Ruin Nation

by Dan Carver

  “Thank you.”

  “Okay, you’re a bastard…”

  “Eh?”

  “I mean, in the illegitimate sense, that is. But now you’re here where you belong, with the type of people you belong with! (How much did you get from the Old Man again?)”

  “Er?”

  “To be with one’s family! (Two or three? Not that it matters one bit to me.)”

  “Ah.”

  “Talkative, aren’t you? Anyway, and I’m telling you this as one Bactrian to another, that that’s the point, isn’t it? And I can see you already agree with me.”

  “Er, I suppose…”

  “Anyway, Dromedary, (and again, I’m telling you this as one Bactrian to another) let’s talk about issues. Real issues. Important issues. Are you married, Dromedary?”

  “I was never fortunate enough to…”

  “I thought not. I can tell by the way you walk. You’re tense. Like a coiled spring. That’s natural. Oh, don’t mind me! I’m a Bactrian. And you know us camels are well known for their fatty deposits – in this case, in the head! A hah!”

  “Yes. Hah! [Cough] …Ahem.”

  “Well, I say a gentleman has certain needs… the instincts and impulses that make him a man. [Belch] Since we don’t have to hunt mammoths anymore, I find that my natural desire for physical exertion often goes unsatisfied. I say a man needs to exert himself at least five times a day! And I’ll say that again. And I’ll also say that at least one of those times should be with company. But that’s the problem, see. It’s so difficult to get yourself a night of torrid passion these days. You blink and the next thing you know, there’s a picture of your todger in the tabloids. Usually superimposed onto a measuring stick. If you do find a nice place, where the girls are clean and discreet, then spending your wad costs one as well. I’m telling you, our climate’s too miserable for kerb crawling. What can one do?”

  “I know what I do. And I know how ashamed of myself I feel afterwards.”

  “…And sometimes you fall in love with them, these fallen angels, these daughters of the night. They’re so brazen and so earthy and so real, and it breaks your heart when your hour’s up and they shove you out the bathroom window and throw your trousers out after. There was this one girl but… oh, that was another world, another time…”

  “What are women like?”

  “Well, they’re soft and warm… and as soon as they’re vertical they’re causing trouble. Hah! But seriously, my dear chap, you mean you’ve never?”

  “No. I’m fifty and I’ve never done it with anyone. Or anything. Women? Well, I never seem to meet any. I think they’re intimidated by my, er, gruff exterior.”

  “Well! It comes to something when a sturdy fellow such as yourself can’t get a woman!”

  “They do tend to run away from me.”

  “And that’s my point, I suppose. I’m a decent, God-fearing, taxpaying man, (if it’s got an ‘ing’ on the end of it and it’s legal, I’m a man and I do it!) and I deserve a little comfort in my life. Don’t we all? Doesn’t everyone?! Someone who doesn’t demand an expensive love nest and, most importantly …isn’t going to run to the newspapers to tell them about what I happen to think is perfectly reasonable bedwear. And why should underwear be gender-specific? You tell me. Please!

  “You’ve got the money now. You’ve got, well let’s just say, if you’re anything like me… urges. Do yourself a favour, man. Plough that money into research and reap the rewards of your own sexual repression.

  “Are you suggesting I make a robot? A robot woman?”

  “Well, let’s face it, man – you’re fifty and you’ve never said boo to a barmaid. The only way you’re going to make female friends is with a plastic kit and an instruction manual. So go on! Give mankind something to be proud of! Give the feminists something to complain about! Why not? They’re bored now they’ve got equality!”

  And, by appealing directly to his twisted libido, Dromedary’s path is set. He launches his funds into an animatronics emporium producing furry costumes and inane robot animals for film and television and to encourage children to take part in various government initiatives. But kid-friendly crap’s just the start and deep in the basement a more lascivious form of entertainment takes shape. But your average bollock-scratching couch potato isn’t thinking about that as he sits, glued to his screen, laughing at the contrived blunderings of a stage school halfwit and a talking alien called Alfonse. He doesn’t know I made Alfonse from an old car seat cover and a box of artificial hip joints I snaffled from a hospital skip. And he certainly doesn’t know that Alfonse’s big sister is a six-foot mechanical whore. It just wouldn’t figure in your average mind.

  So the months roll on. Dromedary sits back, counting the cash and, no doubt, rubbing his hands and licking his lips with glee. And me, Claire and Anja, we work underground in that bloody cellar, trying to make a fully articulated metal skeleton out of things we’ve found on scrapheaps and by begging for parts.

  Before The Great Isolation we just ordered whatever we needed, but sanctions mean that you can’t import mechanical components here in case they get weaponised. So we make do with what we’ve got and, eventually, we’ve got something. I won’t say she’s pretty and we haven’t got any form of artificial skin – it’s back to the garage for more seat leather for yours truly – and she’s ripped the ends off a few courgettes along the way, but we’ve got a tangible thing to show for our efforts and that means we might even get paid. Hell, we might even get a weekend off.

  Now, I can’t think of a delicate way of putting this other than to say that our creation needs road testing. I’m not doing it. That’s flat. Claire and Anja find the whole concept pretty morally repellent and haven’t got the necessary equipment anyway.

  I tell Dromedary next time I see him. He goes into great detail about a woman he met who tested vibrators. He said she rated them on a number of criteria including “abrasion when wet” and “abrasion when dry”. I ask what criteria we should use here and he lists the possibles in such a way that I stick my fingers in my ears and go “La la lah!” And Claire and Anja do the same. And Claire goes “Urgh!” and Anja says she never wants to hear those words coming out of that mouth again. It’s too creepy. Well, I wouldn’t trust Ambler with a blunt pencil. So we’re a bit stuck.

  But, luckily, our Glorious Leader intends to lead from the front. (And the back, once we’ve drilled a second orifice.) It doesn’t seem to matter that his mechanical sweetheart has the swarthy complexion of an old handbag. The old boy’s ready for the racetrack. After all, he’s gone fifty years without so much as starter flag. We retire as fast as our little legs will carry us.

  Now, every new product requires an operations manual and this is no exception. They’re pretty basic instructions: you stick it in and work your way up through the gears. We list the various settings. We figure you can have quite a pleasant evening starting on ‘Vaguely Disinterested Housewife’, move things up a little to ‘Accommodating Hussy’ and work yourself to a resounding finish with a vigorous bout of ‘Earthshake’. And then, as an envelope-pushing experiment, and certainly not something we’d put on the commercial product, we added yet another level, codenamed: ‘Shy Librarian With The Truly Weird Kink’. We never figured anybody would be stupid enough to use it. Well, we underestimated human curiosity. We see a button, we press it.

  Now I can’t rule out industrial sabotage. However I’m more inclined to believe that Dromedary thought he could run before he could walk. Or, perhaps it wasn’t the machine at all. Maybe it was all those years of pent up frustration and he smashed his pelvis into seventeen pieces through sheer enthusiasm.

  Still, they’ve managed to wire up the bits and he’s now wearing a rather fetching genital cast. So I guess the moral of this story is that taking your work home with you is a very bad idea.

  Okay, so what do you want to know next? Bactrian? Yes, let’s have a little more on Bactrian. I think it’s important you understand the old
order to understand why I took such dramatic action against it.

  What? No. I prefer to use ‘dramatic’. ‘Vicious’ implies I wasn’t justified.

  So, Bactrian sits in the office of Doctor Olyphant, consultant head-shrinker at a very discreet clinic. They’re here to discuss his impulse-control problems, his alcohol and substance abuse and his chronic sexual incontinence. Whilst all these things are just dandy behind closed doors, they’ve been causing chaos kerb-side recently and Malmot’s tired of the physical and metaphorical mopping up.

  The therapy will start with a ‘get to know yourself’ session. But getting to know himself isn't the problem. It's a five-times-daily occurrence. It's stopping that's causing the difficulty. The P.M, however, is unrepentant and doesn’t want strangers running around the inside of his head, moving the furniture around.

  “No sense stirring up the sludge, eh, Olster?” he protests. He certainly doesn’t need anyone telling him to empathise with a teapot.

  “Remember,” Olyphant persists, “be like the teapot. The tea is stewing. You must pour it all out. Pour it all out for me, Prime Minister.”

  “This isn't tea, Oly-pants” answers Bactrian, patting his big belly. “It’s foie gras, caviar and wine so expensive the angels weep when they hear the cork pop. And vodka. Plenty of vodka!”

  “Which is probably part of the problem,” Olyphant frowns before switching to a synthesized, sympathetic smile. You can’t tell a politician anything he doesn’t know. You can tell a doctor even less. “I assure you, Prime Minister, visualisation is a proven psychiatric technique. It...”

  “Proven psychiatric technique?” Bactrian howls. “Proven psychiatric technique?! Mincing around the establishment with one hand on my hip, waving the other like a spout! I'll tell you what comes out of my spout...”

  “No need,” the doctor interrupts. “No need.”

  The Prime Minister is making lurid hand gestures indicating the movement of fluids.

  “Your mistake, Old Olly-Olly Oxen-free, is thinking I need to be cured. But why cure something that's so much fun? Seems like a waste of a marvellous illness – the gift that keeps on giving, if you like.”

  “But...”

  “I tell you what your problem is, Olcoholic: too much of this Sigmund Freudy, Squeegee-puss I-hate-women-I’m-scared-of-my-own-nipples business.”

  “Squeegee-puss?”

  “You know the fellow... The chap with the hotsy-totsies for his mother.”

  “You mean…” tries the doctor. But it’s no use.

  “I don’t fancy my mother. Do you?”

  “She’s very attractive for her age but…”

  I don’t know about you but I don’t care for this topic. Let’s end the scene on a stunned silence and switch the action to our next medical establishment. You see, Malmot suspects that Bactrian’s problems are physiological as well as neurological. And so we find ourselves in Harley Street with a different set of medical professionals, including a nurse who won’t accept money to take her clothes off. As you can imagine, this has made the situation quite tense.

  A spectacled man in a starched white smock sits stony-faced, dredging the depths of his mind for that all-important phrase. He’s searching for euphemisms, a subtle alternative to ‘dead within the week.’ After a pre-consultation conference with the specialists involved with the Prime Minister’s case, they came up with a popular phrase involving a creek, a paddle and a pejorative term for human excreta. Mr Bactrian is not particularly popular in Harley Street.

  It’s an impossible situation. Doctors are difficult people to interact with at the best of times and Bactrian does nothing to smooth out the personality differences. His use of the word ‘quack’ repeatedly and at volumes varying from under-the-breath to bull-elephant-roar being a prime example. The doctor is not ‘a quack’, just mildly incompetent, so he puts his usual subtle sarcasm back into its box and sneers his way through the following:

  “Well, Mr Bactrian, let’s start with your liver. Your liver is in a condition that we professional doctors would describe as – and I do not use the term lightly – fucked. Your colon’s so clogged it looks like it’s been pebble-dashed and the CAT scans of your brain resemble nothing less than Dresden in the grip of incendiary bombing.”

  “Uh huh,” Bactrian nods, betraying no emotion.

  “But this is the killer,” the doctor says, suppressing the urge to smirk. “The cause of your nausea: gangrene, stemming from what I can only describe as a penile concretion.”

  “A penile what?” says Bactrian.

  “A penile concretion,” answers the doctor. “It’s a new term. I made it up today.”

  “But what the hell is it?!” Bactrian snarls, his face a contorted kabuki mask of angered perplexitude.

  “Come now,” the doctor chides. “Surely you must have noticed that unsightly lump where your penis used to be? It must have aroused your curiosity when you discovered your manhood had disappeared and been replaced with a Stone Age club? You can’t have thought it was normal?”

  “I’m the Prime Minister,” growls Bactrian, sweating brandy, “I leave discussions on the nature of normality to pseuds and students. Tell me what the problem is, tell me what you intend to do with it, and tell me now! I want to get tough on this issue!”

  “Whip it out!” the doctor snaps. “Now look at it. Move it about a bit. No, you do it. I don’t want to touch it. The problem,” he continues, “stems from your compulsive, and may I say, idiosyncratic use of cocaine. This, coupled with your laissez-faire attitude toward personal hygiene in that area, has led to a build up of smegma on your organ. The narcotic crystals have mixed with sweat to form a cement. This cement has set into a firm shell, restricting blood flow. Some areas of tissue are dead. Others are in the process of decaying. The solution, I’m afraid, is immediate amputation.”

  Bactrian considers his response.

  “This is regrettable news. Go screw yourself, quack!”

  “Please,” the doctor berates, “A man in your condition should stay calm. Are you calm? Well, try to look as if you are. That face unsettles me. Now… surgery really is the only option. ‘Bactrian’s syndrome’ is fatal if not treated immediately.”

  “Bactrian’s syndrome!” the Prime Minister fumes. “Bactrian’s syndrome?!”

  “Another term I made up today,” the doctor says curtly. “We have to call it something. And you’re the first recorded case.”

  “Well, call it after yourself,” Bactrian snaps.

  “No, I don’t think so,” the doctor asserts. “I’m not having my name associated with cock-rot.”

  “You're name’s Myanus. Surely, you're on speaking terms with embarrassment already.”

  “That’s as maybe, Prime Minister, but the past is another country and the future is a new frontier. I'm thinking of my standing in the history books, and when people look up Myanus I don’t want them seeing your penis.”

  “Well how the Hell do you think I feel?!” Bactrian fumes.

  “Think of it this way,” the doctor confides. “When the Churchills, Chamberlains and Thatchers of this world disappear into the murk of political history, your name will be alive, playing across the lips of post-operative transsexuals the world over, as they tell their confused parents that it was ‘Bactrian’s syndrome’ and the breasts are just a side-effect. You’ve been immortalised. God’s smiling on you, son!”

  Bactrian reels from the doctor’s last utterance: a truly vicious blow to a man who’s spent his life trying to disassociate his name from the third sex. When he finally speaks, the words arrive with a menace that requires no exclamation marks:

  “I will not go down in history as the Prime Minister with no penis. I’ll be a stiff before I’m stiffy-less. I’d rather be six foot under than six inches shorter.”

  “I think that’s an overgenerous estimate,” Myanus chips in cheerily, unable to resist this last opportunity to put the boot in. “Well, you’re going to die then,” he adds. “I’ll
bid you goodbye then, Prime Minister. Looks like we won’t be seeing each other again… Except, of course, when I have your knob in a specimen jar marked: Bactrian’s syndrome.” And he points to the afflicted area for emphasis.

  “So be it then!” says Bactrian, with a resolve as rock solid as his member.

  Bactrian is a proud man. He is not a pop star. There are no credibility points for androgyny in politics, only embarrassing tabloid rumours and unspoken admiration from certain sections of the backbench.

  “P.M. Dies of Galloping Gonad Gangrene!” is a future headline haunting him, for amputation, as they say, is not an option.

  He stumbles into the cold night. Cue the wind and rain. Someone turn up the emotive music. This scene needs some pathos.

  And as Bactrian sings the half-forgotten words of some appropriately angst-ridden guitar anthem, he thinks back to better days, before his organ required a quarantine certificate to travel abroad.

  * * *

  Tramps protest outside the huge, bottle-shaped Boozeshop off licence, complaining that the separate cider-basement for the homeless is a form of apartheid. There’s a Leopard Van looming and something tells me we’re about to get carnivorous, so I turn my collar up and hurry back to the architectural salvage project we call our house.

  It’s not my home. It’s a monument to my wife’s disappointment and anger. And she stalks the rooms with a chianti flagon dangling from her cardigan sleeve, rewriting the happier moments of our shared history as examples of my cruelty and neglect. I don't know why I stay. I guess, when you can't see land, you don't know which way to swim.

  Rachel's inside so outside's safe. But soon I'm locked in an argument with my tosser neighbour, Reynolds.

  Reynolds maintains that my rosebush is a tree, it overshadows his patio, and that I need to trim it. I say I don’t care what it is but I’ll happily trim it if he’ll just shut up and go away. But he doesn’t. So I tell him I don’t understand why he wants it trimmed anyway, since it gives him ample cover to stand outside, look up at our bathroom window and jerk his limp dick off. I tell him I’ve seen him do it. And I have.