Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

Bunny opens his eyes and the world is filmed in red. He realises, in a distant way, that he is on his hands and knees in the middle of a street. He can hear far-off wailing and feels an immense rain beating down upon him. He sees that the ground beneath him is pink with his own blood. He crawls a couple of paces and wonders what he is doing. He looks behind him and sees a little yellow car twisted around a maroon concrete mixer and he slowly stands up. He looks at his hands and wonders why he is holding a child’s encyclopaedia. He looks back at the crumpled yellow car and in his mind’s eye he sees the face of a boy.

Then there is a boom of thunder and Bunny looks up at the black clouds that move overhead and he sees a silver pitchfork of lightning leap from the sky and with an intake of breath he throws out his chest and sucks the lightning into his heart and the encyclopaedia flies from his hand with a loud bang and a webbed scar blossoms across his body and he crashes, stiff as a plank, onto the rain-filled street.

First there is the darkness. But Bunny feels he has always been aware of the darkness. Then there is the smell – a rancid stench of body odour with a tang of terror-crazed, female blood trapped within it – and Bunny realises as he inhales this stink that he is, indeed, alive. He finds he is swimming up from the most silent and suffocating depths of the deepest and blackest of seas. He realises that this thing that smells so badly and is squatting beside him has reached way down into the watery darkness and dragged him gasping for air to the surface. He can feel its heat against his lower body but there is something debauched and obscene about its proximity. The thing that is sitting beside him leans across and locks him in an embrace. He can feel, in its form, a plasticity – an absence of bones – and that the creature is quite possibly reptilian by nature. When it speaks, its breath smells of shit and the stench adheres to the contours of his face like a dishcloth or winding-cloth or something.

‘They got me, those motherfuckers,’ it says.

The words crawl across Bunny’s face and seep into his nostrils, his mouth, his ears.

‘They have done me down, my brother,’ it says.

Bunny can sense that whatever this thing is, it is naked. He can feel its erect phallus pressed against his stomach, pulsing with sexual heat, as it leans across him.

‘Twenty-five to life, they gave me!’ it wails, suddenly, clinging to Bunny. ‘Twenty-five to life – with no fucking pussy!’

Bunny feels the creature crawl up on top of him and the scorch of its penis – long and thin – shift against his stomach and an insistent knee separates his thighs.

‘ Help me! ’ it moans.

Bunny tries to move but cannot. He attempts to open his eyes but they feel as though they have been stitched shut with a needle and thread. Then he realises he can see tiny pinpoints of light appearing from the world beyond.

‘But I’ve been watching you,’ says the voice, with a sudden, cloying intimacy. ‘You’re a fucking trip, man!’

Bunny feels a greased arm taking leverage around his neck.

‘You’re out of this world, baby. You’re in a league of your own!’ he says.

Bunny feels the pulsing phallus, move down his stomach, slide across his groin and slip between his legs.

‘You are a fucking inspiration! ’

Bunny struggles, in vain, but is impotent to move his arms or legs.

‘You have the talent, boyfriend! You are a master of the art! ’

Bunny sees the points of light connecting, expanding, and the black slats of his eyelashes drawing apart. He opens his eyes and his pupils contract painfully against the incursive light.

‘Here’s something to remember me by,’ says the voice, in a whisper, ‘until we meet again.’

Then he sees the smeared, scarlet face with its black hole of a mouth, its raw, red tongue, its yellow eyes, its goatish horns, all come down upon him like a lover, and he experiences a searing penetration between his splayed buttocks.

Then, at the point of climax, hot and liquid against his ear, he hears the demon’s grievous moan, rising from his memory.

‘My true intent is all for your delight,’ he thinks it says, but he can’t be exactly sure.

The night is a deep velvet blue and the moon an alabaster balloon and the planets and the stars are spilled across the heavens, in handfuls and heaps, like gold coins. The smell of brine lives deep within the breeze that blows up from across the ocean and speaks, in a secret way, to the crowd of women who walk down the main sodium-lit thoroughfare – it speaks of deep, feminine mysteries and unawakened and illimitable desires, of silver-haired mermaids and bearded, trident-waving mermen and the looped humps of sea monsters and bejewelled cities drowned beneath masses of unreadable water. No one can remember a night quite so magical in Bognor Regis for years.

Bunny stands at the window of his chalet and watches the crowd as it moves down the lamp-lined path and passes the swimming pool, pink and magical, where a reinforced concrete elephant in a yellow tutu spurts strawberry-coloured water from its upraised trunk. Bunny smiles to himself as the crowd of women, unsuspecting, pass the giant fibreglass rabbit, goggle-eyed and buck-toothed, that stands like a bizarre avatar or tribal fetish beside the water-slide. On a little track circling the main swimming pool sits a brightly coloured electric train for children, its engine adorned with the same rapturous face of a circus clown that Bunny remembers from when his father brought him here as a child. He remembers, too, the fun fair, with its world-class monorail and Apache Fort and Dutch windmill that the crowd drifts past, as it winds its way around the empty swings and deserted slides and abandoned seesaws of the children’s playground.

A black rag of cloud slides across the surface of the moon and Bunny sucks on a Lambert & Butler and watches someone point at the Gaiety Building and someone point at the putting green (with its huge golf ball balanced on a thirty-foot golf tee) and someone point at the amusement arcade and everyone ascend the stairs and enter the Main Hall of Butlins Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis.

Standing at the window, there is a certain determination in Bunny’s posture, his feet firmly upon the earth, his chin raised, his shoulders serious and square and a look of concentration, but also mourning, around his eyes.

Over the entrance to the Main Hall the Butlins mission statement blinks in a candy-pink neon, ‘OUR TRUE INTENT IS ALL FOR YOUR DELIGHT’, and Bunny can see through the arched windows of the hall the crowd of women milling around, their invitations in their hands, staring at each other and wondering what they are doing there.

‘Our true intent is all for your delight,’ says Bunny to himself and he throws back his head and drains the contents of a can of Coca-Cola.

Bunny has put on a fresh shirt – thick red stripes with a contrasting white collar and cuffs – and the bizarre webbed scar curls from the open neck of his shirt like crystals of frost. He has loaded extra pomade into his hair and arranged his lovelock so it sits on his forehead with a new, almost yogic serenity. His cheeks are freshly shaved and he smells heavily of cologne and there is a thin, embossed cicatrix above his right eye, an inch long, that looks like it has been sculpted from pink plasticine.

‘What did you say, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

‘I said, our true intent is all for your delight,’ says Bunny.

‘What does that mean?’ says the boy.

‘I don’t know.’

Bunny Junior sits sunk in a beige corduroy beanbag, his own scar across his left eye, faint and pale, like a distant, ghosted echo of his father’s. He is dressed in a white T-shirt and a pair of blue gaberdine shorts and flip-flops.