'Does this routine actually work on the ladies, Bunny?'

Charlotte waggles her hands behind her head, mocking him, and Bunny feels a spike of umbrage worm its way through his bowels.

'You'd be surprised,' he says and, before he can check himself, winks at her.

Charlotte shrieks with laughter and says, 'Did you just wink wink at me?' at me?'

Bunny thinks Did I? then feels her laughter sc.r.a.pe its fingers down his spine.

'I might have,' he says, 'or I might have had something in my eye.'

What the f.u.c.k? he thinks. What the f.u.c.k! What the f.u.c.k!

Charlotte howls and cups her hands over her mouth, then points at Bunny and shouts, 'You are beyond belief!'

'So I've been told,' says Bunny.

'Where have you crawled from? The tar pits?'

'The what what pits?' pits?'

'You should be embalmed and have a sign hung around your neck saying, "extinct".'

'I resent that,' says Bunny. 'I take personal hygiene very seriously,' but even as he says this he can sense the faintest odour of flophouse sweat rising from his armpits.

'Not stink ... Ex-tinct Ex-tinct ... like a dodo.' ... like a dodo.'

'Wo, steady on,' says Bunny, and with a kind of wounded awe watches Charlotte's features vulcanise before his eyes; the dry blonde hair take on the appearance of a steel helmet and her eyes, a fierce, warring, metallic sheen.

'You ridiculous man.'

'Hey, I'm just trying to do my job here.'

'You sad, ridiculous little man,' she says.

'What is this? Jesus!' says Bunny as he grabs handfuls of beauty samples and throws them into his case. A shadow falls across his face and he looks devastated and injured. 'Jesus,' he repeats to himself.

Then Charlotte's face changes again, and without warning she puts her soft, greased fingers over Bunny's hand and says, with a fair approximation of genuine concern, 'Oh, I'm sorry, Mr Munro. I've gone too far. I've wounded you. That wasn't fair.'

Bunny feels a sudden and excruciating pressure on his bladder. He holds up his hand and shakes it as if to ward off further comment.

'No, it's all right, I just need to use your bathroom.'

'What?' says Charlotte.

'Yeah,' says Bunny, 'I've been on the road all day. I need to go so much I can taste it!'

Charlotte shrieks with laughter and a nerve twitches under Bunny's right eye.

'Oh, man, you're a cla.s.s act! It's down the hall!' she says and c.o.c.ks a thumb in the direction of the bathroom.

Charlotte's laughter follows Bunny as he quick-marches towards the bathroom. He feels a violent and boiling rage towards her but is not completely surprised to see visions of her sparky v.a.g.i.n.a strobe before his eyes. He enters the bathroom in a fury, scrabbles at his flies and pa.s.ses a stream of urine with such puissance that it makes the bones in his face ache. A glaze of sweat covers Bunny's brow and his quiff lies on his forehead as limp and insentient as roadkill. Bunny hears a renewed shriek of laughter come from the living room and he bares his teeth.

'f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h,' he says and he p.i.s.ses on her carpet. Then he p.i.s.ses on her lilac-coloured walls, then on the rack full of magazines, then on the hand towels and with a grand flourish he rises up on his toes and p.i.s.ses on her electric toothbrush that sits in a gla.s.s next to the basin. Then he zips himself up, opens the door and strides back down the hall, full of a renewed and un.o.bstructed purpose, and says, 'All right, do you want to buy any of this s.h.i.t or not?'

'I detect a note of hostility, Mr Munro,' says Charlotte, standing up from the sofa and rolling her head around on her neck in order to release some pent-up tension. Bunny notices that she is tall and broad across the shoulders, and the sh.e.l.l-like furuncle on her forehead seems to have morphed into a tiny tusk or horn or something.

'Well, we f.u.c.king dodos dodos get like that sometimes,' says Bunny, and the corner of his eye flutters. get like that sometimes,' says Bunny, and the corner of his eye flutters.

Charlotte stands firm, hands clasped benignly in front of her, and says, as if imparting a simple, incontrovertible fact, 'For your information, Mr Munro, I am a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.'

'Oh, yeah?' says Bunny, 'Well, I just p.i.s.sed all over your bathroom ...'

'You what?' says Charlotte, taking a step closer.

'That's right. The walls, the carpet, your h.e.l.lo h.e.l.lo magazines.' magazines.'

'You what?!'

'Your f.u.c.king toothbrush!' says Bunny, showing his straight, white teeth.

Suddenly, and without discussion, Charlotte begins to jump up and down on the b.a.l.l.s of her feet, her muscular arms relaxed and loose at her sides. Bunny is immediately and completely transfixed by the sight of the diamante charm being tossed around on its happy pink bolster like a child on a trampoline. He notices that Charlotte is not wearing a bra and that, before his very eyes, her nipples are stiffening and now jut through the thin cotton of her T-shirt, hard and fierce and unusually protracted. He sees, incredibly, what appear to be tiny cartoon sparks shooting from them and he thinks, for a sweet moment, that maybe, just maybe, all is not lost. He feels his c.o.c.k roar awake. Meanwhile, Charlotte Parnovar steps forward, and with a solitary rabbit-punch, busts Bunny's nose. There is an audible crack, a supernova of light, a geyser of blood, and Bunny tumbles backwards over the calico sofa and lands in a stunned heap on the floor by the front door.

'Hai!' says Charlotte.

There is a great pumping of blood from Bunny's nose that splashes down his tie and his jaw yawns open and he makes a sucking noise like a fish. In slow motion, he allows his head to fall forward and watches the bright blood pool in his cupped hands and says, not loudly but with the purest kind of outrage, 'f.u.c.k!'

Charlotte continues to hop up and down, her nipples as hard as bone.

'The foundations of Tae Kwon Do are built on integrity, peace and respect. You ought to try some, Rabbit Man Rabbit Man.'

Painfully, Bunny climbs to his feet, points one trembling finger at her and says, 'You horrible, f.u.c.king slag.' He says, 'You mad ... ugly ... diseased ...' and Charlotte Parnovar grins and swivels and tilts her hip to the side.

Bunny Junior looks at his watch and wonders what is taking his father so long. He looks towards the small semi-detached house that Bunny entered and sees, but does not hear, the front door burst open and his father launched backwards through the air, arms by his sides, like he has been shot from a cannon. The boy watches his father crash land on the garden path and lie there. He sees, but does not hear, the door slam shut. Then, before he has even considered what he should do, the door opens again and his father's sample case flies out approximating much the same trajectory as its owner, exploding on the path and disgorging its cargo of tiny bottles and sachets all over the tattered lawn.

The boy sees his father lift his head, then roll over and raise himself up on his hands and knees and grasp wildly at the scattered samples, tossing them in his case. He tries unsuccessfully to close it.

Then his father stands, sample case clutched to his chest, but the time it takes to perform this relatively simple act is horrible in its despairing r.e.t.a.r.dation. The boy watches his father stumble down the footpath, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers and clamping it to what appears to be a very b.l.o.o.d.y nose.

Then the door to the Punto flies open and, with a m.u.f.fled moan, Bunny drops into the driver's seat. The boy looks on in horror but then has a sudden and overwhelming urge to laugh the crazy crimson face, the handkerchief, the busted sample case until he sees that his father's rabbit tie is spotted with blood. The urge to laugh vanishes and the boy feels a cold grief roar through his chest. He rubs at his forehead with the back of his hand and paddles the air frantically beneath his feet, even though he doesn't really know why.

'Dad,' he says, pointing at the tie.

'Just don't ask,' says Bunny and hurls the sample case into the back seat, but as he does so the case springs open and its contents fly all over the inside of the car. He grabs at them futilely and makes the word 'f.u.c.k' sound like the worst word in the world.

'f.u.c.k,' he roars.

Then Bunny looks at himself in the rear-view mirror and actually screams.

'That m.u.f.f-munching d.y.k.e broke my f.u.c.king nose!'

'Dad,' says the boy, still pointing his finger at his father's tie.

Bunny notices that the inside of the windscreen has been decorated with a strange and intricate web of black markings. They draw him in like a spell.

'What the f.u.c.k,' he says, but his voice has turned breathy and remote.

His outraged body achieves, in that instant, a kind of drugged laxity and he sinks back into his seat, hypnotised. A fresh ribbon of blood unravels from his nose.

Bunny says, again, 'What the f.u.c.k.'

Then Bunny Junior realises what it is about his father's tie that makes him feel so unhappy and he starts thinking about Rhino beetles and how they are part of the Scarab family and that the males use their horns in mating battles against other males and that they are among the largest beetles in the whole f.u.c.king f.u.c.king world. world.

'Pick up that piece of paper, down there, on the floor,' says Bunny, after a while. The boy thinks his father sounds like a robot or Cyberman or something.

'Are we going home now, Dad?' says the boy.

'Do as you're told.'

The boy reaches down and picks up the piece of crumpled paper.

'Here it is, Dad,' says the boy.

'Read what it says,' says Bunny.

Bunny Junior makes a great show of straightening out the piece of paper by flattening it on his knee and then, with a certain ostentation, says, 'Pamela Stokes, Meeching Road, Newhaven.' Then the boy looks at his father with a clamped and idiot-sweet smile.

Bunny reaches over and snaps a tissue from the glove box and rolls it into twin plugs and inserts them up his nose. With the sleeve of his jacket he rubs at the dark tracery on the windscreen. Then he stops and looks at the boy.

'Well?' he says.

'Well, what, Dad?' says Bunny Junior.

'Well, are you the b.l.o.o.d.y navigator or what?'

Bunny Junior opens the AZ.

'Is Newhaven a nice place, Dad?'

Bunny rotates the plugs in his nostrils, pats at his bloodstained tie, smoothes down his hair and enacts a bizarre performance with his fingers that the boy is unable to interpret.

'Bunny Boy, you're gonna love it.'

16.

On an enormous plasma-screen TV that sits in the far corner of a living room in a small maisonette in Newhaven, Bunny thinks he can see, at the very edge of his vision, new CCTV footage of the Horned Killer careening through a stampede of shoppers with his trademark trident. But Bunny cannot be completely sure as a wedge of late-afternoon sunlight has moved across the screen and obliterated the image. He can detect, however, in the colour-bleached pixels, a now familiar sense of terror he recognises the crowd's horrified screams and he wonders, for a split second, how close to Brighton this crazy f.u.c.ker actually is, as he says to Pamela Stokes, 'We offer a line of highly indulgent, high-performance skin care that combines the best of over a century of achievements in dermatological research with sensually pleasing, luxury formulations.'

Bunny thinks that Pamela Stokes looks like she has walked out of the all-time f.u.c.king Mr Whippy of one of Poodle's wet dreams. She wears a blood-coloured halter-neck top stretched over a b.o.o.b job from Mars and a black denim skirt with an arabesque of emerald glitter on each thigh. Her eyebrows are fine and perfectly arched. The look on her face suggests that there is nothing she hasn't seen, her eyes, bottomless wells of experience. On her left cheek she has a tiny V-shaped scar, as if a small bird had pecked her there.

'What happened to your nose?' she says.

'You don't want to know,' says Bunny, and he touches gently the plugs of blood-soaked toilet paper. 'Suffice to say the other guy looks a lot worse,' he says and waves away further comment except to say, 'at least I still have have a nose.' a nose.'

Bunny leans forward in his armchair and continues his pitch.

'This comprehensive collection works in synergy with the skin's natural rhythms to help defend against signs of premature aging and provides unprecedented skincare benefits ...'

'Are you all named after cute little animals at ...' and Pamela points at the logo on Bunny's sample case with a hot pink Day-Glo fingernail, '... Eternity Enterprises?'

'Hey?' says Bunny.

'He told you where I lived, didn't he?' says Pamela, looking directly at Bunny.

'Well ...'

'What was his name?'

'Um ... Poodle,' says Bunny, as he twists the cap off a miniature tube of hand cream. He sighs. What a f.u.c.ked-up day, he thinks. Had all of womankind had the painters in on the same f.u.c.king day?

'What did he say about me?' says Pamela.

'He said that you were a most accommodating customer.'

'Did he now?' says Pamela, and Bunny's eyes mist at the drama of her lungs filling with weary air and releasing a compunctious sigh.

'Most obliging, he said. Generous, even.'

Bunny notices a giant baby-blue rabbit wrapped in cellophane perched on the mantelpiece, but before he has even had time to contemplate the extraordinary synchronicity of this, Pamela, who looks as though she has been forced to make some unpleasant and ill-fated decision, sinks back into the sofa and says, 'Tell me more about the hand lotion.'

'Well, Pamela, this rich, hydrating, age-targeting lotion softens the skin and exfoliates surface cells for a smoother ...'

Pamela reaches under her skirt and with a subtle upward shift of her hips slips off her panties. They are as white and blank as a snowflake.

'... Um ... younger look. It is formulated with a relaxing fragrance ...'

Pamela hitches up her skirt and opens her legs.

'... that inspires feelings of ... comfort and ... calm,' says Bunny and he notices a sculpted domino of black fuzz balanced on top of her gash like a pirate flag or a Jolly Roger or something. He closes his eyes for a moment and imagines Avril Lavigne's v.a.g.i.n.a and tears run down his cheeks.

'Are you all right?' asks Pamela.