Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘What, now?’ but the voice seems electronic, like a recorded message.

‘I’m taking that as an affirmative,’ says Bunny.

‘Bunny, where are you?’

He turns the key in the ignition and, with an uncharacteristic confidence that makes Bunny think – What’s up with the Punto? – the car roars into life.

‘Where am I?’ Bunny says, ‘Oh, Georgia, I’m all over the fucking place!’

Bunny forceps the phone and tosses it on the seat next to him. He notices that the two pools of water at his feet have drawn together to become one larger pool and he feels a palpable but unidentifiable sense of emotion at that. He closes his eyes and he hears a great, black wave crash against the seawall and spew its jet of foam over the Punto and the car judders at the impact and he hopes he has not fallen asleep. He opens the glove compartment, takes out the sales list, finds Georgia’s address and moves out onto the depopulated street. Bunny notices that a power-line has blown down and he can see it writhing like a black snake, fizzing and showering sparks and moving towards him down the rain-drenched street. He feels as though the black snake is seeking him out, and that if it reaches him he will die. He also thinks he could be seeing things and that this is all a mirage or an illusion or a monstrous vision or something, and he says through his teeth, ‘Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening.’ Then he jams his foot on the accelerator and moves – in slow motion – down the street.

As Bunny navigates the streets, and Georgia’s voice recedes, he thinks, with a cybernetic certainty – I am the great seducer. I work the night. Sheets of darkness that his headlights can barely penetrate wall him in but Bunny feels like he could lie back and close his eyes and the trusty Punto would know exactly where to go. Once he has left the coastal road, the wind abates and the night stops throwing down any more rain and Georgia’s large white backside fits snugly into the pornographic think-bubble that hangs over his head. A spectral silence envelops the car and Bunny hears nothing but his own steady, inevitable breaths.

Out of the night the great hulk of the Wellborne estate looms up, like a leviathan, black and biblical, and Bunny parks the Punto by the now empty wooden bench – gone is the fat man in the floral dress, gone are the hooded youths. Bunny steps out, his suit drenched, his hair plastered to his head, but he does not care – he is the great seducer. He works the night.

He enters the dark maw of the stairwell and his eyes burn from the acid stench of urine and bleach and he does not care. He feels his genitals leap in his fist as he squeezes them through his sodden trousers and mounts the stairs three at a time even though he cannot really recall speaking to Georgia at all. He shivers in his freezing, waterlogged suit and works the night. He does not care.

Bunny winds his way down the gangway but must retrace his steps because he has missed Flat 95 due to there not being any lights on. He presses his face up to the window and thinks he can see the lambent flicker of a candle or nightlight or something in a back room and he smiles because he knows – he feels it humming all along his spine – more than he knows anything in his entire life, that Georgia is waiting in that dimly lit back room, naked and on all fours, knees spread wide apart, breasts swinging, backside raised to the heavens and her fucking pussy hovering in the air like the most wonderful thing imaginable in this rotten, stinking, infested fucking world, and all he has to do is reposition his erection in his trousers (which he does), then push on the door (that has been left on the latch) and it will swing open (which he does and which it doesn’t), so he taps on the door and whispers ‘Georgia’, through the keyhole. This has no immediate effect, so he bangs on the door with his fist and then gets down on his hands and knees and calls her name in the loudest whisper he can muster through the cat-flap. Then he calls her name again.

Suddenly, very suddenly, all the lights go on. The door opens and a man appears in his underwear with a large, empty, Teflon-coated saucepan in his hand. Bunny has a very good view of an extremely crude representation of a depraved-looking Woody Woodpecker, leering and smoking a cigar, tattooed on the inside of the man’s ankle. Bunny sees, also, that the man has an infected toenail.

‘Who are you? ’ says Bunny, looking up from the floor.

He sees Georgia in an ugly bombazine dressing gown standing behind the man with the saucepan, and Bunny shouts, pointing at the man, ‘Who is he? ’

Georgia, her hand resting protectively on the man’s broad and illustrated shoulder, peers down with a look of genuine confusion on her face and says, ‘Mr Munro, is that you?’

Bunny shouts, ‘I thought he was fucking gone, gone!’

The man with the tattoo on his ankle – where did he get that? Prison? Primary school? – hands the saucepan to Georgia and leans down and says in an end-of-things whisper, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

Bunny, who is attempting unsuccessfully to stand and who is not in any way concentrating on details, thinks the man simply said, ‘Fuck you,’ and instantly regrets replying, in kind, ‘Well, fuck you too.’

The man actually yawns, scratches his stomach, then backs up four paces, runs down the hall and boots Bunny so hard in the ribs that he spins in mid-air and lands, with an expulsion of air, on his back. Bunny places an arm over his head to shield himself from the next blow.

‘Please, don’t,’ he says quietly.

But the blow does not come and he takes his arm away in time to see the door kick shut by a purulent yellow toe.

Back in the Punto, Bunny opens his trousers and undertakes a wank of truly epic proportions – it just goes on and on – and when at last he goes over the edge, Bunny lets his head fall back and opens his mouth as wide as he can and exhales the last remnants of reason, in an elephantine bellow, that echoes through the weather-beaten night, across the Wellborne estate. He realises, in a shadowy way, for a brief moment, that the weird imaginings and visitations and apparitions that he has encountered were the ghosts of his own grief and that he was being driven insane by them. He knows more than he knows anything that very soon they will kill him. But more than any of that, he wonders what was wrong with that bitch Georgia anyway. Jesus.

When Bunny enters the lobby of the Empress Hotel he is pleased to see things have returned to normal – the world seems to have reassembled itself. For some reason the Empress Hotel reminds Bunny of a sad and unsuccessful comb-over but he is too fucked-up to work out why. It is six o’clock and the early risers move through the lobby like the living dead. These scrubbed and scoured lobby-lurkers exude from the pores of their skin an eye-watering miasma of raw alcohol but Bunny doesn’t recognise this as his own private funk is such that people naturally keep their distance. His sour and sodden clothes, the metallic stench of abject terror and the bouquet of his own substantial hangover, form a force field around him. He also looks like a maniac. He feels a real sense of achievement that he has managed to cross the lobby in the manner of a biped and not on all-fours. He wonders whether this may work to his advantage as he leans across the reception desk and says, ‘I need the key to room seventeen. I’ve locked myself out.’

The man sitting behind the counter has a smudge of dead hair plastered across his skull and a nose that reminds Bunny, with a redux of dread, of a cat-flap. On a TV mounted on the wall above his head the news plays out. He is reading the local newspaper through a ‘Mystic Eye’ magnifying card and he looks up at Bunny and lays the newspaper and the ‘Eye’ on the counter.