He stares down at his breakfast, adrift in its sullage of grease, picks up his fork and with a sad poke at a sausage says, ‘Jesus, who cooked these eggs? The bloody council?’
The waitress smiles and covers her mouth with her hand. Around her neck, hanging on a delicate chain, is a dragon’s talon made of pewter holding a small glass eyeball. Bunny catches her smile, unguarded in her enormous, toneless eyes.
‘Ah, there we go. A little drop of sunshine,’ says Bunny, squeezing his thighs together and feeling a pulse of pleasure register around the perineum or wherever.
The waitress fingers her necklace and says, ‘You want tea?’
Bunny nods, and as the waitress moves away, he clocks the sudden and self-conscious seesawing of her retreating haunches and Bunny knows, more than he knows anything in the whole world, that he could fuck this waitress in the blink of an eye, no problems, so that when she returns with his cup of tea, Bunny points at her nametag and says, ‘What’s that? Is that your name? River? Where did you get that?’
The waitress places her hand over the nametag. Bunny notices the frosted, achromatic nail polish she is wearing corresponds in a suppositional way with the non-colour of her eyes. They both have something to do with the moon or the planets or something.
‘My mother called me that,’ said the waitress.
‘Oh, yeah? It’s pretty,’ says Bunny, bisecting a sausage and forking it into his mouth.
‘Because I was born near a river,’ she says.
Bunny chews and swallows and leans forward and says, ‘Good job you weren’t born near a toilet.’
A crease of ancient pain ruckles around the waitress’s eyes, diminishing them, then they clean-slate, blank-out, and she turns her back and begins to walk away. Bunny laughs, apologetically.
‘I’m sorry. Come back. I was joking.’
The breakfast room is empty and Bunny clasps his hands together in panto-supplication and says, ‘Oh, please,’ and the waitress slows.
Bunny zones on the afterpart of her lilac gingham uniform and a glitch in the pixels of the crosshatched pattern causes time to deregulate. He begins to see, in a concussed way, that this moment is a defining one for this particular young lady and a choice is presenting itself to her. It is a choice that could mark this waitress’s life for ever; she could continue to walk away and the day would roll on in all its dismal eventuality or she could turn around and her sweet, young life would open up like, um, a vagina or something. Bunny thinks this, but he also knows, more than he knows anything in the world, that she will, indeed, turn around and willingly and with no coercion step into the slipstream of his considerable sexual magnetism.
‘Please,’ he says.
He contemplates getting down on one knee but realises that it is unnecessary and that he probably wouldn’t be able to get up again.
River, the waitress, stops, she turns and in slow motion lies back in the water’s drift and floats towards him.
‘Actually, River is a beautiful name. It suits you. You’ve got very beautiful eyes, River.’
Bunny recalls hearing on Woman’s Hour, on Radio 4 (his favourite show), that more women prefer their men to wear the colour maroon than any other colour – something to do with power or vulnerability or blood or something – and is glad he has worn his shirt with the oxblood lozenges. It just makes things that bit easier.
‘They go deep,’ he says, spiralling an index finger hypnotically. ‘Way down.’
He feels a simple shift inside him, and the miserable machinery that has been grinding mercilessly in his brain all morning suddenly and effortlessly self-lubricates and moves into something sleek and choreographed and he almost yawns at the inexorable nature of what he is about to do.
He throws out his hands and says, ‘Guess what my name is!’
‘I don’t know,’ says the waitress.
‘Go on. Guess.’
‘No, I don’t know. I’ve got work to do.’
‘Well, do I look like a John?’
The waitress looks at him and says, ‘No.’
‘A Frank?’
‘No.’
Bunny limps his wrist, goes ham-homo, and says, ‘A Sebastian?’
The waitress cocks her head and says, ‘Well … maybe.’
‘Cheeky,’ he says. ‘All right, I’ll tell you.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘It’s Bunny.’
‘Barney?’ says the waitress.
‘No, Bunny.’
Bunny holds up his hands at the back of his head and waggles them like rabbits’ ears. Then he crinkles his nose and makes a snuffly sound.
‘Oh, Bunny! Suddenly River don’t seem so bad!’ says the waitress.
‘Oh, she’s got a mouth on her.’
Bunny leans down and picks up a small suitcase by his chair. He puts it on the table then shoots his cuffs and snaps the locks. Inside the case are various beauty product samples – miniature bottles of body lotion, tiny sachets of face cleanser and little tubes of hand cream.
‘Here, take this,’ says Bunny, giving River a sample of hand cream.
‘What’s this, then?’ says River.
‘It’s Elastin Rich, Extra Relief Hand Lotion.’
‘You sell this stuff?’
‘Yeah, door to door. It’s bloody miraculous, if you must know. You can have it. It’s free.’
‘Thanks,’ says River, in a small voice.
Bunny glances up at the clock on the wall and everything slows down and he feels the thunderous journey of his blood and his teeth throb at their roots and he says, quietly, ‘I can give you a demonstration, if you like.’
River looks at the tiny tube of lotion cradled in the palm of her hand.
‘It’s got Aloe Vera in it,’ he says.
3
Bunny turns the key in the ignition and his yellow Fiat Punto splutters sickly to life. A low-level guilt, if you could call it that, a nagging consternation that it was now 12.15 and he was still not home, rankles at the borders of his consciousness. He has a vague, unsettling memory of Libby being particularly upset the night before but he can’t bring the reasons to mind and, anyway, it is a beautiful day and Bunny loves his wife.
It is testament to Bunny’s irrepressible optimism that the glory days of their courtship refuse to relinquish their hold on the present so that it does not really matter how much shit intersects with the marital fan, when Bunny brings his wife to mind, her arse is always firmer, her breasts are shaped like torpedoes and she still possesses that girlish giggle and those happy lavender eyes. A bubble of joy explodes in his belly as he emerges from the car park into the glorious seaside sunshine. It is a beautiful day and, yes, he loves his wife.
Bunny manoeuvres the Punto through the weekend traffic and emerges onto the seafront, and with a near swoon Bunny sees it – the delirious burlesque of summertime unfolding before him.
Groups of scissor-legged school-things with their pierced midriffs, logoed jogging girls, happy, rumpy dog-walkers, couples actually copulating on the summer lawns, beached pussy prostrate beneath the erotically shaped cumulus, loads of fucking girls who were up for it – big ones, little ones, black ones, white ones, young ones, old ones, give-me-a-minute-and-I’ll-find-your-beauty-spot ones, yummy single mothers, the bright joyful breasts of waxed bikini babes, the pebble-stippled backsides of women fresh from the beach – the whole thing fucking immense, man, thinks Bunny – blondes, brunettes and green-eyed redheads that you just got to love, and Bunny slows the Punto to a crawl and rolls down the window.
Bunny waves at an iPodded fitness freak in Lycra shock-absorbers who maybe waves back; a black chick bouncing across the lawns on a yellow moon-hopper (respect); a semi-naked schoolgirl with a biscuit-sized fucksore on the base of her spine, that turns out, wonderfully, to be a tattoo of a ribbon or a bow – ‘Gift wrapped,’ yells Bunny. ‘Can you believe it?’ – then he wolf-whistles at a completely naked chick with a full Brazilian wax job, who Bunny realises, on closer i
nspection, is actually wearing a skin-coloured thong as anatomically integrated as sausage skin; he waves at a threesome of thunder-thighed Amazonian goddesses in Ugg boots volleying an outsized blow-up ball (they wave back in slow motion). Bunny hits the horn at a couple of surprisingly hot dykettes, who flip him the finger, and Bunny laughs and imagines them dildoed-up and going for it; then sees a knock-kneed girl in pigtails licking a red-and-blue striped stick of Brighton Rock; a girl wearing something unidentifiable that makes her appear as though she has stepped into the skin of a rainbow trout; then a nanny or something bending over a pram and the bright white spot of her panties and he blows air through his teeth and hammers the horn. Then he clocks a forlorn-looking, big-boned office girl that has been separated from her hen party, zigzagging drunkenly across the lawns, alone and disorientated, in a T-shirt that says ‘SQUEAL LIKE A PIGGY’ and carrying a large, inflatable penis. Bunny checks his watch, considers it, but cruises on. He sees a weird, veiled chick in a bikini with a Victorian bustle and then waves at a cute little junkie who looks a lot like Avril Lavigne (same black eyeliner), sitting on a pile of Big Issues in the doorway of the crumbling Embassy apartments. She stands and shuffles towards him, skeletal, with giant teeth and black, panda-like rings under her eyes, and then Bunny realises she is not a junkie chick at all but a famous supermodel at the peak of her success whose name he can’t remember, which makes Bunny’s hard-on leap in his briefs, and then on closer inspection he realises that she is a junkie chick after all and Bunny cruises on, even though everybody who is into this kind of thing knows, more than anything in the world, that junkies give the best head (crack whores, the worst). Bunny turns on the radio and Kylie Minogue’s hit ‘Spinning Around’ comes on, and Bunny can’t believe his luck and feels a surge of almost limitless joy as the squelching, teasing synth starts and Kylie belts out her orgiastic paean to buggery and he thinks of Kylie’s gold hotpants, those magnificent gilded orbs, which makes him think of riding River the waitress’s large, blanched backside, his belly full of sausages and eggs back up in the hotel room, and he begins singing along, ‘I’m spinning around, move out of my way, I know you’re feeling me ’cause you like it like this’, and the song seems to be coming out of all the windows of all the cars in all the world, and the beat is pounding like a motherfucker. Then he sees a group of pudgy mall-trawlers with their smirking midriffs and frosted lipstick, a potentially hot Arab chick in full burka (oh, man, labia from Arabia), and then a billboard advertising fucking Wonderbras or something and he says, ‘Yes!’ and takes a viscous, horn-blaring swerve, rerouting down Fourth Avenue, already screwing the top off a sample of hand cream. He parks and beats off, a big, happy smile on his face, and dispenses a gout of goo into a cum-encrusted sock he keeps under the car seat.
‘Wo!’ says Bunny and the deejay on the radio is saying ‘Kylie Minogue, don’t you love those hotpants!’ and Bunny says, ‘Oh, yeah!’ and points the Punto into the traffic and drives the ten minutes it takes to get to his flat at Grayson Court in Portslade, still smiling and laughing and wondering if his wife Libby might be up for it when he gets home.
4
As Bunny turns into Church Road, the deejay is still talking about Kylie’s gold lamé hotpants – how they are housed in a temperature-controlled vault in a museum in Australia and have reportedly been insured for eight million dollars (more than the Turin Shroud). Bunny feels his mobile vibrate and he flips it open, takes a deep breath and releases a measure of air and says, ‘What?’
‘I got one for you, Bunny.’
It is Geoffrey calling from the office. Geoffrey is Bunny’s boss and he is also, in Bunny’s view, something of a sad case, gone to fat in that mouse-sized office of his on Western Road, almost welded into a tortured swivel chair that he rarely seems to leave. A good-looking guy once upon a million years ago – there are framed photos of him on the back wall of his office, fit and almost handsome – but now an outsized, treacly-voiced pervert who sweats and sniffs and laughs into the handkerchief he forever waves theatrically in his fist. Geoffrey is a sad case, in Bunny’s view, but he likes him all the same. Sometimes Geoffrey exudes a kind of paternal, Buddha-like wisdom that Bunny, on occasion, finds himself responding to.
‘I’m listening, fat man,’ says Bunny.
Geoffrey tells Bunny a joke about a guy who is having sex with his girlfriend and tells her to get down on her hands and knees because he wants to fuck her up the arse and the girl says that’s a bit perverted and the guy says that’s a big word for a six-year-old and Bunny says, ‘I’ve heard it.’
Out of the radio comes a song that Bunny cannot identify and suddenly the whole thing is lost in a blast of static and Bunny rabbit-punches the radio, saying, ‘Fuck!’ whereupon heavy classical music blasts out. The music sounds like it is trumpeting the advent of something way beyond the bounds of terrible. Bunny looks askance at the car radio. He feels spooked by it – the way it seems to choose at random what it wants to hear – and he turns the volume down.
‘Fucking radio,’ says Bunny.
‘What?’ says Geoffrey
‘My car radio is …’ and Bunny hears the tortured squeal of the chair and Geoffrey open a can of lager on the other end of the line.
‘… fucked.’
‘You coming to the office, bwana?’ says Geoffrey.
‘Why would I do that?’
‘Because your boss is lonely and I’ve got a fridge full of beer.’
‘Got to check on the missus first, Geoffrey.’
‘Well, send her my love,’ says Geoffrey and he belches deeply.
‘Yeah,’ says Bunny.
‘Listen, Bun, a woman called the office, says she’s your dad’s carer or something. She says you’ve got to go to your dad’s place. It’s urgent.’
‘What now?’
‘Hey, man, I’m just the messenger.’
Bunny turns the Punto into the forecourt of Grayson Court, snaps shut his phone and parks. He steps out of the car, with his sample case and his jacket slung over his shoulder. Hoops of sweat have formed under the arms of his canary yellow shirt (he’d put on a clean one after fucking River) and as he strides across the courtyard he feels a familiar and not unpleasant tightening in his groin.
‘Maybe. Just maybe,’ he singsongs to himself, thinking of his wife and patting at the pomaded curl that sits, coiled and cocky, on his forehead.
He enters the stairwell and launches himself up the concrete steps, passing on the first floor a young girl in a brief, penicillin-coloured mini-skirt and a white stretch cotton vest that says ‘FCUK KIDS’. She has a pimply fourteen-year-old boy in grimy grey tracksuit trousers attached to her face. Bunny clocks her small, erect niplets jutting through the stretch weave of her vest and he leans in close to her throat as he moves past.
‘Careful, Cynthia, that doggie looks infected,’ he says.
The boy, his body fish-belly white and six-packed, with a mantle of acne across his shoulders, says, ‘Fuck off, you cunt.’
Bunny lets out a series of dog barks.
‘Arf! Arf! Arf!’ he goes, leaning out over the stairwell and taking the steps two at a time.
‘Come here, you wanker!’ says the boy, clenching his face and making to go after him.
The young girl named Cynthia says to the boy, ‘He’s all right. Leave him alone,’ then bares her long, braced teeth and, like a lunar probe or a lamprey, sinks down hungrily upon the boy’s neck.
Bunny roots in his pocket for his key as he strides down the gangway to his door. The front door is painted the same canary yellow as Bunny’s shirt and Bunny flashes for an unacknowledged instant an image of Libby, ten years ago, in Levis and yellow Marigolds, crouched by the door painting it, smiling up at him and wiping a strand of hair from her face with the back of her hand.
When he opens the door, the interior of the flat is dark and strange, and as he enters, he drops his sample case and attempts to hang his jacket on a metal peg that is no longer there. It has be
en snapped off. The jacket falls to the floor in a black heap. He flips the switch on the wall and nothing happens and he notices that the light bulb in the ceiling has been removed from its socket. He shuts the front door. He takes a step forward and, as his eyes adjust to the dark, he observes with a feeling of confusion a deeper disorder. A single bulb burns in a standard lamp, the tasselled shade cocked at an improbable angle, and in this pale uncertain light he sees that the furniture has been moved; his armchair, for instance, turned to face the wall like a naughty schoolboy and buried beneath a yoke of discarded clothes, the laminated dresser upended, its legs snapped off bar one from which a pair of Bunny’s briefs hangs like a sorry flag.
‘Jesus,’ says Bunny.
On the coffee table is a towering stack of pizza boxes and about a dozen unopened two-litre bottles of Coke. Bunny understands, in slow motion, that it seems to be his clothes, in particular, that have been thrown about the place. There is a sour and cloying smell that Bunny remembers, on some level, but cannot identify.
‘Hi, Dad,’ comes a small voice, and a nine-year-old boy, in blue shorts and bare feet, emerges suddenly out of the particled darkness.
‘Fuck me, Bunny Boy! You scared the shit out of me!’ says his father, spinning this way and that. ‘What happened here?’
‘I don’t know, Dad.’
‘What do you mean, “You don’t know”? You bloody live here, don’t you? Where’s your mother?’
‘She’s locked herself in her room,’ says Bunny Junior and rubs at his forehead, then scratches at the back of his leg. ‘She won’t come out, Dad.’
Bunny looks around him and is pole-axed by two parallel thoughts. First, that the state of the flat is personal to him, that it is a message – he sees now that some of his clothes have been slashed or torn apart – and that he is in some way responsible. An unspecified guilt, from out there on the boundaries of his psyche, pops its head over the fence, then ducks back down again. But this uneasiness is superseded by a second, more urgent, mood-altering realisation – that sex with his wife is almost certainly off the agenda and Bunny feels super-pissed off.