Pussy

by Howard Jacobson

  He was on their screens once a week, and then twice. If they watched repeats they could see him every other day. There were women to whom Fracassus’s features were more familiar than their husbands’. Men thought of him as their friend. Children trusted him and would have leapt willingly into his black limousine had he pulled up to them in the street and offered them chocolate. Stoppit!

  The day the Grand Duke died the papers carried the story that the father of Fracassus, the television personality, had Stopped It.

  Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt met in one of their old salad-bar haunts by the Wall and discussed what had transpired. They rarely saw the Prince now but he had retained their services out of some queer affection which they felt guilty about being unable to reciprocate. Occasionally he texted them regarding a word, but then either found another or changed his mode of expression. ‘He’s keeping us in reserve,’ Professor Probrius said.

  ‘Do you know what for?’

  ‘I think he might be more insecure than we’ve ever realised. He could be wondering when he’s going to run out of the ten words he uses and when, in that case, he’ll need us again.’

  ‘I think you flatter yourself.’

  ‘Could be. But I’ve been right about everything so far.’

  She spluttered into her salad. ‘Right? What have you been right about?’

  ‘Didn’t I say that the secret of his success was failure?’

  ‘No. I did.’

  ‘Yes, but you were talking about his failure. I say the secret of his success is the failure of the people who look up to him. They want a hero who isn’t there.’

  ‘I said the first part of that. You said the second.’

  ‘You/me – same difference. Man and wife are one flesh and all that …’

  ‘Man and wife? Is that a proposal?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Does that mean that the Prince has unwittingly brought us together? Can something come of nothing?’

  ‘Is that a terrible thought?’

  ‘Terrible.’

  CHAPTER 26

  Retards

  With his father dead, there was no one in the way of Fracassus’s rise, at least within the walled confines of Urbs-Ludus. His mother, who had spent increasing periods of time in her room, now never left it. As for his brother, no one knew where he was or would have recognised him had they known.

  This situation released Fracassus into the fantasy that was himself. He bought up property, knocked it down or built it higher, as the fancy took him. He put casinos into poorhouses and strip clubs into old people’s homes. From the sky, the Republic of Urbs-Ludus had begun to take on a magical quality, so vertiginous were Fracassus’s towers and so extravagant their illumination. From the ground it was now impossible to see a single star. You’re lucky if you get to see the moon these days, the architecture critic for the Urbs-Ludus Guardian wrote. You’ll be seeing the moon and the stars when I knock the crap out of you, Fracassus tweeted in response.

  At get-togethers of the Fracassites, ‘Knock the crap out of ’em’ replaced ‘Chuck ’em out’ as the cri de rage, no matter that there was no actual person among them to rage against.

  Sometime towards the end of his third series of Stoppit! the producers called Fracassus in for a serious conversation about its future. ‘If you’re planning to axe me I’ll sue the shit out you,’ he announced before he’d even taken off his coat. They weren’t planning to axe him. Quite the opposite. So good were the viewing figures for Stoppit! that they’d been searching for a follow-up show. As ever, it was finding a good title that had held things up. But now they had it. The mystery was why it had taken them so long. Starttit! How good was that? Starttit! – in which young entrepreneurs, some of them perhaps reformed malfeasants from Stoppit! (television loved to recycle) would confide their business hopes and dreams to Fracassus and he would show them how they could be realised. Who knew better about starting a business than he, a penniless child from the shadow of the Wall who had clawed his way out of obscurity to light the sky up with his name? Everyone knew that Fracassus was born a prince and given his own ziggurat every birthday, but the lie was so preposterous it was charming, and besides, everyone wanted to believe it. The lie that the Grand Duke Fracassus had made himself out of nothing allowed the people to believe that they could make themselves out of nothing too. In the flagrancy of the falsehood they found a new spirituality of material hope.

  And this was not a Sunday morning spirituality, gone when the working week began. Believers could now watch Stoppit! on a Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and Starttit! on a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Meaning there would be only one day when he was not on the screen – Sunday, the day of lesser faiths, the day the people rested from Fracassus and missed him.

  The one disadvantage of Fracassus’s new show, viewed from where he stood, was that he’d have to speak more. He called back Professor Probrius, who’d prepped him for his address to the Plasentza Chamber of Commerce. Could Probrius remember any of the things Fracassus had said on that occasion. Professor Probrius consulted his notes. ‘You advised, Your Highness, to aim high, think big, stay focussed, never quit, push hard, laugh at retards, and pay no tax.’

  ‘That,’ the Grand Duke Fracassus said, ‘should get me through the first series.’

  Soon, between Stoppit! and Starttit! there was little else on television that anyone wanted to watch. Even Fracassus wondered what he’d be watching if he wasn’t watching himself. And then, in the best spirit of reality shows, television broke a story about itself. Halfway through a live breakfast programme a gang of masked men and women burst into the studio – the very studio in which Stoppit! and Starttit! were made – narrowly failing to kill Fracassus. In fact they invaded on his day off, so strictly speaking they didn’t narrowly miss killing him at all. Nor were they carrying any weapons to kill him with. But the implication was there for anyone to see. Fracassus stood for free speech and these brigands stood for the opposite. Exactly what happened was not clear, no matter that the entire Republic watched it live, but the short and the long of it was that the masked raiders shouted ‘Bang!’, ordered the presenter and the studio manager to put their hands above their heads, and took them and a young make-up artist hostage.

  Who they were; where they had come from; how they had breached security; what they wanted; who shouted ‘Bang!’ first; what could have been done to prevent the attack; what could be done to prevent it in the future – these were some of the questions to which the people, watching the event unfold before their eyes, demanded answers.

  Nothing of this kind had ever happened in Urbs-Ludus or any of the other Republics before. Had the toy gunmen been nationals their motives would have been easier to fathom. Everyone was angry about something. Everybody was trailing in the wake of someone else. The entire population was but a breath away from marching into a television studio and demanding justice. But these belligerents were not nationals. They had dark skin, black hair and even when they only shouted ‘Bang!’ they shouted it in an alien tongue that made the blood curdle. Once accept that they were foreigners there were still more questions to be answered. The Republic was peaceable to the point of docility. It had no weapons, no history of colonial adventurism, and no international ambitions beyond inviting visitors to go up and down in lifts with golden doors. It had made no compromising alliances, and to tell the truth had no foreign policy of any sort.

  Half an hour into the raid, the attackers took off their masks, revealed themselves to be artisans and demanded, if they were to release their hostages, an end to the opprobrium in which they and their families were held. It wasn’t so long ago that they’d been applauded into the country. Now, the same people who had cheered them at the railway stations, were booing them in the street. Even sales of artisanal breads had slowed.

  See the matter from their side and they were victims. See it from the point of view of frightened hostages and viewers expecting to catch the news on television and they
were common criminals. Knock the crap out of ’em, Fracassus tweeted.

  Whether, with that one tweet, Fracassus – the best-known television personality in the Republics and the owner of the twelve highest towers – taught the people what to think, or whether he simply found himself in accord with the popular mood, is a distinction that only history can make. Suffice it to say that he at once became the mouthpiece for a party that did not as yet exist. Whoever believed that the artisans should be arrested for betraying the trust and hospitality of their hosts, waterboarded, horsewhipped, humiliated and shot by firing squad knew themselves to be of the party of Fracassus and that, by the mathematics of rage and vengeance, meant the majority of the people. The Prime Mover of All the Republics, sensing public anger grow but conscious of his government’s obligations to international law, sent in a soft force to break the siege. The artisans surrendered without a fight. They would now be tried in accordance with local law. Should they be found guilty of affray – and the Prime Mover was prejudging nothing – they would be returned to their countries of origin, always provided, of course, that their countries of origin would deal humanely with them on their return. The statement was ill-timed. On the day of its issue, the young make-up artist, though now released and at home, suffered a belated panic attack. Fracassus put out a numbered series of tweets.

  (1) Justice in our time? Some justice!

  (2) The guilty sent home like heroes.

  (3) The victims returned to their loved ones in body bags.

  That a body bag was coming it a bit thick as a description of someone prescribed mild antidepressants, only a few literalists bothered to point out. The Republic’s blood was up. People who had been tweeting Chuck ’em out had suddenly to rephrase their outrage. Keep ’em here, they tweeted, so we can knock the crap out of ’em. Then chuck ’em out.

  On small events rests the fate of nations. The artisanal invasion of the television station was one of those hairspring moments when you could hear history teeter on the wire. Fracassus felt something even bigger than history – fate, destiny, the hour – run like fire through his veins. The Prime Mover must have felt the same thing drain clean away. There were angry demonstrations outside the Executive Building. People made effigies of him – no matter that no one knew what he looked like – and set fire to them in public parks. Every rioter found common cause with every other. They wanted different things but more than anything else they wanted something. For every tweet supporting the Prime Mover there were a thousand – many, it is true, written by Fracassus – calling for him to resign. So one day in the dead of winter, perspiring heavily, resign was exactly what he did.

  Outside the Palace of the Golden Gates, demonstrators calling to disband all working groups on climate change joined demonstrators calling to raise the age of consent for homosexuals and together they called for Fracassus.

  He appeared briefly on the Palace steps under a canopy of gold. ‘We’re going to Muck Out the Pig-Pen,’ he promised.

  ‘You are the Pig-Pen,’ someone shouted.

  Fracassus located him and pointed. ‘Retard,’ he told the crowd, shaking his head as though to ask what could be done about a world that had such retards in it, and then, to their delight, he did his old imitation of a spastic marionette.

  Watching from an upper window which no sound could penetrate, Dr Cobalt guessed Fracassus had finally gone too far. She couldn’t say she was sorry.

  Professor Probrius, standing behind her, kissed the nape of her neck.

  ‘I see the nature of the electorate still eludes you,’ he said. ‘The word retard is a great bonder.’

  Had she bothered to look out of the window again, Yoni Cobalt would have seen 500 Fracassus supporters all being spastic marionettes.

  CHAPTER 27

  In which Fracassus proves he is no longer in love

  Mighty would be the pen, and nimble the hand wielding it, that could do justice to the speed of events that now overtook the Republics – not only the physical aspects of a dissolution and the setting of dates for an election, but the invisible perturbations: the turbulence felt in every breast at the prospect of they knew not what, the wild gossip, the recriminations, the horrid prognostications on all sides, the told-you-sos from people who had told no one anything unless reading the extreme weather as a portent of troubles ahead could be called a something. Now add to this the foment into which the intellectual life of the Republics was thrown, first by the news that Fracassus had, indeed, as was expected, tossed his hat into the ring as a House of Origen Independent, and then by the rumours that an unknown PhD student called Sojjourner Heminway would stand for the Progressive Party on a platform that embraced equally the desire for something different and the need for everything to stay the same. Everyone had heard of Fracassus. No one had heard of Sojjourner. And yet somehow everyone felt they had. Heminway … Heminway … Ahead of any formal announcement, the news was leaked that she was the great-great-granddaughter of someone else no one had heard of at the time, but who turned out to be the great-great-granddaughter of the Republics’ very first Prime Mover. Prime Movers of All the Republics were rarely seen and never remembered, but a Prime Mover was still a Prime Mover and the fact that Sojjourner Heminway had the first Prime Mover’s blood in her veins lent to her challenge, if and when she made it, the gravitas of continuity. Soon, if and when became yes and then. But simultaneous with confirmation of her candidacy came the announcement that she was launching a campaign to save the Artisanal Seven as they were now to be designated. They had play-acted their protest, she argued, in deference to the frolicsomeness of Urbs-Ludus. It had been a prank with a purpose. They had voiced their grievance in a public place, in a spirit of fun, and while they didn’t seek to absolve themselves of responsibility for distress and injury, none of that had been their intention. In its own way, too, their demonstration highlighted the cultural impoverishment into which a sequence of illiberal administrations had allowed the nation to fall. One of the charges brought against the Artisanal Seven was that they disrespected the Republics’ prime source of entertainment and information. But it was they, the artisans, who deserved our respect, firstly for the changes they had wrought to the culinary arts in Urbs-Ludus – both as to the taste of food and as to its appearance – and secondly for the mellifluous languages that could now be heard pleasing the ear in every corner of the once monolingual Republics. What was television to this? Television, with its endless repeats of cheap programmes bought from outside the Walls and even cheaper repeats of reality programmes whose only beneficiary was the ego of the millionaires to whom it gave prominence. She spoke of millionaires in the plural so as not to personalise her argument too soon, but everyone knew to whom she was referring. The election had not begun and already it was turning toxic.

  Fracassus was thrown into confusion by the reappearance of the only woman ever to have almost touched his heart. His widowed mother believed this second coming of the wickedly Elitist witch to be an omen, and warned her son to withdraw from a race which, in the way of mothers, she didn’t think he had a cat in hell’s chance of winning. He told her he could barely remember who Sojjourner was and resorted to Twitter. May the best man win, he tweeted, by way of allusion both to Sojjourner’s gender and her trousers, but Caleb Hopsack, making a sudden intervention, advised him against too early an assault on Sojjourner Heminway’s appearance. It would be politic, in his view, for Fracassus to keep his powder dry and not accuse his rival of lacking a dress sense appropriate to the position of Prime Mover until much closer to polling day. That would be the best time, too, to insinuate that only lesbians never wore dresses. She would be tired and emotional by then and less able to defend herself. Fracassus didn’t have to be told twice. He had seen enough fights to know that the real killer blows were those landed in round fifteen. I agree with you, he told Hopsack and tweeted Anyone think she has the stamina for this? I don’t, I don’t.

  The other thing he did, to let Sojjourner know she wa
s fooling herself if she believed he thought about her still, was to find himself a wife. This he achieved by travelling incognito to the Nowhere Palace and selecting the croupier who looked most like his mother, reasoning that whoever looked most like his mother looked least like Sojjourner. He wrote her name down on a piece of paper so that he wouldn’t forget it and married her by special decree the day after. Caleb Hopsack, whose wardrobe Fracassus still longed to emulate, was his best man.

  Not wanting the grass to grow beneath his feet, Hopsack followed up on his advice regarding Sojjourner Heminway’s appearance with a visit to the Palace, in the first place to offer Fracassus his condolences – Fracassus could not at first remember what there was for him to be condoled about – and in the second to volunteer his services as Campaign Manager with Special Responsibilities for Twitter which, as anyone with political nous now understood, had grown to be as significant in the winning of votes, if not in the changing of minds, as the stump speech and the rally. Fracassus had embraced his old mentor, wondered where he had been, didn’t listen to the answer, installed him in the very position he’d requested and asked him to be his groomsman. Hopsack accepted and had himself photographed again outside the Golden Gates. It was while he was fumbling for the ring that he learned of one limitation to his power. ‘I want Philander to share responsibility with you for the media campaign,’ Fracassus whispered, before turning to the marriage officiant and affirming, ‘I do.’

  Caleb Hopsack expressed reservations about Philander at the reception. ‘You never know where he’s going to be or what he’s going to say,’ he said.

  ‘I see that as an advantage,’ Fracassus replied. He had chosen cord trousers the same canary yellow as his hair, and a brown and purple windowpane check jacket with four vents, to be married in. Unsure of Palace protocol, Caleb Hopsack had come in tails.