Bunny Junior, incredibly, opens one raw eye and says, 'What happened then, Dad?' and closes it again.

'Well, it was getting late and her mum and dad came and got her and I stayed at the pool, happier than I'd ever been, just floating around ... all full of this gift until I was the last person in the pool ...'

Bunny could see, deep in his memory, the night fall over Butlins and a spray of stars spritz across the sky, and he wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.

'Then it began to get dark and the stars came out and I started to get cold so I went back to our chalet.'

This time the boy keeps his eyes closed when he says, 'What happened to the girl, Dad?'

'Well, the next day my dad sent me down to the pool again and I looked for Penny Charade but she wasn't there, and I was moving through the water feeling sorry for myself when I noticed another girl who was smiling at me, then another one, and suddenly the whole pool was heaving with Penny Charades ... on the side of the pool ... swimming in the water, on the f.u.c.king diving board, waving and smiling and laying on their towels, playing with blow-up b.a.l.l.s and there it was again ... that feeling ... that power ... and me with the gift the gift ...' ...'

Bunny gropes around on the bed until he finds the remote and, with a crack of static, it implodes into nothingness and he closes his eyes. A great wall of darkness moves towards him. He can see it coming, vast and imperious. It is unconsciousness and it is sleep. It moves like a great tidal wave but before it breaks over him and he is away, before he renders himself completely to that oblivious sleep, he thinks, with a sudden, terrible, bottomless dread, of Avril Lavigne's v.a.g.i.n.a.

19.

'Is that your dad in my house?' says the little girl on the bicycle.

'Yeah, I guess,' says Bunny Junior, who has been trying to read about Mata Hari in his encyclopaedia, but can't concentrate on the words because he is so worried about his father. In the breakfast room at the Queensbury, his dad was jumping around like his pants were on fire. He'd eat a bit of sausage, get up and rabbit into his phone, then sit back down and spill his coffee everywhere. He'd disappear into the bathroom and not come out for ages, then follow the waitress around the breakfast room and talk to her a mile a minute about who knows what Bunny Junior sure didn't know. The boy ate his breakfast quickly and, anxious to leave, pulled out the client list and said, 'Where to now, Dad?' but his dad told him they were going to visit a loyal customer in Rottingdean one they could tap into at any time. She just loved that body cream! Then he was stuffing his mouth with eggs and toast and chasing the waitress around the breakfast room again, waggling his hands behind his head like a rabbit. He had put on a new shirt with brown and orange diagonal stripes and a tie with a little picture of a floppy-eared rabbit sticking his head out of a magician's hat, but he hadn't shaved and his hair was sticking up like n.o.body's business.

Bunny Junior was not used to worrying about his dad. He was more used to worrying about his mum. Once, when his father was away, she had come into the bedroom and sat on the bed and put her arms around him and cried her eyes out and he hadn't known what to do but wonder where the old mum had gone.

Now he is sitting in the Punto outside a large, newly built house in Rottingdean, and a girl who looked about the same age as him, maybe a little older, is asking him a question. She is straddling a bicycle and has a small brown mole on her cheek. She rings the bell three times before she speaks to him again.

'Your dad is giving my mum a f.u.c.k,' she says.

She wears a strawberry tankini with the word 'TOXIC' written in little silver studs across her chest. Bunny Junior notices, when she turns to look back at her house, that one side of her bikini bottom has ridden up the crack in her b.u.m.

'He's my dad,' says Bunny Junior, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up one eye and sticking his head out the car window and looking up and down the street but not knowing what it was he was looking for.

'Yeah, I know,' says the girl. 'He's sticking his d.i.c.k in her.'

The boy responds with a tilt of the chin but his feet start flip-flopping furiously.

'Yeah, well, he's the best salesman in the world,' he says.

The girl rocks back and forth on the bicycle and says, 'She makes me go out of the house. But you can hear her from miles away. She sounds like a strangled chicken. c.o.c.k-a-doodle-do!' The little girl flaps her elbows for emphasis.

'You mean a rooster,' says the boy.

'Yeah, whatever. You can hear her for miles.'

Bunny Junior points at the girl's bicycle and says, 'My dad could sell your bicycle to a barracuda.'

The girl pushes her fringe out of her eyes and says, 'A what?'

'It's a predatory fish,' he says. 'Its jaws are armed with hundreds of razor-like teeth.'

'Oh,' says the girl.

She rings the bell on her bicycle and says, 'My dad bought me this.'

'The bicycle?' says the boy.

'No, the bell.'

The little girls rocks some more and grimaces for no particular reason. Bunny Junior likes this girl. He thinks she is very pretty and he hasn't really spoken to a girl before. He paddles his feet for a while and thinks about something to say.

'My mum died,' he says without warning and he experiences a sudden thundering of his blood to his face and he pushes himself back into the seat of the Punto, mortified and ashamed.

'Yeah?' says the girl, then wheels her bicycle up to the window and Bunny Junior sees that she has crimson glitter nail polish on her fingers and a smear of blue shadow over each eye.

'I wish my mum would die,' she says. 'She's a f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h-face.'

The surge of blood subsides and the roaring in his ears abates and Bunny Junior takes his sungla.s.ses from the glove box and slips them on.

'I don't have to go to school,' he says.

The young girl smiles, realigns her bikini bottoms, pushes her fringe out of her eyes and says, 'Cool.'

'My dad says I don't have to.'

They say nothing for a minute and Bunny Junior adjusts his shades and the girl c.o.c.ks her head and looks at the boy sitting in the car, and the sun beats down and she rings her bell twice. Bunny Junior reaches over to the driver's side and taps the car horn two times in response. They smile at each other and together they both look down the road somewhere. They see Bunny exit the house and march across the sun-scorched lawn, tucking his shirt into his trousers.

'Here he comes,' says Bunny Junior quietly, 'my dad.'

The boy wishes his dad would turn around and go back inside because he doesn't want to see his dad although he looks a lot better coming out of the house than he did going in. On the way here, his dad kept turning the radio on and off and moving around in his seat and sounding the horn and swigging from his bottle and driving like a mental case, and when he arrived at the house he actually hopped across the lawn like a rabbit. Most of all, though, he wanted his dad to go back into the house because all of a sudden he could think of a million and one things he wanted to tell this girl on the bicycle about outer s.p.a.ce, the veldts of Africa or the microcosmic world of insects or something, and he didn't even know her name.

'Excuse me, young lady,' says Bunny as he marches up to the Punto.

Bunny is thinking that there is nothing like getting your pipes cleaned first thing in the morning to set you up for the rest of the day. He had woken gloomy and hungover and full of dirty water, and had probably hit the bottle a little heavy in recompense. He thought he may have set something up with the cute little waitress from the breakfast room at the Queensbury Hotel, but he was not completely sure. Then he remembered Mylene Huq from Rottingdean, and a quick call to Poodle was enough to secure her address. The story goes that Mylene Huq's husband took off with someone half his age and that Mylene Huq has been involved in an epic revenge-f.u.c.k ever since. Meanwhile, the word has spread around the local studs and everyone was getting in while the going was good. This kind of opportunity is usually short-lived and always ends in tears, but there is no denying that in the throes of their particular brand of wild justice these b.i.t.c.hes go off like f.u.c.king firecrackers.

'Excuse me, young lady,' he says again.

'Finished giving my mum a f.u.c.k?' says the young girl on the bicycle.

'Eh?' says Bunny, opening the door of the Punto.

'Finishing sticking your d.i.c.k 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 f.a.g 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 f.u.c.k!'

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 AZ 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 cafe 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 s.e.x 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 c.o.c.ks 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 cafe. 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? munt?'

'Um,' says the boy.

'Tell me the truth. Do I look like a f.u.c.king f.a.g f.a.g to you?' 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 gla.s.s 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 s.e.xual antic.i.p.ation that brings clarity of purpose to his mind. But the door opens and a tiny, bent and impossibly ancient lady in dark gla.s.ses 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 says.

With an arthritic and bejewelled hand, the old lady adjusts her gla.s.ses 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 cla.s.sic 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 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 Bosendorfer 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?'