by Nick Cave
‘Dad? It’s me,’ says Bunny as he reaches for the bottle and slops another shot into the glass, his hand jumping about in agitation.
‘Who?’ shouts his father.
‘Dad, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Who the fuck is this?’ says his father and Bunny hears him chopping his dentures. His voice sounds murderous and mad.
‘It’s me.’ Bunny’s hand is jumping around on the end of his wrist so much he appears like he is waving or has epilepsy or he’s just washed his hands and found there is no towel to dry them or something. He throws down the whisky, grimaces, shudders, sucks on his cigarette and finds that his whole body has started to shake.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ says the old man and the coughing starts up again, raking deep into the lungs.
‘D-dad?’ says Bunny, and he hears himself stutter and curses under his breath and tongs shut the phone. He tries to stick a fresh cigarette in his mouth but his head and his hand are jumping so much he finds it near-impossible. He lights it by steadying one hand with the other, then falls back against the sofa, expels the smoke violently and says, ‘Fuck!’
He pictures his father, momentarily, as a medical skeleton sitting in an ancient leather armchair, tubercular lungs sucking at white powdery ribs, fag in hand, snarling into the telephone. The image terrifies him and he squeezes shut his eyes but the dread skull of his father continues to dance before his eyes. I’ll try him again some other time – he thinks.
Later on, and a bottle of whisky gone and nothing else going down, Bunny lurches along the hallway and leans against the door to the master bedroom. He takes a breath and opens the door, his face tensed and inclined to the side, the way an amateur may defuse a large bomb.
With every intention of entering the room cautiously, Bunny stumbles and half-falls and staggers across the room and sits down on the unmade marital bed. He undresses down to his briefs. He turns and sees the curled inscription of his wife’s body still trapped within the sheets and considers reaching out and placing his hand on it. He feels he would do this but is still spooked from having just visited the bathroom where he was confronted with the sight of his wife’s collection of ‘special’ Ann Summers underwear hanging like lace bunting from the retractable clothesline above the bath. He had not seen these particular panties in years and he understood that they had been hung there as a kind of clue to something he was too drunk to fully fathom. Was his wife trying to tell him something? When he reached out and touched them with his fingers, the room swooned dramatically and the walls turned to Silly Putty and the next thing he knew he was lying on his back between the toilet and the bath. He let himself rest there for a moment and looked up at the line of pastel-coloured underwear that waved and danced above him, their gussets open wide like mouths, and Bunny was struck with a sudden and almost palpable sense of his wife’s presence there in the bathroom. The room felt chilled and Bunny thought he could see query marks of vapour rising from his lips. He stood up and got the hell out of there.
Now, sitting in his briefs on the edge of the bed, Bunny pulls the drawer out of Libby’s bedside table and dumps the contents – half-a-dozen little brown medicine bottles and pill packets – on the bed. Bunny locates the trusty Rohypnol, those pretty purple dissectible diamonds, and pops one, and then another, from their foil pockets and swallows them.
Bunny falls, in slow motion, backward and lies upon the bed. He closes his eyes and squeezes his genitals and tries to bring to mind a celebrity vagina but finds that his brain keeps bringing forth images of the day’s horror – the empurpled face of his wife, the imagined death’s head of his father, the screaming crotches of his wife’s ouvert panties. He opens his eyes and finds his attention drifting to the security grille on the window and the room dervishes and Bunny, with an impressive display of both self-control and alcoholic paralysis, remains where he is, on this fucked-up magic carpet ride.
He does this until he can do it no more, whereupon he rises from the bed and returns, bombed-out, to the living room.
He stumbles over the dumped piles of his clothes. Is that ink? Has ink been poured over his clothes? He falls heavily on the sofa and fumbles with the remote and zaps at the TV. He finds the Adult Channel and a televised phone-in sex-line and he allows an East European girl named Evana, who has a tight, hot, wet pussy and the bedside manner of a mallet or something, to coax Bunny through the most forlorn wank, he thinks, in the history of the world.
Then Bunny falls back against the sofa, and before he can surrender to his drugged sleep he manages with a near-super-human act of will to press the ‘OFF’ button on the remote and see, for an instant, the TV go dead, so that for a few short hours the Munro home seems peaceful – no phantoms or ghosts, no clanking of chains, no voices calling from beyond the grave – just a father and his son sleeping, the night hushed and respectful, in a manner fitting a man who will quite soon be dead.
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 banally 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 eyeballs raw and alive in their sockets, his little fists clenched at his sides, and shouts, ‘I just should have used the fucking 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 bloody 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 bloody cows!’
Bunny opens the cupboard door and reels back in mock-horror.
‘Jesus Christ, there’s a fucking 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 ‘FUCK YR PUSSY’ 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 fucking 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 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.
‘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’.
