Ominous portents

Ominous portents are a recurring pattern in Bunny’s story: everyday sounds, natural phenomena, and fragments of news begin to seem like signs of approaching catastrophe. Their force comes from the uncertain boundary between what can be observed and what Bunny makes of it. A burning landmark and a wasps’ nest are real; the sense that they announce a larger reckoning belongs to his increasingly unsettled perception. Together, these signs give private distress an apocalyptic scale without making every warning clearly supernatural or reliably understood.

Early Signs and the Burning Pier

The first signs arrive amid Bunny’s disorientation. He notices a shrill, chattering noise from outside, audible above the air conditioner and so intense that it seems almost apocalyptic. Yet it does not quite make him curious. The sound establishes a recurring tension: the world appears to be announcing something, but Bunny is too dulled or preoccupied to respond fully. The portent is present before he can interpret it, and his partial inattention becomes part of its effect.

That tension sharpens when Libby tells him that the West Pier is burning. Bunny empties a small bottle of vodka, lights another cigarette, and struggles across the hotel room to the window. There he sees the pier burning across the water beneath a dark cloud of starlings. The scene combines an actual fire with birds whose distressed movement makes the disaster seem larger than the visible damage. Bunny wonders why he did not see it sooner and how long he has been in the room; his recognition of the fire is entangled with an uncertain sense of elapsed time and his memory of Libby.

Libby gives the birds’ disturbance an intimate emotional meaning, imagining their young burning in their nests and saying she cannot bear it. Her distress turns the spectacle into more than distant news: the suffering of the birds becomes something Bunny hears through his wife’s voice and tears. The starlings will recur in his later thoughts, so the image of the burning pier does not remain a single episode. It becomes a remembered sign whose associations intensify as Bunny’s perceptions darken.

Death, Shadows, and the Wasps’ Nest

A separate warning appears in Bunny’s encounter with a prostitute. Her voice becomes difficult for him to understand, and a twitching hand moves on his stomach. In the middle of this exchange, he experiences the sudden thought, “I am damned.” His response is not an explanation but a deflection: he says that a bath upstairs must be overflowing. The contrast makes the moment ominous without clarifying its cause. A private conviction of doom surfaces, then is covered by an ordinary excuse.

Later, after looking at himself in a mirror and feeling newly powerful, Bunny sees the shadows behind him bleed, blur, and shift. He imagines them advancing from the spirit world and senses that they belong to the dead, rearranging themselves to make room for him. His intuition is not simply terror: he believes he will die, perhaps not that day but soon, and is surprised to find some comfort in the prospect. The shadows turn an ordinary interior into a threshold between the living and the dead, while Bunny’s unexpected comfort complicates the warning rather than resolving it.

In the same sequence, Bunny notices a pale, perforated clump in the corner of a toilet block. Its shape first suggests a human heart; he then recognizes it as a living wasps’ nest. He interprets the wasps as preparing themselves and links their presence to the earlier fire, thinking of the starlings circling. For a brief moment his mind supplies a succession of catastrophic images, then he checks his teeth in the mirror and wonders where the thoughts came from. The shift from an identifiable nest to imagined apocalypse shows how a concrete object can trigger a much wider, less controllable field of fear.

Public Violence and Personal Foreboding

The portents also reach Bunny through television. A remote lodged under him switches on the set, showing upside-down CCTV footage of the Horned Killer terrorising shoppers in a Tesco car park in Birmingham. The news reports another attack: two young nurses have been killed in their shared accommodation in Bordesley Green, and police remain baffled as panic spreads through the Midlands. The report is specific and public, unlike the private visions attached to the shadows and the wasps. Its threat exists beyond Bunny’s imagination, even as the awkward angle of the footage places him in a disordered, half-conscious relation to the news.

Bunny predicts that the killer is only getting started and is coming his way. River does not hear him; she is absorbed in her own actions. This brief failure of communication leaves his warning unanswered and places a real, developing danger beside his more ambiguous forebodings. Across these scenes, ominous signs do not form a neat code with a single explanation. Birds, shadows, insects, bodily unease, and televised violence accumulate through recurrence and contrast. The motif makes Bunny’s world feel increasingly threatened while preserving the uncertainty of whether a particular sign is supernatural, psychological, or simply a real event that his fear has made portentous.