Pussy

by Howard Jacobson

  For her part she was surprised the Professor was not more affronted by what she had to say. She’d decided she would not hold back, though candour could easily cost her her job. She did not know what loyalties the Professor was bringing to his appointment. She had read some of the papers he had written, from which it was impossible to deduce what kind of man he was personally. Pedantic, of course. But then so was she. A teacher who wasn’t pedantic wasn’t a teacher. So she had hopes for him. But she was taken aback, nonetheless, by the alacrity with which he embraced her view of the task before them. He even appeared to be energised by how much they would have to do to make a human out of a monster for whom not a shred of pity could be found.

  That said, he was evidently not himself prepared to be as outspoken as she was. How could he be, given that he was yet to meet the boy? But she felt that reserving judgement was and would go on being his modus operandi. Fine with her, so long as her modus operandi could go on being revulsion.

  ‘I should warn you before you meet him,’ she said, ‘to be prepared for how ugly he is.’

  ‘I think you’ve already conveyed that.’

  Was he being stern with her after all? Her tongue, she knew, could run away with her. Especially when she was out of the Palace of the Golden Gates.

  ‘I don’t mean morally ugly. I mean facially ugly. One can escape a person’s ugliness by looking into their eyes. There at least there might be beauty. But Fracassus has no eyes to speak of. It could be because he sees imperfectly that he juts his jaw out. His natural movement is a forward projection of a sort I’ve only ever seen on a bewildered primate. And if his jaw’s too big for his head, his head’s too big for the rest of him, which is ironic considering how little is in it.’

  ‘I have to say this is not the impression I get from his parents. His mother talks of him as a beautiful boy.’

  ‘Parental love is blind.’

  ‘I thought you said his parents are unable to love him.’

  Yoni Cobalt crossed her legs and slowly brought one wing of her long split skirt over her knees. The swish made Probrius feel just a little light-headed.

  ‘They don’t love him,’ she said, ‘in the sense that you and I use the word love. But the immoderately wealthy, like the monarchs of earlier times they emulate, are biologically programmed to look upon whatever issues from their loins, as with whatever issues from their wallets – offspring are just another investment, are they not? – as perfect. Imperfect doesn’t compute with the success they have made of their lives. Not to love what they give birth to is not to love themselves. That’s why you and I are here. They fear there’s been a fracture in the pipes. They can smell the shit. It’s our job to fix the plumbing.’

  Professor Probrius laughed. Yes, without doubt, he had never liked a woman so much, not only on first acquaintance, on any acquaintance.

  CHAPTER 8

  The end of stupidity

  ‘Consider this, Your Highness,’ Professor Probrius told Fracassus on their first morning together, ‘as a getting-to-know-you session. But first, if Your Highness has no objection, I’ll open a window.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘You mean you won’t let me?’

  ‘You can’t. There are no windows. It’s to stop people jumping out.’

  ‘So how do you get fresh air?’

  ‘I don’t want fresh air.’

  ‘What if somebody who isn’t you wants fresh air?’

  ‘They can go somewhere else.’

  ‘Do any of your father’s buildings have fresh air?’

  ‘Ask him.’

  ‘What about when you build? Will your towers have windows that open?’

  Fracassus couldn’t hide his impatience. ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Is this an interview?’

  ‘I’m curious, Your Highness, that’s all. I’ve read that you are looking forward to working with your father on a new casino with golf courses and saunas and giant televisions in the pools, and I wonder if they’ll have windows that open?’

  ‘So that people can throw themselves out when they’ve lost their money?’

  ‘Would that bother you?’

  ‘Not if they’ve paid the bill.’

  Professor Probrius paused to write something down in his notebook. ‘Talk to me about yourself,’ he said, putting his pen down.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, you tell me. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m me.’

  ‘You are, but remember I don’t know you yet. What are your interests? What do you like to do in your spare time?’

  ‘Not prostitutes again …’

  Professor Probrius looked alarmed. ‘Explain that to me.’

  ‘Dr Cobalt likes me to talk about prostitutes.’

  ‘Likes? Are you sure? When did she last talk to you about prostitutes?’

  ‘She didn’t talk to me about prostitutes. She wanted me to talk to her about prostitutes.’

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  ‘That I know nothing about prostitutes.’

  ‘And what did she tell you?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Other words. Dr Cobalt is crooked.’

  ‘That’s a serious charge.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell my father. He’d lock her up if I did.’

  ‘Would you like her to be locked up?’

  ‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what she does. She’s a failure like all teachers.’

  ‘You think I’m a failure?’

  ‘I don’t know you yet. Probably.’

  ‘Well, let’s get back to knowing you.’

  Fracassus was sitting in an executive chair at an executive desk in front of an executive-sized television monitor. He had, to Probrius’s eye, the look of a small monarch of a country that had no population. ‘Perhaps we should have that off,’ Probrius suggested.

  ‘I always have it on.’

  ‘Well, for today, let’s try without.’

  Fracassus tapped his keyboard. On all 270 floors of the Palace, monitors coughed and went to sleep. If he couldn’t watch he didn’t see why anyone else should.

  ‘OK, well that might be a good place to start,’ Probrius said. ‘Why do you always have your television on?’

  ‘I like watching it.’

  ‘Do you have any favourite programmes?’

  ‘Wrestling. Wars. And people being told to do stupid things.’

  ‘Who by? Comedians?’

  ‘Sometimes. And hypnotists. There was someone on like you a few nights ago. An uptight guy. So this hypnotist gets him to take his clothes off and crawl around the floor and bark like a dog.’

  ‘And you enjoyed that?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘What else do you enjoy?’

  ‘The guy who makes my bed. He’s spastic. He’s all right when he’s making the bed but when you speak to him he’s like …’ Fracassus did his imitation of a badly strung marionette to show Probrius what Megrim was like. He let his tongue loll out and dribbled.

  ‘Aren’t you sorry for him?’

  ‘Why should I be? He’s lucky to have a job. That’s it.’

  ‘Tell me about the last thing you saw on television.’

  ‘It was a thing about Nero.’

  ‘Not the coffee shop, presumably.’

  ‘I don’t know any coffee shops. I’m not allowed out.’

  Probrius tried a little ingratiation. ‘Maybe we can fix that,’ he said.

  Fracassus seemed not to care. ‘Out’ interested him, but ‘out’ with a professor did not.

  ‘So the Roman Emperor Nero?’

  ‘Him. Yeah.’

  ‘And you liked that why?’

  ‘The naked Roman hookers.’

  ‘You’re only saying that to shock me. Was that how you got round to the subject with Dr Cobalt?’

  ‘You seem interested in Dr Cobalt.’

  ‘She’s my colleague.’

>   ‘Lord, lordy,’ Fracassus said.

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  Having done his spastic marionette, Fracassus could see no reason not to do his horripilated black mammy. ‘Lordy, lordy, Miss Scarlett.’

  ‘I don’t recognise who you’re being.’

  ‘You should watch more television.’

  Professor Probrius was content to leave it at that. They’d made satisfactory progress, he thought.

  Sipping cold lemonade, Professor Probrius reported a censored version of the morning’s conversation to Dr Cobalt. ‘Well, whatever else he is or isn’t, he’s not a pushover,’ he said, wiping the perspiration out of his eyes.

  ‘I’ve been thinking the same,’ Dr Cobalt said. She too was finding the winter weather oppressive. ‘Do you think there could be some sewer-rat cunning there?’

  They were eating an organic salad in a restaurant that had a lot to say for itself – a restaurant with a pleonastic menu, it amused him to think – at the far side of the city. Probrius had not wanted to go there because it was frequented by university people and he did not want to see anyone he knew and answer questions about what he was doing now. But it was a favourite of Yoni Cobalt’s and, all things considered, he didn’t mind being seen with her.

  ‘I’m not inclined to think so,’ he replied. ‘In my experience we feel we have to grant some atom of intelligence, even if it’s only vermin intelligence, to the very stupid. It’s a way of castigating ourselves for thinking of them as stupid in the first place. Once it was a mark of civilisation to revel in the inanities of fools and blockheads. Now we worry about what made them blockheads in the first place – an unfair education system, some abuse suffered in childhood, a bang on the head. With blame culture comes the end of stupidity as a concept. I find it regrettable, myself, that no fool is allowed to attain his full-blown folly entirely on his own.’

  Dr Cobalt put aside her salad. Probrius had gently alluded to the prostitution test she’d set Fracassus some months before – he wasn’t prying, just curious – and the memory of it was still painful to her. Violation Studies had been another of her subjects at university. Probrius could laugh, but violation wasn’t funny. There’d been violation the day she’d listed all the words she knew for prostitute. Of that she had no doubt. The question was: who had violated whom?

  ‘Whatever the word for it,’ she said, ‘the thing he did, the thing he made me do, was damnably clever. And it’s you who’s just said he’s no pushover.’

  He stretched out a hand and laid it on hers. ‘No pushover, no. But nor is a wild dog when it’s cornered. As for the thing you said he made you do, I think you’re attributing to him what’s essentially yours. It was you who made you do it. Feeling you’ve been had is your act. The more sophisticated we are, the more we feel we must grant sophistication to a fool. The besetting sin of our times …’

  Hearing himself, he paused. Is this another fine mess my punditry’s getting me into? he asked himself. He wished he had an easier manner. He wished he had fewer degrees. He wished he were more of a wild dog himself. He threw the Doctor an apologetic look. He was sorry for spoiling their little tête-à-tête repast.

  But he had forgotten that Dr Cobalt had a number of degrees of her own. And he didn’t yet know that she had a soft spot for pedants. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘what’s the besetting sin of our times? I’d better know in case I’m inadvertently committing it.’

  ‘I doubt it, my dear.’ And he was away again. ‘What it comes to, in my estimation, is that we liberals find it so hard to bear the space we see in the minds and hearts of the ignorant that we fill it with our own compunctions. We are only this far’ – he showed her the edge of his knife – ‘from maintaining that the stupid are more intelligent than the clever.’

  ‘Christianity got there a long time ago,’ Dr Cobalt reminded him.

  ‘You aren’t going to tell me Fracassus is a holy fool.’

  ‘He’s a holy little shit. But …’

  CHAPTER 9

  In which Fracassus is taught an important lesson about tax avoidance and has a bright idea

  The Grand Duke invested a day a week in the commercial education of his son. ‘Quality Time’ was the expression some fathers used to describe the intimate hours they devoted to their children; the Grand Duke called his days off with Fracassus ‘Quantity Time’ – a quiet opportunity for them to sit down together and discuss how much they were worth.

  As a rule, these days would begin with the Morning Story, a short extract from the Grand Duke’s own favourite business literature, some mornings Adam Smith, others Dale Carnegie, and occasionally a page or two the Grand Duke had written himself. He had talked for years about gathering his thoughts on acquisition and development into a small and beautifully bound volume, but nothing had come of it. Among his hopes for the future was that one day he and the Prince would write it together. In the meantime, he read passages aloud – sometimes the same passages – with which the Prince seemed most in tune. A chapter entitled ‘How To Get Away With Getting Your Own Way’ was a particular favourite.

  It touched the Grand Duke to see his son sitting at his desk and cradling his cheek in his hand while he read to him about the ins and outs of avoiding rent control or removing a troublesome tenant. It would have reminded him of the early days of parenthood when, tucked up in bed, the infant Prince would close his little bullet-hole eyes and ask to hear a story – would have reminded him of such days had they only happened. I haven’t been the best of fathers, the Grand Duke admitted to himself, vowing to do better while knowing he wouldn’t.

  No excuses, but he wasn’t in the best of health. Overseeing the building of the Origen ziggurat, golf, and the tragic circumstances surrounding Jago had taken their toll. The Grand Duchess, too, was fragile and, when she wasn’t locked away with her susurrating fairy stories, she needed his attention and devotion. The future held its breath for Fracassus.

  This was not a parochial ambition. If the Grand Duke wasn’t in the best of health, neither was the Republic. Neither was the world. When he said the future held its breath for Fracassus he didn’t just mean the future of the House of Origen. He meant the future of the planet.

  But he wasn’t going to rush things. He understood his son’s education architecturally, starting from the bottom, a floor at a time. First to the top wasn’t always the winner. Hold the ladder steady; mind the snakes. For the moment at least, the Prime Mover could sleep easy.

  Some days, after the Morning Story, the Grand Duke would take the Prince to inspect their properties. On his early visits Fracassus had liked going up and down in the lifts, counting how many floors he owned. Now his pleasures were of a more sophisticated kind. He liked calculating how many people he owned.

  On this day, the Grand Duke had planned a visit to the Nowhere Palace of New Transoxiana. It was situated on an artificial beach whose sands were of surpassing softness, sands the colour of his wife’s hair, on an offshore artificial island outside the Walls of the Republic and reachable from it only by a secret underground tunnel. Other titled personages were allowed to use this tunnel but only the Grand Duke had a key. Fracassus had never visited this isolated section of the Wall before and was surprised to see his father putting his ear to it, as though listening to its heartbeat. They had travelled to the Southern Wall without attendants, just the two of them, father and son, and if not exactly in disguise, not exactly in full regalia either. Fracassus watched as his father continued his doctorly exploration of the Wall’s chest, tapping it and listening. Eventually, a tiny aperture appeared and into this the Grand Duke inserted a bronze key. A door opened, just wide enough for one person to enter at a time. It was dark when the door shut behind them. The Grand Duke carried a torch but shone it only when they lost their footing. He wanted the experience to be both a learning adventure and a rebirth for his son. Fracassus didn’t do metaphor and was bored. He reached for his phone. ‘You won’t get a signal down here,’ his father told h
im. ‘Who were you going to ring, anyway?’ ‘I wasn’t going to ring anyone. I was going to check the weather.’ ‘We’re in a tunnel. There is no weather.’ No weather? Fracassus was frightened. He’d seen a television programme in which a father took his son to the top of a mountain to slit his throat but then God stepped in to stop him. Not a great storyline but he liked it when the father slit a ram’s throat instead. If his father was planning something similar, where was the ram? It frightened him to be without a signal.

  ‘You still haven’t told me where you’re taking me,’ he said.

  ‘Offshore.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had a shore.’

  ‘We don’t. We have the idea of a shore and I’m taking you to the idea of off it.’

  Ideas frightened Fracassus. ‘Does it have a name?’

  The Grand Duke lowered his voice. ‘Avoiding tax. Not to be confused with evading tax. Evasion we’ll discuss next week.’

  ‘No, I meant does where we’re going have a name.’

  ‘The Republic Outside the Walls of the Republic.’

  ‘So is this abroad?’ Fracassus had never been abroad.

  ‘It’s not abroad when you’re there, but it is when you’re here. It’s what accountants call abroad. Wait till you see it …’

  ‘Abroad?’

  ‘No, the Nowhere Palace. A building that is ours when we say it is, and not ours when we say it isn’t. A building whose magnificence adds lustre to the Republic’s reputation but not its treasury. Not everything, my son, can be judged by the financial contribution we make. Sometimes we do what we do for the pure beauty of doing it, even if that means keeping a little something back for ourselves.’

  Fracassus remained silent. He had been in the dark for long enough. But then daylight began to pour into the tunnel and the excitement of arrival seized him. He would have liked it to be abroad, but offshore would do. So this was what his father meant by beauty. He thought he could smell the sea. Offshore! – why, even the sky was bluer. The Grand Duke nudged him. Look! There were only a few seconds for his eyes to adjust before Fracassus saw it, a great gaudy flower of steel and glass, growing out of the sand, a purple pyramid bearing the name ORIGEN in the usual gold lettering, and then THE NOWHERE PALACE.