Ruin Nation

by Dan Carver

  I’m told it’s easy to make explosives. I don’t know. I buy mine in. I like to keep that emotional distance. But the knowledge had been circulating for years and anti-government factions formed to misuse it. The Laburnum – an extremely violent organisation named after the poisonous but incredibly boring tree – gained a large quantity of the malleable-explosive, C4. They shaped it into little round bombs. They painted the bombs orange and gift-wrapped them. They sent them to their local M.P. And he stuck them up his bottom..

  Richard Gifford knew nothing about The Laburnum. Why should he? Nor how they knew about his little, shall we say, eccentricities. He had other things on his mind. He was a rising political star. Why should he even consider that the small, orange fruit he had so lovingly inserted into his backside was a bomb? Why he’d stuck a tangerine up his chunter was his own business. How he intended to remove it, we can only speculate upon, as it never became an issue. He walked to work that day, whistling, tapping his umbrella, dishing out amiable kicks to the homeless. As he approached Number Ten, it was smiles from the window. Through the door…down the hall… left into the conference room, cries of: “Gifford! Gifford!” and deep voices heartily condoning his recent xenophobic outbursts and handling of a paving slab wrangle in Clapham station. There was talk of opinion polls and colleagues’ extramarital activities and laughs all round. They pumped his hand and clapped him on the back and some cheeky soul thought to slap him on the rump. It was the last mistake that cheeky soul would ever make.

  “Kaboom!”

  The initial blast kills all present, levelling the fifteen surrounding streets. Many say C4 isn’t that powerful, that it must be all that political wind igniting that causes such a gigantic blast, but, for whatever reason, it rains bricks and blood for three days. The cleanup operation is huge, hampered by souvenir hunters and onlookers. Morbid children play with soggy bits of politician. Dogs bring home chunks of junior minister in their mouths. And the dogs get eaten and so do the chunks of minister. Kebab shops reopen and morality, as is so often the case, goes into flux.

  A phone call is made, admitting responsibility. The surviving government galvanize their ranks and draft a public statement calling for the stamping out of The Laburnum. But it takes one slip of the tongue from ‘Laburnum’ to ‘Labia’ on live television and a militia group of hard-line man-hating feminists take immediate disproportionate offence. Oestrogen Pro-active know it’s a simple mistake but, what the Hell, it gives them an excuse to throw off the veneer of civility and behave as badly as the men they despise. They resolve to destroy the remaining government. It isn’t hard. They bomb a brothel. Twenty-two down, one to go. Our last minister, realising he’ll soon be incubating a bullet, runs away with a partner of unascertainable gender and species.

  The old order is banished. The slabs come up and England digs for victory. But whilst some plant, others simply steal.

  We have no leadership, but a political void with two parties too terrified of reprisals to fill it. But Malmot isn’t scared. Even when the nation descends into bloody civil conflict. He has the police in his pocket. He soon gains military backing and, with Walmart on-side, he has food, ammunition and very large guns. The smaller supermarket militias can’t compete. They crumble. When Walmart has what it wants, it pulls out to concentrate on East African initiatives, but it doesn’t matter. Malmot has his opportunity. He marches on the capital and claims it. All dissenting voices disappear. When a brutal order returns to the streets, he assembles a police state and sells off shares in it. He’s smart enough to lurk in the shadows with Bactrian as a mouthpiece. And he’s smart enough to reconvene parliament. But you’ll never vote him out because all the ballot boxes go straight to the shredders. And no one knows that Malmot is The Laburnum.

  Meanwhile, the remaining animals die. Restaurants offer a ‘veterinary bucket’. Don’t ask what’s in it. Just eat it. It could be the last meat you see in this lifetime. Unless you go to back to Manchester and what they now call the ‘cannibal territories.’

  Global warming continues unabated. Our reservoirs dry up and we become dependent on desalinated seawater. But it’s not safe to drink, so we brew it instead. And now we drink beer for breakfast dinner and tea, from the cradle to the grave. The cannier folk have solar stills to collect water for their children, but the majority of schoolkids are drunks. And their teachers are drunks – although that’s always been the case.

  Old King William’s still on the throne, imploring Africa and the other non-European states for aid, bless him. And my television’s broke and I can’t get the parts. Life goes on. It goes to Hell. And it’s taking us all with it. God, I imagine, finds all this hilarious.

  “You make fun?” says the homeless woman in a croak comprising a dozen accents. Is that Portuguese? I’m sure that last swearword was Czech. The low sun’s in my tired eyes and the stunted trees throw shadows across her wrinkled, riven features. She found me asleep in the gutter. I’m not sure which one of us smells worse.

  “Fun with a capital ‘F’,” I say, as she stares through me. I pinch the silver foil into a sharp crease. She’s asking what I mean. Like a comedian, or something? I say no. I was an army surgeon. Now I make puppets. Nothing important. And I pass her my glittering handiwork.

  “Well, you’re important to me,” she says. “This is the best tinfoil hat I’ve ever seen! I know my thoughts are safe now!”

  And she puts it on her head, picks up the corners of her skirt and starts to dance a slow, solo waltz in the middle of the road. I smile and wish her an unheeded goodbye.

  I start on one of my interminable deliberations on the nature of Fun and why I’m not having any. How I live like a peasant in a crumbling hovel but I’m expected to behave like a gentleman and pay National Insurance for the privilege. How I contribute to a Health Service that doesn’t exist and a pension it’s impossible to collect. Why the council takes a third of my monthly pay and then refuses to empty my bins until I remove the crashed fighter jet in my front garden. Why? I didn’t put it there. It’s metal. Why hasn’t anyone stolen it? Guess it’s too big to move when all you’ve got is a handcart pulled by toddlers.

  If I was let off the leash I could amuse myself, do something interesting with my life. But there are no adventures anymore, no places left to explore in our satellite-mapped country. Everyone’s tried everything and ruined it.

  The sky’s the last frontier. And, sure, I could rejoin an airship gang, build myself a scrapyard zeppelin and take up crapping on holiday jets for a hobby. But I don’t fancy swanning around the heavens, strapped beneath a thousand cubic metres of hydrogen. Been there, done that and lost the woman I loved to overhead power lines.

  All the good uncertainties have gone. There’s just the bad uncertainties now: the traffic smashes; attacks by religious extremists and the maniac on the train with the broken vodka bottle as sharp as the memory of the wife who’s just left him.

  Your main challenge is keeping your pointless job and fighting your own bad complexion. Or you can go out after curfew and see how far you get before the patrols mace you or a leopard chews off your face.

  Mortality should make us feel alive. But it doesn’t. So I guess we don’t have fun anymore. We have it made for us.

  And I just want an adventure.

  * * *

  Sparks shower against the surface of the workshop door. What isn’t scorched is scratched and gouged by the various belts and buckles and ‘interesting’ clothing of the staff. There’s a window – a small square of wire-reinforced glass – and it’s sandwiched between the exterior frost and interior filth. And I’m there, pounding my fist on it, trying to get in. There’s some kind of debris caught beneath the bottom edge of the door, acting like a wedge, and I can’t get the damn thing open.

  Inside, there’s dirty magnolia walls supporting even dirtier metal racking. Cobwebs everywhere – they coat the dull grey shelves and the detritus upon them. Each shelf’s labelled and each label bears absolutely no relat
ion to, well, anything whatsoever. Nothing reveals any obvious purpose, but nothing’s ever thrown away. Because it might be important. But no one knows what’s important anymore, because dozens of workers have come and gone over the years and the remainder have given up trying to work it out. It’s like trying to decode The Secrets of the Ancients.

  There’s an area referred to as ‘The Kitchen’, but you can’t prepare food in it. The work surfaces wear a crocodile pattern of cup marks and the detergent that should be used to clean it just oozes from its coloured bottles like Martian semen. The corrugated metal roof drips condensation. Over live electric sockets.

  The workshop floor’s a greyish rectangle, textured like leprosy. Carcinogenic dust rests in conical piles itching for a lung to rustle up some tumours in. Catalysed fibreglass resin clots in unseen buckets, spewing out hot, choking fumes. Un-catalysed resin spills out from an overturned barrel, imploring something incendiary to set light to it and burn the building down. Which just might happen.

  Sparks shoot skyward like rockets then futter into nothingness. By reversing their course I trace their source and I watch in horrified wonderment.

  Now an angle grinder is a dangerous power tool. It can cut through metal, so it’s more than capable of severing an unwary finger. And it’s pretty unnerving to see it grasped in the podgy digits of the company idiot: Ambler. The grinder screams, as barrel-shaped Ambler swipes and stabs at some dark heap of something or other, muttering something racist to himself. He has dark, curly hair, a wide, liver-lipped mouth, broad, almond-shaped canine teeth and a lolling tongue. He has a dog’s mouth, when I think about it. He has an old dog’s smell. He has dog-level intelligence, hence the racism.

  He’s laughing to himself. I’m doing my amateur psychology thing and theorising that the inside of his brain must be like some cave painting: all full of stick figures and bright primary colours. Then confusion creeps over his face. I wonder if he’s thinking about something beyond his capabilities, like toothpaste tubes, a happy mouse, or not shouting at a black person. Anyway, he’s distracted and the grinder leaps from his hand and scuds across the bench, trailing flaming nuggets.

  Now, Ambler is a mystery to me. I can’t work out what he does and I can’t work out how he does it. I don't know why he's allowed to do it here. I find it hard to believe he can breathe unassisted. Sometimes I see him sitting on the floor and I wonder when he’s going to fall off it. I watch. And he does. He loses balance, he flails around and somehow ends up on something higher up. He can’t even obey gravity. And I’m told he’s the company safety official.

  So he’s standing at my bench. And my bench is on fire. The flames, the flammable chemicals, the grinder and its razor-sharp cutting disk skittering around his ankles – all of this, or should I say none of this, matters to him. He doesn’t do ‘mattered’ because he doesn’t do abstract thought. He doesn’t wear safety goggles, either. It hasn’t occurred to him that a shard of metal skewering him in the eye might hurt. He just stands, watching the fire spread, watching me banging at the window and (almost) wondering what all the fuss is about.

  There’s a vinyl disc playing – ‘Twenty White-Power Hammond Greats’, squawking from a tinny speaker buried somewhere in the great morass of spilt paint and charring debris.

  I’m shouldering the door, kicking at the protruding part of the obstruction with my steel toecaps. But it’s the bottom of the door that gives in first. There’s a splintering crack and I’m in. I haven’t time to think and Ambler isn’t going to do it for me, so I dash forward and grab a fire extinguisher. There’s smoke, shouting, swearing, and I’m spraying like Neptune at a porno shoot. Water everywhere. The grinder shorts and I’m lucky not to get electrocuted. And finally, when the fire’s out, I spray Ambler. And I don’t stop until the extinguisher’s empty. And he just mewls over the wreckage of the whatever-it-is he was making.

  Everything’s quiet now, save for the drip, drip, dripping and the soft splash of our work boots. And he turns to me, sooty-faced and sopping, squelching forward like a proud parent cradling some unidentifiable baby in his arms.

  “Spice rack,” he says. Moron.

  Now, what would life be without cruelty, irony and good things happening to bad people? I don’t know. Ask God. You pray hard enough, maybe he’ll take enough time off from wanking up tsunamis to answer you. I doubt it, though, so here’s my own little parable: The Story Of The Camel And The Erection.

  Historically, people have taken their names from the things they do, sell, kill, kill for money or kill for money and then sell. With this is mind, it is entirely possible for a man whose ancestors traded hump-backed livestock in the Middle East to be called Bactrian. Or even Dromedary. And it’s not impossible to imagine later generations of folk with these camel-based names forming a humorous internet group. And it's all such fun that they arrange to meet. And then they get drunk and they sleep with each other. Commit that to memory.

  Now, Adrian Dromedary is a noxious specimen with a fat face and engorged cherub-cheeks crazed with a Rorschach pattern of burst blood vessels. Buckteeth? He’s got ‘em. And bulging piggy eyes jutting from the collage of zoological atrocities he calls his head. His overall expression? Like he’s sucking on a rancid citrus fruit. Probably one of Richard Gifford’s.

  More of a bipedal hippo than a man, he lives for the satiating of his baser urges. I’m talking food and ‘specialist’ magazines and taking an unhealthy interest in what the mailman might bring in a discreetly wrapped bundle. So you can imagine his surprise when Posty delivers an elegantly typed communication informing him that his entire life is a lie. His camel classification is wrong. His mother was a Dromedary all right, butMr Dromedary, never existed. He’s the bastard son of the late Lord Annadin Bactrian and half-brother to surfacing turd of politics, Humboldt.

  So Dromedary’s been growing increasingly tired of his life of solitude and self-abuse. And his current profession just isn’t supplying those feelings of God-like omnipotence he’s after. Okay, his little, printed ladyfriends give him some sense of control but not as much as, say, firing off a .45 calibre pistol in a crowded restaurant. Or anywhere really, providing people die and he might feel like a man for once. So, we can say this letter is pretty well timed.

  And so our bulbous friend takes himself off to the will reading, poised taut in some oak-panelled annexe of the Bactrian estate with a mercenary expression creeping over those already alarming features of his. The room’s packed with dozens of bastard progeny, evidence of His Lordship’s little extramarital sojourns and the sex games he liked to play with a turkey baster. But, by all accounts, it seems Dromedary was the first little bastard to shoot wombward from The Right Honourable’s testicles, so the cash gets carved up between him and the legitimate Humboldt – which is far more than any bastard has the right to expect. He walks away with enough money to buy Birmingham. Not only that, but his windfall gains him the friendship and sincere affection of his new half-brother. Well, you win some, you lose some.

  Now, as I’ve said, Dromedary is an unpleasant, antisocial man with a bulk that can best be described as… well, terrifying. He’s a beast of the field in a suit. But, like the leech, he has his uses. He’s got brains. He’s also got a head for figures – both numerical and feminine – his days spent on stocks and shares and his evenings on stockings and shaven ravers, intimate evenings making papier-mâché with page twenty-two. These twin lusts have always driven him. Now he can consummate fiscal and physical conjugation in his own business. But what should this company do? And, more importantly, how can he get a lay out of it? Because big brains don’t always mean big ideas and Dromedary hasn’t had an idea in his life. Fortunately, his new brother is just packed with ideas – and they’re all Grade A filth.

  So he’s at the Old Soaks’ Gentlemen’s Club, in Westminster, an austere establishment full of desiccated and depraved old geezers. Contrary to what you might think, women are allowed entrance but the house takes a percentage of their earnin
gs. And to facilitate transactions of this type, the foundations conceal a little know extension of the London Underground subway system that goes direct to Soho and Dirtygirl Street.

  So there’s many options available to members: you can sit back in a booth and eat rich food until you get gout; you can lie back in a leather armchair and drink brandy until you die; or you can participate in any number of orgies with the aforementioned ladies of the Soho district until you get gonorrhoea. The beauty of this last option is that sharing one’s paid companion with the other members of the club means infection for one is infection for all, which fosters a marvellous sense of community.

  As a guest, Dromedary’s barred from the inner sanctums of the club, especially the notorious ‘Bodily’ Function Room. So he sits with Bactrian in an oak construction carved by Freemasons to look like a onion. The politician claps him on the back, calls him ‘Brother dear’, ruffles his hair, even. Then he’s pressing a glass the size of child’s head into his mitt and it’s gratefully accepted. And I can’t think why, in Hell’s name, Bactrian would want to talk to Dromedary, given as he’s taken half his inheritance. Or, perhaps, that’s exactly the reason? Or maybe he’s just a lonely, isolated drunk with no close family and no one to mourn him when he dies? And, after many, many refills, at least four bottles of God-knows-what and with the bodyguard on a toilet break, he leans in and beckons Dromedary close.

  “You know what, Dromedary, old chap? It’s good to be here. To be here with you. To have you, my long lost brother, here, reclaiming your birthright, your heritage.”