The Death of Bunny Munro Read online

  Bunny sits on a bench under a little oak tree.

  ‘Are you OK, Dad?’ says the boy.

  Bunny looks around him and sees the world slip back into focus.

  He notices Poodle, Raymond and Geoffrey making their way towards him. Bunny motions to them with a flick of his head in the general direction of home and the three men and the girlfriends turn and head for the car park. Then he clocks Libby’s mother, Mrs Pennington, pushing her wheelchair-bound husband along the gravel path with an air of steely determination.

  ‘Wait here,’ says Bunny to his son. ‘Go and … um … play.’

  ‘OK, Dad,’ says the boy, looking up at his father with concern. He walks off, giving the remaining seagull, with its horrible yellow eye, a wide berth.

  Bunny stands and follows Mrs Pennington down the path, and as he does so an abutment of cumuli tumble across the sun and an ominous shadow, accompanied by a cold breeze, moves visibly across the graveyard. Bunny sees Mrs Pennington’s gloved hand reach down and turn up the collar of her husband’s jacket. Bunny’s pomaded forelock unravels and whips around his eyes as he calls out, ‘Mrs Pennington! I need to speak to you!’

  Mrs Pennington stops suddenly, then spins her husband around and Bunny is almost blown off his feet by the force field of hatred that envelops her. Her body visibly shakes, her black-gloved hands grip the handles of the wheelchair.

  ‘Um … Mrs Pennington,’ says Bunny.

  ‘Have you any idea how much I despise you?’ spits the woman.

  ‘Mrs Pennington, I wanted to speak to you,’ says Bunny, thinking – Man, this woman is angry.

  ‘What?’ she hisses. Her voice is educated, cultured and distorted with malice. ‘Can you even comprehend the depth of my contempt?’ She releases the wheelchair, screws her hands into small, black fists and pounds emphatically at her own grieving bosom. ‘It runs to the core,’ she snarls.

  ‘I need your help,’ says Bunny and knows, there and then, that he has made a fundamental mistake. The plan he had conceived last night on the sofa (he still could not bring himself to sleep in the master bedroom) seemed at the time nothing short of brilliant but now seems to have gone to sea in a sieve. This was not a good idea.

  ‘My baby lies dead in her grave and you want something from me?!’

  But Bunny perseveres.

  ‘It’s about your grandson, Mrs Pennington,’ he says, and even though the temperature has dropped dramatically a trickle of perspiration runs down the side of Bunny’s face and dark wet rings form in the armpits of his shirt.

  Mrs Pennington stamps on the brake of the wheelchair and, in a freakish contra-zoom, moves towards Bunny and gets right up into his face.

  ‘You tore her heart out. You wrung the life right out of her. My sweet, smiling baby girl … you killed her everyday … you and your whores … killed her like you throttled her in her sleep …’

  Bunny takes a faltering step back and catches his heel on the pebbled border of the path and stumbles backward and the world tips and he thinks – This was not a good idea at all.

  ‘She would call me and weep her little heart out. That happy, happy girl, look at what you did to her!’ hisses Mrs Pennington, tears running unchecked down her face.

  Her husband, with a surprising fleetness, shoots out his hand and grabs Bunny by the wrist with a rigid, cramped claw. The skin of his hand is red and silken and Bunny looks at it in horror.

  ‘You were no kind … of … husband,’ he says, and his once-handsome face judders frantically on the tired spring of his collapsed and wattled neck.

  Bunny rights himself, leans down and addresses Mr Pennington. ‘You can talk,’ he says.

  ‘What?’ screeches Mrs Pennington. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Bunny, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender and shaking his head. ‘Mrs Pennington, I just thought that you could look after Bunny Junior, your grandson, for a while.’ He takes a step forward and says something that has been playing out there on the farthest reaches of his consciousness for days and that now sends a vague signal of alarm through his body. ‘I can’t do it. I’m not capable. I don’t know how.’

  Mrs Pennington shakes he head. ‘That poor, poor boy,’ she says with real feeling. ‘All he has is you … the great Bunny Munro …’

  ‘That may be so, Mrs Pennington, but …’

  Mrs Pennington takes a small tartan lap rug from a leather accessory bag that hangs from the back of the wheelchair and drapes it over her husband’s knees. She rests her gloved fingers lightly on his shoulder and Mr Pennington places his hand, jumping and twitching, on top of hers.

  ‘The problem is, Bunny, I look at him and all I see is you,’ says Mrs Pennington, spitting Bunny’s name out of her mouth like it was something putrid.

  A worming headache has lodged itself directly over Bunny’s right eye.

  ‘Mrs Pennington, I implore you,’ he says, but knows he is wasting his time.

  The woman points at Bunny, her eyes as cold and as hard as flint, and says, ‘You pig … you disgusting, fucking pig,’ then turns her face away as if she can no longer bring herself to look upon him a moment longer.

  Bunny is suddenly sick of all this – the sideways glances, the accusatory looks, the open hostility – the great tidal wave of blame that he has been forced to endure on this of all days and he says to Mrs Pennington, super-pissed-off. ‘Well, thanks a lot, Grandma.’ Then he turns to the chair-bound Mr Pennington, who is in the process of raising an outraged finger in Bunny’s direction, and says, ‘So long, Romeo.’

  ‘You are a disgrace,’ says Mr Pennington, from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘At least I can wipe my own arse,’ says Bunny, and turns and makes his way back down the gravel path, dabbing at the chilled sweat on his face with the sleeve of his jacket.

  He sees Bunny Junior attempting unsuccessfully to squirt a seagull with water from a drinking fountain. The boy stops when he sees his father lurching towards him. Bunny Junior looks down the path at Mrs Pennington, a black hump of grief folded over her husband, and gives her a little wave.

  ‘Don’t waste your time,’ says Bunny, sticking a cigarette in his mouth and furiously patting his pockets for his Zippo.

  ‘What’s wrong with Grandma?’ says the boy.

  ‘You want the truth?’

  ‘OK, Dad,’ says the boy. He follows his father down the path towards the Punto.

  ‘She’s a fucking bitch,’ says Bunny, and torches his cigarette.

  Bunny Junior wishes he had sunglasses like his dad, black wraparounds that made him look ‘insectile’. His granulated eyelids cause him to blink more than other people do and he thinks he should remind his father that he needs to get the special eye drops before he goes completely blind or something. The boy can see the pulsing, scarlet band across his father’s neck and the violence with which he is puffing his fag and blowing the smoke out of his nose. He looks like an animated Looney Toons bull or Mexican Toro or something – thinks the boy – and understands that now is not the time to ask him about such things as eye drops.

  Bunny pulls open the door of the Punto and drops into the driver’s seat and slams the door shut with such finality that it feels almost premonitory – like it’s the end of things. He starts up the Punto and takes a blind and near-suicidal swerve into the traffic and the six-axle concrete mixer that bears down on him, horn blaring, could have been the very event that ruptured Bunny’s mortal coil and sent him to his death – but it is not. The concrete mixer, oxblood-coloured with ‘DUDMAN’ painted in capitals across the front, blasts past with a tanned and tattooed arm hanging out the window as it makes its way to the depot at Fishersgate. Bunny doesn’t even blink.

  Instead Bunny punches the radio and a bombast of classical music pours out and Bunny hits it again – this radio with a mind of its own – and lucks out on a commercial station and wondrously, miraculously, there, pouring from the speakers in all its thrilling optimism and sexual emancipat
ion and gold hotpants comes that song – and all the aggrieving rage hisses out of Bunny like a leaky valve, the boiling heat drains from his face and he turns to his son, knuckles his head and says, ‘Whoever said that there isn’t a God is full of shit!’

  ‘Full of craperoo!’ says the boy, smiling, and rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Full of about ten tons of steaming manure!’ says Bunny. ‘I mean, what a song!’

  ‘Full of a big bucket of faeces!’ says the boy.

  Bunny thrusts his hips forward in the seat and jerks back and forth to that joyous techno beat and feels the music reach purposefully down to the base of his spine and then mushroom outwards with a warmth that makes him feel like he has pissed himself or given birth or come in his pants or something.

  ‘Oh, man,’ says Bunny, and he presses the heel of his hand into his crotch and the day’s images of murderous grandmothers and scornful cripples and poncey vicars and gaggles of sneering fucking bitches evaporate into the ether and he says, ‘It’s a bloody wonder this song is legal!’

  9

  Bunny opens the front door. He has removed his jacket and now wears a cornflower blue shirt with a design that looks like polka dots but is actually, on more careful inspection, antique Roman coins that have, if you get right up close, tiny and varied vignettes of copulating couples printed on them. By some miracle Libby missed this item of clothing when she decided to redesign Bunny’s wardrobe with a kitchen knife and a bottle of Indian ink. She did, however, do irrevocable damage to the famous ‘Greek’ shirt that Poodle had given Bunny for his wedding anniversary. Poodle had picked this up on the Internet on a site for modern-day Lotharios, cocksmen and bedroom-hoppers called seducer.com. It had a not-so-discreet pattern involving a Grecian sex god or something – a dude with an olive wreath around his head and an appendage so impressive it had to be supported in a sling by two plump-cheeked cherubim. Bunny found this particular shirt stuffed down the waste-disposal unit and he had sat down on the floor of the kitchen and wept into its shredded remains.

  ‘Hey, fuck-face,’ said Poodle, entering the flat with a canine grin and a drugged sheen to his eyes.

  ‘Jesus, Poo. Mind your manners,’ says the leggy blonde hanging on to Poodle’s arm, and kicks him in the shin.

  ‘Wo! Steady, girl!’ says Poodle, and hops up and down on one stonewashed leg while Bunny notices, with an electrical libidinous stirring, that the purple birthmark on the blonde’s top lip is shaped a bit like a rabbit.

  Raymond, jacketless, moves around Poodle with a carton of lager cradled in his arms and an imitation smile on his face. Through a miasma of alcohol fumes that Bunny finds vaguely comforting, Raymond says, blandly, ‘All right, Bun?’

  Raymond’s girlfriend, who is almost certainly called Barbara, pops her head up from behind Raymond like an idea-free think-bubble and says, ‘Hi, Bun.’

  Bunny says, ‘Hi … um …’ and thinks maybe her name isn’t Barbara after all and Raymond says, in a stage whisper, ‘Barbara’ and Bunny says, ‘OK, yeah, Barbara … sorry, Barbara.’

  Whatever Barbara says by way of a reply is lost in the clamorous and stentorian advent of Geoffrey, who bursts through the door, a litre of Scotch poking from each pocket of his vast linen jacket. Wheezing frighteningly from his trip up the stairs, he waves his ever-present handkerchief in the air and bellows, ‘Bunny … Bunny … Bunny’ and follows this with a perfect landslide of sweating flesh and not so much embraces Bunny as digests him.

  ‘That was a lovely service, Bun,’ says Geoffrey and everyone agrees.

  The blonde with the birthmark moves forward and says to Bunny, ‘It really was special.’

  Bunny turns to Poodle and says, ‘And Poodle, your friend is …’ but Poodle is nowhere to be seen. Bunny looks down the hall in time to see the surreptitious closing of the bathroom door. Things are looking up, thinks Bunny.

  The leggy blonde smiles at Bunny and introduces herself.

  ‘My name is River,’ she says.

  Bunny looks momentarily confused and then is hit by a brief but intense moment of vertigo, where the floor buckles and the walls tilt and Bunny is forced to hold on to Geoffrey’s shoulder for support.

  ‘You all right, Bun?’ asks Geoffrey, throwing a wing of pillowed flesh across Bunny’s shoulder.

  ‘Shit, that’s weird, I just met …’ says Bunny, and then he flashes on the dumpy waitress from the Grenville Hotel – her plump, white buttocks, the pounding headboard, her mantra of attenuated moans – and the whole scenario threatens to overwhelm him.

  ‘I just wish everything would slow down,’ says Bunny, ‘I wish everything would just level out,’ and immediately wonders why he said this.

  ‘Um,’ says Raymond, embarrassed.

  ‘Of course you do, Bun,’ says Geoffrey, patting Bunny on the back, sympathetically.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ says River, extending her hand, the tips of her long, thin fingers painted in coral pink varnish. Bunny, who has pulled himself together, takes her hand and feels an electro-magnetic exchange of such force that he jumps back and shakes his hand vigorously and says, ‘Did you feel that?!’ He looks aghast at River, whose head is tilted to the side, her brow furrowed. ‘Did you feel that?’ he says. ‘Oh, baby, I am the Duracell Bunny!’ and he does a fair imitation of the pink, battery-powered, drumming rabbit, up and down the hall.

  River looks at Bunny with her large, liquid eyes and unconsciously touches the birthmark on her lip.

  Bunny says, blowing on his hand, ‘Next you’re going to tell me you were born near a river!’ and starts laughing and patting at the creases on the front of his trousers. There is general bafflement at this remark and everyone looks at the floor and Bunny hopes Poodle hasn’t vacuumed up all the whiz.

  ‘And who is this?’ says River.

  Bunny Junior has appeared like a little wraith in the hall and stands with his fists jammed up under his armpits. River reaches down and messes his hair and when she has finished the boy tries to rearrange it as it was.

  ‘That’s Bunny Junior,’ says Bunny. ‘He’s my son.’

  The boy points a thumb at his father and, with a narrow smile, says, ‘And he’s my dad.’

  Everyone laughs at this, which confounds Bunny Junior because what he says is true. This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride – he’s my dad – and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.

  ‘Oh, my God, he is so cute,’ says River and messes up his hair again. ‘If you were just a few years older …’

  The door to the bathroom bursts open and Poodle barrels out, teeth bared and eyes glittering. He rubs at his nose with the back of his hand and says, ‘Jesus Christ, River, the kid is nine years old.’

  River pinches the boy’s cheek and says, ‘I know. I was just saying …’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ says Poodle. His yellow quiff has somehow taken on an even more lustrous sheen – it actually sparkles, as he swivels around and says, ‘Check this out, River! Think of a country … any country …’

  ‘What?’ says River.

  ‘Just think of a bloody country. Jesus …’ says Poodle and winks at Bunny Junior.

  ‘OK,’ says River, ‘Mongolia.’

  ‘OK, Bunny Boy, don’t let your Uncle Poodle down. What’s the capital of Mongolia?’

  Bunny Junior screws up his face in mock concentration, looks at the ceiling, strokes his chin and scratches his head.

  ‘Ulaanbaadar,’ says the boy and the guests all applaud.

  ‘And he’s got brains,’ says River and places her hand on the back of the boy’s neck and he feels an oily and unfamiliar heat pulsing from it.

  ‘It used to be called Urga,’ says Bunny Junior, quietly.

  ‘Brains?’ says Poodle. ‘The boy’s a fucking genius!’

  River claps her hot hands over Bunny Junior’s ears and says, �
��Wo! Language!’

  ‘Shall we go in then?’ says Bunny.

  As the grown-ups move into the living room, Bunny Junior hears Poodle whisper to River, ‘Christ, it’s fucking dark in here. Where are all the light bulbs?’

  He sees River elbow Poodle in the ribs and whisper back, ‘Jesus, Poo, the guy just lost his wife. What do you expect, a fucking disco ball?’

  Later that night Bunny Junior lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling and watches the green glow of the planets revolve above his head. He trances on the spectral refractions of light that move across the ceiling and journey down the wall. He runs through the things he knows about Pluto – for example, how it is composed primarily of rock and ice and is relatively small, approximately a fifth the mass of the Earth’s moon and a third its volume – and after he has done that for a while, he brings his wristwatch up to his ear and listens to the ticking, loud and unstoppable, of time passing. It occurs to him that with each tick of the clock the memory of his mother fades, and she slips away. He feels, with a rush of iced wind across his heart, that even by just lying there he is losing her, little by little. He closes his eyes and attempts with reasonable success to ransack his memory and conjure up images of her. He hopes by doing this that he will prevent her from melting away completely. He wants, deep down, to remember her back into existence.

  He remembers her picking him up from school in her pink velour tracksuit, the prettiest of the mums, he remembers her attending, with much sympathetic cooing, to a bloody nose, and further back he thinks he can remember her applauding him when he rode his bike no-hands. He recalls receiving his encyclopaedia for no other reason than ‘she loved him to bits’, and further back he has a distant, colour-bleached memory of crawling across the kitchen floor and attaching himself to her long, smooth leg and feeling a surprising strength as she dragged him around the kitchen floor. He pictures himself – is this a memory? – lying newly born and swaddled in a blanket with his mother’s cool hand on his forehead and the dark proximity of what must have been his father.