Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘Can I help you, officer?’ says Bunny.

The police officer stops talking into her radio transmitter and there is a squelch of static. Bunny clocks the weighty, hardcore accoutrements – handcuffs, truncheon, mace – hanging from her belt, and also her torpedo-like breasts and, despite his grim disposition, he experiences a kind of alchemical transmutation in his leopard-skin briefs where a mild-mannered mouse morphs into a super-powered hard-on from Krypton and he wonders, obscurely, if society would not be better served if they kept this particular officer away from the general public – like a desk job in a place where it was freezing cold all the time or something.

‘Is that your son?’ says the police officer.

‘Yes, it is,’ says Bunny, draping a practised hand over the front of his steepled trousers and clocking the number on her epaulette – PV388.

‘He tells me…’

‘You spoke to him?’ interrupts Bunny and looks in the window of the Punto and sees Bunny Junior slumped in the passenger seat looking decidedly out of sorts, his head lolled back, the tip of his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.

‘He tells me he is feeling ill,’ says the police officer.

‘And?’ says Bunny. But he’s had enough of this.

The police officer says, all business, ‘What is your name, sir?’

‘My name is Bunny Munro,’ he says, leaning in and snuffling like a rabbit. ‘Is that Chanel?’

‘Excuse me?’ says the police officer.

Bunny leans in closer and sniffs again.

‘Your scent,’ he says. ‘Very nice.’

‘I will ask you to stand back, sir,’ says the police officer and her hands drop to her belt and hover around the can of mace snug in its little holster.

‘That must have knocked you back a few bob.’

The police officer repositions herself, planting her feet firmly on the ground. Bunny senses that she is new on the job and notices an activated, keyed-up gleam in her eye and a fleck of foam on her lower lip, as if this was the moment she had been waiting for all her professional life, and indeed, beyond.

‘Take a step back,’ she says.

‘I mean, how do you afford that on a policeman’s wage?’ says Bunny, thinking he may have got that thing about her not being a dyke wrong, and thinking he would probably be best served if he kept his mouth shut.

‘Would you like to continue this conversation down the station, sir?’ says the police officer, her hands dancing around her belt as if she can’t decide whether to mace him or club him.

Bunny steps forward, blood flushing at his throat.

‘The thing is, officer, that boy you just questioned in the car is frightened. He is scared out of his fucking wits. His mother just died in the most terrifying of circumstances. I can’t begin to describe the effect that this has had on him. It’s a fucking tragedy, if you must know. Right now, my son needs his father. So, if you don’t mind…’

Bunny notices the muscles relax in the police officer’s thighs as she softens her stance. He notices a slight incline of the chin and a twinge of humanity around the edges of her eyes. Bunny thinks – No, he was right the first time, she is definitely not a dyke, and under another set of circumstances things might have panned out differently. He actually feels a throb of sadness as the police officer steps aside and permits Bunny to pass, open the door of the Punto, get in and drive away.

As he negotiates the late-afternoon traffic, Bunny pats Mrs Brooks’ wedding rings in his pocket, registers the after-scent of the police officer’s perfume and is almost blown out of the driver’s seat by a blizzard of imagined pussy, glittering and sleek and expensive and coming at him from every direction – Jordan’s, Kate Moss’s, Naomi Cambell’s, Kylie Minogue’s, Beyoncé’s and, of course, Avril Lavigne’s – but spinning up through all of that, in an annulus of tiny handcuffs and resting on a cartoon cloud of Chanel, comes the humble vagina of the police constable, number PV388.

Back on top – thinks Bunny, obscurely, as he turns into a Pizza Hut and hits the men’s room with a vengeance.

Bunny folds a slice of pizza in half and stuffs it into his mouth. Bunny Junior, shades on, does the same. There are so many jalapeños on the pizza that tears run down the side of Bunny Junior’s face and his nose streams.

‘She wanted to know why I wasn’t in school. I think it’s, like, illegal , or something,’ says the boy with a barb of irony his father does not detect.

‘And?’ he says.

‘I told her I was sick, Dad.’

‘And?’ says Bunny.

‘And she wanted to know where my mother was!’ shouts the boy and drops his piece of pizza, gulps down his Coke and rubs at his forehead. ‘And she wanted to know where my father was!’ Tears well in the boy’s eyes.

‘Bitch,’ says Bunny and stuffs another piece of pizza in his mouth.

‘Why aren’t I in school, Dad?!’ shouts Bunny Junior and wipes a great streak of snot from his nose with the back of his hand. Bunny looks at his son, flat-eyed, and rotates the bracelet on his wrist. He sucks his Coke and says nothing for a while.

‘Take those glasses off,’ says Bunny.

The boy does so, and in the hard-boiled light his swollen eyes itch and dazzle. Bunny pushes the pizza tray to one side and speaks in a voice so quiet the boy has to crane forward to hear him.

‘I’ll ask you straight up, Bunny Boy. What would you rather do? Be with your dad or hang out with a bunch of snotty-nosed little fuckers at school? You want to amount to something? You want to learn the business or walk through life with your arse hanging out of your trousers?’

‘Can I put these glasses back on? It hurts in here. I think I might be going blind,’ says the boy, squinting up at his father. ‘I think I need some eye drops or something.’

‘Answer the question,’ says Bunny, ‘because if you want to go back to school, just say the fucking word.’

‘I want to be with you, Dad.’

‘Of course you do! Because I’m your dad! And I’m showing you the ropes! I’m teaching you the trade. Something some mummified old bitch with a bloody blackboard and a piece of chalk wouldn’t have the faintest idea about.’

The boy’s eyes stream in the people-hating glare and he dabs at them with a napkin and slides his shades back on and says, ‘I think I might need a white stick and a dog soon, Dad.’

Bunny doesn’t hear this, as his attention has been drawn to an adjacent table where a mother sits eating pizza with what must be her daughter. The young girl is wearing gold hipster hotpants and a lemon yellow T-shirt that says ‘YUMMY’ and shows her belly. She wears fluorescent pink nail polish on her fingers and toes. Bunny is thinking that in a few years’ time the girl would be seriously hot, and the thought of this has Bunny considering revisiting the bathroom, but then the girl’s mother says to Bunny, ‘I don’t like the way you are looking at my daughter,’ and Bunny says, aghast, ‘What do you think I am?!’ and then says, ‘Jesus! How old is she?’ and the woman says, ‘Three.’ Bunny says, ‘That’s not to say that in a few years… well, you know…’ and the woman picks up a piece of cutlery and says, ‘If you say one more word, I’ll stick this fork in your face,’ and Bunny replies, ‘Wo! You suddenly got very sexy,’ and the woman scoops up her daughter and moves away, saying, ‘Arsehole,’ and Bunny waggles his rabbit ears at her and says to Bunny Junior, ‘I learned the trade with my old man, out on the streets , you know, the front line. We’d drive around in his van, find some rundown old place, a real drum – flaky paint, overgrown garden – owned by some rich biddy with fifty fucking cats, and in he’d go, and before I had time to eat my sandwich, out he’d come with a nice little Queen Anne dressing table. He had a gift, my old man, the talent , and he taught me the art – how to be a people person. That’s what we are doing, Bunny Boy. You may not be able to see it right now, but I am handing down the talent to you. Do you understand?’