Ruin Nation

by Dan Carver

  D: I know what you want me to say. You want me to confess. I won’t, though.

  M: You won’t? Well, what if I was to show you… In fact, I will show you! Look at this! It’s a flowchart! See this heading: ‘Bloodbath at Battencross Manor’ – it feeds into a box marked ‘Class Warfare’ before splitting off into two possible directions: ‘Death and Glory’ and ‘Complete Proletariat Revolution’.

  D: All of which has nothing to do with me.

  M: Well, you can say that, but if you look here, next to the caption, ‘Our Wise and Benevolent Ruler’, someone’s drawn a picture of you wearing a big crown.

  D: No one will believe I did that.

  M: You dress as an insect for sex. People will believe anything about you.

  D: But… But…

  M: No buts. Someone stab him with something.

  D: Aaaaah!

  M: That’s for planning to kill me. Now, about this Revolution.

  D: There is no Revolution! You know that as well as I do!

  M: But, if there’s no Revolution, how can there be a Counter Revolution?

  D: I… Aaaaagggggh!

  M: Exactly. Now, listen to me. I said, listen to me, Durham! If you stop wailing then you might find this interesting. You see, in a few weeks time – not sure of the date, but it’ll probably be a Friday – a group of men dressed suspiciously like your bullyboys will start a vicious protest against democracy.

  D: Why?

  M: Haven’t worked that out either. Some kind of scandal or something. Anyway… There’ll be all kinds of violent mischief, culminating in the armed occupation of New Downing Street. They’ll have about two hours to declare a new government with a stupid name, issue some weird decrees, make themselves thoroughly unpopular, before I invoke the Emergency Powers Act. You remember what that is, don’t you?

  D: Yes. We used it before. It’s a license for you to declare martial law.

  M: It is. And the first thing I’ll do is flatten Number Ten with the ‘Brownshirts’ inside it.

  D: But you’ll be killing your own agents.

  M: No, there’s an escape tunnel. I’ll be killing members of your extended family I bus in specifically to provide bodies. But that’s by the by. Martial Law means no more fannying around with Parliament and crappy old democracy – just the rule of my iron fist!

  Oh, remember the old days, when we reclaimed London and toasted our success from the top of a Chieftain tank?! It’ll be like that. Only, this time, I’ll be up on the turret and you’ll be smeared all over the tracks! Hurrah!

  All Present: Hurrah!

  M: And then it’s onwards and upwards toward official dictatorship! Not sure which way we’re headed yet. Could be socialist – you’d like that, wouldn’t you? – or perhaps we’ll go goose-stepping off in the fascist direction? I haven’t decided. Perhaps we’ll do both, like the Castro boys’ Cuba: set off to the left and end up marching back on ourselves from the right!

  I hate it when conversation gets too political. Throw in a smattering of Finance talk and you’ll find me staring out the window thinking about sun-dappled woodland and fast-flowing streams full of trout.

  Meanwhile, back in the real world, Malmot’s talking about establishing a Corporate State. Every country needs to stand on its own economic feet, he says. But Durham believes our economy is based upon the production of cheap alcohol, counterfeit clothing and reliant on poseurs drinking themselves to death. With that in mind, why not play to our strengths and open England as a massive tourist resort?

  He mentions Cuba again and someone else mentions that tourists bring in fresh DNA.

  “And you’ll need DNA if you’re going down the fascist route,” says Durham, “because too much of this Far-Right-Racial-Purity malarkey and you’ll end up as a nation of window-lickers.”

  “It’s a fair point,” says Malmot. “But there’s one other business option we haven’t considered yet.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Warmongering. We’ve nothing better to do.”

  We stand in hushed silence. We’re a hundred years behind the rest of the world in weapons technology and starting a war would be suicide. But that’s for the future to decide. We’re here to interrogate the prisoner, Malmot reminds us, and soon we’re back into his alternate reality of Revolution and Counter-revolution.

  “I didn’t put King William back on the throne to have you haul him off and guillotine him!” he snarls.

  Well, we won’t be leaving until Durham ‘confesses’ his involvement in something or other. So I decide to get out of here. In mind, if not in body. I picture myself on the banks of a crystal-clear Estonian lake, eating beef sandwiches with a new wife and the children I don’t have yet. We’re all smiling and no one’s drunk. But Durham can scream louder than I can think and soon the kids are screaming, too. And I consider that God must have been in an exceptionally malicious mood when he gave misery a broadcast frequency.

  Well there’s nothing for me to do until Durham signs his confession, and he can’t sign it till Malmot’s finished making it up. But instead of sitting down and applying himself to the damn document, the evil wraith’s left his beetle friend to stew in a blindfold and earmuffs and decided to drive me home in his great big, horrible car. Is he going to kill me? There’s no chauffeur, no bodyguards and, when I do tune into the damned weird noise he calls his voice, I get the distinct impression he’s attempting to be friendly. I don’t like being in enclosed spaces with him. I find the whole experience distinctly unnerving. Why’s everyone rushing to confide in me all of sudden? Do I look like a sympathetic listener? More likely, it’s because I’m unknown and expendable. There’s no way I can use their secrets against them.

  “You know what bugs me about Durham? Get it? Bugs me?!” he jokes. I get the feeling I should laugh. I manage some kind of chuckle, but my thoughts are back in the interrogation room.

  “But seriously,” he continues. “I’ve sent some good tarts that man’s way and he always turns them down. It’s a small thing in the scheme of things, but it registers on a subconscious level. It’s suspicious. We know he likes women; you caught him with one. But I wonder if knows what to do with them? I mean, in a conventional sense? Has he ever had penetrative sex? Or does he just rub buttocks in a nest of wood shavings?

  “An army may march on his stomach but it thinks with its balls. There’s only so much space in a testicle, Jupiter, and if it’s full of semen then there’s no room for ideas. Full bollocks, empty head. You can’t trust a man who doesn’t ejaculate regularly because his brains are being squashed. It makes him prone to all kinds of peculiar notions. Dressing up as an insect being one of them.”

  “I understand,” I lie.

  “He was a good soldier, you know; brutal, completely amoral, not much of a personality so to speak, but a brilliant organiser. Very efficient.”

  We turn a corner into some rough-looking part of town I don’t recognise.

  “This car’s armoured. The tyres are reinforced,” he tells me and sets about mowing down pedestrians to demonstrate. Some go over the top, some go underneath. Again, I suspect I’m becoming desensitised.

  “Have you read Machiavelli?” he asks.

  “I’ve read ‘The Prince’ and it was…”

  “It’s pretty dull, isn’t it? Not half as juicy as you’re led to expect.”

  “To be honest, Sir, it bored the tits off me.”

  “But you remember the part about Borgia and Ramiro De Orco?”

  “Not entirely, Sir.”

  We turn another corner. More dull thuds, more flying bodies.

  “See! Windscreen’s not even chipped! Anyway… Borgia makes De Orco governor of Romagna. 1501 A.D I believe. De Orco’s a vicious psychopath and Borgia tasks him to reduce crime by any means necessary. And he does it, but makes both Borgia and himself pretty unpopular in the process. So Borgia has the clever idea of hacking his governor in half and leaving the bits on the piazza at Cesena with a block of wood and a
sticky knife. It’s an open secret who did it.

  “Well, the masses think this is marvellous because cruel De Orco’s dead. And Borgia thinks this is marvellous because he has both law and order and immense popularity.”

  “And was Durham to be your De Orco?”

  “Once he’d cleaned up the streets, yes.”

  “But you never got round to killing him?”

  “No. He never got round to cleaning the streets. You’re looking at me blank. Perhaps I should explain: Durham and I parted friendship when the war ended.”

  He backs the car up, squishing an old woman in a tinfoil hat, and continues: “Insects again. Where you and I might see an ants nest, he sees a socialist utopia and sets about trying to emulate it. So I’m setting up sham parliaments for the European Union’s benefit, hoping for some foreign aid. Meanwhile, he’s saying, ‘sod the rest of the world’, and starts demanding we run the country like a giant fucking beehive. At this point, I realise he’s a tiny tad unhinged and persuade him to try policing, where this might be to his professional advantage. It’ll keep him from under my feet and, being a brutal nut, he might just be good at it. That’s when I hatch the De Orco plan.

  “Now, how shall I put this? Well, you expect your police to be a little corrupt. However, you also expect them to solve some crime along the way. It shows willing. It goes some way to justifying the salary.

  “But Durham doesn’t care. He’s getting his pay direct from the criminals, letting them do what they want. Which leaves him more time to do what he wants. And what the drunken little dung-baller likes most of all is plotting my downfall and the confiscation of my army.

  “But I didn’t work long and hard buttering up mad old Generals just to hand everything to the first nutcase in rubber trousers who comes along.”

  “Would he know what to do with an army?” I ask.

  “Probably kit them out in stripy jumpers and send them off on a ten mile pollen hunt. There’ll be weapons training, self-defence classes and lessons on how to build a bivouac out of little wax hexagons. So what do you think? …Yes or no?”

  “I’m guessing it’s a no then, Sir.”

  “Yes, Jupiter, it’s a no.”

  We drive up to a checkpoint. It’s past curfew and a black-visored, heavily-armoured leopard handler asks for our documents. I can’t see his animal, but I notice his leash disappearing up a tree.

  “Oh, it’s you, Sir,” he says upon sight of Malmot. “So sorry.” We drive on without delay.

  Now I don’t know how to talk to Malmot. He despises independence and looks down on deference. Silent? You’re plotting against him. Shy? You’re hiding something. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So I figure I’ll just come out with it. Best to bite the bullet and accept the bollocking if it comes.

  “Durham’s plot, Sir… His revolution… How much of it’s, er… accurate?”

  Malmot makes direct eye contact. I wish he wouldn’t. He should be watching the road. There’s more thuds and crunches as he explains:

  “You mean, how much of it’s bullshit?” And he laughs. “Remember Calamari’s speech in the Dental surgery? About delayed-truth? Well, this is similar. We’re reshaping the actuality to match the intent; making the crime fit the punishment, if you will.”

  “All of it, from the butchering of the landed gentry, fomenting dissent in the capital, and the march to power on Downing Street, it’s all pure Durham, direct from his own secret papers. We’re just providing the people, the opportunities, the triggers, and putting everything into action a little earlier than he might have planned. And if we change the cast a little, make the division between the good guys and bad guys a little clearer cut, perhaps tack on a happy ending, well, if it was a film script, he’d still get his name on the credits.”

  “But he can’t lead a revolution from a prison cell, Sir.”

  “He can if he escapes. Or if we say he’s escaped. Then he’s twice as useful to us. ‘Reds under the beds’ and all that. Nothing like the threat of robbers to get the girls screaming and the boys running downstairs with baseball bats.”

  Well, I’ve had enough of Malmot’s sage-like wisdom for the night so I’m relieved when we arrive at my house.

  I hope he doesn’t try and kiss me, I think to myself, because there’s clearly an ulterior motive here. Fortunately, he doesn’t. Just bids me goodbye with a formal snort and tears off with his wheels squealing.

  And I’m standing on my front step, just about to put my key in the door, when the damn thing creaks open in front of me. And there’s Calamine, smiling like he knows something I don’t. Which he always does. Smiling like he’s just screwed my wife. Which he might have.

  “Do you want to know what the future holds?” he asks me obliquely.

  “Only if it’s extremely, extremely uneventful,” I answer because, by this point, I’m exhausted.

  “I’ve been talking to your wife,” he says.

  “Oh, yes? With your penis?” Is this jealousy I’m expressing? Surely not. The woman despises me and the feeling’s more than mutual.

  “Well, er, no,” he stammers. (You’d be surprised how prudish these men-of-action can be. Won’t look at a woman sideways unless there’s a wedding ring handy.)

  “She wants you back. You’re a hero now. You can expect to be treated like one.” He leans in close. There’s a glint in his eye. “Would you like to know something else interesting? The tests came back and you’re not infertile! Well, that’s funny, I thought to myself. So we went through your bins and discovered that your wife has been taking black-market contraceptives! Isn’t that good news?!”

  “What? That my wife didn’t want to breed with me because she thought I was a waste of space?”

  “No, the wanting you back.”

  “She wants her widow’s pension. Already spent it, probably. Really, Calamine, as far as good news goes, this is, well... it’s just shit news, isn’t it?”

  Calamine seems unfazed.

  “You’re a hero,” he continues brightly, “you should make the most of it. I’ll take your report in the morning. You have some repopulating of the species to do!” He looks at me and laughs. “See you tomorrow, bright and early,” he says with a wink. “Or bleary-eyed and saddle sore!”

  But cold, emotionless sex with someone who expects gratitude doesn’t appeal to me right now. I’m a hero. I have options.

  Tomorrow becomes Today and the rest of the Future lines up accordingly. There’s a knock on the door, but it’s not Calamine. Calamine never shows.

  “Special delivery!” says a man in a grey jumpsuit and peaked cap, handing me a docket to sign. I look at him and he looks at me. It’s the gentleman with three testicles from Battencross Manor.

  “Three corpses, mate,” he says in a broad Geordie brogue. “Reckon you’ll want ‘em round the back. We’d bring ‘em in for you but she’s hurt ‘er wrist.” He jerks his thumb toward his female companion, sat behind the wheel of a large, refrigerated van. The turquoise dress is gone but I recognise her red hair and mad, brown eyes. She waves.

  “Shot ‘em ourselves,” he adds with a wink. “In Rangoon!”

  “Couldn’t you deliver them to the workshop?”

  “No, you’re not there,” he answers with impeccable logic. “And these things need careful storage. We’ve got some mechanical gubbins too. Couldn’t give us a hand, could you? Only she’s…”

  “Hurt her hand. Yes, I know.”

  Soon my shed’s full of mangled metal and human meat. I’m not happy. Bang goes my quiet weekend.

  I contact Malmot. It takes ages to get through to him. Nobody knows who I am. The people who do, don’t care. Then I realise that I don’t own a phone and I’ve never been given a contact number. So whose is this mobile and how did I know what to dial into it? First things first, though…

  “Ah! So you’ve got them, then?” says Malmot.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Wondering who they are, aren’t you?”
/>
  “The corpses? Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Do you really want to know? I mean, really?”

  “Er…”

  “[Gleefully] Well, the black fellow, he’s Nelson Churchill, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Though there isn’t much of either at the moment. Pay particular attention to his neck. We used a garrotte and it bit quite deeply. The woman – can’t remember her name offhand. Campaigns against landmines. We thought it’d be funny if she started campaigning for them. No foul play involved. Drank herself to death. Turned yellow and dropped off the twig, so, perhaps, a lick of paint’s in order. …And don’t fiddle about with her. I don’t appreciate that sort of thing.”

  “I’ve got an estranged wife, Sir. I’m not some weird loner.”

  “I’ve never known a marriage certificate stop a pervert.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “And you are a weird loner – let’s not kid ourselves.”

  “But...”

  “Don’t interrupt. Now, last but not least – drumroll please! – we have Nathaniel Davenport, Leader of the Opposition – now leading the chorus in the Choir Invisible, God rot his righteous soul. Bled to death from an arrow in the femoral artery.”

  “Very clever.”

  “Yes. Keeps the evidence hidden in his trousers, so to speak. He’s our star turn. So get him on ice and sharpen your skills on the other two. He needs to be perfect. Now how long do you think you’ll need?”

  “Do you have any engineers? I could prototype an animatronic skeleton and they could copy it. That’d save time. They’ll need to resize for the woman though. Can’t have her insides a foot and a half taller than her skin.”

  “[Tetchily] Yes, yes. I don’t need the technicalities.”

  “Yes. [Icily] Sorry… Sir.”

  “On a different note, I see you’re using the phone. Got the number then?”

  “Yes, Sir. Though I don’t know how. I…”

  “Good. Got to go now. Goodbye.”

  * * *

  Now let’s jump to the backstage area of the ‘Le Monde’ exhibition Centre. Our ingredients are: one Malmot; one Jupiter; one bespectacled speechwriter; a sound technician with an old laptop computer; eight Goons (assorted); one dead anti-landmine campaigner; one dead Shadow Home Secretary; one dead Leader of the Opposition.