Pussy

by Howard Jacobson

  Fracassus held his breath. Coloured lights danced before his eyes. At the entrance to the pyramid was a winking crystal Sphinx.

  ‘Classy or what?’ the Grand Duke said, gripping his son’s arm.

  ‘Classy,’ Fracassus agreed. He had never used the word before and liked the shape of it in his mouth. Classy – it seemed to open a whole new world of sensation to him. It made his mouth moist. It made his cheeks hot. Classy. It was as though he’d swallowed the softest of chocolates.

  They entered a great amethyst atrium. It was like a giant cage for jungle birds. Parrots, macaws, toucans. Fracassus had watched a nature programme about killer birds. For a moment he thought there must have been real birds there, then he realised their calls were being piped through loudspeakers, which was even better. ‘What do you think?’ his father asked.

  ‘Classy,’ the Prince said.

  ‘The world’s top retailers fight to get a space here,’ his father said. ‘Tiffany, Cartier, Chanel.’

  ‘Is there a Caffè Nero?’ Fracassus asked.

  ‘No Caffè Nero. We wouldn’t have Caffè Nero here. We have Nespresso. Now let’s look at the gaming room.’

  This was the biggest play area Fracassus had ever seen, even bigger than the roof garden on which he’d rolled as an infant, asking for the world and receiving it. He was sorry he’d used up all his words. If the entrance to the casino was classy, what was this?

  Extra classy.

  So many play tables under a single roof inlaid with gold leaf, but, more marvellously, so many players, some dressed as though for the opera, others as though they’d just come from behind a counter selling washing powders, women beautiful and plain, men sophisticated and awkward, some of either sex accustomed to throwing money around, others flat broke and apprehensive – a great, classless party of gamesters who would in no other place or circumstance find themselves together, divided by the urgency of their needs, united in the single fantasy of winning enough to make need yesterday’s bad dream. Fracassus looked around him. The wheels turned, the balls jumped, croupiers employed rakes to push cards about like hot coals, one-armed bandits lit up and whirred, numbers and colours were called, men punched the air, women cried out, one threw what few chips were left to him in a rubbish bin on which the word Origen was stamped in gold leaf.

  ‘Mine,’ Fracassus thought. ‘My offshore midnight palace. My party. My kingdom.’

  Was this how humanity appeared to God when he looked down on it from heaven? That very question was posed in the Republic’s infancy by Lodj Chjarrvak, the Republic’s only thinker, just before he drove his car into the Wall. ‘A mortal shouldn’t own a casino,’ he had pronounced as he strapped himself in. ‘It makes him mad.’ But no one told Fracassus this.

  He slid into the great offshore garden of his thoughts where fortunes were won and lost, where killer birds called to one another through speakers, where he remembered his mouth softening around the sibilants of classy. Blood rushed to his lips.

  The Grand Duke looked at him with satisfaction. If he wasn’t mistaken, this was the first sensual experience of his son’s life.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. It wasn’t a real question. He just wanted to hear Fracassus say he was happy.

  ‘I think I have an idea, Father,’ the Prince replied after a while. He appeared to have been concentrating hard.

  ‘What idea, my son?’

  ‘There are men here with winnings to burn, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And others with sorrows to drown?’

  ‘That’s also unfortunately true.’

  ‘Don’t you think we could do more for them?’

  ‘You aren’t, I hope, talking about psychological counselling.’

  ‘No. Pole dancing.’

  The Grand Duke took the boy in his arms. This was the moment he’d been imagining from the day his son was born. Their first business conversation. ‘I think that’s a brilliant concept,’ he said. Then quickly threw in a qualification. ‘But no touching. We don’t want to fall foul of the feminists on the Licensing Board. And don’t imagine you’re going to run it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We have grander plans for you.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘You will discover in time.’

  ‘When in time?’

  ‘When your education is complete. And when you’ve travelled. I went to Egypt, China and beyond the Urals for my inspiration. The Nowhere Palace wasn’t born in a day, and didn’t grow out of my mind only. You too must travel.’

  ‘Can I go to ancient Rome?’

  ‘We shall see, my son. We shall see.’

  The Grand Duke walked back through the tunnel in a state of high agitation. The trip had gone better than he’d dared hope and he didn’t want to spoil the moment. He didn’t speak the whole time they were underground and wouldn’t let Fracassus speak either. But on coming out again into the Republic he risked giving shape to his thoughts. He looked up to the heavens and breathed the air. It wasn’t clean, but what was? Done, he said to himself. That was the mercantile side of his son’s education taken care of. The ambition tree had been planted. Henceforth, cupidity would water it.

  Now all he had to do was fix the politics.

  CHAPTER 10

  How a weatherman brought sunshine into the Prince’s heart

  Sometimes, when a great man wants something enough, the gods or whatever name we know them by, assemble and agree to bestow it upon him. Such was the divine favour enjoyed by the Grand Duke that no sooner had he said the word ‘politics’ to himself than they came upon a commotion in the streets which only the practice of democratic politics could explain.

  Another plebiscite, presumably. The Grand Duke held himself aloof from people politics. Plebiscites had wreaked havoc upon the Republic once upon a time but they had become so common that he knew to take no more notice of them. The people exercised their power and whatever it was they’d voted for was forgotten in the euphoria of their exercising it. The next day things returned to normal.

  But voting still drew large crowds. It was like a carnival. Cars hooted in support of their side and other cars hooted back. Some drivers succeeded in tooting their horns so expressively it was as though a whole ironic conversation of automobiles was in progress. Professor Probrius, out shopping with Dr Cobalt, heard it and thought of the Persian poem The Conference of the Birds. The birds, finding themselves without a king, go in search of a bird who might be suitable. Might cars one day do the same, he wondered. They were driving themselves already. It wasn’t fanciful to suppose they would soon be casting votes. And with no less acumen, he thought sourly, than their drivers. Dr Cobalt was on his arm. She knew of several other medieval works in which animals sorted out the tricky issue of government. Professor Probrius delighted in her knowledge. ‘A particular favourite of mine, also Persian as it happens,’ she went on, ‘is How the Lions Deposed their King and Instituted Constitutional Democracy.’ Professor Probrius said he hoped she knew of a good translation, or was proficient enough in Farsi, for them to enjoy reading it together. She didn’t have the courage to tell him she’d made it up.

  Fracassus, meanwhile, was revelling in a freedom he rarely enjoyed. For five minutes in the Nowhere Palace he thought he’d found his Nirvana, but now the tumult of election stimulated his fickle mind. He had no idea what the people were voting for. It was the uproar that aroused him, the flags, the cheering, the atmosphere of combat. He had never seen a crowd before, except from the hundred and seventieth floor of the Palace. Close up, it was another event entirely. He couldn’t have known that people massed could generate such heat, or affect the way the very light was refracted. Was the ground shaking or was that his blood moving quicker through his veins? It was as though one of his favourite television programmes had come alive on the streets. Nero could have ridden through on a chariot. Fracassus heard the citizens hailing him. Hail Nero! Hail Fracassus!

  Some among the throng put radi
os to their ears, though Fracassus didn’t know whether that was to drown out the noise of the plebiscite or get more news of it. Vans with loudhailers toured the streets. Two buses faced off in the square, each flashing graphs and figures on giant screens, the same sum appearing now as profit, now as loss, now as what the electorate stood to gain from war, now as what armed conflict with one or other of the sister Republics beyond the Wall would cost them.

  Fracassus wanted to know which bus to support. Which side would the Emperor Nero have been on?

  The Grand Duke had misgivings. By politics – the politics of which it was time Fracassus gathered some awareness – he didn’t mean supporting one side or another. An overview was what he wanted for his son, an ability to use words like liberty and freedom and know in a rough sort of way what they meant; how, again in a rough sort of way, they should sound; and why, in a more precise sort of way, they were never to be granted. But he didn’t want Fracassus dirtying his hands by actual association. War or Peace? Without being especially enamoured of Peace, no one took the prospect of War seriously. It was just another occasion for a referendum. They might as well have been deciding between meat or fish for lunch. But that was still no reason for Fracassus to be down there mixing with the proponents of either. He was glad, at least, that they had come out without their regalia. Despite the heat he turned up his coat collar and advised Fracassus to do the same. This was not a place for a Grand Duke and his son to be seen.

  ‘You don’t have to support any bus,’ he said.

  ‘But which is true?’

  There it was, the very thing the Grand Duke feared. Truth! Soon his son would be wearing the flat cap of revolution, loading the bus with explosives and driving it at the Palace.

  ‘That depends on your angle of vision,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I like the red bus better than the blue bus,’ Fracassus said. ‘It’s got more people around it.’

  A scrawny old gentleman standing by them in the crowd overheard him. Until now he’d been waving his stick at the red bus and cackling.

  He had wild hair and carried a plastic shopping bag stuffed with papers. Fracassus wondered if he was a soothsayer. In every episode of The Life and Loves of the Emperor Nero a soothsayer appeared wearing rags and waving a stick. There must have been thousands of them in ancient Rome. ‘You like red better than blue,’ he said, turning his wild eyes on the Prince. ‘That’s the most intelligent political statement I’ve heard all day. Do you hear that, Philander?’ – he was shouting now at the Advocate for War, unless he was the Advocate for Peace, addressing the crowd through a loudhailer from the open top of the red bus – ‘I’ve got someone here who understands your message. Better red than dead. Ha!’

  The old man threw back his head and cackled again. Fracassus thought his neck might snap. In The Life and Loves of the Emperor Nero the Emperor made a practice of snapping soothsayers’ necks with one hand. He did it with a little twisting gesture, like screwing the top off a bottle. There were schools in the Republic where kids entertained one another in the playground copying that gesture. Bonum nox noctis, you old fart. Snap! Pity poor Fracassus who, having no such friends to play with, had to make his own entertainment.

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ the old man said, turning again to Fracassus as though surprised to see him still there, ‘a father should never live to see his son grow up. Look at him up there, the fraud, grinning like a choirboy and spewing excrement. He was all excrement when he was a baby and he’s all excrement again. I wish it would blow back down his loudhailer and choke him. Can you hear what he’s saying? The Republic is in danger. Ask him who from and he’ll give you a different answer every day. Today it’s the Republic of Gnossia. They’re going to steal our jobs and rape our women, he says. Have you ever been to the Republic of Gnossia? They have full employment and their women are ten times more beautiful than ours. They would rather impale themselves on the Wall than even visit us. Do you know how I know that? He told me. What do you say to that?’

  Fracassus was not accustomed to conversing with strangers. He felt himself colour. He ransacked his intelligence for an answer. He was about to say ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt,’ when he remembered the word he’d learnt that very day. ‘Classy,’ he replied in panic, jutting his jaw.

  The soothsayer went wild with excitement, rolling his head so that his hair flew in all directions, gesticulating with his stick, laughing crazily.

  ‘Do you hear that, Philander – he thinks you’re classy. Another one! And all because I paid for you to have a private education.’

  Hearing his name called, the Advocate raised his hand. For a split second he resembled a schoolboy waving to his father from the steps of his school. Fracassus had never been to school or even seen one but he had, without pleasure, watched repeats of Brideshead Revisited on television. All faggots.

  The old soothsayer must have read his mind. ‘My fault, all my fault,’ he rambled on. ‘I should never have sent him there in the first place. An academy for scoundrels who speak a smattering of Latin, that’s all it is.’ Then, taking Fracassus by the arm, ‘Come on, come with me and we’ll meet him. He can’t resist an opportunity to demonstrate his charm on someone new. Hey, Philander, give your voice a rest and meet your new fan. He’s a nobody and he looks too young to vote so there’s no advantage to you in talking to him. That should appeal to your sense of the topsy-turvy. Don’t do what’s worth doing, do what isn’t. Your old school motto – Quid debemus facere oppositum. Come down from your lying battle bus and tell this boy what you’re going to do when you win the vote even though you won’t.’

  To the Prince’s acute embarrassment, the Advocate – son or no son, excremental liar or truth-teller – descended and was among them. In a matter of seconds he had pushed through the adoring crowd and was pumping Fracassus’s hand as if it were some magic trick and he the magician.

  Fracassus was immediately star-struck. He knew who was pumping his hand. He’d seen him countless times on television, reading the weather forecast. So soothsaying ran in the family. The famous need only one name and Philander was his. No other weather forecaster in the Republic was better known or more loved. Not for the quality of his prognostications but for his looks, the prepubescent face, the mischievous smile, the collop of hair the same lemon-custard colour as the Grand Duke’s, the Grand Duchess’s, and Fracassus’s own. But above all for the gleam of what critics of him called his mendaciousness. Every grin a lie, they said. But how could one complain when every lie came companioned with a grin.

  Fracassus didn’t watch television to pass judgement. It was true that Philander’s forecasts were rubbish. Sun all day tomorrow, he’d promise, and Fracassus knew for a certainty it would rain. The channel kept him on because the viewing figures went through the roof with every deception. Fracassus was not alone in feeling singled out by him, joined, just the two of them – one behind the screen, one in front of it – in the seductive knowledge of falsehood. Of course it would be dry when he’d promised showers. Fracassus loved looking out of his window and seeing the Republic bake in Philander’s empty promises.

  The Prince didn’t understand how he could enjoy being lied to, but he did. And evidently voters, in all likelihood not knowing what they were voting for, felt the same. Lie to us, lie to us. The first falsehood was like a declaration of love. The second a proof of it. After that – but after that didn’t matter. After that Philander had skedaddled.

  Fracassus let his hand melt in the weatherman’s. Philander here, in front of him. Philander, whose pink, powdered fingers would caress the weather map with a strange, indecent incompetence, as though he were one baby undressing another. The Great Philander, undressing him.

  ‘It’s true what my old dad’s telling you,’ Philander said. ‘I don’t know what he’s told you, but I guarantee you it’s true. Every bit of it. Everything’s true.’ His eyes met Fracassus’s. The boy swam in their treacherous blueness. Tomorrow temperatures could reach ninety-seven degrees,
and lo! there was a blizzard. A calm night and every tree in the Republic would be uprooted. ‘Say it after me, Everything’s true.’

  ‘Everything’s true,’ Fracassus repeated as though in a swoon.

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ the scrawny soothsayer shouted.

  ‘So can I count on your vote?’ the weatherman asked Fracassus.

  ‘I don’t have a vote,’ the Prince said.

  ‘Age the problem?’

  ‘Rank.’

  ‘Rank! So much the better. Things rank and gross in nature …’

  ‘Give him your pitch anyway,’ the old man said. ‘Don’t send him away empty-handed.’

  ‘Everything’s true,’ Philander said again, ‘not because it is, but because I say it is.’

  Fracassus didn’t have to be told to repeat it this time. ‘Everything’s true because you say it is.’

  During its short time in Philander’s grip Fracassus’s hand had felt like a fireball. Released, it was as a hailstone.

  The Grand Duke, having lost Fracassus in the crowd, had waited anxiously for his return. ‘So what was that all about?’ he asked when the Prince reappeared, orange-faced and his hair somehow enfolded into itself like a napkin at a banquet.

  Fracassus shrugged. They began to walk home in silence, then Fracassus said, ‘Do you know what I really want?’

  Cold terror gripped the Grand Duke’s heart. Was Fracassus going to say he wanted to make war? Was he going to say he wanted to make peace?

  ‘What, my son?’ All his hopes waited on the Prince’s answer.

  ‘To be a weatherman.’

  The Grand Duke breathed again. His son had had his first smell of politics and not been seduced by ideology into supposing it could be separated from light entertainment.

  He slept well that night. His son’s future was secure. This morning a pimp, this afternoon a weatherman, tomorrow the world.