The Death of Bunny Munro Read online

  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.

  PART TWO

  SALESMAN

  12

  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 sea
t 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.

  ‘Fuck, Bun, some cunt’s giving you a ticket!’

  ‘Shit,’ says Bunny, and he snaps shut his sample case.

  ‘Hey, Bun,’ says Poodle, squinting in the light as though he can’t believe what he sees.

  Bunny, who is halfway out the door, turns.

  ‘Your kid looks like he is having some kind of fit!’

  Bunny slams the door and Geoffrey moves his great weight to the fridge and tosses Poodle a beer.

  ‘I’m worried about that guy,’ he says.

  Bunny grabs the parking ticket that is taped to the windscreen of the Punto and for the benefit of the traffic warden, who is walking down the street, tapping a
way at his electronic ticket dispenser, his hat angled ironically on his head, Bunny performs an impressive porno-panto of a man fucking a traffic warden up the arse. The traffic warden watches Bunny expression-free for a moment, which inspires Bunny to do his famous impersonation of a traffic warden sucking his own dick. Then he watches the traffic warden curse under his breath and start marching down the street towards the Punto, whereupon Bunny performs a basic risk-assessment exercise – he is big and he is black – and climbs in the Punto and starts the car. The traffic warden stops, shakes his head and walks away.

  ‘The nerve of that guy,’ says Bunny, looking over his shoulder. ‘And with a retard in the car and everything!’

  ‘He was a bit of a bastard, wasn’t he, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

  Bunny looks at his son and smiles.

  ‘You said it, Bunny Boy.’

  There is a loud and sudden knock on the roof of the Punto and Bunny jumps and looks everywhere at once. Poodle’s face appears in the window and he mimics rolling it down.

  ‘It’s Poodle,’ says the boy.

  ‘I can see that,’ says Bunny and winds down the window.

  Poodle slips two fingers into the breast pocket of his Polo shirt and extracts a small piece of notepaper and hands it to Bunny.