Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘Excuse me, young lady,’ he says again.

‘Finished giving my mum a fuck?’ says the young girl on the bicycle.

‘Eh?’ says Bunny, opening the door of the Punto.

‘Finishing sticking your dick in my mum?’

Bunny leans in close to the girl and rings the bell on her bike and says, ‘Actually, yes, I have, and it was very nice, thank you very much.’ Then he folds himself up and drops with a contemptuous grunt into the driver’s seat. He turns the key in the ignition and the Punto makes its noises and, insolently and unwilling, starts first time.

‘Jesus, who’s your girlfriend?’ says Bunny. ‘What a little ball-breaker.’

Wisps of sea mist curl around the Punto as Bunny moves onto the ocean road.

‘She just came and talked to me, Dad.’

‘Fancy you, did she?’ said Bunny, popping a fag between his teeth and patting the pockets of his jacket for his Zippo.

Bunny Junior fingers his Darth Vader and says, ‘Da-ad.’ He feels a kind of rising heat.

‘No, she did, I can tell. She had that special light in her eyes!’

‘Da-ad!’

‘I’m telling you, Bunny Boy, I can spot it a mile off!’

Bunny turns to his son and punches him on the arm. Bunny Junior is happy that his dad is happy and he is happy that his dad is not mental and he is also just happy and he says, in a loud voice, ‘Maybe I should go back and give her a fuck!’

Bunny looks at his son as if for the first time and then throws out a great laugh. He knuckles the boy’s skull.

‘One day, Bunny Boy, one day!’ he exclaims, and with the blue sea on one side, and green fields on the other, Bunny Junior waves the client list in the air and holds up the A-Z and laughs, ‘Where to now, Dad?’

Soon Bunny Junior will sit back in his seat and stare out at the white, weather-bitten cliffs and the flocks of seagulls that feast on the newly turned earth in the fields that line the coastal road. He will think that even though his mother would come into his room and hold him and stroke his forehead and cry her eyes out, her hand was still the softest, sweetest, warmest thing he had ever felt, and he will look up and see a flock of starlings trace the angles of her face in the sky. He will think that if he could just feel that soft, warm hand on his forehead again then he would he didn’t know what.

On the television mounted on the wall of a small café in Western Road there is a special report on the Horned Killer. A young mother has been murdered with a garden fork in her home in Maida Vale. The attack was so vicious that the authorities initially had difficulties identifying the sex of the victim. The same afternoon, the killer had done his diabolical streak for the CCTV cameras through a shopping complex in Queensway. Then, as always, he disappeared. On the TV, Bunny sees a stylised map of England that reminds him of a cartoon rabbit (without ears) and shows, with a red line, the dismal, southbound trajectory of the murderer’s infernal journey. Some part of Bunny takes all this personally, but he is not sure why.

The guy serving behind the counter has shaved and oiled his head and leans towards Bunny and cocks his thumb at the TV and says, ‘Can you believe this guy?’ He wears a tight red T-shirt and Bunny, who sits eating a ketchup-smothered Cornish pasty and sucking a pink milkshake through a straw, notices the ringed contours of his nipple piercings through the fabric.

‘He’s working his way to Brighton,’ says Bunny, ominously.

‘What makes you say that, man?’

‘I can feel it in my guts,’ says Bunny. ‘He is coming down.’

Bunny Junior looks around the café and sucks his milkshake and moves back and forth on his swivel-topped stool. He watches a couple nearby, hunched over bowls of spaghetti Bolognese and involved in some heated, whispered altercation. The woman throws furtive glances around the restaurant and the boy tries to decode the nature of their dispute by reading the man’s lips but this proves impossible as he keeps covering his mouth with his hand. Then his attention is drawn to a lone man eating from a plate of chips. He wears a black shirt and has thick white hair and a silver zodiac symbol on a chain around his neck and he is looking directly at the boy. He dips a chip in mayonnaise, puts it in his mouth and smiles at the boy with genuine warmth.

‘All the freaks wash down here,’ says Bunny to the guy behind the counter, but he has turned away and is now serving someone else, so Bunny directs his attention to his son.

‘In this business, Bunny Boy, you meet all kinds of crazy people. It’s the nature of the game. You get a certain understanding for them,’ he says.

The man in the black shirt and the pendant counts some money into a tiny tin plate. He gives Bunny Junior a secret wave, licks the salt off the ends of his fingers, then picks up his jacket, turns his back and leaves.

‘You’ve got to live by your wits. It’s an instinct,’ says Bunny. ‘Always keep one eye open. You turn your back on someone for a second and the next minute they’re boiling your head in a saucepan. It’s something you learn over time, Bunny Boy…’

Through the lunchtime crowd Bunny Junior glimpses a woman in an orange dress with blonde hair standing in the queue across the café at the sandwich counter. Her head is inclined away from him, her face hidden in her hair, and sometimes he can see her and sometimes he can’t.

‘Be bloody prepared,’ says Bunny.

‘For the crazy guy,’ says Bunny Junior, distractedly.

‘You got it, Bunny Boy. One eye on the nutter.’

Bunny Junior stands and ducks and weaves and tries to get a glimpse of the woman who could well be his mother, but he can’t see her any more and he hears his dad say, ‘Once I did this job in Hastings and there was a little girl there that had tiny flippers for hands and her tongue was so long she had it pinned to the lapel of her jacket.’

Bunny Junior climbs back up on his stool and sits very still, hands folded in his lap. The blood has drained from his face and when Bunny looks at his son, he registers his haunted expression.

‘Tell me about it, Bunny Boy! It gives me the creeps just thinking about it!’

Bunny takes out his wallet and the man behind the counter, with his lubricated dome and his erotic accoutrements, says to Bunny as he takes his money, ‘You in town long?’

Bunny delivers a disdainful look and, with Bunny Junior close behind, leaves the café. Outside he stops, throws out his hands in outrage and says to the boy, ‘Do I look like I’ve got a mangina? Do I look like I’ve got a munt? ’

‘Um,’ says the boy.

‘Tell me the truth. Do I look like a fucking fag to you?’

Bunny Junior, who realises he has forgotten to finish his pasty, looks up and down the street and forgets to answer his father as he sees what appears to be a triangle of orange fabric slip around a corner and disappear.

Bunny stands outside a ground-floor flat in Charles Street, Kemp Town, and wonders what he is doing. He turns and sees his son’s face watching him through the window of the Punto – the boy squeezing out his jinked smile – and he wonders what he is doing. At the front door, he presses the buzzer and sees a dark shape wobble, mirage-like, on the other side of the frosted glass – icing sugar sunset with powdered palm trees – then rattle a series of locks and chains, and he wonders what he is doing. He looks at the name on the client list and it says Mrs Candice Brooks and he experiences in the base of his spine a thrill of sexual anticipation that brings clarity of purpose to his mind. But the door opens and a tiny, bent and impossibly ancient lady in dark glasses appears before him and says in a surprisingly youthful voice, ‘Can I help you?’