Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

I swap the bowie knife for a scalpel from my old medical kit. Start small, I figure, pressing the blade into his veiny, white flesh. But I can’t make the first incision. What’s wrong? I was never this nervy in the operating theatre. I’ve got to get this thing in motion, and if it takes a big, dumb, decisive gesture to do it, then so be it.

And so I throw the scalpel like a dart, right into his torso. Big mistake. His bloated carcass deflates like a balloon, spraying gas and all kinds of decomposing matter everywhere. Including over me.

When I’ve finished throwing up in the carpark, I straighten my clothing and consider a trip to the library.

So, I’m going through the shelves and I come to the row we may as well call, ‘The Single Man Section’. There’s plenty on taxidermy so I pick something at random and read: “Hunting’s fun but it can be over all too quickly. If you love animals and want to spend more time with them, why not enter the exciting world of taxidermy?”

The next book, I suspect, is a parody: “Like hunting? Have you ever thought of doing something productive with the animals you murder? A chapter called ‘Catch And Cosh A Cute Companion!’ confirms it.

The third book goes beyond mockery. Two bobcats in Civil War uniforms hoisting the Confederate flag – that’s the front cover. The back cover? Well, why the coyote would want to wear a tutu is anyone’s guess. Still, one large, hairy mammal is pretty much the same as another – even a former Prime Minister – and so I take it to the front desk.

Lucas sits quietly by the window. Purple clouds spit acid rain onto the city. Drizzle sizzles on parked cars and expensive paintjobs bubble and burn, flooding the gutters with metallic pigment. He watches a mink liquefy.

It’s a rare pause for thought in a punishing schedule. Laura packs a plastic-wrapped squishy something into an insulated, aluminium flightcase.

“Don’t stick your head out,” she warns, “it’ll melt.”

“Don’t worry,” he whispers affectionately, “I’ve got spares.”

“When’s Jupiter due?” she asks, addressing the flightcase to ‘ Vatican City’ .

“Not for a while yet, I think. He’s having trouble finding transport.”

“Is he bringing Elton with him?”

“God, I hope not. The last thing I need’s another lecture on supernatural fish.”

“Speaking of problems, have you paid the rent, yet?”

“No,” Lucas answers. “The police have frozen my account.”

“Looks like we’re moving again, then,” she says.

Lucas has astonishing bad luck with rented accommodation, developing a semi-irrational hatred of lettings agents in the process. I say ‘semi’ because his grievances are completely legitimate. He’s been lied to with such furious regularity that he makes them swear on the holy books. Not that that means anything these days. When they’re “absolutely, definitely going to be in” they’re out. When they’re supposed to be meeting you at a property i.e. out, they’re in. Only they “can’t come to the phone right now” because they’re too busy counting their money.

‘The most infuriatingly rude and ignorant people outside of employment agency staff,’ is how Lucas describes them and that’s a pretty damning indictment.

With half of England’s architecture crumbling back into dust, it’s hard to find rented accommodation. It’s even harder to afford it. So sharing with strangers is the only realistic option for a single man. And Lucas will always be single because he insists on wearing a huge, bushy moustache.

Of course, sharing has its downside. You can never be sure what kind of freaks you’ve moved in with until it’s all too late. From students, who’d wake him up at three in the morning to tell him how antisocial he was, to knife-wielding maniacs, he’s lived with them and he’s regretted it. He particularly hates sharing with small-time drug dealers who fill the living room with smelly young men. There’s nowhere to sit unless you win it in some convoluted card game, and the lights burn twenty-four hours a day until the coin metre runs out and they all migrate to the next pothead’s pit.

The buildings themselves have been pretty choice, too, with lead pipes and exposed asbestos. If it couldn’t be removed, he plastered over it – wearing an old scarf for a particle mask. Gas fires belched fumes, light switch plates were wired up live. I recall tales of a bathroom floor rotted to nothing more than a thin skin. No defecatory act could be undertaken without fear of crashing, still seated, through the kitchen ceiling and landing on the cooker with a broken neck.

He spent a desperate year in a YMCA hostel, surrounded by schizos, alcoholics and speed freaks. The alcoholic schizophrenics were his favourite; especially when they banged on his door and threatened to stab him for breaking the toilet. He hadn’t broken the toilet. That had been the speed freak alcoholic with the mind-rotting syphilis.

When his plans to move into a house with an ex-squaddy fraudster and a wiry attempted murderer fall through, he leaps at the chance to move into a place that smells like a garbage dump, but whose residents hold no prior convictions. The house is robbed the day he moves in. He now shares with his sister.

To all intents and purposes, he appears normal. He doesn’t twitch; he’s never decorated his bedroom walls with pornographic collages; his relationship with his parents is healthy and he’s never shown even the slightest interest in his sister’s underwear.

You could cite his moustache as evidence of abnormality but, the truth is, it hides a scar. And not an attractive or mysterious scar, like my sabre wound or Calamine’s ferocious cheek-stripe, just a plain-ugly piece of wartime damage. His top lip was torn open by a shard of his best friend’s shoulder blade. Something to do with anti-personnel mines, I think. I stitched his face back together.

I restored enough of an appearance to make his life worth living again and he rewarded me with his eternal and deeply weird friendship.

We made a pretty good team, too. My regime was always pretty hot on recycling. Lucas’s Health Ministry widened the policy to include human organs. And the United Nations were wrong to call him a compulsive liar. I prefer to think of him as ‘pathologically unspecific’. People who deal in arms or, more accurately, arms, legs, lungs, kidneys and corneas often are. It goes with the trade, as they say.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Lucas’s execution is some thirty years in the future – and, at this point in the chronology, well, we’ve not even skinned the Prime Minister yet.

So we’re hidden in Lucas’s yard. It feels safe. We’re surrounded by high, red-bricked walls, topped with vicious spiked plant life. Horticulture’s his other hobby and there’s a green wooden glasshouse to my right. Laura’s inside. I don’t know what she’s doing but it seems to involve a lot of bending down and shaking her rump in an exaggerated manner. I like Laura. She’s got long black hair and pretends to find me attractive. At some point in the future, I figure I’ll… Hah! No! You don’t need to know that!

Anyway, I open the back of my new government-issue van and a stinking soup drains out. Bactrian lies wrapped in a black tarpaulin and the bouquet isn’t much better.

“Well, I mean, thanks and all that,” says Lucas embarrassed, “but he’s a bit… a bit, er, ripe for my purposes.”

“I wasn’t going to give him to you,” I say. And then I realise how odd that sounds.

Lucas seems hurt. He takes a deep breath.

“I see. [Sigh] I see. Some relative drops off the twig and you instantly think of old Lucas and his incinerator. Figure you can save the price of a coffin, eh? Because you don’t come round any other time, do you?”