Howard Jacobson: Pussy

He thought a long time. Wherever he is, he is enjoying being there, Dr Cobalt thought. Finally he came up with whore, then tart, then hooker.

She looked down the holes that were his eyes. ‘You have more words for prostitute than you have for woman,’ she told him. ‘I want you to ask yourself something. Why can’t you think of a woman without thinking of a prostitute.’

‘That’s unfair,’ he boomed and pouted all at once. He poked his finger at her. Frightening she thought. One day that finger, coming out of the murk of befuddled hurt, would inspire fear. It did already.

‘Why are you poking your finger at me?’

‘Because it’s so unfair. You asked me. This is your crooked game.’

Crooked ? That was a surprise. Didn’t you have to understand the concept of straight before you could understand the concept of crooked?

But he was right. She had exceeded her brief. It wasn’t her job to root around in the unruly attic of the little monster’s head. She was a teacher not a priest. She wasn’t paid to catechize him into obscenities. She should end the lesson now.

But some imp of perversity wanted its way with her. She would fill his head with prostitutes until it burst. ‘Courtesan. Strumpet. Harlot. Concubine. Fille de joie. Hetaira… Shall I spell that for you?’

She stopped, realising how this would look to someone watching the lesson on CCT cameras. I’m teaching your son some new words for prostitute, Your Highness…

How had this happened? Dr Cobalt had three degrees from the Republic’s finest universities. How had the wordless abortion got her into this?

She slept badly again. Or maybe she slept too well. She had a vision that may have been a dream. Or was it that she dreamed she had a vision? In it Fracassus had been elected to the highest position in The Republics. He stood on a great stage with his face on television screens hundreds of feet hight behind him. Crowds cheered his name, breaking it up into syllables – Fra-Ca-Sus … Fra-Ca-Sus …

‘I know a lot of words,’ he was telling them, waving the vocabulary book she had advised him to keep and jutting out his jaw.

‘Tell us!’ the people shouted.

‘Tart. Strumpet.’

‘More!’

‘Concubine. Courtesan. Nobody has more words than me.’

Dr Cobalt killed a mosquito crawling across her face.

The moon had scarcely orbited the earth 200 times since the hour of his birth when Prince Fracassus turned fifteen.

He now began to pass the time he wasn’t looking up Yoni Cobalt’s skirt staring into screens. Thanks to the extensive measures the Grand Duke had taken in recent years to to interface and platformise the Palace, there was not a corner of it that was not connected to walls of light-reflecting surfaces that multiplexed between security monitor, cinema, television, computer, games consoles, smartphone, and every other peripheral device his IT advisers recommended, thus enabling Fracassus to go from room to room in a flicker-induced trance. In this he was not much different from others of his generation for whom the screen had replaced the dummy as pacifier and the cot mobile as soporific, but with this difference – what Fracassus saw when he looked into a screen was not just any flickering image but a flickering image of himself.

Whether it was because of the size of the monitors his father had installed – some of them so big they extended beyond the confines of one room, down the passage and into another – or because he was still in the receptive as opposed to the proactive stage of his development, the Prince preferred watching himself on television to accessing any of the connectivity media at his disposal. Television spoke to him. Television told him not what the world could be but what he could be in it. Television shaped his ambitions. Self-appointed guardians of culture, such as Professor Probrius, were inclined to speak well or ill of television as though it were a single, indivisible thing; but one could no more say that television was good for people or bad for people than one could say a book was. It depended on the book. Fracassus had never read a book but he had, by the age of fifteen, watched so much television that, had it been food, he would have been confined to his bed weighing 500 kilogram.

But to say he watched unceasingly is not to say he watched omnivorously. A strenuous if unconscious system of discrimination determined the patterns of his viewing. Whatever was combative and divisive he liked; whatever was discursive and considered he didn’t. Whatever demeaned, amused him; whatever ennobled, roused his ire. A list of the programmes that excited him and the programmes that left him cold can be supplied upon request; suffice it to say that he rated pictures above speaking, pictures that moved quickly across the screen above pictures that moved slowly, and action above stories. Where a drama did engage his interest it was because its hero was a bully. Bullying being the dramatic element he looked for first, he wasn’t always able to distinguish a play from a panel show, or a reality programme in which contestants were fed food that made them vomit from a documentary set in the death row of a penitentiary. Whatever featured boastful winners and cringing losers, he watched with avidity. Wrestlers, racing car drivers, boxers, condescending chat show hosts, drug dealers, mass murderers, Tony Soprano, Max Schmeling, Macho Man Randy Savage, Henry VIII, sadistic surgeons, bent cops, the Discovery Channel’s dictator of the week – it was on the shoulders of these that he grafted his own image.

In this, again, he was assuredly no different from the many millions of viewers for whom television was a stimulus to envy and emulation, except that they went about their business the following day forgetful of what had transfixed them the night before, whereas Fracassus woke possessed of the same ambitions with which he had gone to bed. There were times when he was unable to tear himself away from his imaginary reflection for long enough to go to bed at all.

His parents were shocked, on their return from a long official trip outside the Walls, to find their son much changed. He had grown somnolent, podgy, ill mannered and, even by his own standards, uncommunicative. Though he knew of their imminent arrival and might have been expected to be at Golden Gate One to greet them, he barely registered their existence when they entered the great living room and discovered him stretched out like an odalisque on a Chinese dragon sofa, eating nachos and cheeseburgers and watching a drama about the life and loves of the Emperor Nero. When they coughed to announce their presence he waved them away with a backward movement of the hand – a reverse royal wave of the sort usually employed for the dismissal of importunate servants. ‘Shush,’ he said. ‘Not finished.’

‘How long has this been going on?’ his mother demanded of Dr Strowheim.

‘The series began to air about five weeks ago, Your Highness,’ was his reply. ‘I believe it has another ten months to run.’

‘I am not talking about the series. We do not leave our son to your care in the expectation that he will be left to watch pornography.’

‘It is history, ma-am.’

‘History? If that’s history I would rather he knew nothing about it.’

‘We have done our best,’ Strowheim assured her, ‘to protect the Prince from knowledge it isn’t in his interest to acquire, and we have acted on your instructions with regards to books. Let him read about wizards and dragons like other children was your command, and my staff have been scrupulous in not deviating from it. But he seems not to be interested in wizards or dragons. Since there is little literature of any other sort available to a person his age, we thought not to close down the only alternative avenue for his native inquiringness to take. He must know something about the world, Your Highness.’