Nick Cave - The Death of Bunny Munro

‘Herd,’ says the boy.

‘Yeah, and them too.’

They sit opposite each other, bent over their bowls, and with a much-exaggerated display of appreciation, they eat their cereal.

‘What key?’ asks Bunny.

Bunny spends the following days organising the funeral arrangements and taking calls of enquiry and commiseration from God knows whom, all with a zoned-out, robotic insentience.

The phone call to Libby’s mother, Doris Pennington, was made with all the sweat-soaked stupor of a man standing on a trapdoor with a rope around his neck. The woman’s complete contempt for her son-in-law went way back, almost nine years, to the first time Libby walked out on him and made her tearful way back home to mother – cum-stained knickers (not hers) in the back seat of Bunny’s old Toyota. The roaring silence that greeted the tragic news broke upon Bunny like a great wave and he sat there, heavy-lidded with the phone pressed to his ear, listening to the phantoms and ghosts inside the phone long after the line had gone dead. Bunny became convinced that he could detect the faraway rhythms of his wife’s voice deep in the phone lines. He felt she was trying to tell him something and a chill ran through his bones and he castaneted the phone and sat there, gulping lungs of air like a fish.

Through these days Bunny made increasingly frequent and protracted visits to the bathroom, beating off with a single-minded savagery, intense even by Bunny’s standards. Now, sitting on the sofa with a large Scotch, his cock feels and looks like something that has been involved in a terrible accident – a cartoon hotdog, maybe, that has made an unsuccessful attempt to cross a busy road.

The boy sits beside him and the two of them are locked in a parenthesis of mutual zonkedness. Bunny Junior stares blankly at the encyclopaedia open in his lap. His father watches the television, smokes his fag and drinks his whisky, like an automaton.

After a time, Bunny turns his head and looks at his son and clocks the way he stares at his weird encyclopaedia. He sees him but he can’t really believe he is there. What did this kid want? What is he supposed to do with him? Who is he? Bunny feels like an extinct volcano, lifeless and paralysed. Yeah, he thinks, I feel like an extinct volcano – with a weird little kid to look after and a mangled sausage for a dick.

Bunny scopes the living room. He has made some attempt at clearing up the debris and bringing some order back to the flat. In doing so he has uncovered the extent of the damage his wife had brought down upon the house. For example, he had found his Avril Lavigne (drool) and Britney (drool) and Beyoncé (drool) CDs floating in the toilet cistern; the entrails of his bootleg Tommy and Pamela video (a gift from his boss, Geoffrey) had been torn out and gallooned around the ceiling light in the bedroom; several unsuccessful attempts had been made to fasten to the wall a headshot of himself, taken at a company bash in the bar of The Wick, by way of a fork through the face, the tines leaving an hysterical Morse code on the woodchip of the bathroom – dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot – fuck you.

Bunny feels this was all done in a private language of blame. He feels a surge of guilt, but he doesn’t know why. He feels victimised. She had a medical condition, for Christ’s sake. She was depressed. The doctors said so. It had to do with a misfiring of her synapses or something. Still, it all feels so fucking personal and then there is a knock on the front door.

Bunny opens the door and is greeted by two social workers – Graeme somebody and Jennifer somebody – making an unannounced and unsolicited visit to monitor how Bunny and his son are coping. Bunny is glad he has made some effort to put right his house. He wishes, though, that he were a little more sober.

‘Hello, young man,’ says Jennifer to Bunny Junior and the boy offers a tight, little smile. ‘Do you think we could talk to your dad for a minute?’

Bunny Junior nods and picks up his encyclopaedia and disappears into his bedroom.

‘He’s adorable,’ says the woman and takes a seat opposite Bunny. She brings with her the ghost of a scent that Bunny remembers with absolute familiarity but cannot identify.

‘We don’t want to take up too much of your time,’ says Graeme, but something in his tone makes this statement seem unsympathetic and accusatory.

Graeme is a tall man with a huge, round, aggressive head and a seriously sunburned face – a human stop sign – and he places himself behind Jennifer, stiff-legged, feet apart, in a sad parody of a Stasi thug. He says he is there as a moderator or a mediator or something, but Bunny is not really listening. He is looking at Jennifer, who is, no matter how you cut it, seriously hot. Barelegged and new on the job, she has dressed herself in a linen skirt and cotton blouse in an attempt to demonstrate a sort of conservative and professional remove – but who is she kidding? Bunny knows, almost psychically, that the bra she is wearing is anything but standard issue, and her panties, well, who knows, but by the way she is sitting in the chair in front of him, and wiggling her knee, he wonders if she is wearing any at all. He considers this for a protracted period of time and comes to believe that her glistening and moisturised lower leg is, as anyone who is into this sort of thing knows, suggestive of a waxed pussy. Bunny feels his eyes closing and realises, from a million miles away, that Jennifer is recommending he seek some emotional support and is running through a list of grief councillors, local twelve-step meetings and support groups. He remembers with a dreadful spasm what has happened to his wife and then he catches the social worker squeezing her thighs together. Jennifer kind of peters out and dries up.

Bunny offers little but monosyllabic responses. He becomes increasingly wary of Graeme, who keeps eyeballing him in an ultra-threatening way, like he was doing something wrong. His crimson face pulses with an aura of something malign and barely suppressed, and Bunny notices a sprinkling of dandruff, like ash, on his dark blue jacket. He tries to concentrate on the possibilities of Jennifer’s vagina by defabricating her outfit. Then Bunny surprises himself by letting forth an ancient groan, a roar torn from the depths, and falling to his knees and flinging his face into Jennifer’s lap.

‘What am I going to do now? What am I going to do now? ’ he bellows and fills his lungs with her salty, summer smell. He feels, in an indirect way, that he has not smelt a woman for what seems like an eternity. He presses his face deeper into her lap and thinks – What is that smell? Opium? Poison?

Jennifer rears back and says, ‘Mr Munro!’ and Bunny wraps his arms around her cool, bare legs and sobs into her dress.

Graeme, her gallant protector, steps forward and says, all business but clearly unnerved, ‘Mr Munro, I must ask you to sit back in your seat!’

Bunny releases Jennifer, and says, quietly, ‘What am I going to do?’ and in saying that, reaches up and, to his surprise, finds his face is wet with real tears. And although he has to arrange himself to disguise the advent of a full-blown hard-on that has tented in his trousers, the question still hangs in the air, just the same. What is he going to do?

He hangs his head and wipes his face and says, ‘I’m so sorry. Please excuse me.’

Jennifer roots around in her handbag and hands Bunny a Kleenex.

‘It may not seem like it now, Mr Munro, but things will get better,’ she says.

‘Do you always carry these?’ asks Bunny, waving the tissue.

Jennifer smiles and says, ‘They are a much-needed tool of the trade, I’m afraid.’

She straightens her skirt and makes to stand.