Ruin Nation (15 page)

I’m heating water on the cooker. I figure I’ll throw it on him, he’ll shoot me and then this whole sorry
charade’ll be over. It all sounds hysterical but I’m rapidly reaching the end of my tether. I’m not intrinsically evil. Why does the world want me for its punch bag? It’s not just the water that’s boiling. It’s my whole life. Like a bubbling cauldron. And the more I look into it, the more unpleasant things bob up and stare back at me. Then the electricity cuts. So no scalding today then.

With the lights out and the sky so black with angry clouds it may as well be midnight, I fumble in the cupboard for kerosene, or lighter fluid, or just anything flammable that I can burn in my old hurricane lamp. You don’t want to be in the dark with a predator. I want to see the bastard coming. Paranoia’s an evolutionary advantage – as you find out in my line of work.

But my fears are unfounded. Calamine’s his usual personable self. I don’t understand his part in last night’s events – and I can’t say I trust him – but I feel comfortable enough to put down the kitchen knife. He takes the gesture graciously. He hands me a tomato plant.

“By way of an apology,” he starts.

“But? What? What the?! What the fuck was last night about?!” I shout.

“You weren’t in work today,” he continues. “I was hoping to talk to you… clear a few things up.”

I know what
I’m
hoping, I think to myself, but the chances of a block of concrete crashing through the ceiling and crushing you, you scar-faced Judas, are pretty remote. Again, I say nothing.

His lips are moving, and I know it’s a pretty juvenile thing to do, but I’m tuning out again. I hear the soft
pitter patter of raindrops on the roof and, before Calamine can even draw breath, I’ve got my chemical-proof glove on and I’m holding a strip of litmus paper out of the window. I check the colour with a candle. It barely even reacts. And before Calamine can take another breath, I’m in and out of the rain with every saucepan, every bucket, every anything that can hold liquid I can find.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I say, because it seems pretty obvious to me. “I’m collecting rainwater!” And he shrugs and looks at me nonplussed. “Look!” I cry, and I’m soaking wet as I say it. “I’m not dissolving! This is drinkable!”

Now, I guess it’s different when you’re up in government with purified water on tap. But when you’re leopard-fodder like me, and your choices are weak beer or the desalinated dysentery-juice from the reservoirs, you get pretty excited about conventional rain. I guess it’s all relative. Calamine’s charmingly condescending when he tells me:

“You know I can get you fresh water whenever you want. You just have to ask.”

“And why would you do that for me?”

“Because you’re part of the team,” he says, smiling in the unflattering candlelight. But I’m thinking of those rifle butts again when he says: “Look, I think we’ve had a bit of a misunderstanding. Just give me a minute to…” and he checks his watch. “In fact, less than a minute…” He trails off, starts counting soundlessly. There’s a sudden noise that I can’t even begin to describe – honestly, I can’t – and then he rips off the watch and slings it into the pedal bin.

“No use to me now,” he says. “Do you own a computer?”

“No,” I say, bemused as ever.

“Good,” he says. “Suffice to say, everything electronic in this entire street is now screwed.”

“Why?”

“EMP.”

“I don’t know what to say to that.”

“You won’t. Not if you don’t know what an EMP is. Let me explain: We’ve just flashed your house with an electromagnetic pulse. Or a microwave pulse – I can never remember which it is... though I hope it’s not the second because I believe they make men sterile. Anyway, my point is this: the pulse fries electronic equipment – annoying if you own a computer repair shop, but quite useful if you suspect a building is bugged. By a building, I mean your house. And now, well, let’s just say we’re free to talk a little more openly.” He pulls up a chair. “So you’ve met Montgomery Burns then.”

“I don’t get the reference,” I say.

“Right. Probably a bit before your time. I mean
Malmot. Tall, thin gentlemen. Grey hair. Grey complexion. Slapped you with a pigskin glove. Screamed obscenities in your face.”

“Oh,
him
!” I say.

“Brings a chill to the room, doesn’t he? And tends to bring out the worst in our friend, Calamari,” Calamine chuckles. “Well, you’ll be pleased to know that Mr
Malmot bears you no personal grievances. He’s just, how shall we say, a little uneasy around new people. In fact, let’s say
all
people. He thinks you win respect by battering them to a pulp. Takes his management strategies from Stalin, you see. Personally, I prefer the subtle approach...”

“You weren’t so subtle last night.”

“That was nothing to do with me.”

“But I heard you outside.”

“Maybe you did,” he says with an edge to his voice. “In which case, you’ll have heard me describe his methods as pointless bluster; you’ll also have heard me explain that you’re already on side and need no further coercion; you’ll have heard me voice my disapproval. You may not have heard me telling the lads to go easy on you but I assure you – if I hadn’t, you’d be in a much sorrier state now.”

“My hand?”

“Yes. I was told to break it.”

“But you didn’t. Well,
er, thanks for that.”

“Don’t thank me, it’s just common sense. They wanted you put firmly in your place – but you don’t hire an artist and then break his fingers before he’s finished the job. That’s just backwards. It’s plain dumb. But that’s the kind of mentality we’re dealing with here. They don’t think things through.”

He seems frustrated, and I get the feeling I’m being told a little more than I should here. So I do what anyone else in my situation would: I nod my head sympathetically and hope he spills some more.

“So this
Malmot: he’s the head vampire?” I prompt. 

“And we’re all expected to bite a few necks,” he laughs mirthlessly. “But I choose my necks carefully, you see. This is the thing, though: I can’t guarantee your safety unless you
return to work. Because whilst I’m aware that you know comparatively little, it’s still too much. And if you’re not in, you’re out, so to speak.”

“And what’s in it for me?” I ask. “I mean, in being ‘in’?” And I’m starting to sound like he is.

“Well, you’re still eligible for the company funeral plan. Now that can be a wooden coffin in fifteen years time or a shallow ditch tomorrow. Your choice.”

“And, by being ‘in’ I stay ‘out’ of the ditch?”

“I swear, you get smarter every day, Jupiter! Glad to have you back on board!” And he claps me on the back like a drunken uncle.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering why he had to fry my house to tell me this? So I ask in some roundabout way and he tells me that the key to efficiency is commonsense and a flexible command structure. But certain parties have their ways of doing things and perhaps those ways could be handled with a little more finesse.

“Malmot wants you to report to him directly. This puts you in an ideal position to observe him and the way he goes about things. He’s a secretive man, you see, and some of us feel we’d benefit from a greater degree of transparency, a little more information to help us go about our business.”

He phrases it so eloquently.

“That’s all?” I ask.

“That’s all.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“It is.”

“But he kills people. And I don’t doubt you do, too!”

“We do what’s necessary to ensure the smooth running of our country. It’s no different from any other business. We just retire a little more violently.”

“I don’t like this.”

“Mr Jupiter, of the few emotions you seem to possess, which is stronger? Your fear or your greed? Or, perhaps, it’s your lust? You know, I can get you ten women at the drop of a hat.
Clean
women who’ll pretend to like you.”

“I have a wife who does that.”

“Unconvincingly. I can get you a new one.”

“Can you get rid of the old one?”

“If you say so. But we’ll go back to your greed for the moment though.”

“Let’s.”

And it doesn’t take long to settle on large quantities of cash and clean water.

“I can finally sober up,” I tell him.

“I’m counting on it,” he says. “I’m sick of working with lunatics and drunks.” And he makes some hand gesture at a man up a telegraph pole. And the lights spark back to life. And the man, slips, falls and breaks his leg.

“See what I mean,” Calamine sighs. I can see why they call him Calamine. He's strangely soothing.

So I’ve just taken delivery of a consignment of fresh H
2
O. What’s the first thing I do with it? I’ll give you a clue: I don’t drink it.

England has the lowest birth rate in Europe. There are many reasons for this. Reduced fertility, miscarriages triggered by poor nutrition, gas clouds full of oestrogen turning men fruity, they all play their part. But our main problem is the water. It’s dirty and diseased and it isn’t safe to wash in. So we don’t. And we honk like rotting lepers. That’s one of the main reasons our society’s falling apart, why our divorce rate’s virtually one hundred percent. Because the English are too repulsive to have sex with each other.

It’s not funny. Relationships thrive on intimacy. How intimate can you get with someone you can smell from the other side of the door?

The Department of Propagation run coach trips. For a small fee, they’ll run you to the coast. If you don’t mind a bit of pollution, you can hose each other down in seawater and conceive in the ocean. Of course, the French know exactly what we’re up to. They steer their boats up to edge of the minefield and shout at us through megaphones:

“Hey, Cow Burner! ‘Allo, Cow Burner! Hey, farkin Little Mermaid! Are you ‘aving sex with your wife? You must smell pretty bad to make your ugly babies underwater! Come to France! We sell you some soap!”

Our prostitutes wash in beer. Rachel wouldn’t because she was too tight with money. So the first thing I do with my water is pour a bucket of it over my head. Then I go straight to Lucas’s house and give Laura a sponge bath.

The rest of the water goes into storage in the garage. I cover the containers with a tarpaulin, rig a shotgun cartridge to a trip wire and run it across the doorway. There are men pretending to be from the electric company putting new surveillance equipment into my house and I watch one working with a suspicious look on my face.

“Why are you putting a camera in my bedroom ceiling?” I ask. The guy installing the stuff, he starts lying to me, telling me
the camera is a ‘power regulator’ or some such crap. I let the matter slide, and our man walks out thinking he’s got one over on me. But I know
exactly
what it is.

So the afternoon finds me strolling through the market stalls in the Westminster ruins. I thread my way between the punters and the spivs and the tables laden with fripperies that no doubt somebody died for somewhere along the way. I see people selling the clothes they stand in. I see people selling the clothes other people stand in and employing various nefarious tactics to obtain them. I’m wearing a stab-proof vest, a cricket box and, just for devilment, I’ve got Velcro bands holding rings of inverted fishing hooks in my pockets. I snag two ‘dippers’ and send them off squealing with their hands bleeding and my
bootprint on their backsides.

Eventually I find what I’m looking for. And what’s in my bag? Why, it’s the camera. And who wants to buy it? Why, the self same guy who installed it in the first place.

Because my life cannot follow any logical path, my workshop’s transformed itself into a dental practice. I walk in. I walk straight out again. I don’t remember a waiting room. I don’t remember a receptionist. I don’t remember the people queuing up to register. I’ve packed in drinking and it occurs to me that I may be having a seizure. Then Calamine steps out wearing a surgical smock.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“Sometimes,” he says, “it’s just not worth explaining.” And he doesn’t – just leads me into a room. I walk into what I think was my
fibreglassing area to find an increasingly manic  Calamari masked and holding pliers, with his boot on a fat man’s chest. He appears to be extracting teeth. Or, at least, attempting to.

“But it looks so easy on television,” he cries, his voice like a suppurating wound. He clanks something into a kidney dish. “You, boy! You were a surgeon!”

“Not a dental surgeon,” I say hesitantly.

“Don't be a sissy.. Come over here and rip this man's teeth out!”

“Mmmfff, mmmnnnffff!” insists the chair-bound man through a mouthful of cotton wool.

“Or I could just
punch
them out, Sir,” Calamari offers, “but where would the fun in that be?” And he croaks like a blood-spattered gargoyle, rolling his dilating eyeballs. “No. Let the boy do it! He skinned the body, didn’t he?”