Ruin Nation

by Dan Carver

  “A-hah! There is nothing here you could try to steal which would not be tearing your throat out first. Speaking of which, be wary around the West wing, enclosure 247:B. That is where we are keeping the Gulls.”

  “Gulls? Carrion Gulls? Still breeding them, are you? Christ!”

  “I may be sounding defensive, but please do tell another way to clean up incriminating battlefield mess?”

  “Yes, but when there aren’t any dead soldiers, the Carrion Gulls migrate inland and eat children.”

  “It is an economic equation, yes? We need Carrion Gulls on constant standby to make conflict zones look innocent for television cameras. We cannot cull them. They cannot breed naturally and cloning is prohibitively expensive. Too many birds have avian flu to harvest DNA. But children are cheap to replace. Give common women alcohol and their legs divide like the Red Sea to Moses. It is swings and roundabouts, yes?”

  “Yes. Empty ones.”

  The black limousine speeds through blacker night. The rear-view mirror reveals Ceesal, writhing contentedly around the backseat like a hippo in a warm morphine fug. We could pay attention but we don’t need to. Malmot is asleep. This is his dream:

  “I’ve never understood why ‘cunt’ is a swearword,” announces Ceesal in an eloquent voice.

  “And why is that?” says Malmot, distracted, disinterested, sweating narcotics, trying to drive inconspicuously but seeing everything like a cubist painting. Only rounder.

  “Because,” Ceesal continues, “fifty percent of the population have them, and the majority of the other fifty spend most of their time trying to get in them. Why would a chap want to do that if they were so bad? And lesbians?! Lesbians’ve got ‘em, they know the drawbacks, and they still chase after ‘em. So, I think, they must be rather good. I think ‘cunt’ should be a compliment.”

  “Much as I admire your newfound capacity for lateral thought,” says Malmot, “try calling King William a cunt... See if you get a knighthood.”

  “I like thinking!” Ceesal laughs. “Can’t recall ever doing it before!”

  “And what was it Holubec did to you again?” Malmot asks, noting that King Tutankhamen’s mummy is sitting in the passenger seat, taking notes.

  “Well,” Ceesal starts. “He scanned my head and found that my brain was adhering to the inside of my skull. The massive pressure on vital areas was what was making me such a confounded imbecile, you see.”

  “He’s right,” says Tutankhamen before transforming into Malmot’s mother and then a leopard. “I never loved you,” says the leopard. The numbers on the speedometer morph into letters. Malmot changes into fifth and accelerates to PMC miles an hour. The leopard changes its spots.

  “They went in through a tiny hole,” Ceesal continues, “did some jiggery pokery and, lo and behold, it turns out I’m actually something of a clever clogs. However, they do concede that I have very little sense of shame or embarrassment. ...Will you excuse me, I’m just going to wave my penis out of the window. Ah! That’s better!”

  The leopard turns to Malmot.

  “It's Bactrian all over again,” it says. “Turn off at the next exit for Purgatory.”

  “Not actual Hell?” Malmot asks. “That’s a relief!”

  “Oh, you’re going to Hell,” the leopard replies, “but first you have to do the induction course.”

  “So I’m the prime minister?” chips in Ceesal, leaning in between the front seats.

  “Technically speaking,” says the leopard, “you should spell Prime Minister with capitals. It’s arcane usage but I feel the lower case implies disrespect.”

  “Shut up, Leopard!” Malmot snaps. “And put that pipe out!”

  “I’m the Prime Minister,” says Ceesal smugly. “And you say I’ve got an interview tomorrow? On live television? That’ll be fun. I’ll make it fun!”

  “Not live, thank God,” Malmot answers. “You see, we must retain control of your public image. We may need to, how shall we say, massage the footage somewhat – ensure you come out in the best light.”

  “You consider me something of a liability, don’t you?” Ceesal laughs. “Worried I’m going to upset the applecart, are you? Too much of a live wire, eh?! Oh dear! Hah! It’s a wonder you don’t arrange a little accident for me?! I would – in your shoes. A-hah!”

  He’s ahead of me, thinks Malmot, checking for a pistol in the glove compartment.

  “Don’t,” whispers the leopard. “The car’s armoured. It’ll ricochet. Drive him down to the docks and collapse a building on his head.”

  “I’ve got to stop him going to that interview,” Malmot whispers back.

  “Like I said,” the leopard repeats, “it’s the docks and a rickety warehouse or nothing. Because you won’t stop him. He’s smart now. He’ll escape. He’ll probably drug you and run off to the interview without you.” And it leans over and paws the speedometer, now calibrated in hieroglyphics. “And slow down.”

  Malmot awakes. He pushes aside the meal that Ceesal doped and considers that everything he has dreamed, bar Tutankhamen and the talking animal, has actually happened. His eyes settle upon a folded note:

  Dear Malmot,

  Gone to the studio. Didn’t think you’d mind. Have taken Big Tony, Mustapha and that slutty admin girl with the big backside and the self-esteem issues. I’m expecting to get lucky.

  Regards,

  PRIME MINISTER CEESAL!!!

  P.S. What is it, exactly, that you do?

  Charming, thinks Malmot. Especially the signature in the shape of ejaculating genitals. He holsters his pistol, slips a silencer into his inside pocket, slides a sheathed stiletto knife into his sock suspender and pockets a packet a poison for good measure.

  “P.S. What is it, exactly, that you do?” he repeats bitterly. “I do what needs to be done.”

  “Wow! That Hitler could really work a crowd!”

  Opinions and attitudes can shift over time. Take Vlad III Tepes for example. That's 'The Impaler' to you and I. He killed an estimated eighty thousand people - including women and children - skewering twenty thousand of them through the anus with sharpened wooden poles, standing them upright and leaving them to die in man-made forests of rotting corpses. But that's all water under the bridge since Bram Stoker recast him as a sexy bereaved husband who can turn into a bat. Yes, goth girls get very wet for Vlad “Dracula”, and now something equally weird's happening with old Adolf.

  Now I'm brutal but I was never racist and I was never cruel. There are six million very emotive reasons why Hitler's rule should not be eulogised but it's happening anyway, as right-wing revisionists and hormonal teens wrap him in the doomed romance of a Twentieth Century Macbeth. They forget the death camps and fixate on the pageantry - which brings us to our current set of circumstances: a lone man sitting in a projection room watching Riefenstahl’s “Triumph Of The Will'. His name is Pip Lindberg. He presents a television chatshow. And Nazis get him hard.

  They say he has a big heart. I'm sure he does. Probably in a jar, next to his collection of Third Reich crockery and a lampshade covered in human skin. I think back to that old nursery rhyme: “Slugs and snails and puppy dog’s tails. That’s what little boys are made of.” My mind turns to the constituent components of your average minor celebrity and I picture a poisonous doughnut: a viscous jam of ego and narcotics boiled inside a half-baked cake of ruthless ambition and Munchausenian self-delusion. Sprinkled with sugar, of course. And if you gorge yourself on the empty calories of celebrity? Well, you end up with a potbelly and a sticky face. Lindberg has both of these.

  He wears gaudily patterned sweaters. He believes they make him more approachable. They don’t. He smiles wide and often, but never with the eyes. Whatever his intended facial expression, from faux shock to joyous rapture, those black orbs stay dead as a shark’s.

  Tune in around midday, just after the televised executions, you can watch him in action. Smack yourself in the skull until you’re down to fifty I.Q. points and you might even enjoy it. T
here’s ex soap stars plugging spin-off series; sanitised, sub-tabloid gossip from no-listers who’ve found the limelight by flaunting their personality disorders on docu-soaps; a woman who’s overcome tragedy by biting out her own malignant melanoma; and to finish, a gay man butchering a classic song in a tortured cat yodel. It's a world away from the world of serious journalism he craves.

  “Don't let it bother you,” he tells his reflection before each show. “What was it Marie Antoinette said? Let them watch crap?”

  But tonight will be different. Tonight he has a real interview. With Ceesal.

  Ceesal. He owed his initial popularity to the accidental invention of a rugby tackle called the Buttocks Of Steel and his continued success to the ability to fit an entire ashtray in his mouth whilst simultaneously lighting gaseous rectal emissions. He had that weird pathological thing of going to sleep in confined spaces, usually cupboards. He had wonky eyes and a tongue that lolled out of his mouth like a wilted sea cucumber. He was terminally stupid.

  The New Ceesal stands straight-backed and handsome in the television studio’s Green Room. Bodyguards Big Tony and Mustapha pretend not to look as he clasps a kneeling woman to his groin. Is it Slutty Admin Girl? Well,her face is hidden but the technique seems familiar.

  So, whilst our heroine works her way up the employment ladder in the time-honoured tradition, Ceesal smiles his sickening rictus grin and grunts like a repulsive, coiffured hog. It’s a less than beautiful moment in the world’s history but these things happen.

  Inside an evil-looking car, and Malmot drives like a man possessed. His incognito status holds no sway with the station’s managers. They repeatedly reject his calls. His Asian chauffeur, relegated to the passenger seat, winces as pedestrians crumple beneath the limo’s reinforced wheels.

  “Shut up!” Malmot screams to his silent passenger, glaring with absent intensity. The chauffeur knows better than to say anything. Malmot, squinting through a rain-lashed, blood-spattered windshield continues:

  “Hell! Well, the way I look at it, the more people I run over, the more people get to eat meat tonight.” He laughs. “Still, no good to you, eh?! Not Halal!”

  The chauffeur says nothing. He covers his eyes. He weeps silently.

  Back in the Green Room, and Lindberg introduces himself to his guest.

  “I know you,” Ceesal purrs. “Where do I know you from?”

  “Eton, Prime Minister.”

  “Well, I'll be a... You're right! It's Pip “lindyhop' Lindberg! I used to board with this bugger!” he tells Big Tony. And they celebrate with the one import that always find its way into the country: cocaine.

  “Has anyone got a miniature alpine chalet?” Ceesal howls. “I'm about to turn my head into a snowglobe!”

  Malmot storms through the main entrance, trench coat flapping like leathery wings. Reception may not know his name, but they know his face. They know his intent. They also know that the last person to stand in his way wound up in a gibbet, displayed at the Paedophile’s Gallery at London Bridge.

  Now, the basis of politics, as you’ll know, is to take The Truth down a dark alley and beat it to a bloody pulp that thanks you for the privilege. So what Lindberg expects to get from Ceesal is beyond anyone’s guess. Some journalistic credibility, maybe? A little extra status? Perhaps some cast-off women (nothing new there). But whatever it is, it’s going to be interesting. The new Prime Minister is behaving in an increasingly hostile, increasingly unorthodox manner.

  “Ten hours is enough for anyone,” Ceesal declares archly, testing Lindberg’s reaction. “We should decimalise Time. A hundred second minute would give us forty extra seconds, which means our current system loses us forty seconds a minute. That’s a lot of seconds and they all have to go somewhere. Don’t you think?”

  “Indeed I do,” Lindberg answers. Enough cocaine and anything makes sense.

  “So, where are they then?” Ceesal presses.

  “Where are what?”

  “All the lost seconds.”

  “I’m not sure that I know,” says Lindberg.

  “But you do agree that they’re missing?”

  “Of course!”

  Then you’re an idiot, thinks Ceesal.

  Malmot enters, trailed by a gaggle of black-clad blonde women bearing clipboards. He has no idea who they are or where they came from. It’s harder still to work out what they do. Are they some form of locally occurring fauna? He waves his Daily Telegraph at them, discovering with growing glee that they can be herded like sheep.

  Scrawny white men with childish hair and the mental age of teenagers mince to and fro, waving their hands, addressing everyone as ‘Guys!’ and screaming ‘Jesus!’ at the slightest hint of dissent. They seem to think their presence is important. Clearly, it isn't.

  Malmot stands silent, surveying the scene. The transition from Green Room schmoozing to interview proper is a blur he can scarcely comprehend. Who knows how these things happen? They defy conventional logic. He retreats into a fantasy world of possible evasive measures: a fire alarm? A drugs raid? Perhaps a good old fashioned incendiary grenade tossed into the director’s room? But the Media have a nasty habit of sniffing around when one of their own explodes into bright orange flame – it makes for such great television. By the time he sets about the relatively simple sabotage of the fuse box, the stage lights are on, the cameras rolling, the theme tune roaring, and Lindberg stands working Ceesal’s hand like a lifeboat bilge pump. They take their appointed places in black leather and aluminium chairs. Ceesal smiles like a Cheshire cat. Thank God the broadcast isn’t live.

  The crowd settle in for an hour of easy, informal chat. No hard-nosed interrogative journalism here. Not with a daytime TV lightweight like Lindberg at the helm. No, expect, instead, to see the 'human' face of government; a potted biography, cosy stories about family and friends (a fiancé?) and a few subtle references to his modest upbringing and the dignity of the common workingman and woman. No real opportunity for divulging classified material. No real opportunity to go off on a crazed tangent. No opportunity to spout filth for its own sake.

  “Three times in one hour. All on my own!” declares Ceesal in response to a deliberately misheard question about his arrival.

  “Excuse me?” asks Lindberg.

  Ceesal’s lip curls up into a ghastly grin.

  “You heard!” he leers, accompanied by a small gasp from the audience. Lindberg’s beatific, chemical veneer cracks into anguish.

  “But I joke, of course,” Ceesal chuckles. The audience laugh nervously. “Probably a bit inappropriate. Didn’t know the cameras were rolling,” he lies. The audience chuckle indulgently.

  “We’ll cut that bit out,” says Lindberg.

  Damn right, thinks Malmot.

  “Oh you won’t, you know!” cries Ceesal. “Because we’re going out live!”

  “What?” Lindberg gasps.

  “Well,” starts the Prime Minister, taking off his jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves, “these things can be so formal, can’t they? They can be so forced, you know. And, personally, I’m sick of all the pretence in politics; the packaging; the spin. I don’t want my image airbrushed, my speeches edited, my past, present and future sanitised.”

  This meets with a roar of approval from the crowd.

  “But? What?!” Lindberg stammers.

  “Oh, it’s not so hard to arrange a little thing like a live broadcast,” Ceesal laughs. “Not when you’re the Top Man!”

  Lindberg’s eyes bulge like elephant balls. Malmot cannot experience fear in its conventional sense but his intuition tells him to obtain distance. He sweeps up Slutty Admin Girl and charges toward the nearest exit. Something is said into some device in his gloved hand. The long, black limo oozes up, its right-side window down and Mohammed, the driver, looking concerned.

  “You should be watching this,” he says, pointing to one of the vehicle’s television screens.

  Slutty Admin Girl stares open-mouthed at the small, flickering ima
ge of Ceesal.

  “He just hinted at something very rude,” she gasps.

  And she's right to gasp. I have a transcript of the interview. Here. Read for yourself.

  LINDBERG: [Shocked] ... I trust that was a metaphor?

  CEESAL: Metaphor? [Feigning ignorance] Like those Spanish chappies who fight bulls! [Laughs] You’ve lost me there, I’m afraid. We were talking about ...

  L: [Interrupts] The human side of politics.

  C: Oh yes ... that! Now, let’s get one thing straight shall we, Pip, old boy: no matter what noble intentions you enter this game with, you will be hampered at every opportunity by those who have gone before you, become disillusioned, and now work solely for the benefit of their own best interests.

  Consequently, a human side – certainly when it comes to things like conscience or compassion – is a weakness, you know. So I repeat: if you want to get ahead, be a cu...

  Half the audience hiss. The other half cheer furiously.

  CEESAL (CONTINUED): I feel I must address my detractors here, in the audience: this is the real me, take it or leave it, you know. I do tell coarse jokes. I do use offensive language. Frequently, in fact. It doesn’t affect my ability to dictate policy. And, on that score, who wants to hear more interesting things about the ‘C Word’?

  L: Hah, Hah! Oh, ho, ho, ho! [Forced] Very good! It’s good to know our new premier has a sense of humour. Really, that’s good. Funny. [Awkward pause] Ahem.

  C: Oh, I’m renowned for it. Humour, that is, you know. People are always telling me I’m funny. I know an absolute scorcher about a traffic cone, if you’d like to hear it? Actually, it’s more of a funny story. All true of course. It’s about a society hostess who supplements her income by performing onstage. ‘Capacity’, she calls herself.

  L: A-hah, hah! The Prime Minister jokes, of course.

  C: Nope, all true! Happened to Thackory Rampton, Minister for Transport!