Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘Mum gave you that tie,’ says Bunny Junior.

Bunny scratches his head and turns to the boy.

‘OK, son, this is serious. This is the real deal. This is one of those moments in life when you’ve really got to listen and, young as you are, try to understand. There is another law of salesmanship that I haven’t told you about. It is the absolutely crucial law. It’s even more important than the patience law. Any salesman worth his salt will tell you the same thing. Now, do you want to know what it is?’

‘OK, Dad.’

‘Well, stop flopping your feet around and I’ll tell you.’

‘OK, Dad.’

‘Never go back. All right? Never, ever, go back. Now, do you want me to tell you why?’

‘OK,’ says the boy, and all down the coastal road the streetlights come on and the boy sees an awesome, mystical majesty in it.

Bunny looks gravely at the boy and says, ‘They may renege on the order.’

‘Might they?’ says the boy.

‘Yes, believe me, it happens,’ says Bunny. ‘OK?’

‘OK, Dad,’ and they smile at each other.

Bunny turns his headlights on and they pass a billboard – a topless Kate Moss, in a pair of Calvin Klein jeans – and he recalls a conversation between Poodle, Geoffrey and himself, down The Wick. Poodle, who kept throwing back tequilas, sucking a lemon and licking the armpit of the girl sitting next to him, said, ‘Well, if you include the haunches, I am definitely a leg man.’ Geoffrey, who was sitting there like King Tut or Buddha or somebody, cupped his own considerable breasts and said, ‘Tit man, no contest.’ Then they looked at Bunny, who pretended to give it some thought, but didn’t really need to. ‘Vagina man,’ said Bunny, and his two colleagues went quiet and nodded in silent agreement. Bunny loves Kate Moss, thinks she’s cool, vanishes her Calvin Kleins, hammers the car horn and thinks, ‘I’m fucking back.’

‘I know where she bought that tie, if you want to get another one,’ says the boy.

Bunny slams his hands on the wheel of the Punto and looks all around him and says, ‘Close your eyes. Go on, close your eyes and don’t open them till I tell you.’

The boy puts his hands in his lap and closes his eyes.

The Punto takes a sudden, violent swerve into a roadside McDonald’s and screeches to a halt.

‘Now open them,’ says Bunny, and the boy can hear the trembling madness in his father’s voice. The light from the giant McDonald’s sign illuminates the boy’s face, coating it in gold, and Bunny can see a little yellow ‘M’ reflected in each of his son’s eyes as he throws open the door of the Punto and steps monstrously out and into the early evening light.

‘Now, tell me you don’t love your dad!’ he roars.

Bunny sits in McDonald’s with a defibrillated hard-on due to the fact that underneath the cashier’s red and yellow uniform she hardly has any clothes on. The cashier wears a nametag that says ‘Emily’ and she keeps glancing across at Bunny with huge vacant eyes and wiggling all around. She has a black lacquered beehive, a conga-line of raw acne across her forehead and a vagina. Bunny thinks she is similar to Kate Moss, only shorter, fatter and more ugly. He bites deep into his Big Mac and says to his son, ‘I fucking love McDonald’s.’

He knows fundamentally, as if it is carved into his very bones, that he could fuck Emily the cashier without any real resistance, but he also understands, in a sorrowful way, that there is a time issue, a problem with the venue (although it wouldn’t be the first time he had slipped it to a waitress in the ladies’) and, of course, he has his nine-year-old son sitting opposite him, flip-flopping his feet, smiling his wonky smile and playing with a plastic Darth Vader figurine that came free with his Happy Meal.

‘Me too,’ says Bunny Junior.

Bunny takes another bite of his Big Mac and knows what everybody knows who is into this sort of thing – that with its flaccid bun, its spongy meat, the cheese, the slimy little pickle and, of course, the briny special sauce, biting into a Big Mac was as close to eating pussy as, well, eating pussy. Bunny put this to Poodle down The Wick one lunchtime, and Poodle, self-proclaimed sexpert and barracuda, argued that eating a tuna carpaccio was actually a lot more like eating pussy than a Big Mac, and this argument raged all through the afternoon, becoming increasingly hostile as the pints went down. Finally Geoffrey, in his near-Godlike wisdom, decided that eating a Big Mac was like eating a fat chick’s pussy and eating a tuna carpaccio was like eating a skinny chick’s pussy, and they left it that. Whatever. Bunny wipes at a blob of special sauce that runs down his chin with the back of his hand. He licks his lips as Emily the cashier throws Bunny another look and scratches at her acne. Bunny can see her nipples actually harden under her uniform, and the effect this has on him is so monumental that Bunny hardly registers that his son is asking him a question.

‘Are you all right, Dad?’

Bunny was thinking that if Emily the cashier took a ten-minute smoko and went downstairs to the toilet, and if he bought Bunny Boy another Coke or Sprite or something – well, who knows? – nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say in the trade. Bunny starts making surreptitious signals, a subtle jerking of the cheekbone towards the customer bathrooms and a kind of egging of the eyeballs, and he hears the boy say, in an anxious little voice, ‘Dad?’

He hopes that his son doesn’t blow the whole thing for him, so he whispers, out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Stay cool, Bunny Boy, just stay cool.’ Then he says, in the voice of a replicant or something, his eyes glued to the waitress, ‘Do you want another Coke or Sprite or something?’

Bunny Junior says, ‘Um,’ and then the manager, a fucking teenager with braces on his teeth and with a nametag that says ‘Ashley’, walks over and asks Bunny to leave. The skin on Ashley’s face has actually turned a shade of green and is peppered with blackheads the size of confetti. He has grease spots on his company tie.

‘I come here a lot. I’m a loyal customer,’ says Bunny.

‘Yeah… um… well, I know you do,’ says Ashley the manager.

Outside, under the golden arches, Bunny opens the door of the Punto and flops into the driver’s seat. The boy climbs in and Bunny says, ‘I fucking hate McDonald’s.’

Bunny Junior wants to ask his father why they had to leave the McDonald’s in such a hurry, but way back in the sub-caverns of his mind, stirring like some hideous, hibernating beast, the answer is already taking shape.

The boy whispers, ‘What are we going to do now, Dad?’

Bunny kicks over the engine of the Punto and the car comes reluctantly and cantankerously to life. He turns out of the McDonald’s car park and merges into the night traffic on the coastal road and all the crouched cars move past.

‘We are gonna get as far away from this place as possible,’ he says.

The boy yawns deep and shudders.

‘Are we going home now, Dad?’

‘Shit, no!’ says Bunny, checking his rear-view mirror. ‘We’re on the road!’

‘What are we gonna do, Dad?’

‘You, me and Darth Vader there are checking into a hotel!’

Bunny checks his mirror again – he’s looking for any police action, the wail of a siren, the flashing blue light looming up behind him – but there is nothing but the somnambulant creep of the evening traffic. He turns off the seafront road, though, just in case, and disappears down a side street. The last thing he needs is to be nicked in breach of his Antisocial Behaviour Order. That would be a serious bummer. Bunny looks at his son, who for some reason has an extremely deranged smile on his face.