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.
BOOK TWO
Dr Yoni Cobalt: I don’t think he’s completely stupid.
Dr Kolskeggur Probrius: And I don’t think he’s competely wicked.
Both: Then why are we terrified?
CHAPTER XVI
Containing the whole science of government
Great as was the consternation, and deep as was the sorrow in every heart, the moment for the Prince to leave came around without mishap or interference by the fates. Fracassus did nothing further untoward. And Sojjourner did not make a last minute appearance. It was written. The world was waiting and it was time he ran into its embrace.
Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt would accompany him, acting as mentors, confidants, travel guides and porters to the Prince and as eyes and ears to his parents. Report your every perturbation, they were told. But do not scruple to describe the highlights too.
Speaking for themselves, Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt were delighted to be going. They too believed that indiscretions were best committed far from home.
The Grand Duke found it as hard as he knew it would be to bring the Grand Duchess round to Fracassus’s departure. He reminded her that they had often been away and left their son, but accepted that this was different. When they had gone travelling the boy was safely ensconced in the palace with a television to watch in every room; now he would be wandering God knows where. Not without technology – to compensate for his cruel pulling of the plug, the Grand Duke lavished the latest phones and tablets and laptops on Fracassus; even a watch that would double as a direct video link to the Palace and fitness activity tracker – though you could never be sure how good the signals were going to be in foreign parts. But he had mature company. And there were signs that he was maturing himself, if one only knew where to look for them. He’d been seasoned by misfortune. He had taken up tweeting again and had more than a million avid followers.
The Grand Duke and Duchess decided against going to the heliport, fearing the parting would prove emotional They saw the party off at the Golden Gates. Renzo took his son in his arms and begged him in a voice thick with emotion to remember all the advice he’d given him over the years. He had a great future. All he had to do now was earn it. Look, listen, learn. Limp and unresponsive, Fracassus gave the impression of somebody who’d forgotten everything that had ever been said to him already. ‘Write to me,’ his mother said, catching Probrius and Cobalt exchanging ironic looks. ‘And I mean write, not tweet. I refuse to read those things.’
Wherever possible, Fracassus would travel First Class, his tutors Economy. This suited all parties. For their part, Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt were pleased to have time together. They took that very particular pleasure in one another’s company reserved for people who look alike. Both had attenuated bodies and long necks, both were pared down into that leanness often found among servants of the wealthy, and both had complimentary sideways tilts that came from having to whisper into each other’s ears in the presence of majesty. Thus they always looked hugger-mugger even when they weren’t. Just what their travelling relations would be had not yet been decided. They would leave it, they thought, as they had left it for the last few years, to chance and opportunity. They weren’t young and reckless like the Prince. They could wait. To tell the truth, they found postponement titillating.
Fracassus, who had yet to meet anyone his own age he resembled, had only himself for company. He didn’t mind that. He had always preferred his own presence to that of other people. Moving from television set to television set in the weeks his parents were away, he had been free to let his mind riot in future scenarios of power. Solitude, he discovered, particularly when passed in front of a television screen, could be phantasmagoric. There had been times when what was true and what was not were so hard to tell apart that Fracassus felt he was exercising power already. ‘Me,’ he would cry inwardly, and sometimes even outwardly, as Nero lowered his thumb and the bodies piled up in the Colosseum. ‘Me,’ he would proclaim – ‘Ich!’ – with every rewind of Max Schmeling flooring the Brown Bomber. Wrestlers, of course, were him. ‘Do you submit now?’ They didn’t just submit, they whimpered their surrender. And feral motorists. Leaping from the burning car and watching it explode on the outskirts of the Mexican village, he felt a passing twinge of something – pride, was it? – knowing the other passengers had not been so fleet of foot and quick of thought. ‘Me, me!’ Their own fault if they were burnt alive or scarred irremediably. A Mariachi band played to show there were no hard feelings. The car had been worth half a million in whatever currency.