Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

Bunny Junior says, ‘Yes, Dad.’

His father stands and says, ‘OK, then.’

‘I might have to learn Braille,’ says the boy.

‘Bitch,’ Bunny says under his breath.

There is a crack of thunder, a flash of lightning and it begins to rain.

In the corner of the room, on a small black television, a bull elephant fornicates epically with its mate. Bunny, who lies on the bed fully clothed and wholly drunk, can’t quite believe what he sees. A storm wails against the windows – thunder, lightning, cats, dogs – and in the bed next to Bunny the boy lies curled in a deep, embryonic sleep. Neither the trumpeting mastodon nor the hammering rain can wake him.

In one practised motion Bunny decants a miniature bottle of Smirnoff down his throat, shudders and gags, then repeats the action with a little green bottle of Gordon’s gin.

He closes his eyes and the black wave of oblivion gathers strength and moves towards him. But Bunny finds his thoughts straying towards the three young mothers he visited yesterday morning – was it only yesterday? – Amanda, Zoë and especially Georgia. Georgia with the big bones and the violet eyes. Georgia with the gone, gone husband.

Somewhere in the back stalls of his consciousness Bunny hears the triumphant bull elephant blow a super-sized bucket of custard into his happy consort. The windows buckle as the storm pounds and down in the bassbins he hears the infrasonic reverberations of thunder. Bunny imagines, dreams even, Georgia naked and angled across his knee, her great, white globoids trembling beneath his touch, and it feels as if these apocalyptic rumblings of weather and his goatish visions were in some weird way connected and prophetic because, deep down, Bunny knows, more than he knows anything in the world, his mobile phone is about to ring and that Georgia will be on the line.

Bunny opens his eyes and gropes about for his mobile phone just as it begins to vibrate, juddering about on the bed to the super-sexy ringtone of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Spinning Around’, and he visualises Kylie’s gold lamé hotpants and his dick magically reanimates, hard and erect, as he flips open the phone and says, ‘What’s the story, morning glory?’

He puts a Lambert & Butler between his lips and torches it with his Zippo and smiles to himself because he knows – he knows the story.

‘Is that Bunny Munro?’ comes a voice, soft and timid and from another world.

The room swims as Bunny throws his legs over the edge of the bed and sits up and says, ‘And who might that be?’ – but he knows .

‘It’s Georgia,’ says Georgia. ‘You were at my house yesterday.’

Bunny draws on his cigarette and blows a syzygy of smoke rings – one, two, three – then reams the last one with his index finger and says, out of a dream, ‘Georgia with the violet eyes.’

‘Is it… did I… have I called too late?’

Bunny slips his socked feet into his loafers and says, with genuine emotion, ‘You won’t believe what I’m watching on the Discovery Channel.’

‘It’s too late… I can call back,’ says Georgia, and Bunny thinks he can hear the low breathing of a sleeping child and a terrible, protracted loneliness coming down the line.

‘Have you any idea just how big an elephant’s dick is?!’ says Bunny.

‘Um… maybe I should…’

‘It’s… aah… it’s fucking elephantine! ’

Bunny leaps to his feet and the room turbinates and unravels and Bunny claws at the air futilely and shouts, ‘Timber!’ and lands like a felled tree between the two beds.

‘I’ve made a mistake,’ says Georgia, and Bunny raises himself on his hands and knees.

‘Georgia… Georgia, the only mistake you made was not to ring me sooner. I’ve been lying here, going off the hinges thinking about you.’

‘You have?’ she says.

Bunny stands, the phone clamped to his ear and looks down at his sleeping son. He experiences a wave of sentiment so strong that he can barely find the presence of mind to pick his car keys up off the bedside table.

‘Didn’t you feel it yesterday?’ said Bunny, his voice low. ‘The chemistry… sparks were going zip, zip and zap, zap!’

‘They were?’ says Georgia.

Bunny conducts a villainous panto-creep from the hotel room, leaving the TV running and closing the door behind him. The hallway is the colour and texture of whale blubber and Bunny moves down it with footsteps both comic and monstrous, the cloacal stream of mustard-coloured carpet roiling beneath his feet.

‘You know they were! E-leck-tricity, baby! Zap, zap! Zip, zip!’ he says into the phone.

‘Well, you seemed like a nice kind of guy,’ she said.

‘Thunderbolts and lightning! Very, very frightening!’

‘Um, Bunny?’ says Georgia.

‘Mamma mia! Mamma mia! Mamma mia, let me go!’

‘Are you all right, Bunny?’

Bunny negotiates the stairs, one at a time, at a perilous backward angle, hanging sloth-like from the banister, whereupon he flings out an arm and sings in an insane operatic voice, ‘Beelzebub had a devil put aside for me! For me! For me!’

He makes his way through the unpeopled lobby of the Empress Hotel and all the while Bunny thinks – This is strange. Where is everybody? He passes the vacated reception desk and his voice grows serious.

‘I’m going to tell you something, Georgia, because I don’t think there should be any bullshit between us. You know, lies and stuff…’

Georgia’s response seems otherworldly, distant, dreamed. ‘Um… OK,’ she says.

‘Because I’ve had it up to here with that shit, all right?’ says Bunny.

‘OK,’ says Georgia. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m drunk.’

Bunny jams another Lambert & Butler in his mouth, torches it, then steps out the front door of the hotel onto the seafront and is hit by a gale force of such brutality he is pummelled to his knees. His jacket flaps over his head and he shouts into his phone, ‘Fuck me, Georgia! Hang on a minute!’

Bunny sees, in slow motion, a vast wave of seawater explode against the promenade wall, then be picked up by the wind and carried, surrealistically and in sheet-form, across the road and dumped on top of him. Bunny scopes the Punto, then crawls towards it, the salted rain tearing at his face. He notices that the coastal road is deserted and that most of the streetlights are down. He hears, above the clamour of the storm, a grinding and twisting of metal, and a crack of lightning reveals the skeleton of the West Pier. The wind hammers at the Punto and Bunny, with considerable effort, prises open the door and, in time, clambers in. He sits, drenched, and watches an over-cranked POV shot of green seawater pool at his feet and he says, stunned and not of this earth, ‘Georgia?’

‘What’s going on, Bunny? Are you OK?’

Georgia’s voice sounds unlike anything he has ever heard before, and he wonders whether he hears anything at all.

‘Just a second,’ says Bunny.

He looks at himself in the rear-view mirror and sees a man who could well be himself but somehow is not. He is not as he remembers himself to be. His features seem unrelated to each other and a general subsidence has occurred. His eyes have sunk into their orbits and there is a debauched slackness to his cheeks and when he attempts to smile he reminds himself of Mrs Brooks’ leering, yellow-toothed Bösendorfer. His face is scoured raw by the salted rain and his helixed forelock hangs across his face like a used condom – but it’s not that – he just looks like a different person and he wonders where he went.

‘Georgia, listen to me. This one’s coming at you, baby, straight from the heart. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘How would you feel about a lonely, lovesick, slightly drunk, middle-aged man coming to visit you in the middle of the night?’