Howard Jacobson - Pussy

Fracassus remained silent. He had been in the dark for long enough. But then daylight began to pour into the tunnel and the excitement of arrival seized him. He would have liked it to be abroad, but off-shore would do. So this was what his father meant by beauty. He thought he could smell the sea. Off-shore! – why, even the sky was bluer. The Grand Duke nudged him. Look! There were only a few seconds for his eyes to adjust before Fracassus saw it, a great gaudy flower of steel and glass, growing out of the sand, a purple pyramid bearing the name ORIGEN in the usual gold lettering, and then THE NOWHERE PALACE.

Fracassus held his breath. Coloured lights danced before his eyes. At the entrance to the pyramid was a winking crystal Sphinx.

‘Classy or what?’ the Grand Duke said, gripping his son’s arm.

‘Classy,’ Fracassus agreed. He had never used the word before and liked the shape of it in his mouth. Classy – it seemed to open a whole new world of sensation to him. It made his mouth moist. It made his cheeks hot. Classy It was as though he’d swallowed the softest of chocolates.

They entered a great amethyst atrium. It was like a giant cage for jungle birds. Parrots, macaws, toucans. Fracassus had watched a nature programme about killer birds. For a moment he thought there must have been real birds there, then he realised their calls were being piped through loud speakers, which was even better. ‘What do you think?’ his father asked.

‘Classy,’ the Prince said.

‘The world’s top retailers fight to get a space here,’ his father said. ‘Tiffany, Cartier, Chanel.’

‘Is there a Cafe Nero?’ Fracassus asked.

‘No Cafe Nero. We wouldn’t have Cafe Nero here. We have Nespresso. Now let’s look at the gaming room.’

This was the biggest play area Fracassus had ever seen, even bigger than the roof garden on which he’d rolled as an infant, asking for the world and receiving it. He was sorry he’d used up all his words. If the entrance to the casino was classy, what was this?

Extra classy.

So many play tables under a single roof inlaid with gold leaf, but, more marvellously, so many players, some dressed as though for the opera, others as though they’d just come from behind a counter selling washing powders, women beautiful and plain, men sophisticated and awkward, some of either sex accustomed to throwing money around, others flat broke and apprehensive – a great, classless party of gamesters who would in no other place or circumstance find themselves together, divided by the urgency of their needs, united in the single fantasy of winning enough to make need yesterday’s bad dream. Fracassus looked around him. The wheels turned, the balls jumped, croupiers employed rakes to push cards about like hot coals, one-armed bandits lit-up and whirred, numbers and colours were called, men punched the air, women cried out, one threw what few chips were left to him in a rubbish bin on which the word Origen was stamped in gold leaf.

‘Mine,’ Fracassus thought. ‘My off-shore midnight palace. My party. My kingdom.’

Was this how humanity appeared to God when he looked down on it from heaven? That very question was posed in the Republic’s infancy by Lodj Chjarrvak, the Republic’s only thinker, just before he drove his car into the Wall. ‘A mortal shouldn’t own a casino,’ he had pronounced as he strapped himself in. ‘It makes him mad.’ But no one told Fracassus this.

He slid into the great off-shore garden of his thoughts where fortunes were won and lost, where killer birds called to one another through speakers, where he remembered his mouth softening around the sibilants of classy . Blood rushed to his lips.

The Grand Duke looked at him with satisfaction. If he wasn’t mistaken, this was the first sensual experience of his son’s life.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. It wasn’t a real question. He just wanted to hear Fracassus say he was happy.

‘I think I have an idea, father,’ the Prince replied after a while. He appeared to have been concentrating hard.

‘What idea, my son?’

‘There are men here with winnings to burn, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And others with sorrows to drown?’

‘That’s also unfortunately true.’

‘Don’t you think we could do more for them?’

‘You aren’t, I hope, talking about psychological counselling.’

‘No. Pole dancing.’

The Grand Duke took the boy in his arms. This was the moment he’d been imagining from the day his son was born. Their first business conversation. ‘I think that’s a brilliant concept,’ he said. Then quickly threw in a qualification. ‘But no touching. We don’t want to fall foul of the feminists on the Licensing Board. And don’t imagine you’re going to run it.’

‘Why not?’

‘We have grander plans for you.’

‘Such as?’

‘You will discover in time.’

‘When in time?’

‘When your education is complete. And when you’ve travelled. I went to Egypt, China and beyond the Urals for my inspiration. The Nowhere Palace wasn’t born in a day, and didn’t grow out of my mind only. You too must travel.’

‘Can I go to Ancient Rome.’

‘We shall see, my son. We shall see.’

The Grand Duke walked back through the tunnel in a state of high agitation. The trip had gone better than he’d dared hope and he didn’t want to spoil the moment. He didn’t speak the whole time they were underground and wouldn’t let Frascassus speak either. But on coming out again into the Republic he risked giving shape to his thoughts. He looked up to the heavens and breathed the air. It wasn’t clean, but what was? Done, he said to himself. That was the mercantile side of his son’s education taken care of. The ambition tree had been planted. Henceforth, cupidity would water it.

Now all he had to do was fix the politics.

Sometimes, when a great man wants something enough, the gods or whatever name we know them by, assemble and agree to bestow it upon him. Such was the divine favour enjoyed by the Grand Duke that no sooner had he said the word ‘politics’ to himself than they came upon a commotion in the streets which only the practice of democratic politics could explain.

Another plebiscite presumably. The Grand Duke held himself aloof from people politics. Plebiscites had wreaked havoc upon the Republic once upon a time but they had become so common that he knew to take no more notice of them. The people exercised their power and whatever it was they’d voted for was forgotten in the euphoria of their exercising it. The next day things returned to normal.

But voting still drew large crowds. It was like a carnival. Cars hooted in support of their side and other cars hooted back. Some drivers succeeded in tooting their horns so expressively it was as though a whole ironic conversation of automobiles was in progress. Professor Probrius, out shopping with Dr Cobalt, heard it and thought of the Persian poem The Conference of the Birds . The birds, finding themselves without a king, go in search of a bird who might be suitable. Might cars one day do the same, he wondered. They were driving themselves already. It wasn’t fanciful to suppose they would soon be casting votes. And with no less acumen, he thought sourly, than their drivers. Dr Cobalt was on his arm. She knew of several other medieval works in which animals sorted out the tricky issue of government. Professor Probrius delighted in her knowledge. ‘A particular favourite of mine, also Persian as it happens,’ she went on, ‘is How The Lions Deposed their King and Instituted Constitutional Democracy .’ Professor Probrius said he hoped she knew of a good translation, or was proficient enough in Farsi, for them to enjoy reading it together. She didn’t have the courage to tell him she’d made it up.