against the windows – thunder, lightning, cats, dogs – and in the bed next to Bunny the boy lies curled in a deep, embryonic sleep. Neither the trumpeting mastodon nor the hammering rain can wake him.
In one practised motion Bunny decants a miniature bottle of Smirnoff down his throat, shudders and gags, then repeats the action with a little green bottle of Gordon’s gin.
He closes his eyes and the black wave of oblivion gathers strength and moves towards him. But Bunny finds his thoughts straying towards the three young mothers he visited yesterday morning – was it only yesterday? – Amanda, Zoë and especially Georgia. Georgia with the big bones and the violet eyes. Georgia with the gone, gone husband.
Somewhere in the back stalls of his consciousness Bunny hears the triumphant bull elephant blow a super-sized bucket of custard into his happy consort. The windows buckle as the storm pounds and down in the bassbins he hears the infrasonic reverberations of thunder. Bunny imagines, dreams even, Georgia naked and angled across his knee, her great, white globoids trembling beneath his touch, and it feels as if these apocalyptic rumblings of weather and his goatish visions were in some weird way connected and prophetic because, deep down, Bunny knows, more than he knows anything in the world, his mobile phone is about to ring and that Georgia will be on the line.
Bunny opens his eyes and gropes about for his mobile phone just as it begins to vibrate, juddering about on the bed to the super-sexy ringtone of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Spinning Around’, and he visualises Kylie’s gold lamé hotpants and his dick magically reanimates, hard and erect, as he flips open the phone and says, ‘What’s the story, morning glory?’
He puts a Lambert & Butler between his lips and torches it with his Zippo and smiles to himself because he knows – he knows the story.
‘Is that Bunny Munro?’ comes a voice, soft and timid and from another world.
The room swims as Bunny throws his legs over the edge of the bed and sits up and says, ‘And who might that be?’ – but he knows.
‘It’s Georgia,’ says Georgia. ‘You were at my house yesterday.’
Bunny draws on his cigarette and blows a syzygy of smoke rings – one, two, three – then reams the last one with his index finger and says, out of a dream, ‘Georgia with the violet eyes.’
‘Is it… did I… have I called too late?’
Bunny slips his socked feet into his loafers and says, with genuine emotion, ‘You won’t believe what I’m watching on the Discovery Channel.’
‘It’s too late… I can call back,’ says Georgia, and Bunny thinks he can hear the low breathing of a sleeping child and a terrible, protracted loneliness coming down the line.
‘Have you any idea just how big an elephant’s dick is?!’ says Bunny.
‘Um… maybe I should…’
‘It’s… aah… it’s fucking elephantine!’
Bunny leaps to his feet and the room turbinates and unravels and Bunny claws at the air futilely and shouts, ‘Timber!’ and lands like a felled tree between the two beds.
‘I’ve made a mistake,’ says Georgia, and Bunny raises himself on his hands and knees.
‘Georgia… Georgia, the only mistake you made was not to ring me sooner. I’ve been lying here, going off the hinges thinking about you.’
‘You have?’ she says.
Bunny stands, the phone clamped to his ear and looks down at his sleeping son. He experiences a wave of sentiment so strong that he can barely find the presence of mind to pick his car keys up off the bedside table.
‘Didn’t you feel it yesterday?’ said Bunny, his voice low. ‘The chemistry… sparks were going zip, zip and zap, zap!’
‘They were?’ says Georgia.
Bunny conducts a villainous panto-creep from the hotel room, leaving the TV running and closing the door behind him. The hallway is the colour and texture of whale blubber and Bunny moves down it with footsteps both comic and monstrous, the cloacal stream of mustard-coloured carpet roiling beneath his feet.
‘You know they were! E-leck-tricity, baby! Zap, zap! Zip, zip!’ he says into the phone.
‘Well, you seemed like a nice kind of guy,’ she said.
‘Thunderbolts and lightning! Very, very frightening!’
‘Um, Bunny?’ says Georgia.
‘Mamma mia! Mamma mia! Mamma mia, let me go!’
‘Are you all right, Bunny?’
Bunny negotiates the stairs, one at a time, at a perilous backward angle, hanging sloth-like from the banister, whereupon he flings out an arm and sings in an insane operatic voice, ‘Beelzebub had a devil put aside for me! For me! For me!’
He makes his way through the unpeopled lobby of the Empress Hotel and all the while Bunny thinks – This is strange. Where is everybody? He passes the vacated reception desk and his voice grows serious.
‘I’m going to tell you something, Georgia, because I don’t think there should be any bullshit between us. You know, lies and stuff…’
Georgia’s response seems otherworldly, distant, dreamed. ‘Um… OK,’ she says.
‘Because I’ve had it up to here with that shit, all right?’ says Bunny.
‘OK,’ says Georgia. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m drunk.’
Bunny jams another Lambert & Butler in his mouth, torches it, then steps out the front door of the hotel onto the seafront and is hit by a gale force of such brutality he is pummelled to his knees. His jacket flaps over his head and he shouts into his phone, ‘Fuck me, Georgia! Hang on a minute!’
Bunny sees, in slow motion, a vast wave of seawater explode against the promenade wall, then be picked up by the wind and carried, surrealistically and in sheet-form, across the road and dumped on top of him. Bunny scopes the Punto, then crawls towards it, the salted rain tearing at his face. He notices that the coastal road is deserted and that most of the streetlights are down. He hears, above the clamour of the storm, a grinding and twisting of metal, and a crack of lightning reveals the skeleton of the West Pier. The wind hammers at the Punto and Bunny, with considerable effort, prises open the door and, in time, clambers in. He sits, drenched, and watches an over-cranked POV shot of green seawater pool at his feet and he says, stunned and not of this earth, ‘Georgia?’
‘What’s going on, Bunny? Are you OK?’
Georgia’s voice sounds unlike anything he has ever heard before, and he wonders whether he hears anything at all.
‘Just a second,’ says Bunny.
He looks at himself in the rear-view mirror and sees a man who could well be himself but somehow is not. He is not as he remembers himself to be. His features seem unrelated to each other and a general subsidence has occurred. His eyes have sunk into their orbits and there is a debauched slackness to his cheeks and when he attempts to smile he reminds himself of Mrs Brooks’ leering, yellow-toothed Bösendorfer. His face is scoured raw by the salted rain and his helixed forelock hangs across his face like a used condom – but it’s not that – he just looks like a different person and he wonders where he went.
‘Georgia, listen to me. This one’s coming at you, baby, straight from the heart. OK?’
‘OK.’
‘How would you feel about a lonely, lovesick, slightly drunk, middle-aged man coming to visit you in the middle of the night?’
‘What, now?’ but the voice seems electronic, like a recorded message.
‘I’m taking that as an affirmative,’ says Bunny.
‘Bunny, where are you?’
He turns the key in the ignition and, with an uncharacteristic confidence that makes Bunny think – What’s up with the Punto? – the car roars into life.
‘Where am I?’ Bunny says, ‘Oh, Georgia, I’m all over the fucking place!’
Bunny forceps the phone and tosses it on the seat next to him. He notices that the two pools of water at his feet have drawn together to become one larger pool and he feels a palpable but unidentifiable sense of emotion at that. He closes his eyes and he hears a great, black wave crash against the seawall and spew its jet of foam over the Punto and the car judders at the impact and he hopes he has not fallen asleep. He opens the glove compartment, takes out the sales list, finds Georgia’s address and moves out onto the depopulated street. Bunny notices that a power-line has blown down and he can see it writhing like a black snake, fizzing and showering sparks and moving towards him down the rain-drenched street. He feels as though the black snake is seeking him out, and that if it reaches him he will die. He also thinks he could be seeing things and that this is all a mirage or an illusion or a monstrous vision or something, and he says through his teeth, ‘Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening.’ Then he jams his foot on the accelerator and moves – in slow motion – down the street.
As Bunny navigates the streets, and Georgia’s voice recedes, he thinks, with a cybernetic certainty – I am the great seducer. I work the night. Sheets of darkness that his headlights can barely penetrate wall him in but Bunny feels like he could lie back and close his eyes and the trusty Punto would know exactly where to go. Once he has left the coastal road, the wind abates and the night stops throwing down any more rain and Georgia’s large white backside fits snugly into the pornographic think-bubble that hangs over his head. A spectral silence envelops the car and Bunny hears nothing but his own steady, inevitable breaths.
Out of the night the great hulk of the Wellborne estate looms up, like a leviathan, black and biblical, and Bunny parks the Punto by the now empty wooden bench – gone is the fat man in the floral dress, gone are the hooded youths. Bunny steps out, his suit drenched, his hair plastered to his head, but he does not care – he is the great seducer. He works the night.
He enters the dark maw of the stairwell and his eyes burn from the acid stench of urine and bleach and he does not care. He feels his genitals leap in his fist as he squeezes them through his sodden trousers and mounts the stairs three at a time even though he cannot really recall speaking to Georgia at all. He shivers in his freezing, waterlogged suit and works the night. He does not care.
Bunny winds his way down the gangway but must retrace his steps because he has missed Flat 95 due to there not being any lights on. He presses his face up to the window and thinks he can see the lambent flicker of a candle or nightlight or something in a back room and he smiles because he knows – he feels it humming all along his spine – more than he knows anything in his entire life, that Georgia is waiting in that dimly lit back room, naked and on all fours, knees spread wide apart, breasts swinging, backside raised to the heavens and her fucking pussy hovering in the air like the most wonderful thing imaginable in this rotten, stinking, infested fucking world, and all he has to do is reposition his erection in his trousers (which he does), then push on the door (that has been left on the latch) and it will swing open (which he does and which it doesn’t), so he taps on the door and whispers ‘Georgia’, through the keyhole. This has no immediate effect, so he bangs on the door with his fist and then gets down on his hands and knees and calls her name in the loudest whisper he can muster through the cat-flap. Then he calls her name again.
Suddenly, very suddenly, all the lights go on. The door opens and a man appears in his underwear with a large, empty, Teflon-coated saucepan in his hand. Bunny has a very good view of an extremely crude representation of a depraved-looking Woody Woodpecker, leering and smoking a cigar, tattooed on the inside of the man’s ankle. Bunny sees, also, that the man has an infected toenail.
‘Who are you?’ says Bunny, looking up from the floor.
He sees Georgia in an ugly bombazine dressing gown standing behind the man with the saucepan, and Bunny shouts, pointing at the man, ‘Who is he?’
Georgia, her hand resting protectively on the man’s broad and illustrated shoulder, peers down with a look of genuine confusion on her face and says, ‘Mr Munro, is that you?’
Bunny shouts, ‘I thought he was fucking gone, gone!’
The man with the tattoo on his ankle – where did he get that? Prison? Primary school? – hands the saucepan to Georgia and leans down and says in an end-of-things whisper, ‘Who the fuck are you?’
Bunny, who is attempting unsuccessfully to stand and who is not in any way concentrating on details, thinks the man simply said, ‘Fuck you,’ and instantly regrets replying, in kind, ‘Well, fuck you too.’
The man actually yawns, scratches his stomach, then backs up four paces, runs down the hall and boots Bunny so hard in the ribs that he spins in mid-air and lands, with an expulsion of air, on his back. Bunny places an arm over his head to shield himself from the next blow.
‘Please, don’t,’ he says quietly.
But the blow does not come and he takes his arm away in time to see the door kick shut by a purulent yellow toe.
Back in the Punto, Bunny opens his trousers and undertakes a wank of truly epic proportions – it just goes on and on – and when at last he goes over the edge, Bunny lets his head fall back and opens his mouth as wide as he can and exhales the last remnants of reason, in an elephantine bellow, that echoes through the weather-beaten night, across the Wellborne estate. He realises, in a shadowy way, for a brief moment, that the weird imaginings and visitations and apparitions that he has encountered were the ghosts of his own grief and that he was being driven insane by them. He knows more than he knows anything that very soon they will kill him. But more than any of that, he wonders what was wrong with that bitch Georgia anyway. Jesus.
When Bunny enters the lobby of the Empress Hotel he is pleased to see things have returned to normal – the world seems to have reassembled itself. For some reason the Empress Hotel reminds Bunny of a sad and unsuccessful comb-over but he is too fucked-up to work out why. It is six o’clock and the early risers move through the lobby like the living dead. These scrubbed and scoured lobby-lurkers exude from the pores of their skin an eye-watering miasma of raw alcohol but Bunny doesn’t recognise this as his own private funk is such that people naturally keep their distance. His sour and sodden clothes, the metallic stench of abject terror and the bouquet of his own substantial hangover, form a force field around him. He also looks like a maniac. He feels a real sense of achievement that he has managed to cross the lobby in the manner of a biped and not on all-fours. He wonders whether this may work to his advantage as he leans across the reception desk and says, ‘I need the key to room seventeen. I’ve locked myself out.’
The man sitting behind the counter has a smudge of dead hair plastered across his skull and a nose that reminds Bunny, with a redux of dread, of a cat-flap. On a TV mounted on the wall above his head the news plays out. He is reading the local newspaper through a ‘Mystic Eye’ magnifying card and he looks up at Bunny and lays the newspaper and the ‘Eye’ on the counter.
‘The crap they print in these things. It’s enough to make you want to slit your wrists. Day after fucking day…’ he says.
He performs a dentured smile and, without concern, enquires, ‘What happened to you?’
‘The key to room seventeen, please,’ says Bunny.
The receptionist picks up his ‘Mystic Eye’ and peers at Bunny.
‘Fucking hurricanes, avian flu, global warming, suicide bombers, war, torture, mass murderers…’
For a moment Bunny thinks that the receptionist is giving a terminal prognosis based on Bunny’s appearance, but realises that the receptionist is tapping at the newspaper with his finger.
‘Plagues, famine, floods, fucking frogs…’
‘The key…’
‘Little children murdering other little children, bodies piling up in mounds…’
‘The key…’
The receptionist swings his arm around in a dramatic arc and jabs his finger at the TV.
‘Look at that fucking guy,’ he says.
But Bunny does not need to look, because he knows. He recognises the familiar shrieking, stampeding crowd, and even though he knows what the receptionist is about to say, it doesn’t stop a chill wind clawing its way up his spine and circling around his tortured skull.
‘He’s here!’ says the receptionist, and then points his finger at Bunny and says, ‘It’s biblical! It’s Reve-fucking-lations! If we could all just be a bit nicer to one another!’
Bunny lifts his head back and notices an antique chandelier hanging greasy and fly-spotted from the ceiling. The crystal teardrops make patterns of ghastly light across the walls. Bunny leans across the counter and looks at the receptionist.
‘Listen, you loopy old cunt. My wife just hung herself from the security grille in my own bloody bedroom. My son is upstairs and I haven’t the faintest fucking idea what to do with him. My old man is about to kick the bucket. I live in a house I’m too spooked to go back to. I’m seeing fucking ghosts everywhere I look. Some mad fucking carpet-muncher broke my nose yesterday and I have a hangover you would not fucking believe. Now, are you gonna give me the key to room seventeen or do I have to climb over this counter and knock your fucking dentures down your throat?’
The receptionist reaches up and turns down the television, then directs his attention to Bunny.
‘The thing is, sir, it is against hotel policy to give out two keys.’
Bunny gently lays his head on the counter and closes his eyes and points of refracted fairy light orbit around his skull.
‘Please don’t,’ says Bunny, quietly.
He stays like that for a time until he feels the key to Room 17 slipped into his hand.
‘Thank you,’ he says, and picks up the newspaper. ‘May I have this?’
Bunny moves across the lobby and cleaves apart a team of tracksuited table-tennis players who look to Bunny like they come from Mongolia or somewhere.
‘Ulaanbaadar!’ shouts Bunny, despite himself.
The guy who is possibly the coach breaks into a smile and the whole team cheer and give Bunny the thumbs-up sign and pat him on the back and say, ‘Ulaanbaadar!’ and Bunny sadly mounts the hotel stairs.
Bunny walks down the hall and looks at his watch and sees the time is 6.30. He puts the key in the lock and, as he does so, he becomes aware of a strange sound coming from Room 17. It is non-human, conversational and very scary. He thinks, as he opens the door, that it is also oddly familiar.
Bunny enters the room and sees two things at approximately the same time. First, the eccentric and unsettling sound that has frightened him is coming from the Teletubbies, who are on the TV. Po is engaged in a freakish, mutant conversation with Dipsy. Then Bunny notices that Bunny Junior is standing motionless in the centre of the room, between the two beds. He is staring at the television set and his face has drained of blood and his eyes are wide in his head and he is standing in a pool of his own water, the front of his pyjamas soaked in urine. The boy turns to his father and makes a fluttering gesture with his left hand and says, in a faraway voice, ‘I couldn’t find the remote.’
‘Shit,’ says Bunny, beneath his breath.
He walks past his son and sits on the edge of his bed. The bed is hard and unforgiving and covered in tiny, empty bottles. On the floor lies the butt of a dead cigarette.
Bunny moves his hand across his face and says, ‘You better change.’
The boy passes his father, holding the tops of his pyjamas with one hand and covering his mouth with the other, and says, ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
Bunny says, ‘It’s OK,’ and the boy disappears into the bathroom.
Bunny tosses the newspaper onto the puddle of urine. He looks at the television and sees Po and Dipsy holding hands in a violently green field full of oversized rabbits. Bunny looks down at the newspaper and sees a black-and-white CCTV grab of the Horned Killer and a headline that reads, ‘HERE AT LAST’. He trances out, in slow motion, on the water absorbing into the newspaper and tries not to take it personally when he sees that the soakage is taking on the shape of a rabbit.
He looks up and finds his son standing in front of him dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. The boy climbs up onto Bunny’s lap and puts his arms around his neck and rests his head on his chest. Bunny places a cautious hand on the boy’s back and stares out.
‘It’s OK,’ he says.
The boy squeezes his dad close and starts to cry.
‘I’m ready,’ says Bunny, obscurely, to nobody in particular.