Ruin Nation (21 page)

“No, dear,” the woman replies, “that was your father.”

“Really! And the gorilla I shot in Sumatra?”

“Your mother.”

“Which explains…”

“Yes, dear. The inheritance money.”

“Gosh! Suppose I’d better take their heads off the wall.”

“Nonsense, dear. You shot them fair and square.”

I’m guessing this is a joke. Either that or I’ve finally slipped into schizophrenia.

“Excuse me!” interjects a beard with a person behind it. “I’ve got an honorary degree in animal husbandry.
I’ll
identify him.” And he grabs my hand and starts examining my fingers. “No fins,” he concludes. “He’s not a fish.”

“I’m human,” I whisper to the woman.

“Bunkum!” the beard spits. “How many balls do you have?!”

“Two…” I say warily. I’m not in the mood for show and tell, so I make my excuses and leave. Calamari collars me on some staircase or other.

“Is everybody drunk yet?”

“No, Sir.”

“Why not?”

“The ethanol reacted with the punch and caught fire.”

“Is that usual?”

“Round here, Sir? Anything goes. I’m sure I saw somebody eating a chunk of potassium earlier.”

“And?”

“His face melted.”

“Yes, that sounds like potassium alright. Any sign of young Lord Battencross?”

“I believe he’s sulking in his room, Sir.”

“Why?”

“He thinks eating potassium is ‘decadent’.”

“Well, it
is
expensive. Tell me, Jupiter, is he alone?”

“He’s an extremely unattractive young man, Sir, so I would imagine so.”

“Hah!” Calamari cries. “
Perfect!”
And he stalks off with that shark’s smile and his eyes lit up all horrible. I figure it’s time to fetch Bactrian. There’s little else I can do.

All the events in my existence, they come as self-contained chapters book-ended by bursts of truly cataclysmic weather. It’s always been so. My mother died in a thunderstorm. My father was taken away in a blizzard. Bongo was stolen in a
heatwave and I was married during a mudslide that collapsed the registry office. Tonight, dear reader, it’s raining fish.

Well, I don’t know why it happens. It just does. I’m standing by the bus. Bactrian’s half-in, half-out of the luggage compartment and it occurs to me that we didn’t build him to withstand plummeting cod. So I grab his legs and ram him back into his armoured container. All around me, I see
toffs with nets, toffs with bed sheets, toffs with their petticoats outstretched and their underwear showing, all trying to catch tomorrow’s dinner.

Like I said, I’m used to stormy portents of doom. But my meteorological omens are usually explicable by science. Fish, though? Fish isn’t weather. Fish is just plain bloody stupid. Fish takes the piss. Fish is a middle-fingered salute direct from God.

I take a while to ponder what the Almighty’s chosen to infuriate me with this time. Something truly, unbelievably horrible, no doubt. Ten to one, there’s Lord Battencross involved and I’ll lay even shorter odds that you’ll find yours truly, up to my damn neck in it, and screaming.

Did I mention why I stopped going to church? Well, you tell me how Torment creates a good man? All God’s ‘chosen’ people, He
shat on them. Turning to piety, that’s the brain’s defence mechanism. God
isn’t
testing your faith, He’s testing your
endurance
. Like a kid burning ants with a spyglass; or pulling the legs off a spider. Or Josef Fucking Mengele, for Christ’s sake.

God’s the drunk parent who burns His children with cigarettes for sport, orchestrating genocides to fill the quiet patches in His eternal diary. And on a smaller level, a deeply personal level, He singles out individuals for special, degrading treatment. This is how I find myself in Lord
Battencross’ bedroom with a pistol in my hand.

I wondered how my life and the teenager’s death would intertwine. It seems I’m to end it. But then…

The room, for all its red flags and posters of Che Guevara, is still the epitome of genteel poverty; it’s beautifully furnished and larger than my whole house. The wallpaper screams elegance. The bed sheets may be worn but they’re still silk. It’s just the seven dead goons that ruin the feng shui. That and the young man with his face slashed up into mosaic pieces.

“Don’t bother with the boy,” says Calamari. “He’ll bleed to death soon enough. Shoot Spencer.”

Spencer, kneeling at my feet, looks up at me. I raise the gun to his temple. And I freeze.

“Amateur!” he
spits.Calamari snatches the weapon and unscrews the silencer. “The bang is very important,” he explains.

Two shots at point-blank range; Spencer’s skull explodes; he collapses, leaking red into the Persian rug.

“Now take this,” says Calamari, handing me the gun. “And, for God’s sake, smile. You’re a hero!”

I watch him bend over the twitching corpse.

“Who’s ‘special’ now?” he asks, jamming his fingers into the entry wounds.

I feel sick. I turn back
round in time to catch him digging in  the dead goons holsters. He takes out Spencer’s semi-automatic. He presses the barrel to my forehead and pulls the trigger. Click! Nothing but a click.

“Dud bullets!” he laughs. “Just in case.”

I don’t ask just-in-case-what? I
know
what.

“Now swap those magazines for live rounds,” he growls. “And look sharp! We’re expecting visitors.”

The English stiff upper lip? It’s a myth. Lord Battencross ebbs away in his mother’s arms and the poor cow explodes with grief. The air’s full of tuxedoes and crinoline gowns and suddenly, as the man found holding the gun, I find myself standing on the window ledge with a makeshift noose around my neck.

“No, no!” Calamari cries. “He stopped them!”

I don’t know what happens next. I pass out from asphyxiation.

Durham sits in his prison cell, half-heartedly adjusting the mandibles of his stag beetle costume. I mentioned before that he likes entomological role-play. He sticks on a pair of antennae and he sets about getting down and dirty the six-legged way, with no forethought for who might charge in and arrest him. In this case, me.

Now get this: Circumstantial evidence has worked in my favour for once. If you believe the papers, then I’m the brave Army officer who rumbled Durham’s plans and set out on a doomed mission to foil them. I may not have saved young Lord
Battencross, but I took on his executioners – single handed, I might add – and dealt out summary justice. I then set off with a team of crack commandoes, tracked the vile, insectoid pervert down and stormed his filthy lair. I confiscated his weapons, burned his massive haul of drugs, liberated the underage prostitutes he kept chained in the basement and then delivered the scheming coward into the hands of the authorities to face trial and a firing squad. The Brownshirts have disappeared and now I’m a hero. But that’s if you believe the press. And who’s just nationalised all the newspapers and replaced their editors with government-friendly stooges? Clue: Begins with ‘M’. But I’ll level with you: I only went on Durham’s capture mission because no one remembered to tell me not to. What I’ll be doing later, at his interrogation, is anyone’s guess. I’m just going with the flow.

So Durham flops backwards on his domed
wingcase and promptly slides off the plank bed and onto the floor. He was apprehended rubbing abdomens with a disinterested women half his age. She looked relieved when we burst through the window. I guess dressing up like a giant dung beetle just isn’t everybody’s bag. Was the huge ball of shit real? I don’t know. Tear gas makes for a pretty good room deodoriser.

You wouldn’t take this man, currently floundering around helpless on his back, for the criminal who ordered Lord
Battencross’s assassination. Equally, you probably wouldn’t figure him for a sinister paramilitary leader. Well, you’d be right on the first count and wrong on the second, because our Mr D. is far more than an arch deviant in shiny neoprene trousers and bicycle-lamp-lens compound eyes. Yes, Dirty Old Durham is as damn near to a Chief of Police as possible in a corrupt country where authority rests in the hands of those who shout loudest and hit hardest. His ‘Brownshirts’ rule the streets, second only to Malmot’s more menacing and seldom-seen-in-daylight secret service. Durham wants to merge the two factions with the Army and declare himself Leader of Everything. So you’ll understand when I tell you that Malmot has taken umbrage to this and chosen to frame his former colleague for murder.

So he’s hauled off his shell and dragged into your classic darkened room. The bare desk with the bright lamp, the smooth-talking but sinister questioner with the fuming cigarette, the dark figures looming in the background – I’m one of them – they’re all present and correct. All we need’s a nervous breakdown and a signature and we can be out of here and back in time for breakfast.

But our beetle’s made of sterner stuff. He knows all the tricks. He’s wise to any subtle, mental manipulation. Professional pride, I figure, but, having been an extractor of confessions, he’s unlikely to give one without an almighty struggle. Bring on the pliers, I think to myself, because he sure ain’t going for the sweet talk. And then I feel slightly ashamed of myself. Perhaps, I’m becoming desensitised.

Durham’s skewered like a pincushion, sharpened bits of this, that and the other jutting out of him at various angles. Is he bothered? Ask the stenographer. Forty-eight pages of yawns and
non-committal grunts would suggest not. In fact, the written record reveals little except me losing my temper.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” I find myself yelling. “How many fucking legs do you think he’s fucking got?!”

Because the torturer can’t seem to tell where Durham starts and the beetle suit ends, the big twat keeps hammering away at extremities made of vacuum-hose and papier-mâché and wondering why he’s not getting anywhere.

After another twelve pages of nothing much, even our mild mannered stenographer’s stamping her little feet and calling him a retard and Calamari winds up asking the poor lad to leave. Then it’s grumpy faces all round as the incompetent youth takes the walk of shame and Durham bids him goodbye with six different middle fingers simultaneously. You’ll notice he hasn’t spoken yet. I’m wondering if he can. Perhaps he communicates in clicking noises?

This is all too much for Calamari who has, in the past, applied for a torturer’s position, but was turned down for being over-qualified.

He strides forward and smacks the ringing metal lamp with his massive, meaty fist – directing it into the prisoner’s bulbous eyes.

“Take the mask off.”

“No,” comes the answer in a surprising, bronchial bark. I’d expected a sustained chirrup and a quick tune played on his back leg. I have to say I’m disappointed. A black, hairy limb reaches forward for a cigarette and pokes it into the pink-lipped hole between the antler-shaped jaws on his helmet.

“I’d say it was good to see you,” he says. “I really would. Only some wanker’s blinding me with a lamp.” Master of understatement is our Durham.

I’ve told you about Calamari’s taste for the theatrical manipulation of fear. But it’s hard to get the psychological edge over a six-foot-six monster dung beetle wreathed in shadows and smoke. He cuts a menacing figure alright. So, it’s with barely concealed disappointment that Calamari orders the
blackout curtains opened and we ditch the Gestapo-style melodramatics in favour of good, old-fashioned sunshine.

I guess this particular species of insect must be nocturnal – or at least realise how ridiculous he looks in broad daylight – because the helmet comes off. Where once was a tall, brooding man-beast we see a short, scowling Don Quixote in a wrinkled wetsuit. He sucks in his hollow cheeks and fixes his piggy, red eyes on each one of us in turn.

“So much for the spirit of interdepartmental cooperation,” he growls. “I look around me at your – hah! – ‘Interrogation Room’ and your – ahem, hah! –
strong-arm
boys here, and it occurs to me that someone’s got a different definition of the word.” And he stubs his cigarette out on the table, much to Calamari’s twitchy annoyance.

He unfolds like a Swiss army knife, striking the ash into Durham’s lap. He leans in close, his hair bristling and his flint-axe teeth glinting in a
jaggedy row.

“Now,” he hisses. “How can I put this politely...” And what happens next isn’t nice.

Okay, I don’t know your familiarity with professional sadism, or how rapacious your appetite for maiming and mutilation might be, but I’ll hazard a guess, suggest it’s low, and further suggest that you keep it that way. Curiosity’s a strange impulse that can lead us into situations our sanity can’t handle. With that in mind, I’ll keep things light and leave out any references to the removal of fingernails, testicles and electric shocks, and the unfortunate things that can be done with a length of old-fashioned dynamite fuse. It might make the following harder to follow, but I figure that’s for the best. There’s a reason they call it ‘blissful’ ignorance. I
will
tell you that Durham spends the next ten minutes upside down. I pull my fingers from my ears and catch the next conversation midflow: