The Death of Bunny Munro Read online

  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 wonde
rs 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.

  19

  ‘Is that your dad in my house?’ says the little girl on the bicycle.

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ says Bunny Junior, who has been trying to read about Mata Hari in his encyclopaedia, but can’t concentrate on the words because he is so worried about his father. In the breakfast room at the Queensbury, his dad was jumping around like his pants were on fire. He’d eat a bit of sausage, get up and rabbit into his phone, then sit back down and spill his coffee everywhere. He’d disappear into the bathroom and not come out for ages, then follow the waitress around the breakfast room and talk to her a mile a minute about who knows what – Bunny Junior sure didn’t know. The boy ate his breakfast quickly and, anxious to leave, pulled out the client list and said, ‘Where to now, Dad?’ but his dad told him they were going to visit a loyal customer in Rottingdean – one they could tap into at any time. She just loved that body cream! Then he was stuffing his mouth with eggs and toast and chasing the waitress around the breakfast room again, waggling his hands behind his head like a rabbit. He had put on a new shirt with brown and orange diagonal stripes and a tie with a little picture of a floppy-eared rabbit sticking his head out of a magician’s hat, but he hadn’t shaved and his hair was sticking up like nobody’s business.

  Bunny Junior was not used to worrying about his dad. He was more used to worrying about his mum. Once, when his father was away, she had come into the bedroom and sat on the bed and put her arms around him and cried her eyes out and he hadn’t known what to do but wonder where the old mum had gone.

  Now he is sitting in the Punto outside a large, newly built house in Rottingdean, and a girl who looked about the same age as him, maybe a little older, is asking him a question. She is straddling a bicycle and has a small brown mole on her cheek. She rings the bell three times before she speaks to him again.

  ‘Your dad is giving my mum a fuck,’ she says.

  She wears a strawberry tankini with the word ‘TOXIC’ written in little silver studs across her chest. Bunny Junior notices, when she turns to look back at her house, that one side of her bikini bottom has ridden up the crack in her bum.

  ‘He’s my dad,’ says Bunny Junior, screwing up one eye and sticking his head out the car window and looking up and down the street but not knowing what it was he was looking for.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ says the girl. ‘He’s sticking his dick in her.’

  The boy responds with a tilt of the chin but his feet start flip-flopping furiously.

  ‘Yeah, well, he’s the best salesman in the world,’ he says.

  The girl rocks back and forth on the bicycle and says, ‘She makes me go out of the house. But you can hear her from miles away. She sounds like a strangled chicken. Cock-a-doodle-do!’ The little girl flaps her elbows for emphasis.

  ‘You mean a rooster,’ says the boy.

  ‘Yeah, whatever. You can hear her for miles.’

  Bunny Junior points at the girl’s bicycle and says, ‘My dad could sell your bicycle to a barracuda.’

  The girl pushes her fringe out of her eyes and says, ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s a predatory fish,’ he says. ‘Its jaws are armed with hundreds of razor-like teeth.’

  ‘Oh,’ says the girl.

  She rings the bell on her bicycle and says, ‘My dad bought me this.’

  ‘The bicycle?’ says the boy.

  ‘No, the bell.’

  The little girls rocks some more and grimaces for no particular reason. Bunny Junior likes this girl. He thinks she is very pretty and he hasn’t really spoken to a girl before. He paddles his feet for a while and thinks about something to say.

  ‘My mum died,’ he says without warning and he experiences a sudden thundering of his blood to his face and he pushes himself back into the seat of the Punto, mortified and ashamed.

  ‘Yeah?’ says the girl, then wheels her bicycle up to the window and Bunny Junior sees that she has crimson glitter nail polish on her fingers and a smear of blue shadow over each eye.

  ‘I wish my mum would die,’ she says. ‘She’s a fucking bitch-face.’

  The surge of blood subsides and the roaring in his ears abates and Bunny Junior takes his sunglasses from the glove box and slips them on.

  ‘I don’t have to go to school,’ he says.

  The young girl smiles, realigns her bikini bottoms, pushes her fringe out of her eyes and says, ‘Cool.’

  ‘My dad says I don’t have to.’

  They say nothing for a minute and Bunny Junior adjusts his shades and the girl cocks her head an
d looks at the boy sitting in the car, and the sun beats down and she rings her bell twice. Bunny Junior reaches over to the driver’s side and taps the car horn two times in response. They smile at each other and together they both look down the road somewhere. They see Bunny exit the house and march across the sun-scorched lawn, tucking his shirt into his trousers.

  ‘Here he comes,’ says Bunny Junior quietly, ‘my dad.’

  The boy wishes his dad would turn around and go back inside because he doesn’t want to see his dad – although he looks a lot better coming out of the house than he did going in. On the way here, his dad kept turning the radio on and off and moving around in his seat and sounding the horn and swigging from his bottle and driving like a mental case, and when he arrived at the house he actually hopped across the lawn like a rabbit. Most of all, though, he wanted his dad to go back into the house because all of a sudden he could think of a million and one things he wanted to tell this girl on the bicycle – about outer space, the veldts of Africa or the microcosmic world of insects or something, and he didn’t even know her name.

  ‘Excuse me, young lady,’ says Bunny as he marches up to the Punto.

  Bunny is thinking that there is nothing like getting your pipes cleaned first thing in the morning to set you up for the rest of the day. He had woken gloomy and hungover and full of dirty water, and had probably hit the bottle a little heavy in recompense. He thought he may have set something up with the cute little waitress from the breakfast room at the Queensbury Hotel, but he was not completely sure. Then he remembered Mylene Huq from Rottingdean, and a quick call to Poodle was enough to secure her address. The story goes that Mylene Huq’s husband took off with someone half his age and that Mylene Huq has been involved in an epic revenge-fuck ever since. Meanwhile, the word has spread around the local studs and everyone was getting in while the going was good. This kind of opportunity is usually short-lived and always ends in tears, but there is no denying that in the throes of their particular brand of wild justice these bitches go off like fucking firecrackers.