The Death of Bunny Munro

  The women laugh and Amanda says, ‘Oh, for a good night’s sleep!’ and mock-throttles her baby.

  Bunny clocks the way Georgia tugs at her T-shirt and squirms in her chair as he turns to her and says, in a playful voice, ‘Now, Georgia, I am very disappointed in you.’ He takes note of the flush of colour that rises at her throat.

  ‘Ooh, Georgia, the man is disappointed!’ says Zoë and reprimands Georgia with a gentle slap to the back of the hand. Georgia bows her head, sips her wine and tugs at her T-shirt, all at the same time.

  ‘You’ve ordered the hand cream, the body lotion, the Almond and Aloe Mask, the Hair Masque and the Lifting Cream but you have not … and it hurts me to say this … you have not ordered the Moroccan Rose Otto Bath Oil.’

  ‘Georgia!’ scolds Zoë. ‘You complete fiend!’

  ‘Now what baffles me is why a woman as fine as yourself feels it justifiable to deny her body the very thing it aches for … liquid heaven … one hundred per cent plant oils and natural fragrance … romantic, old-fashioned, sensuous … Barry White in a bottle, this stuff … with a hint of the East. Slip into this at the end of the day and it will waft you to paradise …’

  Bunny places his hand on the underside of Georgia’s wrist and presses on the soft dough of her flesh and believes he can feel her pulse quicken. He leans in close and whispers, ‘I am very, very disappointed.’

  ‘Georgia, buy the bloody bath oil!’ screams Amanda or Zoë, and once again they shriek with laughter. The baby on Amanda’s lap jettisons the dummy from its mouth and bares the glazed ridges of its gums and makes a noise impossible to interpret.

  Minute beads of perspiration have formed under Georgia’s eyes, as she says, ‘All right. I’ll have the bath oil!’ and then releases her fraught and silvery giggle.

  Bunny shoots his cuffs and writes on the order form.

  ‘One bottle of Moroccan Rose Oil for the lovely Georgia.’

  Bunny smiles at Georgia and Georgia, in time, meets his eyes, and smiles back at him and Bunny knows, without arrogance or hubris, more than he knows anything in this world, that he could fuck Georgia in a heartbeat. Amanda too, he thinks. Zoë would need a little more work but it was Georgia that would give out and give out all the fucking way.

  ‘Now, ladies, I have some rather special Men’s products. A gift for the hubby, perhaps?’

  The three women look at each other and then collapse into laughter.

  Zoë says, ‘Got any facial scrub with ground glass in it?!’

  Amanda says, ‘How about a Moroccan Acid Bath!’

  ‘Do I detect a little husband trouble?’ he says.

  ‘Not any more!’ says Amanda or Zoë, and they hi-five each other in solidarity.

  Bunny looks at Georgia and says, ‘Not you too?’

  Georgia nods. ‘Gone,’ she says.

  ‘What? Gone, gone?’ says Bunny.

  ‘Yep. Gone, gone,’ says Georgia.

  Bunny leans forward and the lubricated forelock snakes on his brow as though it possesses its own heartbeat. He says, conspiratorially, ‘If you don’t mind me saying so, ladies, they must be out of their fucking minds.’

  At this point two small girls waddle into the kitchen, something incomprehensible having severed the hypnotic pull of the vast plasma-screen TV in the living room. With zombied eyes, they stop and look up at the adults and one of the children reaches around and pulls her bikini bottom out of the crack in her arse. Then she turns and disappears back into the living room, the other child following close behind.

  ‘Charming,’ says Bunny, and the women laugh their different laughs, then lapse into a weighted silence as if the course of their lives were altering before their eyes – old skins falling away, weeping wounds healing, new and hopeful horizons opening.

  Zoë picks a piece of lint from the leg of her chocolate velour tracksuit.

  ‘You got any kids, Mr Munro?’

  Bunny realises he was wrong about Zoë and he could fuck her too and a small, grey kitten enters the kitchen through a cat-flap and walks nonchalantly through the room.

  ‘Call me Bunny,’ he says and puts his hands behind his head and waggles them like rabbits’ ears. He creases his nose and makes a snuffling sound.

  ‘You got any kids, Bunny?’ says Zoë.

  ‘One. A boy,’ he says and experiences an uncomfortable intestinal spasm as he remembers his son waiting in the car. He looks at his watch.

  ‘What’s his name?’ asks Georgia.

  ‘Bunny Junior,’ says Bunny with a disarming pathos that fills the room with a gentle heartfelt ache. ‘He’s the light of my life, that little guy. The sun rises and sets with him.’

  ‘And Mrs Munro?’ says Zoë, craning forward and breathing deep into her lungs. Bunny notices, with a specialist’s eye, that Zoë’s breasts make no concessions to any gravitational bias whatsoever, as if they were hewn from granite or flint or something.

  ‘Gone,’ says Bunny, feeling an unexpected constriction of the throat.

  ‘How?’

  Georgia bats Zoë on the arm and says, ‘Don’t be so nosey.’

  ‘She passed away,’ says Bunny. ‘Recently.’

  ‘No,’ says the chorus of mothers.

  Georgia’s hand goes to her mouth and she says, ‘Oh, you poor man,’ and wants to put her hand over Bunny’s but resists the impulse.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you it’s been easy,’ says Bunny, looking over his shoulder.

  ‘No,’ say the women, ‘of course not.’

  Bunny raises his glass of wine and has the eerie feeling that this scenario is not his alone, or even that of the three women, but rather they are players in somebody else’s observance and he looks over his shoulder again to see if anybody is there.

  ‘Do you feel that?’ says Bunny, bringing his shoulders up around his ears.

  The women look at him questioningly.

  ‘A kind of chill in the room?’ he says and looks over his shoulder again, but then lifts his glass and says, ‘To life!’ His hand trembles and the wine slops from the glass and seeps into the cuff of his shirt.

  ‘To life,’ say the women, looking at each other.

  ‘And all the crap that goes with it,’ says Bunny and empties the glass down his throat, then says, ‘Are you sure you don’t feel that?’

  Bunny shudders and looks behind him. He checks his watch but the numbers blur. He pulls on his jacket.

  ‘I’ve got to go, ladies,’ he says and this remark is greeted with a clamour of protest. ‘Now, now, girls, I’m a working man,’ says Bunny and pulls up the collar of his jacket. He notices a whorl of fog curl from his lips like a question mark.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he says, looking this way and that.

  He reaches into the top pocket of his jacket and produces some business cards. He hands one each to Zoë and Amanda.

  ‘Your products will be with you within ten working days. If there is anything you need, don’t … um … hesitate to call. OK? It’s been … um … an absolute pleasure,’ he says.

  Bunny turns to Georgia and he sees her through a bleared film. Georgia looks at Bunny, her violet eyes, wells of sympathy.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she says.

  ‘Um … here is my card. Now, please don’t lose it … ah … and if there is anything and I … um … mean anything I can … ah … do for you, please don’t hesitate to call. Night or … um … you know … day.’

  Georgia puts her hand over Bunny’s and says, ‘What is it?’ then reaches into her purse and hands Bunny a Kleenex. Bunny realises, with a shiver, that the metallic mushroom on the front of Georgia’s T-shirt is not a mushroom at all but a mushroom cloud.

  ‘You have the most … ah … extraordinary eyes, Georgia,’ says Bunny and dabs at his cheeks. ‘Um … they go way … um … down.’

  ‘Oh, you poor man,’ whispers Georgia to herself.

  ‘To the depths … um …’

  Zoë puts her hand to her mouth and blows a tiny sprite of vapo
ur across the pink butterfly tattooed on her wrist. She looks at Amanda and, with an intake of breath, says, ‘Oh, my God.’

  Bunny snaps shut his sample case and scrapes back his chair and he stands and says, ‘Goodbye, ladies.’

  He looks all around him, opens the door and disappears, leaving behind him an atmosphere of incredulity and sadness.

  ‘Wow,’ says Zoë.

  Bunny stands on the gangway, then leans out over the balcony and realises, in a tentative way, that some sort of demand is being made of him from the other side – the dead side – but has no idea what. He descends the stairs and marches across the windblown courtyard of the estate, through its boxy, black shadows and towards the Punto.

  The fat man in the dress and the lavender wig sees Bunny and rears up from the bench and, with the pot-plant held out in front of him like he’s holding a child who had fouled its nappy or a pack of nitro-glycerine or something, lurches towards Bunny, a low growl rising from his throat.

  Bunny stops, plants his feet on the ground and says, ‘Don’t come near me, you fucking nut-job!’

  The guy looks at Bunny and sees something in him sufficiently impressive to inspire an urgent rethink as to the wisdom of his current course of action. He performs a comic, under-cranked retreat and sits back down in his hunched and plaguey position on the bench.

  ‘Fucking wacko,’ says Bunny and crosses the courtyard to the Punto and climbs in.

  ‘Are you all right, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

  ‘What?’ says Bunny. ‘Fucking what?’

  The boy closes his encyclopaedia and says to his father, ‘I don’t really like it here, Dad.’

  Bunny starts the Punto and says, more to himself than to his son, ‘Well, let’s get the f-u-c-k out of here, then.’

  ‘Where to, Dad?’

  Bunny reaches into the pocket of his jacket and produces the client list and shoves it into Bunny Junior’s hand.

  ‘This is the client list,’ says Bunny.

  ‘OK,’ says Bunny Junior.

  Then Bunny reaches across the boy and punches the glove compartment and it springs open. He pulls out a street directory.

  ‘This is an A to Z,’ he says.

  ‘OK,’ says the boy.

  ‘OK. Now, you’re the navigator,’ says Bunny, and the Punto lurches into the street.

  ‘The navigator?’ says the boy.

  ‘The navigator!’ says Bunny.

  Bunny Junior looks at the list and executes a flourish of his hand that he hopes will impress his father and make him like him, or at least not be angry with him. He points at the names.

  ‘Next stop, Shoreham!’ he says, optimistically.

  15

  Bunny Junior sits in the Punto and watches a little Sun beetle land on the windscreen and, from his unique vantage point, admires its black jewel-like underbelly as it moves about the glass. He marvels too at its mysterious, coppery sheen and wonders how anything so common could be so beautiful. He reaches into his pocket and removes a black marker and places it against the windscreen and traces the meandering trajectory of the Sun beetle on the glass. He wonders if there is any order or system to it. Bunny Junior loves beetles – always has and always will. When he was smaller he had a cigarette box full of dead beetles and he tries to remember what he did with it. He had all sorts of beetles – Devil’s Coach-horses, Black Clocks and Brown Chafers, Whirligigs, Sun beetles (like this one), Malachites, Red Soldiers and Sextons, Red Cardinals and Stag Beetles and his favourite, the Rhino Beetle. The Rhino Beetle is the strongest creature in the world and has three horns on its head and can lift 850 times its own weight. If a human could do this, it would mean he could lift 65 tons. He runs through all the beetles he knows quietly and to himself, and as he does so, he traces the now clearly random wanderings of this most ordinary of beetles, making the patch of windscreen look like the outer surface of a slowly expanding human brain. He is managing the job as navigator really well, he thinks – he has a knack for reading the maps and giving clear instructions and his dad, who can be a tough customer to please if you aren’t up to scratch, says he is doing really well. Part of him wonders what he is actually doing, though, sitting in the car all day and missing school. ‘Learning the ropes,’ he guesses.

  The air is turning a coral pink and candy-coloured clouds have been hung about the sky like shredded banners and the sun is falling behind the houses and he can hear the starlings creating their late-afternoon racket. His father has promised that this is the last job of the day, and the Sun beetle crawls its anarchic and pointless beat and before his raw and crusted eyes, the great black brain expands.

  ‘The Replenishing Cream with Rose Flower has almost magical restorative powers,’ says Bunny.

  He is sitting on a calico-covered sofa in the living room of a modest but well kept home in Ovingdean. He feels exhausted, wrung out and, above all, spooked. He is coming to believe that there are forces at work, within and around him, over which he has little or no control. He feels, obliquely, as though he is playing second banana in somebody else’s movie and that the dialogue is in asynchronous Martian and the subtitles are in Mongolian or something. He is finding it exceedingly difficult to ascertain who the first banana is. The optimism of the morning has given way to the notion that he is, in short, basically all over the fucking shop. On top of this, he is finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that there is a very real possibility his wife is observing him from the dead side and that he should, in some way, behave himself. This is close to impossible when the woman sitting in front of him, a Miss Charlotte Parnovar, is a bone fide, died-in-the-wool melon farmer who is giving off such serious and incontestable signals that Bunny can practically see the sparks leaping back and forth between them. Bunny, it should be said, has always considered himself a prize conductor of electricity and, as he massages lotion into staticky Charlotte’s hands, he begins the process of erecting a finial or air terminal or strike-termination device in his zebra-skin briefs.

  ‘This collagen-and elastin-rich cream can improve moisture up to two hundred per cent,’ says Bunny.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ says Charlotte.

  Charlotte has an interestingly high forehead that is, in a sexy way, completely void of expression except for the fact that there is a strange dry cyst, like a white whelk, in the centre of it. She has a soft powdering of near-invisible down on her upper jaw and her stiff, peroxide-ravaged hair is pulled back and clamped to the back of her head with a metal clip. This is done with such severity that it actually elongates her subtly derisive eyes. Charlotte sits across from Bunny on a matching calico sofa, wearing loose-fitting towelling shorts and a pink cotton vest stretched across large, pillowy breasts. She wears a tiny diamanté charm on a silver chain around her neck, like a glittering treasure washed up on a coral shelf.

  On the far wall hangs a framed picture from a West End musical and on the opposite wall a poster of a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, dressed as a gypsy and holding a little brown monkey. On the coffee table in front of him – a homemade affair of stressed brick and smoke-grey Perspex – sits Bunny’s sample case beside an incongruous bowl of stale potpourri.

  Bunny squeezes more lotion into Charlotte’s hands, kneading them and tugging on her fingers.

  ‘Its unique healing powers penetrate deep into the skin, leaving your hands feeling supple and … blissed out,’ he says, and he can see, if he adjusts his sight line fractionally, Charlotte’s inner thigh muscle jump and spasm in the gaping leg of her shorts. Her fingers are bony and strong and lubricated and, as he squeezes and unsqueezes them, he imagines her vagina barely an arm’s length away.

  ‘It’s … um … miraculous,’ says Bunny.

  ‘I don’t doubt it for a second,’ says Charlotte.

  Her voice has a super-sexy masculinity to it, and Bunny frets for a second but shortly after realises the folly in this – if she were a dyke, she wouldn’t be sitting here letting him do his thing with her hands, and he relaxes and presse
s his thumb into her open palm and slowly rotates it.

  ‘They’ve done actual tests,’ says Bunny, emphasising the last word, elongating it, softening it.

  ‘What kind of tests?’ says Charlotte, imitating him, gently mocking him.

  ‘Scientific ones,’ says Bunny.

  ‘Hmmm,’ says Charlotte and Bunny can see a secret and slightly sardonic smile find its way into the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Yeah, does wonders for the wrists too,’ he says, moving up and feeling hard, ribbed muscle in her forearms.

  Charlotte closes her eyes. ‘Hmmm,’ she says again.

  ‘Sexy lady,’ says Bunny, under his breath.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Bunny nods at the poster of Frida Kahlo, who looks down at them from under her one bizarre and conjoined eyebrow with flat expressionless eyes.

  ‘In the picture,’ says Bunny.

  Bunny registers the hint of condescension in Charlotte’s smile.

  ‘Oh, Frida Kahlo. Yes, she’s beautiful, isn’t she? I think that was painted in the 1940s,’ she says, looking up at the picture.

  Bunny thinks he feels a surge of electricity pass through Charlotte’s fingers into his, moving through his bones and straight into the base of his spine. He is overwhelmed by a multitude of tantalising things he can say but for some reason he says, ‘Didn’t they have tweezers back then?’

  Charlotte’s features shift infinitesimally, but in doing so her face becomes angular and severe.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘What do you mean?’

  Bunny holds a finger up to his forehead, and even as he does so, he feels a sense of things unravelling and of having lost control.

  ‘The mono-brow,’ he says, regretting it instantly.

  ‘The what?’ says Charlotte.

  ‘Makes you wonder what her legs looked like,’ he says before he can stop himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t follow you,’ says Charlotte, extracting her hand from Bunny’s and staring at him with a fierce disbelief.