Howard Jacobson: Pussy

Yoni Cobalt sat with her head in her hands all through the debate and kept them there as the first verdicts on the candidates’ performances were delivered.

‘I won’t say I told you so,’ Professor Probrius said. ‘But I did long ago predict that those who tell the stories run the world.’

‘Stories! What stories? He doesn’t have anything to tell.’

‘My love, that is the story.’

Thus, without saying a word, and in losing the debate by every known measure, Fracassus was deemed to have won it

Greatest margin of victory in any televised debate in history, he tweeted.

And then again, an hour later, Time to send sad Sojjourner on a long jjourney.

It has been observed that mankind plays at life and only realises the seriousness of what it’s done when it’s too late.

In the days immediately preceding the election a baffled stillness fell on The Republics, and on Urbs-Ludus, the play capital, in particular. What, of all that had been said, did anybody mean?

There’d been a change of mood after the debate. Fracassus had won by not winning but didn’t act or look like a winner in the days following. He oozed belligerence in his tweets, but on his person an unaccustomed softness could be discerned. Caleb Hopsack grew concerned. It seemed to him that Fracassus had suddenly developed an interior life, a dangerous black hole that could suck in self-doubt and second-thoughts. Caleb Hopsack might have been a joke that only the smartest people got, but to himself he was certitude or he was nothing. Without it, the ground he walked on felt like the surging sea. There was terror in his tweets. Beware the backsliders, he tweeted, not just once but a hundred times. If the world slid back he would be the first to be engulfed. He pictured himself face down in the landslipped mud, where he would lie uncorrupted by change for a hundred thousand years until some fresh-faced archaeologist found him and wondered what function such a creature, strangely garbed and grimacing, could ever have performed.

Fracassus visited his mother in her chocolate factory and fairy room. She too thought there was something different about him. For a moment she even saw how it might be possible to like him. She asked him how his wife was handling the pressure. He looked bemused. He had forgotten he had a wife. He surprised her by enquiring about his brother. Had she heard from him recently? Normally he referred to Jago as ‘It’.

Today Jago was his brother. It was a self-centred enquiry, but it was an enquiry all the same. Did he say anything about the election, he wondered. ‘I cannot lie to you,’ his mother said. ‘He will be voting for Sojjourner.’ She was surprised that Fracassus was not angered by this. ‘I don’t blame him,’ he said. ‘I’d do the same in his position.’

On his way out he tried guessing how many tranpersons there were in The Republics. He reckoned he could afford to lose them all and still romp home a comfortable winner. But he didn’t tweet to say so.

Whatever had softened Fracassus, softened the populace. Not to the point of persuading those who hated Sojjourner to change their minds and vote for her. A change of mind is a rational decision and hatred of Sojjourner had nothing of reason in it. It was fed from wells of poison too deep to fathom. But it was as though belief in Fracassus began to blow away, like leaves that had only ever rested on him lightly. An hour before they’d been at the pantomime shouting ‘She’s behind you!’ Now that they were back out on the street it was as though the pantomime had been watched by someone else.

Though they were frightened to disrupt the stillness, the yesterday men and women of Fracassus’s diatribes – the educated, the knowledgeable, the sad, the losers, the Metropolitan retards – dared to let hope penetrate their bunkers. It had all been a fiction. Even Fracassus didn’t seem to believe any of it really. All men have some goodness in them, don’t they, let it only be an inadvertent mote blown out of someone else’s eye. It was a salutary warning. Fracassus had been sent to frighten them out of their complacency. This thing could happen. I’m behind you. Mind your backs.

Very well. They’d learnt their lesson. They were listening. The people had given them a second chance. In the darkest hours, it was always the people who shone the brightest. Look, and you could see a streak of light. Listen, and you could hear sanity returning to The Republics like water returning to a dried up river bed. The sad bought in extra champagne. The losers invited their friends around to party. The retards danced their little disjointed dance.

But then the wind seemed to turn again. Leaning out of Yoni Cobalt’s window on election night, Kolsgekkur Probrius wet his finger.

Yoni Cobalt felt the muscles in his back tense and then relax.

‘What?’ she said.

He didn’t turn around. He didn’t have the heart to tell her what he knew.