Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘Son?’ says the old man.

Bunny turns around and looks at his father. The old man holds the fouled handkerchief out in front of him, yellow water running from his eyes.

‘I’m dying, son,’ he says.

Bunny’s eyes fill with tears.

‘Dad?’ he says, and he makes to step back into the room but the old man reaches out with his walking stick and, with a last enfeebled lunge, pushes shut the door.

The rain beats down upon the Punto and lashes at the green bin liners that are taped over the shattered windows, that have, by some miracle, held fast and not capsized and poured water all over Bunny Junior’s encyclopaedia and made him have to commit suicide or something. Purple thunder rumbles overhead and sends veins of lightning crackling across the sky. Bunny Junior clutches his encyclopaedia to his chest, like it is his only friend in the world – except at this moment it is no help and he just doesn’t know what to think. He knows that within the pages of the encyclopaedia there is all the information anyone could ever need to know – the answer to all things. But he still doesn’t know what to think. He knows that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes , and he knows that there are four-eyed fish that can see above water and below water at the same time, and he even knows that Joseph Guillotin did not invent the guillotine, but what he doesn’t know is what to do about his dad, who has tears running down his face and who is not saying anything and has no idea where he is going or what he is looking for and is driving around and around in circles. He has stopped at a shop and bought a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of whisky and he is smoking like a chimney and drinking like a fish and driving like a maniac and crying like he doesn’t know what.

For some reason he keeps thinking about the little mechanical bird in the cage, with its colourful wings and pretty little song, and that makes him wish all over again that his dad would stop crying, so he could have a turn.

‘Dad?’ says the boy as Bunny steers the Punto into an empty parking space outside a small café on Western Road. People huddle together under a striped and dripping canvas awning, smoking and drinking coffee, dressed in T-shirts and miniskirts and flip-flops, unprepared for this heavy summer rain.

‘I spoke to Mummy today,’ says the boy, over the top of his encyclopaedia that he keeps pressed to his chest.

A spavined old vagrant hobbles past wearing a flesh-coloured eye-patch and sodden rags wrapped around his impossibly swollen feet. He has soiled the front of his trousers and wears an undersized T-shirt that shows the matted fur on his stomach and says, ‘SHIT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PARTY NAKED’. He taps a tin cup against the window of the Punto and peers inside, scrutinises the occupants through his single, crazed eye, shakes his head in consternation and shuffles off into the rain.

‘What did you say?’ says Bunny, turning and looking at Bunny Junior as if he had only just realised that there is a nine-year-old boy sitting beside him.

‘I spoke to my mummy today.’

‘What?’ he says again.

‘It was really her, Dad. We talked for ages.’

‘You what?’ panics Bunny, and starts slapping at his jacket and looking everywhere at once. He slugs at the Scotch and drags on his Lambert & Butler and blows bones of smoke out his nose and shouts, ‘ You what?! ’

‘She says she’s coming to see you soon,’ says Bunny Junior.

‘Eh?’ says Bunny, beneath the clamour of the rain, and then does the thing with the whisky and cigarettes all over again.

‘Dad, I think I should go back to school,’ says the boy.

‘Eh?’ says Bunny, and he looks across at the café and finds, amid the knot of people sheltering from the rain, three women sitting around a table, deep in conversation, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. One is a blonde and one is a brunette and one is a redhead.

‘I think we should go home, Dad,’ says the boy.

‘Where?’ says Bunny, and a spasm of panic moves across his face and he begins to claw away the bin liner taped to the window, then peers out at the three women. A great torrent of rain gushes in, drenching him, and he shouts into the deluge, ‘What?’

‘I think it’s time we went home, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior, and suddenly he feels a frightful woe in his guts. He reaches over and places his hand on his father’s shoulder as if to pull him back from some deplorable turn of events.

‘Dad?’ he says.

‘Wait here,’ says Bunny, jerking his shoulder away.

Bunny throws open the door of the Punto and decants himself into the gutter, the booze ramping through his veins. He scampers across the footpath, stands upright and pats in vain at his decommissioned dishrag of a quiff, tugs at his tie with the dead rabbits on it and ploughs blindly through the plastic tables and chairs and says to the three women with their cigarettes and cappuccinos, ‘I’m Bunny Munro. I am a salesman. I sell beauty products.’

The women look at each other in bewilderment and the blonde, who has a smudge of chocolate froth on her upper lip, actually starts to laugh, covering her mouth with her long-fingered hand.

Bunny starts to hop up and down, waggling his hands behind his head, and says, manically and with great urgency, ‘I sell rich, hydrating, age-targeting lotions that soften the skin and exfoliate surface cells for a younger, smoother look!’

‘Excuse me!’ says the blonde, who has stopped laughing, but Bunny is screaming now, under the thundering sky and with all the rain coming down.

‘The skin is awakened to its fullest potential and infused with a surge of new beauty, stimulating your feelings of pleasure and well-being!’

Bunny falls to his knees and wraps his arms around the long and shapely legs of the woman with blonde hair and burrows his face into her lap and feels all the psychic strings that bind him to the rational earth snapping like rubber bands in his skull, and he bellows into her dress, ‘What am I gonna do?!’

‘Waiter!’ cries the woman. ‘ Waiter! ’

Bunny looks up at the woman and sees the stripe of chocolate froth on her lip through a film of tears.

‘Will you fuck me?’ he says.

The woman rears back, her long fingers at her mouth. The brunette and the redhead scrape back their chairs.

‘Waiter!’ they scream.

Bunny stands and from the corner of his eye sees Bunny Junior’s face like a little scared balloon framed in the window of the Punto and he throws out his arms and addresses the shrinking customers with the whole of his voice.

‘ Will somebody please fuck me?! ’

Thunder rumbles across the sky and Bunny hears the women scream – many of them, all of them – horrified and familiar as he grabs at them, his teeth bared, his mouth gaping wide, jumps at them, leaps at them – and an Italian waiter with a blue jaw and black apron grabs Bunny around the chest, wrestles him from the café and drags him down the street.

With a shove, the waiter deposits Bunny on the wet footpath outside the Punto and stalks away.

Bunny wrenches open the car door and piles in and looks at the boy. He turns the key in the ignition, guns the engine and looks at the boy. He zooms into the rainy street just as a maroon ‘DUDMAN’ concrete mixer truck veers into the oncoming traffic, its barrel rolling, its windscreen wipers frantically lashing at the storm. Bunny clocks the tanned, tattooed arm hanging limp from the window and looks at the boy. The mixer truck blows its horn – once, then once again – then speeds up and ploughs head-on into the Punto. There is a brutal compaction of metal and an explosion of glass, and as Bunny goes flying past, he looks at the screaming boy.