Howard Jacobson - Pussy

‘If I’m such a child, why did you take me to your club?’

‘In the mistaken hope you’d grow up. You don’t know this woman. You’ve spent ten minutes in her company.’

‘Sometimes ten minutes are all you need.’

‘You’re right, and it only took us ten minutes to find out who she is.’

‘I know who she is.’

‘Oh you do, do you? And do you know she is a Rational Progessivist of the School of Condorcet?’

Whereupon, taking turns, the Grand Duke and Duchess led their wayward son on a grand historical tour of Rational Progessiveness, starting with the Populares of Ancient Rome – not favourites with his beloved Nero if they were not much mistaken – through Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Hegel, pausing for support at Nietzsche’s attack on Hebrew Socialism – and ending up, via Marx and Lenin, with the brutal charismatic revolutionism of Castroism, the murderous, killing-them-softly quietism of Corbynism, and the blood-soaked rice fields Pol Pot. We bet, they said, that she never told you any of that?

‘She told me she wanted women to earn the same as men,’ Fracassus said.

The Grand Duke sighed. ‘Ah yes, that old toxic chestnut – equal pay for women. Sounds innocent, doesn’t it. But nothing ever stops at what it starts with, Fracassus. First equal pay, then paid time off for period pains, then five years maternity leave, then nursery provision, then another five years for postpartum depression, then leave with an ascending scale of bonuses for up to twelve migraines a years, and the next thing we know the Anarcho-Syndicalists are on our backs demanding legislation to make croupiers wear flat shoes and hostesses wear trousers. And that I’m damned sure she never told you, or you wouldn’t be standing here like a bitch in heat.’

‘Renzo!’ the Grand Duchess cried.

‘What? I never mentioned his brother.’

‘Renzo!!’

There being no more to be said on the subject of the Prince’s brother, the couple fell silent, until the Grand Duchess felt able to start again on Fracassus. ‘What we want you to understand before it’s too late,’ she said, ‘is that you’ll never be happy with her. At the first argument she’ll call you a dirty capitalist.’

‘Why would she call me that?’

‘Because it’s what you are,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘In her eyes.’

‘She’s a Metropolitan Liberal Élitist, darling,’ his mother said. ‘I know it hurts.’

‘So what are we?’

‘Scum,’ The Grand Duke said. ‘In her eyes.’

‘Enemies of the People,’ his mother added.

Fracassus rubbed his face. ‘Caleb doesn’t think we’re enemies of the people and he’s the leader of the Ordinary People’s Party.’

‘This is where it gets complicated,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘There’s a war going on out there for the soul of the people. Caleb appeals to them but doesn’t like them. Élitists work for them but don’t appeal to them. Meanwhile we’re the only ones the ordinary people really like. We’re self-made – well at least I am. We like tall buildings. We like tall wives. So do the ordinary people. It’s only the Metropolitan Élite who hate us. And you have to go and find yourself one. Sojjourner with a double j, my eye. Couldn’t you see that for yourself, you foolish boy. There is no double j in Sojourner. There is no Sojjourner. She invents her name and changes the spelling of it because that’s what her class does.’

‘She minds coats.’

The Grand Duchess found a laugh of the deepest irony. ‘Ha – she minds coats. She told you that? She minds coats because minding coats makes her look like an ordinary working woman. Do you want to know the truth – you’ll thank me for this one day – her family manufactures coats. Mink coats. Sable. Chinchilla. They’ll make a coat out of you once you fall into their clutches.’

‘I don’t care. She loves me.’ Fracassus no sooner said it than even he knew it sounded wrong.

The Grand Duke shook his head as though he wanted never to see the world stationary again. ‘When I think who you could have had last night,’ he said at last.

The Grand Duchess looked away.

‘They were students working as prostitutes,’ Fracassus said. ‘It’s the only way they can afford to study the constitution.’

The Grand Duke turned the colour of the atrium at the Nowhere Palace. ‘Studying the constitution! Miss North Pole! The runner-up to Miss Equator! Estrelita the supermodel! Yada-Yada twice Playgirl of the Year! Mandarina, ex-mistress of three Formula 1 World Champions! Need I go on? Why would women of that calibre be studying the constitution? Did you see the extension of their limbs? Did you see their elevation? You had the world to choose from and now you have nothing.’

‘It’s a club for hookers, dad.’

‘Wash your mouth out, boy. I met your mother there.’

Fracassus crept out in the night to revisit his father’s club. Sojjourner? No Sojjourner had ever worked here. Had he made her up?

He requested that they let him into the cloakroom where he’d first talked to her, fantasy or not. He wanted to sit where she’d sat. Sniff the coats.

Gradually, one or two of the serving staff admitted they remembered her. He asked them if they knew anything about her being a Metropolitan élistist. Some said they’d had their suspicions, others shrugged. In a club like this all deviances were respected.

A couple of prostitutes accosted him on the way in, and three more on the way out. He didn’t have the heart for it, he told them. He’d lost his it to a classy lady. So weren’t they classy enough for him? He looked them up and down. They went a long way up. Yes, they were. But classy in a different way. He said he knew they needed money to continue their studies and offered them jobs at his new casino. They wondered when they’d be able to start. First I’ve got to build it, he told them. To ease their disappointment he made a grab at each of them in turn. He knew they wouldn’t do him for assault. They wanted a job at his casino too much.

He resorted to Twitter. Met a bitch called two j’s. Great piece of ass with two a’s. Moved on her, not close.

But no tweet came back.

Aware that his son was not going to take silence for an answer and was preparing a Twitter blitz on Sojjourner’s heart, The Grand Duke finally did what his wife had been asking him to do for years, and pulled the plug.

The building went out with a sigh.

‘Listen to the silence,’ the Grand Duchess exclaimed. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? No more bleeps and pings, no more chimes and quacks. No more clicks, No more hums. No more flashing blue lights that made our Palace resemble a police station.’

Fracassus grew irate. He raged up and down the building trying to get animation out of a television. He put his fist through one, but that didn’t wake it. His phone was dead. Every keyboard unresponsive. He could neither receive a syllable nor send one.

This is a living hell, he thought.

But it gave him new entitlements.

He slipped out of the house in the middle of the day and visited the coffee shops he’d been barred from entering. There, his smartphone worked again. There, dunking ginger biscuits into frappucino, he tweeted again of the agonies of unrequited love. You’ll be sorry.

If she was, she didn’t say so.

Fuck, nigger, cunthe was about to tweet, but the broadband dropped out at just that moment.

He went into a decline. He lost weight. He stopped totting up how much property he owned and how much he was worth. He stopped tweeting. I am stopping tweeting, he tweeted. He made a nuisance of himself with women in the Palace who found it difficult to rebuff him. He groped secretaries and grabbed cleaning staff. Some of them remembered he’d done the same to them when he was an infant. Same stubby little fingers. The Palace sommelier asked him what he had against intercourse – not that she was offering. He said he didn’t think that he would like it. She told him she didn’t think she liked being grabbed between the legs. Yeah you do, he said. Every woman likes being grabbed between the legs. She visited a lawyer who advised her to let sleeping dogs lie.