by Nick Cave
In time, the boy feels his mother return to him, and becomes aware of her presence in the room with him. He feels a general stirring of the air and he notices that the glow-in-the-dark planets are spinning with a renewed energy and the fairy refractions of light move down the walls with the speed of ghostly, green rain.
‘Can’t a guy get some sleep around here?’ says Bunny Junior, out loud.
Then he hears a raucous burst of laughter coming from the living room, so he says it again, leaving three second gaps between the words.
‘Can’t … a … guy … get … some … sleep … around … here?’
Then he smiles because he knows deep in his bones that his dad has gone and said something really funny probably. He kicks off his sheet and slides his feet into his slippers.
10
Bunny sits in the living room, slumped low on the sofa, full of Geoffrey’s Scotch and Poodle’s cocaine. His mood has soured and he is not sure why. He has been trying to imagine Poodle’s River’s pussy but is having great difficulty doing so. River sits opposite him and every time she laughs at Poodle – who is wearing a plastic Viking helmet on his head that most likely belongs to Bunny Junior – the knee of her left leg swings open like old Farmer John’s broken gate and Bunny can see the bright flag of her canary yellow panties. This would usually be enough to send Bunny into a near religious state of rapture but his ever-faithful one-track mind keeps taking unsolicited detours down the dread length of memory lane. This means that even though he is gazing heavy-lidded and slack-jawed between River’s tanned, toned legs and clocking the embossed stereotype of her pussy displayed on the crotch of her panties, his mind takes him to, say, the time he sat with his new and heavily pregnant wife, Libby, on the pebbled beach at Hove. Under a full and yellow moon, and leaning against a concrete groyne, she lifts up her blouse and exposes the taut, neat bump of her condition and the heel of the unborn child sliding eerily across its purple-veined and pearly surface.
‘Jesus, Bun, are you ready for this?’ asked Libby.
Bunny pinched the foetal heel between thumb and forefinger and said, ‘You’re talking to Bunny Munro, babe, you haven’t seen me when I get going!’
Maybe it is because of the Libby-centric nature of the day but this memory leaves Bunny feeling sad and deflated.
He becomes conscious of the fact that Barbara, who is well into her second bottle of Spumante, is saying something to Raymond, who is completely shit-faced and quite possibly asleep.
‘A boy needs his father. Jesus Christ, Raymond, it’s more than some kids have got,’ she says, slurring her words.
Raymond, with mouth open and eyes closed, unexpectedly raises an index finger as if to make some crucial point and rotates it enigmatically and then possibly obscenely and continues to rotate it as Barbara diverts her attention to Bunny and says, ‘At least he’s got you, Bunny.’
River nods in agreement, licks the purple birthmark on her upper lip, looks directly at Bunny and lets her gate swing wide.
‘You poor man,’ she says.
Bunny feels his eyes tear up and hears himself say, in a dreamy, disconnected way, ‘My dad raised me pretty much on his own. Taught me everything I know.’
Poodle starts to stand, a near-empty bottle of Scotch in his hand, and then freezes in a comic semi-crouch as he forgets why he has stood up. He looks about him suspiciously, then flops back onto the sofa beside Bunny.
‘Yeah, and look how you turned out,’ he says, and exposes his needle-like teeth in a sub-human grin.
Bunny, in slow motion, registers this remark and says with a sudden influx of meaning, ‘Say another thing about my dad, Poodle, and I’ll fucking slap you.’
Poodle’s head has fallen over the arm of the sofa, the Viking helmet cleaving miraculously to his yellow hairdo, and does not hear this. His eyes have rolled back into their orbits and his lids flutter weirdly.
‘Bum coke,’ he mutters.
River says, ‘You poor man’ again, and does the thing with her left knee and Bunny resumes his gaze and again his mind takes him elsewhere.
He remembers Libby lying in bed in the maternity ward of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, the newborn infant in her arms. He remembers her looking down at the child and holding the bundle to her breast with a love that involved the whole of her heart. She looked up at Bunny with a question in her eyes. Bunny registered a single, cold bead of perspiration journey down the side of his face and soak into his collar. He knew, at that moment, that everything had changed. Nothing would be the same again. He couldn’t think of anything to say to his wife except maybe goodbye as he stared down at the tiny being in her arms. There was just too much love. He felt that the infant had secretly flipped the switch on an ejector seat that had flung him, unmanned, into the outer limits of his marriage. He didn’t say goodbye, of course, but rather, ‘God, babe, I need a cigarette,’ and approximated a smile and slipped out of the hospital into the rain-filled street.
Bunny responds to this memory by rearing forward, slapping the table and shaking his head to release the thought.
‘I got one!’ he says, with a sudden, unaccountable enthusiasm.
Raymond’s eyes pop open and he produces an insipid smile and Barbara giggles and River cleavages forward. Geoffrey, who is sitting alone and wedged into Bunny’s armchair, like he has been there all his life, rubs his hands together (he loves a joke) and says, ‘OK, here we go!’ His little round eyes glisten in anticipation.
Bunny says, ‘Excuse me, ladies, if this may be a little …’
‘Offensive,’ says Geoffrey, with a low chuckle.
‘Yeah … offensive,’ says Bunny and snaps open his Zippo and torches a cigarette.
‘Well …’ he says and Bunny tells a joke about a guy who decides to have a ‘mood’ party. He gets everything ready, the decorations, the nibbles, the booze, makes everything real nice, and there is a knock on the door and the first guy arrives and he’s all dressed in green and the host says, ‘What are you?’ and the guy in green says, ‘I’m jealousy.’ Then there is another knock on the door and the next guy arrives and he is dressed in pink. The guy in pink sticks one hand on his hip, minces in, saying, ‘I’m pretty in pink.’ A few minutes later there is a loud knock on the door and our host opens it and sees two huge black guys standing there, buck-naked, and one of them has his dick in a bowl of custard and the other one has his dick shoved in a stewed pear. The guy having the party says, ‘What have you two come as?’ and the first black guy says, ‘Ah’m fucking dis custard!’ and then the other black guy says, ‘An ah cum in dis pear!’
The room erupts into laughter, Barbara and Raymond almost clutching each other in glee, Geoffrey chuckling into his handkerchief and looking at Bunny with what amounts to a kind of paternal pride, and River’s leg is banging back and forth so hard and fast that it appears like she is trying to send out some sort of super-urgent semaphore signal with the crotch of her canary-coloured panties. Even Poodle manages what may be interpreted as a thumbs-up sign. Bunny has come back to us!
‘That’s my dad!’ says a small voice and the laughter dies out.
Bunny Junior stands in the doorway in his pyjamas and his oversized slippers, tiny blue shadows under his red-rimmed eyes.
‘All right, Bunny Boy, back to bed,’ says his father.
‘That was a funny one, Dad!’ says Bunny Junior, hopping up and down.
River, whose hair has become unpinned and hangs over one eye, flattens her skirt and stands unsteadily, and in doing so knocks the coffee table, sending cans and bottles flying.
‘Oops. Sorry,’ says River and Bunny sees the outline of her long, taut thigh and a blur of tanned flesh between the top of her skirt and her blouse. She turns and bends over and reveals to Bunny the golden arches of her exposed thong, rising from between her buttocks like the McDonald’s logo.
‘She knocked the cans off the table, Dad!’ says the boy, in a big, loud voice, pointing at River.
Bunny tr
ies to stand but cannot and falls back into the sofa.
‘And Poodle’s got my Viking helmet on!’
River weaves across the living room and Bunny feels the last kinetic twinge of cocaine behind his right eye. His guts feel tight and overdriven and he sees with a palpable sense of horror the possibility of daylight through the window.
‘Oh, you poor little darling. Come on, sweetheart, let’s get you back to bed,’ says River and takes the boy by the hand.
‘Dad?’ says Bunny Junior as River leads him away. ‘Dad?’ he says.
Poodle, whose head still hangs over the edge of the sofa, opens one eye in time to witness their upside-down departure.
‘Good kid,’ he says, as the Viking helmet tumbles from his head. ‘And a real nice arse.’
‘In you go,’ says River, and the boy crawls into bed. He lies there in the dark, rigid and covered with a sheet. River smells smoky and sickly sweet and forbidden and not a bit like his mother. He sees the outline of her giant-sized breasts rising above him and is aware of the proximity of her bottom to his hand. He is afraid to move it. He experiences an acute physical stirring and, as a consequence, feels a flush of shamed blood to his face and he squeezes shut his eyes in anguish.
‘That’s right, sweetheart, close your eyes,’ she says and the boy feels her hot, damp hand on his forehead and he wants to cry so much that he secretly bites into his lower lip.
‘Everything will be all right,’ says River, her voice slurred and booze-modulated. ‘Try to think of nice things – only nice things. Don’t worry about your mummy. She will be fine now. She is in heaven with the angels. Everybody is happy there and they smile all the time because they don’t have to worry any more. They just float around and play and have fun and be happy.’
Bunny Junior feels a suffocating heat emanating from River’s body and thinks he can hear her bones rolling inside her flesh. He feels sick with it.
‘First she will meet Saint Peter, and Saint Peter is a beautiful, wise old man, with a big white beard, and he is the keeper of the gates of heaven, and when he sees your mummy coming he will take out his big golden key and open up the door for her …’
Bunny Junior feels the bed fall away and a sudden darkness close on him and he thinks he hears his mother appear at the door and say, ‘Who is this person sitting next to you on the bed?’
Bunny Junior will shrug his shoulders and say, ‘I don’t know, Mum.’
And his mother will say, ‘Well, maybe we should tell her to just go away?’
And he will say, ‘Yeah, maybe we should just do that, Mum.’
Bunny Junior smiles and tastes the salt of his blood and, in time, sleeps.
11
River enters the kitchen and finds Bunny standing in the middle of the floor, wavering from side to side with a box of Coco Pops in his hand. His shirt hangs open and he is looking out the window in terror at the granulated light of morning. Somewhere, in one of the adjoining flats, a dog yaps and above him there is the unsettling sound of someone dragging furniture around.
‘He’s asleep now. He’s such a sweet kid. He sure loves his dad, that boy.’
Bunny turns towards her, and then looks bewildered at the cereal box in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. He puts it on the counter.
‘Where are the others?’ asks Bunny, his voice sounding far away, like it is coming from the room where the yapping dog is.
River looks at the magnetic alphabet on the door of the fridge and says, ‘They’ve all gone. They said to say goodbye.’
‘How’s Poodle?’
‘They had to carry him out.’
‘That’s our Poo,’ says Bunny, weakly.
‘Did you write this?’ says River, pointing at the obscene message in coloured letters on the fridge.
‘I think maybe my wife did,’ says Bunny.
River turns her back to Bunny and he spies a blue varicose vein, like a reptile’s tongue, behind her knee. River takes a yellow plastic ‘M’ and makes a small amendment to the phrase so that it says ‘FUCK MY PUSSY’, then turns back to Bunny, her hair hanging over one eye, her large, round breasts rising and falling. Bunny leans forward and inspects the letters on the fridge, moving back and forth in an unsuccessful attempt to bring the letters into focus. The phrase warps and blurs before his eyes and it looks to Bunny like some abecedary from Arabia or Mars or somewhere and he says, ‘What?’
Then he stands up straight and throws his arms out to the side and the air in the kitchen kaleidoscopes and fragments and Bunny opens his mouth like a fish and says, ‘What?’ again, only this time rhetorically.
River puts her arms out in front of her, zombie-style, and glides towards Bunny, as if she is on a travelator with no apparent evidence of any ambulatory action whatsoever. She says, with a great swell of feeling, ‘Oh, you poor man.’ And before Bunny can say ‘What?’ a third time, she throws her long, athletic arms around his neck and pulls him to her and he cries genuine tears into her great, heaving, augmented breasts.
Bunny lies on his back on the sofa. He is naked and his clothes sit in sad, little heaps on the living room floor. River, also naked, straddles him and with enormous verve moves piston-like over his unresponsive body. Bunny’s considerable member retains a certain curiosity – it must be said – but the rest of him feels wholly disembodied, as if it attaches no intrinsic value to the matter at hand. He feels like the flenched blubber a butcher may trim from a choice fillet of prime English beef and, as the song says, he has never felt this way before. This is completely new territory for him. He can see that the hard globes of River’s breasts are perfect and better than the real thing and he attempts to lift his arm in order to pinch her nipples, which are the size and texture of liquorice Jelly Spogs, or stick his finger in her arsehole or something, but realises with a certain amount of satisfaction that he can’t be fucked and he lets his arm drop to the side.
River squeezes Bunny’s cock with her muscular vagina.
‘Wow,’ says Bunny, from the depths of space.
‘Pilates,’ says River.
‘Huh?’ grunts Bunny.
‘Cunt crunches,’ says River, and contracts her pelvic floor again.
The remote is lodged under Bunny’s left buttock and as he shifts his weight the television turns on. Bunny’s head lolls off the edge of the sofa and he sees (upside-down) CCTV footage of the Horned Killer with his trident terrorising shoppers in a Tesco car park in Birmingham. The bad-news ribbon that runs along the bottom of the screen informs Bunny that the guy has struck again. Earlier that day he had walked into a shared accommodation in Bordesley Green and butchered two young nurses asleep in their beds, with a garden fork. There is general panic in the Midlands. The police continue to be baffled.
‘He’s just getting started,’ mutters Bunny, the flicker of the TV reflecting in his upside-down eyes. ‘And he’s coming this way.’
River, however, is lost to her gesture of altruism and does not hear. Bunny lifts his head and looks at her and sees that River’s visage has changed somehow – there is a pout of hubris and self-admiration as she picks up the rhythm of what she would consider to be, come morning’s sober light, basically a sympathy fuck.
‘Oh,’ she says, as she pounds her bullet-proof pussy down.
‘You,’ she says, her pistons firing,
‘Poor,’ (down)
‘Poor,’ (yum)
‘Man.’
Bunny is about to close his eyes when he sees, by the window, hidden in the folds of the rose-coloured chenille curtains, what appears to be his deceased wife, Libby. She is dressed in her orange nightdress and she is waving at him. Spooked, Bunny makes a hopeless, wounded sound and opens his mouth and releases a hiss of gas as if his very soul was escaping and then bucks frantically at River in an attempt to dislodge her, which is just what River needs to send her over the edge. Bunny, trapped in the vice of her climaxing haunches, squeezes shut his eyes. River screams and digs her nails into his chest. Bun
ny opens his eyes again, looks wildly around, but Libby has gone.
‘My wife was there,’ he says to River or somebody. ‘She was watching.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ says River, disimpaling herself. ‘You might want to see somebody about that. I know a guy in Kemp Town you could talk to.’
Bunny jabs his finger at the news bulletin on the TV. ‘And he is coming down!’
‘Uh huh? Look, I’ve got to go,’ says River and raises the perfect orbs of her rear end, slick with her various juices, into the early morning air and looks under the sofa for her canary yellow panties.
* * *
River leaves soon after, closing the front door behind her as Bunny feigns sleep on the sofa. But his mind is alert to all manner of things. He thinks, for instance, that he should get up and put on a pair of trousers or something before his son wakes up. He wonders also what his wife wants from him and hopes that he will not be the subject of any further hauntings and supernatural visitations. He wonders, with a shudder, if the disconnectedness he felt while screwing River is a permanent condition and he considers the idea that perhaps he is all washed-up as a world-class cocksman. Maybe Libby’s suicide has jinxed him. Cursed him, maybe. It is certainly possible. Stories abound about people being put off their game by seemingly innocuous and unconnected events. Poodle told Bunny only recently about a local pussy-hound from Portslade who went from stud to dud after attending a Celine Dion concert. He just couldn’t get it up any more. He told Poodle it was like trying to stuff a dead canary in a cash dispenser. In the end he hung up his tackle and became a landscape gardener in Walberswick. Chilling stuff. Whatever. Bunny knows that there are things going on in this world – great mysteries – that he will never be able to work out. He wonders, also, with a gnawing, abdominal anxiety, whether he will ever get it together enough to go and visit his ailing father. And then he starts thinking, in an abstract kind of way, about his son, Bunny Junior, and what the fuck he is going to do with him. What do you do with a kid who can barely locate his own backside? But most of all he wonders how he is going to spend another night in this spooked-out, three-roomed council flat, with its crummy vibe and its deeply fucked-up juju. Bunny realises, lying there on the sofa, that he can’t fucking handle it.
