Ruin Nation (11 page)

But you’ll never get anything out of him. He may let slip something that hints to something else. Occasionally. When he’s drunk. But you’ll only half-hear it. Through a wall. And the words get drowned out by the sobbing.

I know things about him, however. Things that, perhaps, it would be insensitive to tell you. But I never hesitated to bad-mouth the swine when he was alive so I figure it would be the wrong kind of hypocrisy to start speaking well of him now.

That smacking himself on the head, I’ve seen autistics do that before. Don’t know why. I don’t know anything about autism. I can tell you about the gnashing of teeth, though, and how it’s not really gnashing. It’s more of a kind of chattering. Like a monkey. And that’s the thing... He grew up wanting to be a monkey. It was the only way to get affection.

Nanny didn’t like men, she told him. But she found monkeys morbidly amusing.

“I’ve always found simians preferable to the human male,” she said, doubtless whilst dragging him around by the earlobe. “They don’t lie. They don’t make false promises. They’re not dirty and disgusting. So just you follow your Nanny’s advice and mind you don’t grow up into one! Dirty,
dirty, disgusting
things! With just one thing on their dirty,
dirty
,
disgusting
minds!”

More astute parents might’ve noticed that their child’s primary carer was psychosexually deranged, advertised mainly in phone booths and spent whole hours diddling herself with a broom handle. They were unaware of the educational excursions to strip clubs and brothels. They didn’t see him playing lookout as she entertained sailors in back alleys, and they certainly didn’t see her pole dancing with a garter stuffed with banknotes and a peacock feather sticking out of her backside.

“These are the wages of sin,” she would tell the young Malmot, rubbing the notes beneath his nose. “And this,” she said, taking his hand and sliding it inside her hastily replaced underwear, “is the factory that Satan’s workers toil in.”

“Satan pays well,” says the seven-year-old
Malmot. “Did you find it hard to get a job with him?”

“The nuns at the convent wrote me a good reference,” she answers.

So you can talk of Reactive Attachment Disorder and what it did to the poor little mite, but, if anyone should be suffering emotional deprivation caused by separation from their parents, it’s me. After all, my mother was electrocuted and my father went mad and spent his last days in a lunatic asylum. I’d have killed to have two living parents and a perverted nanny. I would have known what to do with her.

Malmot’s window is open. The room reeks. Ceesal has brought a succession of increasingly weird people through the door in recent hours and if their ideas didn’t stink then their aftershave did: a communications expert who just shouted; a female public relations expert who wouldn’t listen; a black race relations expert who was adopted and had never met another black person in his life and, finally, an effeminate man who wanted to see the national flag ‘rebranded’ in pink to make it more ‘inclusive’. Thank God they were gone now.

Ceesal
has changed. He won’t take orders. He refuses to sign things without taking them away first. He’s slimmer now, dresses better and his speech is peppered with anachronistic slang. He calls people ‘guys’ and constantly invades their personal space.

“This is
not
the business of governing,” Malmot growls to Ceesal.

“You’re right,” the horrid grimace replies. “It’s the Future!”

“It’s dragging up mistakes from the past.”

“No, old man!”
Ceesal snaps. “You’re the past. You know, the word on the street is that this party’s out of touch. Well, I’m gonna change that! I’m gonna make us hip! I’m gonna make us happening!”

No, thinks
Malmot, you’re just a preening sociopath who wants to be loved. And it’s that desperation that’ll make people hate you.

Ceesal
speaks of opening up the process of government, making things transparent. Malmot reminds him of his plan to butt-fuck television. He asks how transparent he intends
that
to be. Ceesal says, oh that was last week and that they need to be more ‘Media convergent’ from now on. Malmot asks why the change of heart and where the Hell he dragged up such a gaggle of corporate-speech dunderheads to support him on the idea? Didn’t The Great Separation kill them off? Ceesal tells him that economic collapse isn’t the obstacle it used to be, at least, not for the
forward
-thinking. He continues with more incoherent babble about ‘attitudes’, ‘choice’ and ‘proactivity’.

Malmot
reaches into his desk drawer and produces a pistol. He shoots Ceesal through the head. Ceesal burbles, before passing with an anguished croak.

“And that’s the most sensible thing you’ve said in ages,” says
Malmot, kicking the corpse down the stairs. With Ceesal out of the picture, the whole post-Lindberg Show situation looks far rosier. But things get even better when he picks up the papers.

Now it takes three days for your average journalist to sober up enough to write an article – so the news is always three days out of date. And it’s now exactly three days since
Ceesal’s broadcast and, coincidently, three days since shoddy maintenance work crippled one of our last power stations and plunged seventy five percent of the population into darkness. 

And what’s today’s headline? Clue: It isn’t
Ceesal. That’s because no one outside of London and the New Home Counties had a working television set. Everyone
inside
London and The New Home Counties was watching porn.

Of the few who caught the broadcast,
Malmot thinks, we’ll tell them it was a propaganda transmission from mainland Europe – the snail-eating bastards. More reasons to switch off television and protect ourselves from foreign brainwashing and Orson-Wellesian mischief.

The live audience might suspect, but they’d be too drunk to remember and the makers too busy getting coked up and fucking their way up the
foodchain to care. So who’s to say what happened? That’s if anything happened at all? Ceesal? Never heard of him. Certainly never swore him in as Prime Minister. No, the new Prime Minister is, well, er? Hell. This is where it falls down. Who
is
the new Prime Minister?

Thackory
Rampton, despite being able to walk upright, looks like an oily seabird. Gerald Maxim has a good brain and totalitarian sympathies, but never goes anywhere without his rentboy. Harriet Beasley eats babies; Winona Crackleford is an addict with three legs. Winston  Mokele Mbembe doesn’t exist.

Geoffrey Durham, Chief of the Police and once one of
Malmot’s closest allies, makes no bones about his desire to lead the country. He knows all about the dictatorship, but is clever enough not to say anything that could hamper his chances of taking control of it. He’s the Ernst Roehm to Malmot’s Adolf and far too ambitious to be let anywhere near Number 10. He plans to combine his semi-regular thug police force with the military to create, well God knows what he wants to create, but it won’t be pretty. He also likes to dress as an insect for sex.

Well, they say keep your enemies close, but not when they’re looking at you through compound eyes and snapping their massive, dripping mandibles at you. So Harriet Beasley it is. No, Winona
Crackleford; addicts are easier to control. Or, perhaps Maxim’s rentboy could have the operation? That would solve a lot of problems. ...Ah, damnation! It’s all too complicated. What he wouldn’t give for Bactrian back. And then it hits him – a minute tingle at the base of his brain that sweeps upward into a big, fat, wonderful thought. He
will
have Bactrian back. Maybe not in soul, but at least in body.

“Sincerity Discount Undertakers?” the telephone operator enquires, as the digital exchange is down again.

“That’s correct,” Malmot answers.

“Just putting you through.”

“Thank you.”

“
Sincerity
Discount Undeertaakeers,” confirms the sagging answerphone tape. “We’re sorry that no one is present to take youuur call right now. We hope that you wiill try again later when one of our staff iis preseent, as no one iis preseent at preseent. Or you can leave a message after the tone. Remember, you have ouuur sinceeeere sympathieeeees at this difficuuuuuult tiiiiiiiiiime. [Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep]”

“Pick up the damn phone!” barks
Malmot, his

voice crackling from a stained speaker. “I know you’re in! You’re always in!”

A blood splattered apron lumbers forward through the shadows. It advances with the thud of a footstep and the scrape of the lame leg dragged behind it. Hot breath steams through black/brown rotting teeth. Piggy, onion-skinned eyes swivel in hooded sockets and a voice as stretched and strangulated as the answerphone message calls out:

“I was,
eeer… buuusy. And whoooom do I have the priveliiiiege of talking tooo? Would that, perhaps, be aaa... Miiisteer Qwerty?”

Malmot
pauses, remembers he chose his alias from staring too long at his keyboard and confirms: “Yes, that’s correct.”

“
Aaand would thaat be the Miiister Qwerty of the deead womaan from the reeservoir; a Miiister Qwerty of the road traffic aaaccident victiim with no heeead or the Miiister Qwerty of the faaat maan?” the terrible voice oozes.

“The man,” chokes
Malmot, realising he’s been stacking corpses under the same pseudonym.

“
Wiith the cock?”

“Yes.”

“Well, moost meen have a cock. So doo youu mean the maan wiith the cock aaand noo heead or the maaan wiith the cock liiike a fossilised thermos flask?”

“The,
urgh, thermos flask. You have such a way with words, Shuster,” says Malmot cringing with contempt.

“I
haave a waay wiith the deceased, tooo,” Shuster answers worryingly.

“Well, you’re not having it away with this one. I want his body.”

“They all do!” Shuster cackles. “Your frieend’s proooving quite populaar around here!”

“I,
er... I don’t get you.” Something like a chill runs up Malmot’s spine.

“
Youu seee the veil betweeen the living and the deead is very thin here... Aand a strapping maan liike youur friend...  We’ve goot a suiciide victiim... caan’t keeep her eyes off him!   Aand theere’s a woman whoo fell out of a Ferris wheeel – little moore than a blooody pulp, I tell youu –  sheees all over him like a rash!” An edge of resentment creeps into his voice. “Soo you piick hiim up tommooroow!” he snarls. “Theere’s only roooom for one Casanova heeere.”

Forget my surgical training.
The sad truth is I was born to work in advertising. Give me a product name and ten minutes in the toilet with a notepad and I’ll return with armfuls of catchy, punning dog-clag. Rhymes flow through me like sewage through a tenement hallway. Don’t put me near a piano. I’ve the keyboard dexterity of a double amputee jihadist – but that doesn’t stop me tapping out note sequences of such ungodly infectiousness that you’ll be humming them in your urn.

What a cruel gift to give a man: a talent that isn’t a talent and neither the sunny disposition nor cynical superficiality to advance in his career.

And now I make puppets. It’s not an appalling job. As far as civilian employment goes, well, I’ve hauled furniture, stacked crates, operated lathes, CNC routers and a funny machine that puts the threads on bolts, I’ve worked on the bin lorries, the recycling lorries and landfill sites, I’ve picked mushrooms grown in bunk beds full of shit and sold sex to the middle-aged woman at the post office in exchange for passport application forms. I’ve also worked in a call centre and, I tell you honestly, a couple of hours spent talking to God’s greatest creations and you start to question the quality of His workmanship.

So time restrictions, terrible working conditions, no materials, broken tools, a mere four hours electricity a day and Ambler’s distinctive take on body odour and racial harmony all seem mild by comparison. But I could do without the fines  and the floggings with electrical flex for poor quality work. I listed our limitations. I think it’s unfair to compare ourselves with the best of the big Hollywood Studios.

You could say I feel under-appreciated. But I’ve a slow-boiling temper and I’m still the right side of sane.

I’m faking a pleasant expression when the
tannoy barks into life. Decoding it’s the problem – shards of noise through a speaker held together with electrical tape and the power of prayer, delivered by an Albanian receptionist with a harelip.

I make out my name, something about the boss and hospitals. Through to the main office I go and the facts assemble themselves in all their spittle-flecked glory. And soon I’m running home to jumpstart my car and hightail it to the infirmary.

I couldn’t tell you what make of car I own. Or the original colour. The rusty parts are orange and the other bits fell off years ago. Forget the seat belt. I owe my life to repeat tetanus shots.

I don’t take it to work. There’s the shame – that’s one good reason. But there’s also the difficulty of obtaining regular fuel, combined with Ambler’s consistent attempts to break into it. Now you and I may not understand the hypnotic attraction of pine-shaped air fresheners, but our idiot clearly does. And it’s this compulsion that leads him to jam my doors with sticks, shattered pens and anything else he thinks might function as a key in order to get to them. Despite the fact I never lock it.

I don’t like my car and I won’t speak well of it. I picture it as an assemblage of jagged-edged guillotine blades perched upon a buckled chassis. My brakes are as reliable as a heroin addict. God knows if I’m allowed to drive it legally. Not only is it unsafe, but I took my test drunk and can’t remember if I passed. Not that it matters. The Great Separation crashed all the computer records. I could be a qualified space shuttle pilot for all the DVLA know.

Right, fuel: I’ve about twenty litres of old cooking oil in my garage, subjected to some chemical process by a madman I met in a bar. Apparently, it’s now biodiesel. You’ll excuse me if I have my doubts. So I’m overjoyed when my engine starts.

And now I’m driving. I’m watching our English take on Post-War, Weimar-era Berlin rot around my flimsy metal carapace.

We live in ruins. The water’s dirty and there’s no gas. Power’s intermittent in places, non-existent in others.

Don’t count on a working telephone. The gypsies rip down the cabling and sell it for scrap. And the phone companies buy it back because it’s cheaper than remanufacturing.

Few industries survive. We had few enough to start with. Nothing tangible, at least.

We’ve no food and a workforce ill-equipped to grow it. For every man who can work a plough and plant a crop, there’s three hundred who won’t get out of bed without a clean shirt and a business plan – a massive and mainly useless middleclass population who refuse to be rehabilitated. They’re starving the country.

But let’s be even-handed about this. I’m hardly feeding and clothing the nation myself. I make puppets. And for every ‘Alfonse The Alien’ who cheers someone out of a date with a hot bath and a razorblade, there’s another ten of my creations shaming someone else back into one. I’m talking of company mascots, perpetuating the culture of consumerism and the inadequacies of unrequited ownership. So whilst we live in collapsing houses, cooking stolen vegetables over the ashes of our own floorboards, all we really care about is who’s wearing what brand of jeans. Advertising, eh?

But I don’t care. I’m a good little hypocrite. I sacrificed my principles long ago. My soul concern is getting to Dromedary in time to save my mercenary hide. And I’m making good time until someone shoots out my back windscreen.

There’s nothing in my mirrors. There’s nothing
of
my mirrors. They no longer exist. More bangs and my car is now a convertible. You’ve not known pain until you’ve driven with broken bits of sunroof in your underwear. Rally racing with lacerated buttocks – I don’t recommend it.

Who? What? Where? Why? These are all questions I’d like answered, but I can’t check behind me for glass shards in my collar. Turn my head and I’ll slash my throat.

My foot’s down so hard the floor’s buckling. The whole vehicle’s bucking. The exhaust’s belching, the engine’s blazing and I’m wreathed in dark, choking smoke. I look like a black and white minstrel sitting on a thundercloud.

Fourth gear’s gone, fifth gear lost its teeth with the dinosaurs. What gears
have
I got? Low ones. Noisy ones: Eeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooooooooooooogh!

And now I know I’ve gone mad. The road’s grown fur. Am I asleep? Unfortunately not. I’m surrounded by mink. Thousands and thousands of the horrid, snappy,
bitey little bastards racing alongside me. What’s the attraction? Am I made of ham? And since when have mink carried firearms? Answer is, they don’t. But whatever’s chasing them does.

I need to get out of here. And fast. I’ve one option and it’s off road. It’s a full-lock left and I’m hurtling through hedgerow into wasteland, fence wire whipping at my face. And I’m still being followed.

Sod this, I figure. And it’s foot and handbrake together, a three-sixty spin and soon I’m tangled up in more fencing and a sign marked: ‘Landmines!’

The mink and their mysterious aggressor surge past. And God rot me if it isn’t an old man on a
souped-up disabled scooter; a geriatric Hells Angel; half machine, half decaying old bigot.

Well, you don’t need a helmet unless you’re scared of death. And this guy doesn’t give a fig for the safety of his paper-thin cranium. Or his appearance, it seems. Take an already ugly old geezer and expose his
flappy features to the forces of motion and wind resistance and you’re halfway toward this cold, cataract-crowned nightmare vision. I remember a mouth full of teeth like pipe organ tubes.

So I’m beached on the edge of a minefield, surrounded by rampaging
mustelids and gun toting grandpas with grudges. The smart money says I should get out of here before things start exploding. And that’s exactly what I do, shedding my glass-filled clothes on route.

And I’m naked in the road when the first mine blows and the pensioner goes up and bits of him come down. So now I know what colour my car is: rich, coagulating red.

A chirpy voice pipes up near my elbow:

“
Oi, mister! Wanna buy a piece?”

I look down to see a filth-encrusted boy wearing a ‘Don’t be a Gifford!’ T-shirt. He doesn’t seem bothered by my blood-spattered nudity. But I am.

“Get away from me!” I bellow, followed by, “I’m not a paedo!” for the benefit of anyone else within eye or earshot. And I refuse to speak to him until I’ve retrieved my trousers.

There’s a pistol clasped in his grubby mitten. He waves it like a maraca.

“Very good price,” he assures me.

Now it’s bad practice to buy firearms from children and I’ve been burned on a deal before.

“Oh, go on, mate!” he whines, “It’s kosher! It was me sister’s. She don’t need it no more cause the yardies got her one of them stenguns out of the Worldy War Two!” And he starts to go on about how he needs the cash for ‘
Atomic Jive Rodent
’ trading cards, or some such crap.

“Please, mister! I need
Gerbilux
! He’s got laser eyes! I need him to beat
Felino
!
Felino
’s got Kevlar whiskers and a nuclear arse!”

I have no idea what the Hell he’s on about. I take the pistol. The sight’s off, I notice immediately.

“No thanks, kid,” I say. “It’s a converted replica. You fire that, it’ll shatter the barrel and blow off both your hands.” I pass it back.

“Doesn’t matter, mister,” says the kid. “Just needed your fingerprints on it!” And he’s off into the middle distance before I can find a rock to throw at him.

Now time’s tight and Dromedary’s waiting. My car’s just scrap now, but scrap has value and I don’t want to leave it.

A prostitute approaches. She’s high on God-knows-what with an interplanetary complexion. I can’t tell whether she’s fifteen or fifty. Will she mind my car, I ask? She’ll be glad to – for a small consideration of course. She draws the relevant amount in the air and I produce the appropriate banknote.

I’m doing her a favour, I reason, as I launch into a run. I’m paying her to sit down and relax. Okay, the scenery isn’t particularly telegenic, but it’s got to be better than sucking off tramps for a living. 

Meanwhile, she’s going through the glove compartment. And then she pulls a gemmy from her bag, jacks open the boot and finds the petrol can full of cooking oil. And it’s a Grade A mentalist we’ve got here because she pours it over the seats and sets light to them. And I’m too far away to do anything. The remnants of my car pop apart with a tumultuous ‘woof!’ and a spinning metal something just misses my head. I look up to see my license plate embedded in a tree.

“You’re not a team player,” says Dromedary. It’s an interesting greeting. I’ve only just walked through the door.

“Depends on the team,” says I, devoid of breath. I may be amoral, but I’m not an unscrupulous people-shafter.

He’s hooked up to the morphine drip and soon I’m receiving some woozy lecture on the nature of cooperation and group interaction. I watch him sweating, his big, scarlet bulk rising out of the bedclothes like a fleshy Ayers Rock. Except you’ve never been climbed, I think to myself. He pauses, scans the darkened room for black cats, blue devils and other opiate-induced flora and fauna before returning his attentions to me.

“Sometimes an angel falls into the gutter,” he starts. He means Rachel. “And meets a guttersnipe.” He means me. “Thank God you’ve no children,” he continues. “You haven’t ruined her for someone decent.” He means himself.

I yank open the curtains and he screams, clawing at the sunlight. I smile. Fucking vampire.

“We’re all in the gutter, looking at the stars,” I quote, probably incorrectly. He changes tack.

“I know you’re an ‘angry young man,’” he says and, God rot him, he does the quote marks with his fingers thing. “You want to kick against authority; you want to assert your individuality; you want to dye your hair blue, call yourself ‘Johnny X’ and dance all night to crazy punk rock music!”

And I don’t want to do any of those things, because I’m twenty-six, not sixteen. I want to stop drinking, start a family and run a canoe hire business from a log cabin by the side of an Estonian lake. I want to paddle kayaks in summer, carve souvenirs in winter and raise children that don’t die of cirrhosis aged forty-five. But I keep this quiet. No sense sharing your secrets with a sociopath.

“I didn’t ask you to join my family,” he says, “But I’m determined to make the best of a bad situation till my niece comes to her senses.”

“Eh?” It’s not my wittiest riposte.

Dromedary is a paranoid man who digs into his employee’s private lives. When he finds something of interest he’s not averse to exploiting it. So when he snouts around and discovers I’m married to a Bactrian girl he spots an opportunity to cuckold me and cement his place in the aristocracy. But Rachel is no closer a relation to the former Prime Minister than I am to Chairman Mao. Her family pissed their inheritance away three generations ago. She sees through his ‘avuncular’ interest and finds it downright creepy.

“She’s not your niece,” I say, and I’m about to add “and she’s barely my wife” when he issues some threat and I tell him to go shove the plasma stand up his arse sideways.

“Why, you little bastard!” he cries and throws a half-peeled fruit at me – whereupon I disappear in a puff of smoke and a tinkle of fairy bells because, according to the nurse, it’s all a drug-induced hallucination and I haven’t arrived yet.