The Death of Bunny Munro Page 12

Pamela slips her finger out and it glistens as she beckons to Bunny and says from deep in her throat, ‘Well, come and get it.’

  Bunny slides from the armchair and drops to his hands and knees and with movements that seem newborn and unpractised he crawls across the worn carpet of her maisonette – a tube of hand cream clamped in his fist, a fucking rocket in his briefs and a little trail of plashed tears behind him.

  Quasar – a distant compact body far beyond our galaxy, which looks star-like on a photograph but has a red shift characteristic of an extremely remote object. The distinctive features of quasars are an extremely compact structure and high red shift velocity corresponding to velocities approaching the speed of light. They are the most luminous objects in the universe – thinks Bunny Junior – and he brings his knees up to his chest. The boy believes that if he remains where he is, in the Punto on Meeching Road, Newhaven, his mother will eventually find him, and even as he thinks this he becomes aware of a shift in the air and the smell of his mother’s hand cream. He feels the feathery touch of her hand on his brow. He can feel her trace his profile with an index finger, down his forehead, between his sleeping eyes, along the length of his nose and onto his lips, where she presses her finger down in the approximation of a kiss. Bunny Junior hears a voice – either his or hers, he is not sure which – that says, ‘You … are … the … most … luminous … object … in … the … universe,’ and he feels a gentle folding of the air around him.

  ‘What’s the capital of China!?’

  Bunny Junior awakes to the smell of hand cream and the retracting flutter of his mother’s fingers. His father sits beside him, panting and super-charged, his jacket off, his shirt open, his powerful pomaded hair crazy and all over the shop. White foam has collected in the corners of his mouth, his nose looks like a small, injured tomato and his eyes are energised with a wild joy.

  Bunny Junior sits up and grabs at the empty air in front of his face.

  ‘Mummy?’ he says. ‘Mummy?’

  ‘Eh?’ says Bunny.

  The boy rubs the sleep from his face. ‘Beijing,’ he says.

  Bunny enacts a little stunt with his index fingers.

  ‘What’s the capital of Mongolia?’

  The boy opens and closes boxes in his mind, but he is groggy with sleep and this takes time.

  ‘Come on! The clock’s ticking,’ says Bunny, who is now frantically combing his hair in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Ulaanbaadar,’ he says, ‘formerly Urga.’

  Bunny stops combing his hair and for some reason does an impersonation of Frankenstein’s monster, then mimes electricity coming out his ears and exclaims, ‘Ulaanbaa … what?!’

  ‘Ulaanbaadar, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior.

  Bunny lets forth a great infectious laugh and slaps his thighs and lurches over, grabs his son in a headlock and knuckles the top of his skull.

  ‘My son, the bloody genius! You ought to be on the telly!’ shouts Bunny as he twists the key in the ignition and veers into the road. There is a blare of car horns and Bunny says, pulling at the crotch of his trousers, ‘Fuck, it’s good to be back on the road!’

  ‘That took a really long time, Dad,’ says the boy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were in there a really long time.’

  Bunny turns into the Brighton Road and says, ‘Yeah, I know, but if you want to come on the road with me, the first thing you got to learn is patience. That is the first and fundamental law of salesmanship, Bunny Boy. Patience.’

  Bunny guns the engine and overtakes a maroon cement truck.

  ‘It’s like those bloody Zulu warriors in Africa or wherever.’

  ‘Natal,’ says the boy.

  ‘What?’

  ‘South Africa.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck, whatever. The thing is – if a Zulu warrior wants to spear an antelope or a zebra or something, he doesn’t go stomping through the bush with his boots on and hope the antelope is gonna stay put. Right? He has to employ, what is known in the trade as stealth. Stealth and …’

  ‘Patience,’ says Bunny Junior and compresses a smile.

  Bunny begins to beat on his chest a solemn tattoo with his fist and his face gathers in intensity.

  ‘You become one with your prey … and move quietly, stealthily, towards it and then … Wham! … you stick your spear right through its bloody heart!’

  Bunny slams his hand on the dashboard for dramatic emphasis, and then he looks at the boy and says, ‘Why are you doing that loopy thing with your feet?’

  ‘You left your tie behind, Dad.’

  Bunny’s hand rises to his throat.

  ‘Shit,’ he says, softly.

  ‘You left it back at the last house,’ says the boy.

  Bunny punches his son playfully on the arm.

  ‘Ah, well, Bunny Boy, you tell me a Zulu warrior that ever wore a bloody tie!’

  The Punto is now heading west along the coastal road and the boy watches the sun as it falls beyond the horizon and casts the sea in yellow gold, then pink gold, and then an ethereal, sorrowing blue.

  ‘Aren’t you going to go back and get it?’

  ‘Shit, no, I’ve got a suitcase full of ties!’

  ‘Mum gave you that tie,’ says Bunny Junior.

  Bunny scratches his head and turns to the boy.

  ‘OK, son, this is serious. This is the real deal. This is one of those moments in life when you’ve really got to listen and, young as you are, try to understand. There is another law of salesmanship that I haven’t told you about. It is the absolutely crucial law. It’s even more important than the patience law. Any salesman worth his salt will tell you the same thing. Now, do you want to know what it is?’

  ‘OK, Dad.’

  ‘Well, stop flopping your feet around and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘OK, Dad.’

  ‘Never go back. All right? Never, ever, go back. Now, do you want me to tell you why?’

  ‘OK,’ says the boy, and all down the coastal road the streetlights come on and the boy sees an awesome, mystical majesty in it.

  Bunny looks gravely at the boy and says, ‘They may renege on the order.’

  ‘Might they?’ says the boy.

  ‘Yes, believe me, it happens,’ says Bunny. ‘OK?’

  ‘OK, Dad,’ and they smile at each other.

  Bunny turns his headlights on and they pass a billboard – a topless Kate Moss, in a pair of Calvin Klein jeans – and he recalls a conversation between Poodle, Geoffrey and himself, down The Wick. Poodle, who kept throwing back tequilas, sucking a lemon and licking the armpit of the girl sitting next to him, said, ‘Well, if you include the haunches, I am definitely a leg man.’ Geoffrey, who was sitting there like King Tut or Buddha or somebody, cupped his own considerable breasts and said, ‘Tit man, no contest.’ Then they looked at Bunny, who pretended to give it some thought, but didn’t really need to. ‘Vagina man,’ said Bunny, and his two colleagues went quiet and nodded in silent agreement. Bunny loves Kate Moss, thinks she’s cool, vanishes her Calvin Kleins, hammers the car horn and thinks, ‘I’m fucking back.’

  ‘I know where she bought that tie, if you want to get another one,’ says the boy.

  Bunny slams his hands on the wheel of the Punto and looks all around him and says, ‘Close your eyes. Go on, close your eyes and don’t open them till I tell you.’

  The boy puts his hands in his lap and closes his eyes.

  The Punto takes a sudden, violent swerve into a roadside McDonald’s and screeches to a halt.

  ‘Now open them,’ says Bunny, and the boy can hear the trembling madness in his father’s voice. The light from the giant McDonald’s sign illuminates the boy’s face, coating it in gold, and Bunny can see a little yellow ‘M’ reflected in each of his son’s eyes as he throws open the door of the Punto and steps monstrously out and into the early evening light.

  ‘Now, tell me you don’t love your dad!’ he roars.

  17

  Bunny sits in McDonald’s w
ith 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.

&nbs
p; ‘Soap for Darth Vader,’ says Bunny Junior.

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

  18

  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.