Ruin Nation (12 page)

When I turn up for real, it’s much the same thing. Only this time I get citrus juice in my eye.

“Transform yourself into a form of gas, will you?!” he snarls as I’m seized by burly men and dragged into an adjoining room. This is nothing new. Staff beatings are Dromedary’s main motivational tool.

But these aren’t his usual thugs. The suits are too good. No human hair/acrylic mix for these two gents. And they haven’t tried hitting me yet. So you can understand my apprehension. This isn’t normal.

“Your boss will have explained the situation, no doubt,” says the shorter of the two, six foot one, broad as a barn door,
slightly twitchy, and watchful as a fox. He sees me scoping the territory and blocks the exit. “You’re welcome to jump out the window, sir,” he suggests in his Southern barrowboy growl. “We
are
seven stories up, though.” And so I graciously decline.

The second man’s taller and leaner, but equally wide; shaped like an upturned triangle. The scar on his left cheek has a hypnotic pull and a curious, cranberry colouration. It seems too precisely inflicted to have been obtained in the course of standard employment and I’m not keen on the way it joins up with the corner of his mouth.

“So you’re aware of the situation then,” he states in a manner that’s far too affable for my liking. “Mr Dromedary has brought you up to speed.”

“He’s stoned,” I say. “He threw a
satsuma at me.”

“Don’t get smart,” I’m told.

“Do you like your job?” asks Scarface in smooth tones. “Good jobs are hard to find. I hear you got this one through nepotism.”

“I’d never heard of Dromedary when I signed up,” I say, shaking my head. “He certainly didn’t know me.”

“He said you’d say that,” growls Shorter Man, clearly playing Bad Cop to Scarface’s Good. “He says you’re smart but your attitude stinks.”

“He says you’re shifty,” says Scarface.

“But we don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing,” says Shorter warmly.

“It’s not a good time to be jobless,” takes up Scarface. “No unemployment benefit. No housing benefit. Shops putting poison in the skips so tramps can’t scavenge the out-of-date food. Not that we have out-of-date food anymore.”

“And not a good time to be homeless either,” Shorter continues, “what with the leopards and all.”

“I’m sure your
wife
will be fine,” Scarface smirks. “Mr Dromedary will see to that. But you... Well, she won’t think you’re so ‘sexily non-conformist’ when you haven’t washed for a year and your arm’s been bitten off!”

“You bite the system and it bites back!” Shorter sneers. “
Quite literally
!”

“I think you get our point,” Scarface concludes. But I don’t. Christ on a bike, I have absolutely no idea what they’re on about.

“Is this a staff appraisal?” I ask. Scarface makes a noise like laughing.

“Funny,” he says.

Our meeting lasts approximately half an hour. There’s a couple of anomalies: I’m shown a picture of a man skewered with a railway spike and asked to draw conclusions from it. And there’s lots of talk about bodies floating face down in canals. But, in a country where everyone’s permanently drunk, threats and cartoonish behaviour are part and parcel of everyday life. You learn to ignore it. I’m bored now. I ask what’s going on. Scarface fixes me with his weird blue eyes.

“You made ‘Alfonse’ The Talking Alien, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Hah! I love that little fucker!” adds Shorter helpfully. I’m starting to suspect he’s a little odd.

“Thanks,” I say, “but I don’t see what this has to with...”

“And, most recently,” Scarface continues, “you’ve been working on full-size replicas of the human body?”

“Yes, that’s the polite way of putting it.”

“And you married into the
Bactrian
family?”

“Yes, but probably not the branch you’re thinking of. And Rachel, she’s not really my,
er...”

“She’s a relative of Mr Dromedary.”

“No, she...”

“I think you’ll find she
is
. Mr Dromedary is the half-brother of former Prime Minister Bactrian – although that information is to stay between you, me, my colleague here...”

“And our friend with the railway spike,” Shorter clarifies.

“Indeed.”

“But I’m not...” I plead.

“Please, Mr Jupiter. You’ll have time to speak afterwards.”

“Best to sit back and listen for the moment, Sir,” says Shorter.

“We need a puppet maker.”

“We need a puppet maker and Mr Dromedary gave us your name.”

“Why?”

“Firstly, because you have the experience and secondly, because he’ll be taking forty percent of your first year’s wages as a finder’s fee,” Scarface tells me.

“He also wants a clear run at your wife,” adds the always charming Shorter, “but that’s very much by the by.”

“
C’est la vie,” I say. “You mentioned wages?”

“Yes, Jupiter. You see, we’ve been observing you for some time. And, whilst we’re forced to conclude that your attitude does indeed stink and that you are indeed shifty, psychological profiling suggests that you can be brought to heel like a dog for large sums of money. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’d say there’s an element of truth in it. Are you... are you offering me large sums of money?”

“We believe in rewarding hard work,” says Shorter.

“Doing what?”

“We require someone to assist with a little,
er, promotional campaign.”

“And you mentioned ‘first year’s wages’. So it’s a long-term contract?”

“Oh, believe me,” Laughs Scarface, “if this comes off, there’ll be plenty more work in the pipeline.”

“
And I’ll be working for you, through Dromedary?”

“No, Mr Jupiter, you’ll be working for us directly. We know how he whips his staff like Hebrew slaves. It’s inefficient. We believe in nurturing talent. We’re progressive. We believe in the potential of people.”

“Sign up with us, Sir, and you need never worry about that goofy, red-faced troll again.”

“And that’s got to be an incentive. But think it over. We’ll call you tomorrow.”

“You know,” I say, as I’m halfway through the door, “when you dragged me in here, like a kidnap victim, I thought something sinister was going on.”

“Oh, no,” laughs Scarface. “Not in the slightest.”

“Heavens no!” says Shorter. “Why would you think that?”

So I walk past Dromedary steaming in bed, and I’m smiling so wide it hurts.

I’m about to jump ship for an undisclosed job with two unknowns who show strangers pictures of dead bodies. My motivation is the flimsiest of promises coupled with my own rampaging greed. Am I being stupid or is this the coolest thing I’ve ever done? I was looking for an adventure and
it
found
me
. I’m actually happy. 

Dromedary signals with a dripping paw. He asks how my meeting went and then starts questioning my human parentage. Now I no longer have to take this.

“Has anyone signed your cast yet?” I enquire cheerily, rolling his protesting carcass over. And whilst he flaps his podgy flippers, I scrawl “To our very own Elvis the Pelvis, love from the boys at www.fisting.com.” 

“He’s big on the scene,” I tell the nurse.

I walk out into the night. It’s black and it’s cold, but not even the smouldering wreckage of my car can bring me down. I feel free. I feel alive. It’s God: nil, Jupiter: one!

* * *

Picture the remnants of a supermarket car park. Weeds grow through the cracked tarmac. Faltering allotments ring one half of the perimeter, rusting automobile wreckage the other. The supermarket itself is long gone – looted and firebombed by Walmart shock troops. An abandoned petrol station remains. If you listen, you can make out two leopards fucking on its big, flat roof. A black limousine arrives. Scarface steps out of the shadows and nods. The limo leaves.

“It’s just a job,” I tell myself. I’m staring at my reflection in a compact mirror. My reflection doesn’t look convinced. He looks downright terrified. The floor’s covered in plastic sheeting, thank God, because if
I
don’t leak fluid on it, I’m sure Mr Bactrian will. Only I don’t know it’s Mr Bactrian yet. That knowledge comes later. I
do
know I’m alone with a corpse. And not an attractive corpse. And that today’s task is to skin him.

So I signed my new contract on Monday. Scarface and Shorter came around my house and formally introduced themselves as Misters Calamine and Calamari. I guess you need to sound continental to get ahead these days, now that ‘English’ is a byword for ‘inbred’.

We drank nettle tea and I signed my way through an array of papers arranged on the dining room table. Pretty standard stuff.

“There’s a three month trial period,” says Calamine. “Just a formality really, to see how we all get along. If all goes well, there’s a chance of a permanent position.”

“Which means you’ll be eligible for our health and pension schemes,” Calamari tells me, with a look that says I may soon need them.

“You’ve got a pension scheme?” I’m shocked. “Nobody has a pension scheme these days.”

“We do,” says Calamari smiling. “You’re playing with the big boys now.”

“There’s just one more thing,” says Calamine, opening his briefcase. “Nothing to worry about, though. Now, we’ve been through your contract, that’s out of the way. There’s just one more thing we need you to sign.” And he passes me The Official Secrets Act. My mouth drops open and my mind goes blank. Calamari claps me on the back.

“Yes, we kept that quiet, didn’t we? Thought we’d spring it on you. Thought we’d sound you out a little first – see what kind of stuff you were made of.”

“You told me you were from ‘
Thruster and Parkin,’” I burble.

“On paper, yes,” says Calamari.

“And on your payslips, too,” Calamine confides. “But, in actuality, you’ll be working for His Majesty’s Government. Hence this.” And he slaps the document before me as casually as if it were a work colleague’s birthday card. Calamari passes me a silver fountain pen.

“Nice pen,” I say.

“It’s yours,” Calamari answers. “Now sign.” And, God help me, I do. It’s only later that I remember the photos they’d shown me and what I’d taken as drunken bravado – testing the nerve of the new guy – strikes me as something more sinister. Because they didn’t seem drunk at all.

So now it’s Friday and I’m alone in an abandoned industrial unit in the middle of a nasty estate. I’ve a hairy-backed carcass with a hog’s thighbone for a cock for company and there’s a bowie knife with a sinister matt-black finish in my hand. And I’m wondering, if this is what happens when you say yes, what the Hell happens if you refuse?

Out of fear and the promise of that fat paycheck, it’s the fear that keeps me here. The money lost its attraction an hour ago.

I hold the mirror to the corpse’s mouth. There’s no condensation, just seeping halitosis.

I'm not squeamish and I'm not superstitious. I've cut people open and I've stitched them back together. I'm eminently qualified for this job in terms of skills, experience and my usual mindset. But something's wrong.

I’ve skinned mink before, sure – for food and blankets, we all have – but skinning a person seems like an act of desecration. If I thought God cared, I’d be concerned for my soul.

And then there's the stench, and the fear of what it might mean. I don’t want to see this man’s intestines. It’s bad enough looking at that corncob of a penis. The thought of what this diseased hulk's internal organs might look like has my stomach vaulting. But I'm a professional. I keep telling myself that I'm a professional.

I swap the bowie knife for a scalpel from my old medical kit. Start small, I figure, pressing the blade into his
veiny, white flesh. But I can’t make the first incision. What's wrong? I was never this nervy in the operating theatre. I've got to get this thing in motion, and if it takes a big, dumb, decisive gesture to do it, then so be it.

And so I throw the scalpel like a dart, right into his torso. Big mistake. His bloated carcass deflates like a balloon, spraying gas and all kinds of decomposing matter everywhere. Including over me.

When I’ve finished throwing up in the carpark, I straighten my clothing and consider a trip to the library.

So, I’m going through the shelves and I come to the row we may as well call, ‘The Single Man Section’. There’s plenty on taxidermy so I pick something at random and read: “Hunting’s fun but it can be over all too quickly. If you love animals and want to spend more time with them, why not enter the exciting world of taxidermy?” 

The next book, I suspect, is a parody: “Like hunting? Have you ever thought of doing something
productive
with the animals you murder? A chapter called ‘Catch And Cosh A Cute Companion!’ confirms it.

The third book goes beyond mockery. Two bobcats in Civil War uniforms hoisting the Confederate flag – that’s the front cover. The back cover? Well, why the coyote would want to wear a tutu is anyone’s guess. Still, one large, hairy mammal is pretty much the same as another – even a former Prime Minister – and so I take it to the front desk.

*
* *

Lucas sits quietly by the window. Purple clouds spit acid rain onto the city. Drizzle sizzles on parked cars and expensive paintjobs bubble and burn, flooding the gutters with metallic pigment. He watches a mink liquefy.

It’s a rare pause for thought in a punishing schedule. Laura packs a plastic-wrapped squishy something into an insulated, aluminium
flightcase.

“Don’t stick your head out,” she warns, “it’ll melt.”

“Don’t worry,” he whispers affectionately, “I’ve got spares.”

“When’s Jupiter due?” she asks, addressing the
flightcase to ‘
Vatican City’
.

“Not for a while yet, I think. He’s having trouble finding transport.”

“Is he bringing Elton with him?”

“God, I hope not. The last thing I need’s another lecture on supernatural fish.”

“Speaking of problems, have you paid the rent, yet?”

“No,” Lucas answers. “The police have frozen my account.”

“Looks like we’re moving again, then,” she says.

Lucas has astonishing bad luck with rented accommodation, developing a semi-irrational hatred of lettings agents in the process. I say ‘semi’ because his grievances are completely legitimate. He’s been lied to with such furious regularity that he makes them swear on the holy books. Not that that means anything these days. When they’re “absolutely,
definitely
going to be in” they’re out. When they’re supposed to be meeting you at a property i.e. out, they’re in. Only they “can’t come to the phone right now” because they’re too busy counting their money.

‘The most infuriatingly rude and ignorant people outside of employment agency staff,’ is how Lucas describes them and that’s a pretty damning indictment.

With half of England’s architecture crumbling back into dust, it’s hard to find rented accommodation. It’s even harder to afford it. So sharing with strangers is the only realistic option for a single man. And Lucas will always be single because he insists on wearing a huge, bushy moustache.

Of course, sharing has its downside. You can never be sure what kind of freaks you’ve moved in with until it’s all too late.
From students, who’d wake him up at three in the morning to tell him how antisocial he was, to knife-wielding maniacs, he’s lived with them and he’s regretted it. He particularly hates sharing with small-time drug dealers who fill the living room with smelly young men. There’s nowhere to sit unless you win it in some convoluted card game, and the lights burn twenty-four hours a day until the coin metre runs out and they all migrate to the next pothead’s pit.

The buildings themselves have been pretty choice, too, with lead pipes and exposed asbestos. If it couldn’t be removed, he plastered over it – wearing an old scarf for a particle mask. Gas fires belched fumes, light switch plates were wired up live. I recall tales of a bathroom floor rotted to nothing more than a thin skin. No
defecatory act could be undertaken without fear of crashing, still seated, through the kitchen ceiling and landing on the cooker with a broken neck.

He spent a desperate year in a YMCA hostel, surrounded by
schizos, alcoholics and speed freaks. The alcoholic schizophrenics were his favourite; especially when they banged on his door and threatened to stab him for breaking the toilet. He hadn’t broken the toilet. That had been the speed freak alcoholic with the mind-rotting syphilis.

When his plans to move into a house with an ex-
squaddy fraudster and a wiry attempted murderer fall through, he leaps at the chance to move into a place that smells like a garbage dump, but whose residents hold no prior convictions. The house is robbed the day he moves in. He now shares with his sister.

To all intents and purposes, he appears normal. He doesn’t twitch; he’s never decorated his bedroom walls with pornographic collages; his relationship with his parents is healthy and he’s never shown even the slightest interest in his sister’s underwear.

You could cite his moustache as evidence of abnormality but, the truth is, it hides a scar. And not an attractive or mysterious scar, like my sabre wound or Calamine’s ferocious cheek-stripe, just a plain-ugly piece of wartime damage. His top lip was torn
open by a shard of his best friend’s shoulder blade. Something to do with anti-personnel mines, I think. I stitched his face back together.

I restored enough of an appearance to make his life worth living again and he rewarded me with his eternal and deeply weird friendship.

We made a pretty good team, too. My regime was always pretty hot on recycling. Lucas’s Health Ministry widened the policy to include human organs. And the United Nations were wrong to call him a compulsive liar. I prefer to think of him as ‘pathologically unspecific’. People who deal in arms or, more accurately, arms, legs, lungs, kidneys and corneas often are. It goes with the trade, as they say.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Lucas’s execution is some thirty years in the future – and, at this point in the chronology, well, we’ve not even skinned the Prime Minister yet.

So we’re hidden in Lucas’s yard. It feels safe. We’re surrounded by high, red-bricked walls, topped with vicious spiked plant life. Horticulture’s his other hobby and there’s a green wooden glasshouse to my right. Laura’s inside. I don’t know what she’s doing but it seems to involve a lot of bending down and shaking her rump in an exaggerated manner. I like Laura. She’s got long black hair and pretends to find me attractive. At some point in the future, I figure I’ll… Hah! No! You don’t need to know that!

Anyway, I open the back of my new government-issue van and a stinking soup drains out. Bactrian lies wrapped in a black tarpaulin and the bouquet isn’t much better.

“Well, I mean, thanks and all that,” says Lucas embarrassed, “but he’s a bit... a bit, er,
ripe
for my purposes.”

“I wasn’t going to give him to you,” I say. And then I realise how odd that sounds. 

Lucas seems hurt. He takes a deep breath.

“I see. [Sigh] I see. Some relative drops off the twig and you instantly think of old Lucas and his incinerator. Figure you can save the price of a coffin, eh? Because you don’t come round any other time, do you?”

But the discomfiture’s false. Lucas doesn’t get upset. Even after the landmine, with his face flapping open like a circus tent doorway, he was still jocularity itself.

“You’re welcome here any time you want,” he laughs. “But what
do
you want?” And he prods the tarpaulin distractedly. “He sure is leaky, isn’t he?”

“I burst him,” I say.

“Is that jive talk?”

“Popped him,” I clarify. “He was full of gas.”

“Uh huh,” says Laura, coming to join us. “That’s jive talk alright.” And I’m damned if they don’t talk rubbish my way for another five minutes. It’s the ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or whatever they call it nowadays. They both have it. So I grab them by the shoulders and...

“I love it when he puts his arm around me,” says Laura.

“I’m not sure I care for it, myself,” remarks Lucas. “Darned impudence in my book! But what do you think, darling?” And he’s in the back of the van, soliciting opinions from Bactrian’s body.

“Look!” says I. “Now we can plough deeper into the realms of nonsense or…”

Laura’s got her hand inside my shirt.

“Tell me, Hugo, did you see me in the greenhouse? Were you entranced by my womanly charms?”

“Always am,” says I, sweeping her up and sitting her down. “But, ample as they are, it’s your professional talent I’m after today.”

“Do tell,” she says.