Howard Jacobson - Pussy

Caleb Hopsack expressed reservations about Philander at the reception. ‘You never know where he’s going to be or what he’s going to say,’ he said.

‘I see that as an advantage,’ Fracassus replied. He had chosen waxed cord trousers the same canary yellow as his hair, and a brown and purple window-pane check jacket with four vents, to be married in. Unsure of Palace protocol, Caleb Hopsack had come in tails.

Fracassus emailed Philander under the table while his new wife was making her speech. Need you .

Accipio cum gaudio , Philander emailed back.

Caleb Hopsack stole a look at Fracassus’s phone. ‘Ordinary people are not going to be pleased with too much of that,’ Caleb Hopsack told him from the side of his mouth.

‘Then there’s your first job,’ Fracassus said. ‘You stop him.’

‘You’ve just started him.’

‘I know.’

Fracassus had hatched a plan. He was going to be an enigma.

Fracassus had not met Philander since the time he came down off the bus and told him to believe every word he said – that’s to say to disbelieve all of it – not because it was true but because it wasn’t. For his part, Philander had no memory of that meeting. ‘I forget everybody I meet,’ he confessed, when the two men got together at the Palace, ‘because I’m not interested in them.’

‘I am exactly the same,’ Fracassus said.

What he wanted Philander to do was organize buses to tour the republics making promises that could never be kept, those being the sort of promises the populace preferred. Philander flicked the hair out of his eyes and made a salute. ‘Roger,’ he said. Then he made a joke – ‘Mind you, I’m not promising.’

Fracassus who had never got a joke, didn’t get this one. But he trusted Philander to let him down. In his eyes the campaign was now well and falsely up and running.

Artisanal seven!Fracassus tweeted. Losers.

Hopsack texted his dissatisfaction. Public want action not insults .

Artisanal seven!Fracassus tweeted. Chuck the losers out.

Not quite there yet, Hopsack tweeted. Something more definite required . Public wants assurances there won’t be more .

I will build a wall,Fracassus tweeted. And when I build a wall no one gets over it.

Better, Hopsack texted . But ‘no one gets in’would better . ‘ Over’ suggests athleticism and ordinary people like that. ‘In’ suggests invasion and ordinary people fear that.

But by that time the wall had gone viral. Build the wall! Build the wall!twenty thousand people tweeted in ten minutes.

Sojjourner’s team tweeted that there already was a wall.

Oops!Fracassus retorted. They think they’ve got me. Well I’m gonna build a higher wall.

In another ten minutes another twenty thousand tweeters . Build a higher wall! Build a higher wall!

Sojjourner was not above tweeting below the belt herself. Inanity can do as much damage as malignancy, she posted. And followed this with a caricature of Fracassus, Hopsack and Philander posing together in front of the Golden Gates. Money, imposture and humbug, she tweeted . The Three Wise Monkeys of Urbs-Ludus. Screw The Economy, Screw The People, Screw The Weather.

Fracassus couldn’t have been happier. The words Sojjourner used were too long. Inanity! Malignancy! Imposture! Who ever kept a friend, never mind won an election, saying imposture? He practised pronouncing it in front of a mirror, pouting his lips as though to kiss an old lady from the other side of the room. He looked forward to using it in the forthcoming television debate.

She accused him of profiteering, sexism, mendacity (another one), racism, incitement to hatred, isolationism, and bad spelling.

He accused her of inexperience, Liberal élitism, political correctness, man-hating, minoritymania, and softness on terrorism. She was not a person, he went on, to be trusted with her finger on the nuclear button. ‘Finger’ was the only word in that list that was his.

She accused him of not knowing that The Republics didn’t have a nuclear button.

I wouldn’t worry about that, Caleb Hopsack texted him to say. The Ordinary People’s Party have been campaigning to maintain our nuclear capability for years. They won’t want to be told we don’t have one .

Philander sent Fracassus an email from one of the neighbouring Republics, he wasn’t sure which. Confusion all confounded this end. Electorate don’t know what to think so I’m telling them not to think anything. Regarding nuclear button, press the young harridan on her ignorance of defence issues. Say there is button but only you know where to find it. Bonam Fortunam.

She accused him of being in bed with the military.

He accused her of being in bed with no one.

Don’t go there , Hopsack texted.

Fracassus amended his tweet and accused her of wanting to be in bed with him.

No! Hopsack texted.

She accused him of toe wrestling with foreign autocrats.

He accused her of xenophobia, a word Philander had emailed him.

Again no! Hopsack texted

She accused him of putting the interests of his business empire before the interests of the country.

He accused her of confusing the country with her class and of giving succour to extremists. (Philander again.)

You’re falling into her trap , Hopsack texted. Stick to words of one syllable or she’ll pull you down with her .

Like Leander enticing Hero , Philander added by email.

Dr Cobalt entered the conversation, contesting that version of the myth. Hero swam to Leander of his own accord.

Professor Probrius agreed, but thought the story open to innumerable interpretations.

Start opening that door, Dr Cobalt argued, and there was no saying what moral and behavioural relativism wouldn’t amble through it next?

Losing plot, Hopsack texted. Get rid of those two.

Fracassus was surprised to discover himself sentimentally attached to his old tutors and fired them on the spot.

Though Philander knew better than anyone that life was a sore trial and man’s tenure of it brief, he was still taken aback when he too was dismissed from Team Fracassus. Though Caleb Hopsack had always been against Philander’s appointment, he wasn’t the person directly responsible for the dismissal. Whichever way one looked at it, that person was Philander himself.

It began with a picture in a newspaper – it doesn’t matter which, since it appeared eventually in all of them – of two otters whose recent acquisition by Urbs-Ludus Zoo caused greater interest than it might otherwise have done on account of their extraordinary resemblance, both in body and in face, to Fracassus and Philander, after whom they were instantaneously named. In the photograph, the Fracassus otter had his head to one side, much as Fracassus would incline his whenever a subject beyond his comprehension arose and he wanted to show his disdain for it. Despite the reputation for cuteness enjoyed by the species, this otter showed his teeth in unexplained fury. When his mother saw the photograph it brought immediately to mind Fracassus’s expression the time he came into the bedroom she shared with her dear late husband, turned his mouth into a trumpet of hate, and said ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt.’ The other otter, forever to be known as Philander, possessed the original’s genius for looking at once serious and amused and delighting in his capacity to be both. He was carrying a fish in his mouth, boastfully, as though no other otter in the sea had ever fished as well as he had, and this too reminded people of Philander. The photograph was captioned Maccus and Fracassus – Maccus being a character in a popular children’s movie of long ago, a villain with a head resembling that of a hammerhead shark, and Fracassus being Fracassus.