Ruin Nation (6 page)

“So be it then!” says Bactrian, with a resolve as rock solid as his member.

Bactrian is a proud man. He is not a pop star. There are no credibility points for androgyny in politics, only embarrassing tabloid rumours and unspoken admiration from certain sections of the backbench.

“P.M. Dies of Galloping Gonad Gangrene!” is a future headline haunting him, for amputation, as they say, is not an option.

He stumbles into the cold night. Cue the wind and rain. Someone turn up the emotive music. This scene needs some pathos.

And as Bactrian sings the half-forgotten words of some appropriately angst-ridden guitar anthem, he thinks back to better days, before his organ required a quarantine certificate to travel abroad.

* * *

Tramps protest outside the huge, bottle-shaped
Boozeshop
off licence, complaining that the separate cider-basement for the homeless is a form of apartheid. There’s a Leopard Van looming and something tells me we’re about to get carnivorous, so I turn my collar up and hurry back to the architectural salvage project we call our house.

It’s not my home. It’s a monument to my wife’s disappointment and anger. And she stalks the rooms with a
chianti flagon dangling from her cardigan sleeve, rewriting the happier moments of our shared history as examples of my cruelty and neglect. I don't know why I stay. I guess, when you can't see land, you don't know which way to swim.

Rachel's inside so outside's safe. But soon I'm locked in an argument with my
tosser neighbour, Reynolds.

Reynolds maintains that my rosebush is a tree, it overshadows his patio, and that I need to trim it. I say I don’t care what it is but I’ll happily trim it if he’ll just shut up and go
away. But he doesn’t. So I tell him I don’t understand why he wants it trimmed anyway, since it gives him ample cover to stand outside, look up at our bathroom window and jerk his limp dick off. I tell him I’ve seen him do it. And I have.

Maybe his wife’s seen him at it, and this is all part of some double-bluff display for her benefit. She can’t be too bright to have married the white-trash goober in the first place. I feel resentful. Once again, dullards I don’t give a damn for drag me into their pointless, self-created dramas. They make problems then parcel them up for distribution. So I offer to hit him with a half brick and he goes away. For the moment.

I’m sick ofpetty, suburban bullshit. I want change. I want adventure. I want it now. 

* * *

Bactrian barrel-rolls through the door, pissed as Christmas, with flared, flake-encrusted nostrils and eyes wide as the Grand Canyon. He points his heaving bulk toward the nearest female and announces:

“I have an erection and I demand someone attend to it!” and gesticulates toward his alcohol-soaked mound to clarify. Bodyguards glare through the window. No one seems surprised.

The proprietor eyes him up and slowly down. She’s a small, elegant woman, hair greying at the temples, with strong Eastern European features. We’ll call her Therese. Therese has seen a lot in thirty years in the restaurant trade. What she sees of Bactrian doesn’t impress.

“I’m sorry, Sir,” she says acerbically, “But we don’t service perverts here.”

“But,” says Bactrian, “the sign says
Brothel
.”

“No,
it doesn’t
,” she replies. “If you will kindly take your drunken self outside to read it, you will notice that it says
The Broth Hole
. We are a specialist soup restaurant.”

“So no girls, then?” he persists.

“As I said, Sir, we don’t service perverts.”

“But I’m not a pervert,” he protests.

“Sir, your current demeanour suggests that you are.”

“But I’m not,” he says indignantly.

“That’s as maybe, Sir,” she growls, “but we don’t serve drunken arsewits either. Now, may I suggest you take your sorry organ out of here and find a place more suited to your needs. I believe the
Tommy Tank Palace
has a two for one offer for the over-fifties.”

Bactrian is flustered, frantic. His time on Earth is ticking away.

“Please,” he implores, “I don’t have much time! I’m going to die!”

“I’ve heard that one before,” Therese sneers, “I've been through three wars and four husbands. Listen to me: the only fluid exchanged here is soup. Have you got that? Can your little mind contain the thought?”

“Pleeeaase! I’m going to die!” he whines. “Very soon! And I’m
so
lonely! And it’s such a simple request! A single issue! It’s such a small thing!”

“I’ll bet!” she answers.

“All I want is a little light relief before the reaper calls to collect me. Is it such a big thing? I have funds; plenty of funds!” And he pulls out a substantial wad of God-fearing taxpayer’s money as supporting evidence.

Therese assesses the bundle. A businesswoman, born and bred, she studies the empty restaurant, sighs and snatches the cash.

“You’ll do me…sorry, it? It’s the smart move all round!” says Bactrian brightly.

Therese shakes her head with a condescending smile. She reaches behind the till for a well-thumbed mail order catalogue
.

“Take this,” she says sternly. “The storeroom’s through there. Don’t leave a mess. Don’t make any noise. If either I or my customers get even the slightest indication of what you are doing in there, I
will
call the police. You got that?”

Bactrian nods as graciously as a man about to entertain himself with a catalogue can and bolts through the door, leaving Therese with the impression she’s seen him somewhere before.

The storeroom’s a cosy, pine-planked rectangle, littered with tomato crates and debris from recent renovation. He finds space beneath a long shelf and builds himself a nest of cardboard boxes, enjoying the illicit thrill. Safely ensconced, he locates the firm-control underwear section and sets to work.

It‘s a difficult business and I’ll spare you the exact details. Suffice to say, the concretion numbs sensation and it takes great effort. His elbow slams hard against the wall at regular intervals. The loose planking vibrates and the objects upon the shelf judder closer and closer toward the edge. There’s a clock on the shelf, a monumentally distasteful ornamented lump of heavy mahogany, embellished with crudely carved flowers and varnished, apparently, with hardened treacle. Perched ignominiously upon its top stands the cast metal figure of Justice, trademark sword and scales in hand, fortunately blindfolded to Bactrian’s flagrant self-gratification (Hardly the best advert for human sensuality there’s ever been). As he pounds himself closer to a satisfactory conclusion, Justice draws closer to the edge of the shelf. And, as he reaches his crescendo, she arrives at thin air, plummeting in swift rotations toward the Prime Minister’s skull. She hits hard and heavy; lethally. And Bactrian is dead.

Time flies when you’re having fun.

The street’s dark, save for the flicker of candles behind broken windowpanes and the dim glow of The Broth Hole’s
kerosene lamps. Shadowy buildings crumble in the background. A gas grenade arcs noiselessly through the cold night air and clatters against the cobbles, spewing thick, choking mist. Shadowy people crumple to the pavement. Malmot's operatives, black-clad and wearing respirators, sweep the alleys for witnesses. Pistol silencers sneeze into the howling wind. It’s half past curfew, the leopards are out and the evidence will soon be eaten.

Inside The Broth Hole: Therese sits, flanked by Bactrian’s bodyguards. The Prime Minister, dead – and from the look on his pale face, loving it – lies slumped over a red and white chequered tablecloth.

The door crashes open and Malmot, gasmasked and wrapped from neck to ankle in a long, grey trench coat, enters followed by yet more sinister entities. Leather gloved fingers grip pistols and semiautomatics. Respirator valves hiss and sigh. Another high, sneezing sound and Therese falls face down.

Operatives surround the Prime Minister's corpse. His pulse is checked but none found. They
hood the head and drag his slumped form into an unmarked vehicle. Small packages are placed around the dining area, kerosene lamps unhooked and smashed. Flames lick across the wooden flooring. They make their exit.

A black limousine pulls up.
Malmot gets in. The Broth Hole flashes white, its once-verticals bloating outward in an exhalation of shattered glass.

Jump Cut to Ceesal: David Ceesal. Pronounced “See-sawl”, if you're reading this in transcript. His dull eyes flick open into silent blackness. His first ever action was to hoof the midwife in the face. Coordination would never be his strongpoint.

Now in his late thirties, he’s pop-eyed, boss-eyed and thick; the kind of man who sits in darkened rooms, licking his own face. In the queue for human brains, he was conspicuous by his absence, lining up with the apes for prehensile toes instead. Rumour has it those decades of intermarriage left the
Ceesals with an incomplete genetic code that could only be plugged with monkey DNA. I don’t claim to know but it seems feasible. That's hearsay, however. I never met the guy personally.

Viewed in profile – one eye at a time and with his tongue sheathed in his skull – he could almost be handsome. He has the sturdy physique of a rugby player; the operations to cure his scoliosis have left him straight-backed with a regal posture and the scar from the removal of his eleventh finger is virtually unnoticeable. He holds some political position but I can’t recall exactly what it is. I do know his deformities extend to his bladder, which is reputed to have a capacity of approximately fifteen litres. I also know he has a habit of waking up in cupboards.

I’m not sure why he sleeps in cupboards. There’ll be a deep-seated psychological reason for it, probably involving wombs, but it's not necessary for me to speculate.

So he’s in a cupboard now. He doesn’t know it, though. It’s too dark to see and he’s too stupid to get out. He thinks it’s a coffin. He’s waiting for an angel, someone to tell him he’s dead and pack him off to the afterlife. The door opens, light streams in and an apparition appears: some hazy, undulating entity too thin to be human. Technically speaking, it isn’t. It’s
Malmot.

“Well, well, well,” he goes. “And who’s this then?”

“It’s Ceesal. David Ceesal,” answers our idiot in a sub-bass rumble. He has a nametag to remind him. “I’m not being annoying, am I? Are you an angel? Am I… Am I dead?”

“Well, your body is most definitely alive. Your brain, however… well, let’s just say it’s open to debate.”

“I’m not being annoying, am I?” Ceesal whimpers again. “And what happened last night? What’s wrong with my eyes?”

“Firstly, you are always annoying so don’t bother asking again. Secondly, you’re wearing the shadow Home Secretary’s
glasses. You stole them. I believe you said it would be a ‘good laugh’. I don’t claim to understand your concept of enjoyment but many of our more feeble-minded ministers seemed to agree with you.” And he lets off a starched smile and sniffs haughtily. He might even click his heels like a prison camp commandant. Who can be sure? Whatever, there’s something about Ceesal’s posture he finds disturbing.

“And...” starts
Ceesal.

“And what?”
Malmot answers.

“Well,” says
Ceesal, “well, I’m sure it’s nothing serious, it’s just that... I think I have my backside wedged in a mop bucket.”

Malmot
thinks for a second, with those great, grey wheel arch eyebrows knotting.

“Again,” he says, “I don’t understand your concept of enjoyment, but one might assume, from the positioning of your trousers around your ankles, that you fell asleep whilst trying to relieve yourself. You became, for want of a better expression,
wedged
.”

“Can’t think why I’d want to do that,” mumbles
Ceesal. “Bit of a silly ass thing to do, eh?”

“The question,” answers
Malmot, “is not why you would want to do it, but why you would want to do it in a broom cupboard?” Ceesal releases his buttocks from the bucket with a rubberised purr.

“I don’t know. I have a problem with thinking.”

“I can imagine,” says Malmot. “Fortunately, you’re going somewhere you won’t need to think.”

“Now, I know this one,” says
Ceesal. “It’s either California or middle management.”

“No,” says
Malmot, “and it’s not university either. Tell me, Ceesal, have you ever thought of becoming Prime Minister?”

And so we confine Bactrian to history. When Ceesal asks, “Why me? I mean, I’m hardly The Brain of Britain”, Malmot replies, “My dear chap, you’re not even The Brain of your own skull. For that, we must look to the parasites in you hair. You are, however, a man of noble lineage and proud carriage, big enough to protect your party from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” By which he means, fat enough to keep him (Malmot) shielded from snipers.

“Well, that’s just marvellous!”
Ceesal chuffs.

“Yes,” says
Malmot, “marvellous like a hideous wasting disease.”

And so another idiot ascends to Prime Minister. Simple as that. He’s eminently qualified. ‘Supple
Ceesal’, they call him, ‘pliable as play dough’. His lack of opinions mean he can be pushed any which way – so long as there’s the promise of beer and rugby at the end of it. A perfect puppet. A perfect Prime Minister for a scheming, backseat Machiavelli.

Now,
Malmot’s position may be unassailable but the illusion of democracy is vital to the smooth running of his dictatorship. Our drunken nation doesn’t notice Bactrian’s absence yet, but they will. Eventually. And there’s enough newspapers outside of State control to pose some tricky questions. So best to pre-empt them with a press release explaining Bactrian’s sudden contraction of a debilitating respiratory illness and his retirement from politics. Ceesal will be sworn in before a select audience of loyal and extremely inebriated party members and his picture – taken in profile, with his tongue put away – circulated amongst the press. The former Prime Minister’s disappearance may provoke some international discussion. Who cares? A few carefully circulated lies – kidnapping by aliens, eaten by his own leopards etc – will keep the conspiracy theorists busy.

So it’s back to governing now for
Malmot and preparations for the next fake general election. And if Bactrian’s body needs to turn up sometime, well, it’s safe in refrigerated storage.

The
Stemset
building sits squat on the cliffside. The Devil’s own breezeblock; it sucks the life and colour out of its surroundings; a karmic black hole, leaching in the positive and spitting out the negative in fantastic new forms of mangled depravity. There are trees, bushes and general vegetation, but like nothing you’ve seen
this
side of a nightmare. What should be green is grey, stunted, twisted. And dripping with fat: human tallow renders on the electric fence. We still have science, you see, and its bloody by-products spill from skips, as blackened chimneys flare off the souls of incinerated test specimens. 

It wasn’t always so. The
Stemset
building – or
Ethicare
Well-Being Trust Centre
as it was then known – started its life as a psychiatric hospital. Never one to let stupidity hinder policy, the then Home Secretary decided that the best thing to do with the cripplingly shy, the hyper sensitive and the over anxious members of society, would be to lock them up with shit-slinging window-lickers, psychopathic killers and corpse-mutilating, necrophiliac rapists. The idea being, of course, that this would put them in an environment where they would feel safe and their issues could be resolved quickly and efficiently. Part-private funding and a substantial one-off payment for each patient was
nothing to do with it
. And it
certainly
wasn’t
a plot to camouflage health service inefficiency by locking the evidence out of site.

Ethicare
was also noted for its curious security, the high fence with the wide gap on the cliff’s edge labelled, “Jump here to be free of torment”. And with no doorlocks to stop them, many did and probably were. Unofficial communications between ministers made veiled references to “the successful implementation of a cruel-to-be-kind stratagem”. But throwing aside rumours of conspiracy, malpractice or simply extreme gallows humour, no one could deny that the suicides were televised and that bets were taken on which patients would jump next. I’m told a doctor won fifty pounds on my father’s death.

When asked about the matter in the commons, the Home Secretary replied: “Sometimes, I stand up too fast and it makes my brain all
hurty,” and was quickly consigned to the facility he’d created.

But time marches on regardless. Large sums of money change hands and the last of the patients make the great leap, buttering the cliff with body parts.
Ethicare
Well-Being Trust Centre
becomes
Stemset Life Technologies
, part of a rapidly expanding research corporation. They add electricity to the razorwire fences, sling in some halogen lighting and a couple of watchtowers and fix up a charming sign reading: “If you’ve seen this, you’re already dead. By appointment to His Majesty, King William.”

Business thrives. Anthrax sales are down due to the popularity of home brewing, but government subsidies and a nice little sideline in cryogenics ensure a healthy return for the unethical investor. And here come our investors...

The guard on the main gate is surly and the stench of non-viable embryos in the incinerator further proof, if any were needed, that Stemset may be one of the many entrances to the underworld.

“Call me C,” says a disguised
Ceesal warmly as they approach the huge, reinforced doors.

“Believe me, that's the letter that springs to mind,”
Malmot answers bluntly.  “You’re to behave yourself today. Understand?”

It’s unlikely
Ceesal does. He’s drunk. One more drink and he’ll be quadrupedal. Malmot’s mood is sour, bordering on explosive. His new mouthpiece is an inarticulate inebriate; a liability unfit for public display; a one-way ticket to ridicule.

“Why are we here?” he asks. “Am I being annoying?” he adds.

“We are here,” Malmot replies, “to operate on your deformities. I’m thinking, we probably can’t make you any smarter but we might be able to find some kind of electrical implant that shocks you whenever you behave like an arse. You don’t mind us putting things inside your skull do you?”

“Not at all! Plenty of room in there!”
Ceesal laughs.

“Just as well,” says
Malmot, “because the alternative is a little more...” he turns away “... a little more
fatal
.”

The charming receptionist with the dead seagull eyes and too much makeup introduces them to – or rather points at – Doctor
Holubec, a swarthy Eastern European with a handshake of respectful pressure. But his courteous smile hangs beneath a blank, blue gaze. It’s a look that speaks of war crimes and a first family lost to a mass grave.  Whatever he loved is long gone. He prefers scientific experiments to people now. They only die within set parameters.

The foyer has a barbaric efficiency to it; a Cold War atomic bunker vibe that no amount of smiling photographs can quash. I’m not big on family portraits and torn and tearstained images of long-dead children are seldom ‘jaunty’, no matter what a grieving parent might tell you.

It’s mistrust at first sight for Malmot and Holubec; combative eye contact and a conversational tone that veers from professional to the downright hostile and back. Meanwhile, the idiot Ceesal emits methane and Holubec makes a mental note to inject him with something unpleasant before the day’s out.

Malmot
looks up. Something strikes him strange: a model railway track – suspended roughly a foot and a half below ceiling level and disappearing into the ventilation shafts either side of the foyer. Ceesal just stares, his eyes wide with childish wonderment as a miniature Wild West steam train peeps in above his head, towing six little wagons full of human fingers. He turns, open mouthed, to Holubec.