Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

But Bunny Junior stands there and does not move. He feels his mother’s kisses on his eyelids and he remembers her promise – that she is within him and without him and all about him – and he feels protected and he realises that his granulated eyelids no longer hurt and that the light of the day feels less painful and he feels that this man before him is just one more ugly customer in one more insane episode in an endless parade of demented incidents that collect around the affairs of adults like limescale or something. He feels it is just another part of the great rain of seagull shit that pours for ever over the doings of grown-ups – with their destructor faces and homicidal golf clubs and their filthy violent mouths and squirming black scorpions – and he simply does not feel impelled to move – and still Mushroom Dave draws closer and time grinds down and everyone floats like motes in space and Bunny starts screaming something inaudible and despairing but the boy cannot hear it because Bunny is hammering the Punto’s horn at the same time – and still the boy does not move – and with a great adult grunt, Mushroom Dave brings the nine iron around and the boy reflexively shifts a fraction to the left and feels the sting of the club whiffle against his ear, followed by an immense crack of metal on metal as it slams against the bonnet of the Punto. Bunny Junior places his hand to his ear and when he draws it away and looks at it he sees a smudge of blood on his fingers and the boy makes a kittenish cry and evaporates into the thin and menacing air then reappears in the passenger seat of the Punto.

Bunny roars off down the empty street as the golf club comes down again and blows out the rear window of the heroic little Punto. Bunny Junior rubs his ear, turns around and sees through the hole in the back window Mushroom Dave turn and run towards the house, tossing the nine iron into the yard and disappearing inside.

‘He was what you might call one of the crazy guys, wasn’t he, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

The boy reaches into the glove compartment and extracts a Kleenex and touches it against the tip of his ear and looks at the blood and says, ‘He got me, Dad.’

Bunny says nothing, the wind blowing through the nonexistent side window, his forelock whipping around his eyes, his jacket glittering with sequins of shattered glass. Bunny pulls into the side of the road, turns off the ignition and stares straight ahead, his hands locked around the steering wheel. He takes a series of breaths. He reaches under his seat and pulls out his emergency quarter-bottle of Scotch. He twists off the cap and swallows half of it. He shoves a Lambert & Butler into his mouth, lights it and takes a deep drag, and says to Bunny Junior, ‘Don’t ever fucking do that again.’

‘Do what, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

‘Leave the fucking car.’

‘Mum wanted to talk to me,’ says the boy.

‘Christ! Look what that bastard did to the Punto!’ says Bunny, brushing the shattered glass from the dashboard. Bunny eyeballs the boy and says through clenched teeth, ‘This is not some fucking game we’re playing here.’

‘I know it’s not, Dad.’

‘This is the real fucking deal!’ he says.

Bunny realises then that, in all the commotion, the car radio has turned itself on and Kylie Minogue’s ‘Spinning Around’ is playing and he hears that crazy throbbing synthesiser and Kylie singing all achy about how she is up for fucking anything and he begins to tremble all over, shake and tremble, shake and tremble and jitter all over and his heart begins to palpitate like a jackhammer and his teeth start chattering like some clockwork skull and he draws back his arm, opens his mouth and with a great existential moan, puts his fist through the car radio.

‘That fucking song!’ he screams.

And then his mobile phone goes off.

‘Christ!’ he shrieks and claws his phone from his jacket pocket, flips it opens and screams, ‘What!’

‘Bunny?’

‘What! ’

‘It’s Geoffrey, are you all right, my man?’

‘No, Geoffrey, I’m not fucking all right! I’m not fucking all right, at all!’

‘Listen, Bun, a Miss Lumley called the office. She says she’s your dad’s carer. She sounds… well… super-pissed-off. She says you’ve got to go to your dad’s place, pronto. She says it’s real urgent. She reckons, and I quote, that it’s “a matter of grave importance”,’ says Geoffrey.

‘What? Now?’ says Bunny.

‘She says your dad’s really sick or something.’

There is a silence at Bunny’s end of the line.

‘Just passing on the message, bwana,’ says Geoffrey.

Bunny lobsters the phone, tosses it on the dashboard and pounds at the steering wheel till his hands ache.

‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck! Fuck! And fuck! ’

‘Where are we going, Dad?’

Bunny starts the Punto.

‘We’re going to see your granddad,’ says Bunny. ‘My father. The great Bunny Munro the First,’ he says, and Bunny slams his foot on the accelerator and careens off, jemmying the Punto into the early-afternoon traffic that flows along the coastal road. ‘That’s where we’re fucking going,’ he says.

Bunny Junior sees a great band of bruised thunderheads garnering together over a grey and swollen sea and flocks of seagulls like scraps of shredded newspaper thrown across a sky so full of insult and injury that it looks like it is about to burst into tears or piss its pants or something. He can smell the fish and the salt on the wind, and hear the breakers erupting over the sea wall, and he turns to his father and touches the tip of his ear and says, ‘I think it’s gonna rain, Dad.’

And sure enough Bunny Junior sees the first fat drops of rain thud on the dented bonnet of the Punto, and then the sky rips open and it all comes pouring down.

In a run-down terrace off the Old Steine, the carpets are threadbare and the light bulbs don’t work and on the faded ruined wallpaper there is a willow pattern of frotting Chinamen or Chinamen blowing each other or something – Bunny can’t quite work out which – as he mounts the stairs like it’s the last place on earth he wants to be. His ribs ache and his knees are skinned and his hands are barked and his nose resembles a poisonous red toadstool and there are holes in the knees of his trousers and his quiff looks intestinal, flopping across his forehead like something from the stomach of something.

Bunny Junior follows close behind, and as he passes each landing he sees the storm lashing at the windows and prays that the bin liners that his father gaffer-taped to the blown-out windscreen of the Punto hold fast because he has left his encyclopaedia on the back seat and if anything happened to that he doesn’t know what he’d do.

Coming down the stairs of the building, Bunny runs into Miss Lumley, dressed in a blue nurse’s uniform, with a satchel in one hand and a bunch of keys in the other and her little upside-down watch bobbing on her starched bosom.

‘Just the man I want to see,’ she says.

‘What happened to the lift?’ says Bunny, gasping for air and sweating into his shirt so profusely that it clings to his ribs.

‘It’s broken,’ says Miss Lumley, dryly. ‘It’s been that way for months, Mr Munro.’

Miss Lumley is in her fifties, with a pleasing and compassionate face that has been temporarily disfigured – reddened and soured and frazzled – by being employed in the execution of some unpalatable duty. She peers over the top of a pair of black-framed spectacles and dangles the keys out in front of her.

‘I quit,’ she says.

‘What?’ says Bunny.

‘Your father is dying, Mr Munro. He needs continuous professional care.’