Howard Jacobson - Pussy

‘Do you know what for?’

‘I think he might be more insecure than we’ve ever realised. He could be wondering when he’s going to run out of the ten words he uses and when, in that case, he’ll need us again.’

‘I think you flatter yourself.’

‘Could be. But I’ve been right about everything so far.’

She spluttered into her salad. ‘Right? What have you been right about?’

‘Didn’t I say that the secret of his success was failure?’

‘No. I did.’

‘Yes but you were talking about his failure. I say the secret of his success is the failure of the people who look up to him. They want a hero who isn’t there.’

‘I said the first part of that. You said the second.’

‘You/me – same difference. Man and wife are one flesh and all that…’

‘Man and wife? Is that a proposal?’

‘Could be.’

‘Does that mean that the Prince has unwittingly brought us together? Can something come of nothing?’

‘Is that a terrible thought?’

‘Terrible.’

With his father dead, there was no one in the way of Fracassus’s rise, at least within the walled confines of Urbs-Ludus. His mother, who had spent increasing periods of time in her room, now never left it. As for his brother, no one knew where he was or would have recognized him had they known.

This situation released Fracassus into the fantasy that was himself. He bought up property, knocked it down or built it higher, as the fancy took him. He put casinos into poor houses and strip clubs into old people’s homes. From the sky, the Republic of Urbs-Ludus had begun to take on a magical quality, so vertiginous were Fracassus’s towers and so extravagant their illumination. From the ground it was now impossible to see a single star. You’re lucky if you get to see the moon these days, the architecture critic for the Urbs-Ludus Guardian wrote. You’ll be seeing the moon and the stars when I knock the crap out of you, Fracassus tweeted in response.

At get togethers of the Fracassites ‘Knock the crap out of him replaced ‘Chuck him out’ as the cri de rage , no matter that there was no actual person among them to rage against.

Some time towards the end of his third series of Stoppit! the producers called Fracassus in for a serious conversation about its future. ‘If you’re planning to axe me I’ll sue the shit out you,’ he announced before he’d even taken off his coat. They weren’t planning to axe him. Quite the opposite. So good were the viewing figures for Stoppit! that they’d been searching for a follow-up show. As ever, it was finding a good title that had held things up. But now they had it. The mystery was why it had taken them so long. Starttit! How good was that? Starttit! – in which young entrepreneurs, some of them perhaps reformed malfeasants from Stoppit! (television loved to recycle) would confide their business hopes and dreams to Fracassus and he would show them how they could be realised. Who knew better about starting a business than he, a penniless child from the shadow of the Wall who had clawed his way out of obscurity to light the sky up with his name? Everyone knew that Fracassus was born a Prince and given his own ziggurat every birthday, but the lie was so preposterous it was charming, and besides, everyone wanted to believe it. The lie that the Grand Duke Fracassus had made himself out of nothing allowed the people to believe that they could make thmselves out of nothing too. In the flagrancy of the falsehood they found a new spirituality of material hope.

And this was not a Sunday morning spirituality, gone when the working week began. Believers could now watch Stoppit! on a Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and Starttit! on A Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Meaning there would be only one day when he was not on the screen – Sunday, the day of lesser faiths, the day the people rested from Fracassus and missed him.

The one disadvantage of Fracassus’s new show, viewed from where he stood, was that he’d have to speak more. He called back Professor Probrius who’d prepped him for his address to the Plasentza Chamber of Commerce. Could Probrius remember any of the things Fracassus had said on that occasion. Professor Probrius consulted his notes. ‘You advised, Your Highness, to aim high, think big, stay focussed, never quit, push hard, laugh at retards, and pay no tax.’

‘That,’ the Grand Duke Fracassus said, ‘should get me through the first series.’

Soon, between Stoppit ! and Starttit! there was little else on television that anyone wanted to watch. Fracassus himself wondered what he’d be watching if he wasn’t watching himself. And then, in the best spirit of reality shows, television broke a story about itself. Halfway through a live breakfast programme a gang of masked men and women burst into the studio – the very studio in which Stoppit! and Starttit! were made – narrowly failing to kill Fracassus. In fact they invaded on his day off, so strictly speaking they didn’t narrowly miss killing him at all. Nor were they carrying any weapons to kill him with. But the implication was there for anyone to see. Fracassus stood for free speech and these brigands stood for the opposite. Exactly what happened was not clear, no matter that the entire Republic watched it live, but the short and the long of it was that the masked raiders shouted ‘Bang’, ordered the presenter and the studio manager to put their hands above their heads, and took them and a young make-up artist hostage.

Who they were; where had they come from; how they had breached security; what they wanted; who shouted ‘Bang’ first; what could have been done to prevent the attack; what could be done to prevent it in the future – these were some of the questions to which the people, watching the event unfold before their eyes, demanded answers.

Nothing of this kind had ever happened in Urbs-Ludus or any of the other Republics before. Had the toy gunmen been nationals their motives would have been easier to fathom. Everyone was angry about something. Everybody was trailing in the wake of someone else. The entire population was but a breath away from marching into a television studio and demanding justice. But these belligerents were not nationals. They had dark skin, black hair and even when they only shouted ‘Bang!’ they shouted it in an alien tongue that made the blood curdle. Once accept that they were foreigners and there were still more questions to be answered. The Republic was peaceable to the point of docility. It had no weapons, no history of colonial adventurism, and no international ambitions beyond inviting visitors to go up and down in lifts with golden doors. It had made no compromising alliances, and to tell the truth had no foreign policy of any sort.

Half an hour into the raid, the attackers took off their masks, revealed themselves to be artisans and demanded, if they were to release their hostages, an end to the opprobrium in which they and their families were held. It wasn’t so long ago that they’d been applauded into the country. Now, the same people who had cheered them at the railway station, were booing them in the street. Even sales of artisanal breads had slowed.

See the matter from their side and they were victims. See it from the point of view of frightened hostages and viewers expecting to catch the news on television and they were common criminals. Knock the crap out of them, Fracassus tweeted.

Whether, with that one tweet, Fracassus – the best known television personality in the Republics and the owner of the twelve highest towers – taught the people what to think, or whether he simply found himself in accord with the popular mood, is a distinction that only history can make. Suffice it to say that he at once became the mouthpiece for a party that did not as yet exist. Whoever believed that the artsans should be arrested for betraying the trust and hospitality of their hosts, water-boarded, horse-whipped, humiliated and shot by firing squad knew themselves to be of the party of Fracassus and that, by the mathematics of anger and vengeance, meant the majority of the people. The Prime Mover of All the Republics, sensing public anger grow but conscious of his government’s obligations to international law, sent in a soft force to break the seige. The artisans surrendered without a fight. They would now be tried in accordance with local law. Should they be found guilty of affray – and the Prime Mover was prejudging nothing – they would be returned to their countries of origin, always provided, of course, that their countries of origin would deal humanely with them on their return. The statement was ill-timed. On the day of its issue, the young make-up artist, though now released and at home, suffered a belated panic attack. Fracassus put out a numbered series of tweets.