'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 washing 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 flashing 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 rushing 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.

'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.