The Death of Bunny Munro

by Nick Cave

  ‘Hey, I’ve been having a really hard time!’ said Bunny, his hands thrown out to the sides.

  ‘Stay away from me!’ she cried. ‘Just stay away from me, you fucking maniac!’

  ‘But, River, didn’t we have a good thing going?!’ shouted Bunny, but he could hear her sobs as she charged away, her footsteps like gunshots down the street.

  ‘What was wrong with that girl, Dad?’ asked Bunny Junior, when his father got back in the Punto.

  ‘I think she has a medical condition,’ said Bunny.

  26

  Outside Mary Armstrong’s bungalow, Bunny leans across and says to Bunny Junior, with a belch of inflammable breath, ‘All right, wait here, I won’t be long.’

  ‘What are we going to do, Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

  Bunny takes a slug from his flask and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  ‘Well, son, we’re going to shake the money tree, OK? We’re going to shaft some mugs and milk the jolly green cow,’ says Bunny, jamming a Lambert & Butler into his mouth. ‘We’re grubbing the mullah and gleaning the beans. We’re divesting the greater public of their spondulics. We are, as they say in the trade, raping and looting.’ Bunny torches his cigarette with his Zippo, scorching his quiff and filling the car with the stench of singed hair. ‘We’re trying to make some fucking boodle! Are you with me? And I’ve got a very good feeling about this one.’

  ‘Yes, Dad, but what are we going to do with ourselves after we make the boodle?’

  ‘We are vampires, my boy! We are vultures! We are a frenzy of piranha flenching a fucking water buffalo or a caribou or something!’ says Bunny, with a madman’s grin on his face. ‘We are fucking barracuda!’

  The boy looks at his father and a stone-cold realisation hits him – he sees in the appalling orbits of his father’s eyes a resident terror that makes the child recoil. Bunny Junior sees, at that moment, that his father has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. The boy realises, suddenly, that for some time he has been the passenger on an aeroplane and that he has walked into the cockpit only to find that the pilot is dead drunk at the controls and absolutely no one is flying the plane. Bunny looks into his father’s panic-stricken eyes and sees a thousand incomprehensible dials and switches and meters all spinning wildly and little red bulbs flashing on and off and going beep, beep, beep and he feels, with a nauseating swoon, the aeroplane’s nose tip resolutely earthward and the big blue fiendish world come rushing up to annihilate him – and it scares him.

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ he says, and straightens the little pink daisy in his father’s lapel.

  ‘We just have to open our great jaws and all the little fish will swim in,’ says Bunny, trying with great difficulty to extricate himself from the Punto. ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one.’

  Bunny Junior gets out of the Punto, moves around to the driver’s side, opens the door and helps Bunny out and his father performs a little shuffling two-step and starts to laugh out loud for no reason. Everything goes whoosh as the boy falls out of the sky.

  Bunny walks up the oil-splattered concrete drive. He opens his flask of Scotch and empties it down his throat, then tosses it over his shoulder and it lands among the strew of garbage that lies about the overgrown yard. He mounts the steps to the bungalow, with its grimy pebbledash walls and shattered windows, and knocks on the front door.

  ‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ says Bunny, and the door creaks open but there is no one there. Bunny strokes the hank of hair that lies, limp and doomed, over one eye and feels compelled to enter.

  ‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ calls Bunny, and takes a furtive step across the threshold. ‘Anybody home?’ he says.

  Inside, the atmosphere of dread and desolation in this dilapidated old house is so powerful Bunny can taste it, like rot, in his mouth, and he whispers to himself, ‘I deal in high-quality beauty products,’ and closes the door behind him.

  The kitchen is dark, the blinds drawn, and Bunny breathes in a sour, animal stench. The door to the refrigerator has been left open, and a pulsing, jaundiced light emanates from it. Bunny notices the refrigerator contains a solitary, diseased lemon, like a premonition, and over by the sink he sees a dog of an indeterminate breed lying motionless on the grimy linoleum floor. He moves through the kitchen and realises, dimly and without concern, that he has left his sample case in the Punto, and finds that at some point in that prat-fall of a morning he has skinned the palms of his hands and that they are slick with watery blood. He wipes them on his trousers and enters the darkened hallway and, as he does so, Bunny becomes aware of a strange, atonal, squealing sound.

  ‘Miss Mary Armstrong? Miss Mary Armstrong?’ he calls out and squeezes his penis through his trousers, tugging at it, and letting it grow large and hard in his hand.

  ‘I’ve got a good feeling about this one,’ he says to himself and, in that instant, experiences a kind of weariness of the soul and sits down on the floor and leans back against the wall. He pulls his knees up to his chest and puts his head between them and does a drawing of something with his index finger in the accumulated dust on the floor.

  ‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ he says to himself and closes his eyes.

  He remembers a crazy night he’d had at the Palace Hotel in Cross Street, not that long ago, with a cute, little blonde chick he’d picked up at The Babylon. He remembers himself standing by the bed, huffing and puffing, his barked cock feeling like he’d been fucking a cheese-grater or something, and cursing the fact that he hadn’t had the foresight to bring any lubricant with him. He remembers giggling to himself and thinking what a crazy party he was having and that he might go one more time, even though it looked like the Roofies were wearing off and the girl was showing signs of waking up. I mean, how much punishment can one swinger take! Then there was a knock on the door – three simple, unassuming raps – and to this day Bunny can’t work out what possessed him to open the door. The coke, maybe. The booze, probably. Whatever.

  ‘Room service,’ he had said to himself, with a giggle.

  He opened the door and standing there was his wife, Libby. She looked at Bunny, naked and glazed in sweat, and then looked at the comatose girl spread-eagled on the bed, and all the years of aggrieved rage seemed to drain from her eyes and her face became as inanimate as a wax mask and she simply turned and walked off down the hall. When Bunny returned home the next morning, Libby had changed; she didn’t mention the night before, she stopped giving him a hard time, and she just kind of floated around the house, watching TV and sitting around and sleeping a lot. She even had sex with him. I mean, who would have guessed it, he thought.

  ‘Women,’ Bunny says, shaking his head and he starts to cry again.

  After a while, Bunny stands up and slaps the dust from his trousers, then moves down the darkened hall as if he is walking into a great wind and, in time, he arrives at a black door. The piercing sonic oscillation is louder here and Bunny puts his hands over his ears and peers closely at a large poster of an extremely sexy girl taped to the door, and even before he realises who it is – the curtain of ironed hair, the zany black-rimmed eyes and the pornographic cupid-bow mouth – he feels new tears scald his cheeks and he reaches out and traces, with his finger, the tender contours of her infinitely beautiful face, as if by doing so he could bring her miraculously to life. He says, in the manner of a mantra or prayer or incantation or something, ‘Avril Lavigne. Avril Lavigne. Oh, my darling, Avril Lavigne.’

  And without even considering what may exist on the other side of that black-painted door, Bunny pushes it gently open and addresses the room as though it were an alternate and mysterious universe, saying, through his sobs, ‘Hello, I am Bunny Munro. I represent Eternity Enterprises.’

  Bunny Junior closes the encyclopaedia. He has been reading about the ‘Midwife Toad’ and is astounded to think that the male carries the eggs on his legs until they hatch! What a world we live in – he thinks. What an amazing world.

  He picks up the
client list that lies on the seat beside him and, holding it out in front of him, carefully and deliberately, tears it into strips. He puts one strip of paper into his mouth, sucks it to a soft pap and swallows it, then repeats the action until he has ingested the entire list. That – he thinks – puts an end to that.

  Wisps of mist curl around the Punto and Bunny Junior watches the monstrous, swallowing fog roll down the street towards him, like an imagined thing, making phantoms of everything in its path. The boy leans back and closes his eyes and allows himself to be devoured by it.

  Later, when he opens them again, he sees his mother sitting in her orange nightdress on a low cream brick wall opposite the Punto. She is smiling at him and beckoning him to come join her. Fiddleheads of mist play around her face and when she moves her hands the fog trails from her fingers like purple smoke. Bunny Junior opens the door of the Punto and steps out, like a tiny cosmonaut, into the vaporous air. He floats around the front of the Punto, down along the footpath, and sits on the wall next to his mother. Immediately, he feels a pulsing warmth and he looks up at her.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mummy,’ he says.

  His mother puts her arm around him and the boy rests his head against her body and she is soft and smells of another world and she is truly his mother.

  She says, ‘Oh, my darling child, I am sorry too,’ and presses her lips into his hair. ‘I wasn’t strong enough,’ she says, and then, taking the boy’s face in her hands, says, ‘But you’re the strong one. You always were,’ and the boy feels the splash of his mother’s tears like they were real.

  ‘I just miss you so much, Mummy.’

  ‘I know,’ she says,

  ‘Don’t cry,’ says the boy.

  ‘You see?’ says his mother. ‘You are the strong one.’

  ‘What will we do about Dad?’ says Bunny Junior.

  His mother runs her fingers through the boy’s hair, then says, not unkindly, ‘Your father cannot help you. He is truly lost.’

  ‘That’s OK, Mummy,’ says the boy. ‘I am the navigator.’

  His mother plants a kiss in the boy’s hair and whispers, ‘You have a such a good little heart.’

  ‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’ says the boy.

  ‘No, I am here to tell you something else,’ she says.

  ‘Can I ask you something first?’

  ‘OK,’ she says.

  ‘Are you alive, Mummy? You feel like you are. I can hear your heart beating,’ says the boy, and he holds his mother tight.

  ‘No, Bunny Boy, I am not,’ she says. ‘I died.’

  ‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘Yes, but I want to tell you something else. I want to tell you this. That no matter what happens, I want you to persevere. Do you understand?’

  The boy looks up at his mother.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ he says. ‘What you are saying is that something really bad is going to happen and you want me to be strong.’

  His mother puts his arm around him and smiles and says, ‘You see?’

  Bunny steps into the room at the end of the hall. A single naked bulb burns dimly overhead and in this airless hideaway the squealing note is violent and invasive, and Bunny squints into the dark to find its source. Over by the far wall an electric guitar leans against an amplifier, feeding back. It takes Bunny some time to notice a young lady sitting on a ruined settee in the middle of the room. She does not seem to be moving. She is very thin and wears a pale yellow vest and a pair of pastel-pink panties and nothing else. Bunny can see the outline of the cobbled bones of her shoulders, the exaggerated angles of her knees, her elbows and her wrists. One spidery hand sits cupped in her lap, a cigarette burning down between her fingers. Her head is slumped forward and her straight, brown hair hangs like a curtain over her face.

  ‘Miss Mary Armstrong?’ says Bunny taking a step towards her.

  The girl jerks suddenly upright and raises her head, and says, in a slow and hollow croak, ‘She don’t live here no more. Do you want to see Mushroom Dave?’

  The girl’s eyelids close and her head falls forward again.

  ‘Mushroom Dave … isn’t … here …’ she mutters to herself.

  Bunny crosses the room and throws the switch on the guitar amp and the room is suddenly silent and magic. He sees suspended around the light bulb glittering motes of dust and he moves across the room and stands before the girl, a ribbon of blue cigarette smoke at her fingertips.

  The girl lifts her head and all the muscles of her forehead are employed in an attempt to raise the lids of her eyes. Her hand flutters in mid-air and Bunny can see the fine, bird-like bones of her fingers through her paper-thin skin. The ash from her cigarette falls away and lands intact on the front of her vest. Her eyes are a green of ferocious, chemical intensity and her pupils are non-existent, and Bunny takes a step backward and says tenderly, ‘Oh, baby, look at you.’

  The girl lowers her head again, in short, sharp increments, until her chin rests on her chest, and her hair falls across her face. Bunny reaches down and puts his fingers under her jaw and raises her head again and sees that the poster on the door was not Avril Lavigne at all but a picture of this sad girl before him – the same pert nose, kohled eyes, straight brown hair, nymphomaniacal upper lip and slender, puppyish body. Bunny feels, in the most obscure of ways, that the resemblance to Avril Lavigne is not just fortuitous, but supernatural. Bunny finds himself sucked, with a great rush of blood, into a vortex of association; where the fairy girl before him – with her blueing lips and trickle of bright blood in the crook of her arm, the mortal weaponry of hypodermic syringe and blackened spoon on the table in front of her – was indeed the accelerated collision of time and desire, the coalescence of all the spinning particles of need, like the motes of dust around the light bulb, brought into being by Bunny’s corrupted griefs. In this dim, sequestered room Bunny had walked through the looking glass, into death itself, hers and perhaps his own.

  ‘Let me take that,’ says Bunny and removes the cigarette butt from between her fingers and drops it into an overflowing ashtray. ‘We don’t want to burn the house down,’ he says.

  He kneels before her and gently brushes the cigarette ash from the looped fabric of her faded yellow vest.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ he says, and lights a cigarette of his own, takes a puff or two and then crushes it out in the ashtray.

  He slips his hands under her cotton vest and her body spasms and slackens and he cups her small, cold breasts in his hands and feels the hard pearls of her nipples, like tiny secrets, against the barked palms of his hands. He feels the gradual winding down of her dying heart and can see a bluish tinge blossoming on the skin of her skull through her thin, ironed hair.

  ‘Oh, my dear Avril,’ he says.

  He puts his hands under her knees and manoeuvres her carefully so that her bottom rests on the edge of the settee. He slips his fingers underneath the worn elastic of her panties that are strung across the points of her hips, slips them to her ankles and softly draws apart her knees and feels again a watery ardour in his eyes as he negotiates a button and a zipper. It is exactly as he imagined it – the hair, the lips, the hole – and he slips his hands under her wasted buttocks and enters her like a fucking pile driver.

  27

  The great bank of mist has rolled by and Bunny Junior sits alone on the low brick wall and plays with his Darth Vader figurine, and although the ghost of his mother has gone, he can still feel the cool imprint of her farewell kisses on his eyelids like tiny twin promises. She is, like the song says, within him and without him and all about him. He is the strongest one and he is protected – that was her promise. Ah, promises, promises – he thinks – and he swings his feet and smiles and hums to himself and jumps his Darth Vader along the wall and watches an old black BMW roll down the street and turn into the driveway of the house with all the rubbish in the yard.

  Bunny Junior sees the driver’s door open and a tall lean man leporello from the car
like a set of dirty postcards. His hair is bleached blonde and he wears tight faded jeans, a black T-shirt and pink loafers. The boy notices a cool tattoo of a scorpion on the man’s neck, and thinks he looks like a very tough customer indeed – a real barracuda.

  The man scopes the street, to the left and to the right, with a reflexive, practised regard, and Bunny Junior watches as he drops his bunch of keys, curses, bends down and picks them up. Then he mounts the steps, flicks his cigarette into the yard and enters the house, slamming the door behind him.

  Bunny Junior swings his legs on the wall and thinks about what his mother told him, and he smiles to think that after all he is just a kid, and that’s all he has to be … a kid. A kid who likes Darth Vader, a kid with an amazing memory and who could retain all sorts of fascinating facts, a kid who was interested in the world, a kid with ‘a good little heart’, a kid who could even talk to ghosts. The adult world he was moving about in didn’t have to make sense to him – why everyone looks like zombies, why his mother died, why his father acts like a mental case half the time.

  He remembers with a quickening of the heart the girl on the bicycle, and he wishes he could tell her that this is what she was – just a little girl – and as she grows up maybe she doesn’t have to turn into one of them – cock-a-doodling up the street all the time.

  He knows something terrible is going to happen, but for some reason it doesn’t worry him all that much. He feels he has become immune to this crazy grown-up world like you do to influenza or leprosy or radiation or something. He feels like he has been given an antidote and he could be bitten by every snake on the planet and he would still be able to walk away. He thinks that ghosts are better protection than real people, and he wishes he could tell the girl on the bicycle that as well.

  Bunny Junior hopes nothing really bad happens to his dad, because even though his mother said that he was lost, and even though he probably wasn’t very good at being a father in the way he has seen other fathers be on TV and in magazines and in parks and stuff – for example, when they buy the ointment to stop the child from going blind or throw a Frisbee around in the public gardens or something – he loves his dad with all of his heart and he wouldn’t in a million years swap him for another one. Who would? Like when he is funny, he is an absolute scream – like look at him now as he jumps down the steps of that run-down old house with all the busted refrigerators and bathtubs and junk, with his trousers around his ankles. Tell me a dad who’d do that!