Poodle

Poodle is Bunny’s friend from work, a conspicuous and unreliable companion whose clownish style often turns serious settings into comedy. His role is more than that of a background drinking partner: he offers Bunny practical assistance, shares in the salesmen’s social world, and is present at moments that expose the limits of that world’s bravado. The same figure who quietly signals affection to Bunny Junior at a funeral can be too intoxicated to hear Bunny’s anger, or pass along an address that feeds Bunny’s pursuit of women.

Appearance and Manner

Poodle is repeatedly identified by a deliberately striking look: tight stonewashed jeans, a yellow, lacquered quiff, and a grin likened to a dog’s. At Bunny’s flat, he arrives with a drugged sheen in his eyes and greets Bunny with an insult, as if familiarity licenses rudeness. His appearance is part of his entrance-making manner, but it also becomes a comic refrain: when he later walks into the office, his yellow hairstyle and leering expression are immediately recognizable, while his eyes are described as bloodshot.

His manner swings between showmanship and visible disorder. He can make a dramatic entrance, joke, or contribute to a room’s laughter; elsewhere he loses track of why he has stood up, freezes in a half-crouch, and sinks back onto the sofa. The contrast is central to his characterization: Poodle performs confident, knowing masculinity, yet the performance is repeatedly undercut by intoxication and physical disarray.

At the Funeral

At Libby’s funeral, Poodle stands at the back of the crowd, tapping his foot and moving his hips while secretly smoking with the cigarette cupped in his right hand. He wears headphones and, even at the service, his tight stonewashed jeans and yellow quiff make him conspicuous. The boy notices him, smiles, and receives Poodle’s secret thumbs-up. Among Bunny’s friends, Poodle is the one Bunny Junior likes best, a preference the boy states without hesitation.

Poodle’s irreverence briefly disrupts the funeral’s solemnity. He flicks his cigarette butt with remarkable accuracy and hits a seagull; when the bird flies off carrying the cigarette, Poodle punches the air in triumph. His girlfriend, whose top lip bears a grape-coloured mark, elbows him, and he lowers his head as if in prayer before winking at Bunny Junior and rolling his eyes. The exchange makes him comic, but also gives the boy a small moment of private recognition amid the ceremony.

The seagull incident prompts Bunny Junior to imagine a chain of events in which a cigarette carried to a nest starts the fire that destroys the West Pier. This is the boy’s speculation, not a confirmed account of the fire. His account draws on his own attachment to the pier: his mother took him there for a guided tour on his eighth birthday, followed by a walk to Marrocco’s for ice cream. Poodle’s careless joke of an action therefore touches a memory the boy associates with his mother, even as the boy’s affection for Poodle remains undiminished.

Friendship with Bunny

Poodle and Bunny share the easy, coarse familiarity of longstanding friends. Poodle enters Bunny’s flat with an insulting greeting, while his girlfriend tells him to mind his manners and kicks him in the shin. Bunny, meanwhile, notices the distinctive mark on her lip. The scene presents Poodle’s social circle as boisterous and unceremonious, with Bunny’s attention liable to move from his friend’s arrival to the woman accompanying him.

Their friendship also has a more vulnerable history. Bunny remembers the moment when his infant son pointed at him while sitting in Libby’s arms, and his own overwhelming wish to go to the pub with Poodle. After half a dozen pints, Poodle put an arm around Bunny and reassured him that Libby would get used to the situation. The recollection links Poodle to Bunny’s retreat from the demands of early fatherhood: he was available as a companion, but his comfort offered an easy reassurance rather than addressing Bunny’s distance from his family.

That familiar alliance does not mean Bunny accepts everything Poodle says. During a later gathering, Poodle makes a disparaging remark about Bunny’s father. Bunny reacts with unusual force and threatens to slap him if he says anything else. Poodle does not hear the warning: he has collapsed against the sofa arm, a Viking helmet still clinging to his hair, his eyes rolled back and eyelids fluttering. His muttered reference to cocaine underscores how completely intoxication has removed him from the exchange. The scene makes the friendship’s roughness consequential: Bunny’s anger is real, but Poodle is too incapacitated to register it.

Drinking, Work, and the Men’s Social World

Poodle’s work connection places him alongside Bunny and Geoffrey, but the evidence shows him more clearly as a social presence than as a reliable colleague. When Bunny discusses the business with Geoffrey, Poodle enters with bloodshot eyes, stonewashed jeans, and his familiar hairstyle. Bunny’s dry response treats Poodle’s appearance as evidence in an argument already under way, and Poodle’s baffled question about the previous night points to another stretch of drinking he cannot account for.

At The Wick, Poodle joins Bunny and Geoffrey in a conversation built around sexual preferences and male self-display. He drinks tequila, performs a conspicuous flirtation with a woman beside him, and declares himself a leg man. Geoffrey identifies with a different preference, and Bunny supplies his own blunt answer; the others accept it with silent agreement. The exchange shows Poodle helping to establish a social code in which sexual appetite is treated as a subject for competitive banter. That code offers the men a form of camaraderie, but it also echoes Bunny’s habit of turning desire into a measure of his identity.

Poodle is not only a drinking companion; he also supplies information and opportunities. During the sales journey, he approaches the yellow Fiat Punto, takes a small piece of notepaper from his shirt pocket, and gives Bunny an address in Newhaven as a gift. His self-satisfied delivery is immediately tempered by his dabbing at the raw entrance to his nostril. Later, when Bunny is speaking to Pamela Stokes, he identifies Poodle as the source of a description of her as an accommodating customer. In another instance, Bunny recalls Mylene Huq and obtains her address with a quick call to Poodle. These episodes make Poodle a conduit within Bunny’s network of sexual pursuit, not merely an observer of it.

Comic Support and Narrative Function

Poodle’s humour can help restore a room’s mood. After Bunny tells an elaborate, crude joke, the gathering erupts into laughter: Barbara and Raymond share the joke, Geoffrey chuckles, and even Poodle manages a thumbs-up. The narration presents the moment as a return of Bunny’s old persona, one capable of entertaining others. Poodle’s response is small, but it places him among the people who recognize and reward that performance.

Across these scenes, Poodle’s loyalty is real but limited. He gives Bunny Junior a discreet sign of friendship at the funeral and once offers Bunny physical and verbal comfort after the birth of his son. He also enables Bunny’s evasions, joining him in drinking and supplying contact information that serves Bunny’s compulsive pursuit. His entrances and gestures bring comic energy, yet the comedy does not make him dependable: at crucial moments he may be inattentive, intoxicated, or simply reinforcing the habits Bunny needs to confront. Poodle thus embodies the companionship that keeps Bunny’s old life moving, while offering little evidence that companionship alone can change its direction.