HOWARD JACOBSON

PUSSY

with illustrations by
CHRIS RIDDELL

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Epub ISBN: 9781473549340

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Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,

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Copyright © Howard Jacobson 2017

Illustrations copyright © Chris Riddell 2017

Howard Jacobson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 2017

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

REVELATION

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea …

And the beast which I saw was like unto a hyena; and his feet were as the feet of a clown; and his face was as the face of a spoiled child …

And the people gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority …

And they worshipped the beast, saying: Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking foolish things …

And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against truth …

And it shall come to pass that all who dwell upon the earth shall wonder that they worshipped him …

And they shall know that the beast came not out of the sea but their own hearts …

And they shall fear that once let out, the beast will never be persuaded to go back in again.

PROLOGUE

The March of Ignorance

Early one morning in the famously hot winter of 20** a figure could be seen walking between the tallest obelisks and ziggurats of the walled Republic of Urbs-Ludus. He was looking for the Palace of the Golden Gates and was assured he would not miss it. He was a lean man in his middle forties, of more than average height but lacking hair. Though most of the people he passed pretended not to feel the heat and remained buttoned-up and scarfed, he carried his overcoat over his shoulder. Something about him – it could have been his shaved head, for this was a society that set great store by fantastical coiffure – suggested intransigence and maybe even a fall from authority. He was Professor Kolskeggur Probrius and had, until the year previously, been head of Phonoethics, a university research programme looking into the importance of language to ethical thinking. The words we used and the way we expressed them, he argued, affected the thoughts we had and the actions we took. ‘Bad grammar leads to bad men’ hardly does justice to the subtlety of his thinking, but that was the gist of it.

A bachelor of austere habits, he had earned the esteem of students on account of his dedication to their improvement. Then came the Great Purge of the Illuminati, and Professor Probrius found himself accused of cognitive condescension, that is to say of making a virtue of possessing expert knowledge. Students were distressed by the perceived distance between his attainments and their own. They were made to feel inferior to him and looked down upon. It was conceded that he made efforts to lead students out of perplexity by finding other words for those they found distressing, but that had only resulted, they submitted, in making them feel remedialised. The moment he claimed ignorance of the verb ‘to remedialise’ was the moment that sealed his fate. There it was: he believed language belonged to him. At a specially convened hearing of the Thumb Court seventy-seven thumbs went down while only two went up. Thumb Culture made no provision for abstention. Professor Probrius was out of a job.

It was as the instructions had promised. He could not miss the Palace of the Golden Gates. It was taller by at least a dozen storeys than all the other ziggurats, it bore the name ORIGEN in large letters above the entrance and then again at sky level, and it had golden gates.

Buses were already congregating in the concourse outside the Palace, spilling lucre-tourists who marked it in their I-Spy Book of Monoliths before being driven off to the next one.

A protest was taking place in what appeared to be a designated protest pen. From the spirit in which the demonstration was being policed, Professor Probrius deduced it was a regular occurrence and posed no immediate threat to the building’s security. As the symbolic focus of the Republic’s satisfaction in itself, the Palace had been the scene, three years previously, of the first of the Artisanal Bread Riots, the most violent public disturbance in the Republic’s history. For years, the only activity in Urbs-Ludus had been the construction of towers. Nothing else was made. Even the bread was flown in from somewhere else and invariably arrived stale. Sick of white sliced loaves, dry muffins and inelastic pizza bases, the populace demonstrated in such numbers that the authorities had to import a labour force of skilled dough-makers from countries outside the Wall. But there was an unexpected consequence. Soon, Urbs-Ludus woke to the realisation that the Republic was flooded – not with artisanal bread but with artisans.

One section of the population turned against the other. The wealthy had their brioches but the poor had to queue in hospitals behind those who made them. Crime increased – petty larcenies at first, but then offences against the person, especially against women whom, it appeared, many artisans had never previously encountered, at least not in the immodest dress considered appropriate, in the Republic, for the wives and daughters of property developers. Viewed within the Palace as further proof of man’s insatiable ingratitude, this latest disgruntlement was permitted to express itself, quietly, where it could be monitored. But there could be no doubt that the populace – albeit a different social stratum thereof – was on the growl again.

Professor Probrius had come to the Palace to be interviewed for the position of tutor to the Grand Duke of Origen’s second son – but now, due to unforeseen circumstances, the heir presumptive – Fracassus. He introduced himself at reception, where they looked so affronted to see him not wearing a coat that he thought it wiser to put it on before taking it off. Security was strict but smiling. He was required to show three forms of identification and leave his smartphone in a pigeonhole marked ‘Information Transmission Devices’. Two security officers patted him down, one for one leg, one for the other. A third, wearing a face mask, asked him to say ‘Ah!’ into a balloon. There was no knowing what means the latest enemies of the Game Economy, whether artisanophiles or artisanophobes, would deploy next, and germ warfare, passed from mouth to mouth, could not be ruled out. Professor Probrius exhaled. ‘Ah!’ The balloon filled but didn’t change colour. No one seemed to have expected it would. Then he was invited to take a seat. Above the reception desk was a painting in the style of Titian showing the Grand Duke playing golf with the Pope. Professor Probrius shook his head as though it were a kaleidoscope and he wanted to change the shapes in it. There was so much light reflected from the crystal chandeliers that it was possible he was not seeing what was really there. But no: there, leaning on his silver putter, was the Grand Duke of Origen, and opposite him, and laughing, with a cardinal standing in as his caddy, was the Pope. The only remaining question was whether the painting commemorated a real event or a fantasy one.

Eventually he was shown up in a lift to the 117th floor and ushered into the presence of the Grand Duke and Duchess. Though they’d been sitting at a table playing the board game Cashflow, which the Grand Duchess, wanting a quiet life, always allowed the Grand Duke to win, they were dressed and primped as though in expectation of a film crew, the Grand Duke powdered and wearing his medals, the Grand Duchess, more powdered still, in a vertiginously low-cut sequinned evening gown that appeared to be entirely open, but for a paper clip, on one side. She must have had her perilously high high-heel shoes off because she was still sliding into them as he arrived. Professor Probrius, not wanting to stare at her feet, counted her ribs. She was taller than the Grand Duke by a head and Probrius thought, from the appreciative glances the Grand Duke from time to time threw up at her, that he liked this and wouldn’t at all have minded had she been taller by two heads. Both had hair the colour of lemon custard, the Grand Duchess’s long and irritably girlish like Alice in Wonderland’s, the Grand Duke’s layered as though to resemble the millefeuilles now on sale in good patisseries throughout the Republic. Professor Probrius couldn’t tell how old they were. The expression ‘eternally youthful’ popped into his head. The Grand Duchess had had the usual surgery done on her breasts and looked wearied with all she had to carry.

Professor Probrius was greeted familiarly, the Grand Duke clapping him on the shoulder as Probrius imagined him clapping the Pope on the eighteenth tee.

‘Bitterly cold outside today, I hear,’ the Grand Duke said.

Probrius wasn’t sure how to reply. He was a man of principles, but one of those principles was not to make an unnecessary enemy of the powerful.

‘I haven’t found it so, Your Highness,’ he replied. ‘But then it’s possible I carry my own eco-climate around with me.’

‘You are a lucky man, Professor,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘We have nuclear heating in the Palace, but we still freeze. I have put out an order for all our staff to wear an extra cardigan today.’

Such is the power of suggestion that Professor Probrius fretted briefly for the Grand Duchess, who would have been exposed to the cold had it not been hot.

She smiled, noting his concern and pulled her gown together.

‘The Grand Duchess, too,’ the Grand Duke said, ‘must carry her own eco-climate around with her. She won’t hear of throwing on a cardigan.’

Professor Probrius wasn’t sure if a compliment to the Grand Duchess’s hardiness was called for. Fortunately, she came to his assistance before he could frame one. ‘It would be nice, Professor,’ she said, inching forward, ‘if we had a photograph. We photograph all our guests.’

Professor Probrius assumed this was a euphemism for another security check and readied himself for saying ‘Ah!’ again, but the royal couple simply positioned themselves on either side of him. The Grand Duchess fished about in her reticule, found what she was looking for and shot out an arm. Were arms answering the law of dynamic evolutionary process and getting longer, Probrius just had time to wonder before the Grand Duchess said ‘Smile.’ Then, laughing, she took a selfie.

Above them, on a bank of monitors, the Grand Duchess could be seen taking a selfie of herself taking a selfie in triplicate.

Walking with a slight skipping movement reminiscent of a girl on a hopscotch rug, she led the way into an adjoining room where a grand tea table was set as though for a delegation of a thousand. A ten-tier porcelain tea stand replicating an Origen tower spilled children’s party food – cupcakes in pastel colours, mini hot dogs, bagel snakes and potato men with Smarties for eyes. Probrius was offered a milkshake and invited to pick his own colour straw.

Through the heat haze, the room offered magnificent views of the city. ‘It’s from this window,’ the Grand Duchess said, ‘that we look down on our competitors.’

‘My wife, Professor,’ the Grand Duke said, ‘has a colourful turn of expression. It comes from being born in another country and reading books. Competitors is not how I think of them.’

There followed a complicated description, with which even Professor Probrius found it difficult to keep pace, of the meritocratic system that awarded titles to developers in proportion to the height and luxury-quotient of the hotel complexes, apartment blocks, shopping malls and the like which they had erected. Thus, while a couple of condominiums and an out-of-town gaming resort might get you a baronetcy, it wouldn’t make you a viscount. Things had come a long way, he reminded the Professor, from the Monopoly they had all played as children, where a modest bungalow on your property could bankrupt your opponent. The Grand Duke himself was in the fantasy market today, and kept his title on the understanding that he’d go on dazzling the discontented with bright lights, inner-city ski-runs and infinity pools. It mattered not a jot that they could never afford to stay in one of his fortified hotels. It was enough that they knew of their existence. To his son Fracassus would fall the burden of extending the scale of irresponsible development – irresponsible in the sense of unconfined – set by the House of Origen.

‘He means increasing the profits,’ the Grand Duchess put in.

She pronounced the word with such a proliferation of fffs that Professor Probrius wondered if it had another meaning in her native country. He also wondered whether, at some level in their marriage, the Grand Duke and Duchess were at war.

‘My wife,’ the Grand Duke continued, ‘is a mother. She worries about the pressure on her son. The higher Fracassus climbs, in her eyes, the further he has to fall. But men only fall because they lose their concentration, spread their interests, notice other things; Fracassus has no interests and notices nothing. When we play Monopoly he throws the dice as though they’re hand grenades. He builds a city while I’m languishing in jail. Forgive me if I take pride in him. He isn’t as other boys are. He doesn’t waste time collecting stamps, listening to music or telling jokes. It’s to his credit that he doesn’t get a joke. Fun for Fracassus is victory. Play for Fracassus is war.’

The Grand Duchess stole a glance at Professor Probrius, as though to forge an early alliance of the sensitive.

‘So,’ the Grand Duke pronounced, once tea was cleared away. ‘Shall we get down to business?’

‘Certainly,’ said Professor Probrius, finding his most charming smile and thinking how wonderful it was no longer to be in a university environment and having to watch every word he uttered. ‘À nos moutons.’

The Grand Duke looked to the Grand Duchess and the Grand Duchess looked to the Grand Duke. It was as though, whatever the nature of their struggle, they were as one again and had unanimously decided, that very minute, that they had found the right man.

‘Let’s be on first-name terms,’ the Grand Duchess said.

Probrius inclined his head. ‘I’m Kolskeggur, Your Highnesses,’ he said.

‘And we are the Grand Duke and Duchess of Origen,’ the Grand Duke replied. ‘Now here’s our little problem …’

CHAPTER 1

In which Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, is born

As the birth of potentates in the walled Republic of Urbs-Ludus went, the birth of Prince Fracassus was not especially auspicious. No thunderbolt struck the Palace. A star never before seen did not appear brighter than a meteor in the morning sky. Lionesses did not whelp in the streets. If anything, it was a quiet day. The Grand Duke arrived home earlier than usual from golf. It was not the Grand Duchess’s first lying-in, so – although they say the pain of childbirth is soon forgotten – she knew what to expect. She screamed only once, causing the Grand Duke to set down the comic pages of his newspaper and carefully run his fingers around his hair. Anxiety flattened it. ‘Make sure she has all the books she needs,’ he phoned through to the midwife. Then he rang his stockbroker-in-chief. ‘It’s about to happen,’ he said. ‘Buy. Unless you think we should sell.’

He waited for a telegram from the Prime Mover of All the Republics but none came. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Executive power in the Federation of All the Republics was vested in commoners who looked down their noses at the petty titled meritocrats who ran their individual Republics like medieval fiefdoms. At the same time they chafed against the popularity which these Grand Dukes and Duchesses enjoyed by virtue of their showy wealth. The people gloried in their titles. Gasped at their cloud-capped towers. Gaped at their gold. What did the Prime Mover and his bureaucrats have to rival this? They passed unpopular laws and skulked in low-rise offices on an apron of mulchy marshland which the Monopoly aristocrats called the Pig-Pen and wouldn’t have bought had their dice landed on it every time they threw. The Pig-Pen, as a matter of interest, was also the name the Executive gave to the concentrations of towers and ziggurats where the Grand Dukes and Duchesses conducted their business lives. Each party, when it inveighed against the ineffectiveness and corruption of the other, spoke of Mucking Out the Pig-Pen.

There was, in short, no love lost between the Federation’s competing oligarchies, and so no telegram congratulating the Grand Duke on the birth of a second son on whom the future continuation of his dynasty depended, was sent.

The Grand Duke was asleep when Prince Fracassus was born.

There was a reason for this lukewarmness. Fracassus had an older brother. Jago. Of Jago everything had been expected but none of it delivered. Once bitten, the Grand Duke contained himself. He was not a bitter man. The Republic of Urbs-Ludus, as overseen by the House of Origen, promoted petty grievances not grand resentments and as Grand Duke he had to be forever setting an example. He would not rail against enemies or fate. And he would not again tempt either by showing the size of his expectations.

Thus neither longed for nor dreaded, but no sooner incarnated than hosanna’d – for he was, for all to see, an Origen, with the tiny eyes indicative of petty grievance, the pout of pettishness, and a head of hair already the colour of the Palace gates – Fracassus came griping into the world in expectation of every blessing that a fond father, a copper-bottomed construction empire, a fiscal system sympathetic to the principle of play, and an age grown weary of making informed judgements could lavish, short, that is, of a sweet nature, a generous disposition, an ability to accept criticism, a sense of the ridiculous, quick apprehension, and a way with words.

Of these deficiencies Fracassus lived the early part of his life in blissful ignorance. How different was he, really, from the usual run of children? No baby is magnanimous; all infants have thin skin; small boys will often mistake boisterousness for mirth and bullying for wit; and wordlessness, as is well known, is something children grow out of at different rates. Many a great orator begins life as a tongue-tied toddler, indeed the greatest orators in Urbs-Ludus’s history remained that way.

So Fracassus’s parents had no reason to notice anything amiss and they too lived in blissful ignorance of his shortcomings, if shortcomings they could be called. He was an ordinarily pugnacious, self-involved and boastful child, not much attentive to the world around him and used to getting his own way.

Visitors to the Palace did what visitors to palaces do and doted on the heir presumptive. That he took not the slightest notice of any of them was evidence both of his self-sufficiency and the richness of his interior life. That he cried the moment he was denied whatever it was his little fingers reached for only proved his resolution. That he never spoke a word they recognised suggested he was already master of innumerable foreign languages. That he spat and spewed and farted in their company only showed his indifference to the world’s opinion.

It hardly needs saying that in a republic whose power resided in the spell of awe and majesty it wove around its citizens, the Internet enjoyed high esteem. The Great Duke lent his name to a dozen blogs and funded any website that promoted values close to his heart – the freedom to drink sugary drinks, to choose an example at random. Of these, the foremost at the time of the Grand Duchess’s lying-in was Brightstar, a platform for nativist, homophobic, conspirationist, anti-mongrelist ethno-nationalism which might have caused greater concern to people in high places had they only known what any of those words meant.

Brightstar saw the advantage in associating itself with Prince Fracassus from the moment of his birth. Indeed, it charted his development with such sycophancy that some subscribers to the site weren’t entirely sure whether they were a reading a paean to the Prince or a parody of him. Was there a difference, anyway? However to understand it, the Prince’s extraordinary untutored mastery of foreign tongues was painstakingly explored. Noises he had made were phonetically laid out and readers were invited either to guess at their meanings or confirm, should they be speakers of those hypothesised languages themselves, their lingual accuracy. At this early age, Fracassus was already becoming an inspiration, an example to the people of what freedom from instruction could achieve.

In one of those brief political reversals to which any truly original site is subject, Brightstar was compelled to cease publishing for a while and some of its pages were lost beyond recovery. So there is no way to confirm that on the Prince’s second birthday his water was bottled and, for a nominal sum, offered to subscribers, together with a certificate of authentication in his own hand. Porcelain pillboxes containing samples of his ordure the same. Some say this is malicious fabrication but there are people who claim to have purchased one or other or both and to have them still.

Among the Grand Duke’s and Duchess’s closest friends the usual jealousies stood in the way of adulation on quite that scale. A little more animation wouldn’t have gone amiss, they muttered among themselves. A prince wasn’t expected to show intellectual promise, but wasn’t this Prince slow beyond the usual meaning of the word? And those eyes – were they ever going to open? But out loud they voiced only praise. ‘He will be an ornament to your Dynasty. He will be a flower in the garden of the Republic. He will be a prince among princes.’ The Grand Duke liked the idea of his son as ‘ornament’, wasn’t sure about ‘flower’, but took strong objection to that equalising ‘among’. His son, he hoped, would leave the others in his wake. The rest were not princes but ten-a-penny princelings, as ineffective as that ancien régime from whom, along with weak chins and syphilis, they’d borrowed their titles. Some couldn’t even afford to live in their own tower blocks.

Concealed in his contempt for minor Monopoly aristocrats was a gnawing consciousness of inferiority that could only be explained as shame at being a Monopoly aristocrat himself. The Grand Duke looked down on everybody except those who looked down on him – the gubernatorial classes, unpropertied, untitled, unnoticed by the media and often badly dressed, but wise in the ways of governance and exercising an influence which couldn’t be quantified but for that very reason attracted a near mystical envy and respect. For all his wealth and eminence, the Grand Duke had never met the Prime Mover of All the Republics, whose pronouncements, though delivered from an undistinguished address, were listened to the world over.

The Grand Duke was stung.

Secretly, his ambitions for his son were unbounded. The name of Origen could climb higher yet into the empyrean. Fracassus would build betting halls of such magnificence that only gods could afford to play in them. But after that … after that the Grand Duke looked to his son to Muck Out the Pig-Pen, seize the levers of power, and win for the House of Origen the mystical respect which had so far eluded it.

And then they’d see who’d spurn the advances of whom.

The Grand Duke did not lack realism. His was a republic within a republic, admired and emulated, yet for all its devotion to innocent indulgence, it had always had its critics – mumblers and fly-posters, half-day insurrectionists who sat down on rubber yoga mats and read their messages. There was no violence; it was hard to be angry outside the Palace of the Golden Gates. The building made people smile. They enjoyed looking up and feeling dizzy. Even the homeless liked to see where other people lived. But recently, encouraged by the success of the Artisanal Bread Riots, these demonstrations had got more boisterous. The Grand Duke was a lover of social platforms, but these too spread disaffection, stoking envy and encouraging the unhappy to pick publicly at one another’s scabs. Follow-my-leader discontent, he called it.

In one chill corner of the Grand Duke’s mind crouched calamity. The ladder was tall and the snake was slippery. You couldn’t count on staying at the top. But by the same logic, nor could the Prime Mover. Thus was the Grand Duke able to see, in the very thing he feared, the very thing he craved: the Pigs cleared out of the Pig-Pen and Fracassus atop the world.

Behind their hands, people close to the Palace said the Grand Duke’s natural optimism blinded him to the truth about his son’s character and abilities. Others thought he had shrewdly read the age and knew precisely what it demanded: the last person for the job could easily turn out to be the first person for the job.

The Grand Duchess was too wound around in sorrow to have a view about the infant Fracassus either way. She found him hard to like, and kept away from him as a kindness to them both.