Pussy

by Howard Jacobson

  CHAPTER 11

  A short chapter concerning bricks and mortar

  Buoyed by his success in getting Fracassus to take more interest in his properties, the Grand Duke gave him a hundred acres of land and told him he could build whatever he wanted.

  Fracassus drew a picture of a Roman amphitheatre.

  The Grand Duke discussed the implications of this with his wife. ‘It isn’t necessarily,’ he said, ‘what it seems.’

  ‘Nothing is,’ the Grand Duchess said. ‘But this just might be.’

  ‘For all you know he might intend it as a children’s park.’

  ‘With swings and roundabouts to torture traitors on?’

  ‘I think he has made provision for a sandpit in his plans.’

  ‘Renzo, that will be to soak up the gladiators’ blood.’

  They called Fracassus into their presence and asked him how he saw the amphitheatre operating. He pushed his chin out in the manner of Nero and inverted his thumb.

  ‘Who do you plan to kill there?’ the Grand Duke asked. He was giving his son a chance. Go on, show your mother how absurd her fears are.

  ‘Christians,’ he said.

  ‘Fracassus, this is a Christian country.’

  ‘Jews, then. I don’t know … Muslims … Humanitarians.’

  ‘Humanitarians aren’t a religion.’

  ‘We could still throw them to the lions.’

  Was he joking? The Grand Duke scrutinised his son’s expression. Had there been room enough for light in his eyes, it would have been easier to tell. But no, not joking. And yet he was not in deadly earnest either. It was as though Fracassus inhabited some hitherto undiscovered zone between meaning what he said and not meaning what he said. Ambiguity, was it? No, ambiguity took cognisance of alternatives. The zone Fracassus inhabited appeared to be one where neither words nor intentions had traction. You could just say a thing, and then unsay it, with no cost to yourself and no repercussions for others, because there were no others. The Grand Duke had noted such inconsequential changeability in his dogs. They would want a walk and then they wouldn’t. Changeability wasn’t even the word for it. They wanted a walk in one sphere of time and being, but didn’t want it in another. They were bifurcated. Being human, the Grand Duke decided, meant putting these two spheres together in a continuum of responsibility and decision. By that measure his son was not yet human.

  While not wanting to put a dampener on the Prince’s creativity, or provoke him into God knows what response, the Grand Duke gently suggested other uses for an amphitheatre. A running track, perhaps. An open-air auditorium for pop concerts. Fracassus shrugged. Whatever.

  Eventually the amphitheatre was built and modified into an out-of-town shopping mall. Fracassus opened it. Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt wrote a speech for him but he decided against delivering it. Instead he sliced the ribbon with an ornamental sword and inverted his thumb.

  By general consent, the Amphitheatre was an aesthetic triumph.

  Security staff dressed like Spartacus. Hostesses at the information booths wore thigh-length silver boots, short togas made of aluminium foil, and sported laurel leaves in their hair. A caged lion entertained the children with its roars. And Neroburgers were for sale.

  Commercially, too, the Amphitheatre thrived.

  ‘You have to admit, he has a touch,’ the Grand Duke told his wife. ‘For a sixteen-year-old.’

  ‘So what does he intend next, a slave market?’

  The Grand Duke looked away. Fracassus had already submitted his plans for a colonnaded plaza, the pillars to be finished in white marble, with walkways along which slaves would be paraded, space for restaurants and a Caffè Nero, and a raised stage on which the auction itself would be conducted.

  Other than saying, ‘In no circumstances are we going to allow you to be the auctioneer,’ the Grand Duke raised no objection. The Saepta Julia was finished within budget and on time, and soon became the most visited Ayurvedic spa and herbal treatment centre in All the Republics. Slaves were available for a price, but you had to know who to ask.

  CHAPTER 12

  A mother worries in 140 characters

  Solemnly commemorated as the dawn of seriousness in adjoining Republics, an eighteenth birthday was a joyously frivolous occasion in Urbs-Ludus. The Grand Duke marked the Prince’s with a giant marzipan replica of the Palace and a mock sonorous announcement. ‘It is time, my son,’ he said, ‘for Twitter.’

  He had discussed the Prince’s progress with Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt, both of whom felt the character of the Prince was coming into clearer focus.

  ‘He is certainly who he is,’ Professor Probrius declared.

  ‘And you can certainly see who he’s going to be,’ Dr Cobalt added.

  ‘And words?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Professor, ‘there are more than there were.’

  ‘More, without doubt,’ Dr Cobalt agreed.

  ‘And more appropriate?’

  There was a pause. ‘We are working on that.’

  ‘I have myself,’ the Grand Duke pronounced, ‘added to his stock of commercial and political terms. I wouldn’t say he was fluent in them, but nor would I say he is tongue-tied. I wonder if we might agree that he has enough to be going on with and concentrate on other skills. I think his knowledge of geography is shaky. He has told me several times that he has a yen to travel to ancient Rome but thinks it’s in Los Angeles. This is a slip occasioned by confusing television epics, I imagine.’

  ‘And while we are on that subject, Your Highness, he does also suffer chronology amnesia in relation to ancient worlds in general. He isn’t entirely clear we aren’t still living in them. He talks a lot about Caffè Nero. I have a suspicion he thinks the Emperor owns the chain and might actually be working in one of them. So perhaps we should look at his history, too.’

  ‘Excellent idea. Let’s get him modernised. I propose to get him tweeting.’

  For someone as beguiled by screens as Fracassus, he was slow to embrace interactivity. How to explain this the Grand Duke didn’t know. Perhaps the Prince had been alone with his own thoughts too long to be curious about anyone else’s. He didn’t miss conversation because he’d never had it, and he didn’t crave the to and fro of social media because fro wasn’t a preposition that called to him. What the Grand Duke had to get him to see was that Twitter didn’t entail any of the tedious conversational niceties he feared. Twitter was an assertion of the tweeter’s will, full stop. It imposed no obligation to listen or respond. ‘You can be as deaf as a post and as blind as a bat,’ he told his son, ‘and still tweet with the best of them.’

  Had he had the time, the Grand Duke would personally have led his son into the arts of social media self-assertion, but there were pressing commercial matters to attend to, and there was no point asking the help of the Duchess, who lacked the requisite genius for compression. She refused to understand it. ‘I fail to see,’ she said, when the Grand Duke explained the nuts and bolts of the system to her, ‘how Fracassus is ever going to attain 140 characters. He doesn’t have enough words.’

  ‘140 characters is the maximum, my dear,’ he told her.

  ‘And what’s the minimum?’

  ‘Demanska, I have no idea. How is that relevant?’

  ‘I would like Fracassus to keep his messages as brief as possible. I don’t want him making himself ill thinking of something to say. You know how finding just one word can defeat him.’

  ‘Le mot juste, my dear. One word can sometimes be enough.’

  ‘In Fracassus’s case it will have to be.’

  They exchanged anxious glances. They both feared what that mot juste could turn out to be.

  Left to his own devices, would Fracassus tweet exclusively about pussy?

  CHAPTER 13

  In which Fracassus informs the world what he’s eating

  To allay his wife’s concerns – and not only incidentally his own – the Grand Duke appointed a Twitter adjutant to assist the Pr
ince in mastering the necessary arts.

  The person he chose was Caleb Hopsack, leader of the OPP, the Ordinary People’s Party, and twice voted Commoner of the Year. Though not a member of the Grand Duke’s inner circle – as how could he be, given his loud championing of all things unquiet and unrefined? – the two had nonetheless built up a friendship over the years based on Caleb Hopsack’s knowledge of the turf and the Grand Duke’s longing for some of it to rub off on him. The Grand Duke was under no financial necessity to gamble but felt ancient twinges of kinship with bookies and touts, with tipsters, with stables, with the smell of straw. Perhaps his grandfather … Whatever his motivation, he liked the occasional visit to the racecourse, particularly – whenever possible – in the company of Caleb Hopsack, who seemed to know everybody in the racing fraternity from owners to jockeys to punters and even to the horses. Though he had no reason to envy anybody, the Grand Duke envied Caleb Hopsack. What was his secret? How had he succeeded in making ordinary people feel he was one of them when he had amassed considerable personal wealth, belonged to the most exclusive clubs, hobnobbed with Grand Dukes, and dressed like a stockbroker’s idea of a gentleman farmer who enjoyed a tipple? Certainly the Grand Duke knew no one else of his eminence who could, with such an instinctive flair for looking wrong, wear a racing trilby and windowpane check coats and yellow cotton trousers, and look right in them.

  ‘I don’t know where you find these things,’ the Grand Duke once remarked, looking him up and down with undisguised admiration and perplexity. He felt uncomfortable calling them ‘things’ but wasn’t sure what other word to use.

  ‘The question isn’t where but why,’ Hopsack replied.

  The Grand Duke waited. ‘Why?’ he asked when it became clear that Hopsack wasn’t going to tell him otherwise.

  ‘It goes without saying,’ Hopsack explained, going into that third-person solipsistic mode that ordinary people found transfixing, ‘that as leader of the Little People’s Party, Caleb Hopsack must speak exclusively to and for the concerns of little people. To do that successfully he must look like them.’

  ‘I thought you were leader of the Ordinary People’s Party …’

  ‘Ordinary/Little, Little/Ordinary – same difference.’

  ‘But you don’t look anything like Ordinary or Little people. I have met them. I employ several hundred thousand of them. None of them would know how to begin dressing like you.’

  ‘You entirely miss the point,’ Hopsack said. ‘I am the idealised, never-never rural version of what they secretly would like to look like. It doesn’t matter that the clothes I wear are not ones they would know how to access or could afford to buy even if they did. Sartorially, Caleb Hopsack is their shadow self. Sure it’s a joke. But it’s a joke they get. I bare my cigarette-stained teeth at them and remind them of a horse. They come muttering to my meetings and remind me of bags of hay. We despise one another. This is the age of the ironising of the archetype. I have a beer pot with my name on it in every public house in the Duchy but the Plebs know I prefer Scotch. They need Caleb Hopsack to be ordinary and a toff at the same time.’

  ‘So which are you?’

  ‘What sort of question is that? Have I not said that this is the age of the ironising of the archetype? Maybe I am the one, maybe I’m the other, maybe I’m both.’

  He was just the person, the Grand Duke thought – maybe just the three people – to oversee his son’s Twitter page.

  With the Grand Duke’s permission, Caleb Hopsack would begin by building up interest in Fracassus on his own Twitter page. It would help gain momentum, he said, if Caleb Hopsack were to be filmed chatting to the Prince outside the Golden Gates. Perhaps the Prince would be so good as to put his arm around Hopsack’s shoulder, shake hands with him, kiss him on both cheeks, and then, to the camera, give the double thumb of Internet approval. Whereupon Hopsack would open wide his famous reticulated mouth and gulp down the admiration of his followers like a shark swallowing down scampi. This would go directly on to YouTube, innumerable links to which Caleb Hopsack would tweet around the world.

  The Grand Duke expressed surprise that the leader of the Ordinary Little People’s Party would want to show himself – forgive the expression – jerking off on extraordinary big people.

  ‘If you will forgive my expression, Your Majesty,’ Hopsack said, ‘you are harping on a broken string. Size is no longer relative to itself. Today, thanks in no small measure to Caleb Hopsack, things are not what they were yesterday. Everything’s in the wash. Tomorrow, everything will be in the tumble dryer. Big/small, grand/common – these simple identities are over. By next year, you’ll be more common than we are.’

  Time was moving too quickly for the Grand Duke. ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘The common people.’

  ‘And what will the common people be then?’

  ‘The aristocracy.’

  ‘Leaving you where?’

  ‘Still leading the party.’

  Mesmerised by Caleb Hopsack’s tailoring, and frightened by how wide he could open his mouth, Fracassus acceded to his every request. After his encounter with the Weatherman he had developed a taste for upside-down talk. ‘I’m delighted to meet you,’ he told Hopsack when the cameras began to roll. ‘Unless I’m not.’

  ‘Cut!’ Hopsack cried. ‘I think that’s a bit too unnuanced.’

  Fortunately, Professor Probrius had taken Fracassus through nuance the day before. ‘From the Latin nubes, meaning cloud,’ Fracassus said with some consciousness of erudition. There was a self-satisfaction about Caleb Hopsack that made Fracassus want to hit him. He was glad he had knowledge to do it with. On the other hand he admired him. ‘I can, if you’d prefer,’ he went on, ‘be more cloudier.’

  ‘Well let’s not overdo it,’ Hopsack said. ‘This is Twitter.’

  For the next take Hopsack asked for them to be filmed inside the Golden Gates. He thought it would further their common cause to give the impression that they were in his Palace and that the Prince had called on him. ‘And … action!’ he called, leaning against the Golden Gates and occasionally rubbing fingerprints off them with a check handkerchief. The two men began to talk about their special relationship.

  Over the following weeks Caleb Hopsack tweeted praise for the Prince’s dynamism, generosity, thoughtfulness, integrity, potential suitability for high office, however high that office should be. He was a good guy. Incredibly focussed. Hopsack’s tweets had an air of vacant authority about them. I am confident that such and such is the case, he would say. He did not expect to be contradicted or questioned. His confidence was an imprimatur of truth. If he tweeted that the Prince was a special person then the Prince was a special person. His recommendation was enough.

  Two or three months later, with Caleb Hopsack at his shoulder, Fracassus began to tweet for himself. His first attempts evinced an uncomplicated charm:

  11 Nov: Nice today.

  he wrote. And then, emboldened:

  12 Nov: Not so nice as yesterday. Cheeseburger for lunch.

  13 Nov: My mother still nagging me about reading so my father buys me a comic. The Prince by Mantovani.

  14 Nov: On page 1 of The Prince by Mantovani.

  15 Nov: Cheeseburger for dinner.

  16 Nov: On page 2 of The Prince by Mantovani.

  17 Nov: My eyes hurt.

  18 Nov: Still on page 2 of The Prince by Mantovani.

  19 Nov: Demo outside Palace. Placards say WE WELCOME REFUGEES. I say shoot them.

  20 Nov: Love it that thick morons reacted angrily to my shooting suggestion. What’s wrong with these people? I was joking.

  21 Nov: Given up reading Mantovani’s The Prince.

  ‘Not bad, but now let’s step the pace up a bit,’ Caleb Hopsack said. ‘Let’s address an issue. Perhaps you could mention me.’

  Fracassus did as he was bidden.

  Lunch with Caleb Hopsack. He paid. Classy gesture from an incredibly classy guy.

  Followed by:

&
nbsp; Other diners incredibly interested to see us together. So gratifying.

  Followed by:

  Waiter said his wife committed suicide a year ago this day. Hopsack added 5% to tip. Incredibly moving.

  Followed by:

  Walked into demo against Miss Universe pageant. No wonder. Women marchers looked like pigs.

  Followed by:

  Hopsack promising ordinary people he’ll get migration numbers down to minus zero if elected. Every confidence he’ll deliver.

  Followed by:

  The idea that Caleb Hopsack is migrationist is almost laughable.

  ‘And don’t forget,’ Hopsack told him, ‘that you can retweet.’

  ‘Retweet what?’

  ‘Well, my tweets to you for a start.’

  Fracassus turned up for his weekly cheeseburger dinner with his parents wearing a green and ochre windowpane check tweed jacket with three vents and mustard corduroy trousers.

  ‘Go back to your room this minute and change,’ his mother told him.

  ‘I may have started him too soon,’ the Grand Duke conceded. ‘The boy might be eighteen but he is still impressionable.’

  ‘I did warn you this was bound to happen the minute he met a real person. Have I not been saying for years that all the television he watches has numbed his capacity for interpersonal relationships?’

  ‘You can’t blame television. At least he’s his own self when he’s being Nero. Maybe I should get him a bigger screen.’

  ‘That just puts the problem off for another year.’

  ‘There’s no time like the future,’ the Grand Duke said.

  ‘I say deal with it now.’

  ‘And get him to do what with his time instead? Read about wizards?’

  ‘Help you to rip the wires out of the Palace for a start.’

  ‘For the thousandth time – there are no wires. It’s all done by electromagnetic waves.’