Howard Jacobson - Pussy

‘I once met your father,’ Phonocrates said. ‘He must have told you that. It’s some years since we met but I see the family likeness in you.’

‘I have his hair,’ Fracassus said.

‘And I hope his good character.’

‘I have a great character,’ Fracassus said.

Phonocrates tried to sit up in bed and called Fracassus closer to him. It didn’t occur to Fracassus to offer help. ‘Many years ago,’ Phonocrates said, ‘your father told me he admired the way I ran my country and asked me to divulge to him the secret of good government. I told him that if he would ever do me the honour of sending his son to meet me, I would divulge it to him. You have an older brother, I believe. He never did come to see me. I don’t know why.’ (Transgender faggot, Fracassus decided against telling him.) ‘So I am doubly honoured that you have.’

Fracassus inclined his head. The President waited for him to say the honour was all his, but he didn’t say it.

‘Anyway,’ the President continued, ‘I am today pleased to be keeping my promise. That is not something I usually do…’ He paused, coughed, and banged his chest. ‘And there you have it.’

Fracassus waited. ‘There I have what?’ he asked at last.

‘The whole secret of good government.’

‘Where? What?’

‘Don’t keep your promises.’

Fracassus had no idealism to be outraged, but even he was taken aback by the the old man’s candour.

‘Not any?’

‘Not any… I know what you are thinking. I might have got away with not keeping some of my promises. But all ! And maybe for a short time. But for more than sixty years ! But this is to miss the point. And listen to me carefully now… To be successful in politics you must be thorough. If you are half-hearted you will fail. A half-hearted liar the people will not forgive. “Ah!” they will say, “did you hear that, did you notice that? He has just told a lie. He cannot be trusted.” But if they know you to be a liar through and through, and you show that you know they know you to be a liar, they can trust you. They grow fond of your lies. Eventually they will come to feel that the lies you tell are their lies. It is like pillow talk. Everyone lies in love. That’s the game. You don’t honestly believe what you say to one another. She is not really the most beautiful woman on the planet, and you are not really the most handsome man. But in the game of love you pretend it is so and think none the less of one another for telling lies and believing them. The game of politics is the same . Tomorrow you will all be employed – you promise. The day after tomorrow you will all have free health care. The day after that you will pay no taxes . Who really believes any of that is going to happen? Not the people, much as they would like to. And while they love me for telling them what they want to hear, they love me even more for the theatre of illusion I give them. They think I am the villain in a pantomime and everybody cheers the villain in a pantomime. You ask me are the people stupid. Very far from it. They can smell a fraud a thousand miles anyway. But ask me if they know what’s best for them, then the answer is a resounding no, because their besetting weakness is that they love a fraudster. If someone who wants the best for the people lets them down, they will never forgive him. But a joker who wants the worst for them they will follow into hell – this, Prince Fracassus, is what I would have told your father.’

The following morning, Eugenus Phonocrates, lover of the people, was found dead in his bed.

No one blamed Fracassus.

He stayed for the state funeral. Bells rang. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets. Men and women of all ages wept openly. Some cut their arms and faces. Any baby born that day, no matter what the sex, was named Eugenus Phonocrates.

At the biggest sporting arena a football match was called off so a memorial service could be held. Fracassus, as Heir Presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, was guest of honour. He sat between Phonocrates’ sons on a raised platform in the centre of the field, carried a candle, thought of Sojjourner in her trousers and wept a hard dry tear for the cameras.

Midway through the service, by which time the mourning had fed on itself like a flame, leaping from the mourners’ chests as though to be consumed by their own fervour was the only end they sought, a wild person wearing rags broke though the crowds and dropped at Fracassus’s feet. Carried away by the emotion sweeping through the stadium, the Security Services did nothing to remove the intruder. He was part of it. His own private conflagration.

Fracassus did what he always did when he was afraid and jutted his jaw.

‘Listen to them,’ the wild man said, as though to someone sitting on the Prince’s shoulder. ‘Behold the wondrousness of human folly.’

‘I don’t frighten easily,’ Fracassus said. ‘I have less fear than any man on the planet.’

The wild man ignored his words. ‘Look around you,’ he went on. ‘Man in his massed magnificence. Crowds screamed and cried for me once. Woman said and did disgusting things. They encouraged their own daughters to do the same. They abandoned shame, if they had ever known it. I was the best known singer in Gnossia. The Republic came to a halt when I performed. The radio fell silent. Doctors stopped performing operations. Tickets for my concerts changed hands for more than people paid for their houses. I loved the crazed attention. I studied every face. I drank in the adulation of every person in that crowd. I had the power not just to move but to possess. They weren’t listening to my voice, they were my voice. I loved it and then I hated it. I had thought it was about me but it wasn’t. It was about them. They screamed because they needed to scream. They waved their arms in the air like one great beast with a thousand limbs because they wanted to lose their humanity. That was the only way they could find themselves – by losing what made them separate. Singing, dancing, marching, sport, religion, mourning, war – they’re all the same when the great beast waves its million arms. Only by losing do they find. Something must have happened in the history of humanity that made people cast away their reason. Maybe it was the appearance of a strange planet. Maybe God descended. Maybe it was the applause humanity awarded itself when it moved in a mass out of the great soup of creation. “We’ve made it! We’ve done it! We’re here!” Whatever the cause, adulation for themselves in the appearance of another became a fixture of human life. You no doubt think that when you are applauded it’s because of something you have said, or done, or just because of the way you look. Disabuse yourself. You simply fill a vacuum. The need for you, whoever you are, was there long before you were. You are the object of the habit of hysteria, that’s all.’

Fracassus felt himself sliding into a trance. They can’t half talk, these Gnossians, he thought. Then, through half closed eyes, he saw the once famous singer raise his hand. He’s going to kill me, Fracassus thought. It’s me he blames. He remembered Max Schmeling and made a fist. Then he landed it in the middle of the singer’s face.

Report at once spread that as part of well-orchestrated coup there’d been an attempt on the lives of Phonocrates’ grieving sons. Prince Fracassus, son of the Grand Duke of Origen, here from the Republic of Urbs-Ludus on a peace mission, had foiled it. Cheers mingled with tears. The habit of hysteria had gone looking for a cause and found it in Fracassus.

Back in the Palace of the Golden Gates, watching the late news on television, the Grand Duke saw it happen. He would have liked to call his wife but she was locked away in her fairy grotto chocolate factory. ‘My boy!’ the Grand Duke said, alone.