Howard Jacobson: Pussy

(1) Justice in our time? Some justice!

(2) The guilty sent home like heroes.

(3) The victims returned to their loved ones in body bags.

That a body bag was coming it a bit thick as a description of someone prescribed mild anti-depressants, only a few literalists bothered to point out. The Republic’s blood was up. People who had been tweeting Chuck ’em outhad suddenly to rephrase their outrage. Keep ’em here,they tweeted, so we can knock the crap out of them. Then chuck ’em out.

On small events rests the fate of nations. The artisanal invasion of the television station was one of those hair-spring moments when you could hear history teeter on the wire. Fracassus felt something even bigger than history – fate, destiny, the hour – run like fire through his veins. The Prime Mover must have felt the same thing drain clean away. There were angry demonstrations outside the Executive Building. People made effigies of him – no matter that no one knew what he looked like – and set fire to them in public parks. Every rioter found common cause with every other. They wanted different things but more than anything else they wanted something. For every tweet supporting the Prime Mover there were a thousand – many, it is true, written by Fracassus – calling for him to resign. So one day in the dead of Winter, perspiring heavily, resign was exactly what he did.

Outside the Palace of the Golden Gates, demonstrators calling to disband all working groups on climate change joined demonstrators calling to raise the age of consent for homosexuals and together they called for Fracassus.

He appeared briefly on the Palace steps under a canopy of gold. ‘We’re going to Muck Out the Pig-Pen,’ he promised.

‘You are the Pig-Pen,’ someone shouted.

Fracassus located him and pointed. ‘Retard,’ he told the crowd, shaking his head as though to ask what could be done about a world that had such retards in it, and then, to their delight, he did his old imitation of a spastic marionette.

Watching from an upper window which no sound could penetrate, Dr Cobalt guessed Fracassus had finally gone too far. She couldn’t say she was sorry.

Professor Probrius, standing behind her, kissed the nape of her neck. ‘I see the nature of the electorate still eludes you,’ he said. ‘The word retard is a great bonder.’

Had she bothered to look out of the window again, Yoni Cobalt would have seen five hundred Fracassus supporters all being spastic marionettes.

Mighty would be the pen, and nimble the hand wielding it, that could do justice to the speed of events that now overtook the Republics – not only the physical aspects of a dissolution and the setting of dates for an election, but the invisible perturbations: the turbulence felt in every breast at the prospect of they knew not what, the wild gossip, the recriminations, the horrid prognostications on all sides, the told-you-sos from people who had told no one anything unless reading the extreme weather as an earnest of troubles ahead could be called a something. Now add to this the foment into which the intellectual life of the Republics was thrown, first by the news that Fracassus had, indeed, as was expected, tossed his hat into the ring as a House of Origen Independent, and then by the rumours that an unknown PhD student called Sojjourner Heminway would stand for the Progressive Party on a platform that embraced equally the desire for something different and the need for everything to stay the same. Everyone had heard of Fracassus. No one had heard of Sojjourner. And yet somehow everyone felt they had. Heminway… Heminway…. Ahead of any formal announcement, the news was leaked that she was the great, great grandaughter of someone else no one had heard of at the time, but who turned out to be the great, great grandaughter of The Republics’ very first Prime Mover. Prime Movers of All The Republics were rarely seen and never remembered, but a Prime Mover was still a Prime Mover and the fact that Sojjourner Heminway had the first Prime Mover’s blood in her veins lent to her challenge, if and when she made it, the gravitas of continuity. Soon, if and when became yes and then. But simultaneous with confirmation of her candidacy came the announcement that she was launching a campaign to save the Artisanal Seven as they were now to be designated. They had play-acted their protest, she argued, in deference to the frolicsomness of Urbs-Ludus. It had been a prank with a purpose. They had voiced their grievance in a public place, in a spirit of fun, and while they didn’t seek to absolve themselves of responsibility for distress and injury, none of that had been their intention. In its own way, too, their demonstration highlighted the cultural impoverishment into which a sequence of illberal administrations had allowed the nation to fall. One of the charges brought against the Artisanal Seven was that they disrespected the Republics’ prime source of entertainment and information. But it was they, the artisans who deserved our respect, firstly for the changes they had wrought to the culinary arts in Urbs-Ludus – both as to the taste of food and as to its appearance – and secondly for the mellifluous languages that could now be heard pleasing the ear in every corner of the once mono-lingual Republics. What was television to this? Television, with its endless repeats of cheap programmes bought from outside the Walls and even cheaper repeats of reality programmes whose only beneficiary was the ego of the millionaires to whom it gave prominence. She spoke of millionaires in the plural so as not to personalize her argument too soon, but everyone knew to whom she was referring. The election had not begun and already it was turning toxic.

Fracassus was thrown into confusion by the re-appearance of the only woman ever to have almost touched his heart. His widowed mother believed this reappearance of the wickedly Élitist witch to be an omen, and warned her son to withdraw from a race which, in the way of mothers, she didn’t think he had a cat in hell’s chance chance of winning. He told her he could barely remember who Sojjourner was and resorted to Twitter. May the best man win,he tweeted, by way of allusion both to Sojjourner’s gender and her trousers, but Caleb Hopsack, making a sudden re-appearance, advised him against too early an assault on Sojjourner Heminway’s appearance. It would be politic, in his view, for Fracassus to keep his powder dry and not accuse his rival of lacking a dress sense appropriate to the position of Prime Mover until much closer to polling day. That would be the best time, too, to insinuate the suggestion that only lesbians never wore dresses. She would be tired and emotional by then and less able to defend herself. Fracassus didn’t have to be told twice. He had seen enough fights to know that the real killer blows were those landed in round fifteen. I agree with you, he told Hopsack and tweeted Anyone think she has the stamina for this? I don’t, I don’t.

The other thing he did, to let Sojjourner know she was fooling herself if she believed he thought about her still, was to find himself a wife. This he achieved by travelling incognito to the Nowhere Palace and selecting the croupier who looked most like his mother, reasoning that whoever looked most like his mother looked least like Sojjourner. He wrote her name down on a piece of paper so that he wouldn’t forget it and married her by special decree the day after. Caleb Hopsack, whose wardrobe Fracassus still longed to emulate, was his best man.

Not wanting the grass to grow beneath his feet, Hopsack followed up on his advice regarding Sojjourner Heminway’s appearance with a visit to the Palace, in the first place to offer Fracassus his condolences – Fracassus could not at first remember what there was for him to be condoled about – and in the second to volunteer his services as Campaign Manager with Special Responsibilities for Twitter which, as anyone with political nous now understood, had grown to be as significant in the the winning of votes, if not in the changing of minds, as the stump speech and the rally. Fracassus had embraced his old mentor, wondered where he had been, didn’t listen to the answer, installed him in the very position he’d requested and asked him to be his groomsman. Hopsack accepted and had himself photographed again outside the Golden Gates. It was while he was fumbling for the ring that he learned of one limitation to his power. ‘I want Philander to share responsibility with you for the media Campaign,’ Fracassus whispered, before turning to the marriage officiant and affirming, ‘I do.’