by Nick Cave
‘Excuse me, young lady,’ he says again.
‘Finished giving my mum a fuck?’ says the young girl on the bicycle.
‘Eh?’ says Bunny, opening the door of the Punto.
‘Finishing sticking your dick in my mum?’
Bunny leans in close to the girl and rings the bell on her bike and says, ‘Actually, yes, I have, and it was very nice, thank you very much.’ Then he folds himself up and drops with a contemptuous grunt into the driver’s seat. He turns the key in the ignition and the Punto makes its noises and, insolently and unwilling, starts first time.
‘Jesus, who’s your girlfriend?’ says Bunny. ‘What a little ball-breaker.’
Wisps of sea mist curl around the Punto as Bunny moves onto the ocean road.
‘She just came and talked to me, Dad.’
‘Fancy you, did she?’ said Bunny, popping a fag between his teeth and patting the pockets of his jacket for his Zippo.
Bunny Junior fingers his Darth Vader and says, ‘Da-ad.’ He feels a kind of rising heat.
‘No, she did, I can tell. She had that special light in her eyes!’
‘Da-ad!’
‘I’m telling you, Bunny Boy, I can spot it a mile off!’
Bunny turns to his son and punches him on the arm. Bunny Junior is happy that his dad is happy and he is happy that his dad is not mental and he is also just happy and he says, in a loud voice, ‘Maybe I should go back and give her a fuck!’
Bunny looks at his son as if for the first time and then throws out a great laugh. He knuckles the boy’s skull.
‘One day, Bunny Boy, one day!’ he exclaims, and with the blue sea on one side, and green fields on the other, Bunny Junior waves the client list in the air and holds up the A–Z and laughs, ‘Where to now, Dad?’
Soon Bunny Junior will sit back in his seat and stare out at the white, weather-bitten cliffs and the flocks of seagulls that feast on the newly turned earth in the fields that line the coastal road. He will think that even though his mother would come into his room and hold him and stroke his forehead and cry her eyes out, her hand was still the softest, sweetest, warmest thing he had ever felt, and he will look up and see a flock of starlings trace the angles of her face in the sky. He will think that if he could just feel that soft, warm hand on his forehead again then he would he didn’t know what.
On the television mounted on the wall of a small café in Western Road there is a special report on the Horned Killer. A young mother has been murdered with a garden fork in her home in Maida Vale. The attack was so vicious that the authorities initially had difficulties identifying the sex of the victim. The same afternoon, the killer had done his diabolical streak for the CCTV cameras through a shopping complex in Queensway. Then, as always, he disappeared. On the TV, Bunny sees a stylised map of England that reminds him of a cartoon rabbit (without ears) and shows, with a red line, the dismal, southbound trajectory of the murderer’s infernal journey. Some part of Bunny takes all this personally, but he is not sure why.
The guy serving behind the counter has shaved and oiled his head and leans towards Bunny and cocks his thumb at the TV and says, ‘Can you believe this guy?’ He wears a tight red T-shirt and Bunny, who sits eating a ketchup-smothered Cornish pasty and sucking a pink milkshake through a straw, notices the ringed contours of his nipple piercings through the fabric.
‘He’s working his way to Brighton,’ says Bunny, ominously.
‘What makes you say that, man?’
‘I can feel it in my guts,’ says Bunny. ‘He is coming down.’
Bunny Junior looks around the café and sucks his milkshake and moves back and forth on his swivel-topped stool. He watches a couple nearby, hunched over bowls of spaghetti Bolognese and involved in some heated, whispered altercation. The woman throws furtive glances around the restaurant and the boy tries to decode the nature of their dispute by reading the man’s lips but this proves impossible as he keeps covering his mouth with his hand. Then his attention is drawn to a lone man eating from a plate of chips. He wears a black shirt and has thick white hair and a silver zodiac symbol on a chain around his neck and he is looking directly at the boy. He dips a chip in mayonnaise, puts it in his mouth and smiles at the boy with genuine warmth.
‘All the freaks wash down here,’ says Bunny to the guy behind the counter, but he has turned away and is now serving someone else, so Bunny directs his attention to his son.
‘In this business, Bunny Boy, you meet all kinds of crazy people. It’s the nature of the game. You get a certain understanding for them,’ he says.
The man in the black shirt and the pendant counts some money into a tiny tin plate. He gives Bunny Junior a secret wave, licks the salt off the ends of his fingers, then picks up his jacket, turns his back and leaves.
‘You’ve got to live by your wits. It’s an instinct,’ says Bunny. ‘Always keep one eye open. You turn your back on someone for a second and the next minute they’re boiling your head in a saucepan. It’s something you learn over time, Bunny Boy …’
Through the lunchtime crowd Bunny Junior glimpses a woman in an orange dress with blonde hair standing in the queue across the café at the sandwich counter. Her head is inclined away from him, her face hidden in her hair, and sometimes he can see her and sometimes he can’t.
‘Be bloody prepared,’ says Bunny.
‘For the crazy guy,’ says Bunny Junior, distractedly.
‘You got it, Bunny Boy. One eye on the nutter.’
Bunny Junior stands and ducks and weaves and tries to get a glimpse of the woman who could well be his mother, but he can’t see her any more and he hears his dad say, ‘Once I did this job in Hastings and there was a little girl there that had tiny flippers for hands and her tongue was so long she had it pinned to the lapel of her jacket.’
Bunny Junior climbs back up on his stool and sits very still, hands folded in his lap. The blood has drained from his face and when Bunny looks at his son, he registers his haunted expression.
‘Tell me about it, Bunny Boy! It gives me the creeps just thinking about it!’
Bunny takes out his wallet and the man behind the counter, with his lubricated dome and his erotic accoutrements, says to Bunny as he takes his money, ‘You in town long?’
Bunny delivers a disdainful look and, with Bunny Junior close behind, leaves the café. Outside he stops, throws out his hands in outrage and says to the boy, ‘Do I look like I’ve got a mangina? Do I look like I’ve got a munt?’
‘Um,’ says the boy.
‘Tell me the truth. Do I look like a fucking fag to you?’
Bunny Junior, who realises he has forgotten to finish his pasty, looks up and down the street and forgets to answer his father as he sees what appears to be a triangle of orange fabric slip around a corner and disappear.
20
Bunny stands outside a ground-floor flat in Charles Street, Kemp Town, and wonders what he is doing. He turns and sees his son’s face watching him through the window of the Punto – the boy squeezing out his jinked smile – and he wonders what he is doing. At the front door, he presses the buzzer and sees a dark shape wobble, mirage-like, on the other side of the frosted glass – icing sugar sunset with powdered palm trees – then rattle a series of locks and chains, and he wonders what he is doing. He looks at the name on the client list and it says Mrs Candice Brooks and he experiences in the base of his spine a thrill of sexual anticipation that brings clarity of purpose to his mind. But the door opens and a tiny, bent and impossibly ancient lady in dark glasses appears before him and says in a surprisingly youthful voice, ‘Can I help you?’
Bunny sighs and wonders what he is doing. Then it comes to him – he is here to sell stuff. He closes his eyes and composes himself and approximates a person who has charm and who is in control. This is not as easy as it sounds because Bunny feels, in an oblique way, that a kind of lunacy has come to visit and decided to stay until all the lights go out. ‘I’m looking for a Mrs Candice Brooks,’ he s
ays.
With an arthritic and bejewelled hand, the old lady adjusts her glasses and says, ‘Yes, I’m Mrs Brooks. What can I do for you, young man?’
Bunny thinks – Young man? Jesus, is she blind? – then realises that actually she is. He silently cogitates whether this is, for him, an advantage or a disadvantage. He decides on the former due to his inherent optimism.
‘Mrs Brooks, my name is Bunny Munro. I am a representative of Eternity Enterprises. You have contacted our central office and asked for a free demonstration of our range of beauty products.’
‘I did?’ says the old lady, her ringed fingers tapping and clacking around the edge of the door.
‘Your name is on our list, Mrs Brooks.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it, Mr Munro. Daresay I will forget to turn up to my own funeral,’ says the old lady, with a grim chuckle.
Mrs Brooks invites Bunny in and leads him through a small, sunless kitchen. Bunny thinks, as he checks out her swollen ankles and her support stockings, that chances are Mrs Candice Brooks will turn out to be a classic time-waster – a lonely old bird that just wants to talk. He remembers when he used to go out with his dad, who was in the antique business, and it was precisely this kind of good-natured biddy that his old man could really get his teeth into – that he could really squeeze. He was a master of it – a true charmer. But extorting them of their antique furniture was one thing, trying to sell them beauty products was another thing altogether.
‘I hope the new girl who comes to clean has left the place looking nice. I never really know. They come and go, these young things. They cost the earth and none of them really wants to be looking after a dotty old bat like me.’
‘Hired hindrance, Mrs Brooks,’ says Bunny, and Mrs Brooks chuckles as she taps her way through the kitchen with her white, cleated stick.
‘Exactly, Mr Munro,’ she says, as Bunny remembers, with a sudden plasmatic surge in his leopard-skin briefs, Mylene Huq from Rottingdean, bucking and screaming and begging Bunny to come on her face.
Bunny follows Mrs Brooks into the living room and it is heavy with dead air as if time itself had ossified into something immobile and unyielding. The shelves are crammed with ancient books covered in a patina of dust and there is the terrible spectral absence of a television set. The open-lidded, upright Bösendorfer along the far wall, with its rictus of flavescent teeth, would be a nice little earner for some enterprising antique dealer in a couple of years – thinks Bunny – and he gestures pointlessly at the piano and enquires of the old blind lady, ‘Do you play?’
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 clitorises – 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 classical 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 God 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 bitching 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 café 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 shirt. 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 shirt 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 shirt. 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, r
ather 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 ‘fuck’ under his breath over and over again because now he doesn’t feel hungry in his stomach any more, now he wants to shit 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 shirt. 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.