Pussy

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 intructions 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 realization that the Republic was flooded – not with 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 circumances, 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 pigeon hole 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 fom 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 hundred-and-seventeenth 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 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 milk shake 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 brights 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 its 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 fff’s 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 I 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 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 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 Duchy 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’ 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 recognized 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 Duchesses’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 pean 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 hypothesized 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 pill-boxes 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 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 equalizing ‘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 ino 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.

Meanwhile, Fracassus frolicked pettishly on the arboreal roof terrace of the Palace of the Golden Gates without an apparent care in the world. The sun shone, the orchards grew big with trees, other towers sprouted all around without ever taking light from his, the servants brought whatever he desired, and only bouts of boredom – which he was unable to describe in words – cast a shadow on his happiness. Since he had no company his magnanimity was never tested, nor did he learn what it was to be mocked or teased. To relieve his feelings he sometimes pulled down the Lego edifices he’d built and threw the bricks off the roof. (Like Samson himself, Brightstar commented. A reference that was subsequenly pulled when an editor pointed out who Samson was.) At other times Fracassus tore the flowers in the flowers beds, but no gardener dared remonstrate with him about that. All living things were his and he could rip at them as he liked. When he looked in the mirror he saw what his mother – when she was in the country – told him he was, namely a beautiful boy with a cherub’s complexion and spun gold hair from which he would be able to make whatever shape his ingenuity fancied.

CHAPTER II Concerning a father’s fears and a tutor’s skirt

But then the time came, as it must in the life of every child, gifted or not, to be removed from the condition of baby celebrity – where every burp and bubble is taken as an earnest of future greatness – to the obscure literalism of the school room, where marks are awarded for performance and promise counts for nothing. Punching, biting, scratching and swearing, Fracassus descended from the roof terrace with its infinity pool, its sand pit, its swings and roundabouts, its giant television, its bar serving baby cocktails, hamburgers and candy floss, and the constant attendance of reporters and photographers from Brighstar, to the classrooms of the lower Palace, to questions, comprehension tests, and words. For Fracassus this was a tailspin into darkest hell. Words! Until now he had whimpered, exclaimed, ejaculated, and whatever he had wanted had come to him on a golden platter amid praise and plaudits. So why, he wondered – or would have wondered had he possessed the words to wonder with – the necessity for change? The enormity of the shock, for any child, of having to go from pointing to naming cannot be exaggerated. But for Fracassus, for whom to wish was to be given, it was as catastrophic as birth. To have to find a word to supply a need is to admit the difference between the world and you. Fracassus knew of no such difference. The world had been his, to eat, to tear, to kick. He hadn’t had to name it. The world was him. Fracassus.

He had had no friends. He was the Prince. Princes proper have no friends. Jago had been too preoccupied in his search for self to be a brother to him. And in a sense he didn’t have parents either. The Grand Duchess, when she wasn’t travelling on business with the Grand Duke, was locked in her reading room, turning pages and letting her mind drift. Reading was an auditory experience for her. The leaves of her favourite novels fluttered between her fingers and as they did she could hear the wind blow through the enchanted forest. Sometimes she would turn only to turn back again, letting the pages sigh to her of danger then of rescue, rescue then of danger, back and forth. The books she loved best were printed on the finest paper, as diaphanous as fairy wings. They might float from her they were so slight. But when she snapped a volume shut she could hear the castle gates crash closed. Hush! She was alone. Wild beasts prowled. Who would come to her assistance now? Help, help!

For all his ambitions for his son, the Grand Duke was barely any better acquainted with him. He was too absorbed in his idea of Fracassus to notice him in actuality.

It’s also possible he was frightened of him. The boy’s uncanny, he sometimes thought. He lacks charm, he lacks looks, he lacks humour, he lacks quickness, he lacks companionableness, and yet he’s arrogant! He didn’t doubt that these absences would one day be the presences that got Fracassus noticed, but until then the Grand Duke had to find a way to live with him as a father. This he did by travelling overseas as often as he could.

There was talk on every floor of the Palace about the meaning of this parental dereliction. Some of the servants tried to be sorry for the boy but their pity foundered on some quality in him that repelled affection in any form. The word ‘obnoxious’ was starting to be whispered in the lifts. Nox was a far-off colony of the Republic that was seldom visited. Its inhabitants were reported to be querulous and slow-witted and to have small hands. People disliked for those or a host of other reasons were thought of as obnoxious – coming from Nox. Could that have been the real reason the Grand Duke and Duchess kept their distance – that they too thought of him as a visitant from Nox?

Hitherto, with no one listening or keeping an eye open, with no one prepared to doubt that his brain brewed extraordinary mental projects and that he spoke of them in arcane tongues to people unequipped to understand, the absence in him of the wherewithal to construct a sentence or progress a thought had gone unnoticed.

Until now.

The tutors into whose hands he’d suddenly fallen, like a god toppling from high estate into a fiery lake of devils, grasped the enormity of their task at once. Fracassus was not only short of words, he seemed to be in a sort of war with them. Had he only been surly they would have employed methods designed to relax him, make him feel safe, and communication would soon have followed. But he already was, in his surly way, communicative. He would answer their questions. He would sometimes even essay something in the nature of rough play, though he would immediately shrink should anyone play rough games back. The problem was that he seemed to feel he could get by well enough with the words he had and any attempt to teach him more was an attack upon him personally. Furthermore, he failed to see, since his tutors had words and they could do nothing better with their lives than teach him, just exactly what words had to recommend them. Did he want to end up like them? He believed himself to be complete. Ineducable because there was nothing more he would need to know – and certainly nothing more these failures could ever teach him – for the life he intended to live.

‘You’re all prostitutes,’ he told them once.

And on another occasion, he called them ‘Whores.’

They didn’t know whether to commend him for his loquacity – prostitute was the longest word they’d heard him him use, and whore the most surprising – or discommend him for his misogyny.

As time went on and Fracassus’s education didn’t, his tutors acknowledged they were in a ticklish situation. They were paid handsomely to bring the boy up to scratch; alerting the Grand Duke and Duchess to the fact that scratch was still a long way beyond him would have been self destructive. Whose fault, in that case, was that? Who but they could be to blame? The argument they prepared in their own defence, without accepting that there was anything to defend, went as follows:

The chief architect of this argument had been Dr Cobalt, the only woman on the team of Fracassus’s tutors. A graduate of three universities and holding degrees in two soft subject and one middlingly-hard, Dr Cobalt was tall and slender like a snowy egret and made flustered men think longingly of the cool and even icy climates of the past. She had been the Grand Duke’s choice. Being masculinist by inclination – a hunter before he was strong enough to shoulder a rifle, a boxer before a glove tiny enough for his little fist could be found – Fracassus, his father believed, would surely benefit from contact with her gentler virtues. They all would. The Grand Duke, as evidenced by his taste in domestic architecture, was epithetical by nature. And everything about Yoni Cobalt suggested adjectives. She had long hair, big eyes, full breasts, and wore high heels. And every adjective cried out for an adverb. She had very long hair, very big eyes, very full breasts, and wore very high heels. That she could have been a very successful catwalk model or children’s television presenter made her decision to sacrifice herself to the bringing up of Fracassus the more estimable. Her senior on the tutorial staff, Dr Strowheim, commended her in moderation to the Grand Duke and Duchess, but repeated as though it were his own her argument that their son was enriched by what he didn’t know.

Whether Dr Cobalt was right to have mentioned to him and other members of the teaching staff that the Prince seemed more interested in looking up her skirt than in learning the difference between an active and a passive verb, was another matter. ‘It would depend,’ Dr Strowheim had jested, but with a distinct note of caution, ‘on how actively he looked.’

‘Pretty actively,’ Dr Cobalt said.

‘But it was only a look?’

‘As opposed to what?’

‘As opposed to a more physical exploration.’

‘It was only a look, though the last time he looked I did fear that it presaged—’

‘Then let’s say it was passive,’ the Doctor put in finally.

It did occur to him to suggest she wear trousers in the future, but trousers on women were implicitly banned in the Palace – the Grand Duchess was known not to own a pair – and, if he were to be honest about it, he would have missed the skirt himself.

CHAPTER III In which language is discerned to go backwards

Dr Cobalt slept badly as a rule, but on the night following her ingenious submission to the Grand Duke and Duchess that their son was brilliant by virtue of all that made him stupid, she didn’t sleep at all. The night was hot – that had something to do with it. There were mosquitoes in January, a month in which, once upon a time, it would have snowed. And her basement apartment in Origen Lower Mansions, which abutted the Great North Wall of the Republic, was stuffy and noisy. The air conditioning, which the management refused to service because there was no need of air-conditioning in winter, spluttered and wheezed. There was a low-level of continuous noise, too, from small protest groups camped outside the Mansions, voicing their entitlements, though it wasn’t always clear what they felt entitled to. Somewhere to live, seemed to be the sum of it. Whatever they could lay their hands on, Brightstar said. Promote rights instead of duties and this was the result. But it wasn’t the mosquitoes or the sound of people exercising their entitlement to feel entitled that kept her awake. It was guilt. She believed she’d failed in her pedagogic duties, failed the boy, failed his parents, and failed her sex. The words prostitute and whore had continued to make appearances in his conversation, though never in a context that rendered either of them appropriate. Otherwise wordless, he seemed to want to say these words simply for the sake of saying them, as though he heard an unholy music in them. Shouldn’t she, for his sake and, even more, for women’s, tackle him on this?

‘You can put your computer away, Your Highness,’ she told him one morning soon after her sleepless night, ‘and your play pad and your phones. Today we are going to have a game of synonyms.’

‘How do you play that?’

‘I’m going to give you a word and you’re going to give me another word that means the same. So if I say lesson…’

‘I say boring.’

‘Well, that’s more what you think of a lesson than another word for lesson. But let’s continue. So, if I say teacher…’

‘I say failure.’

If he were a man I’d throw burning tea into his face, Dr Cobalt thought. But she had to go on. Bait the line. Flick the rod. Reel him in. ‘Ok, so now let’s try woman.’

‘Ah no, not woman,’ he boomed. He knew the loudness of his voice irritated Dr Cobalt. Some mornings she had to get up in the middle of a lesson to take a pill. He gave her migraines. Though he liked looking up Dr Cobalt’s skirt he didn’t much like the rest of her. Behind her back he mimicked the way she put her hands over her ears and closed her eyes when his volume was too much at her. Once he’d seen a film on television in which a black servant, wanting to escape a telling-off, had run out of the kitchen with her apron over her head. He combined Dr Cobalt and the black servant in a routine that would have made him split his sides had he been capable of even callous merriment. ‘Oh, lordy, lordy,’ Dr Cobalt cried, lifting her skirts and covering her face with them. ‘Oh, lordy, lordy.’

Fracassus wished he had a friend to share this with. A girl, preferably taller than him, with custard yellow hair waterfalling down her back and false breasts, who would run around the room with him, mimicking Dr Cobalt, with her skirts over her head.

‘I’m waiting,’ Dr Cobalt continued. ‘Woman…’

He tilted his head and pushed his jaw out, something else he knew she found distasteful. It was surprising, even to himself, how much he knew about Dr Cobalt’s like and dislikes. He’d watched men on television panel shows expertly pressing women’s buttons. It wasn’t hard. You just had to know which faces to pull while they were speaking. ‘Girl,’ he said.

‘Anything else?’

‘Lordy, lordy.’

‘Lordy, lordy?’

‘Lordy lordy, Miss Scarlet.’

‘You’ve lost me there. Explain.’

‘Can’t.’

‘Why is it amusing you?’

‘You remind me, that’s all?’

‘I remind you of whom?’

He shrugged and dropped a pencil under the table.

Dr Cobalt knew what that was about. He was always dropping pencils under the table. ‘You can leave it there this time,’ she said. ‘Keep going. Another word for woman…’

She waited. And waited. Was he playing her? Had he rumbled her game? Come on, she thought. Come to momma. And at last he did.

‘Prostitute.’

‘Interesting. I believe I’ve heard you use that word before. But it doesn’t mean woman does it? A woman can be a prostitute but not every woman is a prostitute.’

‘Every prostitute is a woman, though.’

‘Well even that’s not true. You can have a male prostitute.’

‘Like a faggot?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Like what then?

‘We’ll come back to male prostitutes. Let’s stay with the women for now. What other words for prostitute do you know?’

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.

CHAPTER IV Concerning the part played by television in the education of a leader

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.’

‘I will talk to the Grand Duke about this,’ was the the Grand Duchess’s imperious reply. ‘But I shouldn’t have to remind you that you were hired to keep the world and its controversies out of my son’s education until he is ready for it, not thrust it upon him while he isn’t.’

Dr Strowheim would have liked to say that The Life and Loves of the Emperor Nero was hardly ‘the world and its controversies’, but he knew when to stay silent. He bowed and the Grand Duchess went off to discuss these developments with her husband.

In truth, she blamed him for the comatose state in which they found their son. Men and their gadgets! She had stood out against her husband’s digitilization of the palace, firstly on aesthetic grounds – she hated all those wires – and secondly because she believed it was a woman’s job to make the case for interpersonal relationships – too much time looking at screens, she believed, affected men’s ability to read emotions, and God knows they were bad enough at it already. But the Grand Duke had defeated her, as he always did. ‘One,’ he told her with triumphant patronage, there would be no wires; ‘These days, my dear Demanska, machines speak to one another wirelessly. It is quite marvellous, really, how technology has advanced. Which country was it that used to say it ruled the waves? I, my dear, no matter where I walk in the Palace, have only to punch a four digit password into any device I happen to be walking past, to rule the airwaves of the world. And all without a wire to be seen. That’s one. Two: reading emotions has gone far enough, in my opinion,’

He looked at her steadily and caressed her cheek. Forgive his cruelty in referring to this, but did they really want Fracassus to go in the direction of his older brother Jago, a child they no longer saw and seldom talked about but who had gone off the rails as a consequence of what the Grand Duke could only call empathy overload, reading emotions left, right and centre until he no longer knew which emotions were his own – his gender neither – and now lived they had no idea where or with whom as Joyce? No. Whatever his wife thought, he was not prepared to let that happen to Fracassus, even if it meant the boy getting fat, knowing nothing of interpersonality, and thinking he was Nero. Better Nero than Norma.

The mention of Jago always quietened Demanska Origen. Had he been her fault? Certainly he had been more her child than her husband’s, and more her child than Fracassus would ever be. Was it because she blamed herself for Jago’s defection that she had been less of a mother to his younger brother? Could it be that she had grown afraid of her power to sensitize? She tried to remember when she’d last looked Fracassus in the face. Yes, she’d praised his beauty. A mother had to do that. She had carried him in her womb. She had cried at his delivery. But had she ever truly looked deep into his eyes? Did she even know what colour his eyes were? But Jago, lovely Jago, she had known too well. How his face had lit up when she read to him of chocolate factories and magic schoolboys? His tutors had worried that he was still reading about the chocolate factories and magic schoolboys he’d loved at the age of nine or ten when he was nineteen or twenty, but Demanska Origen hadn’t minded that. She was still reading about them herself.

She brought her worries up at her reading group. Should she have encouraged Jago to read something else?

There was a long, troubled silence. They were all mothers of sons. Daughters would find their own way into literature, but the route was too thorny for boys, especially in the face of discouragement from their fathers. Jago wasn’t the only son to have lost his way. In recent years the craze for interpersonality – imported somehow from beyond the Wall, despite the strict protectionism in place – had wreaked havoc among young men. Fathers were afraid to pin medals on their son’s chests not knowing what they’d find. The reading group wasn’t clandestine exactly, but it was unclassified. The men knew of its existence and laughed among themselves. Women! Women and their feelings! But individually they feared it. What expressed itself as a feeling today expressed itself as a deviancy tomorrow.

The Grand Duke wasn’t the only one pressing for the Walls to be built even higher.

The mothers, too, knowing how suspiciously their meetings were viewed, were apprehensive. Women of supreme authority and confidence in other spheres of public life, they shook when they held a book and read to one another from it in quiet, childish voices. Demanska Origen’s question hardly did anything to settle their nerves. Something else! They shifted in their seats, rearranged their skirts, and exchanged anxious glances. Chocolate factories and magic schoolboys constituted a monotheistic faith. To wonder if there was something else to read about was like asking a Christian to take up worshipping the devil.

At last the Duchess of Oblaxa found the the courage to ask, ‘Such as?’

The next silence lasted until the end of the session.

Demanska Origen went home to some degree consoled. She had nothing to blame herself for. She could not have done other than she’d done. Sometimes you can over-excite a child’s imagination with literature. It’s a risk you have to take. If she’d done anything wrong it was only that.

CHAPTER V A painful chapter containing matters it were better to remain silent about

Renzo Origen was more concerned about Fracassus than he had let on to his wife. But for different reasons. If the boy had grown indolent and self-satisfied while he’d been away it was no great matter; a few rounds of golf now he was back would out that right. The off-handedness, similarly, didn’t much matter. He saw it as as a sort of teething, his son practising the incivility he’d need in later life. But there was such a thing as overdoing it. The Grand Duke was not himself a discourteous man. He tipped his caddy well and pretended to listen when his chauffeur told him of his troubles. But he knew that those at the bottom of an empire expected disrespect from those at the top and even loved them for it. It proved the efficacy of a system of which they were part. And since few people intended to remain where birth had placed them, it gave them something to look forward to. In the meantime, they connived in their own humiliation as though the longing to be returned to the condition of a slave was a given of their natures. What was a tyrant, when all was said and done, but the embodied will of the people? If Fracassus’s ambitions tended to the tyrannical, his father had no objection. But there were subtleties to be discerned in the early careers of even the most monstrous of despots. The people craved disrespect but you had to creep into their hearts first. Fracassus lacked finesse. He made enemies too quickly.

And then there was what his wife had reported to be the boy’s inclination towards the pornographic.

‘It is classical pornography, he’s been watching, Your Highness,’ Dr Strowheim had been at pains to point out.

‘Pornography’s pornography,’ the Grand Duke replied. ‘It has no place in the making of the sort of leader I intend Fracassus to be.’

This wasn’t primness speaking. It was what the Grand Duke called Fun-Politik. Pornography threatened innocent soft-core sexploitation. It handed the enemies of harmless good times a weapon.

To the boy himself, sitting him down in his office on the 180th floor and turning off every televison in the building, he set out his position.

‘I assume you know why I’ve brought you here,’ he said.

Fracassus pouted.

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes I do.’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Yes, father.’

‘So why have I brought you here?’

‘To whip my ass.’

‘I could have done that in your room.’

‘Then why did you bring me here.’

‘It’s because I don’t want your mother to overhear this conversation. You respect your mother, don’t you.’

‘When I see her.’

‘Are you missing her? Is that why you’re watching men doing filthy things to women?’

‘I’m not.’

‘So what are you watching?’

‘Nero.’

‘Why?’

‘I like him He makes people do what he wants.’

‘And do you think it’s right to make people do what you want?’

‘Right?’

‘Allowable? Kind? Fair?’

‘If you’re the boss.’

‘Do you ever feel sorry for these people?’

‘Why should I? They get what’s coming to them. It’s fun, seeing people scared.’

‘By people do you mean women?’

‘Some.’

‘And does this Nero make them do sexual things?’

‘Dad!’

‘Well?’

‘Some of them.’

‘And that turns you on?’

Fracassus buried his face on his father’s desk.

‘Listen,’ Renzo Origen went on. ‘It isn’t easy being a man. Especially a rich man. Women come on to you. They come on to me all the time. But you have to show them respect. You’ll be able to have all the women you like, but you don’t have to hurt them. Think of them as collectables rather than conquests. I’m not saying you shouldn’t let them know who’s boss occasionally. Woman like to be mastered. They say they don’t but take my word for it – they do. Nobody will mind that you’re red-blooded. Men will envy you and even militant women won’t hate you in their hearts. I’ve slapped many a feminist’s bottom, I can tell you. And been thanked for it. But don’t get into weird shit – you know what I mean?’

Fracassus raised his pinhole eyes and shook his head. It suddenly occurred to Renzo Origen, looking into his son’s plump vacancy, that he hadn’t understand a word that had been said to him.

‘Describe to me,’ he said, ‘what you think of when you see a woman.’

‘On television?’

‘In the flesh.’

‘I don’t see any women.’

‘You see your mother.’

‘Not often.’

‘What about Dr Cobalt? You see her.’

Fracassus was finding it hard to swallow.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘What do you think of when you see her?’

Nothing from Fracassus.

‘In one word.’

Fracassus scratched his head with one hand and patted his hair with the other.

‘You can tell me. I’m not going to be angry.’

‘Pussy,’ Fracassus said.

That was when Prince Origen decided it was time to rethink the direction his son’s education was taking and call in outside help.

CHAPTER VI In which it is agreed not to scare the horses

‘So that, not to conceal anything from you, Professor, is our problem,’ the Grand Duke declared, opening his hands as though to show his cabinet of painful secrets was now empty. ‘Our son is an orginal. He is the coming man. But it is hard to imagine him, as he is, soothing shareholders or buying off interest groups. Soon he will have media pouncing on his every word. He has to have words for them to pounce on. You may wonder why we are not sending him to college. I mean no disrespect to your profession, Professor, but the academy is not for everyone. It does not teach what we would wish him to learn, and what it does teach we would wish him not to. You wear your erudition lightly, Professor, but there are some it incapacitates for any job but incapitating others. Fracassus’s fulfilment will lie in giving pleasure not in causing pain.’

Professor Probrius smiled and made a pyramid of cogitation with his fingers. This had been one of the gestures that had cost him his job. ‘It would seem to me, Your Highnesses,’ he opined, ‘that you are of two minds about your son’s vocabulary. One the one hand you would like him to be capable of more sophisticated discourse, such as will flatter those who are of his party and persuade those who are not; on the other you fear, as any parent might, what infections he will pick up from language as it is commonly deployed by people aggressively unsympathetic to your way of life.’

‘You put it well,’ the Grand Duke replied, ‘though we are not backward-looking. A benign commercial plutocracy of play cannot be run on democratic lines, but where the people’s wants don’t run counter to our own, we indulge them. I am not their nanny, but in the matter of the few precious rights left to them after generations of Liberal interference – the right to smoke wherever they choose, the right to consume cheap fuel, the right to live in single-colour communities, the right to drink sugary drinks, the right not to have wind farms in their back gardens, the right to fritter away their life-savings at my gaming tables – I am their champion. I don’t scorn their tastes. They enjoy reality tv. So do I. So, I suspect, in your secret heart of hearts, do you, Pofessor. And if Fracassus is likewise entertained, where’s the harm? It keeps him on a level footing with those whose lives will one day be his to play with. It can only be a bonus if he speaks to them in words small enough for them to understand—’

‘Without,’ his wife interrupted, ‘meaning to imply that the people are deficient in understanding—’

‘Exactly,’ the Grand Duke continued. ‘Without meaning to imply any such thing. But when they discover how alike they are despite apparent differences, they will love him.’

‘But—’ interposed his wife again

Professor Probrius showed he was all attention.

‘But – but, he will not be loved by anyone, however small his words, unless he can express himself more sympathetically. He must at least learn to conceal the indifference he feels towards everybody but himself.’

‘My dear—’

‘No, Renzo, we must be honest. We have nurtured a brute.’

‘Not a brute.’

‘A brute!’

‘Because he doesn’t read, my dear…’

‘He does read. He reads the comics you buy him.’

‘Because he doesn’t read what you think he should read…’

‘I am his mother. I have a right to an opinion on his reading.’

The Grand Duke commended himself for not saying, in public, ‘And we know where that leads.’

‘What it comes to,’ he said instead, ‘is that the Grand Duchess and I want Fracassus to be brought up to speed, not just as a speaker but as a man, but not so up to speed – I’m sure you understand me – that he acquires concepts that are destroying our society. You should know that Fracassus has an older brother—’

‘No!’ cried the Grand Duchess.

‘Then maybe you should not know that Fracassus has an older brother. Forget I’ve said anything. But let us at the very least agree on this – personal experience has taught us that you can have too many words.’

The Professor nodded. He was familiar with the argument. ‘It is strange,’ he said, ‘that we have a derogatory term – pleonasm – for the use of more words than are strictly necessary, yet don’t have a laudatory term for the use of fewer words than are strictly necessary. But the truth is, it isn’t quantity that’s the issue. What we need to find for the Prince are the right words. And these we must select with sensitivity. There’s a saying in the teaching profession: don’t scare the horses. Of late we have been scaring them half to death. You tell me Fracassus doesn’t often, for security reasons, leave the 170th floor of the Palace; I fear the spirit of the times would reach him were he to live sealed up on the thousandth. He, too, we must treat as we would a frightened horse.’

Professor Probrius could not have answered more felicitously had he tried. For the Grand Duke and Duchess, the Prince’s employment of the wrong words was as much the problem as his having no words at all. Only recently, after the most minor altercation with his parents, Fracassus had pushed his face out, curled his lips back, and aimed at them, as though they were bullets, the words ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt.’

They had called the Royal physician who examined him over a period of weeks. ‘He has, Your Highness,’ the physician reported, ‘what I’d call Tourettes, only without the Tourettes.’

‘Will he get better?’ the Grand Duchess asked.

‘In the sense of will he extend his range of pejoratives? He might, Your Majesty.’

So Probrius’s proposal that they select the right words for the Prince with sensitivity was warmly welcomed.

‘And we think that you, Professor,’ the Grand Duke said, looking across to his wife for confirmation, ‘are just the person to sneak the right words in. I hope you won’t mind if I am kept abreast of the situation. I might have a few words of my own to suggest. And occasionally one or two I would like to see withdrawn.’

‘I too,’ the Grand Duchess said. There was a great sadness about her, Professor Probrius noticed. He wondered if she were homesick.

Or was there simply – given that the most sorrowful of spirit are the first to notice sorrow in others – a great sadness about him?

He bowed, all three shook on the arrangement, and the Grand Duchess took another selfie.

Professor Probrius was given a free hand with the disposal of Fracassus’s existing tutors. He dismissed them all with the exception of Dr Cobalt.

CHAPTER VII A wind blows through the Republic of Urbs-Ludus

Of the many perversities to which our species is subject, wanting the worst to happen is perhaps the strangest. Only wanting to be looked down on by the powerful comes close to it. Kolskeggur Probrius, though he personally wanted to be looked down on by nobody, did hope for the worst for everybody else. The violence visited on his Phonoethics course had left him embittered and vengeful. So the signs which he read in the wind that the university that had expelled him was a spent force – not just his university but every university – gave him a wicked pleasure. In its demise he espied his vindication. Anything he could do to speed the process up, he would.

He was a man who wet his finger and held it out to the wind. He liked to know which direction it was blowing from and relished being the first to warn of the damage it would do. In the ancient world he’d have been respected as a wind-prophet, but to moderns he was just a desponder. He had tried to prepare his university for what was coming – beware the people! – predicting that everything educators had ever meant by education – example, elucidation, emancipation, deliverance – would soon be scattered like dead leaves. He had proclaimed this at his Trial by Thumb. He might as soon have slit his throat on the steps of the Student Union. He pronounced ‘people’ without respect and down went half the thumbs. He pronounced ‘education’ with reverence and down went the other half.

He descended from his post in a waterfall of blood.

Well, none of it mattered any longer. The Republic wasn’t listening to its universities. They were beyond a joke. Even the most second-hand of the Republic’s comedians had stopped looking to safe-rooms and trigger warnings for comic material. The universities were abandoned cities. Single identity tribes wandered the corridors, speaking words the rest of the Republic didn’t recognize. They might as well have put bones through their noses, and some of them did.

Professor Probrius put his finger to the wind and read what it was saying. Soon, the purgers would be purged in a carnivalesque revolt against protected attitudes, correct ideas, all the things you were not supposed to say, all the things you were not supposed to feel, all the hard won decencies and easily enunciated pieties, all the sanctimony, all that was holier than thou, and with it all that was civilized. Gone – the victim of its own provocations – gone, on a day not far removed from this one, maybe in a year, maybe in ten years, but gone without a doubt, in one great gust of wind.

The sooner, Professor Probrius thought, the better.

He wasted no time settling into his new post. Before meeting Fracassus he thought it wise to exchange ideas with Dr Cobalt.

‘Yoni,’ she said, giving him her cheek.

‘Kolskeggur,’ he responded.

‘I gather from your sanguinity,’ she said, ‘that you haven’t yet had the pleasure of seeing the Prince with your own eyes.’

‘I haven’t. But his distraught parents have described him to me with some vividness.’

‘Nothing beats the real thing.’

‘I’m sure it doesn’t. You, I understand, have been here a number of years.’

‘Five. He was ten when I first had the pleasure. He hasn’t disappointed.’

They were in a coffee shop by the Eastern Wall and so had nothing to fear, they felt, from cameras or microphones. But even so – perhaps the precaution was a leftover from his university days – the Professor scanned the ceiling. ‘I gather,’ he said, ‘that you don’t exactly feel in loco parentis to the boy.’

Dr Cobalt screwed up her arctic eyes. ‘Even his parents don’t feel in loco parentis to the boy.’

‘Let me play the devil’s advocate. Aren’t we, in that case, obliged to feel sorry for him?’

‘Normally I would respect your advocacy. Empathy was one of my degree subjects. But there are times when the usual rules of pity don’t apply. I too once subscribed to the philosophy that a child is a blank canvass on which parents and society write their own messages. Before that, I even believed in the sacredness of the infant, trailing clouds of glory in the moment of his delivery into a harsh and Godless world. The Prince, I have to tell you, trailed a cloud of shit.’

Professor Probrius smiled and looked around him again, just to be sure. He couldn’t remember ever having liked a woman so much on first acquaintance. ‘I take it, then, that you don’t much…’ he began. They both knew the joke.

For her part she was surprised the Professor was not more affronted by what she had to say. She’d decided she would not hold back, though candour could easily cost her her job. She did not know what loyalties the Professor was bringing to his appointment. She had read some of the papers he had written, from which it was impossible to deduce what kind of man he was personally. Pedantic, of course. But then so was she. A teacher who wasn’t pedantic wasn’t a teacher. So she had hopes for him. But she was taken aback, nonetheless, by the alacrity with which he embraced her view of the task before them. He even appeared to be energized by how much they would have to do to make a human out of a monster for whom not a shred of pity could be found.

That said, he was evidently not himself prepared to be as outpoken as she was. How could he be, given that he was yet to meet the boy? But she felt that reserving judgement was and would go on being his modus operandi. Fine with her, so long as her modus operandi could go on being revulsion.

‘I should warn you before you meet him,’ she said, ‘to be prepared for how ugly he is.’

‘I think you’ve already conveyed that.’

Was he being stern with her after all? Her tongue, she knew, could run away with her. Especially when she was out of the Palace of the Golden Gates.

‘I don’t mean morally ugly. I mean facially ugly. One can escape a person’s ugliness by looking in to their eyes. There at least there might be beauty. Bu Fracassus has no eyes to speak of. It could be because he sees imperfectly that he juts his jaw out. His natural movement is a forward projection of a sort I’ve only even seen on a bewildered primate. And if his jaw’s too big for his head, his head’s too big for the rest of him, which is ironic considering how little is in it.’

‘I have to say this is not the impression I get from his parents. His mother talks of him as a beautiful boy.’

‘Parental love is blind.’

‘I thought you said his parents are unable to love him.’

Yoni Cobalt crossed her legs and slowly brought one wing of her long split skirt over her knees. The swish made Probrius feel just a little light-headed.

‘They don’t love him,’ she said, ‘in the sense that you and I use the word love. But the immoderately wealthy, like the monarchs of earlier times they emulate, are biologically programmed to look upon whatever issues from their loins, as with whatever issues from their wallets – offspring are just another investment, are they not? – as perfect. Imperfect doesn’t compute with the success they have made of their lives. Not to love what they give birth to is not to love themselves. That’s why you and I are here. They fear there’s been a fracture in the pipes. They can smell the shit. It’s our job to fix the plumbing.’

Professor Probrius laughed. Yes, without doubt, he had never liked as woman so much, not only on first acquaintance, on any acquaintance.

CHAPTER VIII The end of stupidity

‘Consider this, Your Highness,’ Professor Probrius told Fracassus on their first morning together, ‘as a getting-to-know-you session. But first, if Your Higness has no objection, I’ll open a window.’

‘You can’t.’

‘You mean you won’t let me?’

‘You can’t. There are no windows. It’s to stop people jumping out.’

‘So how do you get fresh air?’

‘I don’t want fresh air.’

‘What if somebody who isn’t you wants fresh air?’

‘They can go somewhere else.’

‘Do any of your father’s buildings have fresh air?’

‘Ask him.’

‘What about when you build? Will your towers have windows that open?’

Fracassus couldn’t hide his impatience. ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt,’ he said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Is this an interview?’

‘I’m curious, Your Highness, that’s all. I’ve read that you are looking forward to working with your father on a new casino with golf courses and saunas and giant televisions in the pools, and I wonder if they’ll have windows that open?’

‘So that people can throw themselves out when they’ve lost their money?’

‘Would that bother you?’

‘Not if they’ve paid the bill.’

Professor Probrius paused to write something down in his notebook. ‘Talk to me about yourself,’ he said, putting his pen down.

‘Like what?’

‘Well you tell me. Who are you?’

‘I’m me.’

‘You are, but remember I don’t know you yet. What are your interests? What do you like to do in your spare time?’

‘Not prostitutes again…’

Professor Probrius looked alarmed. ‘Explain that to me.’

‘Dr Cobalt likes me to talk about prostitutes.’

‘Likes? Are you sure? When did she last talk to you about prostitutes?’

‘She didn’t talk to me about prostitutes. She wanted me to talk to her about prostitutes.’

‘And what did you tell her.’

‘That I know nothing about prostitutes.’

‘And what did she tell you?’

‘I can’t remember. Other words. Dr Cobalt is crooked.’

‘That’s a serious charge.’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell my father. He’d lock her up if I did.’

‘Would you like her to be locked up?’

‘I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what she does. She’s a failure like all teachers.’

‘You think I’m a failure?’

‘I don’t know you yet. Probably.’

‘Well let’s get back to knowing you.

Fracassus was sitting in an executive chair at an executive desk in front of an executive sized television monitor. He had, to Probrius’s eye, the look of a small monarch of a country that had no population. ‘Perhaps we should have that off,’ Probrius suggested.

‘I always have it on.’

‘Well for today, let’s try without.’

Fracassus tapped his keyboard. On all two hundred and seventy floors of the Palace monitors coughed and went to sleep. If he couldn’t watch he didn’t see why anyone else should.

‘Ok, well that might be a good place to start,’ Probrius said. ‘Why do you always have your television on?’

‘I like watching it.’

‘Do you have any favourite programmes?’

‘Wrestling. Wars. And people being told to do stupid things.’

‘Who by? Comedians?’

‘Sometimes. And hypnotists. There was someone on like you a few nights ago. An uptight guy. So this hypnotist gets him to take his clothes off and crawl around the floor and bark like a dog.’

‘And you enjoyed that?’

‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘What else do you enjoy?’

‘The guy who makes my bed. He’s spastic. He’s all right when he’s making the bed but when you speak to him he’s like – ‘ Fracassus did his imitation of a badly strung marionette to show Probrius what Megrim was like. He let his tongue loll out and dribbled.

‘Aren’t you sorry for him?’

‘Why should I be? He’s lucky to have a job. That’s it.’

‘Tell me about the last thing you saw on television.’

‘It was a thing about Nero.’

‘Not the coffee shop, presumably.’

‘I don’t know any coffee shops. I’m not allowed out.’

Probrius tried a little ingratiation. ‘Maybe we can fix that,’ he said.

Fracassius seemed not to care. ‘Out’ interested him, but ‘out’ with a Professor did not.

‘So the Roman Emperor Nero?’

‘Him. Yeah.’

‘And you liked that why?’

‘The naked Roman hookers.’

‘You’re only saying that to shock me. Was that how you got round to the subject with Dr Cobalt?’

‘You seem interested in Dr Cobalt.’

‘She’s my colleague.’

‘Lord, lordy,’ Fracassus said.

‘I don’t know what that means.’

Having done his spastic marionette, Fracassus could see no reason not to do his horripilated black Mammy. ‘Lordy, lordy, Miss Scarlet.’

‘I don’t recognize who you’re being.’

‘You should watch more television.’

Professor Probrius was content to leave it at that. They’d made satisfactory progress, he thought.

Sipping cold lemonade, Professor Probrius reported a censored version of the morning’s conversation to Dr Cobalt. ‘Well, whatever else he is or isn’t, he’s not a pushover,’ he said, wiping the perspiration out of his eyes.

‘I’ve been thinking the same,’ Dr Cobalt said. She too was finding the winter weather oppressive. ‘Do you think there could be some sewer rat cunning there?’

They were eating an organic salad in a restaurant that had a lot to say for itself – a resturant with a pleonastic menu, it amused him to think – at the far side of the city. Probrius had not wanted to go there because it was frequented by university people and he did not want to see anyone he knew and answer questions about what he was doing now. But it was a favourite of Yoni Cobalt’s and all things considered he didn’t mind being seen with her.

‘I’m not inclined to think so,’ he replied. ‘In my experience we feel we have to grant some atom of intelligence, even if it’s only vermin intelligence, to the very stupid. It’s a way of castigating ourselves for thinking of them as stupid in the first place. Once it was a mark of civilization to revel in the inanities of fools and blockheads. Now we worry about what made them blockheads in the first place – an unfair education system, some abuse suffered in childhood, a bang on the head. With blame culture comes the end of stupidity as a concept. I find it regrettable, myself, that no fool is allowed to attain his full-blown folly entirely on his own.’

Dr Cobalt put aside her salad. Probrius had gently alluded to the prostitution test she’d set Fracassus some months more – he wasn’t prying: just curious – and the memory of it was still painful to her. Violation Studies had been another of her subjects at university. Probrius could laugh, but violation wasn’t funny. There’d been violation the day she’d listed all the words she knew for prostitute. Of that she had no doubt. The question was: who had violated whom?

‘Whatever the word for it,’ she said,’ the thing he did, the thing he made me do, was damnably clever. And it’s you who’s just said he’s no pushover.’

He stretched out a hand and laid it on hers. ‘No pushover, no. But nor is a wild dog when it’s cornered. As for the thing you said he made you do, I think you’re attributing to him what’s essentially yours. It was you who made you do it. Feeling you’ve been had is your act. The more sophisticated we are, the more we we feel we must grant sophistication to a fool. The besetting sin of our times…’

Hearing himself, he paused. Is this another fine mess my punditry’s getting me into, he asked himself. He wished he had an easier manner. He wished he had fewer degrees. He wished he were more of a wild dog himself. He threw the Doctor an apologetic look. He was sorry for spoiling their little tête-à-tête repast.

But he had forgotten that Dr Cobalt had a number of degrees of her own. And he didn’t yet know that she had a soft spot for pedants. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘what’s the besetting sin of our times? I’d better know in case I’m inadvertently committing it.’

‘I doubt it, my dear.’ And he was away again. ‘What it comes to, in my estimation, is that we liberals find it so hard to bear the space we see in the minds and hearts of the ignorant that we fill it with our own compunctions. We are only this far’ – he showed her the edge of his knife – ‘from maintaining that the stupid are more intelligent than the clever.’

‘Christianity got there a long time ago,’ Dr Cobalt reminded him.

‘You aren’t going to tell me Fracassus is a holy fool.’

‘He’s a holy little shit. But…’

CHAPTER IX In which Fracassus is taught an important lesson about tax avoidance and has a bright idea

The Grand Duke invested a day a week into the commercial education of his son. ‘Quality Time’ was the expression some fathers used to describe the intimate hours they devoted to their children; the Grand Duke called his days off with Fracassus ‘Quantity Time’ – a quiet opportunity for them to sit down together and discuss how much they were worth.

As a rule, these days would begin with the Morning Story, a short extract from the Grand Duke’s own favourite business literature, some mornings Adam Smith, others Dale Carnegie, and occasionally a page or two the Grand Duke had written himself. He had talked for years about gathering his thoughts on acquisition and development into a small and beautifully bound volume, but nothing had come of it. Among his hopes for the future was that one day he and the Prince would write it together. In the meantime, he read passages aloud – sometimes the same passages – with which the Prince seemed most in tune. A chapter entitled How To Get Away With Getting Your Own Way was a particular favourite.

It touched the Grand Duke to see his son sitting at his desk and cradling his cheek in his hand while he read to him about the ins and outs of avoiding rent control or removing a troublesome tenant. It would have reminded him of the early days of parenthood when, tucked up in bed, the infant Prince would close his little bullet-hole eyes and ask to hear a story – would have reminded him of such days had they only happened. I haven’t been the best of fathers, the Grand Duke admitted to himself, vowing to do better while knowing he wouldn’t.

No excuses, but he wasn’t in the best of health. Overseeing the building of the Origen ziggurat, golf, and the tragic circumstances surrounding Jago had taken their toll. The Grand Duchess, too, was fragile and, when she wasn’t locked away with her susurrating fairy stories, she needed his attention and devotion. The future held its breath for Fracassus.

This was not a parochial ambition. If the Grand Duke wasn’t in the best of health, neither was the Republic. Neither was the world. When he said the future held its breath for Fracassus he didn’t just mean the future of the House of Origen. He meant the future of the planet.

But he wasn’t going to rush things. He understood his son’s education architecturally, starting from the bottom, a floor at a time. First to the top wasn’t always the winner. Hold the ladder steady; mind the snakes. For the moment at least, the Prime Mover could sleep easy.

Some days, after the Morning Story, the Grand Duke would take the Prince to inspect their properties. On his early visits Fracassus had liked going up and down in the lifts, counting how many floors he owned. Now his pleasures were of a more sophisticated kind. He liked calculating how many people he owned.

On this day, the Grand Duke had planned a visit to the Nowhere Palace of New Transoxiana. It was situated on an artificial beach whose sands were of surpassing softness, sands the colour of his wife’s hair, on an offshore artificial island outside the Walls of the Republic and reachable from it only by a secret underground tunnel. Other titled personnages were allowed to use this tunnel but only the Grand Duke had a key. Fracassus had never visited this isolated section of the Wall before and was surprised to see his father putting his ear to it, as though listening to its heart beat. They had travelled to the Southern Wall without attendants, just the two of them, father and son, and if not exactly in disguise, not exactly in full regalia either. Fracassius watched as his father continued his doctorly exploration of the Wall’s chest, tapping it and listening. Eventually, a tiny aperture appeared and into this the Grand Duke inserted a bronze key. A door opened, just wide enough for one person to enter at a time. It was dark when the door shut behind them. The Grand Duke carried a torch but shone it only when they lost their footing. He wanted the experience to be both a learning adventure and a rebirth for his son. Fracassus didn’t do metaphor and was bored. He reached for his phone. ‘You won’t get a signal down here,’ his father told him. ‘Who were you going to ring, anyway?’ ‘I wasn’t going to ring anyone. I was going to check the weather.’ ‘We’re in a tunnel. There is no weather.’ No weather? Fracassus was frightened. He’d seen a television programme in which a father took his son to the top of a mountain to slit this throat but then God stepped into to stop him. Not a great storyline but he liked it when the father slit a ram’s throat instead. If his father was planning something similar, where was the ram? It frightened him to be without a signal.

‘You still haven’t told me where you’re taking me,’ he said.

‘Off-shore.’

‘I didn’t know we had a shore.’

‘We don’t. We have the idea of a shore and I’m taking you to the idea of off it.’

Ideas frightened Fracassus. ‘Does it have a name?’

The Grand Duke lowered his voice. ‘Avoiding tax. Not to be confused with evading tax. Evasion we’ll discuss next week.’

‘No, I meant does where we’re going have a name.’

‘The Republic Outside the Walls of the Republic.’

‘So is this abroad?’ Fracassus had never been abroad.

‘It’s not abroad when you’re there, but it is when you’re here. It’s what accountants call abroad. Wait till you see it…’

‘Abroad?’

‘No, the Nowhere Palace. A building that is ours when we say it is, and not ours when we say it isn’t. A building whose magnificence adds lustre to the Republic’s reputation but not its treasury. Not everything, my son, can be judged by the financial contribution we make. Sometimes we do what we do for the pure beauty of doing it, even if that means keeping a little something back for ourselves.’

Fracassus remained silent. He had been in the dark for long enough. But then daylight began to pour into the tunnel and the excitement of arrival seized him. He would have liked it to be abroad, but off-shore would do. So this was what his father meant by beauty. He thought he could smell the sea. Off-shore! – why, even the sky was bluer. The Grand Duke nudged him. Look! There were only a few seconds for his eyes to adjust before Fracassus saw it, a great gaudy flower of steel and glass, growing out of the sand, a purple pyramid bearing the name ORIGEN in the usual gold lettering, and then THE NOWHERE PALACE.

Fracassus held his breath. Coloured lights danced before his eyes. At the entrance to the pyramid was a winking crystal Sphinx.

‘Classy or what?’ the Grand Duke said, gripping his son’s arm.

‘Classy,’ Fracassus agreed. He had never used the word before and liked the shape of it in his mouth. Classy – it seemed to open a whole new world of sensation to him. It made his mouth moist. It made his cheeks hot. Classy It was as though he’d swallowed the softest of chocolates.

They entered a great amethyst atrium. It was like a giant cage for jungle birds. Parrots, macaws, toucans. Fracassus had watched a nature programme about killer birds. For a moment he thought there must have been real birds there, then he realised their calls were being piped through loud speakers, which was even better. ‘What do you think?’ his father asked.

‘Classy,’ the Prince said.

‘The world’s top retailers fight to get a space here,’ his father said. ‘Tiffany, Cartier, Chanel.’

‘Is there a Cafe Nero?’ Fracassus asked.

‘No Cafe Nero. We wouldn’t have Cafe Nero here. We have Nespresso. Now let’s look at the gaming room.’

This was the biggest play area Fracassus had ever seen, even bigger than the roof garden on which he’d rolled as an infant, asking for the world and receiving it. He was sorry he’d used up all his words. If the entrance to the casino was classy, what was this?

Extra classy.

So many play tables under a single roof inlaid with gold leaf, but, more marvellously, so many players, some dressed as though for the opera, others as though they’d just come from behind a counter selling washing powders, women beautiful and plain, men sophisticated and awkward, some of either sex accustomed to throwing money around, others flat broke and apprehensive – a great, classless party of gamesters who would in no other place or circumstance find themselves together, divided by the urgency of their needs, united in the single fantasy of winning enough to make need yesterday’s bad dream. Fracassus looked around him. The wheels turned, the balls jumped, croupiers employed rakes to push cards about like hot coals, one-armed bandits lit-up and whirred, numbers and colours were called, men punched the air, women cried out, one threw what few chips were left to him in a rubbish bin on which the word Origen was stamped in gold leaf.

‘Mine,’ Fracassus thought. ‘My off-shore midnight palace. My party. My kingdom.’

Was this how humanity appeared to God when he looked down on it from heaven? That very question was posed in the Republic’s infancy by Lodj Chjarrvak, the Republic’s only thinker, just before he drove his car into the Wall. ‘A mortal shouldn’t own a casino,’ he had pronounced as he strapped himself in. ‘It makes him mad.’ But no one told Fracassus this.

He slid into the great off-shore garden of his thoughts where fortunes were won and lost, where killer birds called to one another through speakers, where he remembered his mouth softening around the sibilants of classy. Blood rushed to his lips.

The Grand Duke looked at him with satisfaction. If he wasn’t mistaken, this was the first sensual experience of his son’s life.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. It wasn’t a real question. He just wanted to hear Fracassus say he was happy.

‘I think I have an idea, father,’ the Prince replied after a while. He appeared to have been concentrating hard.

‘What idea, my son?’

‘There are men here with winnings to burn, right?’

‘Right.’

‘And others with sorrows to drown?’

‘That’s also unfortunately true.’

‘Don’t you think we could do more for them?’

‘You aren’t, I hope, talking about psychological counselling.’

‘No. Pole dancing.’

The Grand Duke took the boy in his arms. This was the moment he’d been imagining from the day his son was born. Their first business conversation. ‘I think that’s a brilliant concept,’ he said. Then quickly threw in a qualification. ‘But no touching. We don’t want to fall foul of the feminists on the Licensing Board. And don’t imagine you’re going to run it.’

‘Why not?’

‘We have grander plans for you.’

‘Such as?’

‘You will discover in time.’

‘When in time?’

‘When your education is complete. And when you’ve travelled. I went to Egypt, China and beyond the Urals for my inspiration. The Nowhere Palace wasn’t born in a day, and didn’t grow out of my mind only. You too must travel.’

‘Can I go to Ancient Rome.’

‘We shall see, my son. We shall see.’

The Grand Duke walked back through the tunnel in a state of high agitation. The trip had gone better than he’d dared hope and he didn’t want to spoil the moment. He didn’t speak the whole time they were underground and wouldn’t let Frascassus speak either. But on coming out again into the Republic he risked giving shape to his thoughts. He looked up to the heavens and breathed the air. It wasn’t clean, but what was? Done, he said to himself. That was the mercantile side of his son’s education taken care of. The ambition tree had been planted. Henceforth, cupidity would water it.

Now all he had to do was fix the politics.

CHAPTER X How a weather man brought sunshine into the Prince’s heart

Sometimes, when a great man wants something enough, the gods or whatever name we know them by, assemble and agree to bestow it upon him. Such was the divine favour enjoyed by the Grand Duke that no sooner had he said the word ‘politics’ to himself than they came upon a commotion in the streets which only the practice of democratic politics could explain.

Another plebiscite presumably. The Grand Duke held himself aloof from people politics. Plebiscites had wreaked havoc upon the Republic once upon a time but they had become so common that he knew to take no more notice of them. The people exercised their power and whatever it was they’d voted for was forgotten in the euphoria of their exercising it. The next day things returned to normal.

But voting still drew large crowds. It was like a carnival. Cars hooted in support of their side and other cars hooted back. Some drivers succeeded in tooting their horns so expressively it was as though a whole ironic conversation of automobiles was in progress. Professor Probrius, out shopping with Dr Cobalt, heard it and thought of the Persian poem The Conference of the Birds. The birds, finding themselves without a king, go in search of a bird who might be suitable. Might cars one day do the same, he wondered. They were driving themselves already. It wasn’t fanciful to suppose they would soon be casting votes. And with no less acumen, he thought sourly, than their drivers. Dr Cobalt was on his arm. She knew of several other medieval works in which animals sorted out the tricky issue of government. Professor Probrius delighted in her knowledge. ‘A particular favourite of mine, also Persian as it happens,’ she went on, ‘is How The Lions Deposed their King and Instituted Constitutional Democracy.’ Professor Probrius said he hoped she knew of a good translation, or was proficient enough in Farsi, for them to enjoy reading it together. She didn’t have the courage to tell him she’d made it up.

Fracassus, meanwhile, was revelling in a freedom he rarely enjoyed. For five minutes in the Nowhere Palace he thought he’d found his Nirvana, but now the tumult of election stimulated his fickle mind. He had no idea what the people were voting for. It was the uproar that aroused him, the flags, the cheering, the atmosphere of combat. He had never seen a crowd before, except from the seventieth floor of the Palace. Close up, it was another event entirely. He couldn’t have known that people massed could generate such heat, or affect the way the very light was refracted. Was the ground shaking or was that his blood moving quicker through his veins? It was as though one of his favourite television programmes had come alive on the streets. Nero could have ridden through on a chariot. Fracassus heard the citizens hailing him. Hail Nero! Hail Fracassus!

Some among the throng put radios to their ears, though Fracassus didn’t know whether that was to drown out the noise of the plebiscite or get more news of it. Vans with loud hailers toured the streets. Two buses faced off in the square, each flashing graphs and figures on giant screens, the same sum appearing now as profit, now as loss, now as what the electorate stood to gain from war, now as what armed conflict with one or other of the sister Republics beyond the Wall would cost them.

Fracassus wanted to know which bus to support. Which side would the Emperor Nero have been on?

The Grand Duke had misgivings. By politics – the politics of which it was time Fracassus gathered some awareness – he didn’t mean supporting one side or another. An overview was what he wanted for his son, an ability to use words like liberty and freedom and know in a rough sort of way what they meant; how, again in a rough sort of way, they should sound; and why, in a more precise sort of way, they were never to be granted. But he didn’t want Fracassus dirtying his hands by actual association. War or Peace? Without being especially enamoured of Peace, no one took the prospect of War seriously. It was just another occasion for a referendum. They might as well have been deciding between meat or fish for lunch. But that was still no reason for Fracassus to be down there mixing with the proponents of either. He was glad, at least, that they had come out without their regalia. Despite the heat he turned up his coat collar and advised Fracassus to do the same. This was not a place for a Grand Duke and his son to be seen.

‘You don’t have to support any bus,’ he said.

‘But which is true?’

There it was, the very thing the Grand Duke feared. Truth! Soon his son would be wearing the flat cap of revolution, loading the bus with explosives and driving it at the Palace.

‘That depends on your angle of vision,’ he said.

‘Well I like the red bus better than the blue bus,’ Fracassus said. ‘It’s got more people around it.’

A scrawny old gentlemen standing by them in the crowd overheard him. Until now he’d been waving his stick at the red bus and cackling. He had wild hair and carried a plastic shopping bag stuffed with papers. Fracassus wondered if he was a soothsayer. In every episode of The Life and Loves of the Emperor Nero a soothsayer appeared wearing rags and waving a stick. There must have been thousands of them in Ancient Rome. ‘You like red better than blue,’ he said, turning his wild eyes on the Prince. ‘That’s the most intelligent political statement I’ve heard all day. Do you hear that, Philander’ – he was shouting now at the Advocate for War, unless he was the Advocate for Peace, addressing the crowd through a loud hailer from the open top of the red bus – ‘I’ve got someone here who understands your message. Better red than dead. Ha!’

The old man threw back his head and cackled again. Fracassus thought his neck might snap. In the Life and Loves of the Emperor Nero the Emperor made a practice of snapping soothsayers’ necks with one hand. He did it with a little twisting gesture, like screwing the top off a bottle. There were schools in the Republic where kids entertained one another in the playground copying that gesture. Bonum nox noctis, you old fart. Snap! Pity poor Fracassus who, having no such friends to play with, had to make his own entertainment.

‘Let me tell you something,’ the old man said, turning again to Fracassus as though surprised to see him still there, ‘a father should never live to see his son grow up. Look at him up there, the fraud, grinning like a choirboy and spewing excrement. He was all excrement when he was a baby and he’s all excrement again. I wish it would blow back down his loud hailer and choke him. Can you hear what he’s saying? The Republic is in danger. Ask him who from and he’ll give you a different answer every day. Today it’s the Republic of Gnossia. They’re going to steal our jobs and rape our women, he says. Have you ever been to the Republic of Gnossia? They have full employment and their women are ten times more beautiful than ours. They would rather impale themselves on the Wall than even visit us. Do you know how I know that? He told me. What do you say to that?’

Fracassus was not accustomed to conversing with strangers. He felt himself colour. He ransacked his intelligence for an answer. He was about to say ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt,’ when he remembered the word he’d learnt that very day. ‘Classy,’ he replied in panic, jutting his jaw.

The soothsayer went wild with excitement, rolling his head so that his hair flew in all directions, gesticulating with his stick, laughing crazily. ‘Do you hear that, Philander – he thinks you’re classy. Another one! And all because I paid for you to have a private education.’

Hearing his name called, the Advocate raised his hand. For a split second he resembled a schoolboy waving to his father from the steps of his school. Fracassus had never been to school or even seen one but he had, without pleasure, watched repeats of Brideshead Revisited on television. All faggots.

The old soothsayer must have read his mind. ‘My fault, all my fault,’ he rambled on. ‘I should never have sent him there in the first place. An academy for scoundrels who speak a smattering of Latin, that’s all it is.’ Then, taking Fracassus by the arm, ‘Come on, come with me and we’ll meet him. He can’t resist an opportunity to demonstrate his charm on someone new. Hey, Philander, give your voice a rest and meet your new fan. He’s a nobody and he looks too young to vote so there’s no advantage to you in talking to him. That should appeal to your sense of the topsy-turvy. Don’t do what’s worth doing, do what isn’t. Your old school motto – Quid debeamus facere oppositum. Come down from your lying battle bus and tell this boy what you’re going to do when you win the vote even though you won’t.’

To the Prince’s acute embarrassment, the Advocate – son or no son, excremental liar or truth-teller – descended and was among them. In a matter of seconds he had pushed through the adoring crowd and was pumping Fracassus’s hand as if it were some magic trick and he the magician.

Fracassus was immediately star-struck. He knew who was pumping his hand. He’d seen him countless times on television, reading the weather forecast. So soothsaying ran in the family. The famous need only one name and Philander was his. No other weather forecaster in the Republic was better known or more loved. Not for the quality of his prognostications but for his looks, the pre-pubescent face, the mischievous smile, the collop of hair the same lemon custard colour as the Grand Duke’s, the Grand Duchess’s, and Fracassus’s own. But above all for the gleam of what critics of him called his mendaciousness. Every grin a lie, they said. But how could one complain when every lie came companioned with a grin.

Fracassus didn’t watch television to pass judgement. It was true that Philander’s forecasts were rubbish. Sun all day tomorrow he’d promise and Fracassus knew for a certainty it would rain. The channel kept him on because the viewing figures went through the roof with every deception. Fracassus was not alone in feeling singled out by him, joined, just the two of them – one behind the screen, one in front of it – in the seductive knowledge of falsehood. Of course it would be dry when he’d promised showers. Facassus loved looking out of his window and seeing the Republic bake in Philander’s empty promises.

The Prince didn’t understand how he could enjoy being lied to, but he did. And evidently voters, in all likelihood not knowing what they were voting for, felt the same. Lie to us, lie to us. The first falsehood was like a declaration of love. The second a proof of it. After that – but after that didn’t matter. After that Philander had skedaddled.

Fracassus let his hand melt in the weatherman’s. Philander here, in front of him. Philander, whose pink, powdered fingers would caress the weathermap with a strange, indecent incompetence, as though he were one baby undressing another. The Great Philander, undressing him.

‘It’s true what my old dad’s telling you,’ Philander said. ‘I don’t know what he’s told you, but I guarantee you it’s true. Every bit of it. Everything’s true.’ His eyes met Fracassus’s. The boy swam in their treacherous blueness. Tomorrow temperatures could reach 97 degrees, and lo! there was a blizzard. A calm night and every tree in the Republic would be uprooted. ‘Say it after me, Everything’s true.’

‘Everything’s true,’ Fracassus repeated as though in a swoon.

‘You’d better believe it,’ the scrawny soothsayer shouted.

‘So can I count on your vote?’ the weatherman asked Fracassus.

‘I don’t have a vote,’ the Prince said.

‘Age the problem?’

‘Rank.’

‘Rank! So much the better. Things rank and gross in nature…’

‘Give him your pitch anyway,’ the old said. ‘Don’t send him away empty handed.’

‘Everything’s true,’ Philander said again, ‘not because it is, but because I say it is.’

Fracassus didn’t have to be told to repeat it this time. ‘Everything’s true because you say it is.’

During its short time in Philander’s grip Fracassus’s hand had felt like a fireball. Released, it was as a hailstone.

The Grand Duke, having lost Fracassus in the crowd, had waited anxiously for his return. ‘So what was that all about?’ he asked when the Prince reappeared, orange faced and his hair somehow enfolded into itself like a napkin at a banquet.

Fracassus shrugged. They began to walk home in silence, then Fracassus said, ‘Do you know what I really want?’

Cold terror gripped the Grand Duke’s heart. Was Fracassus going to say he wanted to make war? Was he going to say he wanted to make peace?

‘What, my son?’ All his hopes waited on the Prince’s answer.

‘To be a weatherman.’

The Grand Duke breathed again. His son had had his first smell of politics and not been seduced by ideology into supposing it could be separated from light entertainment.

He slept well that night. His son’s future was secure. This morning a pimp, this afternoon a Weatherman, tomorrow the world.

CHAPTER XI A short chapter concerning bricks and mortar

Buoyed by his success in getting Fracassus to take more interest in his properties, the Grand Duke gave him a hundred acres of land and told him he could build whatever he wanted.

Fracassus drew a picture of a Roman amphitheatre.

The Grand Duke discussed the implications of this with his wife. ‘It isn’t necessarily,’ he said, ‘what it seems.’

‘Nothing is,’ the Grand Duchess said. ‘But this just might be.’

‘For all you know he might intend it as a children’s park.’

‘With swings and roundabouts to torture traitors on?’

‘I think he has made provision for a sand pit in his plans.’

‘Renzo, that will be to soak up the gladiators’ blood.’

They called Fracassus into their presence and asked him how he saw the amphitheatre operating. He pushed his chin out in the manner of Nero and inverted his thumb.

‘Who do you plan to kill there?’ the Grand Duke asked. He was giving his son a chance. Go on, show your mother how absurd her fears are.

‘Christians,’ he said.

‘Fracassus, this is a Christian country.’

‘Jews, then. I don’t know… Muslims… Humanitarians.’

‘Humanitarians aren’t a religion.’

‘We could still throw them to the lions.’

Was he joking? The Grand Duke scrutinised his son’s expression. Had there been room enough for light in his eyes, it would have been easier to tell. But no, not joking. And yet he was not in deadly earnest either. It was as though Fracassus inhabited some hitherto undiscovered zone between meaning what he said and not meaning what he said. Ambiguity, was it? No, ambiguity took cognizance of alternatives. The zone Fracassus inhabited appeared to be one where neither words nor intentions had traction. You could just say a thing, and then unsay it, with no cost to yourself and no repurcussions for others, because there were no others. The Grand Duke had noted such inconsequential changeability in his dogs. They would want a walk and then they wouldn’t. Changeability wasn’t even the word for it. They wanted a walk in one sphere of time and being, but didn’t want it in another. They were bifurcated. Being human, the Grand Duke decided, meant putting these two spheres together in a continuum of responsibility and decision. By that measure his son was not yet human.

While not wanting to put a dampener on the Prince’s creativity, or provoke him into God knows what response, the Grand Duke gently suggested other uses for an amphitheatre. A running track, perhaps. An open air auditorium for pop concerts. Fracassus shrugged. Whatever.

Eventually the amphitheatre was built and modified into an out of town shopping mall. Fracassus opened it. Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt wrote a speech for him but he decided against delivering it. Instead he sliced the ribbon with an ornamental sword and inverted his thumb.

By general consent, the Amphitheatre was an aesthetic triumph. Security staff dressed like Spartacus. Hostesses at the information booths wore thigh length silver boots, short togas made of aluminium foil, and sported laurel leaves in their hair. A caged lion entertained the children with its roars. And Neroburgers were for sale.

Commercially, too, the Amphitheatre thrived.

‘You have to admit, he has a touch,’ the Grand Duke told his wife. ‘For a sixteen year old.’

‘So what does he intend next, a slave market.’

The Grand Duke looked away. Fracassus had already submitted his plans for a colonnaded plaza, the pillars to be finished in white marble, with walkways along which slaves would be paraded, space for restaurants and a Cafe Nero, and a raised stage on which the auction itself would be conducted.

Other than saying, ‘In no circumstances are we going to allow you to be the auctioneer,’ the Grand Duke raised no objection. The Saepta Julia was finished within budget and on time, and soon became the most visited Ayurvedic Spa and Herbal treatment centre in All the Republics. Slaves were available for a price, but you had to know who to ask.

CHAPTER XII A mother worries in 140 characters

Solemnly commemorated as the dawn of seriousness in adjoining Republics, an eighteenth birthday was a joyously frivolous occasion in Urbs-Ludus. The Grand Duke marked the Prince’s with a giant marzipan replica of the Palace and a mock sonorous announcement. ‘It is time, my son,’ he said, ‘for Twitter.’

He had discussed the Prince’ progress with Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt, both of whom felt the character of the Prince was coming into clearer focus.

‘He is certainly who he is,’ Professor Probrius declared.

‘And you can certainly see who he’s going to be,’ Dr Cobalt added.

‘And words?’

‘Yes,’ said the Professor, ‘there are more than there were.’

‘More, without doubt,’ Dr Cobalt agreed.

‘And more appropriate?’

There was a pause. ‘We are working on that.’

‘I have myself,’ the Grand Duke pronounced, ‘added to his stock of commercial and political terms. I wouldn’t say he was fluent in them, but nor would I say he is tongue-tied. I wonder if we might agree that he has enough to be going on with and concentrate on other skills. I think his knowledge of geography is shaky. He has told me several times that he has a yen to travel to Ancient Rome but thinks it’s in Los Angeles. This is a slip occasioned by confusing television epics, I imagine.’

‘And while we are on that subject, Your Highness, he does also suffer chronology amnesia in relation to ancient worlds in general. He isn’t entirely clear we aren’t still living in them. He talks a lot about Cafe Nero. I have a suspicion he thinks the Emperor owns the chain and might actually be working in one of them. So perhaps we should look at his history, too.’

‘Excellent idea. Let’s get him modernized. I propose to get him tweeting.’

For someone as beguiled by screens as Fracassus, he was slow to embrace interactivity. How to explain this the Grand Duke didn’t know. Perhaps the Prince had been alone with his own thoughts too long to be curious about anyone else’s. He didn’t miss conversation because he’d never had it, and he didn’t crave the to and fro of social media because fro wasn’t a preposition that called to him. What the Grand Duke had to get him to see was that Twitter didn’t entail any of the tedious conversational niceties he feared. Twitter was an assertion of the tweeter’s will, full stop. It imposed no obligation to listen or respond. ‘You can be as deaf as a post and as blind as a bat,’ he told his son, ‘and still tweet with the best of them.’

Had he had the time, the Grand Duke would personally have led his son into the arts of social media self-assertion, but there were pressing commercial matters to attend to, and there was no point asking the help of the Duchess who lacked the requisite genius for compression. She refused to understand it. ‘I fail to see,’ she said, when the Grand Duke explained the nuts and bolts of the system to her, ‘how Fracassus is ever going to attain 140 characters. He doesn’t have enough words.’

‘140 characters is the maximum, my dear,’ he told her.

‘And what’s the minimum?’

‘Demanska, I have no idea. How is that relevant?’

‘I would like Fracassus to keep his messages as brief as possible. I don’t want him making himself ill thinking of something to say. You know how finding just one word can defeat him.’

‘Le mot juste, my dear. One word can sometimes be enough.’

‘In Fracassus’s case it will have to be.’

They exchanged anxious glances. They both feared what that mot juste could turn out to be.

Left to his own devices, would Fracassus tweet exclusively about pussy?

CHAPTER XIII In which Fracassus informs the world of what he’s eating.

To allay his wife’s concerns – and not only incidentally his own – the Grand Duke appointed a Twitter adjutant to assist the Prince in mastering the necessary arts.

The person he chose was Caleb Hopsack, leader of OPP, the Ordinary Peoples’ Party, and twice voted Commoner of the Year. Though not a member of the Grand Duke’s inner circle – as how could he be, given his loud championing of all things unquiet and unrefined? – the two had nonetheless built up a friendship over the years based on Caleb Hopsack’s knowledge of the turf and the Grand Duke’s longing for some of it to rub off on him. The Grand Duke was under no financial necessity to gamble but felt ancient twinges of kinship with bookies and touts, with tipsters, with stables, with the smell of straw. Perhaps his grandfather… Whatever his motivation, he liked the occasional visit to the racecourse, particularly – whenever possible – in the company of Caleb Hopsack, who seemed to know everybody in the racing fraternity from owners to jockeys to punters and even to the horses. Though he had no reason to envy anybody, the Grand Duke envied Caleb Hopsack. What was his secret? How had he succeeded in making ordinary people feel he was one of them when he had amassed considerable personal wealth, belonged to the most exclusive clubs, hobnobbed with Grand Dukes, and dressed like a stockbroker’s idea of a gentleman farmer who enjoyed a tipple? Certainly the Grand Duke knew no one else of his eminence who could, with such an instinctive flair for looking wrong, wear a racing trilby and window-pane check coats and yellow waxed cotton trousers, and look right in them.

‘I don’t know where you find these things,’ The Grand Duke once remarked, looking him up and down with undisguised admiration and perplexity. He felt uncomfortable calling them ‘things’ but wasn’t sure what other word to use.

‘The question isn’t where but why,’ Hopsack replied.

The Grand Duke waited. ‘Why?’ he asked when it became clear that Hopsack wasn’t going to tell him otherwise.

‘It goes without saying,’ Hopsack explained, going into that third person solipsistic mode that ordinary people found transfixing, ‘that as Leader of the Little People’s Party Caleb Hopsack must speak exclusively to and for the concerns of little people. To do that successfully he must look like them.’

‘I thought you were Leader of the Ordinary People’s Party…’

‘Ordinary/Little, Little/Ordinary – same difference.’

‘But you don’t look anything like Ordinary or Little people. I have met them. I employ several hundred thousand of them. None of them would know how to begin dressing like you.’

‘You entirely miss the point,’ Hopsack said. ‘I am the idealized, never-never rural version of what they secretly would like to look like. It doesn’t matter that the clothes I wear are not ones they would know how to access or could afford to buy even if they did. Sartorially, Caleb Hopsack is their shadow self. Sure it’s a joke. But it’s a joke they get. I bare my cigarette stained teeth at them and remind them of a horse. They come muttering to my meetings and remind me of bags of hay. We despise one another. This is the age of the ironising of the archetype. I have a beer pot with my name on it in every public house in the Duchy but the Plebs know I prefer Scotch. They need Caleb Hopsack to be ordinary and a toff at the same time.’

‘So which are you?’

‘What sort of question is that? Have I not said that this is the age of the ironizing of the archetype. Maybe I am the one, maybe I’m the other, maybe I’m both.’

He was just the person, the Grand Duke thought – maybe just the three people – to oversee his son’s Twitter page.

With the Grand Duke’s permission, Caleb Hopsack would begin by building up interest in Fracassus on his own Twitter page. It would help gain momentum, he said, if Caleb Hopsack were to be filmed chatting to the Prince on the inside of the golden gates. Perhaps the Prince would be so good as to put his arm around Hopsack’s shoulder, shake hands with him, kiss him on both cheeks, and then, to the camera, give the double thumb of Internet approval. Whereupon Hopsack would open wide his famous reticulated mouth and gulp down the admiration of his followers like a shark swallowing down scampi. This would go directly on to YouTube, innumerable links to which Caleb Hopsack would tweet around the world.

The Grand Duke expressed surprise that the leader of the Ordinary Little People’s Party would want to show himself – forgive the expression – jerking off on extraordinary big people.

‘If you will forgive my expression, Your Majesty,’ Hopsack said, ‘you are harping on a broken string. Size is no longer relative to itself. Today, thanks in no small measure to Caleb Hopsack, things are not what they were yesterday. Everything’s in the wash. Tomorrow, everything will be in the tumble dryer. Big/small, grand/common – these simple identities are over. By next year, you’ll be more common than we are.’

Time was moving too quickly for the Grand Duke. ‘Who’s “we”?’

‘The common people.’

‘And what will the common people be then?’

‘The aristocracy.’

‘Leaving you where?’

‘Still leading the party.’

Mesmerised by Caleb Hopsack’s tailoring, and frightened by how wide he could open his mouth, Fracassus acceeded to his every request. After his encounter with the Weatherman he had developed a taste for upside down talk. ‘I’m delighted to meet you,’ he told Hopsack when the cameras began to roll. ‘Unless I’m not.’

‘Cut!’ Hopsack cried. ‘I think that’s a bit too unnuanced.’

Fortunately, Professor Probrius had taken Fracassus through nuance the day before. ‘From Latin nubes, meaning cloud,’ Fracassus said with some consciousness of erudition. There was a self-satisfaction about Caleb Hopsack that made Fracassus want to hit him. He was glad he had knowledge to do it with. On the other hand he admired him. ‘I can, if you’d prefer,’ he went on, ‘be more cloudier.’

‘Well let’s not overdo it,’ Hopsack said. ‘This is Twitter.’

For the next take Hopsack asked for them to be filmed inside the Golden Gates. He thought it would further their common cause to give the impression that they were in his Palace and that the Prince had called on him. ‘And… action!’ he called, leaning against the Golden Gates and occasionally rubbing fingerprints off them with a check handkerchief. The two men began to talk about their special relationship.

Over the following weeks Caleb Hopsack tweeted praise for the Prince’s dynamism, generosity, thoughtfulness, integrity, potential suitability for high office, however high that office should be. He was a good guy. Incredibly focussed. Hopsack’s tweets had an air of vacant authority about them. I am confident that such and such is the case, he would say. He did not expect to be contradicted or questioned. His confidence was an imprimatur of truth. If he tweeted that the Prince was a special person then the Prince was a special person. His recommendation was enough.

Two or three months later, with Caleb Hopsack at his shoulder, Fracassus began to tweet for himself. His first attempts evinced an uncomplicated charm—

_{Nov 11:}

Nice today, he wrote. And then, emboldened—

_{Nov 12:}

Not so nice as yesterday. Cheeseburger for lunch.

_{Nov 13:}

My mother still nagging me about reading so my father buys me a comic. The Prince by Mantovani.

_{Nov 14:}

On page 1 of The Prince by Mantovani.

_{Nov 15:}

Cheeseburger for dinner.

_{Nov 16:}

On Page 2 of The Prince by Mantovani.

_{Nov 17:}

My eyes hurt.

_{Nov 18:}

Still on page 2 of The Prince by Mantovani.

_{Nov 19:}

Demo outside Palace. Placards say WE WELCOME REFUGEES. I say shoot them.

_{Nov 20:}

Love it that thick morons reacted angrily to my shooting suggestion. What’s wrong with these people? I was joking.

_{Nov 21:}

Given up reading Mantovani’s The Prince.

‘Not bad, but now let’s step the pace up a bit,’ Caleb Hopsack said. ‘Let’s address an issue. Perhaps you could mention me.’

Fracassus did as he was bidden.

Lunch with Caleb Hopsack. He paid. Classy gesture from an incredibly classy guy.

Followed by,

Other diners incredibly interested to see us together. So gratifying.

Followed by,

Waiter said his wife committed suicide a year ago this day. Hopsack added 5% to tip. Incredibly moving.

Followed by,

Walked into demo against Miss Universe Pageant. No wonder. Women marchers looked like pigs.

Followed by,

Hopsack promising ordinary people he’ll get migration numbers down to minus zero if elected. Every confidence he’ll deliver.

Followed by,

The idea that Caleb Hopsack is migrationist is almost laughable.

‘And don’t forget,’ Hopsack told him, ‘that you can retweet.’

‘Retweet what?’

‘Well my tweets to you for a start.’

Fracassus turned up for his weekly cheeseburger dinner with his parents wearing a green and ochre window-pane check tweed jacket with three vents and waxed mustard corduroy trousers.

‘Go back to your room this minute and change,’ his mother told him.

‘I may have started him too soon,’ the Grand Duke conceded. ‘The boy might be eighteen but he is still impressionable.’

‘I did warn you this was bound to happen the minute he met a real person. Have I not been saying for years that all the television he watches has numbed his capacity for interpersonal relationships?’

‘You can’t blame television. At least he’s his own self when he’s being Nero. Maybe I should get him a bigger screen.’

‘That just puts the problem off for another year.’

‘There’s no time like the future,’ the Grand Duke said.

‘I say deal with it now.’

‘And get him to do what with his time instead? Read about wizards?’

‘Help you to rip the wires out of the palace for a start.’

‘For the thousandth time – there are no wires. It’s all done by electromagnetic waves.’

‘Rip the electromagnetic waves out then. They’re brain-cancer forming, anyway.’

‘There’s no proof of that.’

‘Our son’s the proof of that.’

‘I have a better idea. He’s eighteen. You know what he needs…’

‘Renzo, he might as well be eight.’

‘You still know what he needs…’

The Grand Duchess turned her face away.

Later that very evening Prince Fracassus was sitting with his father in the latter’s favourite gentlemen’s club. No one asked questions about Fracassus’s age.

If the evening saw Fracassus bobbing on uncharted waters, the morning saw him landed on a tropic isle.

He was used to waking with an erection and attributed it to the hours he’d just passed in his own company. But this morning he awoke to an unaccustomed sensation: when he looked at his erection he thought of someone else.

Great boner, he tweeted. Must be love.

CHAPTER XIV When my love swears that she is made of truth…

‘After all that talk about prostitutes,’ Professor Probrius laughed, ‘you’d think he’d know how to find one.’

Dr Cobalt gently demurred. ‘You could say that’s to his credit.’

‘The Grand Duke is said to be distraught.’

‘Why distraught? You can’t be telling me he had his heart set on his son settling down with a prostitute.’

‘I don’t know about “settling down”. But whatever he had his heart set on, Fracassius has apparently broken it now.’

‘But not his mother’s, I suspect.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Most mothers aren’t troubled by their sons enjoying the company of women of easy virtue. They keep the channels of affection free for them. It’s feminists they’re frightened of.’

‘Do we know she’s a feminist?’

‘That’s the rumour. And a graduate into the bargain. Dark haired, too. And wears trousers. A dark haired feminist graduate with trousers and her own views. It couldn’t be worse.’

The furore – for no other word could do justice to the amazement and conjecture that spread from the basement of the Palace to the 200th floor – had a simple explanation. After a conversation lasting no more than fifteen minutes, Fracassus had asked the girl looking after the coats at his father’s club to marry him.

Prior to that, Fracassus had looked pleased enough with the company his father had found for him. Tactfully making his excuses, the Grand Duke had slid away, leaving his son in the company of women who gave a new meaning to the word classy. Tall, tanned, teetering, lustrous-lipped, generously implanted, and smelling of the best department stores, they entwined themselves around the Prince, who sat on a swing seat at the bar, swivelling to greet every new addition. They petted him. They blew in his ears, two at a time. Like butterflies skimming a flower, they brushed his lips with theirs, each passing on the nectar the others had collected. Looking for a way of describing how his mouth felt, Fracassus hit upon the image of a jam sandwich. He closed his eyes and swung his seat. Singly or in any combination his young manhood could devise, the women exhaled promise. Dr Cobalt had given him the words to describe their profession; now he had the plethorous Platonic reality of which the words were but shadows.

So why wasn’t he as carried away by the women as his father had every reason to suppose he would be?

They reminded him of his mother.

That was not a reason to give up on them altogether. Fracassus was not a boat burner. On many an evening watching slave girls dropping grapes down Nero’s throat he had succeeded in dispelling his mother’s likeness. It was a matter of narrowing his eyes and letting the blue flicker send him half to sleep. And anyway, in Nero’s world mothers and hookers freely swapped roles. So when he rose to go to the men’s room it wasn’t with the definite intention of not returning. But he had not counted on meeting the girl who took the coats. Rounded where the women he had left behind were willowed, dumpy where they attenuated, to all intents and purposes blind in that she hid behind owlish spectacles where the girls at the bar had shooting stars for eyes, and wearing trousers instead of a snow-fairy dress – it must be remembered that Fracassus had never in his life seen a woman wearing trousers before – she struck him with the sort of force that persuades some men to give their lives to god. That she did not in any way remind him of his mother was of course part of it; but it was her voice and confidence that overwhelmed him. She had the assurance to be frumpy. She had the self-possession to be bossy. Her voice, unlike that of any woman he had ever met, including Dr Cobalt, was not modulated to please. You could take her or you could leave her. Fracassus had been waited on hand and foot, but here was someone not in the slightest bit overwhelmed by his rank or apologetic about her own. It was either punch her in the face or fall in love.

Status seemed nothing to her. He was a Prince and she was a cloakroom attendant. So what? The job she was doing just happened to be the job she was doing. She wasn’t defined by taking coats. What was his excuse?

Fracassus asked her to leave the coats – he’d buy everone a new one – and join him at the bar. He was surprised by his own temerity. She frightened him, but made him comfortable at the same time. It was not permissible, she said in the most matter-of-fact way, for a person not a prostitute to join a club member at the bar. But if he wanted to wait for her she knew a little place she could take him too later. No red velvet. No crystal glasses. No tarts. ‘Will other women there be wearing trousers?’ he asked. She thought it likely. ‘Then I’ll wait for you,’ he said.

Her name was Sojjourner, she told him. With a double j.

The reason she wasn’t defined by taking coats, she explained over coffee in a paper cup and a cheeseburger on a plastic plate, was that she did it only to finance her studies. Fracassus looked deep into her owl-eyes and saw book shelves. ‘Have you ever finished a whole book?’ he asked. She laughed inordinately, throwing back her head and rolling her whole person. ‘A few,’ she said. ‘I’m even writing one.’

A great fear swept across the open plains of the Prince’s mind. Should he ask what her book was about? What if she told him?

Did it matter? He had got to this age well enough, never understanding anyone’s answer to a question. These things evened themselves out. She would never understand his world. They could not understand each other together. He saw their future: he watching a beauty pageant on television, she sitting on his knee and writing her book. Children? Yes, if he concentrated hard enough. He saw a young Fracassus watching a beauty pageant on television. And a small Sojjourner, dressed like her grandmother the Grand Duchess, winning Young Miss Urbs-Ludus.

‘You’ve gone somewhere,’ the real Sojjourner said.

‘I was thinking.’

‘About the women waiting for you at the bar?’

Fracassus looked away. ‘They’re not my type,’ he said. ‘They don’t read books.’

‘Can you be sure of that? How do you know they’re not financing their studies like me? It’s hard for a woman to get a grant. Prostitution is just one of the ways women get by in a man’s world. From a feminist perspective, prostitution in such a case can be a valid choice and is to be differentiated from coerced sex-working, which is not to deny that it reinforces a negative stereotype of women in a way that harms both sexes.’

Fracassus wondered if he was going to faint. Not even Yoni Cobalt could put together so many letters without breathing.

‘Is that what you’re writing about?’ he asked.

‘No. The subject of my book is the Constitution of The Republics with special reference to Urbs-Ludus. Its working title is Somnolence and Corruption: A Warning to the Comatose. Prostitution will come into it.’

Never having seen anyone like her before, and not knowing what else to do, Fracassus made to kiss her. She pulled back, raised a little finger, wagged it at him and, in the loudest voice he’d ever heard not issuing from a loud hailer, said ‘Too soon.’

Fracassus apologized and put his hand between her legs instead.

‘Too soon even for that,’ she laughed.

‘When then?’ Fracassus asked.

‘I have a degree and a book to finish,’ she replied. ‘I have criminal lawyers to expose. I have women’s health and job prospects to improve. I have children to save. I have the comatose to rouse. I have a mark to make.’

‘I’ll wait for you,’ Fracassus said for the second time that night.

CHAPTER XV …I do believe her though I know she lies

‘She’s called Sojjourner with two js,’ he told his father.

‘Sojjourner with two jjs? Am I supposed to be impressed? I suggest you think again with three n’s.’

‘Why n’s?’ the Grand Duchess asked.

‘No, no, no and no.’

‘That’s four n’s,’ Fracassus said.

‘You’d better not cheek your father,’ the Grand Duchess warned. ‘He’s very upset about this. And so am I.’

‘I love her.’

‘Love her!’ The Grand Duke exploded. ‘What can you know about love. You’re a child.’

‘If I’m such a child, why did you take me to your club?’

‘In the mistaken hope you’d grow up. You don’t know this woman. You’ve spent ten minutes in her company.’

‘Sometimes ten minutes are all you need.’

‘You’re right, and it only took us ten minutes to find out who she is.’

‘I know who she is.’

‘Oh you do, do you? And do you know she is a Rational Progessivist of the School of Condorcet?’

Whereupon, taking turns, the Grand Duke and Duchess led their wayward son on a grand historical tour of Rational Progessiveness, starting with the Populares of Ancient Rome – not favourites with his beloved Nero if they were not much mistaken – through Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Hegel, pausing for support at Nietzsche’s attack on Hebrew Socialism – and ending up, via Marx and Lenin, with the brutal charismatic revolutionism of Castroism, the murderous, killing-them-softly quietism of Corbynism, and the blood-soaked rice fields Pol Pot. We bet, they said, that she never told you any of that?

‘She told me she wanted women to earn the same as men,’ Fracassus said.

The Grand Duke sighed. ‘Ah yes, that old toxic chestnut – equal pay for women. Sounds innocent, doesn’t it. But nothing ever stops at what it starts with, Fracassus. First equal pay, then paid time off for period pains, then five years maternity leave, then nursery provision, then another five years for postpartum depression, then leave with an ascending scale of bonuses for up to twelve migraines a years, and the next thing we know the Anarcho-Syndicalists are on our backs demanding legislation to make croupiers wear flat shoes and hostesses wear trousers. And that I’m damned sure she never told you, or you wouldn’t be standing here like a bitch in heat.’

‘Renzo!’ the Grand Duchess cried.

‘What? I never mentioned his brother.’

‘Renzo!!’

There being no more to be said on the subject of the Prince’s brother, the couple fell silent, until the Grand Duchess felt able to start again on Fracassus. ‘What we want you to understand before it’s too late,’ she said, ‘is that you’ll never be happy with her. At the first argument she’ll call you a dirty capitalist.’

‘Why would she call me that?’

‘Because it’s what you are,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘In her eyes.’

‘She’s a Metropolitan Liberal Élitist, darling,’ his mother said. ‘I know it hurts.’

‘So what are we?’

‘Scum,’ The Grand Duke said. ‘In her eyes.’

‘Enemies of the People,’ his mother added.

Fracassus rubbed his face. ‘Caleb doesn’t think we’re enemies of the people and he’s the leader of the Ordinary People’s Party.’

‘This is where it gets complicated,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘There’s a war going on out there for the soul of the people. Caleb appeals to them but doesn’t like them. Élitists work for them but don’t appeal to them. Meanwhile we’re the only ones the ordinary people really like. We’re self-made – well at least I am. We like tall buildings. We like tall wives. So do the ordinary people. It’s only the Metropolitan Élite who hate us. And you have to go and find yourself one. Sojjourner with a double j, my eye. Couldn’t you see that for yourself, you foolish boy. There is no double j in Sojourner. There is no Sojjourner. She invents her name and changes the spelling of it because that’s what her class does.’

‘She minds coats.’

The Grand Duchess found a laugh of the deepest irony. ‘Ha – she minds coats. She told you that? She minds coats because minding coats makes her look like an ordinary working woman. Do you want to know the truth – you’ll thank me for this one day – her family manufactures coats. Mink coats. Sable. Chinchilla. They’ll make a coat out of you once you fall into their clutches.’

‘I don’t care. She loves me.’ Fracassus no sooner said it than even he knew it sounded wrong.

The Grand Duke shook his head as though he wanted never to see the world stationary again. ‘When I think who you could have had last night,’ he said at last.

The Grand Duchess looked away.

‘They were students working as prostitutes,’ Fracassus said. ‘It’s the only way they can afford to study the constitution.’

The Grand Duke turned the colour of the atrium at the Nowhere Palace. ‘Studying the constitution! Miss North Pole! The runner-up to Miss Equator! Estrelita the supermodel! Yada-Yada twice Playgirl of the Year! Mandarina, ex-mistress of three Formula 1 World Champions! Need I go on? Why would women of that calibre be studying the constitution? Did you see the extension of their limbs? Did you see their elevation? You had the world to choose from and now you have nothing.’

‘It’s a club for hookers, dad.’

‘Wash your mouth out, boy. I met your mother there.’

Fracassus crept out in the night to revisit his father’s club. Sojjourner? No Sojjourner had ever worked here. Had he made her up?

He requested that they let him into the cloakroom where he’d first talked to her, fantasy or not. He wanted to sit where she’d sat. Sniff the coats.

Gradually, one or two of the serving staff admitted they remembered her. He asked them if they knew anything about her being a Metropolitan élistist. Some said they’d had their suspicions, others shrugged. In a club like this all deviances were respected.

A couple of prostitutes accosted him on the way in, and three more on the way out. He didn’t have the heart for it, he told them. He’d lost his it to a classy lady. So weren’t they classy enough for him? He looked them up and down. They went a long way up. Yes, they were. But classy in a different way. He said he knew they needed money to continue their studies and offered them jobs at his new casino. They wondered when they’d be able to start. First I’ve got to build it, he told them. To ease their disappointment he made a grab at each of them in turn. He knew they wouldn’t do him for assault. They wanted a job at his casino too much.

He resorted to Twitter. Met a bitch called two j’s. Great piece of ass with two a’s. Moved on her, not close.

But no tweet came back.

Aware that his son was not going to take silence for an answer and was preparing a Twitter blitz on Sojjourner’s heart, The Grand Duke finally did what his wife had been asking him to do for years, and pulled the plug.

The building went out with a sigh.

‘Listen to the silence,’ the Grand Duchess exclaimed. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? No more bleeps and pings, no more chimes and quacks. No more clicks, No more hums. No more flashing blue lights that made our Palace resemble a police station.’

Fracassus grew irate. He raged up and down the building trying to get animation out of a television. He put his fist through one, but that didn’t wake it. His phone was dead. Every keyboard unresponsive. He could neither receive a syllable nor send one.

This is a living hell, he thought.

But it gave him new entitlements.

He slipped out of the house in the middle of the day and visited the coffee shops he’d been barred from entering. There, his smartphone worked again. There, dunking ginger biscuits into frappucino, he tweeted again of the agonies of unrequited love. You’ll be sorry.

If she was, she didn’t say so.

Fuck, nigger, cunt he was about to tweet, but the broadband dropped out at just that moment.

He went into a decline. He lost weight. He stopped totting up how much property he owned and how much he was worth. He stopped tweeting. I am stopping tweeting, he tweeted. He made a nuisance of himself with women in the Palace who found it difficult to rebuff him. He groped secretaries and grabbed cleaning staff. Some of them remembered he’d done the same to them when he was an infant. Same stubby little fingers. The Palace sommelier asked him what he had against intercourse – not that she was offering. He said he didn’t think that he would like it. She told him she didn’t think she liked being grabbed between the legs. Yeah you do, he said. Every woman likes being grabbed between the legs. She visited a lawyer who advised her to let sleeping dogs lie.

Dr Cobalt, now teaching the Prince the principles of governance, swore she saw a tear running down his cheek when she mentioned Foucault. A dry tear, if there were such a thing.

‘I think there is,’ Professor Probrius Opined. He believed he’d read an ancient treatise somewhere on the constitutent parts of tears. A tear of grief was was wet and warm. A tear of compassion was wet and light. A tear of pique was dry and heavy and had no temperature.

‘You’re an unforgiving critic,’ Dr Cobalt said.

‘I’m hopeful, that’s all. Pique is a quality not to be underestimated in the making of fools and tyrants.’

‘And which do you think he will be?’

‘This mistake is to think it has to be one or the other.’

There is a time-honoured method among the rich for dealing with a love-sick young man and healing his broken heart. You send him away.