Ruin Nation (10 page)

L:
No.

C: Oh, come now! No need to be embarrassed. This is your swansong, after all. You may as well enjoy it.

L:
Swansong? Eh? But I’m not going anywhere.

C:
Oh dear! Have I let something slip? ... Oh well, cat’s rather out of the bag now, isn’t it? May as well come clean, you know. Confession’s good for the soul, and all that.

You see, I have it on very good authority that this is your last broadcast. [Adopts forced smile.]

L:
Really? I mean,
really
?

C:
[Sympathetic] Well, you’re not getting any younger, are you? And think about it: how many other political interviews have they given you? One might suspect an attempt to raise the show’s profile – in readiness for your replacement. I mean, from soap stars to the Prime Minister, it’s a bit of a departure, isn’t it? In fact, ‘departure’ is the operative word here, I’d say. A hah! ... Sorry. I just found that last remark quite amusing.

L: [Ashen-faced] But ... but they’d tell me?

C:
Why? And give you extra time to consult your lawyers?
Oh come now, Pip-Pop. Let’s face it, you’re getting a bit long in the tooth for telly, aren’t you? This is a young man’s game, you know. A young man wearing a sharp suit and talking with a fashionable regional accent.

L:
[Flustered] But ... I ... Damn! But, I mean … Ah, Christ! ... I can’t believe it!

C:
So you may as well go out on a song, I say. Something
appropriate
.

L:
Yes, you’re ... You’re right! Something
appropriate
!

It’s not hard to push Lindberg over the edge. You’ve a man with a voluminous, but ultimately, fragile ego working in a cutthroat industry full of young, smart, backstabbing jackals. Throw in Ceesal’s goading, drug-induced paranoia and  you’ve all the constituent components of a highly amusing mental breakdown.

Well, Mental is as Mental does, and
Malmot watches stupefied as Lindberg treats the viewing public to the curious spectacle of a fat man with a tie wrapped around his head, marching on the spot to his own internal rhythm and singing:

“Stick it up slow

She won’t notice

Slip it up whilst she’s still drunk

She don’t know you’ve laid her

You won’t have to pay her

So give her some old Eton spunk!”

In between other, even more disgusting verses, he screams: “I’ll show you what an old man can do!” and, following a few hip thrusts and some rather lewd hand gestures, he concludes:

“And I’d like to dedicate that song to the all the good people of film and television. I’m sure the irony will be completely lost on you, you vultures! You hyenas!”

He bows, calls the audience ‘Bastards!’ and exits, stage right, into the awaiting arms of a burly stagehand cradling a cosh. He reappears later in the Green Room,
straightjacketted and strapped to an upright trolley, much to Ceesal’s delight.

“Well, my dear chap,”
Ceesal chuckles, positively jubilant. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You know I’m not finished yet,” Lindberg mumbles through some sort of reinforced muzzle.

“I think, perhaps, you might be.”

“Well, I don’t care,” comes the unconvincing response.

“Good on you! That’s the spirit!”

“Don’t patronise me. This is all your fault.”

“Okay. You know, you’re just being weird now.”

“Look, don’t. ... Just don’t. I’ve spoken to my producer and she says they had no intention of firing me.”

“Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? To you. In your delicate condition.”

“You lied to me.”

“Perhaps you deserved it?”

“And what do you mean by that?”

“Exactly what it says on the tin, as they say. But, if I were to add anything, you know, it might be that you could try being a little nicer to those less fortunate than yourself.”

“And what, exactly, do you mean by that?”

“Well, back in the old days... school, you know, and at the gentlemen’s club… You
were
rather
mean
to me.”

And, with those cryptic words,
Ceesal smiles and gestures the orderly. Lindberg exits backwards on squeaking wheels, issuing threats.

“Now that’s exactly the kind of behaviour I was talking about,” says
Ceesal.

Big Tony steps out of the shadows.

“Mr Malmot’s outside,” he says.

“Let him wait,” says
Ceesal. “There’s something I have to attend to first.”

Malmot is installed in his London office of red walls, red leather, read pornography and unread reports. The verdigris glass of the table lamp casts unflattering shadows onto his hawk-like face as he ponders the previous night’s events and Lindberg’s mysterious death from carbon monoxide poisoning. Ceesal grins disturbingly.

“The Truth is a person’s honest interpretation of the events that have happened around them,” says the Prime Minister.

“That’s relative Truth. Interpretation is different from reality,” Malmot replies.

“And I’d agree with that,” says
Ceesal. “... To a degree.”

“So what are we saying here?” the desiccated weasel creaks, tapping his fountain pen. “That a hosepipe
magically
attached itself to the ambulance exhaust and passed itself through the window?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says
Ceesal with a smirk. “Perhaps. Or, just maybe, someone tampered with the oxygen cylinders. You know, I couldn't possibly comment.”

“That would require forward planning. Premeditated murder, you could say.”

“Well, it pays to think ahead.”

“I can’t condone this sort of behaviour. It's ostentatious!”
Malmot chides.

“Oh, come now!”
Ceesal laughs. “In the two and a half weeks I’ve known you, you’ve shot two women and had a man starved to death in front of full-length mirror. ... And you criticise me for one little gassing, one brief flexing of my murder muscles?”

“You
don’t do it in public!
There’s a time and a place for everything, Ceesal. And that place is certainly not beneath the nose of the Media. Human life may be cheap, but its opinions aren’t so easily bought.”

“Which should show you where you’re going wrong.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You’re running scared from the press. You should be riding it like a cheap bitch. The minute we have to question the Media’s loyalty is the minute it stops serving our objectives. So why not snuggle into bed with it, whisper sweet nothings into its ear and then slap the little
pricktease when it doesn’t put out. It’ll soon come round to the right way of thinking. After all, your only other option is to destroy it completely. And what good would that do?”

Malmot
briefly considers an England devoid of television and the rediscovery of the simpler things in life like card games, folktales and unhurried sexual intercourse. Not to mention the ease of ruling an ill-informed populace with no recourse to the press. Suddenly killing the Media seems like a marvellous idea.

They say men divide women into virgins and whores, but it’s actually more of a sliding scale. We balance a new partner’s sexual appetite against the risk of unwittingly raising another man’s bastard. I never had that problem with Rachel, though. We never had kids. In fact, we barely had a relationship.

She never figured in my conversation much either – something she took personally. But careless talk costs marriages as well as lives. With
chlamydia crippling fertility and our diseased maternity wards killing as many as they bring into the world, if it weren’t for the council estate slags we’d be an extinct nation. Let the wrong person know that you’ve got a healthy wife of breeding age and he’ll be round with a bunch of flowers for your missus and a machete for you. He’ll be carrying her off on his shoulder whilst you’re trying to scoop your innards back in. So I know it sounds chauvinistic, but I wouldn’t let her out of the house unless she was heavily armed. She seemed to think this was weird.

You’ll know about the mink. They were released from fur farms in the late nineteen nineties and, after a couple of decades spent breeding in the shadows, broke cover and unleashed animal genocide – systematically devouring every small prey species, every medium-sized prey species, and then teaming up to take on everything else – us included. That’s the great joke: we
can
wear their fur – they don’t mind – so long as we’re inside their stomachs at the time.

With the weight of numbers and evolution on their side, they’re diversifying to fill the ecological niches left by the other animals, including herbivorous roles.

So this is how we find ourselves in our current situation: mink swarming all over our vegetable patch and Rachel trapped in the shed, leaning out of the window with a small calibre air rifle. It’s her own fault. If she hadn’t been outside, burning all my possessions, I wouldn’t have had to lock her in there. Trouble is, the mink have me cornered up a tree and I’m now no longer in a position to let her out.

Well, I'd have taken my pistol and blown the swine into bite-sized chunks. But then my critical faculties only go so far before deferring to the more damaged aspects of my personality. I walk the fine line between very clever and very stupid and it’s a constant source of infuriation for all concerned. Rachel, however, can keep her temper with anything but my good self and knows that the pistol is louder and draws attention. Given what we’ve got growing in the garden, well, attention’s something we don’t need. Our supposedly Non-Genetically Modified seeds have turned out to be GM after all. Worse still, Novelty GM: an erotic tableau of genitalia-shaped vegetables erupting from our once wholesome little allotment. You can’t turn your head for peapod pornography.

Bad science smells and the mink won’t touch our filthy crop. But they’re happy to conduct their business amongst it, preventing us from removing the offending evidence.

Now this is serious stuff. I’ve seen an eighty-year-old grandmother put in the stocks for an accidental arse cantaloupe. If the cops find our crops, we’ll be looking at a minimum six month stretch.

But why’s vag veg such a threat to society? Surely it’s all just innocent fun? Well, no, I’m afraid, it’s not. The government’s knee-jerk response to endemic alcoholism and the wholesale commodification of the female body is draconian obscenity law. So, whilst it’s impossible not to drink booze and prostitution remains our sole profitable industry, it’s illegal to be seen intoxicated or to have your photo taken with your tits out. All this, despite complete and total public indifference.

So, I was unlucky. Black-market products are a law unto themselves and you expect a few curious foreign phrases on the packaging. Thank God we didn’t plant the ‘Sodomy Beans’. Or the ‘Spurting Cock Zucchinis’.

*
* *

Malmot’s
always been odd. Or, perhaps, I should use the past tense there. After all, he’s been dead these past twenty years. In fact, it remains one of my proudest achievements that, even in my dotage, my prostate remains healthy enough to urinate on his grave – liberally and without the slightest discomfort – at least twice yearly. But my internal plumbing is beside the point. You’ll be wondering the reason for the sudden narrative-shift. Well, the simple fact, and one I feel I should clarify, is that I’m dictating this memoir from my deathbed. I have a young, female journalist recording my every semi-senile utterance. If my words seem to wander into the one-sided, it’s because I’m responding to her continual interruptions (all cynical attempts to build up her own part in History by the way. She isn’t doing this for love of The Leader).

Now I’m not new to dictating. Fact is, I’ve made something of a career of it. And, like most folk in the trade, I run the constant risk of overthrow. So whilst you may be reading this in your school, in its hundredth, leather-bound reprint, saluting my picture – and I sincerely hope that you are – it’s more likely
you’re a NATO General plucking the pages from my dead fingers as your troops hoist my corpse up the nearest lamppost. I’m a pragmatist, you see. At best, I’ve hopped across the border with my elite guard, my faithful doctor, a sympathetic writer and died fighting with a gun in my hand. More realistically, I’ve left this world as I came into it: with my head between some woman’s thighs. That way, if they do display my body in public, at least I’ll be grinning with my tongue stuck out. But I digress.

Malmot’s
always been odd. It’s all that wailing and gnashing of teeth he does. The outside world, well, you get that icy facade. I used to think he had no emotions. Then I saw him hunched up in a hotel room, whinnying and smacking himself in the head with his fist. That’s when I realised there was something deeply wrong going on in there.