The Death Of Bunny Munro Part 5

'Wo! Steady, girl!' says Poodle, and hops up and down on one stonewashed leg while Bunny notices, with an electrical libidinous stirring, that the purple birthmark on the blonde's top lip is shaped a bit like a rabbit.

Raymond, jacketless, moves around Poodle with a carton of lager cradled in his arms and an imitation smile on his face. Through a miasma of alcohol fumes that Bunny finds vaguely comforting, Raymond says, blandly, 'All right, Bun?'

Raymond's girlfriend, who is almost certainly called Barbara, pops her head up from behind Raymond like an idea-free think-bubble and says, 'Hi, Bun.'

Bunny says, 'Hi ... um ...' and thinks maybe her name isn't Barbara after all and Raymond says, in a stage whisper, 'Barbara' and Bunny says, 'OK, yeah, Barbara ... sorry, Barbara.'

Whatever Barbara says by way of a reply is lost in the clamorous and stentorian advent of Geoffrey, who bursts through the door, a litre of Scotch poking from each pocket of his vast linen jacket. Wheezing frighteningly from his trip up the stairs, he waves his ever-present handkerchief in the air and bellows, 'Bunny ... Bunny ... Bunny' and follows this with a perfect landslide of sweating flesh and not so much embraces Bunny as digests him.

'That was a lovely service, Bun,' says Geoffrey and everyone agrees.

The blonde with the birthmark moves forward and says to Bunny, 'It really was special.'

Bunny turns to Poodle and says, 'And Poodle, your friend is ...' but Poodle is nowhere to be seen. Bunny looks down the hall in time to see the surrept.i.tious closing of the bathroom door. Things are looking up, thinks Bunny.

The leggy blonde smiles at Bunny and introduces herself.

'My name is River,' she says.

Bunny looks momentarily confused and then is. .h.i.t by a brief but intense moment of vertigo, where the floor buckles and the walls tilt and Bunny is forced to hold on to Geoffrey's shoulder for support.

'You all right, Bun?' asks Geoffrey, throwing a wing of pillowed flesh across Bunny's shoulder.

's.h.i.t, that's weird, I just met ...' says Bunny, and then he flashes on the dumpy waitress from the Grenville Hotel her plump, white b.u.t.tocks, the pounding headboard, her mantra of attenuated moans and the whole scenario threatens to overwhelm him.

'I just wish everything would slow down,' says Bunny, 'I wish everything would just level out,' and immediately wonders why he said this.

'Um,' says Raymond, embarra.s.sed.

'Of course you do, Bun,' says Geoffrey, patting Bunny on the back, sympathetically.

'I'm sorry for your loss,' says River, extending her hand, the tips of her long, thin fingers painted in coral pink varnish. Bunny, who has pulled himself together, takes her hand and feels an electro-magnetic exchange of such force that he jumps back and shakes his hand vigorously and says, 'Did you feel that?!' He looks aghast at River, whose head is tilted to the side, her brow furrowed. 'Did you feel that?' he says. 'Oh, baby, I am the Duracell Bunny!' and he does a fair imitation of the pink, battery-powered, drumming rabbit, up and down the hall.

River looks at Bunny with her large, liquid eyes and unconsciously touches the birthmark on her lip.

Bunny says, blowing on his hand, 'Next you're going to tell me you were born near a river!' and starts laughing and patting at the creases on the front of his trousers. There is general bafflement at this remark and everyone looks at the floor and Bunny hopes Poodle hasn't vacuumed up all the whiz.

'And who is this?' says River.

Bunny Junior has appeared like a little wraith in the hall and stands with his fists jammed up under his armpits. River reaches down and messes his hair and when she has finished the boy tries to rearrange it as it was.

'That's Bunny Junior,' says Bunny. 'He's my son.'

The boy points a thumb at his father and, with a narrow smile, says, 'And he's my dad.'

Everyone laughs at this, which confounds Bunny Junior because what he says is true. This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride he's my dad dad and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go. and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.

'Oh, my G.o.d, he is so cute,' says River and messes up his hair again. 'If you were just a few years older ...'

The door to the bathroom bursts open and Poodle barrels out, teeth bared and eyes glittering. He rubs at his nose with the back of his hand and says, 'Jesus Christ, River, the kid is nine years old.'

River pinches the boy's cheek and says, 'I know. I was just saying ...'

'Well, don't,' says Poodle. His yellow quiff has somehow taken on an even more l.u.s.trous sheen it actually sparkles, as he swivels around and says, 'Check this out, River! Think of a country ... any country ...'

'What?' says River.

'Just think of a b.l.o.o.d.y country. Jesus ...' says Poodle and winks at Bunny Junior.

'OK,' says River, 'Mongolia.'

'OK, Bunny Boy, don't let your Uncle Poodle down. What's the capital of Mongolia?'

Bunny Junior screws up his face in mock concentration, looks at the ceiling, strokes his chin and scratches his head.

'Ulaanbaadar,' says the boy and the guests all applaud.

'And he's got brains,' says River and places her hand on the back of the boy's neck and he feels an oily and unfamiliar heat pulsing from it.

'It used to be called Urga,' says Bunny Junior, quietly.

'Brains?' says Poodle. 'The boy's a f.u.c.king genius!'

River claps her hot hands over Bunny Junior's ears and says, 'Wo! Language!'

'Shall we go in then?' says Bunny.

As the grown-ups move into the living room, Bunny Junior hears Poodle whisper to River, 'Christ, it's f.u.c.king dark in here. Where are all the light bulbs?'

He sees River elbow Poodle in the ribs and whisper back, 'Jesus, Poo, the guy just lost his wife. What do you expect, a f.u.c.king dis...o...b..ll?'

Later that night Bunny Junior lies on his bed and stares at the ceiling and watches the green glow of the planets revolve above his head. He trances on the spectral refractions of light that move across the ceiling and journey down the wall. He runs through the things he knows about Pluto for example, how it is composed primarily of rock and ice and is relatively small, approximately a fifth the ma.s.s of the Earth's moon and a third its volume and after he has done that for a while, he brings his wrist.w.a.tch up to his ear and listens to the ticking, loud and unstoppable, of time pa.s.sing. It occurs to him that with each tick of the clock the memory of his mother fades, and she slips away. He feels, with a rush of iced wind across his heart, that even by just lying there he is losing her, little by little. He closes his eyes and attempts with reasonable success to ransack his memory and conjure up images of her. He hopes by doing this that he will prevent her from melting away completely. He wants, deep down, to remember her back into existence.

He remembers her picking him up from school in her pink velour tracksuit, the prettiest of the mums, he remembers her attending, with much sympathetic cooing, to a b.l.o.o.d.y nose, and further back he thinks he can remember her applauding him when he rode his bike no-hands. He recalls receiving his encyclopaedia for no other reason than 'she loved him to bits', and further back he has a distant, colour-bleached memory of crawling across the kitchen floor and attaching himself to her long, smooth leg and feeling a surprising strength as she dragged him around the kitchen floor. He pictures himself is this a memory? lying newly born and swaddled in a blanket with his mother's cool hand on his forehead and the dark proximity of what must have been his father.

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 p.u.s.s.y 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 p.u.s.s.y 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 b.u.mp 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 s.h.i.t-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 f.u.c.king 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.

'b.u.m c.o.ke,' 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 Suss.e.x 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, 'G.o.d, 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 antic.i.p.ation.

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 d.i.c.k in a bowl of custard and the other one has his d.i.c.k 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 f.u.c.king dis custard!' and then the other black guy says, 'An ah c.u.m 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 semaph.o.r.e 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 b.u.t.tocks 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 tries 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 a.r.s.e.'

'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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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.'