Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

With every intention of entering the room cautiously, Bunny stumbles and half-falls and staggers across the room and sits down on the unmade marital bed. He undresses down to his briefs. He turns and sees the curled inscription of his wife’s body still trapped within the sheets and considers reaching out and placing his hand on it. He feels he would do this but is still spooked from having just visited the bathroom where he was confronted with the sight of his wife’s collection of ‘special’ Ann Summers underwear hanging like lace bunting from the retractable clothesline above the bath. He had not seen these particular panties in years and he understood that they had been hung there as a kind of clue to something he was too drunk to fully fathom. Was his wife trying to tell him something? When he reached out and touched them with his fingers, the room swooned dramatically and the walls turned to Silly Putty and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back between the toilet and the bath. He let himself rest there for a moment and looked up at the line of pastel-coloured underwear that waved and danced above him, their gussets open wide like mouths, and Bunny was struck with a sudden and almost palpable sense of his wife’s presence there in the bathroom. The room felt chilled and Bunny thought he could see query marks of vapour rising from his lips. He stood up and got the hell out of there.

Now, sitting in his briefs on the edge of the bed, Bunny pulls the drawer out of Libby’s bedside table and dumps the contents – half-a-dozen little brown medicine bottles and pill packets – on the bed. Bunny locates the trusty Rohypnol, those pretty purple dissectible diamonds, and pops one, and then another, from their foil pockets and swallows them.

Bunny falls, in slow motion, backward and lies upon the bed. He closes his eyes and squeezes his genitals and tries to bring to mind a celebrity vagina but finds that his brain keeps bringing forth images of the day’s horror – the empurpled face of his wife, the imagined death’s head of his father, the screaming crotches of his wife’s ouvert panties. He opens his eyes and finds his attention drifting to the security grille on the window and the room dervishes and Bunny, with an impressive display of both self-control and alcoholic paralysis, remains where he is, on this fucked-up magic carpet ride.

He does this until he can do it no more, whereupon he rises from the bed and returns, bombed-out, to the living room.

He stumbles over the dumped piles of his clothes. Is that ink? Has ink been poured over his clothes? He falls heavily on the sofa and fumbles with the remote and zaps at the TV. He finds the Adult Channel and a televised phone-in sex-line and he allows an East European girl named Evana, who has a tight, hot, wet pussy and the bedside manner of a mallet or something, to coax Bunny through the most forlorn wank, he thinks, in the history of the world.

Then Bunny falls back against the sofa, and before he can surrender to his drugged sleep he manages with a near-super-human act of will to press the ‘OFF’ button on the remote and see, for an instant, the TV go dead, so that for a few short hours the Munro home seems peaceful – no phantoms or ghosts, no clanking of chains, no voices calling from beyond the grave – just a father and his son sleeping, the night hushed and respectful, in a manner fitting a man who will quite soon be dead.

When Bunny Junior enters the living room, he squints into the light that pours through the window. A mop of bed-hair crowns his sleep-seamed face, and his pyjamas are runkled and a Spiderman web-blaster is attached to his forearm. He screws up his nose at the cloying odour and waves his hand in front of his face.

Then he sees, with a gasp and a rush of energised wind through his body, his father sprawled motionless on the sofa, grey as a kitchen glove and coated in a patina of cold grease. The metallic, outsized TV remote is still cradled banally in his dead hand like an anachronism. It looks antique and obsolete and somehow responsible for Bunny’s condition, as if it had failed in its sole responsibility of keeping Bunny alive.

‘Dad?’ says the boy, quietly, then louder, ‘Dad!’

He begins to hop from one foot to the other in his complimentary bathroom slippers. Bunny does not respond, and if he is breathing, then it is too shallow and inconsequential to produce any noticeable movement in his body.

Bunny Junior actually jumps up and down and screams ‘Dad!’ with such force that his father rears wildly up, batting at himself with his hands.

‘What?!’ he says.

Bunny Junior says, ‘You didn’t move!’

‘What?’

‘You just didn’t move!’

‘Hey? No, I fell asleep,’ says Bunny and tries to recognise his son.

Bunny Junior turns and jabs his finger angrily towards the hall and the master bedroom, still hopping weirdly from foot to foot.

‘Didn’t you want to sleep in there?!’ he says, in a loud voice, rubbing at his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Didn’t you want to go and sleep in there?!’

Bunny sits up and wipes at the slick of drool on his bristled cheek.

‘No. What? No, I fell asleep. What time is it?’ says Bunny.

The boy does not actually move closer to his father but when Bunny looks at him he seems to hard-zoom into focus, which gives the impression of an almost supernatural forward motion, and Bunny rears back reactively.

‘I should have used the key,’ says Bunny Junior, anxiously.

Bunny feels the events of the previous day collect about him, stealing the air. He is, on an abstract level, shocked by the realisation that his life is now different. It has become tragic and lamentable. He has become pitiable. A widower. But more explicably he also understands that the Rohypnol and the whisky he consumed the night before still course through his system and this makes him feel, in a very real way, pretty good.

‘What?’

‘The key, Dad, I should have used it!’

‘When? What?’

Bunny Junior looks at his father, his face twisted in rage, his granulated eyeballs raw and alive in their sockets, his little fists clenched at his sides, and shouts, ‘I just should have used the fucking key!’

Bunny, who has no idea of what is going on, does a kind of cabaret grab with his arm and ducks and weaves to avoid a slice of sunlight that scythes the room in two.

Grimacing, he says, ‘Christ, keep your voice down.’

Then he raises himself up, wavers on new legs and feels all the love thunder through his bloodstream.

‘Jesus, I’m loaded,’ he says, and he stands there in his briefs. ‘Is there anything to eat?’

Bunny Junior opens and closes his mouth and throws his arms out to the sides in a gesture that means ‘I don’t know’ and says, in a sad, grief-modulated voice, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, let’s take a look then!’ says Bunny. ‘I could eat a bloody cow!’

Bunny Junior, who loves his father, compresses his lips into a skew-whiff smile and says, ‘Me too, Dad!’ and follows him into the farragoed kitchen, where, like the living room, stuff has been up-ended, flung around and scattered about.

‘Yeah, well, I could eat two bloody cows!’

Bunny opens the cupboard door and reels back in mock-horror.

‘Jesus Christ, there’s a fucking monkey in here!’ and pulls out a box of Coco Pops and, rattling them to his ear, turns towards the fridge and opens it. He notices that the coloured magnetic alphabet that has decorated the fridge in a nonsensical scramble of letters for the last five years has been arranged to say ‘FUCK YR PUSSY’ and he wonders, as he snaps the seal on a pint of milk and sniffs it, who would have done that.

‘Actually, Bunny Boy, I could eat the whole fucking flock,’ he says.