The Death of Bunny Munro (7 page)

River enters the kitchen and finds Bunny standing in the middle of the floor, wavering from side to side with a box of Coco Pops in his hand. His shirt hangs open and he is looking out the window in terror at the granulated light of morning. Somewhere, in one of the adjoining flats, a dog yaps and above him there is the unsettling sound of someone dragging furniture around.

‘He’s asleep now. He’s such a sweet kid. He sure loves his dad, that boy.’

Bunny turns towards her, and then looks bewildered at the cereal box in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. He puts it on the counter.

‘Where are the others?’ asks Bunny, his voice sounding far away, like it is coming from the room where the yapping dog is.

River looks at the magnetic alphabet on the door of the fridge and says, ‘They’ve all gone. They said to say goodbye.’

‘How’s Poodle?’

‘They had to carry him out.’

‘That’s our Poo,’ says Bunny, weakly.

‘Did you write this?’ says River, pointing at the obscene message in coloured letters on the fridge.

‘I think maybe my wife did,’ says Bunny.

River turns her back to Bunny and he spies a blue varicose vein, like a reptile’s tongue, behind her knee. River takes a yellow plastic ‘M’ and makes a small amendment to the phrase so that it says ‘FUCK MY PUSSY’, then turns back to Bunny, her hair hanging over one eye, her large, round breasts rising and falling. Bunny leans forward and inspects the letters on the fridge, moving back and forth in an unsuccessful attempt to bring the letters into focus. The phrase warps and blurs before his eyes and it looks to Bunny like some abecedary from Arabia or Mars or somewhere and he says, ‘What?’

Then he stands up straight and throws his arms out to the side and the air in the kitchen kaleidoscopes and fragments and Bunny opens his mouth like a fish and says, ‘What?’ again, only this time rhetorically.

River puts her arms out in front of her, zombie-style, and glides towards Bunny, as if she is on a travelator with no apparent evidence of any ambulatory action whatsoever. She says, with a great swell of feeling, ‘Oh, you poor man.’ And before Bunny can say ‘What?’ a third time, she throws her long, athletic arms around his neck and pulls him to her and he cries genuine tears into her great, heaving, augmented breasts.

Bunny lies on his back on the sofa. He is naked and his clothes sit in sad, little heaps on the living room floor. River, also naked, straddles him and with enormous verve moves piston-like over his unresponsive body. Bunny’s considerable member retains a certain curiosity – it must be said – but the rest of him feels wholly disembodied, as if it attaches no intrinsic value to the matter at hand. He feels like the flenched
blubber a butcher may trim from a choice fillet of prime English beef and, as the song says, he has never felt this way before. This is completely new territory for him. He can see that the hard globes of River’s breasts are perfect and better than the real thing and he attempts to lift his arm in order to pinch her nipples, which are the size and texture of liquorice Jelly Spogs, or stick his finger in her arsehole or something, but realises with a certain amount of satisfaction that he can’t be fucked and he lets his arm drop to the side.

River squeezes Bunny’s cock with her muscular vagina.

‘Wow,’ says Bunny, from the depths of space.

‘Pilates,’ says River.

‘Huh?’ grunts Bunny.

‘Cunt crunches,’ says River, and contracts her pelvic floor again.

The remote is lodged under Bunny’s left buttock and as he shifts his weight the television turns on. Bunny’s head lolls off the edge of the sofa and he sees (upside-down) CCTV footage of the Horned Killer with his trident terrorising shoppers in a Tesco car park in Birmingham. The bad-news ribbon that runs along the bottom of the screen informs Bunny that the guy has struck again. Earlier that day he had walked into a shared accommodation in Bordesley Green and butchered two young nurses asleep in their beds, with a garden fork. There is general panic in the Midlands. The police continue to be baffled.

‘He’s just getting started,’ mutters Bunny, the flicker of the TV reflecting in his upside-down eyes. ‘And he’s coming this way.’

River, however, is lost to her gesture of altruism and does not hear. Bunny lifts his head and looks at her and sees that River’s visage has changed somehow – there is a pout of hubris
and self-admiration as she picks up the rhythm of what she would consider to be, come morning’s sober light, basically a sympathy fuck.

‘Oh,’ she says, as she pounds her bullet-proof pussy down.

‘You,’ she says, her pistons firing,

‘Poor,’ (down)

‘Poor,’ (yum)

‘Man.’

Bunny is about to close his eyes when he sees, by the window, hidden in the folds of the rose-coloured chenille curtains, what appears to be his deceased wife, Libby. She is dressed in her orange nightdress and she is waving at him. Spooked, Bunny makes a hopeless, wounded sound and opens his mouth and releases a hiss of gas as if his very soul was escaping and then bucks frantically at River in an attempt to dislodge her, which is just what River needs to send her over the edge. Bunny, trapped in the vice of her climaxing haunches, squeezes shut his eyes. River screams and digs her nails into his chest. Bunny opens his eyes again, looks wildly around, but Libby has gone.

‘My wife was there,’ he says to River or somebody. ‘She was watching.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ says River, disimpaling herself. ‘You might want to see somebody about that. I know a guy in Kemp Town you could talk to.’

Bunny jabs his finger at the news bulletin on the TV. ‘And
he
is coming down!’

‘Uh huh? Look, I’ve got to go,’ says River and raises the perfect orbs of her rear end, slick with her various juices, into the early morning air and looks under the sofa for her canary yellow panties.

River leaves soon after, closing the front door behind her as Bunny feigns sleep on the sofa. But his mind is alert to all manner of things. He thinks, for instance, that he should get up and put on a pair of trousers or something before his son wakes up. He wonders also what his wife wants from him and hopes that he will not be the subject of any further hauntings and supernatural visitations. He wonders, with a shudder, if the disconnectedness he felt while screwing River is a permanent condition and he considers the idea that perhaps he is all washed-up as a world-class cocksman. Maybe Libby’s suicide has jinxed him. Cursed him, maybe. It is certainly possible. Stories abound about people being put off their game by seemingly innocuous and unconnected events. Poodle told Bunny only recently about a local pussy-hound from Portslade who went from stud to dud after attending a Celine Dion concert. He just couldn’t get it up any more. He told Poodle it was like trying to stuff a dead canary in a cash dispenser. In the end he hung up his tackle and became a landscape gardener in Walberswick. Chilling stuff. Whatever. Bunny knows that there are things going on in this world – great mysteries – that he will never be able to work out. He wonders, also, with a gnawing, abdominal anxiety, whether he will ever get it together enough to go and visit his ailing father. And then he starts thinking, in an abstract kind of way, about his son, Bunny Junior, and what the fuck he is going to do with him. What do you do with a kid who can barely locate his own backside? But most of all he wonders how he is going to spend another night in this spooked-out, three-roomed council flat, with its crummy vibe and its deeply fucked-up juju. Bunny realises, lying there on the sofa, that he can’t fucking handle it.

But even though these questions whirl around Bunny’s mind like rooftops and tractors and farm animals in a tornado or twister or something, another part of Bunny’s mind – the plotter, the designer, the maker-of-plans, works quietly away, sifting through the data to find a way forward.

And in time it comes to him, not in a blinding flash, but rather in a shift of the gears of the heart, or perhaps a release of dread from his body, or a stabilising of his internal chemistry. He feels, in that instant, that he knows what he has to do, and with that knowledge comes an enormous sense of relief. The answer, as is so often the way, has been staring him in the face all along.

Bunny smiles, then drapes River’s canary yellow panties over his face and sucks on the crotch and happily jerks off, then falls into a deep and uncluttered sleep, thinking – Easy, no problem, vagina, vagina.

Bunny Junior lies on the floor of his bedroom reading his encyclopaedia. The carpet is thin and his knees and elbows and hip-bones hurt from lying in the same position for so long and he keeps thinking he should get up off the floor and lie on his bed but he knows that the discomfort he feels keeps him awake and alert and his memory keen. He is in the process of storing information. He is well into the letter ‘M’ and is reading about Merlin, who was a wizard or sage in the Arthurian legends, whose magic was used to help King Arthur. His mother bought the encyclopaedia for him, just because ‘she loved him to bits’, the boy likes to remember. Bunny Junior thinks it is an elegant-looking book with a jacket the exact colour of one of those citronella-impregnated mosquito candles. Merlin was the son of an incubus and a mortal woman, and the boy looks up ‘incubus’ and finds that an incubus is a malevolent spirit who has intercourse with women in their sleep, then he looks up ‘intercourse’ and thinks – Wow, imagine that – as he gradually intuits the presence of his father standing in the doorway of his room.

His father has showered and shaved and his ornamental curl that sits in the middle of his forehead has been artfully arranged into something musical, like a treble clef or a fiddlehead, and
even though his eyes are a shocking scarlet colour and his hands tremble so much that he has had to keep them in his pockets, he looks, on the face of it, dynamic and handsome. He is wearing a navy blue suit and a shirt that is covered in little maroon diamonds and he is wearing his favourite tie – the one with the cartoon rabbits on it. He is staring down at Bunny Junior and smiling. Bunny Junior thinks – Well, what’s going on? He thinks – Boy, something good must be coming down!

‘Hi, Dad!’ says the boy.

‘You got a suitcase?’ says Bunny.

‘I don’t know, Dad.’

‘Well, find one!’ says Bunny, flinging his arms out to the sides in mock-exasperation. ‘Jesus! Haven’t I taught you anything?’

‘What for, Dad?’

‘What do you mean, “What for?”’

‘What do I need a suitcase for?’ says the boy, thinking –
He’s sending me away
– and he feels the wind rush out of him.

‘Well, what do you think you need a bloody suitcase for?’ says Bunny.

‘Am I going somewhere?’ says the boy, jumping from foot to foot and wiping at his forehead with the back of his hand.

‘Not
I
,’ says Bunny, ‘
We
…’

‘We?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where are we going, Dad?’

Bunny Junior is dressed in a pair of shorts and flip-flops. He wears a faded T-shirt that has a picture of an orange crazy-paved mutant called The Thing printed on it. The T-shirt is a couple of sizes too small for Bunny Junior and is covered in
holes, but the boy wears it for reasons of nostalgia that only he can understand.

‘We are hitting the road!’ says Bunny, cocking a thumb and jerking it over his shoulder in the general direction of the outside world.

‘Really?’ says the boy, smiling so much that his teeth show.

‘Really,’ says Bunny. ‘But you can’t go looking like a bloody hobo. It’s the first rule of salesmanship. Be presentable.’

‘Just you and me, Dad?’ says the boy, peeling off the T-shirt, balling it up and pitching it across the room.

‘Just you and me, Bunny Boy.’

Outside the morning sun is resplendent, the sky is blue, and white clouds scud optimistically overhead. A breeze, with the faintest of Arctic memories riding on it, blows from the northeast. Bunny and Bunny Junior launch themselves down the stairwell and haul their suitcases across the terrace of the estate. Bunny feels, just by stepping out of the flat, a renewed optimism and strength. He smiles. He whistles.

Bunny sees Cynthia sitting like an omen on the swing in the tiny children’s play area. She wears white-cuffed sailor’s shorts, a white vest and her frosted-white toenails glow opal-like against the black, rubberised tarmac.

‘Where are you going?’ she says and smiles at Bunny and her orthodontic braces flash in the sun.

‘We’re so outta here,’ says Bunny Junior, who has found himself a pair of shades. He cocks his thumb at the Punto sitting in the car park. ‘Like, gone,’ he says.

Bunny, who has tranced out on the bunched intersection of Cynthia’s shorts, says, ‘Yeah, we’re out of here.’

‘Shame,’ says Cynthia and leans forward to reveal a pure white thong rising from the sweet arcuation of her creamy buttocks.

‘Fuck me,’ says Bunny, under his breath. He looks up to the third floor and sees the yellow front door of his flat like a hex or a curse or something. He feels a cold whirl in his intestines. ‘Yeah, Cynthia, we are definitely out of here.’

‘Hitting the road,’ says Bunny Junior.

‘Shame,’ says Cynthia, unnecessarily, and snaps her gum. She lifts her legs and leans back on the swing, setting it in motion.

‘Come on, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior and together they walk across to the car park. Bunny thinks – That wasn’t so hard – as he pops the boot on the Punto and they throw in their bags. They climb into the car and Bunny inserts the ignition key and the engine coughs and strains and in time turns.

Bunny Junior puts his head out the window and makes an unsolicited observation. ‘The sky looks like a giant swimming pool, Dad,’ he says.

‘Oh, yeah?’ says Bunny, decommissioning Cynthia’s shorts and imagining the hello and goodbye of her oscillating, playground pussy.

‘Olympic-sized,’ says the boy.

Bunny drives out of the estate and a boy with dirty yellow hair sticking out from under a bright red baseball cap and various chrome labrets inserted into his sensory organs appears out of nowhere, riding a skateboard. He wears a green T-shirt that says ‘Lick My Kunst’ and cuts recklessly in front of the Punto. Bunny hits the horn and the boy responds with a sharp upward movement of the middle finger. Bunny rolls down the window and yells, ‘Sk8ter boi,’ and immediately thinks of Avril
Lavigne and then Avril Lavigne’s vagina. He recalls Poodle saying that he had seen on the Internet that Avril Lavigne was ‘a real crazy chick’. She must be, with that zany black eyeliner, thinks Bunny.

He hits the traffic on the roundabout and blasts his horn again, this time at a maroon ‘DUDMAN’ concrete mixer truck that bears down heavily on the Punto. It roars past, a tattooed arm hanging from the driver’s window, its middle finger extended.

‘Man,’ says Bunny, ‘everyone’s gone crazy!’ and he pulls into a petrol station and fills the Punto. Then he heads for the offices of Eternity Enterprises that operates out of a cramped room on Western Road, above a video store that doubles as a cut-rate off-licence. Bunny pulls into a disabled parking bay and kills the motor.

‘Wait here, Bunny Boy, I’ll be back in a minute,’ he says and he hauls himself out of the car. Bunny thinks his dad looks like a real go-getter, with his sample case and his suit.

‘OK, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior and he adjust his sunglasses. ‘I’ll wait here.’

Bunny makes to cross the road, then turns back and sticks his head through the driver’s seat window.

‘If a traffic warden comes by, pretend you’re a spastic or something.’

‘OK, Dad.’

The boy watches his father cross the road and thinks there is something about the way his dad moves through the world that is truly impressive. Cars screech to a halt, drivers shake their fists and stick their heads out the windows and curse and blow their horns and Bunny walks on as if radiating some super-human force field, like he has walked off the pages of
a comic book. The world can’t touch him. He seems to be the grand generator of some hyper-powerful electricity.

‘It’s clobbering time!’ says Bunny Junior, completely to himself.

Bunny crosses the road and sees a young mother or an au pair or something looking trance-like at a poster for the movie
Seabiscuit
in the video shop window. In a buggy a little girl, her face smeared in something chemical-green, holds a Barbie doll or a Bratz doll or something and writhes in her safety harness.

‘Excellent,’ says Bunny.

The woman has a sprinkling of freckles on the back of her neck and a prominent ridge of cartilage along the top of her nose. She wears a logo-free T-shirt and black Havaianas and her toenails are painted the colour of plums. She turns and looks at Bunny, dark smudges under her eyes.

‘Eh?’ she says.

Bunny nods at the poster.

‘The film,’ he says.

‘Yeah?’ says the woman.

Then Bunny looks at the child, squirming in her loculus of havoc, the Bratz doll clutched in her podgy little fist.

‘These children are having their childhoods stolen from them,’ he says. He leans down and touches the little girl on the top of her head with his fingers and smiles at the woman. ‘Poor things.’

The woman bends over the buggy and moves away and Bunny clocks her hunched and hurried retreat.

‘Definitely a mummy,’ he says to himself.

He presses the intercom of ‘Eternity Enterprises’.

‘Who is it?’ says a distorted, robot voice through the
intercom and Bunny looks up at the video cam mounted above the doorway and flips it the finger. The monitor squawks and Bunny enters. He bounds up the stairs two at a time and continues down a dank, low-ceilinged hall until he comes to a door that says, in a Gothic demi-bold font, ‘ETERNITY ENTERPRISES’. Without knocking, he opens it and enters.

Geoffrey sits in his swivel chair like some infernal cyber-experiment gone horribly wrong – the unholy welding of too much man with too little machine. He is a circus elephant on roller-skates or a semi-deflated Michelin Man in a Hawaiian shirt. He looks up at Bunny with his implausibly wise, button-like eyes and says, ‘What’s green and smells like bacon?’

Bunny rolls his eyes at Geoffrey, faux-bored.

‘Kermit’s finger,’ says Geoffrey.

There is a painful screech of tortured springs as Geoffrey leans back in his chair. Then, with an air of satisfaction, he steeples his fingers over his riotous girth and smiles.

‘I’ve heard it,’ says Bunny.

‘Yeah, but it’s a stone classic.’

‘If you say so, Geoffrey.’

‘Always worth reviving, I say, lest we forget,’ says Geoffrey.

Geoffrey seems supremely at home in this environment, as if everything he needs is here in this pinched and cut-rate room – and indeed it is – his fridge full of lager, his Swedish porn collection, his telephone and his little swivel chair; but the office is hot and airless and Bunny feels, almost immediately, a rivulet of perspiration wind its way between his shoulder blades. With a watery redistribution of weight, Geoffrey leans his garish bulk forward and all the little grass-skirted
hula dancers slip and slide. His face is laddered by the sunlight that pours through the half-open Venetian blinds and he is forced to squint and his bright, little eyes sink into his face.

‘I’ve got a question for you, Bun,’ he says. ‘What are you doing here?’

Bunny hooks one finger into his collar and says, ‘I’m ready to go.’

Geoffrey gestures to the single wooden chair in the corner and says, ‘Take a seat, bwana, you’re making me nervous.’

Bunny drags the chair to the desk and sits down and is about to say something but Geoffrey raises one massive paw in the air.

‘Are you sure, my man? There is no pressure here. Shouldn’t you take a little time just to, you know, sort some things out?’

‘I’m all right, Geoffrey. Just give me the list and some samples. I’m all out of samples.’

‘When I lost my Hilda, Bun, you know, it took a while.’

Bunny feels a wobble in the room’s atmospherics and a vague acceleration of his blood. This is pissing him off. He slaps his palm down on the desktop.

‘What am I gonna do? Sit around the house all day, tugging at my dick? Now, Geoffrey, give me the fucking list.’

Bunny entertains the idea of asking his boss if he was ever visited by his wife after she died, but thinks better of it. That is all behind him now.

‘OK, Bunny, you’re the boss,’ says Geoffrey, handing Bunny a list of names and addresses that he folds in two and slips into the inside pocket of his jacket. Bunny realises he has been
sweating so heavily that drops of perspiration have soaked into the fabric of his tie.

‘No, Geoffrey, you’re the boss. I just happen to be the only guy in this two-bit operation that has the faintest fucking idea how to sell anything.’

The door flies open and Poodle enters with his leering grin, his stonewashed jeans and his yellow, architectural ’do. His booze-blown eyes are a terrifying Virgin red.

‘I rest my case,’ says Bunny, standing.

‘Christ!’ says Poodle, ‘What happened last night?’

‘I think you may have been a little excessive in your libations,’ says Geoffrey. ‘You brought shame upon the house of Eternity Enterprises.’

Then Geoffrey looks at Bunny and says, ‘What do you want?’

‘The lot. Hand shit. Face shit. Body shit. Hair shit.’

Geoffrey reaches down under the desk and produces a collection of various sachets, tubes and miniature bottles of lotions and creams, and Bunny sweeps them into his sample case.

Then Bunny turns to Poodle, who is looking sideways at Bunny, his eyes glinting, his needle-like teeth bared in a peerless impression of a happy velociraptor. He moves the flat of his hand slowly across the considerable bulge in his stonewashed jeans and raises an eyebrow.

‘I fucked your lady friend last night,’ said Bunny.

‘I know. She told me. She said it was a little … sad,’ says Poodle.

‘Oh, yeah? Can you ask her for my dick back?’

Poodle emits a low chuckle and with the tips of his manicured fingers tugs at the gold sleeper in his ear.

‘I know. Incredible, eh? She’s a yoga-nut. She’s training to
become an instructor.’ Poodle rubs his hands together then performs a Jackoesque swivel of his hips. ‘Fun and games!’ He squeezes his genitals. ‘Coming down to The Wick for a drinky-poo?’

‘No,’ says Bunny, ‘I’ve got my kid in the car.’

Poodle moves to the window in a lewd creep. He wears tight jeans and a clean, white Polo shirt that accentuate his broad shoulders and small, compact buttocks but give him the proportions of a hyena. He peers through the slatted blinds, the sunlight jazzing the pale irises of his eyes.