Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘Is there anything else you would like to discuss, Mr Munro?’ she says.

‘Yes,’ says Bunny, and he feels a bead of perspiration collect in the hollow beneath his Adam’s apple. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

Jennifer instinctively looks to Graeme for the official line on this question. Bunny thinks he can feel the heat coming off Graeme’s barbecued face and he turns his head to look at him and glimpses Graeme rolling his eyes.

‘What if you are not sure whether your wife has actually completely died?’ asks Bunny, balling the tissue in his fist and flicking it across the room.

The social workers leave and Bunny takes his place on the sofa and watches the television.

‘Can I come back in now?’ asks Bunny Junior, appearing at the door.

‘Well, yeah,’ says Bunny, opening a beer.

The boy sits down next to his father and starts flip-flopping his feet.

‘What is it with you and your feet?’ says Bunny.

‘Sorry, Dad.’

Bunny points at the television.

‘Have you seen that?’ he says.

‘I didn’t think you liked watching the news,’ says the boy.

On the TV there is more CCTV footage of the devil guy who paints himself red, wears plastic joke-shop horns and attacks women. He has struck again. This time fatally. He has followed a young office worker named Beverly Hamilton into an underground car park and murdered her with a garden fork. He stabbed her hundreds of times. The car park is in Leeds, which, thinks Bunny, is further south. The public are in a state of shock. Later that day the Horned Killer, as the press have tagged him, had paraded in front of CCTV cameras at a nearby mall, panicking the shoppers. Then he disappeared. The police are ‘baffled’.

‘Do you believe this guy?’ says Bunny.

‘No, Dad, I don’t!’ says the boy.

There is a simple service for Libby Munro at St Nicolas Church in Portslade. Bunny and Bunny Junior stand in the church, heads bowed. They are dressed in the brand new black suits Bunny had found hanging, side by side, in the otherwise empty closet in his bedroom. A receipt he discovered in the jacket pocket showed that Libby had bought the suits from Top Shop in Churchill Square, two days before her suicide. What was that about?

Every day a newer, weirder and sadder aspect to Libby’s demise reveals itself. A neighbour had said that she had seen Libby burning pieces of paper and dropping them over the balcony a couple of days before her death. They had turned out to be the love letters Bunny had written her before they were married. He found little burnt pieces of them under the stairwell with the syringes and the condoms. What had got into her? She must have been crazy.

The whey-faced and effeminate Father Miles, with a cumulus of white hair banked around his skull, delivers his eulogy in a pneumatic whisper that Bunny has to crane his head to fully hear. He refers to Libby as ‘full of life and loved by all’ and later ‘selfless and generous beyond measure’, not once mentioning her medical condition and her subsequent mode of departure, Bunny notices, other than to say ‘she had joined the angels prematurely’.

Bunny gives a cursory scope of the congregation and sees, squeezed into the same pew, on the other side of the church, a small number of Libby’s friends.

Patsy ‘Bad Vibes’ Parker throws Bunny incriminatory looks every so often, but Bunny expects nothing less. Patsy Parker has never liked Bunny and at every opportunity she can find alerts him to the fact. Patsy is short, with an over-developed backside, and to compensate for her low stature wears high heels much of the time on her tiny undersized feet. When she would come to visit Libby, she would walk down the gangway in an obscene and purposeful trot, reminding Bunny of one of the three little pigs, probably the one who made its house out of bricks. This is particularly pertinent, as she had once, in a fit of pique over some porny comment she had overheard him make about the walking fuck-fest Sonia Barnes from No. 12, called Bunny a wolf. Bunny assumed she meant the cartoon wolf, all drooling tongue and bulging eyeballs, and had actually taken this remark as a compliment. Each time he’d see her he would do his ‘I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down’ routine. Bunny considers rolling out his tongue and bugging his eyeballs at her but realises with a certain satisfaction that he can’t be fucked.

Next to Patsy Parker, Bunny sees, is Rebecca Beresford, who Libby would refer to at any given time as ‘the older sister she never had’, ‘her soul mate’ and ‘her best friend in the world’. Rebecca Beresford stopped talking to Bunny years ago after an incident at a barbecue on Rottingdean beach that involved a half bottle of Blue Label Smirnoff, an uncooked chipolata, her fifteen-year-old daughter and a serious misreading of the signs. This led to a furore that a year of contrition could not defuse. Eventually an unspoken agreement was forged that mutual disdain was the only way forward. Whatever. Rebecca Beresford shoots scowling broadside glances at Bunny from the other side of the church.

Next to her is the seriously sexy Helen Claymore, who also gives Bunny nasty little looks, but Bunny can see that her heart isn’t in them and that she is clearly up for it. This is not an opinion but a statement of fact. Helen Claymore is dressed in a tight, black tweed suit that does something insane to her breasts, militarises them, torpedoes them, and something out of this world to her depth-charged rear end. Helen Claymore has been transmitting signals to Bunny in this way for years and Bunny takes a deep breath and allows himself to open up to her vibes like a medium or spiritualist or something. He gives vent to his imagination and realises for the millionth time that he has none and so he pictures her vagina. Bunny marvels at this for an unspecified moment. He sees it hovering before his eyes like a holy apparition and intuits the wonder of it and feels his dick harden like a bent fork or a divining rod or a cistern lever – he can’t decide which.

Then he hears a release of hissed gas and turns to see Libby’s mother, Mrs Pennington, staring straight at him with a look of horror and sheer hatred on her face. She actually bares her teeth at him. Caught in the act – thinks Bunny – and bends his head in prayer.

The boy looks up at his father and then over at Mrs Pennington and smiles at her and raises his hand in a sad, little wave. His grandmother looks at him and shakes her head in rage and grief, and a great sob breaks from her chest. Her husband, a good-looking guy who had a stroke a year ago and is now consigned to a wheelchair, lifts a convulsive hand and places it over that of his despairing wife.

Suddenly, Father Miles is talking about ‘those left behind’, and when he mentions Libby’s ‘loving husband’, Bunny thinks he can hear an audible groan from the congregation – a boo and a hiss for the bad guy. He thinks he may well be imagining this but, just in case, he repositions himself, giving them his back, as if to shield himself from their collective disdain by facing the wall.

When he opens his eyes his attention is grabbed by a painting of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus cradled in her arms. Underneath there is a lacquered plaque that reads Madonna and Child , which makes him close his eyes and incline his head again and think about Madonna and her waxed pussy (probably) and how he’d read in some interview that she liked having her yoga-toned bottom spanked.

Behind all this imagining he can hear the low whisper of his wife’s eulogy and suddenly he feels a kind of imminent sense of her presence and, weirdly, his own doom. He can stand it no longer.

‘Wait here,’ he whispers to his son.