Howard Jacobson - Pussy

‘I did.’

‘You hired a girl to break my son’s heart?’

‘Demanska, our son doesn’t have a heart.’

‘You actually paid someone?’

‘Sojjourner, yes. I auditioned actresses but none could quite manage the self-righteousness. It turns out that only a Progressive Metropolitan Élitist can convincingly play a Progressive Metropolitan Élitist for money. I wanted Fracassus to fall for her and fall for her he did. I wanted him disillusioned and disillusioned he became. Now look at him. I made him so Progessive-proof that even Reactionaries start from his pronouncements.’

‘And you know for sure the girl is not in his life somewhere?’

‘They wouldn’t last ten seconds in each other’s company today.’

‘Then I wonder who is in his life?’

‘Ambition.’

‘How lonely he must be.’

‘You’ve forgotten how much he enjoys his own company. A vain man is never lonely. Which is a good job because a braggart never has a friend.’

‘My poor Fracassus. How cruel you’ve been to him, Renzo.’

‘Only to be kind, my dear. Only to be kind.’

He didn’t tell her that the Head of Celebrity at Urbs-Ludus television had been enquiring as to Fracassus’s availability and mentioning eye-watering sums of money. Bearing her sensibilities in mind, he did suggest they think about giving Fracassus a book show, an idea they said they’d consider, though in such an event the fee would not be so eye-watering.

International communication having reached a level of sophistication and celerity unknown to previous ages, word of what the world was thinking of Fracassus reached him almost before it thought it. He would not have been human had this not moved him to what in a lesser person might have been called conceit, but in him passed as self-awareness.

The bomb, he found the modesty to confess, had quickened his maturity. I have gone from boy to man in a single morning, he tweeted.

Within the week, newspaper supplements were carrying the story HOW A BOY BECAME A MAN, alongside photographs of mangled corpses. These he no sooner saw than he retweeted, and so there and back around the globe the message went as though it were the media equivalent of perpetual motion.

In the bomb, Fracassus saw – that is to say Professor Probrius taught him to see – not only his opportunity but a truth that offered opportunity for everyone. Society had grown degenerate. It had lost the ability to draw a distinction between the guilty and the innocent, it had lost the courage to blame, it had taken ordinary decent outrage and turned it into bigotry, it had made good people fear the consequences of their goodness. Bombs only kill when we’re scarred to kill the killer, he tweeted.

That should be scared , Professor Probrius told him. But it was too late.

Bombs only kill when we’re scarred to kill the killer was re-tweeted more than a million times. Scarred was considered a master-stroke, enmeshing in a visual, an auditory but, most important of all, a consequential way, the concepts of fear and wound, cowardice and disfigurement, the momentary and the never-to-be-forgotten. That which scared us scarred us. That which scarred us marked us out as scared. We who were afraid to condemn the bombers were also victims of their bombs. But where other victims died, we were only scarred, which made our being scared the more ignoble. Or was there something holy in our refusal to kill? Scared was an anagram of sacred, the anagrammatizing clue being the verb to scar. Disfigure the word for afraid and we got the word for righteous.

There was no end to the play people could make of this mistake of genius.

‘He’s claiming it as his, I suppose,’ Dr Cobalt said.

‘He’s trying to,’ Professor Probrius replied. ‘But he isn’t quite sure what it is he’s done. He came across the word anagram in a tweet the other day and had to put himself to bed. He’s going in for a lot of jutting and pouting which is the usual sign he’s bluffing something out.’

Whether Fracassus was aware of what he’d done or not, his name now hung in the firmament, fierce and vivid, like a hunter’s moon. Invitations to him to return home and give a talk, a seminar, a lecture, anything he chose, flooded his mail box. Caleb Hopsack congratulated his ‘star twitter pupil’ and begged him to address the annual conference of the Ordinary People’s Party. It took a while for the phlegmatic citizens of Plasentza to grasp that the tweeter of the hour, a real live Prince and property tycoon who’d broken the spell under which they’d been living for decades, was actually resident in the capital city of their country. But once his presence had been verified they were eager to hear him. They hadn’t realised how pusillanimous they were until, in 140 characters of fire, he’d shown them. They had practised tolerance for evil-doers and tried to reintegrate them into society. They had cared for minorities and strangers, but now these same minorities appeared to them as self-pitying schismatics and those same strangers were planting bombs. What about their own needs? Who was speaking up for them?

Fracassus was.

Time to Muck Out the Pig-Pen, he tweeted, remembering a phrase his father had whispered into his crib.

Invited to discuss the Bomb as Opportunity at a meeting of the Plasentza Scientific and Philosophical Society, he drew huge crowds. He had feared he would have to make a speech of more than 140 characters and ordered Professor Probrius to write it for him, but the organizers assured him it would be enough if he simply mounted the rostrum and shouted ‘Kill the killer.’

‘Kill the killer,’ the crowd chanted back.

‘We’re too scarred,’ someone shouted. And then that too was picked up and passed from voice to voice.

Not knowing what to say, Fracassus turned his face sideways to the audience as he’d seen someone called Mussolini do in old newsreels. It was the very expression – though he could hardly be expected to remember that – with which he came into the world. He folded his arms and pursed his lips: a stance suggesting petulance on a Homeric scale. As though by divine chemistry, the audience was at once transformed into supplicants and Fracassus into a God who could stand there for eternity, waiting to be appeased. Nero, Mussolini, Fracasus.

‘Fra-Ca-Sus!’ the people called.

Peevish and impassive, his fists clenched, Fracassus raised his chin and stared towards the East.

He left the stage still clenching his fists. Women fought to kiss his knuckles. ‘Such a boy,’ one said. ‘And yet such a man,’ said another.

‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ he told them.

‘They haven’t heard anything yet either,’ Dr Cobalt muttered to Professor Probrius. They were standing to one side, waiting to escort him back to the hotel, not wanting to be seen. Fracassus was a prodigy. A monstrous and abnormal thing. He appeared from nowhere. It would disappoint the faithful to learn he had an elocution teacher and a life coach.

‘He has a terrific advantage,’ Probrius said, ‘in that they don’t actually come to hear him. There’s something about him that compels attention. It can’t be looks and it can’t be presence, because he has neither.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I think it’s that very question. What is it? Why are we looking at him? He possesses the opposite to charisma to such a degree that people will stand for hours trying to figure out why they’re standing there for hours.’

‘But see how transfigured they look as they leave. It is as though they’ve been vouchsafed a vision.’