Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

Bunny stands on the balcony outside his flat and leans out over the railing. He drinks from a can of lager and watches as two attendants push the gurney across the car park and deposit his wife into the back of the ambulance. There is no urgency to this act and it seems to Bunny, in an oblique way, eerily casual and routine. A summer breeze blows through the wind tunnels of the estate, collecting upon itself, growing stronger and flapping the edges of the sheet that hangs over the gurney. Bunny thinks he can see the side of his wife’s foot but he is not sure. He draws on a cigarette and drinks from the can of lager.

As he leans out over the balcony railing and feels the pulse of his blood collecting in his face, he remembers by way of a gravitational swoon lying with Libby on a hotel bed in Eastbourne. He recalls her rising from the bed and walking to the bathroom, and somewhere between the retreat of those high blushing buttocks and the return of her yellow, freshly-douched bush, Bunny made a reckless and vertiginous decision and said, ‘Libby Pennington, will you marry me?’ and as he said these words the room spun wildly and he found himself gripping the sides of the bed, as if he may be jettisoned away.

Libby stood there, bold, naked, fists on hips and said, with a skewed smile, ‘You’re drunk.’ (which was true) ‘Ask me in the morning.’ Bunny picked up his watch from the bedside table, made a show of holding it to his ear and tapping on the glass.

‘It is morning,’ he said, and Libby laughed in that wild, girlish way she had and sat down on the bed, next to Bunny.

‘Will you honour and obey me?’ (She was also drunk.)

‘Um, yes,’ said Bunny. He groped for a cigarette and put it in his mouth. Libby placed her hand between his legs and squeezed.

‘In sickness and in health?’

‘Um, OK,’ said Bunny, lighting up and expelling a plume of grey smoke into the room. He closed his eyes. He heard her rustling about in her handbag and when he opened his eyes, she was writing something in lipstick on his chest.

‘I got to take another pee,’ she said and once again, through a veil of discharged smoke, he scoped that glorious, goodbye backside. Bunny stood up, the floor spongy and uncertain, looked at his image in the dressing-table mirror. Then the room tilted suddenly and blood rushed from his extremities and thundered in his face and his heart hammered in his chest and he held on to the dressing table as he read, in reverse, the single word, ‘YES’.

As the spell retreated he looked up to see, standing in the doorway of the bathroom and smiling at him, his future wife.

Now, propped against the railing of the balcony, he feels, but does not cogitate, that this memory of his departed wife – her moving away from him through the haze of cigarette smoke in a down-at-heel hotel in Eastbourne – will forever dream-float in his consciousness. It will hang like a protective veil in front of the other memories, as the very happiest of them all and safeguard him from any hardboiled questions like how the fuck did it all come to this.

Bunny watches the unhurried ambulance drive away from the flats, followed by the police car.

They are taking my wife away, he thinks.

He drains the can of lager and crushes it in his fist, and hears his son ask, out of nowhere, ‘Do you want another beer, Dad?’

He turns slowly and looks down at his son. (How long had he been there?) The boy seems diminished in stature and wears a pair of filthy complimentary hotel slippers about ten sizes too big for him that Bunny had brought home from a trip a million years ago. Bunny Junior presses his lips together in a wonky impression of a smile, making him look uncannily like his departed mother.

‘I’ll get you one, if you like.’

‘Um, OK,’ says Bunny and hands the crushed can to his son. ‘You can put that in the bin.’ The boy disappears.

Bunny holds on to the metal railing for a moment as he experiences a fresh attack of vertigo and wishes that everything would stop happening so fast. He feels as if his string has been severed and he is floating free beyond anything that would even vaguely resemble realness, without a single clue or idea or notion as to what on earth he is going to do now. What is he going to do?

He looks down at the forecourt below and sees a small contingent of residents who stand smoking in the great stretched slab of late afternoon shadow cast by the block. They have been drawn outside by the presence of the ambulance and the police car. They are, he realises, all women and they talk quietly amongst themselves but cast secret glances up at Bunny every now and then. Bunny notices Cynthia, in her yellow mini-skirt and cotton vest, talking to a young mother who has a baby welded to one salient hip. Cynthia drops her cigarette on the ground and grinds it with a neat swivel of her flip-flop. Bunny notices the muscle leap in her young thigh. Cynthia looks up at Bunny and smiles with her long metallic teeth. Then she waves at Bunny by lifting her right hand and wiggling her fingers and from where Bunny is standing he can actually see the subtle rise of her young mound beneath the taut fabric of her mini-skirt. How old is she, anyway?

What is he going to do?

Bunny thinks, as he returns Cynthia’s sad little wave and feels a gathering of manpower in his crotch, that maybe, in one way, he knows the answer. But he also thinks, on a wholly different level, that maybe, in another way, he does not know the answer at all. He thinks that he should work this question out, but he also thinks, with a sense of relief, that he can’t be fucked. He feels a major decampment of stamina, of energy from his person, but notices paradoxically that his dick is hard, and as he turns and heads inside, he feels sad and lonely.

Bunny Junior sits on the sofa, tranced out in front of the television, a huge bottle of Coca-Cola clamped between his knees. He has a medical condition called blepharitis or granulated eyelids or something and he has run out of steroid eye drops. His eyes are puffy and sore and rimmed in red and he thinks at some point he should tell his father so that he can buy some more drops. He is glad all the people have cleared out. The police. The ambulance men. He was tired of the way they kept looking at him, whispering in the hallway like he couldn’t hear or something. They kept making him think of his mum and every time he thought of his mum he felt like he was going to drop through the middle of the world. They wouldn’t stop asking him if he was all right, when all he was trying to do was watch the television. Can’t anyone get any peace around here?

He notices his dad walk into the living room at approximately the same time as he remembers that he has forgotten to get him a beer from the fridge. How come he forgot to do that? His dad’s face looks like grey felt. He walks differently, like he is not quite sure whose living room he is entering, like he’s in a bit of a daze.

‘What happened to my beer?’ says Bunny, in slow motion, as he sits down next to Bunny Junior on the sofa.

‘I forgot, Dad,’ says Bunny Junior. ‘The TV was on.’

The sleeve of a discarded sweater hangs over the top of the TV screen, partially obscuring what seems to be a news broadcast involving a giraffe that lies motionless, on its side, in its enclosure at the London Zoo. It is surrounded by a number of attendants and medical staff in Wellington boots and arabesques of smoke rise from its body.

‘What are you watching that for?’ asks Bunny, meaning the news, unable to think of anything else to say.

The boy rapid blinks to cool his eyes and wipes at his forehead with the back of his hand and says, ‘The giraffe was struck by lightning, Dad, at the zoo. It’s quite common on the veldts of Africa. They cop it all the time. They act like lightning rods. One minute they are minding their own business, the next minute they’re jelly.’