Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘Let me take that,’ says Bunny and removes the cigarette butt from between her fingers and drops it into an overflowing ashtray. ‘We don’t want to burn the house down,’ he says.

He kneels before her and gently brushes the cigarette ash from the looped fabric of her faded yellow vest.

‘Oh, dear,’ he says, and lights a cigarette of his own, takes a puff or two and then crushes it out in the ashtray.

He slips his hands under her cotton vest and her body spasms and slackens and he cups her small, cold breasts in his hands and feels the hard pearls of her nipples, like tiny secrets, against the barked palms of his hands. He feels the gradual winding down of her dying heart and can see a bluish tinge blossoming on the skin of her skull through her thin, ironed hair.

‘Oh, my dear Avril,’ he says.

He puts his hands under her knees and manoeuvres her carefully so that her bottom rests on the edge of the settee. He slips his fingers underneath the worn elastic of her panties that are strung across the points of her hips, slips them to her ankles and softly draws apart her knees and feels again a watery ardour in his eyes as he negotiates a button and a zipper. It is exactly as he imagined it – the hair, the lips, the hole – and he slips his hands under her wasted buttocks and enters her like a fucking pile driver.

The great bank of mist has rolled by and Bunny Junior sits alone on the low brick wall and plays with his Darth Vader figurine, and although the ghost of his mother has gone, he can still feel the cool imprint of her farewell kisses on his eyelids like tiny twin promises. She is, like the song says, within him and without him and all about him. He is the strongest one and he is protected – that was her promise. Ah, promises, promises – he thinks – and he swings his feet and smiles and hums to himself and jumps his Darth Vader along the wall and watches an old black BMW roll down the street and turn into the driveway of the house with all the rubbish in the yard.

Bunny Junior sees the driver’s door open and a tall lean man leporello from the car like a set of dirty postcards. His hair is bleached blonde and he wears tight faded jeans, a black T-shirt and pink loafers. The boy notices a cool tattoo of a scorpion on the man’s neck, and thinks he looks like a very tough customer indeed – a real barracuda.

The man scopes the street, to the left and to the right, with a reflexive, practised regard, and Bunny Junior watches as he drops his bunch of keys, curses, bends down and picks them up. Then he mounts the steps, flicks his cigarette into the yard and enters the house, slamming the door behind him.

Bunny Junior swings his legs on the wall and thinks about what his mother told him, and he smiles to think that after all he is just a kid, and that’s all he has to be… a kid. A kid who likes Darth Vader, a kid with an amazing memory and who could retain all sorts of fascinating facts, a kid who was interested in the world, a kid with ‘a good little heart’, a kid who could even talk to ghosts. The adult world he was moving about in didn’t have to make sense to him – why everyone looks like zombies, why his mother died, why his father acts like a mental case half the time.

He remembers with a quickening of the heart the girl on the bicycle, and he wishes he could tell her that this is what she was – just a little girl – and as she grows up maybe she doesn’t have to turn into one of them – cock-a-doodling up the street all the time.

He knows something terrible is going to happen, but for some reason it doesn’t worry him all that much. He feels he has become immune to this crazy grown-up world like you do to influenza or leprosy or radiation or something. He feels like he has been given an antidote and he could be bitten by every snake on the planet and he would still be able to walk away. He thinks that ghosts are better protection than real people, and he wishes he could tell the girl on the bicycle that as well.

Bunny Junior hopes nothing really bad happens to his dad, because even though his mother said that he was lost, and even though he probably wasn’t very good at being a father in the way he has seen other fathers be on TV and in magazines and in parks and stuff – for example, when they buy the ointment to stop the child from going blind or throw a Frisbee around in the public gardens or something – he loves his dad with all of his heart and he wouldn’t in a million years swap him for another one. Who would? Like when he is funny, he is an absolute scream – like look at him now as he jumps down the steps of that run-down old house with all the busted refrigerators and bathtubs and junk, with his trousers around his ankles. Tell me a dad who’d do that!

A few seconds later, the front door of the house flies open and the man called Mushroom Dave rockets out of that forlorn little house with the sole intention of burying a golf club into the back of Bunny’s head. Bunny knows this because Mushroom Dave has a nine iron cranked in the air and is screaming, in a voice full of slaughter, ‘You’re a fucking dead man, you freak!’

Bunny intuits, as he charges across the yard, that to run is most likely a waste of time and that, in all probability, the catastrophe that had been seeking him out his entire life has finally found him and the Day of Judgement is at hand.

But he also thinks, as a matter of good policy, that he should just get the fuck out of there.

But as he crosses the front yard loaded with all that useless impedimenta, Bunny finds that every old washer, bathtub and refrigerator has conspired to punk his progress and, with each tumble and fall, he senses, in a premonitory way, the apocalyptic whisper of the death-dealing nine iron ruckle the air around his cranium. He knows, more than he knows anything in the world, that Mushroom Dave is right, he is a fucking dead man.

But, in an act of athletic agility that surprises even him, Bunny leaps over an old cast-iron, clawfoot bathtub (actually worth a few bob), pulling up his trousers at the same time, scrambles across the footpath, yanks open the door of the Punto, piles in and slams the door behind him. He hits the lock buttons, and with his heart thundering in his chest he turns the key in the ignition and the Punto does not cough and does not wheeze – and does not start.

‘You fucking piece of shit!’ cries Bunny, and then to Bunny Junior, ‘Lock your fucking door! We’re all gonna die!’

Bunny looks up and sees Mushroom Dave’s murderous face, like a terrible melted mask, and he clocks the horizontal sweep of the golf club and hears the gun-crack explosion of his side window and the bright shattering of cubed glass as it implodes inwards and showers Bunny in vicious little zircons.

Bunny tries the key again and the Punto, as if outraged by this attack upon its person, roars perversely into life at exactly the moment that Bunny realises that the boy is actually not in the car at all and that Mushroom Dave is screaming and bringing the club around again.

Bunny hits the accelerator, veers crazily into the street, just as Bunny Junior appears out of nowhere, in his shorts and his T-shirt, and walks almost casually into the path of the Punto.

‘Dad,’ he says.

Bunny slams on the brake and the Punto screeches to a halt and Bunny Junior stands motionless in front of the car and in that instant there is a moment of true intimacy between the father and his son. Their eyes lock and nobody moves and nobody says anything, yet a current of understanding passes between them, obscure and intangible, but that has something to do with shame and terror and death.

Mushroom Dave moves towards Bunny Junior, with polyps erupting across his brain and scarlet mayhem in his face and a black scorpion writhing on his neck. He raises the club above his head and says, ‘You’re fucking dead, you little cunt.’