‘The crap they print in these things. It’s enough to make you want to slit your wrists. Day after fucking day …’ he says.
He performs a dentured smile and, without concern, enquires, ‘What happened to you?’
‘The key to room seventeen, please,’ says Bunny.
The receptionist picks up his ‘Mystic Eye’ and peers at Bunny.
‘Fucking hurricanes, avian flu, global warming, suicide bombers, war, torture, mass murderers …’
For a moment Bunny thinks that the receptionist is giving a terminal prognosis based on Bunny’s appearance, but realises that the receptionist is tapping at the newspaper with his finger.
‘Plagues, famine, floods, fucking frogs …’
‘The key …’
‘Little children murdering other little children, bodies piling up in mounds …’
‘The key …’
The receptionist swings his arm around in a dramatic arc and jabs his finger at the TV.
‘Look at that fucking guy,’ he says.
But Bunny does not need to look, because he knows. He recognises the familiar shrieking, stampeding crowd, and even though he knows what the receptionist is about to say, it doesn’t stop a chill wind clawing its way up his spine and circling around his tortured skull.
‘He’s here!’ says the receptionist, and then points his finger at Bunny and says, ‘It’s biblical! It’s Reve-fucking-lations! If we could all just be a bit nicer to one another!’
Bunny lifts his head back and notices an antique chandelier hanging greasy and fly-spotted from the ceiling. The crystal teardrops make patterns of ghastly light across the walls. Bunny leans across the counter and looks at the receptionist.
‘Listen, you loopy old cunt. My wife just hung herself from the security grille in my own bloody bedroom. My son is upstairs and I haven’t the faintest fucking idea what to do with him. My old man is about to kick the bucket. I live in a house I’m too spooked to go back to. I’m seeing fucking ghosts everywhere I look. Some mad fucking carpet-muncher broke my nose yesterday and I have a hangover you would not fucking believe. Now, are you gonna give me the key to room seventeen or do I have to climb over this counter and knock your fucking dentures down your throat?’
The receptionist reaches up and turns down the television, then directs his attention to Bunny.
‘The thing is, sir, it is against hotel policy to give out two keys.’
Bunny gently lays his head on the counter and closes his eyes and points of refracted fairy light orbit around his skull.
‘Please don’t,’ says Bunny, quietly.
He stays like that for a time until he feels the key to Room 17 slipped into his hand.
‘Thank you,’ he says, and picks up the newspaper. ‘May I have this?’
Bunny moves across the lobby and cleaves apart a team of tracksuited table-tennis players who look to Bunny like they come from Mongolia or somewhere.
‘Ulaanbaadar!’ shouts Bunny, despite himself.
The guy who is possibly the coach breaks into a smile and the whole team cheer and give Bunny the thumbs-up sign and pat him on the back and say, ‘Ulaanbaadar!’ and Bunny sadly mounts the hotel stairs.
Bunny walks down the hall and looks at his watch and sees the time is 6.30. He puts the key in the lock and, as he does so, he becomes aware of a strange sound coming from Room 17. It is non-human, conversational and very scary. He thinks, as he opens the door, that it is also oddly familiar.
Bunny enters the room and sees two things at approximately the same time. First, the eccentric and unsettling sound that has frightened him is coming from the Teletubbies, who are on the TV. Po is engaged in a freakish, mutant conversation with Dipsy. Then Bunny notices that Bunny Junior is standing motionless in the centre of the room, between the two beds. He is staring at the television set and his face has drained of blood and his eyes are wide in his head and he is standing in a pool of his own water, the front of his pyjamas soaked in urine. The boy turns to his father and makes a fluttering gesture with his left hand and says, in a faraway voice, ‘I couldn’t find the remote.’
‘Shit,’ says Bunny, beneath his breath.
He walks past his son and sits on the edge of his bed. The bed is hard and unforgiving and covered in tiny, empty bottles. On the floor lies the butt of a dead cigarette.
Bunny moves his hand across his face and says, ‘You better change.’
The boy passes his father, holding the tops of his pyjamas with one hand and covering his mouth with the other, and says, ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
Bunny says, ‘It’s OK,’ and the boy disappears into the bathroom.
Bunny tosses the newspaper onto the puddle of urine. He looks at the television and sees Po and Dipsy holding hands in a violently green field full of oversized rabbits. Bunny looks down at the newspaper and sees a black-and-white CCTV grab of the Horned Killer and a headline that reads, ‘HERE AT LAST’. He trances out, in slow motion, on the water absorbing into the newspaper and tries not to take it personally when he sees that the soakage is taking on the shape of a rabbit.
He looks up and finds his son standing in front of him dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. The boy climbs up onto Bunny’s lap and puts his arms around his neck and rests his head on his chest. Bunny places a cautious hand on the boy’s back and stares out.
‘It’s OK,’ he says.
The boy squeezes his dad close and starts to cry.
‘I’m ready,’ says Bunny, obscurely, to nobody in particular.
PART THREE
DEADMAN
25
The boy thinks his father looks weird, sitting there eating his breakfast in the dining room of the Empress Hotel, but it’s hard to really know for sure as it seems a long time since he has looked anything else. His eyes keep darting all over the place – no sooner have they looked over there, than they look over here, and as soon as they look over here, they are looking somewhere else. Sometimes he is rubbernecking over his shoulder, or searching under the table, or checking who is coming through the door, or squinting at the waitress like he thinks she is wearing a disguise, like a mask or veil or something. He keeps holding his ribs and sucking air through his teeth and wincing and generally making strange faces. Sometimes he does these things sped-up and sometimes he does them slowed-down. Bunny Junior feels time is playing tricks on him. For example, it feels like he could grow from a little boy into a wrinkly old man in the time it takes his father to lift his cup, bring it to his lips and take a slurp of tea, and other times it seems like his father is doing everything revved-up and super-fast, like racing around the breakfast room or running off to the bathroom. Bunny Junior feels like he’s been ‘hitting the road’ for a million years but realises with a chilly, drizzly feeling that this is only the third day.
His dad keeps saying something about the client list but as far as Bunny Junior can see the list is pretty much finished. He wonders what will happen when there are no more names left on the list. Will they go home? Will they just get another list? Does this just go on and on for ever? What did life have in store for him? What will he amount to? Is there some alternative life waiting to be lived? Then his dad forks an entire sausage into his mouth and the boy can’t help but smile at this truly impressive display. That’s the thing with his dad – thinks the boy – just when you’re about to get really angry with him, he goes and does something that leaves you completely awestruck. Well – he thinks – I love my dad and that’s a good thing. I mean – he thinks – you’ve got to hand it to him.
Bunny Junior watches a glob of ketchup run down his father’s chin and land on his father’s tie. This particular tie is sky-blue and there are cartoon rabbits printed on it, with little stitched crosses for eyes, lounging around on white cotton clouds. Bunny is too busy scanning the breakfast room to notice the mess he is making, so the boy reaches across the table and dabs at the spot with a damp napkin.
‘That’s better,’ says the boy.
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‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ says Bunny, looking around the place like his head was on some kind of crazy, floppy spring.
‘You’d be a bit of an old pig,’ says the boy.
Bunny stands up and looks under his chair.
‘I said, “You’d be a bit of an old, fucking pig”,’ says Bunny Junior, a bit louder.
The boy has been reading his encyclopaedia at the breakfast table and, as well as ‘Apparition’ and ‘Visitation’, he has looked up ‘Near-Death Experience’.
The boy looks at his father and, for no particular reason, says, ‘Hey, Dad, it says in my encyclopaedia that a Near-Death Experience is a striking occurrence sometimes reported by those who have recovered from being close to death.’
His father stands abruptly and bumps the table and there is a rattle of crockery and the little white porcelain vase falls over with its sad and solitary flower and they both watch, in slow motion, the water soak into the tablecloth. Bunny Junior picks up the flower (a simulated pink English daisy) and puts it in the buttonhole of his father’s jacket.
‘There you go,’ says the boy.
‘We’ve got work to do,’ says Bunny. He scrapes back his chair and says, ‘We’ve got important business to attend to.’
Bunny pulls up the collar of his jacket and wraps his arms around himself.
‘Is the air conditioning up too high in here?’ he says, with a shudder.
‘I guess,’ says the boy, and he picks up his encyclopaedia and follows his father out of the breakfast room of the Empress Hotel.
At the reception desk, Bunny hears a pretty Australian backpacker chick with pink highlights in her hair and a dusting of translucent powder on her freckles say to her friend, ‘Hey, Kelly, did you see this?’
She points to a tabloid newspaper on the counter.
Kelly has blue hair and wears a loose cheesecloth dress and Tibetan beads around her neck. She looks at the tabloid and sees a photograph of the Horned Killer, flanked by two overweight policemen. The killer is shirtless and six-packed and smeared in red paint, his hands are cuffed, his fake joke-shop horns still perch on his head. He stares resolutely into the camera. The headline reads, ‘GOTCHA!’
‘Wow, Zandra, they got the guy,’ she says.
Zandra traces the contours of the killer’s body with one plum-coloured fingernail and says, ‘Looks kind of cute, though.’
Kelly looks over her shoulder at Bunny, who has moved in close and is craning his neck and trying to see the front page of the newspaper.
‘Who?’ she says, distracted.
‘The devil guy,’ says Zandra.
Kelly elbows Zandra and says, under her breath, ‘My God, girl, you are incorrigible!’ then looks over her shoulder at Bunny again.
‘Wash off the body paint. Lose the plastic horns …’ says Zandra.
‘Girl, you are rampant!’ says Kelly, from the side of her mouth.
‘Yeah,’ says Zandra, ‘I know,’ and with a little grunt adjusts her backpack, adding, ‘I wouldn’t mind his shoes under my bed at all!’
‘Sssh,’ says Kelly, under her breath.
‘Sorry,’ says Zandra, ‘I mean, hooves!’
Kelly turns around and faces Bunny.
‘Could we have a little room here, please?’
Bunny raises his hands in the air and takes a step backwards.
‘Sorry, Kelly,’ says Bunny, ‘It’s just that I think we are having our childhoods stolen from us.’
Bunny moves across to the receptionist, with his wisps of white hair and his catastrophic hinged nose, and pays his bill, and as he turns away the receptionist shoots out his hand and grabs Bunny by the wrist. He looks at Bunny through his ‘Mystic Eye’ and points at the newspaper.
‘Did you see this? They are saying here that this devil guy’s horns aren’t fake. They’re real.’
As the automatic door hisses open Bunny Junior feels a sense of relief to be leaving the Empress Hotel and he says to his father, ‘A Near-Death Experience generally includes an out-of-body event in which people travel through a dark void or tunnel towards the light.’
The sun beats down and steam rises from the wet and dazzling streets. The glare hurts the boy’s eyes and he slips on his shades and wonders if he is actually dead. He thinks – Is this why I keep seeing my mother? He pinches the flesh on his thigh until his eyes water, and out on the sea a bank of condensed mist moves across the water towards them, like an unsolicited memory.
‘In a Near-Death Experience people have reported encountering religious figures!’ shouts Bunny Junior, jumping up and down, and rubbing the bruise on his thigh and thinking – ouch, ouch and ouch! ‘One may even encounter deceased loved ones!’
His father keeps walking in a peculiar way and beating at his clothes with his hand and looking over his shoulder, and the sea mist continues to roll towards them, like a great white wall, blurring the line between the real world and its fogbound dream or something.
‘There you go,’ says the boy, helping his father, who has fallen over on the sidewalk, to his feet. ‘Look what you’ve gone and done,’ he says, pointing to a little triangular rip in the knee of his trousers.
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ says his father as he takes a long drink of something from a bottle, opens the door of the Punto and, face first, falls in.
When the Punto doesn’t start, his father pounds the steering wheel, then actually clasps his hands together in supplication and petitions God and all His saints for assistance, and the insubordinate Punto, as if taking pity on him, coughs and splutters into life with a promise of taking him where he wants to go.
‘A Near-Death Experience is often accompanied by strong feelings of peacefulness, Dad,’ says the boy.
‘Grab the client list,’ says Bunny, resting his head on the wheel and playing with the hole in his trousers.
The boy says, ‘It … is … often … accompanied … by … strong … feelings … of … peacefulness,’ and he leans over and takes a tissue from the glove compartment and together they dab at the messy little scrape on his dad’s knee.
‘There you go,’ says the boy.
Bunny parks the Punto outside a tumbledown bungalow on the hill between Peacehaven and Newhaven – the residence of Miss Mary Armstrong, the last name on the list. The front yard is overgrown and littered with all manner of junk – used appliances and broken machines – a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a washing machine, a bathtub full of yellowed newspapers, a ruptured kayak, a ruined Chesterfield settee and a motorcycle, dismantled and forgotten. Standing in the centre of the yard is a grotesque sculptural abstraction made from welded steel and strips of brightly coloured, spray-painted plastic.
‘What a shit-hole’ says Bunny. ‘They just get worse and worse.’
There had been three names left on the client list, but the other two names had turned out to be non-starters and a complete waste of time.
The first was a Mrs Elaine Bartlett, who lived on the fourth floor of a block of flats in Moulsecombe. Lying on the floor of its only working elevator was a bombed-out kid with a can of air freshner in one hand and a Tesco bag in the other and a Burberry cap on his head. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem, except the boy had emptied the contents of his bowels into his shorts and these were pulled down around his skinny, little ankles. The boy had managed, rather heroically, thought Bunny, to graffiti in green spray paint on the elevator wall, ‘I AM A SAD CUNT’. Bunny had stepped into the elevator, then stepped out and allowed its doors to judder shut. He contemplated momentarily climbing the four flights of stairs to Mrs Elaine Bartlett’s flat and realised, to his credit, that there was no way he was going to make it up them in his present condition, so he staggered back to the Punto.
The next name on the list, a Mrs Bonnie England, living over the hill in Bevendean was not at home in her semidetached brick-clad box, or so the guy who answered the door and claimed to be her husband maintained. Bunny could see t
his was clearly untrue, as the woman in the grease-stained pinafore, standing next to the guy who opened the door was obviously Mrs Bonnie England. Bunny didn’t press the point, primarily because Mrs Bonnie England was the animate equivalent of the fouled elevator in Moulescombe – a prime stomach-churner with the proportions and sex appeal of a Portakabin. Bunny had simply made a deferential apology for inconveniencing them (the husband was the red-faced, super-pissed-off type, and Bunny was tired of being beaten up) then backed respectfully away and fell over her rubbish bins. Lying on his back on the concrete walkway, Bunny watched Mrs Bonnie England and her husband hold each other’s hands and laugh at him.
‘Ouch,’ said Bunny.
As Bunny limped back to the Punto, he noticed, to his complete surprise, the ripe and rotund figure of River – the waitress from the breakfast room at the Grenville Hotel – walking down the street in her purple gingham uniform with the white collar and cuffs. He rubbed his eyes as if he were seeing things, like she were a mirage or a visual fallacy of some sort or something. She seemed like she had walked out of another lifetime, a less complicated and happier age, and his cock leapt at the memory of her, and his heart pounded like a military drum and he started to cry.
‘Hey!’ said Bunny, running up to her, dabbing at his cheeks. ‘What are you doing, River?’
River took one look at Bunny and screamed. She veered savagely in a wide and reckless arc and sped up, taking wild glances over her shoulder.
‘Hey!’ said Bunny. ‘It’s me! Bunny!’
River broke into a run, the various parts of her body pumping and pulsating beneath her uniform.