The boy thinks his father looks weird, sitting there eating his breakfast in the dining room of the Empress Hotel, but it’s hard to really know for sure as it seems a long time since he has looked anything else. His eyes keep darting all over the place – no sooner have they looked over there, than they look over here, and as soon as they look over here, they are looking somewhere else. Sometimes he is rubbernecking over his shoulder, or searching under the table, or checking who is coming through the door, or squinting at the waitress like he thinks she is wearing a disguise, like a mask or veil or something. He keeps holding his ribs and sucking air through his teeth and wincing and generally making strange faces. Sometimes he does these things sped-up and sometimes he does them slowed-down. Bunny Junior feels time is playing tricks on him. For example, it feels like he could grow from a little boy into a wrinkly old man in the time it takes his father to lift his cup, bring it to his lips and take a slurp of tea, and other times it seems like his father is doing everything revved-up and super-fast, like racing around the breakfast room or running off to the bathroom. Bunny Junior feels like he’s been ‘hitting the road’ for a million years but realises with a chilly, drizzly feeling that this is only the third day.
His dad keeps saying something about the client list but as far as Bunny Junior can see the list is pretty much finished. He wonders what will happen when there are no more names left on the list. Will they go home? Will they just get another list? Does this just go on and on for ever? What did life have in store for him? What will he amount to? Is there some alternative life waiting to be lived? Then his dad forks an entire sausage into his mouth and the boy can’t help but smile at this truly impressive display. That’s the thing with his dad – thinks the boy – just when you’re about to get really angry with him, he goes and does something that leaves you completely awestruck. Well – he thinks – I love my dad and that’s a good thing. I mean – he thinks – you’ve got to hand it to him.
Bunny Junior watches a glob of ketchup run down his father’s chin and land on his father’s tie. This particular tie is sky-blue and there are cartoon rabbits printed on it, with little stitched crosses for eyes, lounging around on white cotton clouds. Bunny is too busy scanning the breakfast room to notice the mess he is making, so the boy reaches across the table and dabs at the spot with a damp napkin.
‘That’s better,’ says the boy.
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ says Bunny, looking around the place like his head was on some kind of crazy, floppy spring.
‘You’d be a bit of an old pig,’ says the boy.
Bunny stands up and looks under his chair.
‘I said, “You’d be a bit of an old, fucking pig”,’ says Bunny Junior, a bit louder.
The boy has been reading his encyclopaedia at the breakfast table and, as well as ‘Apparition’ and ‘Visitation’, he has looked up ‘Near-Death Experience’.
The boy looks at his father and, for no particular reason, says, ‘Hey, Dad, it says in my encyclopaedia that a Near-Death Experience is a striking occurrence sometimes reported by those who have recovered from being close to death.’
His father stands abruptly and bumps the table and there is a rattle of crockery and the little white porcelain vase falls over with its sad and solitary flower and they both watch, in slow motion, the water soak into the tablecloth. Bunny Junior picks up the flower (a simulated pink English daisy) and puts it in the buttonhole of his father’s jacket.
‘There you go,’ says the boy.
‘We’ve got work to do,’ says Bunny. He scrapes back his chair and says, ‘We’ve got important business to attend to.’
Bunny pulls up the collar of his jacket and wraps his arms around himself.
‘Is the air conditioning up too high in here?’ he says, with a shudder.
‘I guess,’ says the boy, and he picks up his encyclopaedia and follows his father out of the breakfast room of the Empress Hotel.
At the reception desk, Bunny hears a pretty Australian backpacker chick with pink highlights in her hair and a dusting of translucent powder on her freckles say to her friend, ‘Hey, Kelly, did you see this?’
She points to a tabloid newspaper on the counter.
Kelly has blue hair and wears a loose cheesecloth dress and Tibetan beads around her neck. She looks at the tabloid and sees a photograph of the Horned Killer, flanked by two overweight policemen. The killer is shirtless and six-packed and smeared in red paint, his hands are cuffed, his fake joke-shop horns still perch on his head. He stares resolutely into the camera. The headline reads, ‘GOTCHA!’
‘Wow, Zandra, they got the guy,’ she says.
Zandra traces the contours of the killer’s body with one plum-coloured fingernail and says, ‘Looks kind of cute, though.’
Kelly looks over her shoulder at Bunny, who has moved in close and is craning his neck and trying to see the front page of the newspaper.
‘Who?’ she says, distracted.
‘The devil guy,’ says Zandra.
Kelly elbows Zandra and says, under her breath, ‘My God, girl, you are incorrigible!’ then looks over her shoulder at Bunny again.
‘Wash off the body paint. Lose the plastic horns…’ says Zandra.
‘Girl, you are rampant!’ says Kelly, from the side of her mouth.
‘Yeah,’ says Zandra, ‘I know,’ and with a little grunt adjusts her backpack, adding, ‘I wouldn’t mind his shoes under my bed at all!’
‘Sssh,’ says Kelly, under her breath.
‘Sorry,’ says Zandra, ‘I mean, hooves!’
Kelly turns around and faces Bunny.
‘Could we have a little room here, please?’
Bunny raises his hands in the air and takes a step backwards.
‘Sorry, Kelly,’ says Bunny, ‘It’s just that I think we are having our childhoods stolen from us.’
Bunny moves across to the receptionist, with his wisps of white hair and his catastrophic hinged nose, and pays his bill, and as he turns away the receptionist shoots out his hand and grabs Bunny by the wrist. He looks at Bunny through his ‘Mystic Eye’ and points at the newspaper.
‘Did you see this? They are saying here that this devil guy’s horns aren’t fake. They’re real.’
As the automatic door hisses open Bunny Junior feels a sense of relief to be leaving the Empress Hotel and he says to his father, ‘A Near-Death Experience generally includes an out-of-body event in which people travel through a dark void or tunnel towards the light.’
The sun beats down and steam rises from the wet and dazzling streets. The glare hurts the boy’s eyes and he slips on his shades and wonders if he is actually dead. He thinks – Is this why I keep seeing my mother? He pinches the flesh on his thigh until his eyes water, and out on the sea a bank of condensed mist moves across the water towards them, like an unsolicited memory.
‘In a Near-Death Experience people have reported encountering religious figures!’ shouts Bunny Junior, jumping up and down, and rubbing the bruise on his thigh and thinking – ouch, ouch and ouch! ‘One may even encounter deceased loved ones!’
His father keeps walking in a peculiar way and beating at his clothes with his hand and looking over his shoulder, and the sea mist continues to roll towards them, like a great white wall, blurring the line between the real world and its fogbound dream or something.
‘There you go,’ says the boy, helping his father, who has fallen over on the sidewalk, to his feet. ‘Look what you’ve gone and done,’ he says, pointing to a little triangular rip in the knee of his trousers.
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ says his father as he takes a long drink of something from a bottle, opens the door of the Punto and, face first, falls in.
When the Punto doesn’t start, his father pounds the steering wheel, then actually clasps his hands together in supplication and petitions God and all His saints for assistance, and the insubordinate Punto, as if taking pity on him, coughs and splutters into life with a promise of taking him where he wants to go.
‘A Near-Death Experience is often accompanied by strong feelings of peacefulness, Dad,’ says the boy.
‘Grab the client list,’ says Bunny, resting his head on the wheel and playing with the hole in his trousers.
The boy says, ‘It… is… often… accompanied… by… strong… feelings… of… peacefulness,’ and he leans over and takes a tissue from the glove compartment and together they dab at the messy little scrape on his dad’s knee.
‘There you go,’ says the boy.
Bunny parks the Punto outside a tumbledown bungalow on the hill between Peacehaven and Newhaven – the residence of Miss Mary Armstrong, the last name on the list. The front yard is overgrown and littered with all manner of junk – used appliances and broken machines – a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, a bathtub full of yellowed newspapers, a ruptured kayak, a ruined Chesterfield settee and a motorcycle, dismantled and forgotten. Standing in the centre of the yard is a grotesque sculptural abstraction made from welded steel and strips of brightly coloured, spray-painted plastic.
‘What a shit-hole’ says Bunny. ‘They just get worse and worse.’
There had been three names left on the client list, but the other two names had turned out to be non-starters and a complete waste of time.
The first was a Mrs Elaine Bartlett, who lived on the fourth floor of a block of flats in Moulsecombe. Lying on the floor of its only working elevator was a bombed-out kid with a can of air freshner in one hand and a Tesco bag in the other and a Burberry cap on his head. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem, except the boy had emptied the contents of his bowels into his shorts and these were pulled down around his skinny, little ankles. The boy had managed, rather heroically, thought Bunny, to graffiti in green spray paint on the elevator wall, ‘I AM A SAD CUNT’. Bunny had stepped into the elevator, then stepped out and allowed its doors to judder shut. He contemplated momentarily climbing the four flights of stairs to Mrs Elaine Bartlett’s flat and realised, to his credit, that there was no way he was going to make it up them in his present condition, so he staggered back to the Punto.
The next name on the list, a Mrs Bonnie England, living over the hill in Bevendean was not at home in her semidetached brick-clad box, or so the guy who answered the door and claimed to be her husband maintained. Bunny could see this was clearly untrue, as the woman in the grease-stained pinafore, standing next to the guy who opened the door was obviously Mrs Bonnie England. Bunny didn’t press the point, primarily because Mrs Bonnie England was the animate equivalent of the fouled elevator in Moulescombe – a prime stomach-churner with the proportions and sex appeal of a Portakabin. Bunny had simply made a deferential apology for inconveniencing them (the husband was the red-faced, super-pissed-off type, and Bunny was tired of being beaten up) then backed respectfully away and fell over her rubbish bins. Lying on his back on the concrete walkway, Bunny watched Mrs Bonnie England and her husband hold each other’s hands and laugh at him.
‘Ouch,’ said Bunny.
As Bunny limped back to the Punto, he noticed, to his complete surprise, the ripe and rotund figure of River – the waitress from the breakfast room at the Grenville Hotel – walking down the street in her purple gingham uniform with the white collar and cuffs. He rubbed his eyes as if he were seeing things, like she were a mirage or a visual fallacy of some sort or something. She seemed like she had walked out of another lifetime, a less complicated and happier age, and his cock leapt at the memory of her, and his heart pounded like a military drum and he started to cry.
‘Hey!’ said Bunny, running up to her, dabbing at his cheeks. ‘What are you doing, River?’
River took one look at Bunny and screamed. She veered savagely in a wide and reckless arc and sped up, taking wild glances over her shoulder.
‘Hey!’ said Bunny. ‘It’s me! Bunny!’
River broke into a run, the various parts of her body pumping and pulsating beneath her uniform.
‘Hey, I’ve been having a really hard time!’ said Bunny, his hands thrown out to the sides.
‘Stay away from me!’ she cried. ‘Just stay away from me, you fucking maniac!’
‘But, River, didn’t we have a good thing going?!’ shouted Bunny, but he could hear her sobs as she charged away, her footsteps like gunshots down the street.
‘What was wrong with that girl, Dad?’ asked Bunny Junior, when his father got back in the Punto.
‘I think she has a medical condition,’ said Bunny.
Outside Mary Armstrong’s bungalow, Bunny leans across and says to Bunny Junior, with a belch of inflammable breath, ‘All right, wait here, I won’t be long.’
‘What are we going to do, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
Bunny takes a slug from his flask and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket.
‘Well, son, we’re going to shake the money tree, OK? We’re going to shaft some mugs and milk the jolly green cow,’ says Bunny, jamming a Lambert & Butler into his mouth. ‘We’re grubbing the mullah and gleaning the beans. We’re divesting the greater public of their spondulics. We are, as they say in the trade, raping and looting.’ Bunny torches his cigarette with his Zippo, scorching his quiff and filling the car with the stench of singed hair. ‘We’re trying to make some fucking boodle! Are you with me? And I’ve got a very good feeling about this one.’
‘Yes, Dad, but what are we going to do with ourselves after we make the boodle?’
‘We are vampires, my boy! We are vultures! We are a frenzy of piranha flenching a fucking water buffalo or a caribou or something!’ says Bunny, with a madman’s grin on his face. ‘We are fucking barracuda!’
The boy looks at his father and a stone-cold realisation hits him – he sees in the appalling orbits of his father’s eyes a resident terror that makes the child recoil. Bunny Junior sees, at that moment, that his father has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. The boy realises, suddenly, that for some time he has been the passenger on an aeroplane and that he has walked into the cockpit only to find that the pilot is dead drunk at the controls and absolutely no one is flying the plane. Bunny looks into his father’s panic-stricken eyes and sees a thousand incomprehensible dials and switches and meters all spinning wildly and little red bulbs flashing on and off and going beep, beep, beep and he feels, with a nauseating swoon, the aeroplane’s nose tip resolutely earthward and the big blue fiendish world come rushing up to annihilate him – and it scares him.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ he says, and straightens the little pink daisy in his father’s lapel.
‘We just have to open our great jaws and all the little fish will swim in,’ says Bunny, trying with great difficulty to extricate himself from the Punto. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one.’
Bunny Junior gets out of the Punto, moves around to the driver’s side, opens the door and helps Bunny out and his father performs a little shuffling two-step and starts to laugh out loud for no reason. Everything goes whoosh as the boy falls out of the sky.
Bunny walks up the oil-splattered concrete drive. He opens his flask of Scotch and empties it down his throat, then tosses it over his shoulder and it lands among the strew of garbage that lies about the overgrown yard. He mounts the steps to the bungalow, with its grimy pebbledash walls and shattered windows, and knocks on the front door.
‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ says Bunny, and the door creaks open but there is no one there. Bunny strokes the hank of hair that lies, limp and doomed, over one eye and feels compelled to enter.
‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ calls Bunny, and takes a furtive step across the threshold. ‘Anybody home?’ he says.
Inside, the atmosphere of dread and desolation in this dilapidated old house is so powerful Bunny can taste it, like rot, in his mouth, and he whispers to himself, ‘I deal in high-quality beauty products,’ and closes the door behind him.
The kitchen is dark, the blinds drawn, and Bunny breathes in a sour, animal stench. The door to the refrigerator has been left open, and a pulsing, jaundiced light emanates from it. Bunny notices the refrigerator contains a solitary, diseased lemon, like a premonition, and over by the sink he sees a dog of an indeterminate breed lying motionless on the grimy linoleum floor. He moves through the kitchen and realises, dimly and without concern, that he has left his sample case in the Punto, and finds that at some point in that prat-fall of a morning he has skinned the palms of his hands and that they are slick with watery blood. He wipes them on his trousers and enters the darkened hallway and, as he does so, Bunny becomes aware of a strange, atonal, squealing sound.
‘Miss Mary Armstrong? Miss Mary Armstrong?’ he calls out and squeezes his penis through his trousers, tugging at it, and letting it grow large and hard in his hand.
‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one,’ he says to himself and, in that instant, experiences a kind of weariness of the soul and sits down on the floor and leans back against the wall. He pulls his knees up to his chest and puts his head between them and does a drawing of something with his index finger in the accumulated dust on the floor.
‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ he says to himself and closes his eyes.
He remembers a crazy night he’d had at the Palace Hotel in Cross Street, not that long ago, with a cute, little blonde chick he’d picked up at The Babylon. He remembers himself standing by the bed, huffing and puffing, his barked cock feeling like he’d been fucking a cheese-grater or something, and cursing the fact that he hadn’t had the foresight to bring any lubricant with him. He remembers giggling to himself and thinking what a crazy party he was having and that he might go one more time, even though it looked like the Roofies were wearing off and the girl was showing signs of waking up. I mean, how much punishment can one swinger take! Then there was a knock on the door – three simple, unassuming raps – and to this day Bunny can’t work out what possessed him to open the door. The coke, maybe. The booze, probably. Whatever.
‘Room service,’ he had said to himself, with a giggle.
He opened the door and standing there was his wife, Libby. She looked at Bunny, naked and glazed in sweat, and then looked at the comatose girl spread-eagled on the bed, and all the years of aggrieved rage seemed to drain from her eyes and her face became as inanimate as a wax mask and she simply turned and walked off down the hall. When Bunny returned home the next morning, Libby had changed; she didn’t mention the night before, she stopped giving him a hard time, and she just kind of floated around the house, watching TV and sitting around and sleeping a lot. She even had sex with him. I mean, who would have guessed it, he thought.
‘Women,’ Bunny says, shaking his head and he starts to cry again.
After a while, Bunny stands up and slaps the dust from his trousers, then moves down the darkened hall as if he is walking into a great wind and, in time, he arrives at a black door. The piercing sonic oscillation is louder here and Bunny puts his hands over his ears and peers closely at a large poster of an extremely sexy girl taped to the door, and even before he realises who it is – the curtain of ironed hair, the zany black-rimmed eyes and the pornographic cupid-bow mouth – he feels new tears scald his cheeks and he reaches out and traces, with his finger, the tender contours of her infinitely beautiful face, as if by doing so he could bring her miraculously to life. He says, in the manner of a mantra or prayer or incantation or something, ‘Avril Lavigne. Avril Lavigne. Oh, my darling, Avril Lavigne.’
And without even considering what may exist on the other side of that black-painted door, Bunny pushes it gently open and addresses the room as though it were an alternate and mysterious universe, saying, through his sobs, ‘Hello, I am Bunny Munro. I represent Eternity Enterprises.’
Bunny Junior closes the encyclopaedia. He has been reading about the ‘Midwife Toad’ and is astounded to think that the male carries the eggs on his legs until they hatch! What a world we live in – he thinks. What an amazing world.
He picks up the client list that lies on the seat beside him and, holding it out in front of him, carefully and deliberately, tears it into strips. He puts one strip of paper into his mouth, sucks it to a soft pap and swallows it, then repeats the action until he has ingested the entire list. That – he thinks – puts an end to that.
Wisps of mist curl around the Punto and Bunny Junior watches the monstrous, swallowing fog roll down the street towards him, like an imagined thing, making phantoms of everything in its path. The boy leans back and closes his eyes and allows himself to be devoured by it.
Later, when he opens them again, he sees his mother sitting in her orange nightdress on a low cream brick wall opposite the Punto. She is smiling at him and beckoning him to come join her. Fiddleheads of mist play around her face and when she moves her hands the fog trails from her fingers like purple smoke. Bunny Junior opens the door of the Punto and steps out, like a tiny cosmonaut, into the vaporous air. He floats around the front of the Punto, down along the footpath, and sits on the wall next to his mother. Immediately, he feels a pulsing warmth and he looks up at her.
‘I’m so sorry, Mummy,’ he says.
His mother puts her arm around him and the boy rests his head against her body and she is soft and smells of another world and she is truly his mother.
She says, ‘Oh, my darling child, I am sorry too,’ and presses her lips into his hair. ‘I wasn’t strong enough,’ she says, and then, taking the boy’s face in her hands, says, ‘But you’re the strong one. You always were,’ and the boy feels the splash of his mother’s tears like they were real.
‘I just miss you so much, Mummy.’
‘I know,’ she says,
‘Don’t cry,’ says the boy.
‘You see?’ says his mother. ‘You are the strong one.’
‘What will we do about Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
His mother runs her fingers through the boy’s hair, then says, not unkindly, ‘Your father cannot help you. He is truly lost.’
‘That’s OK, Mummy,’ says the boy. ‘I am the navigator.’
His mother plants a kiss in the boy’s hair and whispers, ‘You have a such a good little heart.’
‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’ says the boy.
‘No, I am here to tell you something else,’ she says.
‘Can I ask you something first?’
‘OK,’ she says.
‘Are you alive, Mummy? You feel like you are. I can hear your heart beating,’ says the boy, and he holds his mother tight.
‘No, Bunny Boy, I am not,’ she says. ‘I died.’
‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’
‘Yes, but I want to tell you something else. I want to tell you this. That no matter what happens, I want you to persevere. Do you understand?’
The boy looks up at his mother.
‘Yes, I think so,’ he says. ‘What you are saying is that something really bad is going to happen and you want me to be strong.’
His mother puts his arm around him and smiles and says, ‘You see?’
Bunny steps into the room at the end of the hall. A single naked bulb burns dimly overhead and in this airless hideaway the squealing note is violent and invasive, and Bunny squints into the dark to find its source. Over by the far wall an electric guitar leans against an amplifier, feeding back. It takes Bunny some time to notice a young lady sitting on a ruined settee in the middle of the room. She does not seem to be moving. She is very thin and wears a pale yellow vest and a pair of pastel-pink panties and nothing else. Bunny can see the outline of the cobbled bones of her shoulders, the exaggerated angles of her knees, her elbows and her wrists. One spidery hand sits cupped in her lap, a cigarette burning down between her fingers. Her head is slumped forward and her straight, brown hair hangs like a curtain over her face.
‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ says Bunny taking a step towards her.
The girl jerks suddenly upright and raises her head, and says, in a slow and hollow croak, ‘She don’t live here no more. Do you want to see Mushroom Dave?’
The girl’s eyelids close and her head falls forward again.
‘Mushroom Dave… isn’t… here…’ she mutters to herself.
Bunny crosses the room and throws the switch on the guitar amp and the room is suddenly silent and magic. He sees suspended around the light bulb glittering motes of dust and he moves across the room and stands before the girl, a ribbon of blue cigarette smoke at her fingertips.
The girl lifts her head and all the muscles of her forehead are employed in an attempt to raise the lids of her eyes. Her hand flutters in mid-air and Bunny can see the fine, bird-like bones of her fingers through her paper-thin skin. The ash from her cigarette falls away and lands intact on the front of her vest. Her eyes are a green of ferocious, chemical intensity and her pupils are non-existent, and Bunny takes a step backward and says tenderly, ‘Oh, baby, look at you.’
The girl lowers her head again, in short, sharp increments, until her chin rests on her chest, and her hair falls across her face. Bunny reaches down and puts his fingers under her jaw and raises her head again and sees that the poster on the door was not Avril Lavigne at all but a picture of this sad girl before him – the same pert nose, kohled eyes, straight brown hair, nymphomaniacal upper lip and slender, puppyish body. Bunny feels, in the most obscure of ways, that the resemblance to Avril Lavigne is not just fortuitous, but supernatural. Bunny finds himself sucked, with a great rush of blood, into a vortex of association; where the fairy girl before him – with her blueing lips and trickle of bright blood in the crook of her arm, the mortal weaponry of hypodermic syringe and blackened spoon on the table in front of her – was indeed the accelerated collision of time and desire, the coalescence of all the spinning particles of need, like the motes of dust around the light bulb, brought into being by Bunny’s corrupted griefs. In this dim, sequestered room Bunny had walked through the looking glass, into death itself, hers and perhaps his own.
‘Let me take that,’ says Bunny and removes the cigarette butt from between her fingers and drops it into an overflowing ashtray. ‘We don’t want to burn the house down,’ he says.
He kneels before her and gently brushes the cigarette ash from the looped fabric of her faded yellow vest.
‘Oh, dear,’ he says, and lights a cigarette of his own, takes a puff or two and then crushes it out in the ashtray.
He slips his hands under her cotton vest and her body spasms and slackens and he cups her small, cold breasts in his hands and feels the hard pearls of her nipples, like tiny secrets, against the barked palms of his hands. He feels the gradual winding down of her dying heart and can see a bluish tinge blossoming on the skin of her skull through her thin, ironed hair.
‘Oh, my dear Avril,’ he says.
He puts his hands under her knees and manoeuvres her carefully so that her bottom rests on the edge of the settee. He slips his fingers underneath the worn elastic of her panties that are strung across the points of her hips, slips them to her ankles and softly draws apart her knees and feels again a watery ardour in his eyes as he negotiates a button and a zipper. It is exactly as he imagined it – the hair, the lips, the hole – and he slips his hands under her wasted buttocks and enters her like a fucking pile driver.
The great bank of mist has rolled by and Bunny Junior sits alone on the low brick wall and plays with his Darth Vader figurine, and although the ghost of his mother has gone, he can still feel the cool imprint of her farewell kisses on his eyelids like tiny twin promises. She is, like the song says, within him and without him and all about him. He is the strongest one and he is protected – that was her promise. Ah, promises, promises – he thinks – and he swings his feet and smiles and hums to himself and jumps his Darth Vader along the wall and watches an old black BMW roll down the street and turn into the driveway of the house with all the rubbish in the yard.
Bunny Junior sees the driver’s door open and a tall lean man leporello from the car like a set of dirty postcards. His hair is bleached blonde and he wears tight faded jeans, a black T-shirt and pink loafers. The boy notices a cool tattoo of a scorpion on the man’s neck, and thinks he looks like a very tough customer indeed – a real barracuda.
The man scopes the street, to the left and to the right, with a reflexive, practised regard, and Bunny Junior watches as he drops his bunch of keys, curses, bends down and picks them up. Then he mounts the steps, flicks his cigarette into the yard and enters the house, slamming the door behind him.
Bunny Junior swings his legs on the wall and thinks about what his mother told him, and he smiles to think that after all he is just a kid, and that’s all he has to be… a kid. A kid who likes Darth Vader, a kid with an amazing memory and who could retain all sorts of fascinating facts, a kid who was interested in the world, a kid with ‘a good little heart’, a kid who could even talk to ghosts. The adult world he was moving about in didn’t have to make sense to him – why everyone looks like zombies, why his mother died, why his father acts like a mental case half the time.
He remembers with a quickening of the heart the girl on the bicycle, and he wishes he could tell her that this is what she was – just a little girl – and as she grows up maybe she doesn’t have to turn into one of them – cock-a-doodling up the street all the time.
He knows something terrible is going to happen, but for some reason it doesn’t worry him all that much. He feels he has become immune to this crazy grown-up world like you do to influenza or leprosy or radiation or something. He feels like he has been given an antidote and he could be bitten by every snake on the planet and he would still be able to walk away. He thinks that ghosts are better protection than real people, and he wishes he could tell the girl on the bicycle that as well.
Bunny Junior hopes nothing really bad happens to his dad, because even though his mother said that he was lost, and even though he probably wasn’t very good at being a father in the way he has seen other fathers be on TV and in magazines and in parks and stuff – for example, when they buy the ointment to stop the child from going blind or throw a Frisbee around in the public gardens or something – he loves his dad with all of his heart and he wouldn’t in a million years swap him for another one. Who would? Like when he is funny, he is an absolute scream – like look at him now as he jumps down the steps of that run-down old house with all the busted refrigerators and bathtubs and junk, with his trousers around his ankles. Tell me a dad who’d do that!
A few seconds later, the front door of the house flies open and the man called Mushroom Dave rockets out of that forlorn little house with the sole intention of burying a golf club into the back of Bunny’s head. Bunny knows this because Mushroom Dave has a nine iron cranked in the air and is screaming, in a voice full of slaughter, ‘You’re a fucking dead man, you freak!’
Bunny intuits, as he charges across the yard, that to run is most likely a waste of time and that, in all probability, the catastrophe that had been seeking him out his entire life has finally found him and the Day of Judgement is at hand.
But he also thinks, as a matter of good policy, that he should just get the fuck out of there.
But as he crosses the front yard loaded with all that useless impedimenta, Bunny finds that every old washer, bathtub and refrigerator has conspired to punk his progress and, with each tumble and fall, he senses, in a premonitory way, the apocalyptic whisper of the death-dealing nine iron ruckle the air around his cranium. He knows, more than he knows anything in the world, that Mushroom Dave is right, he is a fucking dead man.
But, in an act of athletic agility that surprises even him, Bunny leaps over an old cast-iron, clawfoot bathtub (actually worth a few bob), pulling up his trousers at the same time, scrambles across the footpath, yanks open the door of the Punto, piles in and slams the door behind him. He hits the lock buttons, and with his heart thundering in his chest he turns the key in the ignition and the Punto does not cough and does not wheeze – and does not start.
‘You fucking piece of shit!’ cries Bunny, and then to Bunny Junior, ‘Lock your fucking door! We’re all gonna die!’
Bunny looks up and sees Mushroom Dave’s murderous face, like a terrible melted mask, and he clocks the horizontal sweep of the golf club and hears the gun-crack explosion of his side window and the bright shattering of cubed glass as it implodes inwards and showers Bunny in vicious little zircons.
Bunny tries the key again and the Punto, as if outraged by this attack upon its person, roars perversely into life at exactly the moment that Bunny realises that the boy is actually not in the car at all and that Mushroom Dave is screaming and bringing the club around again.
Bunny hits the accelerator, veers crazily into the street, just as Bunny Junior appears out of nowhere, in his shorts and his T-shirt, and walks almost casually into the path of the Punto.
‘Dad,’ he says.
Bunny slams on the brake and the Punto screeches to a halt and Bunny Junior stands motionless in front of the car and in that instant there is a moment of true intimacy between the father and his son. Their eyes lock and nobody moves and nobody says anything, yet a current of understanding passes between them, obscure and intangible, but that has something to do with shame and terror and death.
Mushroom Dave moves towards Bunny Junior, with polyps erupting across his brain and scarlet mayhem in his face and a black scorpion writhing on his neck. He raises the club above his head and says, ‘You’re fucking dead, you little cunt.’
But Bunny Junior stands there and does not move. He feels his mother’s kisses on his eyelids and he remembers her promise – that she is within him and without him and all about him – and he feels protected and he realises that his granulated eyelids no longer hurt and that the light of the day feels less painful and he feels that this man before him is just one more ugly customer in one more insane episode in an endless parade of demented incidents that collect around the affairs of adults like limescale or something. He feels it is just another part of the great rain of seagull shit that pours for ever over the doings of grown-ups – with their destructor faces and homicidal golf clubs and their filthy violent mouths and squirming black scorpions – and he simply does not feel impelled to move – and still Mushroom Dave draws closer and time grinds down and everyone floats like motes in space and Bunny starts screaming something inaudible and despairing but the boy cannot hear it because Bunny is hammering the Punto’s horn at the same time – and still the boy does not move – and with a great adult grunt, Mushroom Dave brings the nine iron around and the boy reflexively shifts a fraction to the left and feels the sting of the club whiffle against his ear, followed by an immense crack of metal on metal as it slams against the bonnet of the Punto. Bunny Junior places his hand to his ear and when he draws it away and looks at it he sees a smudge of blood on his fingers and the boy makes a kittenish cry and evaporates into the thin and menacing air then reappears in the passenger seat of the Punto.
Bunny roars off down the empty street as the golf club comes down again and blows out the rear window of the heroic little Punto. Bunny Junior rubs his ear, turns around and sees through the hole in the back window Mushroom Dave turn and run towards the house, tossing the nine iron into the yard and disappearing inside.
‘He was what you might call one of the crazy guys, wasn’t he, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
The boy reaches into the glove compartment and extracts a Kleenex and touches it against the tip of his ear and looks at the blood and says, ‘He got me, Dad.’
Bunny says nothing, the wind blowing through the nonexistent side window, his forelock whipping around his eyes, his jacket glittering with sequins of shattered glass. Bunny pulls into the side of the road, turns off the ignition and stares straight ahead, his hands locked around the steering wheel. He takes a series of breaths. He reaches under his seat and pulls out his emergency quarter-bottle of Scotch. He twists off the cap and swallows half of it. He shoves a Lambert & Butler into his mouth, lights it and takes a deep drag, and says to Bunny Junior, ‘Don’t ever fucking do that again.’
‘Do what, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Leave the fucking car.’
‘Mum wanted to talk to me,’ says the boy.
‘Christ! Look what that bastard did to the Punto!’ says Bunny, brushing the shattered glass from the dashboard. Bunny eyeballs the boy and says through clenched teeth, ‘This is not some fucking game we’re playing here.’
‘I know it’s not, Dad.’
‘This is the real fucking deal!’ he says.
Bunny realises then that, in all the commotion, the car radio has turned itself on and Kylie Minogue’s ‘Spinning Around’ is playing and he hears that crazy throbbing synthesiser and Kylie singing all achy about how she is up for fucking anything and he begins to tremble all over, shake and tremble, shake and tremble and jitter all over and his heart begins to palpitate like a jackhammer and his teeth start chattering like some clockwork skull and he draws back his arm, opens his mouth and with a great existential moan, puts his fist through the car radio.
‘That fucking song!’ he screams.
And then his mobile phone goes off.
‘Christ!’ he shrieks and claws his phone from his jacket pocket, flips it opens and screams, ‘What!’
‘Bunny?’
‘What!’
‘It’s Geoffrey, are you all right, my man?’
‘No, Geoffrey, I’m not fucking all right! I’m not fucking all right, at all!’
‘Listen, Bun, a Miss Lumley called the office. She says she’s your dad’s carer. She sounds… well… super-pissed-off. She says you’ve got to go to your dad’s place, pronto. She says it’s real urgent. She reckons, and I quote, that it’s “a matter of grave importance”,’ says Geoffrey.
‘What? Now?’ says Bunny.
‘She says your dad’s really sick or something.’
There is a silence at Bunny’s end of the line.
‘Just passing on the message, bwana,’ says Geoffrey.
Bunny lobsters the phone, tosses it on the dashboard and pounds at the steering wheel till his hands ache.
‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck! Fuck! And fuck!’
‘Where are we going, Dad?’
Bunny starts the Punto.
‘We’re going to see your granddad,’ says Bunny. ‘My father. The great Bunny Munro the First,’ he says, and Bunny slams his foot on the accelerator and careens off, jemmying the Punto into the early-afternoon traffic that flows along the coastal road. ‘That’s where we’re fucking going,’ he says.
Bunny Junior sees a great band of bruised thunderheads garnering together over a grey and swollen sea and flocks of seagulls like scraps of shredded newspaper thrown across a sky so full of insult and injury that it looks like it is about to burst into tears or piss its pants or something. He can smell the fish and the salt on the wind, and hear the breakers erupting over the sea wall, and he turns to his father and touches the tip of his ear and says, ‘I think it’s gonna rain, Dad.’
And sure enough Bunny Junior sees the first fat drops of rain thud on the dented bonnet of the Punto, and then the sky rips open and it all comes pouring down.
In a run-down terrace off the Old Steine, the carpets are threadbare and the light bulbs don’t work and on the faded ruined wallpaper there is a willow pattern of frotting Chinamen or Chinamen blowing each other or something – Bunny can’t quite work out which – as he mounts the stairs like it’s the last place on earth he wants to be. His ribs ache and his knees are skinned and his hands are barked and his nose resembles a poisonous red toadstool and there are holes in the knees of his trousers and his quiff looks intestinal, flopping across his forehead like something from the stomach of something.
Bunny Junior follows close behind, and as he passes each landing he sees the storm lashing at the windows and prays that the bin liners that his father gaffer-taped to the blown-out windscreen of the Punto hold fast because he has left his encyclopaedia on the back seat and if anything happened to that he doesn’t know what he’d do.
Coming down the stairs of the building, Bunny runs into Miss Lumley, dressed in a blue nurse’s uniform, with a satchel in one hand and a bunch of keys in the other and her little upside-down watch bobbing on her starched bosom.
‘Just the man I want to see,’ she says.
‘What happened to the lift?’ says Bunny, gasping for air and sweating into his shirt so profusely that it clings to his ribs.
‘It’s broken,’ says Miss Lumley, dryly. ‘It’s been that way for months, Mr Munro.’
Miss Lumley is in her fifties, with a pleasing and compassionate face that has been temporarily disfigured – reddened and soured and frazzled – by being employed in the execution of some unpalatable duty. She peers over the top of a pair of black-framed spectacles and dangles the keys out in front of her.
‘I quit,’ she says.
‘What?’ says Bunny.
‘Your father is dying, Mr Munro. He needs continuous professional care.’
‘I thought that’s what you were doing,’ says Bunny.
‘He needs to be in hospital, Mr Munro.’
Miss Lumley takes a step forward and presses the keys into Bunny’s hand and looks him up and down.
‘What happened to you?’ she asks.
‘He won’t go into hospital, you know that,’ says Bunny, leaning against the wall for support, the weight of the last few days hanging across his shoulders like bags of cement.
‘Perhaps you could both go in,’ says Miss Lumley, reaching up and gently touching the side of Bunny’s nose. ‘You look worse than he does.’
‘You don’t look too hot yourself,’ says Bunny, and smiles and reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out his flask of Scotch.
‘Drink?’
Miss Lumley smiles back. ‘It’s not been easy. I am a patient woman, Mr Munro. I have tried my best. I simply will not subject myself to the level of abuse I have been receiving. I’m sure you understand. Your father is a very sick man,’ she says, placing her hand on her chest. ‘Here,’ she says, then taps her head, ‘… and here.’
Bunny takes a hit from the flask, sticks a Lambert & Butler in his mouth and Zippos it as Miss Lumley looks down at Bunny Junior.
‘Hey, darling,’ she says.
Bunny Junior waggles his Darth Vader figurine.
‘I got hit in the ear,’ he says.
Miss Lumley bends down and, pushing her spectacles up the bridge of her nose, examines the boy’s tiny wound.
‘I’ve got something for that,’ she says and opens her satchel and produces a small tube of antiseptic cream and a box of plasters. She dabs a small amount of the cream on the tip of his ear and covers it with a tiny circular, flesh-toned plaster.
‘You have been in the wars,’ says Miss Lumley, closing her satchel.
‘You should see the other guy,’ says Bunny Junior, and looks up at his dad and smiles.
Miss Lumley turns to Bunny.
‘He’s a sweetheart,’ she says.
Bunny sucks on his Lambert & Butler, his hand trembling, an electrified nerve jumping under his right eye, a rivulet of perspiration trailing down the side of his face.
‘Seriously, Mr Munro, are you OK?’
‘Hey,’ says Bunny, ‘it’s visiting day.’
‘I understand your pain,’ says Miss Lumley, placing her hand on his arm. She picks up her satchel. ‘Get your father to a hospital, Mr Munro,’ and she disappears down the stairs.
Bunny jiggles the bunch of keys in his hand, wraps his fingers around them and looks at Bunny Junior.
‘Oh, man,’ he says. ‘Here we go.’
The boy looks back at him with his dismantled smile, his head angled to the side, and then together – father and son – they mount the final set of stairs.
Bunny tucks in his shirt and rearranges his hair and straightens his tie and drains the remainder of his flask of Scotch and sucks the last gasp out of the Lambert & Butler and turns to Bunny Junior and says, ‘How do I look?’ and without waiting for an answer knocks three times on the door of Flat 17 and takes a precautionary step backward.
‘Piss off, you bitch!’ comes a roar, from inside. ‘I’m busy!’
Bunny leans close to the door and says, ‘Dad! It’s me! Bunny!’
Bunny hears a terrible hacking from within. There is a clacking sound and scrape of furniture, a chain of raw expletives and the door opens and Bunny Munro the First stands in the doorway, small and bent, dressed in a brown Argyll jumper with snowflakes and a white polar bear on the front, a nicotine-coloured shirt and a mangled pair of brown corduroy slippers. The zipper gapes open in his trousers and faded blue tattoos peek from the sleeves of his jumper and the open neck of his shirt. The skin on his face is as grey as pulped newspaper and the gums of his dentures are stained a florid purple, the teeth bulky and brown. A sullage of colourless hair spills down the back of his egg-shaped skull, like chicken gravy. He brings with him an overpowering stench of stale urine and medicinal ointment. In one hand he holds a heavy cleated walking stick and in the other, a grimly unpleasant handkerchief. He looks at Bunny and clacks his dentures.
‘Like I said, piss off!’ He slams the door in Bunny’s face.
‘Oh, man,’ says Bunny, putting the key in the door and turning it. ‘Just don’t say anything,’ he says to Bunny Junior out of the side of his mouth, and together they enter the room.
The bedsit is small and unventilated and filled with a layer of stale cigarette smoke. The storm hammers at the windows behind lace curtains yellow with age, and in a tiny kitchen to the side, a kettle shrieks. The old man has sat himself in a sole leather armchair in front of the TV, his walking stick resting across his knees. Behind him a mahogany standard lamp with a tasselled shade casts a fierce light on the back of the old man’s elongated skull. On the TV, a pornographic video involving a teenage girl and a black rubber dildo plays out in colour-saturated reds and greens. The old man pushes his gnarled fist into the lap of his rancid grey trousers, claws at his crotch and proclaims, ‘The fucking thing don’t work!’
The old man looks up from his chair and rubs at his jaw and out of one shrewd eye he scrutinises Bunny’s unfortunate demeanour. He sucks air through his psychedelic dentures, points at Bunny’s red rosette nose and says, ‘How did you get that? Raping an old lady?’
Bunny touches Mrs Brooks’ rings in his jacket pocket and with a twinge of shame or something says, ‘What you need is a nice cup of tea, Dad,’ and walks into the kitchen and turns the screaming kettle off.
‘No, I don’t,’ says the old man. ‘What I need is to get my fucking rocks off!’ and he scrabbles at the flies of his trousers again.
Bunny crosses the room and hits the switch on the TV.
‘Perhaps we can turn this off, Dad,’ he says.
‘Give us a fag, then,’ snorts the old man and wipes at the foam in the corners of his mouth. ‘That fucking bitch stole mine.’
Bunny crosses the room and hands his father his pack of Lambert & Butlers and the old man sticks one between his lips and puts the pack in the top pocket of his shirt. Bunny lights his father’s cigarette as Bunny Junior walks across the room to a little birdcage sitting on an antique Sutherland end-table by the window. Inside it, on a perch threaded with ivy, sits a tiny mechanical bird with red and blue wings. Bunny Junior runs his fingers along the gilded bars of the cage and the little automata rocks on its perch.
‘Come on, Dad, let’s make you a nice cup of tea,’ says Bunny.
‘I don’t want a nice cup of tea,’ sneers the old man and drags on his cigarette, then presses his handkerchief to his mouth and embarks on a seemingly endless bout of coughing that bends his old body double and brings dark, yellow tears to his eyes.
‘Are you all right, Dad?’ asks Bunny.
‘Eighty fucking years old and I go and get lung cancer,’ he says and spits something unspeakable into his handkerchief. ‘Yeah, I’m just fucking great.’
‘Is there anything I can do, Dad?’ says Bunny.
‘Do? You? You must be fucking joking,’ says the old man.
Bunny Junior turns the gold key in the front of the bird cage and the automata jumps to life and sings a song in a series of short sweet notes, its beak clacking open and shut, its red and blue wings lifting and falling. A look of immense pleasure passes across the boy’s face.
‘Don’t break that thing. It’s worth a bloody fortune,’ says the old man who is attempting to pull the zipper up on his flies, working at it with his twisted fingers.
‘Sorry, Granddad,’ says the boy.
The old man stops what he is doing and looks up at Bunny, the cigarette clamped between his dentures, threads of skin like worn rubber bands looping at his throat.
‘What did he call me?’ he says, jabbing a finger at the boy. ‘Is he taking the piss?’
‘He’s your grandson, Dad. You know he is,’ says Bunny. The old man turns to Bunny Junior, who watches the little mechanical bird as it sings and dances on its perch.
‘Leave that bloody bird alone and come over here to Grandpa.’
With small, cautious steps Bunny Junior moves towards his grandfather, but the old man beckons him closer and leans towards the boy and cocks a thumb at Bunny, who stands clicking his Zippo and pointlessly patting at the pockets of his jacket for a cigarette. The old man says conspiratorially to the boy, ‘I hope you break his heart. I hope you break it like he broke mine.’
‘Leave him alone, Dad,’ mutters Bunny, ‘and give us a fag.’
‘Fuck off and buy your own,’ says Bunny Senior and looks at Bunny from the corner of one yellow, dewy eye, then rolls his tongue around his mouth and hawks into his handkerchief. Bunny Junior turns to the birdcage and twists the key again.
‘I just spoke to the woman who looks after you. Miss… What’s her name?’ says Bunny.
‘Cunt-face.’
‘She says you need to go to the hospital, Dad.’
Bunny Senior raises his walking stick above his head, his face purple with rage.
‘You tell that bloody bitch if she ever sets foot in my place again, I’ll break this fucking stick over her back! You hear me? I’ll poke her…’ and the old man makes an obscene penetrative gesture with the walking stick and bares his dentures, ‘… in the anus. I’ll pull her fucking guts out.’
‘Jesus, Dad,’ says Bunny.
‘I’ll fucking eviscerate the bitch,’ and rolls his huge round tongue around his lips. He hacks into his handkerchief again and holds it up for Bunny Junior to see. He shouts, ‘See that? That’s my fucking lung!’ then points at Bunny with his walking stick. ‘Your fucking dad, I tried to teach him the business,’ he snarls. ‘I showed him the most lovely things a boy could see…’
‘Come on, Dad,’ says Bunny.
‘And he ends up peddling toilet brushes!’
‘Beauty products.’
‘Door to fucking door,’ snarls the old man, contemptuously.
‘By appointment,’ says Bunny.
‘Fucking amateur.’
‘I work through a reputable company,’ says Bunny.
‘You’re the bloody Bog Roll Man,’ says the old man and puts his head between his legs, moans mortally and coughs his guts out. He wipes at his eyes with his handkerchief and sucks on the cigarette.
‘Dad, you need proper medical attention,’ says Bunny.
‘You broke my heart. You dashed the cup from my lips, you little cunt.’
‘Dad, you need…’
‘Don’t you come round here telling me what I need.’
The old man addresses Bunny Junior, with one raised finger, taps the pocked bulb of his snout and says, ‘I was an antique dealer, boy. I had a nose for it.’
‘Dad…’ says Bunny.
‘You want to end up a bloody nobody like him?’
‘Dad…’
The old man looks at Bunny and sneers.
‘Shut your fucking hole. You are beyond recall. You are a lost cause. But we might just be able to save the kid,’ and the old man slams the arms of his leather chair. ‘If he’d just use his ears…’
Bunny Senior hacks into his handkerchief. His face grows purple with the effort and he takes some time to compose himself and then his eyes glaze, dimmed in memory and loss, and he speaks in a sly, soft voice.
‘Down on Tom Tiddler’s ground, we were, picking up gold and silver.’
‘We should go, Dad,’ says Bunny to the old man. ‘Come on, Bunny Boy.’
‘I had a nose for it. I could smell a piece of Chippendale, the box of Georgian silver under the stairs… a pretty little bit of French, a tasty little bon du jour. Those old girls, give them a few words, and that special look… well, can we do business, then, madam? I’d have the Sheraton escritoire off the old bitch for a song… yes, a lovely bit of serpentine… and there would be not a straight line on it…’
Bunny Senior makes gentle curves in the air with his hand and says in a state of awe, ‘I was a fucking master of the art.’
Bunny finds himself wavering on his feet, the whisky hitting him from all different directions at the same time, and he looks around for somewhere to sit but he can’t find anywhere and anyway he feels if he doesn’t have a cigarette soon then he will gnaw his bloody arm off, and he says to the old man, who has now closed his eyes and is reeling in his seat and making motions in the air like he is describing the contours of a well-endowed woman, ‘You sure you don’t want me to make you a cup of tea before we go, Dad?’
The old man drops his hands, opens one cruel eye and regards Bunny.
‘You make me want to vomit,’ he snarls.
The mechanical bird winds down and stops singing and grows still on its little perch and Bunny Junior turns and takes a step forward and stands in front of his grandfather.
‘My dad could sell a bicycle to a barracuda,’ he says.
There is a sudden anti-sound like a retracted implosion of air that presses around Bunny’s skull and forces him to throw his hands over his ears, stretch wide his mouth and pop the pockets of air in the joints of his jaw. He feels as though he has been plunged to the bottom of a dark and soundless ocean, the hydrostatic pressure so intense it feels like knitting needles hammered into his eardrums. Not a word is spoken and Bunny floats aghast in this petrified state.
Then, just as suddenly, all the sound comes rushing back and the old man jams his cigarette into a saucer on the butler’s tray beside him and shouts, ‘What did you say?’
‘Dad,’ says Bunny. ‘Please.’
The old man raises himself to his feet and stands crooked as a question mark, as if his ancient spine had lost the power to support his furious, bulbous skull. ‘Do you mock me? Do you mock me!?’ he shrieks.
‘Dad, don’t!’ implores Bunny, moving forward, one arm outstretched in front of him, but there is all this whisky in his bloodstream and he stumbles over a walnut footstool – where did that come from? – and falls flat on his face.
With a roar, the old man lunges, like an animal, towards the boy and jabs him viciously in the ribs with his walking stick and knocks the child to the ground.
‘Do you fucking-well mock me?!’ he screams.
Bunny Junior stares at his father, stunned. Bunny climbs to his feet and sees his father’s bloodless knuckles tighten around the handle of the walking stick and witnesses a terrible and familiar bearing of his dentures and a great hurtling-away of the years.
‘Don’t, Dad,’ he says, quietly.
Bunny Senior rears around – this tiny, wicked man – and raises his walking stick above his head and beats at the air and makes ready to bring it down on Bunny.
‘What did you say? What did you say to me?!’
Bunny cringes, nearly to the floor, screws shut his eyes and throws his hands over his head and whispers, ‘Sorry, Dad,’ and waits.
In time, Bunny opens his eyes and sees his father sitting back in his cracked leather armchair, his walking stick lying on the floor, rubbing his wrists against his temples, his yellow, deathbed fingers clawing the air like a rack of tiny, mangled antlers. He groans, then examines Bunny through a merciless, solitary eye and says, ‘Look at you.’
The boy stands now, silent and frozen and alone. He looks down at his father, who is folded in a heap on the floor. The old man claws the ground for his walking stick, then points it at Bunny and says to the boy, ‘Get him out of here.’
Bunny Junior walks over to his father and Bunny raises himself to his feet. The old man explodes into another bout of coughing, hauled from the depths of his lungs. Bunny opens the door and he and the boy step out.
‘Son?’ says the old man.
Bunny turns around and looks at his father. The old man holds the fouled handkerchief out in front of him, yellow water running from his eyes.
‘I’m dying, son,’ he says.
Bunny’s eyes fill with tears.
‘Dad?’ he says, and he makes to step back into the room but the old man reaches out with his walking stick and, with a last enfeebled lunge, pushes shut the door.
The rain beats down upon the Punto and lashes at the green bin liners that are taped over the shattered windows, that have, by some miracle, held fast and not capsized and poured water all over Bunny Junior’s encyclopaedia and made him have to commit suicide or something. Purple thunder rumbles overhead and sends veins of lightning crackling across the sky. Bunny Junior clutches his encyclopaedia to his chest, like it is his only friend in the world – except at this moment it is no help and he just doesn’t know what to think. He knows that within the pages of the encyclopaedia there is all the information anyone could ever need to know – the answer to all things. But he still doesn’t know what to think. He knows that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes, and he knows that there are four-eyed fish that can see above water and below water at the same time, and he even knows that Joseph Guillotin did not invent the guillotine, but what he doesn’t know is what to do about his dad, who has tears running down his face and who is not saying anything and has no idea where he is going or what he is looking for and is driving around and around in circles. He has stopped at a shop and bought a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky and he is smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish and driving like a maniac and crying like he doesn’t know what.
For some reason he keeps thinking about the little mechanical bird in the cage, with its colourful wings and pretty little song, and that makes him wish all over again that his dad would stop crying, so he could have a turn.
‘Dad?’ says the boy as Bunny steers the Punto into an empty parking space outside a small café on Western Road. People huddle together under a striped and dripping canvas awning, smoking and drinking coffee, dressed in T-shirts and miniskirts and flip-flops, unprepared for this heavy summer rain.
‘I spoke to Mummy today,’ says the boy, over the top of his encyclopaedia that he keeps pressed to his chest.
A spavined old vagrant hobbles past wearing a flesh-coloured eye-patch and sodden rags wrapped around his impossibly swollen feet. He has soiled the front of his trousers and wears an undersized T-shirt that shows the matted fur on his stomach and says, ‘SHIT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PARTY NAKED’. He taps a tin cup against the window of the Punto and peers inside, scrutinises the occupants through his single, crazed eye, shakes his head in consternation and shuffles off into the rain.
‘What did you say?’ says Bunny, turning and looking at Bunny Junior as if he had only just realised that there is a nine-year-old boy sitting beside him.
‘I spoke to my mummy today.’
‘What?’ he says again.
‘It was really her, Dad. We talked for ages.’
‘You what?’ panics Bunny, and starts slapping at his jacket and looking everywhere at once. He slugs at the Scotch and drags on his Lambert & Butler and blows bones of smoke out his nose and shouts, ‘You what?!’
‘She says she’s coming to see you soon,’ says Bunny Junior.
‘Eh?’ says Bunny, beneath the clamour of the rain, and then does the thing with the whisky and cigarettes all over again.
‘Dad, I think I should go back to school,’ says the boy.
‘Eh?’ says Bunny, and he looks across at the café and finds, amid the knot of people sheltering from the rain, three women sitting around a table, deep in conversation, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. One is a blonde and one is a brunette and one is a redhead.
‘I think we should go home, Dad,’ says the boy.
‘Where?’ says Bunny, and a spasm of panic moves across his face and he begins to claw away the bin liner taped to the window, then peers out at the three women. A great torrent of rain gushes in, drenching him, and he shouts into the deluge, ‘What?’
‘I think it’s time we went home, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior, and suddenly he feels a frightful woe in his guts. He reaches over and places his hand on his father’s shoulder as if to pull him back from some deplorable turn of events.
‘Dad?’ he says.
‘Wait here,’ says Bunny, jerking his shoulder away.
Bunny throws open the door of the Punto and decants himself into the gutter, the booze ramping through his veins. He scampers across the footpath, stands upright and pats in vain at his decommissioned dishrag of a quiff, tugs at his tie with the dead rabbits on it and ploughs blindly through the plastic tables and chairs and says to the three women with their cigarettes and cappuccinos, ‘I’m Bunny Munro. I am a salesman. I sell beauty products.’
The women look at each other in bewilderment and the blonde, who has a smudge of chocolate froth on her upper lip, actually starts to laugh, covering her mouth with her long-fingered hand.
Bunny starts to hop up and down, waggling his hands behind his head, and says, manically and with great urgency, ‘I sell rich, hydrating, age-targeting lotions that soften the skin and exfoliate surface cells for a younger, smoother look!’
‘Excuse me!’ says the blonde, who has stopped laughing, but Bunny is screaming now, under the thundering sky and with all the rain coming down.
‘The skin is awakened to its fullest potential and infused with a surge of new beauty, stimulating your feelings of pleasure and well-being!’
Bunny falls to his knees and wraps his arms around the long and shapely legs of the woman with blonde hair and burrows his face into her lap and feels all the psychic strings that bind him to the rational earth snapping like rubber bands in his skull, and he bellows into her dress, ‘What am I gonna do?!’
‘Waiter!’ cries the woman. ‘Waiter!’
Bunny looks up at the woman and sees the stripe of chocolate froth on her lip through a film of tears.
‘Will you fuck me?’ he says.
The woman rears back, her long fingers at her mouth. The brunette and the redhead scrape back their chairs.
‘Waiter!’ they scream.
Bunny stands and from the corner of his eye sees Bunny Junior’s face like a little scared balloon framed in the window of the Punto and he throws out his arms and addresses the shrinking customers with the whole of his voice.
‘Will somebody please fuck me?!’
Thunder rumbles across the sky and Bunny hears the women scream – many of them, all of them – horrified and familiar as he grabs at them, his teeth bared, his mouth gaping wide, jumps at them, leaps at them – and an Italian waiter with a blue jaw and black apron grabs Bunny around the chest, wrestles him from the café and drags him down the street.
With a shove, the waiter deposits Bunny on the wet footpath outside the Punto and stalks away.
Bunny wrenches open the car door and piles in and looks at the boy. He turns the key in the ignition, guns the engine and looks at the boy. He zooms into the rainy street just as a maroon ‘DUDMAN’ concrete mixer truck veers into the oncoming traffic, its barrel rolling, its windscreen wipers frantically lashing at the storm. Bunny clocks the tanned, tattooed arm hanging limp from the window and looks at the boy. The mixer truck blows its horn – once, then once again – then speeds up and ploughs head-on into the Punto. There is a brutal compaction of metal and an explosion of glass, and as Bunny goes flying past, he looks at the screaming boy.
Bunny opens his eyes and the world is filmed in red. He realises, in a distant way, that he is on his hands and knees in the middle of a street. He can hear far-off wailing and feels an immense rain beating down upon him. He sees that the ground beneath him is pink with his own blood. He crawls a couple of paces and wonders what he is doing. He looks behind him and sees a little yellow car twisted around a maroon concrete mixer and he slowly stands up. He looks at his hands and wonders why he is holding a child’s encyclopaedia. He looks back at the crumpled yellow car and in his mind’s eye he sees the face of a boy.
Then there is a boom of thunder and Bunny looks up at the black clouds that move overhead and he sees a silver pitchfork of lightning leap from the sky and with an intake of breath he throws out his chest and sucks the lightning into his heart and the encyclopaedia flies from his hand with a loud bang and a webbed scar blossoms across his body and he crashes, stiff as a plank, onto the rain-filled street.
First there is the darkness. But Bunny feels he has always been aware of the darkness. Then there is the smell – a rancid stench of body odour with a tang of terror-crazed, female blood trapped within it – and Bunny realises as he inhales this stink that he is, indeed, alive. He finds he is swimming up from the most silent and suffocating depths of the deepest and blackest of seas. He realises that this thing that smells so badly and is squatting beside him has reached way down into the watery darkness and dragged him gasping for air to the surface. He can feel its heat against his lower body but there is something debauched and obscene about its proximity. The thing that is sitting beside him leans across and locks him in an embrace. He can feel, in its form, a plasticity – an absence of bones – and that the creature is quite possibly reptilian by nature. When it speaks, its breath smells of shit and the stench adheres to the contours of his face like a dishcloth or winding-cloth or something.
‘They got me, those motherfuckers,’ it says.
The words crawl across Bunny’s face and seep into his nostrils, his mouth, his ears.
‘They have done me down, my brother,’ it says.
Bunny can sense that whatever this thing is, it is naked. He can feel its erect phallus pressed against his stomach, pulsing with sexual heat, as it leans across him.
‘Twenty-five to life, they gave me!’ it wails, suddenly, clinging to Bunny. ‘Twenty-five to life – with no fucking pussy!’
Bunny feels the creature crawl up on top of him and the scorch of its penis – long and thin – shift against his stomach and an insistent knee separates his thighs.
‘Help me!’ it moans.
Bunny tries to move but cannot. He attempts to open his eyes but they feel as though they have been stitched shut with a needle and thread. Then he realises he can see tiny pinpoints of light appearing from the world beyond.
‘But I’ve been watching you,’ says the voice, with a sudden, cloying intimacy. ‘You’re a fucking trip, man!’
Bunny feels a greased arm taking leverage around his neck.
‘You’re out of this world, baby. You’re in a league of your own!’ he says.
Bunny feels the pulsing phallus, move down his stomach, slide across his groin and slip between his legs.
‘You are a fucking inspiration!’
Bunny struggles, in vain, but is impotent to move his arms or legs.
‘You have the talent, boyfriend! You are a master of the art!’
Bunny sees the points of light connecting, expanding, and the black slats of his eyelashes drawing apart. He opens his eyes and his pupils contract painfully against the incursive light.
‘Here’s something to remember me by,’ says the voice, in a whisper, ‘until we meet again.’
Then he sees the smeared, scarlet face with its black hole of a mouth, its raw, red tongue, its yellow eyes, its goatish horns, all come down upon him like a lover, and he experiences a searing penetration between his splayed buttocks.
Then, at the point of climax, hot and liquid against his ear, he hears the demon’s grievous moan, rising from his memory.
‘My true intent is all for your delight,’ he thinks it says, but he can’t be exactly sure.
The night is a deep velvet blue and the moon an alabaster balloon and the planets and the stars are spilled across the heavens, in handfuls and heaps, like gold coins. The smell of brine lives deep within the breeze that blows up from across the ocean and speaks, in a secret way, to the crowd of women who walk down the main sodium-lit thoroughfare – it speaks of deep, feminine mysteries and unawakened and illimitable desires, of silver-haired mermaids and bearded, trident-waving mermen and the looped humps of sea monsters and bejewelled cities drowned beneath masses of unreadable water. No one can remember a night quite so magical in Bognor Regis for years.
Bunny stands at the window of his chalet and watches the crowd as it moves down the lamp-lined path and passes the swimming pool, pink and magical, where a reinforced concrete elephant in a yellow tutu spurts strawberry-coloured water from its upraised trunk. Bunny smiles to himself as the crowd of women, unsuspecting, pass the giant fibreglass rabbit, goggle-eyed and buck-toothed, that stands like a bizarre avatar or tribal fetish beside the water-slide. On a little track circling the main swimming pool sits a brightly coloured electric train for children, its engine adorned with the same rapturous face of a circus clown that Bunny remembers from when his father brought him here as a child. He remembers, too, the fun fair, with its world-class monorail and Apache Fort and Dutch windmill that the crowd drifts past, as it winds its way around the empty swings and deserted slides and abandoned seesaws of the children’s playground.
A black rag of cloud slides across the surface of the moon and Bunny sucks on a Lambert & Butler and watches someone point at the Gaiety Building and someone point at the putting green (with its huge golf ball balanced on a thirty-foot golf tee) and someone point at the amusement arcade and everyone ascend the stairs and enter the Main Hall of Butlins Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis.
Standing at the window, there is a certain determination in Bunny’s posture, his feet firmly upon the earth, his chin raised, his shoulders serious and square and a look of concentration, but also mourning, around his eyes.
Over the entrance to the Main Hall the Butlins mission statement blinks in a candy-pink neon, ‘OUR TRUE INTENT IS ALL FOR YOUR DELIGHT’, and Bunny can see through the arched windows of the hall the crowd of women milling around, their invitations in their hands, staring at each other and wondering what they are doing there.
‘Our true intent is all for your delight,’ says Bunny to himself and he throws back his head and drains the contents of a can of Coca-Cola.
Bunny has put on a fresh shirt – thick red stripes with a contrasting white collar and cuffs – and the bizarre webbed scar curls from the open neck of his shirt like crystals of frost. He has loaded extra pomade into his hair and arranged his lovelock so it sits on his forehead with a new, almost yogic serenity. His cheeks are freshly shaved and he smells heavily of cologne and there is a thin, embossed cicatrix above his right eye, an inch long, that looks like it has been sculpted from pink plasticine.
‘What did you say, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.
‘I said, our true intent is all for your delight,’ says Bunny.
‘What does that mean?’ says the boy.
‘I don’t know.’
Bunny Junior sits sunk in a beige corduroy beanbag, his own scar across his left eye, faint and pale, like a distant, ghosted echo of his father’s. He is dressed in a white T-shirt and a pair of blue gaberdine shorts and flip-flops.
Bunny turns to the boy, sucks on his cigarette, expels a funnel of smoke into the room and asks, ‘Will you be all right, Bunny Boy?’
‘I’ll be all right. But will you?’ says Bunny Junior.
Bunny crumples the can of Coke and lobs it into the sink in the tiny kitchenette and says, ‘Yes, I’m ready,’ then slips on his jacket, throws his arms out to the side and says, ‘How do I look?’
‘You look good, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior. ‘You look ready.’
‘Well, yeah, because there is something I’ve got to do,’ says Bunny.
‘I know, Dad,’ says the boy, and he picks the scorched remnants of his encyclopaedia, with its rain-swollen pages, off a low laminated coffee table.
‘You go wait for me down at the swimming pool, and I’ll come by and pick you up later,’ says Bunny.
‘Yeah, Dad, I know.’
Bunny sucks the last gasp out of his Lambert & Butler, crushes it in an ashtray, checks himself in the mirror (for the hundredth time) and says, ‘Sure you do, Bunny Boy.’
Bunny Junior lies back in the beanbag and opens his encyclopaedia and peels apart the ruined pages until he finds a definition of the word ‘Fantasy’.
‘A fantasy is a situation imagined by an individual which does not correspond with reality but expresses certain desires or aims of its creator. Fantasies typically involve situations that are impossible or highly unlikely,’ reads the boy and closes the encyclopaedia. ‘Who would have guessed that, Dad?’ he says, secretly pinching his leg.
‘See you, Bunny Boy,’ says Bunny, and he opens the door of the chalet and steps outside into the cool evening air.
Outside the night air carries within it only the faintest idea of a chill but it is enough for Bunny to register a shiver run through his body. At least he hopes it is the breeze and not some eleventh-hour lack of resolve, because, as he walks down the path towards the Main Hall, he feels a rising but not altogether unexpected suspicion that the course of action he is about to embark upon may not be as straightforward as he has planned.
He stops walking for a moment, puts a Lambert & Butler in his mouth and looks up at the night sky for guidance or strength or courage or something, but the moon appears counterfeit and merely cosmetic, the stars cheap and gimmicky.
‘Oh, man,’ he says to himself. ‘What happened to the night?’
Bunny Zippos his cigarette, takes a deep drag, holds it in his lungs and comes to understand that there is simply no point in turning back, he must do what he came here to do, and he expels a resolute stream of blue smoke into the air and moves on. He leaves the path, makes his way around the side of the Main Hall and enters the stage door of the Empress Ballroom.
The carpeted stairs are rank with cigarette smoke and stale beer, and as he climbs them, Bunny sees within the bizarre amorphous pattern of the flock wallpaper a gallery of sinister faces with elongated and spiteful eyes. He sees these as a congregation of accusatory faces – a grotesque collection of the aggrieved – and he hopes that they are not some kind of premonition of things to come.
He traces his finger along the raised scar over his right eye and walks down a short hall, and as he draws closer he hears the dull murmur of the crowd gathering and he thinks he can hear, on the soft-pedal, a note of anxious expectation growing within it. He also senses, deeper down, a reverberation of malice and mistrust that he knows is imagined, or at least anticipated, but nevertheless implodes within him like a sadness.
‘Oh, man,’ he says again and he enters the cramped backstage area of the Empress Ballroom.
Bunny sequesters himself into the wings and, hidden there, takes a deep breath and pulls back one of the red velvet, star-spangled curtains and sees that the interior of the Empress Ballroom, with its purple-and-gold satin ceiling and its ornamental balconies, is filled to capacity with the crowd of women that he had observed walking up the main path. He feels his heart constrict and a bubble of dread rise in his chest.
On the tiny glittering stage, a three-piece band dressed in pale green velour jackets begins to play an instrumental version of a soft rock classic that Bunny feels is both familiar and foreign at the same time.
Bunny puts a Lambert & Butler in his mouth and pats his pocket for his Zippo.
‘Need a light, friend?’ says a voice.
Bunny turns and sees a tall, lean-looking figure standing, like a tower of obtuse angles, in the shadows. He has a cigarette dangling from his mouth and what appears to be a saxophone hanging around his neck. The man strikes a match and the flare of the flame reveals him to be a blue-eyed, handsome man in his early fifties. He sports a black moustache, wears a hairnet and is dressed in the same pale green velour jacket that the other band members are wearing. He reaches over and lights Bunny’s cigarette.
‘Shouldn’t you be on?’ says Bunny, keeping his voice low.
The musician takes a drag of his cigarette and blows a considered plume of smoke into the air and says, ‘No, man, they haul me in on the third number.’ Then he takes a step back, sucks on his cigarette again and gives Bunny the once-over. ‘Hey, man, I love the quiff. What are you?’ he asks, ‘A joke-man? A magician? A singer?’
‘Yeah, something like that,’ says Bunny, and then adds, ‘I dig your moustache.’
‘Thanks, man. The missus don’t go for it much.’
‘No, it looks good,’ says Bunny.
‘Well, it’s a commitment,’ says the musician and takes a final drag on his cigarette and with a swivel of his black leather boot grinds it into the floor.
‘I can see that,’ says Bunny.
‘But I do love my wife,’ says the musician, tracing his fingers along his moustache, a distant look in his eyes.
Bunny feels a wave of emotion erupt in his throat and he presses his lips together and turns his face away, so that it is momentarily lost in shadow.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a tiny man in a red tuxedo with white piping and gold buttons the size of milk bottle tops and an immaculate strawberry-blonde toupee pushes past Bunny and bounds onto the stage. He executes, with a shimmy and a shake, a series of rolling gestures with his hands that brings the band’s song to a close.
The musician with the moustache leans in close to Bunny and behind his hand speaks to him out of the side of his mouth.
‘Hey, did you hear the one about the junkie who shot up a whole packet of curry powder?’
‘No,’ says Bunny, who has pulled back the curtain again and is anxiously scanning the crowd on the dance floor of the Empress Ballroom.
‘Yeah, well, now he’s in a korma.’
On the stage the diminutive Master of Ceremonies skips up to the microphone, pops his cuffs and throws his arms out wide and says in a voice that surprises Bunny in its depth and insistence, ‘Hi-di-hi!’
The audience responds with a smattering of non-committal applause.
‘I can’t hear you!’ says the MC, in a singsong voice, ‘I said “Hi-di-hi!”’ and then walks to the lip of the stage and points the microphone at the audience.
‘Hi-di-hi!’ says the audience, in unison.
‘That’s better! Are we gonna have fun tonight?’
The crowd, swept up, clamours its assent, with foot stomps and hand claps.
‘We are gonna dance!’ says the MC, and the little man does a nifty twisting movement with his tiny feet, his pink toupee shimmering in the stage lights, the buttons on his jacket twinkling. ‘We are gonna sing!’ he cries, and yodels horribly, then cocks his thumb over his shoulder at the band and says in a panto-whisper, waggling his thick black eyebrows, ‘I better leave that to the professionals!’ The crowd laugh and whistle and applaud. ‘And when the lights go down,’ says the MC, winking suggestively, ‘maybe make a little love!’
The crowd hoot and stomp their feet as the little man shuffles around the stage making suggestive movements with his tiny, gloved hands and grinding his child-like hips.
Bunny feels a thread of perspiration wind its way down the side of his face and he pulls a handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and presses it against his forehead. The musician looks at Bunny with an expression of concern or sympathy or something.
‘What are you doing here, man?’ he asks.
‘I’m just trying to put things right, you know,’ says Bunny.
‘Uh-huh, I hear you,’ says the musician. ‘We’ve got to love one another or die, brother.’
‘Yeah, I heard that,’ says Bunny, and again a swell of regret blooms within him and he puts his hand up to his heart.
‘It’s super-glue, baby,’ says the musician, and blows softly into his saxophone. ‘It keeps the heart of the world pumping.’
Bunny peers around the curtain again, and the mirrorball that hangs from the ceiling of the ballroom has begun to revolve and splinters of silver light dance across the faces of the crowd and Bunny sees Georgia, standing in the front row, a thing of certain beauty, proud-looking, almost regal, in a cream chiffon evening dress with scarlet sequins sewn across its bodice like a spray of arterial blood. Her yellow hair hangs in loose ringlets around her lavender eyes and she sways, back and forth, to some inner song, a content smile upon her face. Zoë and Amanda stand each side of Georgia dressed in identical indigo trouser suits. Bunny notices that Zoë now has the same candy-coloured hair extensions as Amanda, and they look happy.
Standing nearby, Bunny sees the Tae Kwon Do black belt, Charlotte Parnovar, dressed in a Mexican peasant skirt and a white embroidered blouse, and as Bunny unconsciously traces his fingers along the lumped bridge of his nose he sees that her face looks softer, less severe, all evidence of the unsightly cyst on her forehead gone.
Bunny sees Pamela Stokes (Poodle’s ‘gift’) with her arm around the waist of the cuckolded Mylene Huq from Rottingdean, both smiling and stealing shy and coquettish glances at one another.
Bunny recognises Emily, the cashier from McDonald’s, dressed in a snug yellow top and tight red trousers, her skin glowing, gazing about the Empress Ballroom as though she has never seen anything so beautiful in her life and applauding enthusiastically as the strange little MC, with the pink toupee, raises his hand to quieten the crowd.
‘But seriously, folks, before the fun begins, we’ve got a gentleman who has come along tonight and wants to say a few words to you.’
Bunny wipes his face with his handkerchief and says to the musician with the saxophone and the moustache, ‘I guess this is me.’
‘Knock ’em dead, brother,’ says the musician, and he pats Bunny on the back. ‘Knock ’em dead.’
Bunny takes a final, firing-squad suck of his Lambert & Butler and grinds it out on the floor. Then he pulls the curtain aside, pats at his lovelock and walks onto the stage as the MC executes a dainty little two-step, throws out his arms and says, ‘So without further ado-da-do, could we have a big round of applause for Mr Bunny Munro!’
Bunny walks onstage to blind and uproarious applause. He enters an apron of red light that spills across the stage like splashed ink. He registers the foot stomps and cheers and whistles, and for a brief moment Bunny feels the air of compacted dread loosen around his heart and thinks that, all things considered, his plan may not be so foolhardy as he had previously thought and sending out the invitations to these women was perhaps not such a dumb idea after all. But as he stretches out his hand and sees the blood-coloured light pool in his palm like a cup of gore, he understands that nothing in this world is ever that easy. Why would it be? He walks closer to the lip of the stage, plants his feet firmly on the floorboards and peers into the audience.
He sees, with a shamed stricture of the heart, the old blind lady, Mrs Brooks, in dark glasses and pink lipstick, seated in a wheelchair. Her skin looks considerably younger, Bunny notices, and as she performs her metronomic rocking and claps her ringed hands together, she appears sprightly and newly energised. Behind her, a pretty young carer stands, one hand resting affectionately on the old lady’s shoulder.
To one side of her, Bunny sees, dressed in a dazzling mulberry taffeta cocktail dress, the young girl from The Babylon Lounge in Hove that Bunny date-raped. She is sharing a joke and laughing together with a dark-eyed beauty in sateen drainpipes and gold pumps that he had a similar thing with after a night at The Funky Buddha. Bunny feels a shamed flush of blood to the throat.
He sees a girl with long, ironed hair and crazy kohled eyes and cupid-bow lips, and he recognises her as the Avril Lavigne look-alike from the bungalow in Newhaven. Beside her stands Mushroom Dave, tapping his foot and dressed in a black suit and tie, his arm thrown protectively around her shoulders, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He whispers something to the girl and they look at each other and smile.
And so it goes, Bunny looks over there and looks over here and looks somewhere in the middle and sees someone from this place and then someone from that place and someone from some other place altogether. On and on it goes, faces rising from the mossy depths of his memory, each with their burning attendant shame – Sabrina Cantrell, and Rebecca Beresford, and Rebecca Beresford’s beautiful young daughter – and over there, caught in the roaming spotlight, he sees Libby’s mother, Mrs Pennington, who is smiling now, smiling and rubbing the shoulders of her stricken, chair-bound husband.
More and more he sees them, standing at the front of the stage, swaying on the dance floor, standing on tiptoes at the back of the hall, waving from the little ornamental balconies – all of them and all the others, in every shape and form and incarnation, some half-recalled and some half-forgotten and some barely a smudged fingerprint on his memory – but all looking glorious and radiant and altogether perfect.
From this council estate and this broken-down apartment and this one-bedroom flat and this down-at-heel hotel, from this dying seaside town and from that dying seaside town, Bunny sees them all coming towards him, from down the days and months and dreadful years of his life, the great teeming parade of the sorrowful, the grieving, the wounded and the shamed – but look! Look at their faces! – all happy now and happy and altogether happy in the eternally beautiful Empress Ballroom at Butlins Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis.
Then, as Bunny steps, squinting, into the spotlight and taps the microphone twice with his index finger, he sees, at the very front of the stage, River the waitress from the breakfast room of the Grenville Hotel – looking more lovely than he can imagine anyone could ever look – stepping angrily from the crowd and thrusting forth her arm and extending one purple finger and screaming through her teeth, ‘My God, it’s him!’
Suddenly the atmosphere undergoes a momentous change. The applause, like an inverted roar, is sucked from the room and there is a whirl of confusion and all the furious light bulbs of recognition ignite at the same time. Then follows a howl of outrage that breaks across Bunny with such force that he is propelled backward and almost knocked off his feet.
Bunny steps back to the microphone, leans in and says, into the purgatorial storm, ‘My name is Bunny Munro. I sell beauty products. I ask you for one minute of your time.’
Bunny stares down at the audience and begins his testimony.
Bunny tells the crowd how he was involved in a head-on collision with a concrete mixer truck. He tells them how he was struck by lightning. He explains how his nine-year-old son was almost killed. He talks, to the audience, in terms of a miracle or a wonderment, and he puts forward the question as to why he was spared.
‘Why was I spared?’ he asks, in slow motion, crackling yellow lightning fracturing the purple-and-gold ceiling. The stage lights shift and move across Bunny’s face in reds and purples and deep greens, and the mirrorball slowly revolves and sprinkles him with particles of jewelled light, and everything feels like it has come climbing up from a dream.
He tells the crowd of the shameful nature of his life. He talks explicitly and in detail about the people he has taken advantage of – how he has treated the world and everything in it with utter contempt.
‘I was a salesman, all right,’ says Bunny, ‘peddling misery, door to door,’ and he closes his eyes and surrenders to his own swooning testimony and his body is picked up and sent floating about on little prayers of refracted light. He places his hands inside his shirt and traces his fingers along the embossed scar that the electric charge has written into his body and talks about the nature of love and how frightened it made him feel, how the very existence of it terrified him and had him running scared and, with beads of red perspiration blossoming in the palms of his hands, he talks about the suicide of his wife and his own accountability in that dreadful act. He talks about the terrible absence of her in his life and in the life of his boy.
He tells the crowd of his crisis of conscience and how he had seen all the things he had done and all the misery he caused pass by him in an unbroken chain and he tells them how he was literally possessed by the Devil as coloured water pools around his feet and flows like a river across the apron of the stage.
Once again he asks of the audience, why he had been spared.
‘Why was I spared?’ he asks, again, in slow colour motion.
He says that after a while he had given up thinking about why he had not died and started to think about how he could live his life differently in the future. He tells the audience that his father is dying of lung cancer and that his intention is to go and look after him. He tells the audience that he is going to try to move through life with a bit more dignity from now on. But most of all, he tells the audience that he is going to go and look after his little boy, Bunny Junior.
At first the crowd berate him. They boo him, hiss him and shake their fists at him. Then Mushroom Dave moves forward and expertly flicks a cigarette and it explodes in a shower of sparks against Bunny’s chest, which serves to further increase the force of the crowd’s disdain. Charlotte Parnovar starts springing up and down on her toes, throwing threatening shapes and looking like she is about to jump up on stage and impart a little more peace, integrity and respect by busting Bunny’s nose again. River keeps thrusting her finger at Bunny and shrieking incomprehensibly. A wine glass spins through the air and shatters on the stage behind him. Libby’s mother, Mrs Pennington, screams in rage from the centre of the room, her face a horrible mask, the bone of her finger jabbing at him from inside her long black glove.
But Bunny soldiers on.
He says that the well-being of his son is the most important thing to him in the world and that he knows he can’t wind back the clock and undo all the things he has done, but, with the crowd’s help, he could at least turn the tide on his wretched life and move on with a little self-respect. He implores the crowd to listen to him.
Perhaps it was the blind lady, Mrs Brooks – who knows? – but someone, somewhere, says, ‘Quiet! Let him speak,’ and the ramping crowd, in time, gains some composure, and when Bunny talks about the depth of love he has for his nine-year-old son, a sudden unexpected groundswell of sentiment moves through the people and someone, somewhere, shakes their head and calls out, ‘You poor man,’ and slowly the crowd’s rage falls away and they begin to listen.
Then Bunny moves forward and he holds his hands out to the sides, the red sweat leaking from his wrists like blood and fire blossoming across his chest, and he says, ‘But first I need your help,’ and he bows his dripping head, and then he raises it again.
‘I am truly sorry,’ he says.
Bunny takes a step forward and experiences a contra-zooming of the crowd that causes him to clutch at the memory of them.
‘Can you please find it in your hearts to forgive me?’
Tears pour down his cheeks – red tears, purple tears, green tears – and Georgia sobs quietly and Zoë and Amanda give her consolatory hugs and the girls from The Funky Buddha and The Babylon Lounge wipe tears from each other’s eyes with balled-up Kleenexes and there is a great surge of collective emotion as you might see on TV or somewhere, and the audience begin to applaud – because they are human and so much want to forgive – and Bunny moves forward and descends the three short steps into the crowd.
River the waitress approaches Bunny and throws her arms around his neck and cries strawberry tears upon his chest and forgives, and Mushroom Dave embraces Bunny and forgives, and the little junkie chick smiles up at him through her ironed hair and kohled eyes and forgives and all the girls from McDonald’s and Pizza Hut and KFC hold onto Bunny and kiss him and forgive and Mrs Pennington moves forward with her wheelchaired husband and lifts her arms up and Bunny embraces her and together they weep and together they forgive and Bunny moves through the crowd and feels a chill in the air and notices a ghost of frost curl from his lips as Charlotte Parnovar dressed as Frida Kahlo hugs him with her muscular arms and forgives and the blind Mrs Brooks reaches out to him with her ancient hands and forgives and people kiss him and hug him and pat him on the back and forgive – because we so much want to forgive and to be forgiven ourselves – and Bunny sees Libby, his wife, through the crowd, dressed in her orange nightdress and as he moves towards her the crowd parts and he smiles into a prism of light and green oily oversized tears fall down his face and he says, ‘Forgive me, Libby. Oh, Libby, forgive me.’
‘Hey, don’t worry about that,’ she says, with a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘There is plenty of time for that.’
‘I went a bit crazy. I just missed you so much,’ says Bunny, and purple blood drips from his brow and pours from his hands and runs relentlessly across the dance floor.
‘Hey, I’ve got to go,’ says Libby. ‘Bunny Junior will be all right now.’
‘Does that mean you’re going to stop haunting me?’
Bunny hears the siren of a police car or an ambulance or something, from a million miles away, wailing mournfully through the psychedelic night. He thinks he hears a great rain, crashing all around him, like applause.
‘Haunting you?’ she says, with a furrowed brow. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I just miss you so much.’
‘I never haunted you,’ she says, flickering and strobing all about the place.
‘Well, what are you doing now then?’ says Bunny, mopping at his face with his handkerchief, his blood adding a scarlet patina to the rain-pocked water running freely along the gutters.
Libby laughs. ‘Hey, Bunny, I’ll see you in a minute,’ and moves off and disappears like a ghost or spectre or something, under the streaming umbrellas of the weeping crowd.
As Bunny walks down the main thoroughfare, the sky is wide and mostly clear and full of ordinary lights. The Butlins mission statement blinks above his head and he hears the band start up in the Empress Ballroom and a cheer from the crowd and the sound of a saxophone carried on the cool, salted air. Scraps of blue cloud drift across the moon like spilled ink and he wipes his hand across his brow and loosens his tie.
‘Oh, man,’ he says, with the kind of narcotic euphoria a dying creature may experience before its lights blow out.
Bunny can see his son waiting for him at the edge of the pool, in a hoop of light thrown down by the streetlamp. His flip-flops are placed carefully beside him and he trails his feet, thoughtfully, in the water.
‘Hi, Dad,’ says the boy.
‘Hi, Bunny Boy,’ says his father.
Bunny puts his hand lightly upon his son’s head and runs his fingers through his hair.
‘Check this out,’ says Bunny. ‘Come on.’
The boy climbs to his feet, looks up at the heavens and makes an unsolicited observation about the sky looking like a giant swimming pool full of black ink and stars, then follows Bunny over to the brightly coloured electric children’s train sitting on its silver tracks. He trails puddled footprints of pink water behind him, the moon duplicated in each of them – the police sirens, the ambulance sirens, getting louder.
‘I remember this from when I was a kid,’ says Bunny, and he climbs into the front carriage. ‘Hop in,’ he says.
Bunny Junior climbs up next to his father and makes himself comfortable and Bunny points to the train’s control panel and its big yellow plastic key.
‘See that key?’ says Bunny. ‘Turn it.’
Bunny Junior looks up at his father, his lips pressed together, and feels a fluttering around the region of the heart.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ says Bunny, ‘this time you’re driving,’ and places his hand on the boy’s head.
Bunny Junior reaches down and turns the big yellow key and the little train springs to life and it begins to shunt along its tracks. Bunny throws his arm around the boy and the child smiles wide and begins to laugh. The train circles the swimming pool and Bunny Junior sees reflected in its waters all the treasures of heaven and he looks at the rain dripping off his father’s head and he feels the rain running down his own face and the boy starts to laugh out loud. Bunny rings the train’s silver bell and Bunny Junior rings the silver bell and scarlet blood flows down the gutters and from one end of the Holiday Camp to the next can be heard the laughter of a father and son and the ringing of silver bells.
As the train completes its circuit and slows to a halt, Bunny asks the boy, ‘Do you want to go again?’
Bunny Junior looks at his father and reads his face and shakes his head, and says, ‘No, it’s OK, Dad.’
He watches his father climb out of the train.
‘Come on, I want to sit by the pool,’ shouts Bunny. ‘It’s much too loud here.’
Together they walk back to the pool. Bunny takes his shoes and socks off and dangles his feet in the rain-pocked water as Bunny Junior sits down beside him. Bunny puts his arm around his son, squinting into the sudden white headlights.
‘Ah, Bunny Boy,’ he says, and draws him close and presses his lips into his hair and breathes in his pungent, little-boy odour.
‘Fuck,’ says Bunny, quietly, and shakes his head.
Bunny Junior reads his father’s face some more and sees the raised white scarring like a lace handkerchief at his throat and thinks he smells the tang of scorched flesh and sees the water pooling all around him.
‘I’ve got to lie down a minute,’ says Bunny, but the boy can’t hear him for the screaming umbrellas.
By the edge of the pool – and in slow motion – Bunny falls away and lies upon his back, his feet dangling in the riffled water. The boy reaches over and strokes his father’s brow.
‘I’m going to close my eyes for a bit,’ says Bunny, clutching for a moment at Bunny Junior’s T-shirt.
Bunny Junior leans down and kisses his father.
‘No, don’t close your eyes, Dad,’ he says softly and kisses him again.
Bunny shuts his eyes, his arms relaxing at his sides.
‘Just for a bit,’ he says. ‘It’s better.’
‘No, don’t close your eyes, Dad,’ says the boy.
Bunny tilts his head away and he opens his eyes again for a fraction of a second and sees Penny Charade, the twelve-year-old girl he met at Butlins when he was a boy, dressed in her yellow polka-dot bikini, her long wet hair hanging down, sitting on the other side of the swimming pool, her caramel-coloured legs moving the surface of the water. She smiles at Bunny with her violet eyes.
‘I just found this world a hard place to be good in,’ says Bunny, then closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ whispers Bunny Junior.
The rain hammers down and black thunderheads boom and send lightning crackling across the sky. The crowds weep and scream from under their dripping umbrellas and beneath the canvas awning of the café on Western Road. Bunny Junior lays his head down on his father’s chest and puts his arms around his neck and kisses him a final time.
He looks behind him and sees the maroon concrete mixer truck on its side. He sees the sheared tattooed arm dangling by a cord of skin tissue from its window. He sees the mangled Punto, wrapped in folds of smoke and steam, its passenger door hanging open. He feels the sting of his grazed hands and knees. He sees his blackened encyclopaedia lying on the road, curling grey smoke. He hears the last soft beat of his father’s heart.
‘Oh, Daddy,’ he says.
The boy wipes the blood and the storm from his father’s face and sees rushing towards him through the curtain of rain, in slow motion – just like life – the emergency services, with sirens whooping and lights screaming, and ambulance drivers in their streaming rubberised jackets and firemen with water running from their golden helmets and police officers with their heavy utility belts, in slow motion, rushing headlong towards him – just like in life – and the paramedics with their clattering gurneys rushing and rushing towards him and the leaden rain coming down, and the awed and weeping crowd, like statues, but, in their way, full of noise and rushing too – just like life – all suddenly clamouring, like a vast agency of protection, for the boy’s attention.
Bunny Junior watches a policewoman with long blonde hair trailing behind her like moulded plastic and her radio transmitter squelching its own private language and her warm, merciful, adult face smiling down at him as she kneels on the street and says, ‘Come on, little man, let me help you,’ and Bunny Junior gently pushes her outstretched hand to one side and, standing, stands up above.