The Death Of Bunny Munro Part 3

6.

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 ba.n.a.lly 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s raw and alive in their sockets, his little fists clenched at his sides, and shouts, 'I just should have used the f.u.c.king 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y cows!'

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

'Jesus Christ, there's a f.u.c.king monkey 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 'f.u.c.k YR p.u.s.s.y' and he wonders, as he snaps the seal on a pint of milk and sniffs it, who would have done that. 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 'f.u.c.k YR p.u.s.s.y' 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 f.u.c.king flock,' he says.

'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 G.o.d 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 c.u.m-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 c.o.c.k 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 f.a.g 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 d.i.c.k.

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 Beyonce (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 f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king personal personal and then there is a knock on the front door. 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.

'h.e.l.lo, 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 p.u.s.s.y. 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 v.a.g.i.n.a 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? 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.

'Is there anything else you would like to discuss, Mr Munro?' she says.

'Yes,' says Bunny, and he feels a bead of perspiration collect in the hollow beneath his Adam's apple. 'Do you believe in ghosts?'

Jennifer instinctively looks to Graeme for the official line on this question. Bunny thinks he can feel the heat coming off Graeme's barbecued face and he turns his head to look at him and glimpses Graeme rolling his eyes.

'What if you are not sure whether your wife has actually completely died?' asks Bunny, balling the tissue in his fist and flicking it across the room.

The social workers leave and Bunny takes his place on the sofa and watches the television.

'Can I come back in now?' asks Bunny Junior, appearing at the door.

'Well, yeah,' says Bunny, opening a beer.

The boy sits down next to his father and starts flip-flopping his feet.

'What is it with you and your feet?' says Bunny.

'Sorry, Dad.'

Bunny points at the television.

'Have you seen that?' he says.

'I didn't think you liked watching the news,' says the boy.

On the TV there is more CCTV footage of the devil guy who paints himself red, wears plastic joke-shop horns and attacks women. He has struck again. This time fatally. He has followed a young office worker named Beverly Hamilton into an underground car park and murdered her with a garden fork. He stabbed her hundreds of times. The car park is in Leeds, which, thinks Bunny, is further south. The public are in a state of shock. Later that day the Horned Killer, as the press have tagged him, had paraded in front of CCTV cameras at a nearby mall, panicking the shoppers. Then he disappeared. The police are 'baffled'.

'Do you believe this guy?' says Bunny.

'No, Dad, I don't!' says the boy.

7.

There is a simple service for Libby Munro at St Nicolas Church in Portslade. Bunny and Bunny Junior stand in the church, heads bowed. They are dressed in the brand new black suits Bunny had found hanging, side by side, in the otherwise empty closet in his bedroom. A receipt he discovered in the jacket pocket showed that Libby had bought the suits from Top Shop in Churchill Square, two days before her suicide. What was that about?

Every day a newer, weirder and sadder aspect to Libby's demise reveals itself. A neighbour had said that she had seen Libby burning pieces of paper and dropping them over the balcony a couple of days before her death. They had turned out to be the love letters Bunny had written her before they were married. He found little burnt pieces of them under the stairwell with the syringes and the condoms. What had got into her? She must have been crazy.

The whey-faced and effeminate Father Miles, with a c.u.mulus of white hair banked around his skull, delivers his eulogy in a pneumatic whisper that Bunny has to crane his head to fully hear. He refers to Libby as 'full of life and loved by all' and later 'selfless and generous beyond measure', not once mentioning her medical condition and her subsequent mode of departure, Bunny notices, other than to say 'she had joined the angels prematurely'.

Bunny gives a cursory scope of the congregation and sees, squeezed into the same pew, on the other side of the church, a small number of Libby's friends.

Patsy 'Bad Vibes' Parker throws Bunny incriminatory looks every so often, but Bunny expects nothing less. Patsy Parker has never liked Bunny and at every opportunity she can find alerts him to the fact. Patsy is short, with an over-developed backside, and to compensate for her low stature wears high heels much of the time on her tiny undersized feet. When she would come to visit Libby, she would walk down the gangway in an obscene and purposeful trot, reminding Bunny of one of the three little pigs, probably the one who made its house out of bricks. This is particularly pertinent, as she had once, in a fit of pique over some p.o.r.ny comment she had overheard him make about the walking f.u.c.k-fest Sonia Barnes from No. 12, called Bunny a wolf. Bunny a.s.sumed she meant the cartoon wolf, all drooling tongue and bulging eyeb.a.l.l.s, and had actually taken this remark as a compliment. Each time he'd see her he would do his 'I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down' routine. Bunny considers rolling out his tongue and bugging his eyeb.a.l.l.s at her but realises with a certain satisfaction that he can't be f.u.c.ked.

Next to Patsy Parker, Bunny sees, is Rebecca Beresford, who Libby would refer to at any given time as 'the older sister she never had', 'her soul mate' and 'her best friend in the world'. Rebecca Beresford stopped talking to Bunny years ago after an incident at a barbecue on Rottingdean beach that involved a half bottle of Blue Label Smirnoff, an uncooked chipolata, her fifteen-year-old daughter and a serious misreading of the signs. This led to a furore that a year of contrition could not defuse. Eventually an unspoken agreement was forged that mutual disdain was the only way forward. Whatever. Rebecca Beresford shoots scowling broadside glances at Bunny from the other side of the church.

Next to her is the seriously s.e.xy Helen Claymore, who also gives Bunny nasty little looks, but Bunny can see that her heart isn't in them and that she is clearly up for it. This is not an opinion but a statement of fact. Helen Claymore is dressed in a tight, black tweed suit that does something insane to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, militarises them, torpedoes them, and something out of this world to her depth-charged rear end. Helen Claymore has been transmitting signals to Bunny in this way for years and Bunny takes a deep breath and allows himself to open up to her vibes like a medium or spiritualist or something. He gives vent to his imagination and realises for the millionth time that he has none and so he pictures her v.a.g.i.n.a. Bunny marvels at this for an unspecified moment. He sees it hovering before his eyes like a holy apparition and intuits the wonder of it and feels his d.i.c.k harden like a bent fork or a divining rod or a cistern lever he can't decide which.

Then he hears a release of hissed gas and turns to see Libby's mother, Mrs Pennington, staring straight at him with a look of horror and sheer hatred on her face. She actually bares her teeth at him. Caught in the act thinks Bunny and bends his head in prayer.

The boy looks up at his father and then over at Mrs Pennington and smiles at her and raises his hand in a sad, little wave. His grandmother looks at him and shakes her head in rage and grief, and a great sob breaks from her chest. Her husband, a good-looking guy who had a stroke a year ago and is now consigned to a wheelchair, lifts a convulsive hand and places it over that of his despairing wife.

Suddenly, Father Miles is talking about 'those left behind', and when he mentions Libby's 'loving husband', Bunny thinks he can hear an audible groan from the congregation a boo and a hiss for the bad guy. He thinks he may well be imagining this but, just in case, he repositions himself, giving them his back, as if to s.h.i.+eld himself from their collective disdain by facing the wall.

When he opens his eyes his attention is grabbed by a painting of the Virgin Mary with the infant Jesus cradled in her arms. Underneath there is a lacquered plaque that reads Madonna and Madonna and Child Child, which makes him close his eyes and incline his head again and think about Madonna and her waxed p.u.s.s.y (probably) and how he'd read in some interview that she liked having her yoga-toned bottom spanked.

Behind all this imagining he can hear the low whisper of his wife's eulogy and suddenly he feels a kind of imminent sense of her presence and, weirdly, his own doom. He can stand it no longer.

'Wait here,' he whispers to his son.

Bunny sidles from the pew and, head bent, sneaks out of the church. He ducks across the green square of lawn and, in a little public toilet made out of bricks, shaded by an implausible palm tree, he rests his head against the graffitied wall of the cubicle and beats off. He remains in this position for a time, then gloomily bats at a toilet paper dispenser, cleans himself up and exits the cubicle.

With eyes downcast, he stands before the reflective square of stainless steel screwed to the wall above the sink. After a while Bunny finds the courage to raise his head and look at himself. He half expects some drooling, slack-jawed ogre to greet him there in the smeared mirror and is pleasantly surprised to see that he recognises the face that stares back at him warm, loveable and dimpled. He pats at his pomaded forelock and smiles at himself. He leans in closer. Yeah, there it is that irresistible and unnameable allure a little bashed and battered, to be sure, but who wouldn't be?

Then, on closer inspection, he sees something else there, looking back at him. He leans in nearer still. Something grievous has resided in his face that he is amazed to see adds to his general magnetism. There is an intensity to his eyes that was not there before a tragic light that he feels has untold potential and he shoots the mirror a sad, emotive smile and is aghast at his new-found pulling power. He tries to think of a papped celebrity who has been visited by some great tragedy and come out the other side looking better as a result, but can't think of one. This makes him feel mega-potent, ultra-capable and super-human, all at the same time.

But most of all, Bunny feels vindicated. Despite everything, he's got his mojo back. He feels he is ready to face the scowling disdain of this church full of uptight women. He even contemplates knocking out another one there at the sink. He sticks a Lambert & Butler in his mouth and lights it and blows a trumpet of smoke at his own reflected image.