The Death of Bunny Munro Read online

  ‘What do you mean, “Won’t come out”?!’ he says, marching through the living room and down the hall and shouting ‘Libby! Lib!’

  In the hall, a box of Coco Pops has been evenly and deliberately emptied across the carpet and Bunny feels them exploding beneath his feet. He yells louder, incensed, ‘Libby! For fuck’s sake!’

  Bunny Junior follows his father down the hall and says, ‘There are Coco Pops everywhere, Dad,’ and stomps about on them in his bare feet.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ says Bunny to the boy. He rattles the door handle vigorously and yells, ‘Libby! Open the door!’

  His wife does not respond. Bunny presses his ear to the door and hears a peculiar high-toned vocal sound coming from inside the room.

  ‘Libby?’ he says quietly. There is something not unfamiliar about the weird, alien mewling and it affects Bunny in such a way that he lets his head loll back and sees that there are great lengths of Crazy String hanging from the empty light socket in the hall like the electric-blue entrails of an alien or something. He points, incredulously, and says, ‘Wha-a-a?’ and, after a time, drops in slow motion to his knees.

  ‘Oh, that was me,’ says Bunny Junior, pointing at the Crazy String. ‘Sorry.’

  Bunny presses his eye to the keyhole.

  ‘Ha!’ he exclaims, coming back to life.

  Through the keyhole he can see his wife, Libby, standing by the window. Unbelievably, she is wearing the orange nightgown that she wore on their wedding night, which Bunny has not seen in years. In an instant, in a flash, he remembers, in dreamtime, his brand new wife walking towards him in their honeymoon hotel, the sheer near-invisible material of the nightgown hanging perilously from her swollen nipples, the phosphorescent skin beneath, the smudge of yellow pubic hair, veiled and dancing before his eyes.

  Kneeling among the Coco Pops, his eye pressed to the keyhole, Bunny thinks, with an unannounced wave of euphoria, that the chances of a mid-afternoon fuck look decidedly better.

  ‘Oh, come on, baby, it’s your Bunnyman,’ he says, but Libby still does not respond.

  Bunny leaps to his feet, hammers at the door with his fists and screams, ‘Open the fucking door!’ as Bunny Junior says, ‘I’ve got a key, Dad,’ but Bunny pushes the boy to one side, takes a few steps back and slams himself into the door. The boy says, ‘Dad, I’ve got a key!’ and Bunny hisses, ‘Get out of my way!’ and this time flies at the door like a maniac, full force and grunting with the effort, and still the door does not open.

  ‘Fuck!’ he screams in frustration and drops to his knees, pressing a furious eye to the keyhole. ‘Open the fucking door! You’re scaring the kid!’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Stand clear, Bunny Boy!’

  ‘I’ve got a key,’ says the boy, holding the key out to his father.

  ‘Well, why didn’t you say so? Christ!’

  Bunny takes the key, puts it in the keyhole and opens the bedroom door.

  Bunny Junior follows his father in. He sees that Teletubbies is on the TV but the TV, small and portable, is on the floor over by the window. The red one named Po, with the circular antenna on its head, is saying something in a voice that the boy no longer has the ability to understand. Without taking his eyes off the TV, the boy senses his father has stopped moving and he perceives an orange smear of stillness in the corner of his vision. He hears his father say the word ‘Fuck’, but in a quiet, awestruck way, and decides not to lift his head. Instead, he looks at the carpet and keeps looking and notices a Coco Pop has lodged itself between the toes of his left foot.

  Bunny curses quietly a second time and brings his hand up to his mouth. Libby Munro, in her orange nightdress, hangs from the security grille. Her feet rest on the floor and her knees are buckled. She has used her own crouched weight to strangle herself. Her face is the purple colour of an aubergine or something and Bunny thinks, for an instant, as he squeezes shut his eyes to expunge the thought, that her tits look good.

  5

  Bunny stands on the balcony outside his flat and leans out over the railing. He drinks from a can of lager and watches as two attendants push the gurney across the car park and deposit his wife into the back of the ambulance. There is no urgency to this act and it seems to Bunny, in an oblique way, eerily casual and routine. A summer breeze blows through the wind tunnels of the estate, collecting upon itself, growing stronger and flapping the edges of the sheet that hangs over the gurney. Bunny thinks he can see the side of his wife’s foot but he is not sure. He draws on a cigarette and drinks from the can of lager.

  As he leans out over the balcony railing and feels the pulse of his blood collecting in his face, he remembers by way of a gravitational swoon lying with Libby on a hotel bed in Eastbourne. He recalls her rising from the bed and walking to the bathroom, and somewhere between the retreat of those high blushing buttocks and the return of her yellow, freshly-douched bush, Bunny made a reckless and vertiginous decision and said, ‘Libby Pennington, will you marry me?’ and as he said these words the room spun wildly and he found himself gripping the sides of the bed, as if he may be jettisoned away.

  Libby stood there, bold, naked, fists on hips and said, with a skewed smile, ‘You’re drunk.’ (which was true) ‘Ask me in the morning.’ Bunny picked up his watch from the bedside table, made a show of holding it to his ear and tapping on the glass.

  ‘It is morning,’ he said, and Libby laughed in that wild, girlish way she had and sat down on the bed, next to Bunny.

  ‘Will you honour and obey me?’ (She was also drunk.)

  ‘Um, yes,’ said Bunny. He groped for a cigarette and put it in his mouth. Libby placed her hand between his legs and squeezed.

  ‘In sickness and in health?’

  ‘Um, OK,’ said Bunny, lighting up and expelling a plume of grey smoke into the room. He closed his eyes. He heard her rustling about in her handbag and when he opened his eyes, she was writing something in lipstick on his chest.

  ‘I got to take another pee,’ she said and once again, through a veil of discharged smoke, he scoped that glorious, goodbye backside. Bunny stood up, the floor spongy and uncertain, looked at his image in the dressing-table mirror. Then the room tilted suddenly and blood rushed from his extremities and thundered in his face and his heart hammered in his chest and he held on to the dressing table as he read, in reverse, the single word, ‘YES’.

  As the spell retreated he looked up to see, standing in the doorway of the bathroom and smiling at him, his future wife.

  Now, propped against the railing of the balcony, he feels, but does not cogitate, that this memory of his departed wife – her moving away from him through the haze of cigarette smoke in a down-at-heel hotel in Eastbourne – will forever dream-float in his consciousness. It will hang like a protective veil in front of the other memories, as the very happiest of them all and safeguard him from any hardboiled questions like how the fuck did it all come to this.

  Bunny watches the unhurried ambulance drive away from the flats, followed by the police car.

  They are taking my wife away, he thinks.

  He drains the can of lager and crushes it in his fist, and hears his son ask, out of nowhere, ‘Do you want another beer, Dad?’

  He turns slowly and looks down at his son. (How long had he been there?) The boy seems diminished in stature and wears a pair of filthy complimentary hotel slippers about ten sizes too big for him that Bunny had brought home from a trip a million years ago. Bunny Junior presses his lips together in a wonky impression of a smile, making him look uncannily like his departed mother.

  ‘I’ll get you one, if you like.’

  ‘Um, OK,’ says Bunny and hands the crushed can to his son. ‘You can put that in the bin.’ The boy disappears.

  Bunny holds on to the metal railing for a moment as he experiences a fresh attack of vertigo and wishes that everything would stop happening so fast. He feels as if his string has been severed and he is floating free beyond anything that would even vaguely r
esemble realness, without a single clue or idea or notion as to what on earth he is going to do now. What is he going to do?

  He looks down at the forecourt below and sees a small contingent of residents who stand smoking in the great stretched slab of late afternoon shadow cast by the block. They have been drawn outside by the presence of the ambulance and the police car. They are, he realises, all women and they talk quietly amongst themselves but cast secret glances up at Bunny every now and then. Bunny notices Cynthia, in her yellow mini-skirt and cotton vest, talking to a young mother who has a baby welded to one salient hip. Cynthia drops her cigarette on the ground and grinds it with a neat swivel of her flip-flop. Bunny notices the muscle leap in her young thigh. Cynthia looks up at Bunny and smiles with her long metallic teeth. Then she waves at Bunny by lifting her right hand and wiggling her fingers and from where Bunny is standing he can actually see the subtle rise of her young mound beneath the taut fabric of her mini-skirt. How old is she, anyway?

  What is he going to do?

  Bunny thinks, as he returns Cynthia’s sad little wave and feels a gathering of manpower in his crotch, that maybe, in one way, he knows the answer. But he also thinks, on a wholly different level, that maybe, in another way, he does not know the answer at all. He thinks that he should work this question out, but he also thinks, with a sense of relief, that he can’t be fucked. He feels a major decampment of stamina, of energy from his person, but notices paradoxically that his dick is hard, and as he turns and heads inside, he feels sad and lonely.

  Bunny Junior sits on the sofa, tranced out in front of the television, a huge bottle of Coca-Cola clamped between his knees. He has a medical condition called blepharitis or granulated eyelids or something and he has run out of steroid eye drops. His eyes are puffy and sore and rimmed in red and he thinks at some point he should tell his father so that he can buy some more drops. He is glad all the people have cleared out. The police. The ambulance men. He was tired of the way they kept looking at him, whispering in the hallway like he couldn’t hear or something. They kept making him think of his mum and every time he thought of his mum he felt like he was going to drop through the middle of the world. They wouldn’t stop asking him if he was all right, when all he was trying to do was watch the television. Can’t anyone get any peace around here?

  He notices his dad walk into the living room at approximately the same time as he remembers that he has forgotten to get him a beer from the fridge. How come he forgot to do that? His dad’s face looks like grey felt. He walks differently, like he is not quite sure whose living room he is entering, like he’s in a bit of a daze.

  ‘What happened to my beer?’ says Bunny, in slow motion, as he sits down next to Bunny Junior on the sofa.

  ‘I forgot, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior. ‘The TV was on.’

  The sleeve of a discarded sweater hangs over the top of the TV screen, partially obscuring what seems to be a news broadcast involving a giraffe that lies motionless, on its side, in its enclosure at the London Zoo. It is surrounded by a number of attendants and medical staff in Wellington boots and arabesques of smoke rise from its body.

  ‘What are you watching that for?’ asks Bunny, meaning the news, unable to think of anything else to say.

  The boy rapid blinks to cool his eyes and wipes at his forehead with the back of his hand and says, ‘The giraffe was struck by lightning, Dad, at the zoo. It’s quite common on the veldts of Africa. They cop it all the time. They act like lightning rods. One minute they are minding their own business, the next minute they’re jelly.’

  Bunny hears his son, but his voice seems to come from a vast distance and his stomach makes a hollow, rumbling sound and he realises he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast and thinks he may be hungry. He takes one of the pizza boxes from the stack on the coffee table and opens it. He waves it under his nose.

  ‘How long have these been here?’ says Bunny.

  ‘I don’t know, Dad,’ says the boy. ‘Maybe a million years?’

  Bunny sniffs it.

  ‘Smells all right,’ he says and folds a slice in half and stuffs it in his mouth.

  ‘Tastes all right, too,’ he says, but it comes out sounding incomprehensible.

  Bunny Junior reaches over and takes a slice.

  ‘Very nice, Dad,’ he says, and for a moment the fuzzed tones of the TV weld the boy to his father and they sit together on the sofa and say nothing. After some time Bunny points at the towering stack of pizza boxes on the coffee table in front of them, a cigarette burning between his fingers. His mouth is full of pizza and there is a questioning expression on his face and he is about to say something and he chews vigorously and continues to point at the pizza boxes.

  Bunny Junior says, ‘I think mum left them for us, Dad’ and as he says this he feels the fiery centre of the world drag at his insides and he paddles his feet over the edge of the sofa so violently that his slippers fly off his feet. Bunny looks at his son and responds by nodding and swallowing and zoning in on the TV.

  Later that night Bunny Junior says to his father, ‘I better go to bed now, Dad.’

  Bunny, zomboid, says, ‘Ah, yeah’, and a bit later on says, ‘OK, then.’

  The boy puts on his outsized slippers and says to his father, ‘I’m usually in bed ages ago.’ He rubs at his raw, bleared eyes with the back of his hands. ‘My eyes are sore,’ he says.

  ‘OK, Bunny Boy, I’ll just sit here then,’ says his father and makes a vague, circular gesture with his hand, which Bunny Junior finds impossible to interpret.

  ‘Well, I’ll just go to bed then, now, Dad,’ says the boy and stands and looks down at his father and sees he has returned to the thrall of the television. Two greased and roided gladiators, dressed in Lycra shock-absorbers, beat each other with Styrofoam-capped staves. They wear facemasks so there is nothing to suggest whether they are men or women as they bat and snarl at each other. Bunny Junior thinks he might sit down again and check this out but instead says, ‘Goodnight, Dad.’

  With exaggerated care, the boy steps over the piles of trashed clothes that lie about the living room like sleeping animals, as if they may, if he wrong-foots, awaken. He moves into the hall, the Coco Pops now ground into the carpet by the day’s dismal traffic, and makes his way towards his room. He sees, in terror, from the corner of his eye, the closed door to the master bedroom and the key hanging from the lock like a reproach. Bunny Junior presses his lips together and squeezes shut his eyes. He decides he will not open them again until he is safe within the confines of his room. He makes the rest of the journey feeling along the hallway wall like a blind man until he arrives at the door to his room. He touches with his hand the poster of the cartoon rabbit flipping its middle finger that is Blu-tacked to the door and feels the plastic letters arranged along the top of it. They spell B-U-N-N-Y J-N-R. He pushes open his door and enters his bedroom and only then does he open his eyes.

  Bunny Junior changes into his pyjamas, pulls back the sheet on his bed, lies down, then reaches over and turns off his bedroom light. He is comforted by the canned applause that emanates from the living room and is happy his dad is close by. Above him a mobile of the nine planets of the solar system, painted in Day-Glo, rotates slowly, put into motion by the bedtime movements of the boy. As each planet turns and spins, Bunny Junior runs through the information he has collected about each one. For example – Saturn’s interior is similar to Jupiter’s, consisting of a rocky core, a liquid metallic hydrogen layer and a molecular hydrogen layer. Traces of various ices are present – stuff he has remembered from the encyclopaedia his mother gave him when he was seven. He wishes, vaguely, that his father would come in and sit with him while he tries to sleep. He feels like it will take two thousand light years before he will be able to get to sleep. He sleeps.

  Back in the living room Bunny watches the TV without interest, without judgement or without any visible cognitive response whatsoever. Occasionally his head falls back and he drains a beer. He opens another.
His eyes glaze over. He sucks a cigarette, like a machine. Like a robot, he does it all again. Yet, as the blue evening, framed in the window, darkens into nighttime, little pockets of emotion twitch at the corners of his eyes and his forehead creases and his hands begin to tremble.

  Then without warning Bunny leaps to his feet, and as if he has been girding himself for this moment all evening, moves to the sideboard (procured by Libby from a garage sale in Lewes) and opens its frosted glass front. Bunny reaches inside and returns to the sofa with a bottle of malt whisky and a short, heavy glass.

  He pours himself a drink, and then up-ends it down his throat. He gags and throws his body forward, shakes his head and repeats the action with the bottle and the glass again. Then with little stabs of his index finger punches a number into his mobile phone. The line engages and before there is even time for the purr of the ringtone, he hears an awful, protracted bout of coughing, deep and wet, that forces Bunny to hold the phone at arm’s length from his ear.

  In time, Bunny, clearly disturbed, says, ‘Dad?’ with an unintended and violent emphasis on the initial letter – not a stammer as such, but the beginnings of one, as if the word has been wrenched from his mouth like a stinking tooth.

  ‘Dad?’ he says again, jamming the phone under his chin and firing up another fag.

  The coughing stops and Bunny hears a vicious intake of air sucked through oversized dentures that actually sounds like a nest of aggrieved snakes. Then the seething, bilious enquiry, ‘What?’