The Death of Bunny Munro (11 page)

Bunny sits in McDonald’s with a defibrillated hard-on due to the fact that underneath the cashier’s red and yellow uniform she hardly has any clothes on. The cashier wears a nametag that says ‘Emily’ and she keeps glancing across at Bunny with huge vacant eyes and wiggling all around. She has a black lacquered beehive, a conga-line of raw acne across her forehead and a vagina. Bunny thinks she is similar to Kate Moss, only shorter, fatter and more ugly. He bites deep into his Big Mac and says to his son, ‘I fucking love McDonald’s.’

He knows fundamentally, as if it is carved into his very bones, that he could fuck Emily the cashier without any real resistance, but he also understands, in a sorrowful way, that there is a time issue, a problem with the venue (although it wouldn’t be the first time he had slipped it to a waitress in the ladies’) and, of course, he has his nine-year-old son sitting opposite him, flip-flopping his feet, smiling his wonky smile and playing with a plastic Darth Vader figurine that came free with his Happy Meal.

‘Me too,’ says Bunny Junior.

Bunny takes another bite of his Big Mac and knows what everybody knows who is into this sort of thing – that with its flaccid bun, its spongy meat, the cheese, the slimy little pickle
and, of course, the briny special sauce, biting into a Big Mac was as close to eating pussy as, well, eating pussy. Bunny put this to Poodle down The Wick one lunchtime, and Poodle, self-proclaimed sexpert and barracuda, argued that eating a tuna carpaccio was actually a lot more like eating pussy than a Big Mac, and this argument raged all through the afternoon, becoming increasingly hostile as the pints went down. Finally Geoffrey, in his near-Godlike wisdom, decided that eating a Big Mac was like eating a fat chick’s pussy and eating a tuna carpaccio was like eating a skinny chick’s pussy, and they left it that. Whatever. Bunny wipes at a blob of special sauce that runs down his chin with the back of his hand. He licks his lips as Emily the cashier throws Bunny another look and scratches at her acne. Bunny can see her nipples actually harden under her uniform, and the effect this has on him is so monumental that Bunny hardly registers that his son is asking him a question.

‘Are you all right, Dad?’

Bunny was thinking that if Emily the cashier took a ten-minute smoko and went downstairs to the toilet, and if he bought Bunny Boy another Coke or Sprite or something – well, who knows? – nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say in the trade. Bunny starts making surreptitious signals, a subtle jerking of the cheekbone towards the customer bathrooms and a kind of egging of the eyeballs, and he hears the boy say, in an anxious little voice, ‘Dad?’

He hopes that his son doesn’t blow the whole thing for him, so he whispers, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Stay cool, Bunny Boy, just stay cool.’ Then he says, in the voice of a replicant or something, his eyes glued to the waitress, ‘Do you want another Coke or Sprite or something?’

Bunny Junior says, ‘Um,’ and then the manager, a fucking teenager with braces on his teeth and with a nametag that says ‘Ashley’, walks over and asks Bunny to leave. The skin on Ashley’s face has actually turned a shade of green and is peppered with blackheads the size of confetti. He has grease spots on his company tie.

‘I come here a lot. I’m a loyal customer,’ says Bunny.

‘Yeah … um … well, I know you do,’ says Ashley the manager.

Outside, under the golden arches, Bunny opens the door of the Punto and flops into the driver’s seat. The boy climbs in and Bunny says, ‘I fucking hate McDonald’s.’

Bunny Junior wants to ask his father why they had to leave the McDonald’s in such a hurry, but way back in the sub-caverns of his mind, stirring like some hideous, hibernating beast, the answer is already taking shape.

The boy whispers, ‘What are we going to do now, Dad?’

Bunny kicks over the engine of the Punto and the car comes reluctantly and cantankerously to life. He turns out of the McDonald’s car park and merges into the night traffic on the coastal road and all the crouched cars move past.

‘We are gonna get as far away from this place as possible,’ he says.

The boy yawns deep and shudders.

‘Are we going home now, Dad?’

‘Shit, no!’ says Bunny, checking his rear-view mirror. ‘We’re on the road!’

‘What are we gonna do, Dad?’

‘You, me and Darth Vader there are checking into a hotel!’

Bunny checks his mirror again – he’s looking for any police action, the wail of a siren, the flashing blue light looming up
behind him – but there is nothing but the somnambulant creep of the evening traffic. He turns off the seafront road, though, just in case, and disappears down a side street. The last thing he needs is to be nicked in breach of his Antisocial Behaviour Order. That would be a serious bummer. Bunny looks at his son, who for some reason has an extremely deranged smile on his face.

‘Really, Dad?’ he says. ‘
A hotel?
’

‘That’s right! And you know what we are going to do when we get there?’ Blocks of yellow light move across the boy’s face and his eyes are round and wild as Bunny adds, with due reverence, ‘Room service.’

‘What’s room service, Dad?’

‘Jesus Christ, Bunny Boy, you know the capital of Mongolia but you don’t know what room service is?’

Bunny has been banned for life from three McDonald’s, one Burger King and thrown out of the Kentucky Fried on Western Road with such force that he fractured two of his ribs. This was on a busy Saturday in the middle of the afternoon. Bunny also has four separate ASBOs in the Sussex area.

‘Room service is when you lie on your bed in a hotel room, close your eyes and think of anything in the world that you want, and I mean anything, then you ring up reception, ask for it and some jobber in a bowtie brings it up for you.’

‘Anything, Dad?’ says the boy, twisting his Darth Vader and realising at the same time that he didn’t actually have anything to worry about all along.

‘Sandwiches, cup of tea, fish and chips, a bottle of vino … um … fags … a massage … anything. And another thing, Bunny Boy …’

The Punto passes a shadowy man with tattoos on his arms
changing the back tire on a maroon cement truck (with the word ‘DUDMAN’ painted across the bonnet in giant cream letters) parked in a lay-by at the side of the road. Bunny Junior notices with a jolt of panic that its windscreen wipers are moving back and forth at a tremendous rate, but it isn’t raining.

‘When we get to the hotel, I’m gonna show you the weirdest thing in the world!’

The boy looks up at his father and says, ‘What, Dad?’

Bunny rolls his eyes and says, ‘I’m talking fucking completely Wacko Jacko!’

‘What’s that, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior again, stifling a yawn.

‘I mean seriously off the planet, Janet!’

‘Da-ad!’ says the boy.

‘I mean bananas in fucking pyjamas!’

The boy laughs and says, ‘Da-a-ad!’

Bunny changes lanes, looks awed and leans in close to Bunny Junior for dramatic effect.

‘The tiniest fucking soaps you’ve ever seen in your life.’

‘Soaps?’ says Bunny Junior.

‘Yeah, smaller than a matchbox, they are.’

‘Really,’ says the boy and squeezes his lips together in a smile.

‘And individually wrapped,’ says Bunny.

Bunny Junior’s face glows gold, then tarnishes, and then glows gold again, and goes on like that for a while. He holds out his hand, his thumb and forefinger extended to suggest the size of a matchbox.

‘Really? This big?’ he says, amazed.

‘What?’

‘The soaps,’ says Bunny Junior.

‘Smaller.’

Bunny holds his thumb and forefinger about an inch and a half apart and whispers to his son, ‘They are
tiny
.’

Bunny Junior can smell the fish on the salted air blowing up from the sea. A mist rolls up from the dark waters and curls about the Punto, a ghostly white. He waggles his black plastic figurine.

‘Soap for Darth Vader,’ says Bunny Junior.

Bunny flips on his high beams and says, ‘You got it, Bunny Boy.’

Bunny remembers the day he and Libby arrived home from the hospital with the baby. The tiny child’s eyes, yet to find their colour, peered out of his scarlet, Claymation face as they laid him in the cot.

Bunny said to Libby, ‘I don’t know what to say to him.’

‘It doesn’t really matter, Bun. He is three days old.’

‘Yeah, I guess.’

‘Tell him he’s beautiful,’ said Libby.

‘But he’s not. He looks like somebody stepped on him.’

‘Well, tell him that then,’ she said. ‘Only, in a nice voice.’

Bunny leaned into the crib. The child seemed to Bunny both terrifyingly present and a thousand light years away, all at the same time. There was something about him that he just couldn’t handle, so full of his mother’s love.

‘You look like somebody put you through the mincer, little guy.’

Bunny Junior jerked his tiny bunched fingers in the air and changed the shape of his mouth.

‘See? He likes it,’ said Libby.

‘You look like a bowl of Bolognese,’ said Bunny. ‘You look like a baboon’s arse.’

Libby giggled and placed her raw and swollen fingers against the baby’s head and the baby closed its eyes.

‘Don’t listen to him. He’s jealous,’ she said.

That was also the day that Sabrina Cantrell, Libby’s workmate and ‘oldest friend’, came to pay her a visit. While Libby nursed the baby in the living room, in their tiny kitchenette Sabrina made the exhausted new mother a cup of tea. Bunny, who offered to help her, was suddenly and unexpectedly visited by a venereal compulsion that involved Sabrina Cantrell’s arse and both his hands – something midway between a slap and a full-blown squeeze. It came out of nowhere, this compulsion, and even as he groped up great handfuls of her backside he wondered – What the fuck am I doing? Nothing came of it, of course, and it was the last time he ever saw Sabrina Cantrell, but a chain of events was set in motion that Bunny felt was beyond his control. There was a voice and a command, there was an action and there was indeed a consequence – shock-waves reverberated through the Munro household for weeks. Why had he done it? Who knows? Whatever. Fuck you.

Bunny rarely thought about that first marital miscalculation – what it was that guided his hands inexorably towards their forbidden resting place – but he did often think about the
feel
of Sabrina Cantrell’s backside under the thin crepe skirt, that wonderful contracting of the buttocks, the jump of outraged muscle, before the shit and the fan had their fateful assignation.

As he lies on his back, in his zebra-striped briefs at the Queensbury Hotel in Regency Square, working his way through a bottle of Scotch and watching with ancient eyes the tiny TV that blithers in the corner of the room, Bunny places a finger
gently on the bridge of his nose and two thin rivulets of new dark blood emerge and run down his chin and drop soundlessly onto his chest. He curses to himself, rolls a Kleenex into plugs and inserts them up each nostril.

The room is a riot of psychedelic wallpaper and blood-coloured paisley carpet that appears to be designed around the ghosted, Technicolor nightmares of an Australian backstreet abortionist. The scarlet curtains hang like strips of uncooked meat and a paper lightshade that hangs from the ceiling writhes with fierce, whiskered Chinese dragons. The room reeks of bad plumbing and bleach and there is no room service and there is no mini-bar.

Bunny Junior lies on the other bed, in his pyjamas, engaged in an epic battle with his tormented eyelids – nodding off, then jerking awake, then nodding off again – a little yawn, a little scratch, a little folding of the hands to sleep.

‘Daddy?’ he mutters, rhetorically, sadly, to himself.

Bunny stops thinking about Sabrina Cantrell’s backside and starts thinking about her pussy instead and quite soon he is thinking about Avril Lavigne’s vagina. He is almost positive that Avril Lavigne possesses the fucking Valhalla of all vaginas, and in response to this late-night meditation he carefully folds a copy of the
Daily Mail
over his semi-tumescent member. There is, after all, a child in the room.

Bunny lights a Lambert & Butler and focuses on the television. A woman on a ‘confessional’ talk show is admitting to being sex addict. This holds no special interest to Bunny except that he finds it difficult to see how this woman, with her triplicate chins, flabby arms and lardy rear-end, could find enough guys willing to indulge her rank appetites. But apparently this was not a problem, and she gives a lurid and detailed account
of her nympho-sploits. In time they bring on her husband, beaten-down and camera-shy, and she asks him to forgive her. The camera does a slow zoom on her tear-sodden face as she says, ‘Oh, Frank, I have done bad things. Terrible, terrible things. Could you please find it in your heart to forgive me?’

Bunny pours himself another Scotch and lights up a Lambert & Butler.

‘Kill the bitch,’ he mutters.

Bunny Junior opens his eyes and, in a faraway voice that rises up from the soft curds of sleep, says ‘What did you say, Dad?’

‘Kill the bitch,’ answers Bunny, but the boy’s eyes have closed again.

Then the sound seems to drop out of the television and the face of the host, a guy with a floppy yellow fringe and a salad-green suit, seems to morph into that of a braying cartoon horse or laughing hyena or something and Bunny, appalled, closes his eyes.

He recalls, with a shudder, Libby standing in their kitchenette, red-eyed with confusion and disbelief, holding the baby and the telephone, and asking Bunny, point-blank, ‘Is it true?’

She had been on the phone with Sabrina Cantrell, who had rung up to inform Libby that her husband had groped her in the kitchen and was, in all probability, a sexual pervert or something.

Bunny did not answer but hung his head and examined the monochromatic checkerboard linoleum on the floor of the kitchenette.

‘Why?’ she sobbed.

Bunny, in all honesty, had no fucking idea and he said this to her, shaking his head.

He remembered, quite distinctly, the baby, sitting like a little prince in his wife’s arms, lift one well-sucked fist and uncurl his index finger and point it at Bunny. Bunny recalls looking at the child and having the overwhelming desire to go down to the Wick with Poodle. After half a dozen pints Poodle put a comforting arm around Bunny and bared his shark-like teeth and said, ‘Don’t worry, Bun, she’ll get used to it.’

Bunny opens his eyes and sees the boy has raised himself up and is sitting on the edge of his bed, a look of concern on his face.

‘Are you all right, Dad?’ says the boy.

But before Bunny can think of what to answer, the TV comes alive with a urgent blast of music and a voice that cries, ‘
Wakey-wakey!
’ and the boy and his father look at the screen and see an advertisement for Butlins Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis. Various photographs framed in yellow cartoon stars cartwheel across the screen, showing the range of activities offered at Butlins – the Tiki Bar with its simulated electrical storms, the Empress Ballroom with its crimson curtains and tuxedoed band, the indoor and outdoor swimming pools, the world-famous monorail, the putting green, the adult quiz nights, the giant fibreglass rabbit that stands sentry by the pool, the Apache Fort, the Gaiety Building and amusement arcade. Smiling staff members in their trademark red coats show smiling patrons to their individual chalets and finally, in pink neon, blinking hypnotically across the screen, the Butlin’s Holiday Camp mission statement, ‘Our true intent is all for your delight.’

Bunny’s eyes grow wide, his mouth drops open and says with genuine feeling, ‘Fuck me. Butlins.’ He sits straight up and jams another Lambert & Butler in his mouth. ‘Are you watching this, Bunny Boy?
Butlins!
’

‘What’s Butlins, Dad?’

Bunny Zippos his cigarette and points at the TV, expels a noisy trumpet of smoke and says, ‘Butlins, my boy, is the best fucking place in the world!’

‘What is it, Dad?’

‘It’s a holiday camp,’ says Bunny. ‘My father took me there when I was a kid,’ and with the mention of his father, Bunny feels a butcher’s hook twisting in his bowels. He looks at his watch and screws up his face and says to himself, ‘Christ, my old dad.’

‘Why is it the best place in the world?’ asks the boy.

‘Has anyone ever mentioned you ask a lot of fucking questions?’

‘Yes.’

Bunny reaches across to the bedside table and grabs the Scotch and, waving the bottle with an extravagant flourish, says, ‘Well, let me just pour a little drink and I’ll tell you.’

Bunny slops whisky into his glass, then lies back against the headboard and says, with emphasis, ‘But you’ve got to listen.’

Bunny Junior’s head suddenly wobbles dramatically on his neck and he falls back on the bed, arms splayed. He closes his eyes.

‘OK, Dad,’ he says.

‘Don’t bloody ask me why Dad took me to Butlins. He no doubt had some raunchy tête-à-tête or some liaison kangaroo with some slapper or something, I don’t know, he was a squire of the dames, my old man, and he loved a bit of the fluff. Not bad-looking either, in his day,’ says Bunny.

‘When we arrived he changed his shirt, had a shave, put pomade in his hair, you know, then sent me down the pool, for a swim. He said he’d come by and get me later on.’

The boy’s breath deepens and he brings his little square knees up to his chest and appears to sleep. Bunny pours the Scotch down his throat, then attempts to place the glass back on the bedside table but he misses and the glass rolls around the shrieking paisley carpet. He retreats deep into his memory and he sees the throbbing terraced lawns and the turquoise water churning with screaming children. He sees the fifteen-foot bucktooth rabbit that stands by the swimming pool. His voice comes out tired and sad.

‘So I went down to the pool, and I was doing this thing that I liked to do. I’d crouch down with just my eyes looking over the top of the water and glide around like a crocodile or a bloody alligator and watch all the kids jumping around and doing bombs and cavorting about. I used to feel like nobody could see me but, you know, I could see them.’

Bunny attempts to make some gesture with his hand to illustrate a point and for a brief moment he wonders how on earth he ever ended up this way.

‘Anyway, on this particular occasion I started to get the feeling that someone was watching me and I turned around and there, sitting on the edge of the pool, was a girl … about my age … I was just a kid …’

Bunny sees, in his mind, the girl with her long wet hair and her nut-coloured limbs, and he finds that hot tears are running down his face, and once again he circles his hand in the air, his cigarette dead between his fingers.

‘And she was smiling at me … watching me … and smiling at me and, Bunny Boy, I got to tell you, she had the
most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen and she wore a tiny yellow polka-dot bikini and she was all caramel-coloured from the sun … with these violet eyes … and something came over me, I don’t know what, but all the bloody emptiness I felt as a kid seemed to evaporate and I filled with something … a kind of power. I felt like a bloody machine.’

Bunny can see, in his mind’s eye, the afternoon sun spinning in the sky and the glare of it as it touched the surface of the pool. He can see the water part as he floated slowly through it.

‘So I kind of glided towards her and the closer I got the more she smiled … and I don’t know what came over me, but I stood up and asked her what her name was … fucking
twelve years old
I was …’

The cigarette falls from Bunny’s fingers and lands on the scarlet carpet.

‘… and she said her name was Penny Charade … I kid you not. Penny Charade … I’ll never forget it … and when I told her my name she laughed and I laughed and I knew that I had this power … this special thing that all the other bastards who were flopping around in the pool trying to impress the girls didn’t have … I had this gift … a talent … and it was in that moment that I knew what I was put on this stupid fucking planet to do …’

Bunny Junior, incredibly, opens one raw eye and says, ‘What happened then, Dad?’ and closes it again.

‘Well, it was getting late and her mum and dad came and got her and I stayed at the pool, happier than I’d ever been, just floating around … all full of this gift until I was the last person in the pool …’

Bunny could see, deep in his memory, the night fall over
Butlins and a spray of stars spritz across the sky, and he wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.

‘Then it began to get dark and the stars came out and I started to get cold so I went back to our chalet.’

This time the boy keeps his eyes closed when he says, ‘What happened to the girl, Dad?’

‘Well, the next day my dad sent me down to the pool again and I looked for Penny Charade but she wasn’t there, and I was moving through the water feeling sorry for myself when I noticed another girl who was smiling at me, then another one, and suddenly the whole pool was heaving with Penny Charades … on the side of the pool … swimming in the water, on the fucking diving board, waving and smiling and laying on their towels, playing with blow-up balls and there it was again … that feeling … that power … and me with
the gift
…’

Bunny gropes around on the bed until he finds the remote and, with a crack of static, it implodes into nothingness and he closes his eyes. A great wall of darkness moves towards him. He can see it coming, vast and imperious. It is unconsciousness and it is sleep. It moves like a great tidal wave but before it breaks over him and he is away, before he renders himself completely to that oblivious sleep, he thinks, with a sudden, terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne’s vagina.