Ruin Nation (3 page)

“The degeneration of Britain’s inhabitants into a mindless pool of protoplasm is an imminent occurrence! Do you want to regress back to the primordial soup we struggled so hard to crawl out of, so many,
many
millions of years ago?! Do you want to?!”

“Do I get a bread roll?”
Malmot enquires, but Bactrian continues unabashed.

“…And do you know what the sickest part of this misbegotten situation is? Shall I tell you?
It’s taxpayers that’ll pay for it!”

“That’s the
soundbites. Drop the volume now; take them into your confidence.”

“Now I know you don’t want tax hikes.
No one
does. I
certainly
don’t!”

“Liar! Boo!”

“But what would you
rather
have: a
small
increase now, to pay for the police officers so vital to our war against drugs, or a series of massive increases to pay for the inevitable epidemic?

“Law and order or atavistic descent? Dilettantism with dealers or decency? The choice is yours!”

“Cross out ‘dilettante,’ says Malmot thoughtfully. “It sounds like an artificial penis.”

“I thought it was.”

“That’s a ‘dildo’. Like in that picture in your wallet.”

“No, that’s a pony.”

“Other end. Now you’re to learn that speech by heart.”

“Like a good little hypocrite.”

“Indeed. [Laughs] …Like a good little hypocrite.”

He turns and fixes Bactrian with those evil red eyes.

“You see, you and me... Well, it’s a matter of breeding. We can handle our vices. But the vast majority… they can’t. And they need handsome examples like us to tell them to behave themselves.”

Bactrian catches his reflection in the paint-spattered window.

“Am
I
handsome?” he asks.

“When not in close proximity. But my point is this…” and
Malmot snorts, “I just can’t bear to see the scum enjoying themselves.”

“
Heh!”

“Now, this fellow here,” he says, kicking the drowned man. “We’ll give him a blood test and, if he’s clean, well, we’ll have him roasted in garlic and cayenne pepper. ...And now to our last piece of business…”

“The breweries?”

“Yes, and the compulsory purchase thereof.”

“You know my feelings on this.”

“Yes, Prime Minister, but fortunately you have no say in the matter. I do, however, and I’m placing alcohol production under State control.”

“And there’s a theory behind this, isn’t there?”

“
Yeees,” comes Malmot’s patronising sigh. “As you well know, England is a nation of drunks. And, if you keep people drunk in a ditch, well, they don’t bother you. And if people die of liver disease, well, you don’t have to feed them. This leaves more food for the military. Feed the military and starve the proletariat and the proletariat enlists. The result is more soldiers and less useless eaters.”

“And all because of the booze.”

“The targeted distribution of alcohol. Butcher the weak and disenfranchised and arm the strong and dependent. It’s simple economics.”

“I like economics.”

“No. You like prostitutes.”

“You’re right. Let’s get some.”

“Let’s.”

You’ll have noticed many strange things about modern day England. You’ll be wondering what happened to democratic political process. Why ‘New’ Downing Street? It might also strike you strange that a starving country is awash with alcohol. And what
are
people eating?

Well, like every other major civilisation, from the Mayans to the Romans, we became decadent; we got complacent and we fucked up. We stopped fighting for the Empire and fought for our right to party instead. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. I will say that measuring success by the amount of brain damage you can inflict upon yourself on a Friday and Saturday night is misguided.

For years we’d been moving all our people into service industries and middle management positions, stigmatising manual labour and forcing ill-equipped teenagers into nonsensical celebrity-culture college courses. Craftsmanship dwindled as practical skills died out. Soon all our nation was fit for was pushing paper and punishing cheap alcopops. Anyone with a brain moved abroad.

A series of badly conceived military actions blighted our popularity on the continent and throughout the world in general. Further acts of political stupidity and arrogance sealed our fate. The French sealed the tunnel and the Russians cut off our oil. The Germans enforced a no fly zone but there was nothing to fuel our planes with anyway. We had no means of importing food and our love of concrete office blocks left no ground for growing any.

We’d been self-infantilising for years. Now we were truly helpless.

Riots broke out across the North West. Gangs ripped up the paving slabs to plant vegetables. But our officials preferred bureaucracy to logic and arrested our would-be farmers for the contravention of planning laws. It soon became known that our ruling bodies ranked neat block paving over human life. Manchester declared nation status, followed by Liverpool. When the troops rolled in to force reunification, the terrorism started.

I’m told it’s easy to make explosives. I don’t know. I buy mine in. I like to keep that emotional distance. But the knowledge had been circulating for years and anti-government factions formed to misuse it.
The Laburnum
– an extremely violent organisation named after the poisonous but incredibly boring tree – gained a large quantity of the malleable-explosive, C4. They shaped it into little round bombs. They painted the bombs orange and gift-wrapped them. They sent them to their local M.P. And he stuck them up his bottom..

Richard Gifford knew nothing about The Laburnum. Why should he? Nor how
they
knew about his little, shall we say, eccentricities. He had other things on his mind. He was a rising political star. Why should he even consider that the small, orange fruit he had so lovingly inserted into his backside was a bomb? Why he’d stuck a tangerine up his chunter was his own business. How he intended to remove it, we can only speculate upon, as it never became an issue. He walked to work that day, whistling, tapping his umbrella, dishing out amiable kicks to the homeless. As he approached Number Ten, it was smiles from the window. Through the door…down the hall… left into the conference room, cries of: “Gifford! Gifford!” and deep voices heartily condoning his recent xenophobic outbursts and handling of a paving slab wrangle in Clapham station. There was talk of opinion polls and colleagues’ extramarital activities and laughs all round. They pumped his hand and clapped him on the back and some cheeky soul thought to slap him on the rump. It was the last mistake that cheeky soul would ever make.

“Kaboom!”

The initial blast kills all present, levelling the fifteen surrounding streets. Many say C4 isn’t that powerful, that it must be all that political wind igniting that causes such a gigantic blast, but, for whatever reason, it rains bricks and blood for three days. The cleanup operation is huge, hampered by souvenir hunters and onlookers. Morbid children play with soggy bits of politician. Dogs bring home chunks of junior minister in their mouths. And the dogs get eaten and so do the chunks of minister. Kebab shops reopen and morality, as is so often the case, goes into flux.

A phone call is made, admitting responsibility. The surviving government galvanize their ranks and draft a public statement calling for the stamping out of The Laburnum. But it takes one
slip of the tongue from ‘Laburnum’ to ‘Labia’ on live television and a militia group of hard-line man-hating feminists take immediate disproportionate offence.
Oestrogen Pro-active
know it’s a simple mistake but, what the Hell, it gives them an excuse to throw off the veneer of civility and behave as badly as the men they despise. They resolve to destroy the remaining government. It isn’t hard. They bomb a brothel. Twenty-two down, one to go. Our last minister, realising he’ll soon be incubating a bullet, runs away with a partner of unascertainable gender and species.

The old order is banished. The slabs come up and England digs for victory. But whilst some plant, others simply steal.

We have no leadership, but a political void with two parties too terrified of reprisals to fill it. But Malmot isn’t scared. Even when the nation descends into bloody civil conflict. He has the police in his pocket. He soon gains military backing and, with Walmart on-side, he has food, ammunition and very large guns. The smaller supermarket militias can’t compete. They crumble. When Walmart has what it wants, it pulls out to concentrate on East African initiatives, but it doesn’t matter. Malmot has his opportunity. He marches on the capital and  claims it. All dissenting voices disappear. When a brutal order returns to the streets, he assembles a police state and sells off shares in it. He’s smart enough to lurk in the shadows with Bactrian as a mouthpiece. And he’s smart enough to reconvene parliament. But you’ll never vote him out because all the ballot boxes go straight to the shredders.  And no one knows that Malmot
is
The Laburnum.

Meanwhile, the remaining animals die. Restaurants offer a ‘veterinary bucket’. Don’t ask what’s in it. Just eat it. It could be the last meat you see in this lifetime. Unless you go to back to Manchester and what they now call the ‘cannibal territories.’

Global warming continues unabated. Our reservoirs dry up and we become dependent on desalinated seawater. But it’s not safe to drink, so we brew it instead. And now we drink beer for breakfast dinner and tea, from the cradle to the grave. The cannier folk have solar stills to collect water for their children, but the majority of schoolkids are drunks. And their teachers are drunks – although that’s always been the case.

Old King William’s still on the throne, imploring Africa and the other non-European states for aid, bless him. And my television’s broke and I can’t get the parts. Life goes on. It goes to Hell. And it’s taking us all with it. God, I imagine, finds all this hilarious.

“You make
fun
?” says the homeless woman in a croak comprising a dozen accents. Is that Portuguese? I’m sure that last swearword was Czech. The low sun’s in my tired eyes and the stunted trees throw shadows across her wrinkled, riven features. She found me asleep in the gutter. I’m not sure which one of us smells worse.

“Fun with a capital ‘F’,” I say, as she stares through me. I pinch the silver foil into a sharp crease. She’s asking what I mean. Like a comedian, or something? I say no. I was an army surgeon. Now I make puppets. Nothing important. And I pass her my glittering handiwork.

“Well,
you’re important to
me,”
she says. “This is the best tinfoil hat I’ve ever seen! I know my thoughts are safe now!”

And she puts it on her head, picks up the corners of her skirt and starts to dance a slow, solo waltz in the middle of the road. I smile and wish her an unheeded goodbye.

I start on one of my interminable deliberations on the nature of Fun and why I’m not having any. How I live like a peasant in a crumbling hovel but I’m expected to behave like a gentleman and pay National Insurance for the privilege. How I contribute to a Health Service that doesn’t exist and a pension it’s impossible to collect. Why the council takes a third of my monthly pay and then refuses to empty my bins until I remove the crashed fighter jet in my front garden. Why?
I
didn’t put it there. It’s metal. Why hasn’t anyone stolen it? Guess it’s too big to move when all you’ve got is a handcart pulled by toddlers.

If I was let off the leash I could amuse myself, do something interesting with my life. But there are no adventures anymore,
no places left to explore in our satellite-mapped country. Everyone’s tried everything and ruined it.

The sky’s the last frontier. And, sure, I could rejoin an airship gang, build myself a
scrapyard zeppelin and take up crapping on holiday jets for a hobby. But I don’t fancy swanning around the heavens, strapped beneath a thousand cubic metres of hydrogen. Been there, done that and lost the woman I loved to overhead power lines.

All the good uncertainties have gone. There’s just the bad uncertainties now: the traffic smashes; attacks by religious extremists and the maniac on the train with the broken vodka bottle as sharp as the memory of the wife who’s just left him.

Your main challenge is keeping your pointless job and fighting your own bad complexion. Or you can go out after curfew and see how far you get before the patrols mace you or a leopard chews off your face.

Mortality should make us feel alive. But it doesn’t. So I guess we don’t have fun anymore. We have it made for us.

And I just want an adventure.

* * *

Sparks shower against the surface of the workshop door. What isn’t scorched is scratched and gouged by the various belts and buckles and ‘interesting’ clothing of the staff. There’s a window – a small square of wire-reinforced glass – and it’s sandwiched between the exterior frost and interior filth. And I’m there, pounding my fist on it, trying to get in. There’s some kind of debris caught beneath the bottom edge of the door, acting like a wedge, and I can’t get the damn thing open.