by Dan Carver
The fire escape doors splinter open and what bursts out clearly wants to kick someone until his skull splits open. There’s ten of them, armed with chairlegs and bloody shards of mirror; and I don’t plan on being the next thing they pulp. I see a ventilation duct, dark, dirty, dripping, looking like something you’d plug a colostomy bag into. Suddenly, I’m on Calamine’s shoulders, and, before I know it, I’m levering the grill off and I’m in that duct. And then we’re both inside. And they can follow us in, I reason, but it’s a confined space and, if they want me, they’ll have to queue. And I’ll take the face off at least one of them before I go. And I make some heroic statement to this effect, which Calamine finds uproariously funny.
“We have pistols,” he reminds me. And when somebody invades our privacy, he puts a bullet between their eyes and laughs even louder. No one seems to bother us after that.
“So what have you been up to?” he asks. “Apart from the obvious?”
“So that’s the first best way to wind up a leftie,” says Malmot with a curdled chuckle, when we’ve reconvened in the big, black armoured bus. “Not because it’s disgusting and so plainly stupid, but because the production of semen is a solely male preserve and the pro-feminist factions perceive it as sexist.”
“And eight hundred people died because of a perception,” says I.
“Eight hundred people were admitted to hospital over a perception,” Malmot corrects me. “Seven hundred and fifty of them critical. Fatalities are separate. No word of them yet. Still the counting up to do. Standard practice is to pile up all the bits in a room and see how many complete bodies you can make.”
“Fun for all the family, then,” I hear myself comment. I can’t say I’m feeling so proud of myself anymore.
“Don’t be such a fuddy duddy,” Malmot snaps. “People have been killing each other over perceptions and misinterpretations for thousands of years. Who are you to go against precedent?” And then the smile creeps back across his face. “But let’s not argue over that now. Oh, we’ve crippled the Opposition, all right. And once we’ve sent Nelson Churchill out Jew-baiting and lynched Laeticia Veetabycs for twinky-snatching, there’ll be rioting from Land’s End to the Hadrian’s Wall Blockade. They’ll be deader than stone dead ducks.”
“What about the other parties?” I ask.
“Oh, they’ll try to capitalise on the chaos,” says Malmot, “just as we intend to. But the beauty of these single-issue organisations is that they tend to embarrass themselves the minute they emerge from their dank, backroom boltholes. England has an allergy to tie-dye ponchos, you know, and self-righteous, barely-literate protest songs. Some pansy calls for peace and the general public respond by praying for a tank battalion. We’re going to give them that battalion.
Chapter Five
Corrosive Urine And Other Forms Of Passive Resistance
It’s time to get out of London. We get a couple of hundred miles, maybe, and then we break down. It’s my fault. I have trouble with authority.
It’s childish, I know, but I’d taken to urinating against the wheel arches under cover of night. It was my little gesture of disrespect. What I hadn’t realised was that I’m some sort of biological freak. I’d given up alcohol and my body was expelling the toxins, with the result that my urine turned highly caustic.
And so we’re driving along when, suddenly, there’s a screeching, a grinding and all the noises in-between, sparks trailing down the road behind us and the back wheels flying past us and off across the motorway. My piss has eaten through the axle.
“That was an armoured transmission,” says Calamari bemused. I say nothing. I hide.
I’m keeping myself nicely out of the way when I notice something unusual: tyre tracks disappearing into nowhere. I trace them through tangled, brambled undergrowth into a deep ditch, where I discover an overgrown wonderland of massive pornographic vegetables: Novelty GM, the feral crop of a crashed lorry.
The mummified driver hangs entwined in wrist-thick tendrils, garlanded with nippled tomatoes and crowned with an arse-like pumpkin.
I beckon Speechwriter over. He misreads my grim smile.
“Don’t you feel any kind of sympathy?” he says, exploding into wet-liberal apoplexy. “What kind of a man are you? You! You, with your corrosive urine and your tinkering around in dead people’s innards and your starting riots and your stupid false moustaches?! Is your mother proud of you?!”
“Yes,” I tell the pompous little twat. “She was. But now she’s dead. She was hit by lightning and burned from the inside out, right in front of me. I was ten. Is your mother proud of you?”
Speechwriter doesn’t know what to say to that. Speechwriter’s mum runs yoga retreats and has an open relationship with some hippy fuckwit who paints his bollocks with woad.
A tow truck pulls in, sees me holding a gargantuan carrot phallus and pulls straight out again.
“This may take some time,” Calamari says.
We’re in a pub. I’m drinking the only non-alcoholic option available: my own distilled urine. And if that’s not enough to curdle the soul, we’re in Lincolnshire.
If all’s going to plan, a contingent of phoney ‘Brownshirts’ should be marching upon New Downing Street right about now. Soon after, they’ll be bombed by whatever collection of aeroplane parts our engineers can coax into the sky. We don’t know what form this aircraft will take but we’re all agreed it should be called ‘The Phoenix’. The propaganda opportunity’s too good to miss.
Calamari has a warped idea of relaxation. If he’s not punching children in the arm with a sharpened corkscrew, he’s suggesting we all go for a leisurely narrowboat trip down the remnants of the Grand Union Canal. But there isn’t much of the canal left to cruise down, so we’ve run aground and decamped to a delightful dive situated between an abandoned themepark, the various sites of an electricity plant and the Rampton mental hospital. It’s weird and I don’t like it, but we’re stuck in stasis until Malmot makes contact. When? We don’t know. I mean, how long does it take to destroy a capital city?
In this little backwater, the only contact with civilised society is the weekly shipment of Country and Western records from some mythic nearby town. Television’s referred to as ‘the Devil’s Box’ and the genepool’s so tiny it makes Battencross Manor look healthy. There’s one attractive woman here and she’s deceased. Her plaster death mask stares out from behind the bar.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
The landlord, broad and barrel-chested, fight-mashed face and a nose like a sheep’s stomach, pivots on the heels of his cowboy boots.
“Mother,” he says, expanding our matriarchal theme.
“Yours?”
“Everyone’s,” is his teary-eyed and deeply worrying answer.
“The last human being in Lincolnshire,” mutters Speechwriter. “Before they de-evolved back into apes.”
Our armed escorts – the State Security Staff, or whatever you want to call them – they’re outside, kicking something. No one seems concerned by the gunshots. I sip my horrid drink. Speechwriter’s being thoughtful.
I pull back the thick, crusty curtains. “It's snowing!” I say.
“No, I think you’ll find that’s fallout from the powerplant,” says Speechwriter. He pushes his spectacles up his nose and passes me what appears to be the local newspaper.
“You know what this means,” he says, tapping the page.
“What?”
“We’ve underestimated them. Somebody in this village can read.”
Calamari walks in, wearing that pleased facial alignment that means he’s been up to no good. He must have found something to fuck. Now, relaxed and refreshed, he decides to have a conversation with us.
“We’re leaving,” he says. “So douse the place in fuel and set light to it. And you, Jupiter: take the landlord outside and hang him.
...I take no pride in my actions that night.
Chapter Six
The Predictable Descent into Chaos
“Any word from London?”
“Plenty of words,” answers a smirking tough, polishing his rifle. “Just none of ‘em repeatable.”
I’ve seen housework elevated into an art form. Our Security Staff take gun maintenance into fetish territory. I guess it kills the time between killing people. So whilst they beaver away at their bang-sticks, I watch the grey wreckage of the English countryside roll past the windows, wondering what kind of a city I’ll return to. Will I still have a home? Will I still have a wife? And do I care either way? Because she’s not a nice person and I’m… I’m worse. I’m a murderer.
“You were pretty handy with that rope back there,” says the polisher.
“I had a gun to my head,” I protest.
“Erm, no,” he answers. “I don’t think you did.”
“It felt like I did.”
“Never hold up in court,” he says with a shake of the skull. “But don’t beat yourself up over it.”
“I was only following orders.”
“Hah! Didn’t wash in Nuremberg, won’t wash here!”
“I can’t say I care for the analogy. I’m not a Nazi.”
“I know. They gassed their victims. You threw him out of his kid’s treehouse and hanged him with his own belt. Then you jumped on him and swung on his legs.”
“I was trying to do the decent thing.”
“What? Humiliate a dying man?”
“No! I, er... I read it somewhere, or something. You swing on their legs and it breaks their neck. It makes it quicker.”
“Not the way you do it, pal!”
I can’t look him in the eye. I’m not feeling especially proud of myself at the moment.
“The first kill,” he says with a sudden seriousness, “it never sits well. Not if you’ve got a conscience. You just got to think of yourself as a round in a gun. It’s someone else who aims the gun; it’s someone else who pulls the trigger. We’re just bullets, man. We go where the gunpowder takes us.”
“So I shouldn’t feel guilty?”
“No. You should always feel guilty. Because, if you don’t, well, you may as well hand that soul of yours straight to the Devil.” He casts a cautious eye over Calamari and with that sideways wisdom, he puts down his rifle and starts to polish his boots.
But I don’t have a conscience to trouble me, just a very real sensation of falling downwards whilst still standing up. It creeps over me from time to time, leaving me a little numb, but I always get over it eventually.
So time ticks on without me. The miles slide beneath our wheels. When the waking world calls me back, it’s to confuse me with unexpected scenery.
“Where are we? The fucking Peak District?!”
No-one’s answering. If they weren’t all so busy with their combat boots and tins of dubbing, I’d swear I was surrounded by extremely ugly statues.
Where there should be the expansive horizontals of a newly-flattened London, there’s diagonals, curves and the odd unexpected vertical. Green in colour and grassy in texture, it appears to be countryside, replete with luscious rolling hills and… gun emplacements?!
Well, call me old-fashioned, but I’ve never seen a mountain with a door in it – let alone an armed checkpoint. This is Malmot’s work. It bears all the hallmarks of a gateway to Hades.
Speak of the spindly shit and He shall appear. He unfolds himself from an overhead luggage locker. And whilst that last image may not be factually accurate, it’s still my abiding memory of the moment. He manifests in smoke and brimstone and his words unravel in a lazy purr.
“Welcome to Colchester Barracks.”
Colchester had a varied and interesting history – right up to the point where it collapsed into the ocean. Prior to that, there were the famous rucks between the Romans and Boudicca’s Iceni tribe – characterised by butchery, sexual assaults and temple-burnings – and then, in the thirteenth century, it became popular with Flemish weavers.
Things hotted up a little during the first English Civil War when Cromwell’s boys besieged the city and starved it into submission. Attempts to frighten off the Parliamentarians with a bloody big cannon failed when it fell from the battlements, shattered and passed into legend as the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ from the nursery rhyme. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men” couldn’t put it back together again. So the Royalists surrendered and the Roundheads shot ‘em.
Fast forward a few hundred years and we find military chiefs building a major barracks here. Why? Because “higher than average levels of female promiscuity” ensure “a steady supply of the resources essential to a smooth-running military unit.”
And it’s for this same reason that Malmot chooses to refortify the walled city and the army compounds, reopen the nightclubs and turn Colchester into his base of operations.
Now you’ll have watched a few war films. You’ll know what these bases look like and the way they’re run. Well, take that basic notion and then wind the architecture back a couple of thousand years. Take away the barbwire fences and concrete and substitute colossal earthwork ramparts. Once you’re past the gates, you proceed up a deep trough into the main enclosure, a bowl-rimmed plateau of epic proportions atop what’s basically a Bronze Age hillfort. But hillfort doesn’t do the thing justice. It’s a mountainous structure, pockmarked with semi-buried buildings and crowned with the funnels and gutters of a complex water catchment system. There’s no electricity – the wind turbines have yet to be assembled – and the light comes via bonfire and flame torch, casting flickering shadows over black, hunchback vehicles. Now and again, something large and mean clanks past on steel tracks, engines roaring on rough-arsed biodiesel. Hordes of soldiers carry out incomprehensible duties. I hear barked orders, female laughing and male grunting.
Places like this don’t spring up overnight. They take years to plan and decades to build. God knows what it takes to keep them secret, but I’m sure it’s measured in lives. And God knows why Malmot requests my company on a midnight stroll of the perimeter – just me, him and two semiautomatic-toting soldiers in scowls and greatcoats.
“Are you an ambitious man?” Malmot asks me.
“Quietly ambitious, Sir. I don’t like treading water but, equally, I don’t like to rock the boat.”
“What a nicely vague mishmash of metaphors, Jupiter. Clearly you know which side your bread’s buttered.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“And who’s baked it.”
“Er, yes, Sir.”
“But you’re not about to spread the jam, are you?”
“Spread the jam, Sir?” Feigning ignorance: where would I be without it?
“Spill the beans,” he persists.
But I’m not about to spill anything. I know the deal. It starts with secrets and ends with intestines. And to Malmot? Well, I’d rather slit myself open in a shark enclosure – for all the compassionate treatment I’d get.
“Ah, your hesitancy does you credit,” he says at last. “It’s a fool who talks about himself too readily. A great man has admirers to do so for him.”
I don’t ask him where he stands on the autobiographies of famous dictators, because, at this point in the proceedings, I’d no notion I’d end up as one. I just shuffle my feet a bit.
It’s a bitterly cold night. It’s not a fact worth remarking upon, but there’s an awkward silence and I need something anodyne to fill it. So the temperature gets mentioned and he turns to me with a funny look on his bony face.
“I often get the impression that what you’re saying is different from what you’re telling me.”
It’s an accurate enough observation. So I leave it to pass without comment.
“I, myself,” he continues, “I, myself, never discuss myself –except to state that my wisdom and benevolence is but a counterpoint to my intrinsic sense of place and purpose.” And he stops in his tracks to ask: “Is that clear?”
“As crystal, Sir,” I say, although I mean ‘mud’.
“A moment ago I asked
about ambitions. I was wondering where you saw yourself in the scheme of things. Where you wanted to be. And how you saw yourself getting there. And whilst I have no doubt that you’d misuse power if given it, I don’t think you seek it in itself. Because I suspect that you resent it. Because, for all your amoral posturing, you have an innate sense of fair play and arbitrary authority goes against that.”
Am I being condemned or complimented? I wait for the summation.
“You see, I like to get the measure of my employees and there’s something of the perpetual dissenter about you, Jupiter.”
“I wouldn’t know, Sir.”
“I think you do. I think you do know but you’re not letting on. You’re disturbingly well behaved for an artist and that’s not usual. It worries me. I can see the anger seething beneath the surface, but it’s not going anywhere productive. Or even destructive.”
“I did hang someone, Sir.”
“But you didn’t enjoy it.”
“I, er, might have, Sir.”
“No, Jupiter, you’re lying. Calamari was there and he says you seemed pretty indifferent to the whole business. So where is all this boiling rage going to, I wondered, what’s he channelling it all into?”
“I'm luke-warm on cats, Sir.”
“No, that's not it.”
“I dislike touching other people’s shoes.”
“No, no, no. Stop toying with me. I know you’re your problem is, boy, and it’s God. You hate God. You want to destroy Him.”
“I, er… Well …” I stammer. But what can you say when someone’s sussed your most degenerate desire? “Er… It’s an idea that had…”