The Death Of Bunny Munro Part 14

Mrs Brooks makes monster claws of her arthritic hands and giggles like a little girl. 'Only on Hallowe'en,' she says.

'You are a very trusting lady. Do you always invite strangers into your home?' asks Bunny.

'Trusting? Nonsense! I have one foot firmly planted in the grave, Mr Munro. What would anyone want from me?' and with her antenna-like stick clicking against the furniture, the old lady makes her way to the chintz-covered armchair and lowers herself into it.

'You'd be surprised,' says Bunny, looking at his watch and suddenly remembering an alcoholic dream he had had the night before that involved finding a matchbox full of celebrity c.l.i.torises Kate Moss's, Naomi Campbell's, Pamela Anderson's and of course Avril Lavigne's (among others) and trying unsuccessfully to stab holes in the lid with a blunt knitting needle while the little pink peas screamed for air.

'I may be blind, Mr Munro, but my other senses have yet to desert me. You seem like a nice man.'

Mrs Brooks offers Bunny the chair opposite her and Bunny has the sudden urge to turn around and make a run for it he feels a kind of foreboding in the room but instead he sits and places his sample case on the little Queen Anne table in front of him. Bunny realises to his surprise that there is an oversized transistor radio on the table that has been playing cla.s.sical music the whole time he has been there.

Mrs Brooks swoons dramatically, and then rocks back and forth and says, with great reverence, 'Beethoven. Next to Bach, no one does it better. Streets ahead of Mozart. Beethoven understood suffering in the most profound way. You can feel his deep belief in G.o.d and his raging love for the world.'

'It's all a bit over my head,' says Bunny. 'I'm just a working stiff.'

'Auden said it all. "We must love one another or die."'

Mrs Brooks' misshapen hands twitch on the armrests of her chair like alien spiders and her rings make an unsettling clicking sound. Outside Bunny can hear the b.i.t.c.hing squawk of seagulls and the low drone of the seafront traffic.

'Have you read Auden, Mr Munro?'

Bunny sighs and rolls his eyes and snaps open his sample case.

'Bunny,' he says. 'Call me Bunny.'

'Have you read Auden, Bunny?'

Bunny feels a needle of irritation tweak the nerve over his left eye.

'Only on Hallowe'en, Mrs Brooks,' says Bunny, and the old lady laughs like a little girl.

The Punto is parked on the Marine Parade and Bunny Junior rests his head on the window and watches the steady stream of people walking past and wonders exactly what it is he is doing. He feels like he has learned the Patience Law and wonders when his dad is going to teach him how to actually sell something. The boy thinks there may be a chance that not only is he going blind with advanced blepharitis, but he is going insane as well, and has looked up the word 'Mirage' in his encyclopaedia and it says 'An optical illusion resulting from the refraction of light causing objects near the horizon to become distorted.' He has also found 'Apparition' and it says 'The visual experience of seeing a person (living or dead) not actually present,' but none of this makes much sense to him. He has come to believe that his mother is looking for him and that she has something important to tell him, and he thinks that if he remains where he is she will, in time, find him. He is glad he has learned the Patience Law. It has been helpful. He also thinks that there is something that he has to tell his mother but he can't think of what it is because he is too hungry. He wishes he had eaten his Cornish pasty in the cafe at lunchtime. He sees a group of youths mooch by, stuffing handfuls of chips into the holes in their hoods, and a hungering noise issues from the pit of his stomach.

He looks behind him and can see, across the road on the promenade, a booth with 'FISH AND CHIPS' written in large letters on its candy-striped awning. The sea breeze brings down a delirious waft of fried potatoes and vinegar and Bunny Junior closes his eyes and inhales and, once again, whatever the animal is that's trapped in his guts lets out a demonstrative moan.

The boy knows he is not allowed to get out of the car but he is becoming increasingly worried that if he doesn't eat something soon, he is going to die of hunger. He knows that he has three one-pound coins in the pocket of his trousers. He imagines, with a certain amount of pleasure, his father returning and finding him dead in the Punto. What would that say about his Patience Law? The boy sits there and counts to one hundred. He looks over one shoulder then the other. He opens the door of the Punto and climbs out, jiggling the coins in his pocket.

Down to the pedestrian crossing he thinks then over the road, two minutes tops. He feels a sudden surge of panic move up the nerves in his legs and explode in his stomach and he puts his hand on his chest and feels his heart pounding through his s.h.i.+rt. Then he puts his head down and sets off.

He arrives at the pedestrian crossing just as the red man blinks on and he waits a full three minutes for the green one. In that time, a man dressed in white tracksuit bottoms and a white polo s.h.i.+rt sidles up to him. He has plucked eyebrows and thinning black hair, 'No school today?' says the man, smiling and playing with the little embroidered polo player on the breast of his s.h.i.+rt. The man's eyes are so blue and clear, and his teeth so straight and white, that Bunny Junior has to squint when he looks at him.

'Taking a sickie?' enquires the man but it is not a question, rather the naming of some perverse and diabolical act.

The light changes and Bunny Junior charges across the street and doesn't look back, saying the word 'f.u.c.k' under his breath over and over again because now he doesn't feel hungry in his stomach any more, now he wants to s.h.i.+t his pants. He feels to his core the terrible knowledge that he should never have left the refuge of the Punto.

At the fish and chip booth there is a small queue and he joins it and stands there, hopping from foot to foot. He turns his head tentatively in the way you do if you think there may be a monster or ogre or something behind you, and sees the guy in the tracksuit on the other side of the road fiddling with the polo player on his s.h.i.+rt. He seems to have forgotten about Bunny Junior until he raises his head and smiles and lifts up his index finger and moves it back and forth.

Bunny Junior turns away and watches the man in the fish and chip booth with the wire mesh basket and Popeye arms until it is his turn to order. He notices that the man's arms are covered in thick, black fur.

'Chips, please,' says the boy.

The man behind the counter fills a small waxed-paper cone with chips and says, 'One pound.'

The boy says, 'Salt, please.'

The man sprinkles salt on the chips from a large, stainless steel saltshaker.

The boy says, 'Vinegar, please.'

The man puffs on his cigarette and pours vinegar from a bottle onto the chips. He hands the paper cone to the boy and the boy gives him the money and turns around and sees his mother walking away from him down the promenade. She wears an orange dress and her blonde hair is tied back in a ponytail.

'Maybe I should report you to the authorities,' says the man in the white tracksuit bottoms, who is suddenly standing next to the boy, talking out the side of his mouth and twisting the little polo player on his s.h.i.+rt. Bunny Junior swings away from the man because he thinks the man wants to eat him. He sees his mother get swallowed up by the crowd and, with a roaring in his ears, takes off after her, wis.h.i.+ng his mother would stop disappearing all the time.

The boy notices that the people look like the undead or aliens or something as he weaves his way through the crowd. Everybody seems a foot taller and their arms have grown longer and their faces are mask-like and their jaws are slack. He looks this way and that and cannot see his mother and under his breath says that word again. He stops, looks up and down the promenade and stuffs a handful of chips in his mouth. He looks over the wrought-iron railing, down to the lower promenade, and sees, with a burst of love, his mother talking to a group of people who are sitting in an outdoor cafe. She is smoking a cigarette and Bunny Junior wonders when she started doing that. He thinks the first thing he'll do when he is reunited with his mother is tell her to just put that cigarette out. He stuffs another handful of chips into his mouth and descends the stairs, two at a time, the paper cone held above his head like he was the Statue of Liberty or an Olympic torch-bearer.

It is hotter down on the lower promenade and h.e.l.lishly bright. The boy wishes he had brought his shades because his eyes are itching like n.o.body's business and everyone has got hardly any clothes on. The boy recoils at the ma.s.s of hairy arms and dead flaky skin and congealed make-up and stinky rings of sweat and cadaverous age spots and rolls of white fat as he winds his way through the crowd towards his pretty mother.

He walks up to the cafe, gasping for air and wondering what to do with his chips. Sensing the boy's presence, his mother turns around.

'h.e.l.lo,' she says, in a warm, familiar voice.

Bunny Junior can see that her features have been slightly modified.

'Are you all right, sweetheart?' she says and puffs on her cigarette.

There is something in the way she says this that makes the boy step forward and wrap his arms around his mother's waist and rest his head against her stomach. He feels, at this moment, a vast sense of sad love for his mother, and at the same time wonders why she is not nearly as soft as he remembered her to be. Her stomach seems full of rocks and when he touches her b.r.e.a.s.t.s they feel small and hard.

'Excuse me?'

The boy can hear something extrinsic in her voice an unrecognisable and alien quiver of agitation maybe, or embarra.s.sment, he isn't sure, and it makes him want to let go of her, but he doesn't know how to, so he clings on harder. The woman whoever she is squirms and pulls at him and little stabs of pain shoot up his arms as she manages to prise herself free.

'Stop that,' she says. 'Where is your mother?'

The boy looks up at her and sees that she has a nose like a little brown hook and that her hair is not really blonde at all, but mouse-coloured, and her dress, which is actually pink, smells of cigarettes and old coconuts.

The woman reaches out to touch the boy on the head but he rears back and she accidentally knocks the cone of chips flying. The chips scatter across the floor of the restaurant.

'Oh, dear, I am sorry,' she says.

But the boy is spinning now, spinning and turning and running for his f.u.c.king life f.u.c.king life.

21.

'This Replenis.h.i.+ng Hand Cream has almost magical restorative powers. The effects are instantaneous,' says Bunny. 'Allow me to show you.'

'On these fossilised old things, I doubt it,' says Mrs Brooks. She removes her rings and holds out her monstrous claws. Bunny squeezes some cream into his hands and reaches across the table and takes hold of the old lady's fingers and gently ma.s.sages the cream into her knotted knuckles. Her arthritic hands actually creak under Bunny's touch. Mrs Brooks rocks back and forth, marking the s.p.a.ce around her with her metronomic sway.

'It's been many years since someone has done this to me, Mr Munro. You have certainly charged an old girl's batteries!'

Bunny says, in mock surprise, 'My G.o.d, Mrs Brooks! Your hands look like a young girl's!'

Mrs Brooks laughs a tinkling, happy laugh.

'Oh, you silly man,' she says.

Bunny Junior charges up the steps and along the promenade, doing his best not to touch the killer zombies, past the fish and chip man with his fuzzy blow-up arms and over the zebra crossing where the child-eaters operate, and when Bunny Junior sees the yellow, s.h.i.+t-splattered Punto he feels a palpable sense of relief, like he is back where he belongs. He pulls open the door and flops into the pa.s.senger seat, his feet doing their lunatic dance, his heart as heavy as an anvil or an anchor or a death. He presses down the lock on the door and rests his head on the window and screws up his eyes and remembers how his mum used to get pretty nutty some days like the time he found her sniffing his dad's s.h.i.+rts and throwing them around the bedroom or sitting on the kitchen floor crying with crazy lipstick smeared all over her face. But even though she had what his dad told him was a 'medical condition', she always smelled nice and she always felt soft.

There is a sudden rapping on the window as loud as gunshots. The boy's blood turns to ice. His blood turns to ice and he covers his eyes with his hands and says, 'Please don't eat me.'

He hears the sound again and looks up to see a female police officer tapping on the gla.s.s.

The police officer is young, with cropped hair and a pretty face, and as she mimics winding down the window, she smiles at Bunny Junior and the boy notices, to his relief, attractive indentations appear at the corners of her mouth. He winds down the window. He sees she has an almost invisible frosting of soft blonde hair on her top lip, and when she leans in the window he hears the new leather of her utility belt creak. Bunny Junior smells something shockingly sweet as she says, 'Are you all right, young man?'

The boy presses his lips together in the imitation of a smile and nods his head.

'Shouldn't you be in school?' she says, and Bunny Junior guesses the ogre in the white tracksuit has turned him in and he has no idea how to answer this question. He fiddles with his Darth Vader and shakes his head.

'Why not?' says the police officer, and Bunny Junior hears a little blurt of static come from her radio transmitter that sounds so much like a fart that he giggles for a second.

'My dad says I don't have to go to school today,' he says, and suddenly he is sick to death of adults police officers with truncheons and creeps in white tracksuits, zodiac-symbol-wearing wackos and women who crow like roosters, fat men in dresses and mothers who go and kill themselves, and he wonders, with fury, where his f.u.c.king father is. Almost immediately Bunny Junior feels bad for thinking that and erases it from his mind.

'Why is that?' says the police officer.

'I'm sick,' says Bunny Junior and sinks back in his seat and, with a dramatic flourish, approximates what he considers to be a reasonable imitation of a boy dying a million deaths.

'I see. Well, shouldn't you be in bed then?'

Bunny Junior shrugs and says, 'I guess.'

The police officer points into the car and says, 'Who's that?'

The boy waggles his Darth Vader and says, 'Darth Vader.'

The police officer stands up straight and claps her hand to her chest and says, in a mock-serious voice, 'May the Force be with you.'

Bunny Junior notices the little indentations appear in the corners of her mouth. Then they disappear and she puts her head back in the window and says, 'Where's your dad, then?'

The silver bracelet that Bunny wears on his left wrist clinks, then echoes quietly around the room. Mrs Brook's hands twitch in her lap and they do indeed look younger. She wears a blissed-out smile on her tiny, wrinkled face, and as Bunny licks the stub of his pencil and finishes filling in the order form, he feels, in a remote way, vindicated. He thinks he has outdone himself. He has sold this elderly lady a vast amount of beauty products that she will never use, but in doing so, he has made the old trout happy. But Bunny also feels a jittery discomfort in his body, a caffeinated restlessness to the order of his blood. He has felt this way all afternoon, and has a.s.sumed it was a basic quotidian hangover (he had overdone it a bit this morning), but through the window he can see a dark menace of starlings falling and ascending above the gusting sea and he understands, suddenly, that the discomfort he is feeling is actually a rising terror of sorts but a terror of what?

'You will receive the products within ten working days, Mrs Brooks,' says Bunny.

'It's been an absolute pleasure, Mr Munro.'

It hits Bunny then and he realises he has known it was coming all along. He feels it moving up through his bones and he feels his heart adjust itself in preparation. He notices that the radio has inexplicably stopped transmitting and the room has darkened a fraction and the temperature has dropped. He experiences a lack of feeling in his fingertips and a lifting of the hair on the back of his neck. There is a brief crackling of the electrics in the overhead light. He knows more than he knows anything that if he raises his head and looks over at the living room wall, he will see his dead wife, Libby, sitting on the brocaded piano stool by the Bosendorfer. She will be wearing the nightdress that she wore on her wedding night and the night she hanged herself. He can see a smudge of orange in the far corner of his vision and an accusatory upward motion of an arm or something. He hears the starlings begin to twitter manically and peck and scratch at the window. The air begins to throb and warp, and when he hears great, heavy, doom-laden chords being hammered out on the piano, he throws his hands over his ears and makes an unsuccessful attempt to scream.

Mrs Brooks begins raking the air with her claws.

'Beethoven!' she shouts, deliriously, a curlicue of fog at her lips.

'She had a medical condition,' pleads Bunny.

'What?' says Mrs Brooks.

'Eh?' he says, keeping his head lowered.

Bunny feels an unsolicited and volcanic rage rip through his insides a rage towards everything this wife of his, who even beyond the grave hunts him down in order to wag a defamatory finger; this arthritic old b.i.t.c.h with her lacks and loopy needs; his s.p.a.ced-out kid waiting in the car; his father dying of cancer; all the rapacious, blood-sucking women; the f.u.c.king bees and the starlings What does everybody want from me?! What does everybody want from me?! He curses his own insatiable appet.i.tes, but even as he does so he tries, with a Herculean act of will, to divert his thoughts onto the s.h.i.+ny genitalia of a starlet or celebrity or He curses his own insatiable appet.i.tes, but even as he does so he tries, with a Herculean act of will, to divert his thoughts onto the s.h.i.+ny genitalia of a starlet or celebrity or anything anything, but can't think of one because the starlings are dive-bombing against the window and the piano chords are so loud now he thinks his head is going to split in half. Mrs Brooks grabs his hand with her mangled claw and says, 'We must love one another or die!'

'Eh?' says Bunny, keeping his eyes averted, keeping them down, keeping them closed.

He hears Mrs Brooks say, 'It is just that you seem so sad.'

'Eh? What? Sad?' says Bunny and wrenches his arm away and slams shut his sample case. The old lady looks about blindly, her outstretched hand uselessly sc.r.a.ping the air.

'Forgive me,' she says, full of self-reproach. 'I'm terribly sorry to have upset you.' Her hands pound at the aggrieved s.p.a.ce in front of her. 'I'll see you out,' she says.

Bunny stands, head still inclined, his hands over his ears.

'Don't bother, Mrs Brooks,' he snarls and reaches down and deftly and noiselessly scoops up the old lady's wedding rings from the table and slips them into the pocket of his jacket. 'I'll make my own way,' he says.

Bunny turns defiantly towards the Bosendorfer just in time to see the empty brocaded piano stool and the air wobble with his ghost-wife's departure. He turns away, pats his pocket, flicks his pomaded forelock from his eyes and thinks f.u.c.k you all.

22.

Outside Bunny stands on the footpath and allows the pale remnants of the afternoon sun and the gentle sea breeze to pa.s.s across his face and take with it the cloying atmospherics of the old lady's dust-covered home a place where ghosts appear. His s.h.i.+rt is soaked in sweat and he s.h.i.+vers as he looks around and notices that the starlings have gone. He still thinks he can hear the pounding, funereal piano chords coming from Mrs Brooks' flat, but he can't be sure.

He walks down to Marine Parade and as he turns the corner he becomes aware of several things at the same time. First, a female police officer is standing by the Punto talking into a radio transmitter or walkie-talkie or something. Second, she is wearing a blue gaberdine uniform that makes her t.i.ts hum with a custodial authority that hits Bunny right in the d.i.c.k, and finally that she is definitely not a d.y.k.e because her a.r.s.e is high-up and unbelievably fit. It is only as he strides towards her, the piano booming in his head, that he wonders what the f.u.c.k she is doing there.

'Can I help you, officer?' says Bunny.

The police officer stops talking into her radio transmitter and there is a squelch of static. Bunny clocks the weighty, hardcore accoutrements handcuffs, truncheon, mace hanging from her belt, and also her torpedo-like b.r.e.a.s.t.s and, despite his grim disposition, he experiences a kind of alchemical trans.m.u.tation in his leopard-skin briefs where a mild-mannered mouse morphs into a super-powered hard-on from Krypton and he wonders, obscurely, if society would not be better served if they kept this particular officer away from the general public like a desk job in a place where it was freezing cold all the time or something.

'Is that your son?' says the police officer.

'Yes, it is,' says Bunny, draping a practised hand over the front of his steepled trousers and clocking the number on her epaulette PV388.