Pussy

by Howard Jacobson

  Whether Dr Cobalt was right to have mentioned to him and other members of the teaching staff that the Prince seemed more interested in looking up her skirt than in learning the difference between an active and a passive verb, was another matter. ‘It would depend,’ Dr Strowheim had jested, but with a distinct note of caution, ‘on how actively he looked.’

  ‘Pretty actively,’ Dr Cobalt said.

  ‘But it was only a look?’

  ‘As opposed to what?’

  ‘As opposed to a more physical exploration.’

  ‘It was only a look, though the last time he looked I did fear that it presaged—’

  ‘Then let’s say it was passive,’ the Doctor put in finally.

  It did occur to him to suggest she wear trousers in the future, but trousers on women were implicitly banned in the Palace – the Grand Duchess was known not to own a pair – and, if he were to be honest about it, he would have missed the skirt himself.

  CHAPTER 3

  In which language is discerned to go backwards

  Dr Cobalt slept badly as a rule, but on the night following her ingenious submission to the Grand Duke and Duchess that their son was brilliant by virtue of all that made him stupid, she didn’t sleep at all. The night was hot – that had something to do with it. There were mosquitoes in January, a month in which, once upon a time, it would have snowed. And her basement apartment in Origen Lower Mansions, which abutted the Great North Wall of the Republic, was stuffy and noisy. The air conditioning, which the management refused to service because there was no need of air conditioning in winter, spluttered and wheezed. There was a low level of continuous noise, too, from small protest groups camped outside the Mansions, voicing their entitlements, though it wasn’t always clear what they felt entitled to. Somewhere to live, seemed to be the sum of it. Whatever they could lay their hands on, Brightstar said. Promote rights instead of duties and this was the result. But it wasn’t the mosquitoes or the sound of people exercising their entitlement to feel entitled that kept her awake. It was guilt. She believed she’d failed in her pedagogic duties, failed the boy, failed his parents, and failed her sex. The words prostitute and whore had continued to make appearances in his conversation, though never in a context that rendered either of them appropriate. Otherwise wordless, he seemed to want to say these words simply for the sake of saying them, as though he heard an unholy music in them. Shouldn’t she, for his sake and, even more, for women’s, tackle him on this?

  ‘You can put your computer away, Your Highness,’ she told him one morning soon after her sleepless night, ‘and your play pad and your phones. Today we are going to have a game of synonyms.’

  ‘How do you play that?’

  ‘I’m going to give you a word and you’re going to give me another word that means the same. So if I say lesson …’

  ‘I say boring.’

  ‘Well, that’s more what you think of a lesson than another word for lesson. But let’s continue. So, if I say teacher …’

  ‘I say failure.’

  If he were a man I’d throw burning tea into his face, Dr Cobalt thought. But she had to go on. Bait the line. Flick the rod. Reel him in. ‘OK, so now let’s try woman.’

  ‘Ah no, not woman,’ he boomed. He knew the loudness of his voice irritated Dr Cobalt. Some mornings she had to get up in the middle of a lesson to take a pill. He gave her migraines. Though he liked looking up Dr Cobalt’s skirt he didn’t much like the rest of her. Behind her back he mimicked the way she put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes when his volume was too much for her. Once he’d seen a film on television in which a black servant, wanting to escape a telling-off, had run out of the kitchen with her apron over her head. He combined Dr Cobalt and the black servant in a routine that would have made him split his sides had he been capable of even callous merriment. ‘Oh, lordy, lordy,’ Dr Cobalt cried, lifting her skirts and covering her face with them. ‘Oh, lordy, lordy.’

  Fracassus wished he had a friend to share this with. A girl, preferably taller than him, with custard-yellow hair waterfalling down her back and false breasts, who would run around the room with him, mimicking Dr Cobalt, with her skirts over her head.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ Dr Cobalt continued. ‘Woman …’

  He tilted his head and pushed his jaw out, something else he knew she found distasteful. It was surprising, even to himself, how much he knew about Dr Cobalt’s likes and dislikes. He’d watched men on television panel shows expertly pressing women’s buttons. It wasn’t hard. You just had to know which faces to pull while they were speaking. ‘Girl,’ he said.

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Lordy, lordy.’

  ‘Lordy, lordy?’

  ‘Lordy, lordy, Miss Scarlett.’

  ‘You’ve lost me there. Explain.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Why is it amusing you?’

  ‘You remind me, that’s all.’

  ‘I remind you of whom?’

  He shrugged and dropped a pencil under the table.

  Dr Cobalt knew what that was about. He was always dropping pencils under the table. ‘You can leave it there this time,’ she said. ‘Keep going. Another word for woman …’

  She waited. And waited. Was he playing her? Had he rumbled her game? Come on, she thought. Come to Momma. And at last he did.

  ‘Prostitute.’

  ‘Interesting. I believe I’ve heard you use that word before. But it doesn’t mean woman does it? A woman can be a prostitute but not every woman is a prostitute.’

  ‘Every prostitute is a woman, though.’

  ‘Well even that’s not true. You can have a male prostitute.’

  ‘Like a faggot?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Like what then?’

  ‘We’ll come back to male prostitutes. Let’s stay with the women for now. What other words for prostitute do you know?’

  He thought a long time. Wherever he is, he is enjoying being there, Dr Cobalt thought. Finally he came up with whore, then tart, then hooker.

  She looked down the holes that were his eyes. ‘You have more words for prostitute than you have for woman,’ she told him. ‘I want you to ask yourself something. Why can’t you think of a woman without thinking of a prostitute?’

  ‘That’s unfair,’ he boomed and pouted all at once. He poked his finger at her. Frightening, she thought. One day that finger, coming out of the murk of befuddled hurt, would inspire fear. It did already.

  ‘Why are you poking your finger at me?’

  ‘Because it’s so unfair. You asked me. This is your crooked game.’

  Crooked? That was a surprise. Didn’t you have to understand the concept of straight before you could understand the concept of crooked?

  But he was right. She had exceeded her brief. It wasn’t her job to root around in the unruly attic of the little monster’s head. She was a teacher not a priest. She wasn’t paid to catechise him into obscenities. She should end the lesson now.

  But some imp of perversity wanted its way with her. She would fill his head with prostitutes until it burst. ‘Courtesan. Strumpet. Harlot. Concubine. Fille de joie. Hetaira … Shall I spell that for you?’

  She stopped, realising how this would look to someone watching the lesson on CCTV cameras. I’m teaching your son some new words for prostitute, Your Highness …

  How had this happened? Dr Cobalt had three degrees from the Republic’s finest universities. How had the wordless abortion got her into this?

  She slept badly again. Or maybe she slept too well. She had a vision that may have been a dream. Or was it that she dreamed she had a vision? In it Fracassus had been elected to the highest position in the Republics. He stood on a great stage with his face on television screens hundreds of feet high behind him. Crowds cheered his name, breaking it up into syllables – Frac-Ass-Us … Frac-Ass-Us …

  ‘I know a lot of words,’ he was telling them, waving the vocabulary book she had advised him to keep an
d jutting out his jaw.

  ‘Tell us!’ the people shouted.

  ‘Tart. Strumpet.’

  ‘More!’

  ‘Concubine. Courtesan. Nobody has more words than me.’

  Dr Cobalt killed a mosquito crawling across her face.

  CHAPTER 4

  Concerning the part played by television in the education of a leader

  No sooner had the moon orbited the earth for the 200th time, counting from the hour of his birth, than Fracassus woke to find himself fifteen.

  He now began to pass the time he wasn’t looking up Yoni Cobalt’s skirt staring into screens. Thanks to the extensive measures the Grand Duke had taken in recent years to interface and platformise the Palace, there was not a corner of it that was not connected to walls of light-reflecting surfaces that multiplexed between security monitor, cinema, television, computer, games console, smartphone, and every other peripheral device his IT advisers recommended, thus enabling Fracassus to go from room to room in a flicker-induced trance. In this he was not much different from others of his generation for whom the screen had replaced the dummy as pacifier and the cot mobile as soporific, but with this difference – what Fracassus saw when he looked into a screen was not just any flickering image but a flickering image of himself.

  Whether it was because of the size of the monitors his father had installed – some of them so big they extended beyond the confines of one room, down the passage and into another – or because he was still in the receptive as opposed to the proactive stage of his development, the Prince preferred watching himself on television to accessing any of the connectivity media at his disposal. Television spoke to him. Television told him not what the world could be but what he could be in it. Television shaped his ambitions. Self-appointed guardians of culture, such as Professor Probrius, were inclined to speak well or ill of television as though it were a single, indivisible thing; but one could no more say that television was good for people or bad for people than one could say a book was. It depended on the book. Fracassus had never read a book but he had, by the age of fifteen, watched so much television that, had it been food, he would have been confined to his bed weighing 500 kilograms.

  But to say he watched unceasingly is not to say he watched uncritically. A strenuous if unconscious system of discrimination determined the patterns of his viewing. Whatever was combative and divisive he liked; whatever was discursive and considered he didn’t. Whatever demeaned, amused him; whatever ennobled, roused his ire.

  A list of the programmes that excited him and the programmes that left him cold can be supplied upon request; suffice it to say that he rated pictures above speaking, pictures that moved quickly across the screen above pictures that moved slowly, and action above stories. Where a drama did engage his interest it was because its hero was a bully. Bullying being the dramatic element he looked for first, he wasn’t always able to distinguish a play from a panel show, or a reality programme in which contestants were fed food that made them vomit from a documentary set in the death row of a penitentiary. Whatever featured boastful winners and cringing losers, he watched with avidity. Wrestlers, racing-car drivers, boxers, condescending chat-show hosts, drug dealers, mass murderers, Tony Soprano, Max Schmeling, Macho Man Randy Savage, Henry VIII, sadistic surgeons, bent cops, the Discovery Channel’s dictator of the week – it was on the shoulders of these that he grafted his own image.

  In this, again, he was assuredly no different from the many millions of viewers for whom television was a stimulus to envy and emulation, except that they went about their business the following day forgetful of what had transfixed them the night before, whereas Fracassus woke possessed of the same ambitions with which he had gone to bed. There were times when he was unable to tear himself away from his imaginary reflection for long enough to go to bed at all.

  His parents were shocked, on their return from a long official trip outside the Walls, to find their son much changed. He had grown somnolent, podgy, ill-mannered and, even by his own standards, uncommunicative. Though he knew of their imminent arrival and might have been expected to be at Golden Gate One to greet them, he barely registered their existence when they entered the great living room and discovered him stretched out like an odalisque on a Chinese dragon sofa, eating nachos and cheeseburgers and watching a drama about the life and loves of the Emperor Nero. When they coughed to announce their presence he waved them away with a backward movement of the hand – a reverse royal wave of the sort usually employed for the dismissal of importunate servants. ‘Shush,’ he said. ‘Not finished.’

  ‘How long has this been going on?’ his mother demanded of Dr Strowheim.

  ‘The series began to air about five weeks ago, Your Highness,’ was his reply. ‘I believe it has another ten months to run.’

  ‘I am not talking about the series. We do not leave our son to your care in the expectation that he will be left to watch pornography.’

  ‘It is history, ma’am.’

  ‘History? If that’s history I would rather he knew nothing about it.’

  ‘We have done our best,’ Strowheim assured her, ‘to protect the Prince from knowledge it isn’t in his interest to acquire, and we have acted on your instructions with regards to books. Let him read about wizards and dragons like other children was your command, and my staff have been scrupulous in not deviating from it. But he seems not to be interested in wizards or dragons. Since there is little literature of any other sort available to a person his age, we thought not to close down the only alternative avenue for his native enquiringness to take. He must know something about the world, Your Highness.’

  ‘I will talk to the Grand Duke about this,’ was the Grand Duchess’s imperious reply. ‘But I shouldn’t have to remind you that you were hired to keep the world and its controversies out of my son’s education until he is ready for it, not thrust it upon him while he isn’t.’

  Dr Strowheim would have liked to say that The Life and Loves of the Emperor Nero was hardly ‘the world and its controversies’, but he knew when to stay silent. He bowed and the Grand Duchess went off to discuss these developments with her husband.

  In truth, she blamed him for the comatose state in which they found their son. Men and their gadgets! She had stood out against her husband’s digitalisation of the Palace, firstly on aesthetic grounds – she hated all those wires – and secondly because she believed it was a woman’s job to make the case for interpersonal relationships – too much time looking at screens, she believed, affected men’s ability to read emotions, and God knows they were bad enough at it already. But the Grand Duke had defeated her, as he always did. ‘One,’ he told her with triumphant patronage, there would be no wires; ‘These days, my dear Demanska, machines speak to one another wirelessly. It is quite marvellous, really, how technology has advanced. Which country was it that used to say it ruled the waves? I, my dear, no matter where I walk in the Palace, have only to punch a four-digit password into any device I happen to be walking past, to rule the airwaves of the world. And all without a wire to be seen. That’s one. Two: reading emotions has gone far enough, in my opinion.’

  He looked at her steadily and caressed her cheek. Forgive his cruelty in referring to this, but did they really want Fracassus to go in the direction of his older brother Jago, a child they no longer saw and seldom talked about but who had gone off the rails as a consequence of what the Grand Duke could only call empathy overload, reading emotions left, right and centre until he no longer knew which emotions were his own – his gender neither – and now lived they had no idea where or with whom as Joyce? No. Whatever his wife thought, he was not prepared to let that happen to Fracassus, even if it meant the boy getting fat, knowing nothing of interpersonality, and thinking he was Nero. Better Nero than Norma.

  The mention of Jago always quietened Demanska Origen. Had he been her fault? Certainly he had been more her child than her husband’s, and more her child than Fracassus would ever be. Was it because she blamed her
self for Jago’s defection that she had been less of a mother to his younger brother? Could it be that she had grown afraid of her power to sensitise? She tried to remember when she’d last looked Fracassus in the face. Yes, she’d praised his beauty. A mother had to do that. She had carried him in her womb. She had cried at his delivery. But had she ever truly looked deep into his eyes? Did she even know what colour his eyes were? But Jago, lovely Jago, she had known too well. How his face had lit up when she read to him of chocolate factories and magic schoolboys. His tutors had worried that he was still reading about the chocolate factories and magic schoolboys he’d loved at the age of nine or ten when he was nineteen or twenty, but Demanska Origen hadn’t minded that. She was still reading about them herself.

  She brought her worries up at her reading group. Should she have encouraged Jago to read something else?

  There was a long, troubled silence. They were all mothers of sons. Daughters would find their own way into literature, but the route was too thorny for boys, especially in the face of discouragement from their fathers. Jago wasn’t the only son to have lost his way. In recent years the craze for interpersonality – imported somehow from beyond the Wall, despite the strict protectionism in place – had wreaked havoc among young men. Fathers were afraid to pin medals on their sons’ chests, not knowing what they’d find. The reading group wasn’t clandestine exactly, but it was unclassified. The men knew of its existence and laughed among themselves. Women! Women and their feelings! But individually they feared it. What expressed itself as a feeling today expressed itself as a deviancy tomorrow.