Howard Jacobson - Pussy

Fracassus didn’t watch television to pass judgement. It was true that Philander’s forecasts were rubbish. Sun all day tomorrow he’d promise and Fracassus knew for a certainty it would rain. The channel kept him on because the viewing figures went through the roof with every deception. Fracassus was not alone in feeling singled out by him, joined, just the two of them – one behind the screen, one in front of it – in the seductive knowledge of falsehood. Of course it would be dry when he’d promised showers. Facassus loved looking out of his window and seeing the Republic bake in Philander’s empty promises.

The Prince didn’t understand how he could enjoy being lied to, but he did. And evidently voters, in all likelihood not knowing what they were voting for, felt the same. Lie to us, lie to us. The first falsehood was like a declaration of love. The second a proof of it. After that – but after that didn’t matter. After that Philander had skedaddled.

Fracassus let his hand melt in the weatherman’s. Philander here, in front of him. Philander, whose pink, powdered fingers would caress the weathermap with a strange, indecent incompetence, as though he were one baby undressing another. The Great Philander, undressing him.

‘It’s true what my old dad’s telling you,’ Philander said. ‘I don’t know what he’s told you, but I guarantee you it’s true. Every bit of it. Everything’s true.’ His eyes met Fracassus’s. The boy swam in their treacherous blueness. Tomorrow temperatures could reach 97 degrees, and lo! there was a blizzard. A calm night and every tree in the Republic would be uprooted. ‘Say it after me, Everything’s true .’

‘Everything’s true ,’ Fracassus repeated as though in a swoon.

‘You’d better believe it,’ the scrawny soothsayer shouted.

‘So can I count on your vote?’ the weatherman asked Fracassus.

‘I don’t have a vote,’ the Prince said.

‘Age the problem?’

‘Rank.’

‘Rank! So much the better. Things rank and gross in nature…’

‘Give him your pitch anyway,’ the old said. ‘Don’t send him away empty handed.’

‘Everything’s true,’ Philander said again, ‘not because it is, but because I say it is.’

Fracassus didn’t have to be told to repeat it this time. ‘ Everything’s true because you say it is.’

During its short time in Philander’s grip Fracassus’s hand had felt like a fireball. Released, it was as a hailstone.

The Grand Duke, having lost Fracassus in the crowd, had waited anxiously for his return. ‘So what was that all about?’ he asked when the Prince reappeared, orange faced and his hair somehow enfolded into itself like a napkin at a banquet.

Fracassus shrugged. They began to walk home in silence, then Fracassus said, ‘Do you know what I really want?’

Cold terror gripped the Grand Duke’s heart. Was Fracassus going to say he wanted to make war? Was he going to say he wanted to make peace?

‘What, my son?’ All his hopes waited on the Prince’s answer.

‘To be a weatherman.’

The Grand Duke breathed again. His son had had his first smell of politics and not been seduced by ideology into supposing it could be separated from light entertainment.

He slept well that night. His son’s future was secure. This morning a pimp, this afternoon a Weatherman, tomorrow the world.

Buoyed by his success in getting Fracassus to take more interest in his properties, the Grand Duke gave him a hundred acres of land and told him he could build whatever he wanted.

Fracassus drew a picture of a Roman amphitheatre.

The Grand Duke discussed the implications of this with his wife. ‘It isn’t necessarily,’ he said, ‘what it seems.’

‘Nothing is,’ the Grand Duchess said. ‘But this just might be.’

‘For all you know he might intend it as a children’s park.’

‘With swings and roundabouts to torture traitors on?’

‘I think he has made provision for a sand pit in his plans.’

‘Renzo, that will be to soak up the gladiators’ blood.’

They called Fracassus into their presence and asked him how he saw the amphitheatre operating. He pushed his chin out in the manner of Nero and inverted his thumb.

‘Who do you plan to kill there?’ the Grand Duke asked. He was giving his son a chance. Go on, show your mother how absurd her fears are.

‘Christians,’ he said.

‘Fracassus, this is a Christian country.’

‘Jews, then. I don’t know… Muslims… Humanitarians.’

‘Humanitarians aren’t a religion.’

‘We could still throw them to the lions.’

Was he joking? The Grand Duke scrutinised his son’s expression. Had there been room enough for light in his eyes, it would have been easier to tell. But no, not joking. And yet he was not in deadly earnest either. It was as though Fracassus inhabited some hitherto undiscovered zone between meaning what he said and not meaning what he said. Ambiguity, was it? No, ambiguity took cognizance of alternatives. The zone Fracassus inhabited appeared to be one where neither words nor intentions had traction. You could just say a thing, and then unsay it, with no cost to yourself and no repurcussions for others, because there were no others. The Grand Duke had noted such inconsequential changeability in his dogs. They would want a walk and then they wouldn’t. Changeability wasn’t even the word for it. They wanted a walk in one sphere of time and being, but didn’t want it in another. They were bifurcated. Being human, the Grand Duke decided, meant putting these two spheres together in a continuum of responsibility and decision. By that measure his son was not yet human.

While not wanting to put a dampener on the Prince’s creativity, or provoke him into God knows what response, the Grand Duke gently suggested other uses for an amphitheatre. A running track, perhaps. An open air auditorium for pop concerts. Fracassus shrugged. Whatever.

Eventually the amphitheatre was built and modified into an out of town shopping mall. Fracassus opened it. Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt wrote a speech for him but he decided against delivering it. Instead he sliced the ribbon with an ornamental sword and inverted his thumb.

By general consent, the Amphitheatre was an aesthetic triumph. Security staff dressed like Spartacus. Hostesses at the information booths wore thigh length silver boots, short togas made of aluminium foil, and sported laurel leaves in their hair. A caged lion entertained the children with its roars. And Neroburgers were for sale.

Commercially, too, the Amphitheatre thrived.

‘You have to admit, he has a touch,’ the Grand Duke told his wife. ‘For a sixteen year old.’

‘So what does he intend next, a slave market.’

The Grand Duke looked away. Fracassus had already submitted his plans for a colonnaded plaza, the pillars to be finished in white marble, with walkways along which slaves would be paraded, space for restaurants and a Cafe Nero, and a raised stage on which the auction itself would be conducted.

Other than saying, ‘In no circumstances are we going to allow you to be the auctioneer,’ the Grand Duke raised no objection. The Saepta Julia was finished within budget and on time, and soon became the most visited Ayurvedic Spa and Herbal treatment centre in All the Republics. Slaves were available for a price, but you had to know who to ask.

Solemnly commemorated as the dawn of seriousness in adjoining Republics, an eighteenth birthday was a joyously frivolous occasion in Urbs-Ludus. The Grand Duke marked the Prince’s with a giant marzipan replica of the Palace and a mock sonorous announcement. ‘It is time, my son,’ he said, ‘for Twitter.’