Dan Carver: Ruin Nation

The old order is banished. The slabs come up and England digs for victory. But whilst some plant, others simply steal.

We have no leadership, but a political void with two parties too terrified of reprisals to fill it. But Malmot isn’t scared. Even when the nation descends into bloody civil conflict. He has the police in his pocket. He soon gains military backing and, with Walmart on-side, he has food, ammunition and very large guns. The smaller supermarket militias can’t compete. They crumble. When Walmart has what it wants, it pulls out to concentrate on East African initiatives, but it doesn’t matter. Malmot has his opportunity. He marches on the capital and claims it. All dissenting voices disappear. When a brutal order returns to the streets, he assembles a police state and sells off shares in it. He’s smart enough to lurk in the shadows with Bactrian as a mouthpiece. And he’s smart enough to reconvene parliament. But you’ll never vote him out because all the ballot boxes go straight to the shredders. And no one knows that Malmot is The Laburnum.

Meanwhile, the remaining animals die. Restaurants offer a ‘veterinary bucket’. Don’t ask what’s in it. Just eat it. It could be the last meat you see in this lifetime. Unless you go to back to Manchester and what they now call the ‘cannibal territories.’

Global warming continues unabated. Our reservoirs dry up and we become dependent on desalinated seawater. But it’s not safe to drink, so we brew it instead. And now we drink beer for breakfast dinner and tea, from the cradle to the grave. The cannier folk have solar stills to collect water for their children, but the majority of schoolkids are drunks. And their teachers are drunks – although that’s always been the case.

Old King William’s still on the throne, imploring Africa and the other non-European states for aid, bless him. And my television’s broke and I can’t get the parts. Life goes on. It goes to Hell. And it’s taking us all with it. God, I imagine, finds all this hilarious.

“You make fun ?” says the homeless woman in a croak comprising a dozen accents. Is that Portuguese? I’m sure that last swearword was Czech. The low sun’s in my tired eyes and the stunted trees throw shadows across her wrinkled, riven features. She found me asleep in the gutter. I’m not sure which one of us smells worse.

“Fun with a capital ‘F’,” I say, as she stares through me. I pinch the silver foil into a sharp crease. She’s asking what I mean. Like a comedian, or something? I say no. I was an army surgeon. Now I make puppets. Nothing important. And I pass her my glittering handiwork.

“Well, you’re important to me,” she says. “This is the best tinfoil hat I’ve ever seen! I know my thoughts are safe now!”

And she puts it on her head, picks up the corners of her skirt and starts to dance a slow, solo waltz in the middle of the road. I smile and wish her an unheeded goodbye.

I start on one of my interminable deliberations on the nature of Fun and why I’m not having any. How I live like a peasant in a crumbling hovel but I’m expected to behave like a gentleman and pay National Insurance for the privilege. How I contribute to a Health Service that doesn’t exist and a pension it’s impossible to collect. Why the council takes a third of my monthly pay and then refuses to empty my bins until I remove the crashed fighter jet in my front garden. Why? I didn’t put it there. It’s metal. Why hasn’t anyone stolen it? Guess it’s too big to move when all you’ve got is a handcart pulled by toddlers.

If I was let off the leash I could amuse myself, do something interesting with my life. But there are no adventures anymore, no places left to explore in our satellite-mapped country. Everyone’s tried everything and ruined it.

The sky’s the last frontier. And, sure, I could rejoin an airship gang, build myself a scrapyard zeppelin and take up crapping on holiday jets for a hobby. But I don’t fancy swanning around the heavens, strapped beneath a thousand cubic metres of hydrogen. Been there, done that and lost the woman I loved to overhead power lines.

All the good uncertainties have gone. There’s just the bad uncertainties now: the traffic smashes; attacks by religious extremists and the maniac on the train with the broken vodka bottle as sharp as the memory of the wife who’s just left him.

Your main challenge is keeping your pointless job and fighting your own bad complexion. Or you can go out after curfew and see how far you get before the patrols mace you or a leopard chews off your face.

Mortality should make us feel alive. But it doesn’t. So I guess we don’t have fun anymore. We have it made for us.

And I just want an adventure.

Sparks shower against the surface of the workshop door. What isn’t scorched is scratched and gouged by the various belts and buckles and ‘interesting’ clothing of the staff. There’s a window – a small square of wire-reinforced glass – and it’s sandwiched between the exterior frost and interior filth. And I’m there, pounding my fist on it, trying to get in. There’s some kind of debris caught beneath the bottom edge of the door, acting like a wedge, and I can’t get the damn thing open.

Inside, there’s dirty magnolia walls supporting even dirtier metal racking. Cobwebs everywhere – they coat the dull grey shelves and the detritus upon them. Each shelf’s labelled and each label bears absolutely no relation to, well, anything whatsoever. Nothing reveals any obvious purpose, but nothing’s ever thrown away. Because it might be important. But no one knows what’s important anymore, because dozens of workers have come and gone over the years and the remainder have given up trying to work it out. It’s like trying to decode The Secrets of the Ancients.

There’s an area referred to as ‘The Kitchen’, but you can’t prepare food in it. The work surfaces wear a crocodile pattern of cup marks and the detergent that should be used to clean it just oozes from its coloured bottles like Martian semen. The corrugated metal roof drips condensation. Over live electric sockets.

The workshop floor’s a greyish rectangle, textured like leprosy. Carcinogenic dust rests in conical piles itching for a lung to rustle up some tumours in. Catalysed fibreglass resin clots in unseen buckets, spewing out hot, choking fumes. Un-catalysed resin spills out from an overturned barrel, imploring something incendiary to set light to it and burn the building down. Which just might happen.

Sparks shoot skyward like rockets then futter into nothingness. By reversing their course I trace their source and I watch in horrified wonderment.

Now an angle grinder is a dangerous power tool. It can cut through metal, so it’s more than capable of severing an unwary finger. And it’s pretty unnerving to see it grasped in the podgy digits of the company idiot: Ambler. The grinder screams, as barrel-shaped Ambler swipes and stabs at some dark heap of something or other, muttering something racist to himself. He has dark, curly hair, a wide, liver-lipped mouth, broad, almond-shaped canine teeth and a lolling tongue. He has a dog’s mouth, when I think about it. He has an old dog’s smell. He has dog-level intelligence, hence the racism.

He’s laughing to himself. I’m doing my amateur psychology thing and theorising that the inside of his brain must be like some cave painting: all full of stick figures and bright primary colours. Then confusion creeps over his face. I wonder if he’s thinking about something beyond his capabilities, like toothpaste tubes, a happy mouse, or not shouting at a black person. Anyway, he’s distracted and the grinder leaps from his hand and scuds across the bench, trailing flaming nuggets.