Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

“Parliament’s just a pantomime performance for the public,” Calamari explains. “The military runs this country.”

“And I run the military,” Malmot laughs.

“Impressive,” I say.

“Impressive? Yes. I’m proud of my achievements. But interesting? Well, I’m afraid not. I’m sick of staging parliament, Jupiter. I’m a soldier not a playwright. I don’t care about story arcs; I don’t give a damn about character motivation for ethnic minority candidates in Kent. I’m not Shakespeare. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but what about the tank? I find heavy artillery the most direct form of communication, don’t you?”

“It does what it’s meant to do, Sir.”

“It does what it’s designed for ,” Malmot replies. “And a democracy, for all its much-vaunted, high-minded intentions, does not. Dictatorship is a simple and honest system. Straightforward and efficient. Democracy is like running a cookbook through a shredder and expecting the wastepaper to make a recipe. It’s a jumble sale jigsaw with half the pieces missing.”

“But people like freedom of choice, Sir.”

“What makes you assume they have it? However, point that out and they don’t take kindly to it. So we’re not going to. We’re going to make them believe they’ve chosen dictatorship themselves, that they’re a part of it. And once they’ve tried it they’ll love it. Give a man a flag and a gun and he’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. And I don’t care what anyone says – there’s not a woman out there who wouldn’t trade two good husbands for a mean-eyed bastard in a black uniform.”

Have you heard of ‘Wernicke’s disease’? It affects heavy drinkers. A deficiency of vitamin B1, or thiamine, leads to a blurring of consciousness and damage to the optic nerves. I’m suspecting I’ve got it. More worrying though, the DT’s have hold of me and I’m feeling increasingly odd.

Delirium tremens last between three and ten days. Sufferers experience both visual and auditory hallucinations with a fatality rate of between one and twenty percent. So, looking on the less-than-bright-side, there’s a one in five chance that I might die. And whilst I’m staring Death in the face, shaking and sweating, my head full of blue devils and pink elephants, my stomach trying to crawl out of my mouth, Malmot chooses to tell me that the dead man we’ve reanimated is former Prime Minister Bactrian. We’re to take him on a campaign tour – part propaganda mission and part test to see if our drunken nation notices anything odd about him. If not, well, the plan is to slaughter all the Opposition and Independent Members of Parliament and make their robotised corpses behave so badly they disgrace British democracy forever. I take all this as calmly as I can. I vomit for an hour solid.

I’m left with Calamine, who instantly becomes tolerable again.

“So we’re to part ways,” he says.

“Good,” I reply, “because you never stick up for me when he’s around.”

“I’ve been too busy watching my own back to watch yours. Haven’t you noticed? I’m not exactly Mr Popular these days. Seems they don’t like independent thought.”

“Planning a Night Of The Long Knives, is he?”

“When isn’t he?”

It occurs to me that Calamine might be plotting something himself. I’d like to know what. But he won’t be drawn on the subject. Not straight away. He returns to the matter in hand.

“Now this is the situation: you and your fat, mental friend are to complete former Prime Minister Bactrian and then report to Calamari at this address.” He hands me a business card. It seems to be for a brothel. “In between, you’re to pick up two suits from this address,” another business card, “and make yourselves presentable. You’ll be going on tour with Calamari and assisting with maintenance and operation. Always refer to former Prime Minister Bactrian as ‘former Prime Minister Bactrian’. Not, ‘The Dead Guy’, ‘Old Coffin Bollocks’, or anything of the like. ‘Former Prime Minister Bactrian.’ Understand?”

“I understand,” I say, less than graciously. “Do we have to take Elton?”

“I thought he was your assistant?”

“He’s a human hemorrhoid. I’d rather he stays here until we’re suicidal enough to need him.”

“Okay. That’s fine. Now, Women. We can provide you with women along the way. We run things on military lines and understand necessity. However, I will level with you and tell you that we can’t guarantee the quality. So, if you choose to remain faithful to whoever, I would suggest that you ride her before reporting. You won’t be coming home for a while.”

“You’re a cunt,” I tell him. I would add ‘insensitive’ but it sounds so wet liberal.

“I’d call myself a pragmatist. It’s a mindset that exists outside of standard romantic notions of honour and decency. If you have any common sense you’ll follow my example.”

He throws me something.

“Officer’s stripes? I was never an officer?”

“I thought all army doctors were officers?”

“Not me. I was generally referred to as ‘Hey, you!’.”

“Well, be something greater than yourself,” he says. “Or, at least, fake it until you can. Trust me, you’ll need all the rank you can get when we bury democracy.

These are the other things Calamine tells me:

1: The infantile bickering of the petit bourgeois will never advance society.

2: Complete freedom means the time, space and opportunity to complicate your existence with irrelevant crap.

3: Dictatorship is just a derogatory term for a one party system. A one party system need not be corrupt.

Although, let’s be realistic…

4: It always is.

So…

5: Let’s build civilisation on our own terms, rather than those of genocidal mad men. Meaning…

6: Malmot.

And so…

7: I’m to report to him secretly.

Remember…

6: Don’t get found out.

7: Don’t get killed.

And lastly…

8: This is not as weird as it gets. By any stretch of the imagination.

I don’t know why Calamine seems to trust me. I wouldn’t say I trust him . I think he assumes I have principles.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. What they don’t tell you is that a little power corrupts stupidly. Case in point: Geoffrey Durham. Short, round body, thin head and gaunt face. How do you get that kind of combination? Well, I don’t know, but he’s got it. Imagine a Prussian helmet with feet.

He’s a mass of dangling objects, from the luxuriant moustache to the half-lampshades that jut from his rounded shoulders. He calls them epaulettes. I call them ridiculous. But they complement the gold brocade nicely, as does the vainglorious patchwork of military ribbons that span his pigeon chest.

Clothes maketh the man, they say, and Durham seems to think so. In fact, let’s check out his wardrobe. There’s the usual collection of sensible tailored whatnots and then, if you look to the left, you’ll see the rolled-up sleeping bag he wears when pretending to be a caterpillar. And there’s the butterfly costume he puts on before leaping out of it. But his pride and joy is his black, semi-articulated dung beetle exoskeleton. If it weren’t for the inconvenience of his day job, you’d be hard pressed getting him out of it.

So you’ll be wondering what kind of job this fine specimen holds down. Well, as I think I may have mentioned earlier, Geoffrey Durham is a man of responsibility. He’s the Chief of Police.

We’re down in the depths of Police Headquarters. Durham stands up from behind his outsized mahogany desk, paces the length of the dank, grey dungeon he calls his office, ducks beneath a heavy oak lintel and disappears up a windy, stone staircase to attend to whatever’s troubling his horrid mind. Watch his feet. See those tiny and incredibly shiny shoes jerking up and down in a clockwork goosestep. Even the sound of his footsteps is pompous.