Twitter, too, was busy that night.
Amazing guy. Remember to know what you want and get it. If only I’d known half of what he knows at his age. Amazing.
Inspirational, was another. Think big! Aim high! Wow! Thank you, Prince Fracassus.
CHAPTER XXIII
A short chapter with no lessons to be learnt therefrom
Though Prince Fracassus could sink slowly into oblivion for all Dr Cobalt cared, Professor Probrius was her lover and she was conjoined with him in his enterprise, however little she approved of it. She had to enquire, therefore, whether the Prince did not risk losing supporters from one level of society by his assiduous wooing of supporters from another.
Probrius understood her concerns but thought not. There was a universalism in the Prince’s messages, he believed, which Yoni, who’d seen less of him close up, had not grasped. Take tax…. But Yoni Cobalt would not even listen to what Probrius wanted to tell her. So far and no further, she told him. Tax was her red line.
Probrius laughed cynically. ‘The road to hell,’ he said, ‘was paved with politicians’ promises never to cross a red line. At least Fracassus would never make such a promise.’
‘Proimising not to make a promise to cross a red line is also a promise,’ Yoni Cobalt said.
It so fell out that the Prince’s next engagement was to judge a beauty pageant. Miss Plasentza. This time it was Professor Probrius who felt uneasy. He strongly advised the Prince against it. It was off-message, he said. You couldn’t tweet Bombs only kill when we’re scarred to kill the killer one minute, and then talk lipstick and deportment the next. But Fracassus knew his own mind. Judging a beauty pageant beat opening department stores and addressing groups of the hard of hearing.
‘I’m very good with beautiful women,’ he said.
Plasentza being a liberal democracy, its beauty contest was tolerated but not much approved of. It was held bienially in a small hotel on the outskirts of the capital and reported only on local radio. Fracassus agreed to participate on the understanding that the organizers booked the largest ballroom in the country, guaranteed the presence of television cameras, and gave him fifteen per cent of the take. Such was the fascination he engendered, his stipulations were met and his percentage increased to twenty.
He had lost much of his shyness. He could look women in the eye now. And not think they all looked like his mother. He had a metallic suit made for the occasion based on the one worn by Spravchik, and on the big night he inspected the contestants as he remembered the Minister inspecting the Numa women, getting the prettiest of them to twerk for him and then open their mouths to show him their teeth. He lowered his voice and asked each of them in turn if she was here only because she needed money to continue her studies. All but one said they wanted to be a model because the world needed beauty. The exception burst out crying. ‘I can’t believe that you can tell that about me,’ she said. ‘It shows,’ he said. ‘it shows.’ He crowned her Miss Plasentza and backstage, after the show, made her cry again by pushing his hand down her dress.
BOMB BOY TYCOON BLOWS HIS TOP the Plasentza Mail reported. But it soon became clear that far from detracting from his burgeoning reputation, the assault helped it burgeon still more. He was a red blooded young man. He meant what he did as a compliment not a rudeness. He had a love of loveliness in women and was expressing it.
A national debate followed. For many, this was a test case of liberal democracy itself. Enough was enough. People were tired of being told what they could and couldn’t do, could and couldn’t think, could and couldn’t feel. They were fed up with having to feign pity every time the violation alarm was raised by some professional thin-skin who could weep and shake to order. So Fracassus had handled a woman’s breast without remembering to ask her first! People who thought that was a crime needed to live in the real world where violence meant being held up at gun point in the food queue and sexism didn’t stop at the misuse of a pronoun.
Women’s magazines carried out polls of their readers. Ninety per cent of women in the lower ranks of society approved the Prince’s action and said they wouldn’t have minded in the least had he done it to them. It reminded some of them, fondly, of being woed by their husbands. Fracassus tweeted that the ten percent who disapproved were probably dogs. But he took no notice of any other figures. The people had spoken. The people were his people. And he was their man. Great support, he tweeted.
Sojjourner could fuck off.
‘Unless you want to go on judging beauty pageants,’ Professor Probrius advised, ‘it might be time to think of moving on.’
Fracassus wasn’t sure what Probrius had against him judging further beauty pageants.
‘I don’t think it’s what your father had in mind for you.’
‘He wanted me to see the world. I’m seeing it.’
But then he grew bored himself. There weren’t that many beauty pageants to judge. Could that have been because there weren’t that many beauties in Plasentza? ‘Blame liberal democracy,’ Dr Cobalt told him. ‘The women here value things other than their appearance.’
Fracassus screwed up his face. ‘What other things?’
‘Intellectual development, careers, charitable causes, growing old gracefully.’
‘Is that possible?’ Fracassus asked.
‘Intellectual development?’
‘Growing old gracefully. I think women can be too old.’
‘Too old for what?’
‘Being a woman.’
Don’t tweet that, Your Highness, Probrius advised.
Lacking the energy for a fight, Fracassus agreed. He had grown listless again. He sat in his room watching television. The world was talking about him but he wasn’t talking about the world. There was nothing for him to do. He would have liked to build a casino or a chamber of horrors while he had time on his hands, but Plasentza had building regulations that Urbs-Ludus did not. He missed Spravchik. He missed women. He couldn’t remember when he had last stood next to a woman who was taller than him. Probrius was right about liberal democracy and beauty – the more you got of the former, the less you got of the latter.
‘What we could really do with,’ he said one evening after dinner, ‘is another bomb.’
And then, in a manner of speaking, one dropped.
CHAPTER XXIV
On the sadness of things. A son returns, a father prepares to depart
Mortality spares no one, let him build higher than a kite can fly. The Grand Duke fell ill.
It felt, to the people of Urbs-Ludus, like a sign. The Grand Duke was ill because the state was ill.
‘Your father needs you,’ Professor Probrius said. ‘It’s time to say your goodbyes and leave.’
A sadness descended on Fracassus. He realised he had no friends to say goodbye to. ‘What have I achieved here?’ he thought aloud. ‘I haven’t built a casino. I haven’t wrestled. I haven’t had much in the way of pussy.’ ( In fact he hadn’t had any pussy but didn’t want to admit that to himself.) ‘The people love me, but I don’t love them.’
He had heard there was a thing called depression. Could it be…?
It was Dr Cobalt he turned to in matters of feeling. ‘It’s the lull before the storm, your Highness,’ she told him.
‘I’m not asking about the weather,’ Fracassus said. ‘I’m asking about me.’
‘It’s the lull before your storm.’
Fracassus hated metaphors, without knowing what they were, almost as much as he hated foreign languages. ‘What storm?’