Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

Malmot likes to think he understands the common man. Thing is, I’m not common and he sure as Hell isn’t. The jury’s still out on whether he’s undead. Our points of reference are poles apart. So how can he second-guess me correctly? Well, he can’t but that doesn’t stop him interrupting my every sentence with something mind-shreddingly irrelevant. Ten minutes of talking passes and not one iota of information is exchanged.

“The clues are in the words I’m using,” I seethe. “Try listening to them.”

This is the wrong thing to say, and I’m soon in acute agony. I’m concussed. It can happen when you’re smacked round the head with a rifle butt. Elton, who’s as weird as Malmot seems to be autistic, pipes up fearfully. There’s a brief discussion and they seem to strike some common ground about wheelchairs and old tape recorders.

Meanwhile, Calamari circles me like a shark in a black ocean. I hear a match strike. I hear him open his dumb mouth and, God rot him, if he doesn’t go into some hectoring rant. A True Believer, this one. I can’t stay focussed enough to listen. My thoughts seem to slide over each other before I can catch hold of them. There’s a dull throb at the back of my head and a searing heat at the front. Sometimes the sensations swap. There are moments of lucidity then the pain drives me back into a kind of echoey, underwater version of my own brain. Words go in, but they don’t commit themselves to memory. Only fragments of his deluded diatribe remain:

“You should feel honoured to crawl in the presence of such a great mind.”

“A very great mind. Though you won’t understand his methods…”

“… the carrot and the stick…”

“Forward progress…”

“Rowing in time to the beat of the drum.”

“And if that doesn’t work, well, you beat their heads instead. Because what have we got to work with here? Men and women who behave like apes because they’ve no notion of the greater good.”

“We’re trying to carve a society out of a dung heap. We’re trying to grow food, create jobs, link up the gaps in public services…”

“But the populace won’t embrace their own potential…”

“…for the good of the State.”

“Disenfranchised. Of course our predecessors didn’t help – lying through their teeth, crippling everything they touched, offering our country’s arsehole to the Americans and then wondering why we got spunked all over by Islamist terrorists.”

“…and then the swing to the Right. And the plagues and The Great Separation and the civil wars.”

“Thank God for strong leadership.”

“England was once a beacon to the world. Now we’re feral children playing in its ashes. But we can burn bright again if we stop the general population pissing in the wood pile.”

“Stop pissing in the woodpile, Jupiter.”

And that’s the last I know. I’m out for the count. My head fills with horrific visions of military parades. I see banners and police beatings and England as a form of bacteria, spreading to mainland Europe in the rat infested holds of creaking, wooden boats. Bacteria in jackboots.

I wake into dull daylight. Afraid. Worryingly, I also have an erection.

I’m not going in to work today. I’m working on an Advanced Theory of Violent Assault. I figure, after the third or fourth time, something in my head’ll rupture and I’ll die. Seeing as no-one’s sussed how to make a ghost do manual labour yet, I feel death might be my smartest option: an eternity of peace and quiet with just a few brief interruptions from clairvoyants. And I’d like to see them find a clairvoyant. Last I heard, they’d burnt them all. I doubt I’ll go to Hell. I can’t believe it exists. You tally up God’s antics over the last few thousand years and you have to conclude that He should be burning in it Himself. And with that in mind, the first thing I’m going to do is track Him down and call Him a Cunt.

I consider a brief stint as a vengeful spectre, compile a list of folk I’d like to traumatise and then waste a few moments pondering the mechanics of turning your head inside out and vomiting blood. Do the undead really do that? And, if so, how? Is it a skill you have to work on? And then I turn my thoughts back to the real world. I’m not the most motivated of workers today. Probably something to do with the rifle butt and the pistol whipping. So I’m disinclined to open the door when Mr Calamine comes a-calling.

I’m heating water on the cooker. I figure I’ll throw it on him, he’ll shoot me and then this whole sorry charade’ll be over. It all sounds hysterical but I’m rapidly reaching the end of my tether. I’m not intrinsically evil. Why does the world want me for its punch bag? It’s not just the water that’s boiling. It’s my whole life. Like a bubbling cauldron. And the more I look into it, the more unpleasant things bob up and stare back at me. Then the electricity cuts. So no scalding today then.

With the lights out and the sky so black with angry clouds it may as well be midnight, I fumble in the cupboard for kerosene, or lighter fluid, or just anything flammable that I can burn in my old hurricane lamp. You don’t want to be in the dark with a predator. I want to see the bastard coming. Paranoia’s an evolutionary advantage – as you find out in my line of work.

But my fears are unfounded. Calamine’s his usual personable self. I don’t understand his part in last night’s events – and I can’t say I trust him – but I feel comfortable enough to put down the kitchen knife. He takes the gesture graciously. He hands me a tomato plant.

“By way of an apology,” he starts.

“But? What? What the?! What the fuck was last night about?!” I shout.

“You weren’t in work today,” he continues. “I was hoping to talk to you… clear a few things up.”

I know what I’m hoping, I think to myself, but the chances of a block of concrete crashing through the ceiling and crushing you, you scar-faced Judas, are pretty remote. Again, I say nothing.

His lips are moving, and I know it’s a pretty juvenile thing to do, but I’m tuning out again. I hear the soft pitter patter of raindrops on the roof and, before Calamine can even draw breath, I’ve got my chemical-proof glove on and I’m holding a strip of litmus paper out of the window. I check the colour with a candle. It barely even reacts. And before Calamine can take another breath, I’m in and out of the rain with every saucepan, every bucket, every anything that can hold liquid I can find.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I say, because it seems pretty obvious to me. “I’m collecting rainwater!” And he shrugs and looks at me nonplussed. “Look!” I cry, and I’m soaking wet as I say it. “I’m not dissolving! This is drinkable!”

Now, I guess it’s different when you’re up in government with purified water on tap. But when you’re leopard-fodder like me, and your choices are weak beer or the desalinated dysentery-juice from the reservoirs, you get pretty excited about conventional rain. I guess it’s all relative. Calamine’s charmingly condescending when he tells me:

“You know I can get you fresh water whenever you want. You just have to ask.”

“And why would you do that for me?”

“Because you’re part of the team,” he says, smiling in the unflattering candlelight. But I’m thinking of those rifle butts again when he says: “Look, I think we’ve had a bit of a misunderstanding. Just give me a minute to…” and he checks his watch. “In fact, less than a minute…” He trails off, starts counting soundlessly. There’s a sudden noise that I can’t even begin to describe – honestly, I can’t – and then he rips off the watch and slings it into the pedal bin.