Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

The next name on the list, a Mrs Bonnie England, living over the hill in Bevendean was not at home in her semidetached brick-clad box, or so the guy who answered the door and claimed to be her husband maintained. Bunny could see this was clearly untrue, as the woman in the grease-stained pinafore, standing next to the guy who opened the door was obviously Mrs Bonnie England. Bunny didn’t press the point, primarily because Mrs Bonnie England was the animate equivalent of the fouled elevator in Moulescombe – a prime stomach-churner with the proportions and sex appeal of a Portakabin. Bunny had simply made a deferential apology for inconveniencing them (the husband was the red-faced, super-pissed-off type, and Bunny was tired of being beaten up) then backed respectfully away and fell over her rubbish bins. Lying on his back on the concrete walkway, Bunny watched Mrs Bonnie England and her husband hold each other’s hands and laugh at him.

‘Ouch,’ said Bunny.

As Bunny limped back to the Punto, he noticed, to his complete surprise, the ripe and rotund figure of River – the waitress from the breakfast room at the Grenville Hotel – walking down the street in her purple gingham uniform with the white collar and cuffs. He rubbed his eyes as if he were seeing things, like she were a mirage or a visual fallacy of some sort or something. She seemed like she had walked out of another lifetime, a less complicated and happier age, and his cock leapt at the memory of her, and his heart pounded like a military drum and he started to cry.

‘Hey!’ said Bunny, running up to her, dabbing at his cheeks. ‘What are you doing, River?’

River took one look at Bunny and screamed. She veered savagely in a wide and reckless arc and sped up, taking wild glances over her shoulder.

‘Hey!’ said Bunny. ‘It’s me! Bunny!’

River broke into a run, the various parts of her body pumping and pulsating beneath her uniform.

‘Hey, I’ve been having a really hard time!’ said Bunny, his hands thrown out to the sides.

‘Stay away from me!’ she cried. ‘Just stay away from me, you fucking maniac!’

‘But, River, didn’t we have a good thing going?!’ shouted Bunny, but he could hear her sobs as she charged away, her footsteps like gunshots down the street.

‘What was wrong with that girl, Dad?’ asked Bunny Junior, when his father got back in the Punto.

‘I think she has a medical condition,’ said Bunny.

Outside Mary Armstrong’s bungalow, Bunny leans across and says to Bunny Junior, with a belch of inflammable breath, ‘All right, wait here, I won’t be long.’

‘What are we going to do, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

Bunny takes a slug from his flask and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘Well, son, we’re going to shake the money tree, OK? We’re going to shaft some mugs and milk the jolly green cow,’ says Bunny, jamming a Lambert & Butler into his mouth. ‘We’re grubbing the mullah and gleaning the beans. We’re divesting the greater public of their spondulics. We are, as they say in the trade, raping and looting.’ Bunny torches his cigarette with his Zippo, scorching his quiff and filling the car with the stench of singed hair. ‘We’re trying to make some fucking boodle! Are you with me? And I’ve got a very good feeling about this one.’

‘Yes, Dad, but what are we going to do with ourselves after we make the boodle?’

‘We are vampires, my boy! We are vultures! We are a frenzy of piranha flenching a fucking water buffalo or a caribou or something!’ says Bunny, with a madman’s grin on his face. ‘We are fucking barracuda! ’

The boy looks at his father and a stone-cold realisation hits him – he sees in the appalling orbits of his father’s eyes a resident terror that makes the child recoil. Bunny Junior sees, at that moment, that his father has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. The boy realises, suddenly, that for some time he has been the passenger on an aeroplane and that he has walked into the cockpit only to find that the pilot is dead drunk at the controls and absolutely no one is flying the plane. Bunny looks into his father’s panic-stricken eyes and sees a thousand incomprehensible dials and switches and meters all spinning wildly and little red bulbs flashing on and off and going beep, beep, beep and he feels, with a nauseating swoon, the aeroplane’s nose tip resolutely earthward and the big blue fiendish world come rushing up to annihilate him – and it scares him.

‘Oh, Daddy,’ he says, and straightens the little pink daisy in his father’s lapel.

‘We just have to open our great jaws and all the little fish will swim in,’ says Bunny, trying with great difficulty to extricate himself from the Punto. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one.’

Bunny Junior gets out of the Punto, moves around to the driver’s side, opens the door and helps Bunny out and his father performs a little shuffling two-step and starts to laugh out loud for no reason. Everything goes whoosh as the boy falls out of the sky.

Bunny walks up the oil-splattered concrete drive. He opens his flask of Scotch and empties it down his throat, then tosses it over his shoulder and it lands among the strew of garbage that lies about the overgrown yard. He mounts the steps to the bungalow, with its grimy pebbledash walls and shattered windows, and knocks on the front door.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ says Bunny, and the door creaks open but there is no one there. Bunny strokes the hank of hair that lies, limp and doomed, over one eye and feels compelled to enter.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ calls Bunny, and takes a furtive step across the threshold. ‘Anybody home?’ he says.

Inside, the atmosphere of dread and desolation in this dilapidated old house is so powerful Bunny can taste it, like rot, in his mouth, and he whispers to himself, ‘I deal in high-quality beauty products,’ and closes the door behind him.

The kitchen is dark, the blinds drawn, and Bunny breathes in a sour, animal stench. The door to the refrigerator has been left open, and a pulsing, jaundiced light emanates from it. Bunny notices the refrigerator contains a solitary, diseased lemon, like a premonition, and over by the sink he sees a dog of an indeterminate breed lying motionless on the grimy linoleum floor. He moves through the kitchen and realises, dimly and without concern, that he has left his sample case in the Punto, and finds that at some point in that prat-fall of a morning he has skinned the palms of his hands and that they are slick with watery blood. He wipes them on his trousers and enters the darkened hallway and, as he does so, Bunny becomes aware of a strange, atonal, squealing sound.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong? Miss Mary Armstrong?’ he calls out and squeezes his penis through his trousers, tugging at it, and letting it grow large and hard in his hand.

‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one,’ he says to himself and, in that instant, experiences a kind of weariness of the soul and sits down on the floor and leans back against the wall. He pulls his knees up to his chest and puts his head between them and does a drawing of something with his index finger in the accumulated dust on the floor.

‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ he says to himself and closes his eyes.

He remembers a crazy night he’d had at the Palace Hotel in Cross Street, not that long ago, with a cute, little blonde chick he’d picked up at The Babylon. He remembers himself standing by the bed, huffing and puffing, his barked cock feeling like he’d been fucking a cheese-grater or something, and cursing the fact that he hadn’t had the foresight to bring any lubricant with him. He remembers giggling to himself and thinking what a crazy party he was having and that he might go one more time, even though it looked like the Roofies were wearing off and the girl was showing signs of waking up. I mean, how much punishment can one swinger take! Then there was a knock on the door – three simple, unassuming raps – and to this day Bunny can’t work out what possessed him to open the door. The coke, maybe. The booze, probably. Whatever.