Howard Jacobson: Pussy

Dr Cobalt knew what Professor Probrius was doing and what Fraccasus, under his tutelage, was struggling to give birth to as a thought. She seized a moment while Probrius was paying a visit to the lavatory to nudge Fracassus in another direction. ‘This could have happened anywhere, you know.’

‘Never has at home.’

‘That doesn’t mean it never will.’

‘Couldn’t happen in Cholm. Spravchik wouldn’t let it.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

Probrius was back sooner than she’d calculated. It was possible he’d changed his mind, realising what she was shaping up to say to Fracassus.

The three exchanged suspicious glances in silence until Professor Probrius asked her how she would define a phobia.

‘You know what a phobia is.’

‘I want to hear it from your lips.’

‘A phobia is an irrational fear.’

‘What’s irrational about a fear of being bombed?’

‘Nothing. It’s perfectly rational, unless it paralyses you from living your life.’

‘Then what’s irrational about being afraid of the people doing it?’

‘Nothing. What’s irrational is blaming everybody who looks like them.’

‘Is it wrong to identify a source?’

‘It is wrong to spread the net so wide that the source becomes an entire people.’

‘How else, in a liberal democracy, are we to set about stopping it from happening again?’

‘Increased security. Detective work. Intelligence…’

‘And if they fail?’

‘We have to try making the world a better place.’

‘And in the mean time?’

‘Act humanely.’

‘And that means sympathizing with the terrorists.’

‘If it was terrorists who did it.’

‘Oh, come on, Yoni, they’ve claimed it.’

‘Ah, so now you trust them?’

‘Ah, so now you don’t?’

Fracassus, who had been attending to every word between them – it was the longest conversation he’d ever listened to from start to finish – tweeted underneath the table: Liberal democracy equals more sympathy for bombers than for bombed.

Never was a truer word spoken: A prophet is not without honour, save in his own land.

Far from his native country, where he had grown up in the shadow of his father the Grand Duke, Prince Fracassus was attracting attention for his ability to attract attention. With each new tweet and exploit another clipping was added to that collage of moral force and popular influence known to an age of rapid dissemination of trivia as personality. After his heroics at Gnossia, stories of the temple he was building in Cholm began to appear on message boards and news sites. A photograph of Cholm’s Chief Minister, Vozzek Spravchik, annointing him with Numa oil high in the Blackbread Mountains with nothing but a drop into black infinity behind them, and soft round clouds like women’s buttocks floating above, appeared again and again in celebrity magazines and colour supplements. Only an official selfie of the two men toe-wrestling in the barren Makindo Desert as the sun went down received more coverage – though that mainly in magazines for men who liked looking at photographs of men.

When his tweets on the subject of the Plasentza bombings appeared it was as though the prayers of thousands had been answered. The country did not lack for information and opinion. A Liquid Crystal Display Device in the hands of every citizen facilitated the transmission of all conceivable views on all conceivable subjects. Anything that could be said, had been said. But the digital context was everything: no one, especially in a liberal democracy such as Plasentza, wanted to see their thoughts or secret beliefs replicated word for word on a hate site. Young himself, and photogenic in the sense that people were becoming accustomed to his image, Fracassus made available to the under-thirties what until now only the over-fifties had thought. By virtue of the family he came from, the title he held and the size of his property portfolio, he lent centrality to opinions hitherto only heard on the lips of disreputables and drunks. Though he could no more have strung his random vociferations into a system than he could have read a sentence of Thomas Carlyle on Hero Worship, others had begun to marshal and codify everything he said for him. To those who argued that it hardly amounted to a political programme, others argued that it did. Does/doesn’twas the stuff of twitter and kept Fracassus’s name before the public.

Occasionally at first, but with growing frequency, word of what he was saying leaked out of Plasentza back to the Republics. It began to be invoked in the course of those yoga-mat demonstrations which had been no more than a minor inconvenience for traffic at the time Fracassus left Urbs-Ludus, but had since grown into a serious threat to the stability not only of Urbs-Ludus but to All the Republics. ‘Where is Fracassus?’ was a call heard first on this side of the Wall, and then on that. ‘Who is Fracassus?’ the Prime Mover of All the Republics was reported as enquiring. Though whether in fear of his influence or in expectation of his support no one could be sure.

Outside the Palace of the Golden Gates, few had known of Fracassus in his youth. He had not ventured out into the world much. Brightstar intermittently championed him, but so ironically hyperbolic (unless it wasn’t) had been their coverage that for every enthusiast they won to his cause, they lost a dozen. Now he was somewhere else, theories as to his true identity proliferated. He was an invention of a news-starved media. The house of Origen, having been shaken, first by the rumoured scandal of a sex-change heir, then by the demonstrations outside their properties, had come up with a manufactured robotic figure to mend their fortunes. Fracassus was a charlatan, a chimera, a ghost, a bankrupt. By the same token he was a businessman who turned to gold leaf everything he touched, an architect of wild dreams, a patriot, a hero, and an orator of genius.

That all this made him the ideal person to be given his own television show could not be disputed when the idea was floated to the head of Celebrity at Urbs-Ludus television. The word went out. Find him. Bring him back. Offer him anything.

But no one said ‘Immediately,’ so there seemed to be no hurry.

‘Our boy is shaping up,’ the Grand Duke told his wife.

‘What as?’

‘The thing we always wanted him to be. And quite frankly, if you take a look at what’s happening on the street, the thing we need him to be.’

‘I’m a mother, Renzo. A mother only wants her son to be happy.’

‘He can be happy and great.’

‘I still see his face on the day he left.’

Knowing his wife’s aversion to their son’s looks, the Grand Duke doubted that. ‘Describe it to me.’

‘He looked so sad.’

‘It’s good for someone his age to suffer disappointments.’

‘Renzo, his whole world came crashing down.’

‘He’d only known the girl ten minutes. I’d call that a brief disenchantment. Brief, but necessary.’

‘You seem pleased it happened.’

The Grand Duke rose from his chair and paced the room. He did not like concealing things from his wife. ‘My dear Demanska,’ he said, ‘I am pleased it happened and have no regrets that I made it happen. At the time he left us, Fracassus was, for all his stubbornness of character, a clay man. A person had only to graze him with their thumb and it left an impression that lasted for a month. It struck me as best to get some impressions over and done with while he was still young. I feel wholly vindicated by the figure he is cutting in the world right now.’

‘You made it happen?’