Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

Bunny hears his son, but his voice seems to come from a vast distance and his stomach makes a hollow, rumbling sound and he realises he hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast and thinks he may be hungry. He takes one of the pizza boxes from the stack on the coffee table and opens it. He waves it under his nose.

‘How long have these been here?’ says Bunny.

‘I don’t know, Dad,’ says the boy. ‘Maybe a million years?’

Bunny sniffs it.

‘Smells all right,’ he says and folds a slice in half and stuffs it in his mouth.

‘Tastes all right, too,’ he says, but it comes out sounding incomprehensible.

Bunny Junior reaches over and takes a slice.

‘Very nice, Dad,’ he says, and for a moment the fuzzed tones of the TV weld the boy to his father and they sit together on the sofa and say nothing. After some time Bunny points at the towering stack of pizza boxes on the coffee table in front of them, a cigarette burning between his fingers. His mouth is full of pizza and there is a questioning expression on his face and he is about to say something and he chews vigorously and continues to point at the pizza boxes.

Bunny Junior says, ‘I think mum left them for us, Dad’ and as he says this he feels the fiery centre of the world drag at his insides and he paddles his feet over the edge of the sofa so violently that his slippers fly off his feet. Bunny looks at his son and responds by nodding and swallowing and zoning in on the TV.

Later that night Bunny Junior says to his father, ‘I better go to bed now, Dad.’

Bunny, zomboid, says, ‘Ah, yeah’, and a bit later on says, ‘OK, then.’

The boy puts on his outsized slippers and says to his father, ‘I’m usually in bed ages ago.’ He rubs at his raw, bleared eyes with the back of his hands. ‘My eyes are sore,’ he says.

‘OK, Bunny Boy, I’ll just sit here then,’ says his father and makes a vague, circular gesture with his hand, which Bunny Junior finds impossible to interpret.

‘Well, I’ll just go to bed then, now, Dad,’ says the boy and stands and looks down at his father and sees he has returned to the thrall of the television. Two greased and roided gladiators, dressed in Lycra shock-absorbers, beat each other with Styrofoam-capped staves. They wear facemasks so there is nothing to suggest whether they are men or women as they bat and snarl at each other. Bunny Junior thinks he might sit down again and check this out but instead says, ‘Goodnight, Dad.’

With exaggerated care, the boy steps over the piles of trashed clothes that lie about the living room like sleeping animals, as if they may, if he wrong-foots, awaken. He moves into the hall, the Coco Pops now ground into the carpet by the day’s dismal traffic, and makes his way towards his room. He sees, in terror, from the corner of his eye, the closed door to the master bedroom and the key hanging from the lock like a reproach. Bunny Junior presses his lips together and squeezes shut his eyes. He decides he will not open them again until he is safe within the confines of his room. He makes the rest of the journey feeling along the hallway wall like a blind man until he arrives at the door to his room. He touches with his hand the poster of the cartoon rabbit flipping its middle finger that is Blu-tacked to the door and feels the plastic letters arranged along the top of it. They spell B-U-N-N-Y J-N-R. He pushes open his door and enters his bedroom and only then does he open his eyes.

Bunny Junior changes into his pyjamas, pulls back the sheet on his bed, lies down, then reaches over and turns off his bedroom light. He is comforted by the canned applause that emanates from the living room and is happy his dad is close by. Above him a mobile of the nine planets of the solar system, painted in Day-Glo, rotates slowly, put into motion by the bedtime movements of the boy. As each planet turns and spins, Bunny Junior runs through the information he has collected about each one. For example – Saturn’s interior is similar to Jupiter’s, consisting of a rocky core, a liquid metallic hydrogen layer and a molecular hydrogen layer. Traces of various ices are present – stuff he has remembered from the encyclopaedia his mother gave him when he was seven. He wishes, vaguely, that his father would come in and sit with him while he tries to sleep. He feels like it will take two thousand light years before he will be able to get to sleep. He sleeps.

Back in the living room Bunny watches the TV without interest, without judgement or without any visible cognitive response whatsoever. Occasionally his head falls back and he drains a beer. He opens another. His eyes glaze over. He sucks a cigarette, like a machine. Like a robot, he does it all again. Yet, as the blue evening, framed in the window, darkens into nighttime, little pockets of emotion twitch at the corners of his eyes and his forehead creases and his hands begin to tremble.

Then without warning Bunny leaps to his feet, and as if he has been girding himself for this moment all evening, moves to the sideboard (procured by Libby from a garage sale in Lewes) and opens its frosted glass front. Bunny reaches inside and returns to the sofa with a bottle of malt whisky and a short, heavy glass.

He pours himself a drink, and then up-ends it down his throat. He gags and throws his body forward, shakes his head and repeats the action with the bottle and the glass again. Then with little stabs of his index finger punches a number into his mobile phone. The line engages and before there is even time for the purr of the ringtone, he hears an awful, protracted bout of coughing, deep and wet, that forces Bunny to hold the phone at arm’s length from his ear.

In time, Bunny, clearly disturbed, says, ‘Dad?’ with an unintended and violent emphasis on the initial letter – not a stammer as such, but the beginnings of one, as if the word has been wrenched from his mouth like a stinking tooth.

‘Dad?’ he says again, jamming the phone under his chin and firing up another fag.

The coughing stops and Bunny hears a vicious intake of air sucked through oversized dentures that actually sounds like a nest of aggrieved snakes. Then the seething, bilious enquiry, ‘What?’

‘Dad? It’s me,’ says Bunny as he reaches for the bottle and slops another shot into the glass, his hand jumping about in agitation.

‘Who?’ shouts his father.

‘Dad, I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Who the fuck is this?’ says his father and Bunny hears him chopping his dentures. His voice sounds murderous and mad.

‘It’s me.’ Bunny’s hand is jumping around on the end of his wrist so much he appears like he is waving or has epilepsy or he’s just washed his hands and found there is no towel to dry them or something. He throws down the whisky, grimaces, shudders, sucks on his cigarette and finds that his whole body has started to shake.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ says the old man and the coughing starts up again, raking deep into the lungs.

‘D-dad?’ says Bunny, and he hears himself stutter and curses under his breath and tongs shut the phone. He tries to stick a fresh cigarette in his mouth but his head and his hand are jumping so much he finds it near-impossible. He lights it by steadying one hand with the other, then falls back against the sofa, expels the smoke violently and says, ‘Fuck!’

He pictures his father, momentarily, as a medical skeleton sitting in an ancient leather armchair, tubercular lungs sucking at white powdery ribs, fag in hand, snarling into the telephone. The image terrifies him and he squeezes shut his eyes but the dread skull of his father continues to dance before his eyes. I’ll try him again some other time – he thinks.

Later on, and a bottle of whisky gone and nothing else going down, Bunny lurches along the hallway and leans against the door to the master bedroom. He takes a breath and opens the door, his face tensed and inclined to the side, the way an amateur may defuse a large bomb.