Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

Meanwhile, she’s going through the glove compartment. And then she pulls a gemmy from her bag, jacks open the boot and finds the petrol can full of cooking oil. And it’s a Grade A mentalist we’ve got here because she pours it over the seats and sets light to them. And I’m too far away to do anything. The remnants of my car pop apart with a tumultuous ‘woof!’ and a spinning metal something just misses my head. I look up to see my license plate embedded in a tree.

“You’re not a team player,” says Dromedary. It’s an interesting greeting. I’ve only just walked through the door.

“Depends on the team,” says I, devoid of breath. I may be amoral, but I’m not an unscrupulous people-shafter.

He’s hooked up to the morphine drip and soon I’m receiving some woozy lecture on the nature of cooperation and group interaction. I watch him sweating, his big, scarlet bulk rising out of the bedclothes like a fleshy Ayers Rock. Except you’ve never been climbed, I think to myself. He pauses, scans the darkened room for black cats, blue devils and other opiate-induced flora and fauna before returning his attentions to me.

“Sometimes an angel falls into the gutter,” he starts. He means Rachel. “And meets a guttersnipe.” He means me. “Thank God you’ve no children,” he continues. “You haven’t ruined her for someone decent.” He means himself.

I yank open the curtains and he screams, clawing at the sunlight. I smile. Fucking vampire.

“We’re all in the gutter, looking at the stars,” I quote, probably incorrectly. He changes tack.

“I know you’re an ‘angry young man,’” he says and, God rot him, he does the quote marks with his fingers thing. “You want to kick against authority; you want to assert your individuality; you want to dye your hair blue, call yourself ‘Johnny X’ and dance all night to crazy punk rock music!”

And I don’t want to do any of those things, because I’m twenty-six, not sixteen. I want to stop drinking, start a family and run a canoe hire business from a log cabin by the side of an Estonian lake. I want to paddle kayaks in summer, carve souvenirs in winter and raise children that don’t die of cirrhosis aged forty-five. But I keep this quiet. No sense sharing your secrets with a sociopath.

“I didn’t ask you to join my family,” he says, “But I’m determined to make the best of a bad situation till my niece comes to her senses.”

“Eh?” It’s not my wittiest riposte.

Dromedary is a paranoid man who digs into his employee’s private lives. When he finds something of interest he’s not averse to exploiting it. So when he snouts around and discovers I’m married to a Bactrian girl he spots an opportunity to cuckold me and cement his place in the aristocracy. But Rachel is no closer a relation to the former Prime Minister than I am to Chairman Mao. Her family pissed their inheritance away three generations ago. She sees through his ‘avuncular’ interest and finds it downright creepy.

“She’s not your niece,” I say, and I’m about to add “and she’s barely my wife” when he issues some threat and I tell him to go shove the plasma stand up his arse sideways.

“Why, you little bastard!” he cries and throws a half-peeled fruit at me – whereupon I disappear in a puff of smoke and a tinkle of fairy bells because, according to the nurse, it’s all a drug-induced hallucination and I haven’t arrived yet.

When I turn up for real, it’s much the same thing. Only this time I get citrus juice in my eye.

“Transform yourself into a form of gas, will you?!” he snarls as I’m seized by burly men and dragged into an adjoining room. This is nothing new. Staff beatings are Dromedary’s main motivational tool.

But these aren’t his usual thugs. The suits are too good. No human hair/acrylic mix for these two gents. And they haven’t tried hitting me yet. So you can understand my apprehension. This isn’t normal.

“Your boss will have explained the situation, no doubt,” says the shorter of the two, six foot one, broad as a barn door, slightly twitchy, and watchful as a fox. He sees me scoping the territory and blocks the exit. “You’re welcome to jump out the window, sir,” he suggests in his Southern barrowboy growl. “We are seven stories up, though.” And so I graciously decline.

The second man’s taller and leaner, but equally wide; shaped like an upturned triangle. The scar on his left cheek has a hypnotic pull and a curious, cranberry colouration. It seems too precisely inflicted to have been obtained in the course of standard employment and I’m not keen on the way it joins up with the corner of his mouth.

“So you’re aware of the situation then,” he states in a manner that’s far too affable for my liking. “Mr Dromedary has brought you up to speed.”

“He’s stoned,” I say. “He threw a satsuma at me.”

“Don’t get smart,” I’m told.

“Do you like your job?” asks Scarface in smooth tones. “Good jobs are hard to find. I hear you got this one through nepotism.”

“I’d never heard of Dromedary when I signed up,” I say, shaking my head. “He certainly didn’t know me.”

“He said you’d say that,” growls Shorter Man, clearly playing Bad Cop to Scarface’s Good. “He says you’re smart but your attitude stinks.”

“He says you’re shifty,” says Scarface.

“But we don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing,” says Shorter warmly.

“It’s not a good time to be jobless,” takes up Scarface. “No unemployment benefit. No housing benefit. Shops putting poison in the skips so tramps can’t scavenge the out-of-date food. Not that we have out-of-date food anymore.”

“And not a good time to be homeless either,” Shorter continues, “what with the leopards and all.”

“I’m sure your wife will be fine,” Scarface smirks. “Mr Dromedary will see to that. But you… Well, she won’t think you’re so ‘sexily non-conformist’ when you haven’t washed for a year and your arm’s been bitten off!”

“You bite the system and it bites back!” Shorter sneers. “ Quite literally !”

“I think you get our point,” Scarface concludes. But I don’t. Christ on a bike, I have absolutely no idea what they’re on about.

“Is this a staff appraisal?” I ask. Scarface makes a noise like laughing.

“Funny,” he says.

Our meeting lasts approximately half an hour. There’s a couple of anomalies: I’m shown a picture of a man skewered with a railway spike and asked to draw conclusions from it. And there’s lots of talk about bodies floating face down in canals. But, in a country where everyone’s permanently drunk, threats and cartoonish behaviour are part and parcel of everyday life. You learn to ignore it. I’m bored now. I ask what’s going on. Scarface fixes me with his weird blue eyes.

“You made ‘Alfonse’ The Talking Alien, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Hah! I love that little fucker!” adds Shorter helpfully. I’m starting to suspect he’s a little odd.

“Thanks,” I say, “but I don’t see what this has to with…”

“And, most recently,” Scarface continues, “you’ve been working on full-size replicas of the human body?”

“Yes, that’s the polite way of putting it.”

“And you married into the Bactrian family?”

“Yes, but probably not the branch you’re thinking of. And Rachel, she’s not really my, er…”

“She’s a relative of Mr Dromedary.”

“No, she…”

“I think you’ll find she is . Mr Dromedary is the half-brother of former Prime Minister Bactrian – although that information is to stay between you, me, my colleague here…”