Part 17 (2/2)

'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 s.e.x 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 s.e.xy 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 p.o.r.nographic 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, 'h.e.l.lo, 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 that what you wanted to tell me?' 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 a.s.sociation; 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 gla.s.s, into death itself, hers and perhaps his own.

'Let me take that,' says Bunny and removes the cigarette b.u.t.t 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 b.u.t.ton and a zipper. It is exactly as he imagined it the hair, the lips, the hole and he slips his hands under her wasted b.u.t.tocks and enters her like a f.u.c.king 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.

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