SSC (2001) The Dog Catcher (8 page)

When rupert
was growing up in the 1960s
all the features in the newspapers
seemed to be about the future, the past you couldn’t give away for sixpence.
Papers and magazines were overflowing with visionary line drawings,
Rotring-enscribed prophesies for the rebuilding of the World. Siefert’s plot to
replace Covent Garden with tower slabs; the long-forgotten ‘traffic expert’
Colin Buchanan who schemed to lay six-lane motorways where Canterbury Cathedral
stood, taking up valuable land, doing nothing and looking old; T. Dan Smith’s
Newcastle. Abroad, whispering the names of future cities with impossible
enchantment: Brazilia, Canberra, Ottawa; and at home, of course, the magic that
would become Milton Keynes. All done by young men in architects’ offices, thin
black lines rendering stark towering workers’ housing, shopping precincts,
industrial zones, flowers growing where they were told to grow in conical
concrete tubs, white families walking hand in hand. There was usually a
monorail in there somewhere and the sun always shone. Who wouldn’t want to
live there, in Skelmersdale New Town? Or even better, how great must it be for ‘there’
to be your creation. To change the real world, to jumble it up and to spit it
out looking different, not for good or ill but simply to change it, to say:

‘I put
that there, that building. The particular headache that its abiding ugliness
gives people, that’s my doing.’

But at
his low point rupert wasn’t changing the world, he was lucky if he got to
change a step or a walk-in wardrobe a little bit.

So once
he had sorted out his wife and she was a player in the flag cleaning business, rupert
started to consider how he could bring power to himself. It came to him in his
dissatisfaction that politics, that had to be the game, that was all about
reshaping society, wasn’t it? Closing down hospitals, letting terrorists out of
prison, starting minor wars in little countries, moving people around like the
cursor on your computer screen.

‘The
wastebasket contains fifty thousand miners. Do you want to remove them
permanently?’

‘Click
yes I do.’

‘Find/change
five hundred cottage hospitals into ten gigantic, super sickness centres.’

‘The
find/change feature is not undoable. Continue! cancel?’

‘Continue,
continue, continue, you stupid machine, the future is not undoable. Click!’

So the
problem now was how was rupert to get into politics at this late stage?
Certainly not standing as an MP or any of that nonsense, who had the time for
that? Going around housing estates kissing Pakistani women, then being
unelected if you’d unpleased your ungrateful constituents.

It was
during the early Nineties when rupert was thinking these thoughts and one day
he heard two magic words: ‘Think tank’. He knew right away he had to find Out
more about these cognitive panzers. Like all the best ideas, the idea for ‘Think
tanks’ came from the United States. What they were was groups of brainy
individuals who were paid to think up all kinds of new ideas for how society
should be organised and then to suggest these new ideas to the government.

Sensing
the way the wind was howling, it was a left-wing think tank that rupert joined.
It was called ‘The Lozenge Institute’, and was financed by a group of left-wing
individuals who were involved in the businesses of vivisection, nuclear
reprocessing and Formula One motor racing.

After
the inevitable avalanche election victory rupert then set about moving from
where the ideas were thought up, to where the ideas were put into practice. He
had to jump out of the think tank, towel himself off and leap into the ‘Taskforce’.

Tony’s
government had created more than four hundred taskforces so that Tony could
stick his snout up every crevice and cranny of your life, which was what he
liked. Taskforces were groups of the right people who studied burning issues of
the day and could be relied on to fiercely, independently and freely come up
with the answers Tony wanted. They had names like ‘The Creative Industries
Taskforce’, ‘The Achieving 20% Market Share Sub-group’ and ‘The Review of the
List of Nationally Important Sporting Events Which Must be Made Available to
Terrestrial TV Channels’. Taskforces were great for the likes of rupert, real
power and no responsibility. There was only one wasp in the lemonade: there was
a terrible, shocking shortage of the right kind of tonythinking individuals to
stock these taskforces and because there weren’t enough reliable right thinking
persons to go round, taskforces as often as not reported to other taskforces
with exactly the same people on them. Ruthie Rogers often found herself
reporting to herself. So the initiatives just went round and round, important
initiatives in the field of fire-proofing pet toys went uninitiated.

rupert
knew, with the signals he gave off and the work he’d done at the Lozenge Institute,
that it would be easy for him to get onto some ordinary, bog-standard taskforce
(though perhaps not the ‘Cowboy Builders Working Group’ or its four
sub-groups, since none of the sixty-three people involved in it were architects
or surveyors). Instead he wanted to get into a taskforce that was right up
close to the juice, to the power, which of course meant Tony, because even when
your taskforce came up with some dazzling new ideas in the field of the
regulation of artificial meat products nothing happened unless you reported to
some big bastard on the way up with real spunk. rupert was determined to get
onto a taskforce that reported to Tony, the biggest bastard of all. If rupert
wanted to discuss something he just bloody well wanted to get on the phone to
Tony or walk over to Number 10 and bloody well talk to Tony.

So rupert
waited and wheedled till he could get an invite to a dinner with Tony so he
could explain his ideas. Finally it happened at Helena Kennedy QC’s (Baroness
Kennedy of the Shaws) place. Once Salman’s bodyguards and Tony’s bodyguards had
gone into the other room to eat the pizzas that had been delivered for them by
a boy on a scooter, rupert went into his dance.

It came
in two parts. The first part. rupert explained that the work of his heroes, the
architects Mies van de Rohe and le Corbusier, had been unfairly traduced by the
enemies of progress like that reactionary cunt Prince Charles with his organic
oatymeal biscuits and his visions of self-effacing stone cottages. In fact it
wasn’t that they had gone too far but rather that they hadn’t gone far enough —
what was needed was more organisation, more planning, more control. The second
part. People had to be convinced that they wanted this themselves, that’s where
his childhood creation of Forcesuasion came in. Through Forcesuasion rather
than the government doing what the people demanded (which when you thought
about it was terribly old-fashioned) you could get the people to demand what
you wanted to give them in the first place. If all the powers of the
government, all the ministers, all the civil servants, simply went on and on
and on and on without deviation or deflection, ignoring all interjection, then
in no time at all the populace would be clamouring to be given the chance to
live in planned housing, in controlled housing zones, eating nutritious
balanced meals in airy spacious communal canteens (Ruthie Rogers was already
hard at work designing the menus).

‘I’ve
proved it in my own life,’ he said to the Prime Minister. ‘I’ve proved it over
and over again. It’s not undoable, Tony,’ he asserted feverishly over the
granita of summer fruits. Tony leant forward to hear more.

On the
doorstep of Helena’s house, as the Jags growled smokily in the night air and
the bodyguards’ eyes snapped this way and that, Tony said to rupert, ‘rupert, I
want you to do the undoable.’

‘I’ll
do it, Tony,’ he replied and they shook hands, staring into each other’s eyes
like lovers.

As he
was driven home rupert thought about what somebody had told him was the epitaph
of the German poet and playwright Bertholt Brecht: ‘He had opinions and people
listened to them.’ He had opinions and soon they would be rammed down the
throats of the Strasbourg Goose of the populace. That was rupert now, a man who
had everything: an influential position, a powerful good-looking wife, a family
and a house.

Or
rather, he thought happily, A House. His House deserved the capital letters
that he forswore. His house in Belgravia, a mere half a mile from Richard and
Ruthie Rogers’ place. A dream of a house. When he bought it, it was a dark poky
six-bedroom, end-of-terrace London house and now it was transformed into an
oasis of light and space. As soon as you entered the plain front door you were
met with a vision, a spectacular glass staircase which shot vertiginously up in
front of you. The staircase was not, rupert would insist, ‘an object’,
something with which to impress the neighbours, it was simply what it was, a
direct link from the new roof lights right down to the basement. A conventional
staircase would have destroyed this sense of lightness and space which he was
trying to achieve. The treads of the staircase were etched with three rows of
opaque dots to make it easier to see the stair edges. rupert had not wanted
them and they had not been there originally but one night, finding his son Mies
half-way up the clear glass staircase in a puddle of urine, clutching the
treads in terror, Helen forced him to have the dots put in. They gave him a
twitch of revulsion every time he descended the stairs. The sitting room was
sited up these stairs. The only thing to sit on once you got up there were four
of the cantilever steel chairs that Mies van de Rohe had designed for the
German pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, the famous ‘Barcelona
chairs’. Apart from that the room was empty.

If you
looked closely you could see that one wall was all cupboards which were crammed
with the couple’s books, music, TV. There was an absolute lack of clutter.
rupert and Helen even kept the phone in the cupboard, which meant that
occasionally they did miss some important phone calls — such as the one from
Corbu’s school saying his stitches from the foot wound he’d received from the
sharp steel edges of the floor in the kitchen had sprung open again and they’d
sent him back to the hospital, so he’d sat alone in casualty for eight hours
being molested by blood-encrusted drunks — but it was better than clutter.
Because that was the thing about minimalism, it was demanding, it asked a lot of
you, everything that was in the minimalist room was balanced on a hair trigger
of harmony, every object was precisely where it was supposed to be and the
slightest thing out of place threw the whole delicate equilibrium into utter
chaos. One pencil out of its box, one picture at the wrong angle and everything
was completely ruined, a single toy on the floor and you might as well
wallpaper the room in a Laura Ashley print and order matching velour sofas from
DFS. And disorder you couldn’t see couldn’t be allowed either, it still seemed
to give off telepathic waves of disharmony, seeping under the door and
polluting the pristine atmosphere, which is why he had to insist that the kids
kept their sleeping space in the same ordered state as the rest of the house,
even though he never visited it. Minimalism is becoming increasingly de rigueur
but most are just playing at it. By her own admission not the tidiest of
people, Helen now said to friends at dinner parties that once you start living
here you get into the habit of putting things away’.

This
pleased rupert but then he had found out she was renting a small bedsit in
Vauxhall, rammed to the ceiling with pottery turtles, leatherette footstools
and flowery, appliqué table mats, where she would sneak off as if visiting a
lover and would sit for hours, rocking backwards and forwards stroking a
ceramic clown amidst a mountain of knick-knacks. He didn’t shout at her when he
found out but they had a long, long talk about it and of course she saw in the
end that it was best to give the place up. Anyway these days she was too busy
cleaning flags to have time to stroke a ceramic clown.

The
only really showy aspect of the living room was a piece of glass, a metre
square, set in the floor just over the front door. Sometimes rupert thought he
could see a faint stain of yellow on the crystal-clear glass from another pool
of Mies’ urine, after the boy had blindly chased a ball onto it, then frozen in
fright, seemingly floating in thin space above the front door.

Though
Helen went on as usual, he refused to mutilate this glass, pointing out that
Mies would no longer go within ten feet of it without violent spasms
accompanied by vomiting. Also he insisted that as the glass was bonded with
acrylic even if it cracked it wouldn’t go anywhere, surely they could all see
that.

So on
the night when Tony gave him his task, he sat happily in the back of the
Jaguar, dreams of power seemed to seep out of the car’s heater and wrap him in
a contented fug. The long black limousine turned into his street and the
headlights, the powerful new sort that shone like blue stars, lit up the side
wall of his beloved house. Lit up the end-of-terrace side wall that had been
smoothed, over and over again, to the finish of an egg and then coated five
times in a special paint imported from Germany. On that wall which had been
beautiful and clean and pristine and white as a sea mist when he left it, on
that wall was now written in letters perhaps two foot high a single word:

‘PATRICK’.

He got
out of the car and stood on the pavement, shaking. rupert couldn’t have felt
more violated if he’d been forcibly fucked up the arse by some Irish labourers
on Hampstead Heath. This couldn’t happen to him, he was part of the power. He
felt awful and sick with rage. Just the single, stupid, cretinous name ‘PATRICK’,
spray-painted in the shaky tentative hand of an illiterate. He wouldn’t have
minded so much, he told himself if it had been some sort of a political slogan,
something to do with tortured Kurds, say, or that bloke in Peru who looked like
one of the Grateful Dead. It wasn’t even as if the name was a proper graffiti
artists’ tag, which at least had some aspirations to funky street art; he’d
read all about it in
MSR
magazine, how generally these tags were the
products of teams or crews wending their way home from clubs, late-night,
hit-and-run signwriters, enscribing their ‘Noms de disco’, ‘Wot’, ‘Hemp’, ‘Waste’
as a homeward slug’s trail. Never, though, something as bland as an ordinary
name: ‘PATRICK’. Indeed rupert suddenly remembered that he actually owned a
Keith Haring painting, done with a spray can, of his trademark little jumping
men, that’s how down with graffiti art he was.