'I can't hear you!' says the MC, in a singsong voice, 'I said "Hi-di-hi!"' and then walks to the lip of the stage and points the microphone at the audience.

'Hi-di-hi!' says the audience, in unison.

'That's better! Are we gonna have fun tonight?'

The crowd, swept up, clamours its a.s.sent, with foot stomps and hand claps.

'We are gonna dance!' says the MC, and the little man does a nifty twisting movement with his tiny feet, his pink toupee shimmering in the stage lights, the b.u.t.tons on his jacket twinkling. 'We are gonna sing!' he cries, and yodels horribly, then c.o.c.ks his thumb over his shoulder at the band and says in a panto-whisper, waggling his thick black eyebrows, 'I better leave that to the professionals!' The crowd laugh and whistle and applaud. 'And when the lights go down,' says the MC, winking suggestively, 'maybe make a little love!'

The crowd hoot and stomp their feet as the little man shuffles around the stage making suggestive movements with his tiny, gloved hands and grinding his child-like hips.

Bunny feels a thread of perspiration wind its way down the side of his face and he pulls a handkerchief from the pocket of his jacket and presses it against his forehead. The musician looks at Bunny with an expression of concern or sympathy or something.

'What are you doing here, man?' he asks.

'I'm just trying to put things right, you know,' says Bunny.

'Uh-huh, I hear you,' says the musician. 'We've got to love one another or die, brother.'

'Yeah, I heard that,' says Bunny, and again a swell of regret blooms within him and he puts his hand up to his heart.

'It's super-glue, baby,' says the musician, and blows softly into his saxophone. 'It keeps the heart of the world pumping.'

Bunny peers around the curtain again, and the mirrorball that hangs from the ceiling of the ballroom has begun to revolve and splinters of silver light dance across the faces of the crowd and Bunny sees Georgia, standing in the front row, a thing of certain beauty, proud-looking, almost regal, in a cream chiffon evening dress with scarlet sequins sewn across its bodice like a spray of arterial blood. Her yellow hair hangs in loose ringlets around her lavender eyes and she sways, back and forth, to some inner song, a content smile upon her face. Zoe and Amanda stand each side of Georgia dressed in identical indigo trouser suits. Bunny notices that Zoe now has the same candy-coloured hair extensions as Amanda, and they look happy.

Standing nearby, Bunny sees the Tae Kwon Do black belt, Charlotte Parnovar, dressed in a Mexican peasant skirt and a white embroidered blouse, and as Bunny unconsciously traces his fingers along the lumped bridge of his nose he sees that her face looks softer, less severe, all evidence of the unsightly cyst on her forehead gone.

Bunny sees Pamela Stokes (Poodle's 'gift') with her arm around the waist of the cuckolded Mylene Huq from Rottingdean, both smiling and stealing shy and coquettish glances at one another.

Bunny recognises Emily, the cashier from McDonald's, dressed in a snug yellow top and tight red trousers, her skin glowing, gazing about the Empress Ballroom as though she has never seen anything so beautiful in her life and applauding enthusiastically as the strange little MC, with the pink toupee, raises his hand to quieten the crowd.

'But seriously, folks, before the fun begins, we've got a gentleman who has come along tonight and wants to say a few words to you.'

Bunny wipes his face with his handkerchief and says to the musician with the saxophone and the moustache, 'I guess this is me.'

'Knock 'em dead, brother,' says the musician, and he pats Bunny on the back. 'Knock 'em dead.'

Bunny takes a final, firing-squad suck of his Lambert & Butler and grinds it out on the floor. Then he pulls the curtain aside, pats at his lovelock and walks onto the stage as the MC executes a dainty little two-step, throws out his arms and says, 'So without further ado-da-do, could we have a big round of applause for Mr Bunny Munro!'

33.

Bunny walks onstage to blind and uproarious applause. He enters an ap.r.o.n of red light that spills across the stage like splashed ink. He registers the foot stomps and cheers and whistles, and for a brief moment Bunny feels the air of compacted dread loosen around his heart and thinks that, all things considered, his plan may not be so foolhardy as he had previously thought and sending out the invitations to these women was perhaps not such a dumb idea after all. But as he stretches out his hand and sees the blood-coloured light pool in his palm like a cup of gore, he understands that nothing in this world is ever that easy. Why would it be? He walks closer to the lip of the stage, plants his feet firmly on the floorboards and peers into the audience.

He sees, with a shamed stricture of the heart, the old blind lady, Mrs Brooks, in dark gla.s.ses and pink lipstick, seated in a wheelchair. Her skin looks considerably younger, Bunny notices, and as she performs her metronomic rocking and claps her ringed hands together, she appears sprightly and newly energised. Behind her, a pretty young carer stands, one hand resting affectionately on the old lady's shoulder.

To one side of her, Bunny sees, dressed in a dazzling mulberry taffeta c.o.c.ktail dress, the young girl from The Babylon Lounge in Hove that Bunny date-raped. She is sharing a joke and laughing together with a dark-eyed beauty in sateen drainpipes and gold pumps that he had a similar thing with after a night at The Funky Buddha. Bunny feels a shamed flush of blood to the throat.

He sees a girl with long, ironed hair and crazy kohled eyes and cupid-bow lips, and he recognises her as the Avril Lavigne look-alike from the bungalow in Newhaven. Beside her stands Mushroom Dave, tapping his foot and dressed in a black suit and tie, his arm thrown protectively around her shoulders, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He whispers something to the girl and they look at each other and smile.

And so it goes, Bunny looks over there and looks over here and looks somewhere in the middle and sees someone from this place and then someone from that place and someone from some other place altogether. On and on it goes, faces rising from the mossy depths of his memory, each with their burning attendant shame Sabrina Cantrell, and Rebecca Beresford, and Rebecca Beresford's beautiful young daughter and over there, caught in the roaming spotlight, he sees Libby's mother, Mrs Pennington, who is smiling now, smiling and rubbing the shoulders of her stricken, chair-bound husband.

More and more he sees them, standing at the front of the stage, swaying on the dance floor, standing on tiptoes at the back of the hall, waving from the little ornamental balconies all of them and all the others, in every shape and form and incarnation, some half-recalled and some half-forgotten and some barely a smudged fingerprint on his memory but all looking glorious and radiant and altogether perfect.

From this council estate and this broken-down apartment and this one-bedroom flat and this down-at-heel hotel, from this dying seaside town and from that dying seaside town, Bunny sees them all coming towards him, from down the days and months and dreadful years of his life, the great teeming parade of the sorrowful, the grieving, the wounded and the shamed but look! Look at their faces! all happy now and happy and altogether happy in the eternally beautiful Empress Ballroom at Butlins Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis.

Then, as Bunny steps, squinting, into the spotlight and taps the microphone twice with his index finger, he sees, at the very front of the stage, River the waitress from the breakfast room of the Grenville Hotel looking more lovely than he can imagine anyone could ever look stepping angrily from the crowd and thrusting forth her arm and extending one purple finger and screaming through her teeth, 'My G.o.d, it's him! it's him!'

Suddenly the atmosphere undergoes a momentous change. The applause, like an inverted roar, is sucked from the room and there is a whirl of confusion and all the furious light bulbs of recognition ignite at the same time. Then follows a howl of outrage that breaks across Bunny with such force that he is propelled backward and almost knocked off his feet.

Bunny steps back to the microphone, leans in and says, into the purgatorial storm, 'My name is Bunny Munro. I sell beauty products. I ask you for one minute of your time.'

Bunny stares down at the audience and begins his testimony.

Bunny tells the crowd how he was involved in a head-on collision with a concrete mixer truck. He tells them how he was struck by lightning. He explains how his nine-year-old son was almost killed. He talks, to the audience, in terms of a miracle or a wonderment, and he puts forward the question as to why he was spared.

'Why was I spared?' he asks, in slow motion, crackling yellow lightning fracturing the purple-and-gold ceiling. The stage lights shift and move across Bunny's face in reds and purples and deep greens, and the mirrorball slowly revolves and sprinkles him with particles of jewelled light, and everything feels like it has come climbing up from a dream.

He tells the crowd of the shameful nature of his life. He talks explicitly and in detail about the people he has taken advantage of how he has treated the world and everything in it with utter contempt.

'I was a salesman, all right,' says Bunny, 'peddling misery, door to door,' and he closes his eyes and surrenders to his own swooning testimony and his body is picked up and sent floating about on little prayers of refracted light. He places his hands inside his shirt and traces his fingers along the embossed scar that the electric charge has written into his body and talks about the nature of love and how frightened it made him feel, how the very existence of it terrified him and had him running scared and, with beads of red perspiration blossoming in the palms of his hands, he talks about the suicide of his wife and his own accountability in that dreadful act. He talks about the terrible absence of her in his life and in the life of his boy.

He tells the crowd of his crisis of conscience and how he had seen all the things he had done and all the misery he caused pa.s.s by him in an unbroken chain and he tells them how he was literally possessed by the Devil as coloured water pools around his feet and flows like a river across the ap.r.o.n of the stage.

Once again he asks of the audience, why he had been spared.

'Why was I spared?' he asks, again, in slow colour motion.

He says that after a while he had given up thinking about why he had not died and started to think about how he could live his life differently in the future. He tells the audience that his father is dying of lung cancer and that his intention is to go and look after him. He tells the audience that he is going to try to move through life with a bit more dignity from now on. But most of all, he tells the audience that he is going to go and look after his little boy, Bunny Junior.

At first the crowd berate him. They boo him, hiss him and shake their fists at him. Then Mushroom Dave moves forward and expertly flicks a cigarette and it explodes in a shower of sparks against Bunny's chest, which serves to further increase the force of the crowd's disdain. Charlotte Parnovar starts springing up and down on her toes, throwing threatening shapes and looking like she is about to jump up on stage and impart a little more peace, integrity and respect by busting Bunny's nose again. River keeps thrusting her finger at Bunny and shrieking incomprehensibly. A wine gla.s.s spins through the air and shatters on the stage behind him. Libby's mother, Mrs Pennington, screams in rage from the centre of the room, her face a horrible mask, the bone of her finger jabbing at him from inside her long black glove.

But Bunny soldiers on.

He says that the well-being of his son is the most important thing to him in the world and that he knows he can't wind back the clock and undo all the things he has done, but, with the crowd's help, he could at least turn the tide on his wretched life and move on with a little self-respect. He implores the crowd to listen to him.

Perhaps it was the blind lady, Mrs Brooks who knows? but someone, somewhere, says, 'Quiet! Let him speak,' and the ramping crowd, in time, gains some composure, and when Bunny talks about the depth of love he has for his nine-year-old son, a sudden unexpected groundswell of sentiment moves through the people and someone, somewhere, shakes their head and calls out, 'You poor man,' and slowly the crowd's rage falls away and they begin to listen.

Then Bunny moves forward and he holds his hands out to the sides, the red sweat leaking from his wrists like blood and fire blossoming across his chest, and he says, 'But first I need your help,' and he bows his dripping head, and then he raises it again.

'I am truly sorry,' he says.

Bunny takes a step forward and experiences a contra-zooming of the crowd that causes him to clutch at the memory of them.

'Can you please find it in your hearts to forgive me?'

Tears pour down his cheeks red tears, purple tears, green tears and Georgia sobs quietly and Zoe and Amanda give her consolatory hugs and the girls from The Funky Buddha and The Babylon Lounge wipe tears from each other's eyes with balled-up Kleenexes and there is a great surge of collective emotion as you might see on TV or somewhere, and the audience begin to applaud because they are human and so much want to forgive and Bunny moves forward and descends the three short steps into the crowd.

River the waitress approaches Bunny and throws her arms around his neck and cries strawberry tears upon his chest and forgives, and Mushroom Dave embraces Bunny and forgives, and the little junkie chick smiles up at him through her ironed hair and kohled eyes and forgives and all the girls from McDonald's and Pizza Hut and KFC hold onto Bunny and kiss him and forgive and Mrs Pennington moves forward with her wheelchaired husband and lifts her arms up and Bunny embraces her and together they weep and together they forgive and Bunny moves through the crowd and feels a chill in the air and notices a ghost of frost curl from his lips as Charlotte Parnovar dressed as Frida Kahlo hugs him with her muscular arms and forgives and the blind Mrs Brooks reaches out to him with her ancient hands and forgives and people kiss him and hug him and pat him on the back and forgive because we so much want to forgive and to be forgiven ourselves and Bunny sees Libby, his wife, through the crowd, dressed in her orange nightdress and as he moves towards her the crowd parts and he smiles into a prism of light and green oily oversized tears fall down his face and he says, 'Forgive me, Libby. Oh, Libby, forgive me.'

'Hey, don't worry about that,' she says, with a dismissive wave of her hand. 'There is plenty of time for that.'

'I went a bit crazy. I just missed you so much,' says Bunny, and purple blood drips from his brow and pours from his hands and runs relentlessly across the dance floor.

'Hey, I've got to go,' says Libby. 'Bunny Junior will be all right now.'

'Does that mean you're going to stop haunting me?'

Bunny hears the siren of a police car or an ambulance or something, from a million miles away, wailing mournfully through the psychedelic night. He thinks he hears a great rain, crashing all around him, like applause.

'Haunting you?' she says, with a furrowed brow. 'What do you mean?'

'I just miss you so much.'

'I never haunted haunted you,' she says, flickering and strobing all about the place. you,' she says, flickering and strobing all about the place.

'Well, what are you doing now then?' says Bunny, mopping at his face with his handkerchief, his blood adding a scarlet patina to the rain-pocked water running freely along the gutters.

Libby laughs. 'Hey, Bunny, I'll see you in a minute,' and moves off and disappears like a ghost or spectre or something, under the streaming umbrellas of the weeping crowd.

As Bunny walks down the main thoroughfare, the sky is wide and mostly clear and full of ordinary lights. The Butlins mission statement blinks above his head and he hears the band start up in the Empress Ballroom and a cheer from the crowd and the sound of a saxophone carried on the cool, salted air. Sc.r.a.ps of blue cloud drift across the moon like spilled ink and he wipes his hand across his brow and loosens his tie.

'Oh, man,' he says, with the kind of narcotic euphoria a dying creature may experience before its lights blow out.

Bunny can see his son waiting for him at the edge of the pool, in a hoop of light thrown down by the streetlamp. His flip-flops are placed carefully beside him and he trails his feet, thoughtfully, in the water.

'Hi, Dad,' says the boy.

'Hi, Bunny Boy,' says his father.

Bunny puts his hand lightly upon his son's head and runs his fingers through his hair.

'Check this out,' says Bunny. 'Come on.'

The boy climbs to his feet, looks up at the heavens and makes an unsolicited observation about the sky looking like a giant swimming pool full of black ink and stars, then follows Bunny over to the brightly coloured electric children's train sitting on its silver tracks. He trails puddled footprints of pink water behind him, the moon duplicated in each of them the police sirens, the ambulance sirens, getting louder.

'I remember this from when I was a kid,' says Bunny, and he climbs into the front carriage. 'Hop in,' he says.

Bunny Junior climbs up next to his father and makes himself comfortable and Bunny points to the train's control panel and its big yellow plastic key.

'See that key?' says Bunny. 'Turn it.'

Bunny Junior looks up at his father, his lips pressed together, and feels a fluttering around the region of the heart.

'Don't be afraid,' says Bunny, 'this time you're driving,' and places his hand on the boy's head.

Bunny Junior reaches down and turns the big yellow key and the little train springs to life and it begins to shunt along its tracks. Bunny throws his arm around the boy and the child smiles wide and begins to laugh. The train circles the swimming pool and Bunny Junior sees reflected in its waters all the treasures of heaven and he looks at the rain dripping off his father's head and he feels the rain running down his own face and the boy starts to laugh out loud. Bunny rings the train's silver bell and Bunny Junior rings the silver bell and scarlet blood flows down the gutters and from one end of the Holiday Camp to the next can be heard the laughter of a father and son and the ringing of silver bells.

As the train completes its circuit and slows to a halt, Bunny asks the boy, 'Do you want to go again?'

Bunny Junior looks at his father and reads his face and shakes his head, and says, 'No, it's OK, Dad.'

He watches his father climb out of the train.

'Come on, I want to sit by the pool,' shouts Bunny. 'It's much too loud here.'

Together they walk back to the pool. Bunny takes his shoes and socks off and dangles his feet in the rain-pocked water as Bunny Junior sits down beside him. Bunny puts his arm around his son, squinting into the sudden white headlights.

'Ah, Bunny Boy,' he says, and draws him close and presses his lips into his hair and breathes in his pungent, little-boy odour.

'f.u.c.k,' says Bunny, quietly, and shakes his head.

Bunny Junior reads his father's face some more and sees the raised white scarring like a lace handkerchief at his throat and thinks he smells the tang of scorched flesh and sees the water pooling all around him.

'I've got to lie down a minute,' says Bunny, but the boy can't hear him for the screaming umbrellas.

By the edge of the pool and in slow motion Bunny falls away and lies upon his back, his feet dangling in the riffled water. The boy reaches over and strokes his father's brow.

'I'm going to close my eyes for a bit,' says Bunny, clutching for a moment at Bunny Junior's T-shirt.

Bunny Junior leans down and kisses his father.

'No, don't close your eyes, Dad,' he says softly and kisses him again.

Bunny shuts his eyes, his arms relaxing at his sides.

'Just for a bit,' he says. 'It's better.'

'No, don't close your eyes, Dad,' says the boy.

Bunny tilts his head away and he opens his eyes again for a fraction of a second and sees Penny Charade, the twelve-year-old girl he met at Butlins when he was a boy, dressed in her yellow polka-dot bikini, her long wet hair hanging down, sitting on the other side of the swimming pool, her caramel-coloured legs moving the surface of the water. She smiles at Bunny with her violet eyes.

'I just found this world a hard place to be good in,' says Bunny, then closes his eyes and, with an expiration of breath, goes still.

'Oh, Daddy,' whispers Bunny Junior.

The rain hammers down and black thunderheads boom and send lightning crackling across the sky. The crowds weep and scream from under their dripping umbrellas and beneath the canvas awning of the cafe on Western Road. Bunny Junior lays his head down on his father's chest and puts his arms around his neck and kisses him a final time.

He looks behind him and sees the maroon concrete mixer truck on its side. He sees the sheared tattooed arm dangling by a cord of skin tissue from its window. He sees the mangled Punto, wrapped in folds of smoke and steam, its pa.s.senger door hanging open. He feels the sting of his grazed hands and knees. He sees his blackened encyclopaedia lying on the road, curling grey smoke. He hears the last soft beat of his father's heart.

'Oh, Daddy,' he says.

The boy wipes the blood and the storm from his father's face and sees rushing towards him through the curtain of rain, in slow motion just like life the emergency services, with sirens whooping and lights screaming, and ambulance drivers in their streaming rubberised jackets and firemen with water running from their golden helmets and police officers with their heavy utility belts, in slow motion, rushing headlong towards him just like in life and the paramedics with their clattering gurneys rushing and rushing towards him and the leaden rain coming down, and the awed and weeping crowd, like statues, but, in their way, full of noise and rushing too just like life all suddenly clamouring, like a vast agency of protection, for the boy's attention.