Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘That’s better,’ says the boy.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ says Bunny, looking around the place like his head was on some kind of crazy, floppy spring.

‘You’d be a bit of an old pig,’ says the boy.

Bunny stands up and looks under his chair.

‘I said, “You’d be a bit of an old, fucking pig”,’ says Bunny Junior, a bit louder.

The boy has been reading his encyclopaedia at the breakfast table and, as well as ‘Apparition’ and ‘Visitation’, he has looked up ‘Near-Death Experience’.

The boy looks at his father and, for no particular reason, says, ‘Hey, Dad, it says in my encyclopaedia that a Near-Death Experience is a striking occurrence sometimes reported by those who have recovered from being close to death.’

His father stands abruptly and bumps the table and there is a rattle of crockery and the little white porcelain vase falls over with its sad and solitary flower and they both watch, in slow motion, the water soak into the tablecloth. Bunny Junior picks up the flower (a simulated pink English daisy) and puts it in the buttonhole of his father’s jacket.

‘There you go,’ says the boy.

‘We’ve got work to do,’ says Bunny. He scrapes back his chair and says, ‘We’ve got important business to attend to.’

Bunny pulls up the collar of his jacket and wraps his arms around himself.

‘Is the air conditioning up too high in here?’ he says, with a shudder.

‘I guess,’ says the boy, and he picks up his encyclopaedia and follows his father out of the breakfast room of the Empress Hotel.

At the reception desk, Bunny hears a pretty Australian backpacker chick with pink highlights in her hair and a dusting of translucent powder on her freckles say to her friend, ‘Hey, Kelly, did you see this?’

She points to a tabloid newspaper on the counter.

Kelly has blue hair and wears a loose cheesecloth dress and Tibetan beads around her neck. She looks at the tabloid and sees a photograph of the Horned Killer, flanked by two overweight policemen. The killer is shirtless and six-packed and smeared in red paint, his hands are cuffed, his fake joke-shop horns still perch on his head. He stares resolutely into the camera. The headline reads, ‘GOTCHA!’

‘Wow, Zandra, they got the guy,’ she says.

Zandra traces the contours of the killer’s body with one plum-coloured fingernail and says, ‘Looks kind of cute, though.’

Kelly looks over her shoulder at Bunny, who has moved in close and is craning his neck and trying to see the front page of the newspaper.

‘Who?’ she says, distracted.

‘The devil guy,’ says Zandra.

Kelly elbows Zandra and says, under her breath, ‘My God, girl, you are incorrigible!’ then looks over her shoulder at Bunny again.

‘Wash off the body paint. Lose the plastic horns…’ says Zandra.

‘Girl, you are rampant! ’ says Kelly, from the side of her mouth.

‘Yeah,’ says Zandra, ‘I know,’ and with a little grunt adjusts her backpack, adding, ‘I wouldn’t mind his shoes under my bed at all! ’

‘Sssh,’ says Kelly, under her breath.

‘Sorry,’ says Zandra, ‘I mean, hooves! ’

Kelly turns around and faces Bunny.

‘Could we have a little room here, please?’

Bunny raises his hands in the air and takes a step backwards.

‘Sorry, Kelly,’ says Bunny, ‘It’s just that I think we are having our childhoods stolen from us.’

Bunny moves across to the receptionist, with his wisps of white hair and his catastrophic hinged nose, and pays his bill, and as he turns away the receptionist shoots out his hand and grabs Bunny by the wrist. He looks at Bunny through his ‘Mystic Eye’ and points at the newspaper.

‘Did you see this? They are saying here that this devil guy’s horns aren’t fake. They’re real.’

As the automatic door hisses open Bunny Junior feels a sense of relief to be leaving the Empress Hotel and he says to his father, ‘A Near-Death Experience generally includes an out-of-body event in which people travel through a dark void or tunnel towards the light.’

The sun beats down and steam rises from the wet and dazzling streets. The glare hurts the boy’s eyes and he slips on his shades and wonders if he is actually dead. He thinks – Is this why I keep seeing my mother? He pinches the flesh on his thigh until his eyes water, and out on the sea a bank of condensed mist moves across the water towards them, like an unsolicited memory.

‘In a Near-Death Experience people have reported encountering religious figures!’ shouts Bunny Junior, jumping up and down, and rubbing the bruise on his thigh and thinking – ouch, ouch and ouch! ‘One may even encounter deceased loved ones!’

His father keeps walking in a peculiar way and beating at his clothes with his hand and looking over his shoulder, and the sea mist continues to roll towards them, like a great white wall, blurring the line between the real world and its fogbound dream or something.

‘There you go,’ says the boy, helping his father, who has fallen over on the sidewalk, to his feet. ‘Look what you’ve gone and done,’ he says, pointing to a little triangular rip in the knee of his trousers.

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ says his father as he takes a long drink of something from a bottle, opens the door of the Punto and, face first, falls in.

When the Punto doesn’t start, his father pounds the steering wheel, then actually clasps his hands together in supplication and petitions God and all His saints for assistance, and the insubordinate Punto, as if taking pity on him, coughs and splutters into life with a promise of taking him where he wants to go.

‘A Near-Death Experience is often accompanied by strong feelings of peacefulness, Dad,’ says the boy.

‘Grab the client list,’ says Bunny, resting his head on the wheel and playing with the hole in his trousers.

The boy says, ‘It… is… often… accompanied… by… strong… feelings… of… peacefulness,’ and he leans over and takes a tissue from the glove compartment and together they dab at the messy little scrape on his dad’s knee.

‘There you go,’ says the boy.

Bunny parks the Punto outside a tumbledown bungalow on the hill between Peacehaven and Newhaven – the residence of Miss Mary Armstrong, the last name on the list. The front yard is overgrown and littered with all manner of junk – used appliances and broken machines – a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, a bathtub full of yellowed newspapers, a ruptured kayak, a ruined Chesterfield settee and a motorcycle, dismantled and forgotten. Standing in the centre of the yard is a grotesque sculptural abstraction made from welded steel and strips of brightly coloured, spray-painted plastic.

‘What a shit-hole’ says Bunny. ‘They just get worse and worse.’

There had been three names left on the client list, but the other two names had turned out to be non-starters and a complete waste of time.

The first was a Mrs Elaine Bartlett, who lived on the fourth floor of a block of flats in Moulsecombe. Lying on the floor of its only working elevator was a bombed-out kid with a can of air freshner in one hand and a Tesco bag in the other and a Burberry cap on his head. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem, except the boy had emptied the contents of his bowels into his shorts and these were pulled down around his skinny, little ankles. The boy had managed, rather heroically, thought Bunny, to graffiti in green spray paint on the elevator wall, ‘I AM A SAD CUNT’. Bunny had stepped into the elevator, then stepped out and allowed its doors to judder shut. He contemplated momentarily climbing the four flights of stairs to Mrs Elaine Bartlett’s flat and realised, to his credit, that there was no way he was going to make it up them in his present condition, so he staggered back to the Punto.