'Excuse me!' says the blonde, who has stopped laughing, but Bunny is screaming now, under the thundering sky and with all the rain coming down.

'The skin is awakened to its fullest potential and infused with a surge of new beauty, stimulating your feelings of pleasure and well-being!'

Bunny falls to his knees and wraps his arms around the long and shapely legs of the woman with blonde hair and burrows his face into her lap and feels all the psychic strings that bind him to the rational earth snapping like rubber bands in his skull, and he bellows into her dress, 'What am I gonna do?!'

'Waiter!' cries the woman. 'Waiter!'

Bunny looks up at the woman and sees the stripe of chocolate froth on her lip through a film of tears.

'Will you f.u.c.k me?' he says.

The woman rears back, her long fingers at her mouth. The brunette and the redhead sc.r.a.pe back their chairs.

'Waiter!' they scream.

Bunny stands and from the corner of his eye sees Bunny Junior's face like a little scared balloon framed in the window of the Punto and he throws out his arms and addresses the shrinking customers with the whole of his voice.

'Will somebody please f.u.c.k me?!'

Thunder rumbles across the sky and Bunny hears the women scream many of them, all of them horrified and familiar as he grabs at them, his teeth bared, his mouth gaping wide, jumps at them, leaps at them and an Italian waiter with a blue jaw and black ap.r.o.n grabs Bunny around the chest, wrestles him from the cafe and drags him down the street.

With a shove, the waiter deposits Bunny on the wet footpath outside the Punto and stalks away.

Bunny wrenches open the car door and piles in and looks at the boy. He turns the key in the ignition, guns the engine and looks at the boy. He zooms into the rainy street just as a maroon 'DUDMAN' concrete mixer truck veers into the oncoming traffic, its barrel rolling, its windscreen wipers frantically lashing at the storm. Bunny clocks the tanned, tattooed arm hanging limp from the window and looks at the boy. The mixer truck blows its horn once, then once again then speeds up and ploughs head-on into the Punto. There is a brutal compaction of metal and an explosion of gla.s.s, and as Bunny goes flying past, he looks at the screaming boy.

30.

Bunny opens his eyes and the world is filmed in red. He realises, in a distant way, that he is on his hands and knees in the middle of a street. He can hear far-off wailing and feels an immense rain beating down upon him. He sees that the ground beneath him is pink with his own blood. He crawls a couple of paces and wonders what he is doing. He looks behind him and sees a little yellow car twisted around a maroon concrete mixer and he slowly stands up. He looks at his hands and wonders why he is holding a child's encyclopaedia. He looks back at the crumpled yellow car and in his mind's eye he sees the face of a boy.

Then there is a boom of thunder and Bunny looks up at the black clouds that move overhead and he sees a silver pitchfork of lightning leap from the sky and with an intake of breath he throws out his chest and sucks the lightning into his heart and the encyclopaedia flies from his hand with a loud bang bang and a webbed scar blossoms across his body and he crashes, stiff as a plank, onto the rain-filled street. and a webbed scar blossoms across his body and he crashes, stiff as a plank, onto the rain-filled street.

31.

First there is the darkness. But Bunny feels he has always been aware of the darkness. Then there is the smell a rancid stench of body odour with a tang of terror-crazed, female blood trapped within it and Bunny realises as he inhales this stink that he is, indeed, alive. He finds he is swimming up from the most silent and suffocating depths of the deepest and blackest of seas. He realises that this thing that smells so badly and is squatting beside him has reached way down into the watery darkness and dragged him gasping for air to the surface. He can feel its heat against his lower body but there is something debauched and obscene about its proximity. The thing that is sitting beside him leans across and locks him in an embrace. He can feel, in its form, a plasticity an absence of bones and that the creature is quite possibly reptilian by nature. When it speaks, its breath smells of s.h.i.t and the stench adheres to the contours of his face like a dishcloth or winding-cloth or something.

'They got me, those motherf.u.c.kers,' it says.

The words crawl across Bunny's face and seep into his nostrils, his mouth, his ears.

'They have done me down, my brother,' it says.

Bunny can sense that whatever this thing is, it is naked. He can feel its erect phallus pressed against his stomach, pulsing with s.e.xual heat, as it leans across him.

'Twenty-five to life, they gave me!' it wails, suddenly, clinging to Bunny. 'Twenty-five to life with no f.u.c.king p.u.s.s.y!'

Bunny feels the creature crawl up on top of him and the scorch of its p.e.n.i.s long and thin shift against his stomach and an insistent knee separates his thighs.

'Help me!' it moans.

Bunny tries to move but cannot. He attempts to open his eyes but they feel as though they have been st.i.tched shut with a needle and thread. Then he realises he can see tiny pinpoints of light appearing from the world beyond.

'But I've been watching you,' says the voice, with a sudden, cloying intimacy. 'You're a f.u.c.king trip, man!'

Bunny feels a greased arm taking leverage around his neck.

'You're out of this world, baby. You're in a league of your own!' he says.

Bunny feels the pulsing phallus, move down his stomach, slide across his groin and slip between his legs.

'You are a f.u.c.king inspiration! inspiration!'

Bunny struggles, in vain, but is impotent to move his arms or legs.

'You have the talent, boyfriend! talent, boyfriend! You are a You are a master of the art! master of the art!'

Bunny sees the points of light connecting, expanding, and the black slats of his eyelashes drawing apart. He opens his eyes and his pupils contract painfully against the incursive light.

'Here's something to remember me by,' says the voice, in a whisper, 'until we meet again.'

Then he sees the smeared, scarlet face with its black hole of a mouth, its raw, red tongue, its yellow eyes, its goatish horns, all come down upon him like a lover, and he experiences a searing penetration between his splayed b.u.t.tocks.

Then, at the point of climax, hot and liquid against his ear, he hears the demon's grievous moan, rising from his memory.

'My true intent is all for your delight,' he thinks it says, but he can't be exactly sure.

32.

The night is a deep velvet blue and the moon an alabaster balloon and the planets and the stars are spilled across the heavens, in handfuls and heaps, like gold coins. The smell of brine lives deep within the breeze that blows up from across the ocean and speaks, in a secret way, to the crowd of women who walk down the main sodium-lit thoroughfare it speaks of deep, feminine mysteries and unawakened and illimitable desires, of silver-haired mermaids and bearded, trident-waving mermen and the looped humps of sea monsters and bejewelled cities drowned beneath ma.s.ses of unreadable water. No one can remember a night quite so magical in Bognor Regis for years.

Bunny stands at the window of his chalet and watches the crowd as it moves down the lamp-lined path and pa.s.ses the swimming pool, pink and magical, where a reinforced concrete elephant in a yellow tutu spurts strawberry-coloured water from its upraised trunk. Bunny smiles to himself as the crowd of women, unsuspecting, pa.s.s the giant fibregla.s.s rabbit, goggle-eyed and buck-toothed, that stands like a bizarre avatar or tribal fetish beside the water-slide. On a little track circling the main swimming pool sits a brightly coloured electric train for children, its engine adorned with the same rapturous face of a circus clown that Bunny remembers from when his father brought him here as a child. He remembers, too, the fun fair, with its world-cla.s.s monorail and Apache Fort and Dutch windmill that the crowd drifts past, as it winds its way around the empty swings and deserted slides and abandoned seesaws of the children's playground.

A black rag of cloud slides across the surface of the moon and Bunny sucks on a Lambert & Butler and watches someone point at the Gaiety Building and someone point at the putting green (with its huge golf ball balanced on a thirty-foot golf tee) and someone point at the amus.e.m.e.nt arcade and everyone ascend the stairs and enter the Main Hall of Butlins Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis.

Standing at the window, there is a certain determination in Bunny's posture, his feet firmly upon the earth, his chin raised, his shoulders serious and square and a look of concentration, but also mourning, around his eyes.

Over the entrance to the Main Hall the Butlins mission statement blinks in a candy-pink neon, 'OUR TRUE INTENT IS ALL FOR YOUR DELIGHT', and Bunny can see through the arched windows of the hall the crowd of women milling around, their invitations in their hands, staring at each other and wondering what they are doing there.

'Our true intent is all for your delight,' says Bunny to himself and he throws back his head and drains the contents of a can of Coca-Cola.

Bunny has put on a fresh shirt thick red stripes with a contrasting white collar and cuffs and the bizarre webbed scar curls from the open neck of his shirt like crystals of frost. He has loaded extra pomade into his hair and arranged his lovelock so it sits on his forehead with a new, almost yogic serenity. His cheeks are freshly shaved and he smells heavily of cologne and there is a thin, embossed cicatrix above his right eye, an inch long, that looks like it has been sculpted from pink plasticine.

'What did you say, Dad?' says Bunny Junior.

'I said, our true intent is all for your delight,' says Bunny.

'What does that mean?' says the boy.

'I don't know.'

Bunny Junior sits sunk in a beige corduroy beanbag, his own scar across his left eye, faint and pale, like a distant, ghosted echo of his father's. He is dressed in a white T-shirt and a pair of blue gaberdine shorts and flip-flops.

Bunny turns to the boy, sucks on his cigarette, expels a funnel of smoke into the room and asks, 'Will you be all right, Bunny Boy?'

'I'll be all right. But will you?' says Bunny Junior. be all right. But will you?' says Bunny Junior.

Bunny crumples the can of c.o.ke and lobs it into the sink in the tiny kitchenette and says, 'Yes, I'm ready,' then slips on his jacket, throws his arms out to the side and says, 'How do I look?'

'You look good, Dad,' says Bunny Junior. 'You look ready.'

'Well, yeah, because there is something I've got to do,' says Bunny.

'I know, Dad,' says the boy, and he picks the scorched remnants of his encyclopaedia, with its rain-swollen pages, off a low laminated coffee table.

'You go wait for me down at the swimming pool, and I'll come by and pick you up later,' says Bunny.

'Yeah, Dad, I know.'

Bunny sucks the last gasp out of his Lambert & Butler, crushes it in an ashtray, checks himself in the mirror (for the hundredth time) and says, 'Sure you do, Bunny Boy.'

Bunny Junior lies back in the beanbag and opens his encyclopaedia and peels apart the ruined pages until he finds a definition of the word 'Fantasy'.

'A fantasy is a situation imagined by an individual which does not correspond with reality but expresses certain desires or aims of its creator. Fantasies typically involve situations that are impossible or highly unlikely,' reads the boy and closes the encyclopaedia. 'Who would have guessed that, Dad?' he says, secretly pinching his leg.

'See you, Bunny Boy,' says Bunny, and he opens the door of the chalet and steps outside into the cool evening air.

Outside the night air carries within it only the faintest idea of a chill but it is enough for Bunny to register a shiver run through his body. At least he hopes it is the breeze and not some eleventh-hour lack of resolve, because, as he walks down the path towards the Main Hall, he feels a rising but not altogether unexpected suspicion that the course of action he is about to embark upon may not be as straightforward as he has planned.

He stops walking for a moment, puts a Lambert & Butler in his mouth and looks up at the night sky for guidance or strength or courage or something, but the moon appears counterfeit and merely cosmetic, the stars cheap and gimmicky.

'Oh, man,' he says to himself. 'What happened to the night?'

Bunny Zippos his cigarette, takes a deep drag, holds it in his lungs and comes to understand that there is simply no point in turning back, he must do what he came here to do, and he expels a resolute stream of blue smoke into the air and moves on. He leaves the path, makes his way around the side of the Main Hall and enters the stage door of the Empress Ballroom.

The carpeted stairs are rank with cigarette smoke and stale beer, and as he climbs them, Bunny sees within the bizarre amorphous pattern of the flock wallpaper a gallery of sinister faces with elongated and spiteful eyes. He sees these as a congregation of accusatory faces a grotesque collection of the aggrieved and he hopes that they are not some kind of premonition of things to come.

He traces his finger along the raised scar over his right eye and walks down a short hall, and as he draws closer he hears the dull murmur of the crowd gathering and he thinks he can hear, on the soft-pedal, a note of anxious expectation growing within it. He also senses, deeper down, a reverberation of malice and mistrust that he knows is imagined, or at least antic.i.p.ated, but nevertheless implodes within him like a sadness.

'Oh, man,' he says again and he enters the cramped backstage area of the Empress Ballroom.

Bunny sequesters himself into the wings and, hidden there, takes a deep breath and pulls back one of the red velvet, star-spangled curtains and sees that the interior of the Empress Ballroom, with its purple-and-gold satin ceiling and its ornamental balconies, is filled to capacity with the crowd of women that he had observed walking up the main path. He feels his heart constrict and a bubble of dread rise in his chest.

On the tiny glittering stage, a three-piece band dressed in pale green velour jackets begins to play an instrumental version of a soft rock cla.s.sic that Bunny feels is both familiar and foreign at the same time.

Bunny puts a Lambert & Butler in his mouth and pats his pocket for his Zippo.

'Need a light, friend?' says a voice.

Bunny turns and sees a tall, lean-looking figure standing, like a tower of obtuse angles, in the shadows. He has a cigarette dangling from his mouth and what appears to be a saxophone hanging around his neck. The man strikes a match and the flare of the flame reveals him to be a blue-eyed, handsome man in his early fifties. He sports a black moustache, wears a hairnet and is dressed in the same pale green velour jacket that the other band members are wearing. He reaches over and lights Bunny's cigarette.

'Shouldn't you be on?' says Bunny, keeping his voice low.

The musician takes a drag of his cigarette and blows a considered plume of smoke into the air and says, 'No, man, they haul me in on the third number.' Then he takes a step back, sucks on his cigarette again and gives Bunny the once-over. 'Hey, man, I love the quiff. What are you?' he asks, 'A joke-man? A magician? A singer?'

'Yeah, something like that,' says Bunny, and then adds, 'I dig your moustache.'

'Thanks, man. The missus don't go for it much.'

'No, it looks good,' says Bunny.

'Well, it's a commitment,' says the musician and takes a final drag on his cigarette and with a swivel of his black leather boot grinds it into the floor.

'I can see that,' says Bunny.

'But I do love my wife,' says the musician, tracing his fingers along his moustache, a distant look in his eyes.

Bunny feels a wave of emotion erupt in his throat and he presses his lips together and turns his face away, so that it is momentarily lost in shadow.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a tiny man in a red tuxedo with white piping and gold b.u.t.tons the size of milk bottle tops and an immaculate strawberry-blonde toupee pushes past Bunny and bounds onto the stage. He executes, with a shimmy and a shake, a series of rolling gestures with his hands that brings the band's song to a close.

The musician with the moustache leans in close to Bunny and behind his hand speaks to him out of the side of his mouth.

'Hey, did you hear the one about the junkie who shot up a whole packet of curry powder?'

'No,' says Bunny, who has pulled back the curtain again and is anxiously scanning the crowd on the dance floor of the Empress Ballroom.

'Yeah, well, now he's in a korma.'

On the stage the diminutive Master of Ceremonies skips up to the microphone, pops his cuffs and throws his arms out wide and says in a voice that surprises Bunny in its depth and insistence, 'Hi-di-hi!'

The audience responds with a smattering of non-committal applause.