Libby hangs herself at home

Libby hangs herself at home, an event discovered by Bunny Munro and Bunny Junior that leaves both father and son living with her absence in different ways. The scene begins with a locked bedroom and a child’s warning, but its consequences extend through the novel: Bunny’s shock and grief, Bunny Junior’s fear that his mother’s image is disappearing, and their later experiences of her as a presence in memory and vision.

Background and Warning

When Bunny returns to the flat, Bunny Junior tells him that Libby has locked herself in her room and will not come out. The child rubs his forehead and scratches the back of his leg as he explains. Around them, the home is in disarray; Bunny notices that some of his clothes have been slashed or torn. He senses that this may be a message directed at him and that he may be responsible, though the guilt remains indistinct. Almost at once, however, his attention turns to his frustrated expectation of sex with his wife. The shift from an uneasy suspicion of blame to self-absorption exposes the emotional distance present at the threshold of the crisis; the narration does not establish that Bunny understands what Libby is facing.

Bunny presses the bedroom door handle and calls for Libby, first loudly and then more quietly. Bunny Junior points out that Coco Pops are scattered across the hall and has been stomping on them in his bare feet. As Bunny listens at the door, he hears a high, strange vocal sound from inside. In the hall, lengths of Crazy String hang from the empty light socket; Bunny stares at them and sinks to his knees. The interruption is absurd and ordinary, but it does not dispel the alarm: Bunny Junior then gives him a key, making it possible to open the bedroom door.

Discovery

Bunny enters the room with his son behind him. The small portable television is on the floor by the window, still showing Teletubbies. Bunny Junior keeps his eyes on the screen, unable to understand the voice of Po, while he senses his father has stopped moving. He lowers his gaze to the carpet and notices a Coco Pop lodged between the toes of his left foot. The child’s attention to this tiny detail runs beside the event without absorbing it; he does not look directly at what his father has found.

Libby, wearing her orange nightdress, is hanging from the security grille. Her feet rest on the floor and her knees are buckled: she has used her crouched weight to strangle herself. Bunny curses quietly and raises a hand to his mouth. His response is rendered as a shockingly divided instant: he shuts his eyes against an intrusive sexual thought about her body even as he confronts her death. The juxtaposition does not soften the horror of the discovery; it shows how his habitual sexual appetite persists at the moment when his marriage and family life have been irrevocably changed.

The Immediate Aftermath

From the balcony, Bunny watches two attendants push a gurney across the car park and put Libby into the ambulance. Their unhurried handling of the task seems eerily routine to him. A summer breeze moves through the estate and flaps the sheet over the gurney; Bunny thinks he can see the side of Libby’s foot but is unsure. He drinks lager and smokes as he watches. The ordinary gestures continue where an emergency might seem to demand urgency, making the removal of his wife appear at once practical and unreal.

As he leans over the railing, Bunny remembers proposing to Libby in a hotel room in Eastbourne. He recalls her returning from the bathroom and his drunken, reckless request that she marry him. She tells him he is drunk and asks him to ask again in the morning; he responds by making a show of checking his watch. This memory places their marriage beside the ambulance carrying her away. It does not explain her suicide, but it gives the aftermath a personal measure: Bunny returns in thought to the beginning of their life together while watching its end being handled as routine.

Memory, Vision, and Continuing Presence

The loss does not settle into a single, shared form of grief. Bunny Junior can store detailed knowledge in an orderly mental catalogue, yet finds it increasingly difficult to recall what his mother looked like. He tries to preserve their experiences like exhibits in the Booth Museum. When he remembers being pushed on a swing at St Ann’s Well Gardens, he can picture himself laughing in the air but cannot clearly see who is pushing him. His mother becomes, in this memory, a dissolving figure; the child feels suspended, beyond touch and consequence. The effort to catalogue memories cannot stop the image itself from fading.

That fear coexists with vivid encounters. In Newhaven, while Bunny Junior is in the Punto, he believes his mother will eventually find him. He senses the smell of her hand cream and a touch across his brow, and hears a voice tell him that he is the most luminous object in the universe. Later, mist gathers around the car and he sees Libby in her orange nightdress, seated on a low wall and beckoning. He leaves the car, sits beside her, and rests his head against her body. The scene gives him a moment of warmth and recognition against the threat of forgetting; it presents his contact with her through his perception, not as an explanation of what happens after death.

Libby also appears to Bunny amid the crowd gathered for his public apology. He sees her in her orange nightdress and asks her to forgive him, saying that he missed her. When he asks whether she has been haunting him, she denies ever having done so, then flickers and disappears beneath the crowd’s umbrellas. The exchange leaves the boundary between memory, vision, and supernatural presence unresolved. Libby’s suicide is not only the past event that bereaves the family: it continues to shape how Bunny understands his guilt and how Bunny Junior tries to remain connected to the mother whose face he fears losing.