Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘Then it began to get dark and the stars came out and I started to get cold so I went back to our chalet.’

This time the boy keeps his eyes closed when he says, ‘What happened to the girl, Dad?’

‘Well, the next day my dad sent me down to the pool again and I looked for Penny Charade but she wasn’t there, and I was moving through the water feeling sorry for myself when I noticed another girl who was smiling at me, then another one, and suddenly the whole pool was heaving with Penny Charades… on the side of the pool… swimming in the water, on the fucking diving board, waving and smiling and laying on their towels, playing with blow-up balls and there it was again… that feeling… that power… and me with the gift …’

Bunny gropes around on the bed until he finds the remote and, with a crack of static, it implodes into nothingness and he closes his eyes. A great wall of darkness moves towards him. He can see it coming, vast and imperious. It is unconsciousness and it is sleep. It moves like a great tidal wave but before it breaks over him and he is away, before he renders himself completely to that oblivious sleep, he thinks, with a sudden, terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne’s vagina.

‘Is that your dad in my house?’ says the little girl on the bicycle.

‘Yeah, I guess,’ says Bunny Junior, who has been trying to read about Mata Hari in his encyclopaedia, but can’t concentrate on the words because he is so worried about his father. In the breakfast room at the Queensbury, his dad was jumping around like his pants were on fire. He’d eat a bit of sausage, get up and rabbit into his phone, then sit back down and spill his coffee everywhere. He’d disappear into the bathroom and not come out for ages, then follow the waitress around the breakfast room and talk to her a mile a minute about who knows what – Bunny Junior sure didn’t know. The boy ate his breakfast quickly and, anxious to leave, pulled out the client list and said, ‘Where to now, Dad?’ but his dad told him they were going to visit a loyal customer in Rottingdean – one they could tap into at any time. She just loved that body cream! Then he was stuffing his mouth with eggs and toast and chasing the waitress around the breakfast room again, waggling his hands behind his head like a rabbit. He had put on a new shirt with brown and orange diagonal stripes and a tie with a little picture of a floppy-eared rabbit sticking his head out of a magician’s hat, but he hadn’t shaved and his hair was sticking up like nobody’s business.

Bunny Junior was not used to worrying about his dad. He was more used to worrying about his mum. Once, when his father was away, she had come into the bedroom and sat on the bed and put her arms around him and cried her eyes out and he hadn’t known what to do but wonder where the old mum had gone.

Now he is sitting in the Punto outside a large, newly built house in Rottingdean, and a girl who looked about the same age as him, maybe a little older, is asking him a question. She is straddling a bicycle and has a small brown mole on her cheek. She rings the bell three times before she speaks to him again.

‘Your dad is giving my mum a fuck,’ she says.

She wears a strawberry tankini with the word ‘TOXIC’ written in little silver studs across her chest. Bunny Junior notices, when she turns to look back at her house, that one side of her bikini bottom has ridden up the crack in her bum.

‘He’s my dad,’ says Bunny Junior, screwing up one eye and sticking his head out the car window and looking up and down the street but not knowing what it was he was looking for.

‘Yeah, I know,’ says the girl. ‘He’s sticking his dick in her.’

The boy responds with a tilt of the chin but his feet start flip-flopping furiously.

‘Yeah, well, he’s the best salesman in the world,’ he says.

The girl rocks back and forth on the bicycle and says, ‘She makes me go out of the house. But you can hear her from miles away. She sounds like a strangled chicken. Cock-a-doodle-do!’ The little girl flaps her elbows for emphasis.

‘You mean a rooster,’ says the boy.

‘Yeah, whatever. You can hear her for miles.’

Bunny Junior points at the girl’s bicycle and says, ‘My dad could sell your bicycle to a barracuda.’

The girl pushes her fringe out of her eyes and says, ‘A what?’

‘It’s a predatory fish,’ he says. ‘Its jaws are armed with hundreds of razor-like teeth.’

‘Oh,’ says the girl.

She rings the bell on her bicycle and says, ‘My dad bought me this.’

‘The bicycle?’ says the boy.

‘No, the bell.’

The little girls rocks some more and grimaces for no particular reason. Bunny Junior likes this girl. He thinks she is very pretty and he hasn’t really spoken to a girl before. He paddles his feet for a while and thinks about something to say.

‘My mum died,’ he says without warning and he experiences a sudden thundering of his blood to his face and he pushes himself back into the seat of the Punto, mortified and ashamed.

‘Yeah?’ says the girl, then wheels her bicycle up to the window and Bunny Junior sees that she has crimson glitter nail polish on her fingers and a smear of blue shadow over each eye.

‘I wish my mum would die,’ she says. ‘She’s a fucking bitch-face.’

The surge of blood subsides and the roaring in his ears abates and Bunny Junior takes his sunglasses from the glove box and slips them on.

‘I don’t have to go to school,’ he says.

The young girl smiles, realigns her bikini bottoms, pushes her fringe out of her eyes and says, ‘Cool.’

‘My dad says I don’t have to.’

They say nothing for a minute and Bunny Junior adjusts his shades and the girl cocks her head and looks at the boy sitting in the car, and the sun beats down and she rings her bell twice. Bunny Junior reaches over to the driver’s side and taps the car horn two times in response. They smile at each other and together they both look down the road somewhere. They see Bunny exit the house and march across the sun-scorched lawn, tucking his shirt into his trousers.

‘Here he comes,’ says Bunny Junior quietly, ‘my dad.’

The boy wishes his dad would turn around and go back inside because he doesn’t want to see his dad – although he looks a lot better coming out of the house than he did going in. On the way here, his dad kept turning the radio on and off and moving around in his seat and sounding the horn and swigging from his bottle and driving like a mental case, and when he arrived at the house he actually hopped across the lawn like a rabbit. Most of all, though, he wanted his dad to go back into the house because all of a sudden he could think of a million and one things he wanted to tell this girl on the bicycle – about outer space, the veldts of Africa or the microcosmic world of insects or something, and he didn’t even know her name.

‘Excuse me, young lady,’ says Bunny as he marches up to the Punto.

Bunny is thinking that there is nothing like getting your pipes cleaned first thing in the morning to set you up for the rest of the day. He had woken gloomy and hungover and full of dirty water, and had probably hit the bottle a little heavy in recompense. He thought he may have set something up with the cute little waitress from the breakfast room at the Queensbury Hotel, but he was not completely sure. Then he remembered Mylene Huq from Rottingdean, and a quick call to Poodle was enough to secure her address. The story goes that Mylene Huq’s husband took off with someone half his age and that Mylene Huq has been involved in an epic revenge-fuck ever since. Meanwhile, the word has spread around the local studs and everyone was getting in while the going was good. This kind of opportunity is usually short-lived and always ends in tears, but there is no denying that in the throes of their particular brand of wild justice these bitches go off like fucking firecrackers.