by Nick Cave
‘Take those glasses off,’ says Bunny.
The boy does so, and in the hard-boiled light his swollen eyes itch and dazzle. Bunny pushes the pizza tray to one side and speaks in a voice so quiet the boy has to crane forward to hear him.
‘I’ll ask you straight up, Bunny Boy. What would you rather do? Be with your dad or hang out with a bunch of snotty-nosed little fuckers at school? You want to amount to something? You want to learn the business or walk through life with your arse hanging out of your trousers?’
‘Can I put these glasses back on? It hurts in here. I think I might be going blind,’ says the boy, squinting up at his father. ‘I think I need some eye drops or something.’
‘Answer the question,’ says Bunny, ‘because if you want to go back to school, just say the fucking word.’
‘I want to be with you, Dad.’
‘Of course you do! Because I’m your dad! And I’m showing you the ropes! I’m teaching you the trade. Something some mummified old bitch with a bloody blackboard and a piece of chalk wouldn’t have the faintest idea about.’
The boy’s eyes stream in the people-hating glare and he dabs at them with a napkin and slides his shades back on and says, ‘I think I might need a white stick and a dog soon, Dad.’
Bunny doesn’t hear this, as his attention has been drawn to an adjacent table where a mother sits eating pizza with what must be her daughter. The young girl is wearing gold hipster hotpants and a lemon yellow T-shirt that says ‘YUMMY’ and shows her belly. She wears fluorescent pink nail polish on her fingers and toes. Bunny is thinking that in a few years’ time the girl would be seriously hot, and the thought of this has Bunny considering revisiting the bathroom, but then the girl’s mother says to Bunny, ‘I don’t like the way you are looking at my daughter,’ and Bunny says, aghast, ‘What do you think I am?!’ and then says, ‘Jesus! How old is she?’ and the woman says, ‘Three.’ Bunny says, ‘That’s not to say that in a few years … well, you know …’ and the woman picks up a piece of cutlery and says, ‘If you say one more word, I’ll stick this fork in your face,’ and Bunny replies, ‘Wo! You suddenly got very sexy,’ and the woman scoops up her daughter and moves away, saying, ‘Arsehole,’ and Bunny waggles his rabbit ears at her and says to Bunny Junior, ‘I learned the trade with my old man, out on the streets, you know, the front line. We’d drive around in his van, find some rundown old place, a real drum – flaky paint, overgrown garden – owned by some rich biddy with fifty fucking cats, and in he’d go, and before I had time to eat my sandwich, out he’d come with a nice little Queen Anne dressing table. He had a gift, my old man, the talent, and he taught me the art – how to be a people person. That’s what we are doing, Bunny Boy. You may not be able to see it right now, but I am handing down the talent to you. Do you understand?’
Bunny Junior says, ‘Yes, Dad.’
His father stands and says, ‘OK, then.’
‘I might have to learn Braille,’ says the boy.
‘Bitch,’ Bunny says under his breath.
There is a crack of thunder, a flash of lightning and it begins to rain.
23
In the corner of the room, on a small black television, a bull elephant fornicates epically with its mate. Bunny, who lies on the bed fully clothed and wholly drunk, can’t quite believe what he sees. A storm wails against the windows – thunder, lightning, cats, dogs – and in the bed next to Bunny the boy lies curled in a deep, embryonic sleep. Neither the trumpeting mastodon nor the hammering rain can wake him.
In one practised motion Bunny decants a miniature bottle of Smirnoff down his throat, shudders and gags, then repeats the action with a little green bottle of Gordon’s gin.
He closes his eyes and the black wave of oblivion gathers strength and moves towards him. But Bunny finds his thoughts straying towards the three young mothers he visited yesterday morning – was it only yesterday? – Amanda, Zoë and especially Georgia. Georgia with the big bones and the violet eyes. Georgia with the gone, gone husband.
Somewhere in the back stalls of his consciousness Bunny hears the triumphant bull elephant blow a super-sized bucket of custard into his happy consort. The windows buckle as the storm pounds and down in the bassbins he hears the infrasonic reverberations of thunder. Bunny imagines, dreams even, Georgia naked and angled across his knee, her great, white globoids trembling beneath his touch, and it feels as if these apocalyptic rumblings of weather and his goatish visions were in some weird way connected and prophetic because, deep down, Bunny knows, more than he knows anything in the world, his mobile phone is about to ring and that Georgia will be on the line.
Bunny opens his eyes and gropes about for his mobile phone just as it begins to vibrate, juddering about on the bed to the super-sexy ringtone of Kylie Minogue’s ‘Spinning Around’, and he visualises Kylie’s gold lamé hotpants and his dick magically reanimates, hard and erect, as he flips open the phone and says, ‘What’s the story, morning glory?’
He puts a Lambert & Butler between his lips and torches it with his Zippo and smiles to himself because he knows – he knows the story.
‘Is that Bunny Munro?’ comes a voice, soft and timid and from another world.
The room swims as Bunny throws his legs over the edge of the bed and sits up and says, ‘And who might that be?’ – but he knows.
‘It’s Georgia,’ says Georgia. ‘You were at my house yesterday.’
Bunny draws on his cigarette and blows a syzygy of smoke rings – one, two, three – then reams the last one with his index finger and says, out of a dream, ‘Georgia with the violet eyes.’
‘Is it … did I … have I called too late?’
Bunny slips his socked feet into his loafers and says, with genuine emotion, ‘You won’t believe what I’m watching on the Discovery Channel.’
‘It’s too late … I can call back,’ says Georgia, and Bunny thinks he can hear the low breathing of a sleeping child and a terrible, protracted loneliness coming down the line.
‘Have you any idea just how big an elephant’s dick is?!’ says Bunny.
‘Um … maybe I should …’
‘It’s … aah … it’s fucking elephantine!’
Bunny leaps to his feet and the room turbinates and unravels and Bunny claws at the air futilely and shouts, ‘Timber!’ and lands like a felled tree between the two beds.
‘I’ve made a mistake,’ says Georgia, and Bunny raises himself on his hands and knees.
‘Georgia … Georgia, the only mistake you made was not to ring me sooner. I’ve been lying here, going off the hinges thinking about you.’
‘You have?’ she says.
Bunny stands, the phone clamped to his ear and looks down at his sleeping son. He experiences a wave of sentiment so strong that he can barely find the presence of mind to pick his car keys up off the bedside table.
‘Didn’t you feel it yesterday?’ said Bunny, his voice low. ‘The chemistry … sparks were going zip, zip and zap, zap!’
‘They were?’ says Georgia.
Bunny conducts a villainous panto-creep from the hotel room, leaving the TV running and closing the door behind him. The hallway is the colour and texture of whale blubber and Bunny moves down it with footsteps both comic and monstrous, the cloacal stream of mustard-coloured carpet roiling beneath his feet.
‘You know they were! E-leck-tricity, baby! Zap, zap! Zip, zip!’ he says into the phone.
‘Well, you seemed like a nice kind of guy,’ she said.
‘Thunderbolts and lightning! Very, very frightening!’
‘Um, Bunny?’ says Georgia.
‘Mamma mia! Mamma mia! Mamma mia, let me go!’
‘Are you all right, Bunny?’
Bunny negotiates the stairs, one at a time, at a perilous backward angle, hanging sloth-like from the banister, whereupon he flings out an arm and sings in an insane operatic voice, ‘Beelzebub had a devil put aside for me! For me! For me!’
He makes his way through the unpeopled
lobby of the Empress Hotel and all the while Bunny thinks – This is strange. Where is everybody? He passes the vacated reception desk and his voice grows serious.
‘I’m going to tell you something, Georgia, because I don’t think there should be any bullshit between us. You know, lies and stuff …’
Georgia’s response seems otherworldly, distant, dreamed. ‘Um … OK,’ she says.
‘Because I’ve had it up to here with that shit, all right?’ says Bunny.
‘OK,’ says Georgia. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m drunk.’
Bunny jams another Lambert & Butler in his mouth, torches it, then steps out the front door of the hotel onto the seafront and is hit by a gale force of such brutality he is pummelled to his knees. His jacket flaps over his head and he shouts into his phone, ‘Fuck me, Georgia! Hang on a minute!’
Bunny sees, in slow motion, a vast wave of seawater explode against the promenade wall, then be picked up by the wind and carried, surrealistically and in sheet-form, across the road and dumped on top of him. Bunny scopes the Punto, then crawls towards it, the salted rain tearing at his face. He notices that the coastal road is deserted and that most of the streetlights are down. He hears, above the clamour of the storm, a grinding and twisting of metal, and a crack of lightning reveals the skeleton of the West Pier. The wind hammers at the Punto and Bunny, with considerable effort, prises open the door and, in time, clambers in. He sits, drenched, and watches an over-cranked POV shot of green seawater pool at his feet and he says, stunned and not of this earth, ‘Georgia?’
‘What’s going on, Bunny? Are you OK?’
Georgia’s voice sounds unlike anything he has ever heard before, and he wonders whether he hears anything at all.
‘Just a second,’ says Bunny.
He looks at himself in the rear-view mirror and sees a man who could well be himself but somehow is not. He is not as he remembers himself to be. His features seem unrelated to each other and a general subsidence has occurred. His eyes have sunk into their orbits and there is a debauched slackness to his cheeks and when he attempts to smile he reminds himself of Mrs Brooks’ leering, yellow-toothed Bösendorfer. His face is scoured raw by the salted rain and his helixed forelock hangs across his face like a used condom – but it’s not that – he just looks like a different person and he wonders where he went.
‘Georgia, listen to me. This one’s coming at you, baby, straight from the heart. OK?’
‘OK.’
‘How would you feel about a lonely, lovesick, slightly drunk, middle-aged man coming to visit you in the middle of the night?’
‘What, now?’ but the voice seems electronic, like a recorded message.
‘I’m taking that as an affirmative,’ says Bunny.
‘Bunny, where are you?’
He turns the key in the ignition and, with an uncharacteristic confidence that makes Bunny think – What’s up with the Punto? – the car roars into life.
‘Where am I?’ Bunny says, ‘Oh, Georgia, I’m all over the fucking place!’
Bunny forceps the phone and tosses it on the seat next to him. He notices that the two pools of water at his feet have drawn together to become one larger pool and he feels a palpable but unidentifiable sense of emotion at that. He closes his eyes and he hears a great, black wave crash against the seawall and spew its jet of foam over the Punto and the car judders at the impact and he hopes he has not fallen asleep. He opens the glove compartment, takes out the sales list, finds Georgia’s address and moves out onto the depopulated street. Bunny notices that a power-line has blown down and he can see it writhing like a black snake, fizzing and showering sparks and moving towards him down the rain-drenched street. He feels as though the black snake is seeking him out, and that if it reaches him he will die. He also thinks he could be seeing things and that this is all a mirage or an illusion or a monstrous vision or something, and he says through his teeth, ‘Thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening.’ Then he jams his foot on the accelerator and moves – in slow motion – down the street.
As Bunny navigates the streets, and Georgia’s voice recedes, he thinks, with a cybernetic certainty – I am the great seducer. I work the night. Sheets of darkness that his headlights can barely penetrate wall him in but Bunny feels like he could lie back and close his eyes and the trusty Punto would know exactly where to go. Once he has left the coastal road, the wind abates and the night stops throwing down any more rain and Georgia’s large white backside fits snugly into the pornographic think-bubble that hangs over his head. A spectral silence envelops the car and Bunny hears nothing but his own steady, inevitable breaths.
Out of the night the great hulk of the Wellborne estate looms up, like a leviathan, black and biblical, and Bunny parks the Punto by the now empty wooden bench – gone is the fat man in the floral dress, gone are the hooded youths. Bunny steps out, his suit drenched, his hair plastered to his head, but he does not care – he is the great seducer. He works the night.
He enters the dark maw of the stairwell and his eyes burn from the acid stench of urine and bleach and he does not care. He feels his genitals leap in his fist as he squeezes them through his sodden trousers and mounts the stairs three at a time even though he cannot really recall speaking to Georgia at all. He shivers in his freezing, waterlogged suit and works the night. He does not care.
Bunny winds his way down the gangway but must retrace his steps because he has missed Flat 95 due to there not being any lights on. He presses his face up to the window and thinks he can see the lambent flicker of a candle or nightlight or something in a back room and he smiles because he knows – he feels it humming all along his spine – more than he knows anything in his entire life, that Georgia is waiting in that dimly lit back room, naked and on all fours, knees spread wide apart, breasts swinging, backside raised to the heavens and her fucking pussy hovering in the air like the most wonderful thing imaginable in this rotten, stinking, infested fucking world, and all he has to do is reposition his erection in his trousers (which he does), then push on the door (that has been left on the latch) and it will swing open (which he does and which it doesn’t), so he taps on the door and whispers ‘Georgia’, through the keyhole. This has no immediate effect, so he bangs on the door with his fist and then gets down on his hands and knees and calls her name in the loudest whisper he can muster through the cat-flap. Then he calls her name again.
Suddenly, very suddenly, all the lights go on. The door opens and a man appears in his underwear with a large, empty, Teflon-coated saucepan in his hand. Bunny has a very good view of an extremely crude representation of a depraved-looking Woody Woodpecker, leering and smoking a cigar, tattooed on the inside of the man’s ankle. Bunny sees, also, that the man has an infected toenail.
‘Who are you?’ says Bunny, looking up from the floor.
He sees Georgia in an ugly bombazine dressing gown standing behind the man with the saucepan, and Bunny shouts, pointing at the man, ‘Who is he?’
Georgia, her hand resting protectively on the man’s broad and illustrated shoulder, peers down with a look of genuine confusion on her face and says, ‘Mr Munro, is that you?’
Bunny shouts, ‘I thought he was fucking gone, gone!’
The man with the tattoo on his ankle – where did he get that? Prison? Primary school? – hands the saucepan to Georgia and leans down and says in an end-of-things whisper, ‘Who the fuck are you?’
Bunny, who is attempting unsuccessfully to stand and who is not in any way concentrating on details, thinks the man simply said, ‘Fuck you,’ and instantly regrets replying, in kind, ‘Well, fuck you too.’
The man actually yawns, scratches his stomach, then backs up four paces, runs down the hall and boots Bunny so hard in the ribs that he spins in mid-air and lands, with an expulsion of air, on his back. Bunny places an arm over his head to shield himself from the next blow.
‘Please, don’t,’ he says quietly.
But the blow does not come an
d he takes his arm away in time to see the door kick shut by a purulent yellow toe.
Back in the Punto, Bunny opens his trousers and undertakes a wank of truly epic proportions – it just goes on and on – and when at last he goes over the edge, Bunny lets his head fall back and opens his mouth as wide as he can and exhales the last remnants of reason, in an elephantine bellow, that echoes through the weather-beaten night, across the Wellborne estate. He realises, in a shadowy way, for a brief moment, that the weird imaginings and visitations and apparitions that he has encountered were the ghosts of his own grief and that he was being driven insane by them. He knows more than he knows anything that very soon they will kill him. But more than any of that, he wonders what was wrong with that bitch Georgia anyway. Jesus.
24
When Bunny enters the lobby of the Empress Hotel he is pleased to see things have returned to normal – the world seems to have reassembled itself. For some reason the Empress Hotel reminds Bunny of a sad and unsuccessful comb-over but he is too fucked-up to work out why. It is six o’clock and the early risers move through the lobby like the living dead. These scrubbed and scoured lobby-lurkers exude from the pores of their skin an eye-watering miasma of raw alcohol but Bunny doesn’t recognise this as his own private funk is such that people naturally keep their distance. His sour and sodden clothes, the metallic stench of abject terror and the bouquet of his own substantial hangover, form a force field around him. He also looks like a maniac. He feels a real sense of achievement that he has managed to cross the lobby in the manner of a biped and not on all-fours. He wonders whether this may work to his advantage as he leans across the reception desk and says, ‘I need the key to room seventeen. I’ve locked myself out.’
The man sitting behind the counter has a smudge of dead hair plastered across his skull and a nose that reminds Bunny, with a redux of dread, of a cat-flap. On a TV mounted on the wall above his head the news plays out. He is reading the local newspaper through a ‘Mystic Eye’ magnifying card and he looks up at Bunny and lays the newspaper and the ‘Eye’ on the counter.
