Part 17 (1/2)

'Did you see this? They are saying here that this devil guy's horns aren't fake. They're real.'

As the automatic door hisses open Bunny Junior feels a sense of relief to be leaving the Empress Hotel and he says to his father, 'A Near-Death Experience generally includes an out-of-body event in which people travel through a dark void or tunnel towards the light.'

The sun beats down and steam rises from the wet and dazzling streets. The glare hurts the boy's eyes and he slips on his shades and wonders if he is actually dead. He thinks Is this why I keep seeing my mother? He pinches the flesh on his thigh until his eyes water, and out on the sea a bank of condensed mist moves across the water towards them, like an unsolicited memory.

'In a Near-Death Experience people have reported encountering religious figures!' shouts Bunny Junior, jumping up and down, and rubbing the bruise on his thigh and thinking ouch, ouch and ouch! ouch! 'One may even encounter deceased loved ones!' 'One may even encounter deceased loved ones!'

His father keeps walking in a peculiar way and beating at his clothes with his hand and looking over his shoulder, and the sea mist continues to roll towards them, like a great white wall, blurring the line between the real world and its fogbound dream or something.

'There you go,' says the boy, helping his father, who has fallen over on the sidewalk, to his feet. 'Look what you've gone and done,' he says, pointing to a little triangular rip in the knee of his trousers.

'I don't know what I'd do without you,' says his father as he takes a long drink of something from a bottle, opens the door of the Punto and, face first, falls in.

When the Punto doesn't start, his father pounds the steering wheel, then actually clasps his hands together in supplication and pet.i.tions G.o.d and all His saints for a.s.sistance, and the insubordinate Punto, as if taking pity on him, coughs and splutters into life with a promise of taking him where he wants to go.

'A Near-Death Experience is often accompanied by strong feelings of peacefulness, Dad,' says the boy.

'Grab the client list,' says Bunny, resting his head on the wheel and playing with the hole in his trousers.

The boy says, 'It ... is ... often ... accompanied ... by ... strong ... feelings ... of ... peacefulness,' and he leans over and takes a tissue from the glove compartment and together they dab at the messy little sc.r.a.pe on his dad's knee.

'There you go,' says the boy.

Bunny parks the Punto outside a tumbledown bungalow on the hill between Peacehaven and Newhaven the residence of Miss Mary Armstrong, the last name on the list. The front yard is overgrown and littered with all manner of junk used appliances and broken machines a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a was.h.i.+ng machine, a bathtub full of yellowed newspapers, a ruptured kayak, a ruined Chesterfield settee and a motorcycle, dismantled and forgotten. Standing in the centre of the yard is a grotesque sculptural abstraction made from welded steel and strips of brightly coloured, spray-painted plastic.

'What a s.h.i.+t-hole' says Bunny. 'They just get worse and worse.'

There had been three names left on the client list, but the other two names had turned out to be non-starters and a complete waste of time.

The first was a Mrs Elaine Bartlett, who lived on the fourth floor of a block of flats in Moulsecombe. Lying on the floor of its only working elevator was a bombed-out kid with a can of air freshner in one hand and a Tes...o...b..g in the other and a Burberry cap on his head. This normally wouldn't have been a problem, except the boy had emptied the contents of his bowels into his shorts and these were pulled down around his skinny, little ankles. The boy had managed, rather heroically, thought Bunny, to graffiti in green spray paint on the elevator wall, 'I AM A SAD c.u.n.t'. Bunny had stepped into the elevator, then stepped out and allowed its doors to judder shut. He contemplated momentarily climbing the four flights of stairs to Mrs Elaine Bartlett's flat and realised, to his credit, that there was no way he was going to make it up them in his present condition, so he staggered back to the Punto.

The next name on the list, a Mrs Bonnie England, living over the hill in Bevendean was not at home in her semidetached brick-clad box, or so the guy who answered the door and claimed to be her husband maintained. Bunny could see this was clearly untrue, as the woman in the grease-stained pinafore, standing next to the guy who opened the door was obviously Mrs Bonnie England. Bunny didn't press the point, primarily because Mrs Bonnie England was the animate equivalent of the fouled elevator in Moules...o...b.. a prime stomach-churner with the proportions and s.e.x appeal of a Portakabin. Bunny had simply made a deferential apology for inconveniencing them (the husband was the red-faced, super-p.i.s.sed-off type, and Bunny was tired of being beaten up) then backed respectfully away and fell over her rubbish bins. Lying on his back on the concrete walkway, Bunny watched Mrs Bonnie England and her husband hold each other's hands and laugh at him.

'Ouch,' said Bunny.

As Bunny limped back to the Punto, he noticed, to his complete surprise, the ripe and rotund figure of River the waitress from the breakfast room at the Grenville Hotel walking down the street in her purple gingham uniform with the white collar and cuffs. He rubbed his eyes as if he were seeing things, like she were a mirage or a visual fallacy of some sort or something. She seemed like she had walked out of another lifetime, a less complicated and happier age, and his c.o.c.k leapt at the memory of her, and his heart pounded like a military drum and he started to cry.

'Hey!' said Bunny, running up to her, dabbing at his cheeks. 'What are you doing, River?'

River took one look at Bunny and screamed. She veered savagely in a wide and reckless arc and sped up, taking wild glances over her shoulder.

'Hey!' said Bunny. 'It's me! Bunny!'

River broke into a run, the various parts of her body pumping and pulsating beneath her uniform.

'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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king 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 after we make the boodle?' we make the boodle?'

'We are vampires, my boy! We are vultures! We are a frenzy of piranha flenching a f.u.c.king water buffalo or a caribou or something!' says Bunny, with a madman's grin on his face. 'We are f.u.c.king barracuda! 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 pa.s.senger on an aeroplane and that he has walked into the c.o.c.kpit 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 p.e.n.i.s 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 acc.u.mulated 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 c.o.c.k feeling like he'd been f.u.c.king 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, una.s.suming raps and to this day Bunny can't work out what possessed him to open the door. The c.o.ke, maybe. The booze, probably. Whatever.