Dan Carver - Ruin Nation

D: I… Aaaaagggggh!

M: Exactly. Now, listen to me. I said, listen to me, Durham! If you stop wailing then you might find this interesting. You see, in a few weeks time – not sure of the date, but it’ll probably be a Friday – a group of men dressed suspiciously like your bullyboys will start a vicious protest against democracy.

D: Why?

M: Haven’t worked that out either. Some kind of scandal or something. Anyway… There’ll be all kinds of violent mischief, culminating in the armed occupation of New Downing Street. They’ll have about two hours to declare a new government with a stupid name, issue some weird decrees, make themselves thoroughly unpopular, before I invoke the Emergency Powers Act. You remember what that is, don’t you?

D: Yes. We used it before. It’s a license for you to declare martial law.

M: It is. And the first thing I’ll do is flatten Number Ten with the ‘Brownshirts’ inside it.

D: But you’ll be killing your own agents.

M: No, there’s an escape tunnel. I’ll be killing members of your extended family I bus in specifically to provide bodies. But that’s by the by. Martial Law means no more fannying around with Parliament and crappy old democracy – just the rule of my iron fist!

Oh, remember the old days, when we reclaimed London and toasted our success from the top of a Chieftain tank?! It’ll be like that. Only, this time, I’ll be up on the turret and you’ll be smeared all over the tracks! Hurrah!

All Present: Hurrah!

M: And then it’s onwards and upwards toward official dictatorship! Not sure which way we’re headed yet. Could be socialist – you’d like that, wouldn’t you? – or perhaps we’ll go goose-stepping off in the fascist direction? I haven’t decided. Perhaps we’ll do both , like the Castro boys’ Cuba: set off to the left and end up marching back on ourselves from the right!

I hate it when conversation gets too political. Throw in a smattering of Finance talk and you’ll find me staring out the window thinking about sun-dappled woodland and fast-flowing streams full of trout.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Malmot’s talking about establishing a Corporate State. Every country needs to stand on its own economic feet, he says. But Durham believes our economy is based upon the production of cheap alcohol, counterfeit clothing and reliant on poseurs drinking themselves to death. With that in mind, why not play to our strengths and open England as a massive tourist resort?

He mentions Cuba again and someone else mentions that tourists bring in fresh DNA.

“And you’ll need DNA if you’re going down the fascist route,” says Durham, “because too much of this Far-Right-Racial-Purity malarkey and you’ll end up as a nation of window-lickers.”

“It’s a fair point,” says Malmot. “But there’s one other business option we haven’t considered yet.”

“And what’s that?”

“Warmongering. We’ve nothing better to do.”

We stand in hushed silence. We’re a hundred years behind the rest of the world in weapons technology and starting a war would be suicide. But that’s for the future to decide. We’re here to interrogate the prisoner, Malmot reminds us, and soon we’re back into his alternate reality of Revolution and Counter-revolution.

“I didn’t put King William back on the throne to have you haul him off and guillotine him!” he snarls.

Well, we won’t be leaving until Durham ‘confesses’ his involvement in something or other. So I decide to get out of here. In mind, if not in body. I picture myself on the banks of a crystal-clear Estonian lake, eating beef sandwiches with a new wife and the children I don’t have yet. We’re all smiling and no one’s drunk. But Durham can scream louder than I can think and soon the kids are screaming, too. And I consider that God must have been in an exceptionally malicious mood when he gave misery a broadcast frequency.

Well there’s nothing for me to do until Durham signs his confession, and he can’t sign it till Malmot’s finished making it up. But instead of sitting down and applying himself to the damn document, the evil wraith’s left his beetle friend to stew in a blindfold and earmuffs and decided to drive me home in his great big, horrible car. Is he going to kill me? There’s no chauffeur, no bodyguards and, when I do tune into the damned weird noise he calls his voice, I get the distinct impression he’s attempting to be friendly. I don’t like being in enclosed spaces with him. I find the whole experience distinctly unnerving. Why’s everyone rushing to confide in me all of sudden? Do I look like a sympathetic listener? More likely, it’s because I’m unknown and expendable. There’s no way I can use their secrets against them.

“You know what bugs me about Durham? Get it? Bugs me?!” he jokes. I get the feeling I should laugh. I manage some kind of chuckle, but my thoughts are back in the interrogation room.

“But seriously,” he continues. “I’ve sent some good tarts that man’s way and he always turns them down. It’s a small thing in the scheme of things, but it registers on a subconscious level. It’s suspicious. We know he likes women; you caught him with one. But I wonder if knows what to do with them? I mean, in a conventional sense? Has he ever had penetrative sex? Or does he just rub buttocks in a nest of wood shavings?

“An army may march on his stomach but it thinks with its balls. There’s only so much space in a testicle, Jupiter, and if it’s full of semen then there’s no room for ideas. Full bollocks, empty head. You can’t trust a man who doesn’t ejaculate regularly because his brains are being squashed. It makes him prone to all kinds of peculiar notions. Dressing up as an insect being one of them.”

“I understand,” I lie.

“He was a good soldier, you know; brutal, completely amoral, not much of a personality so to speak, but a brilliant organiser. Very efficient.”

We turn a corner into some rough-looking part of town I don’t recognise.

“This car’s armoured. The tyres are reinforced,” he tells me and sets about mowing down pedestrians to demonstrate. Some go over the top, some go underneath. Again, I suspect I’m becoming desensitised.

“Have you read Machiavelli?” he asks.

“I’ve read ‘The Prince’ and it was…”

“It’s pretty dull, isn’t it? Not half as juicy as you’re led to expect.”

“To be honest, Sir, it bored the tits off me.”

“But you remember the part about Borgia and Ramiro De Orco?”

“Not entirely, Sir.”

We turn another corner. More dull thuds, more flying bodies.

“See! Windscreen’s not even chipped! Anyway… Borgia makes De Orco governor of Romagna. 1501 A.D I believe. De Orco’s a vicious psychopath and Borgia tasks him to reduce crime by any means necessary. And he does it, but makes both Borgia and himself pretty unpopular in the process. So Borgia has the clever idea of hacking his governor in half and leaving the bits on the piazza at Cesena with a block of wood and a sticky knife. It’s an open secret who did it.

“Well, the masses think this is marvellous because cruel De Orco’s dead. And Borgia thinks this is marvellous because he has both law and order and immense popularity.”

“And was Durham to be your De Orco?”

“Once he’d cleaned up the streets, yes.”

“But you never got round to killing him?”

“No. He never got round to cleaning the streets. You’re looking at me blank. Perhaps I should explain: Durham and I parted friendship when the war ended.”

He backs the car up, squishing an old woman in a tinfoil hat, and continues: “Insects again. Where you and I might see an ants nest, he sees a socialist utopia and sets about trying to emulate it. So I’m setting up sham parliaments for the European Union’s benefit, hoping for some foreign aid. Meanwhile, he’s saying, ‘sod the rest of the world’, and starts demanding we run the country like a giant fucking beehive. At this point, I realise he’s a tiny tad unhinged and persuade him to try policing, where this might be to his professional advantage. It’ll keep him from under my feet and, being a brutal nut, he might just be good at it. That’s when I hatch the De Orco plan.