L: [Flustered] But… I… Damn! But, I mean… Ah, Christ!… I can’t believe it!
C: So you may as well go out on a song, I say. Something appropriate.
L: Yes, you’re… You’re right! Something appropriate!
It’s not hard to push Lindberg over the edge. You’ve a man with a voluminous, but ultimately, fragile ego working in a cutthroat industry full of young, smart, backstabbing jackals. Throw in Ceesal’s goading, drug-induced paranoia and you’ve all the constituent components of a highly amusing mental breakdown.
Well, Mental is as Mental does, and Malmot watches stupefied as Lindberg treats the viewing public to the curious spectacle of a fat man with a tie wrapped around his head, marching on the spot to his own internal rhythm and singing:
In between other, even more disgusting verses, he screams: “I’ll show you what an old man can do!” and, following a few hip thrusts and some rather lewd hand gestures, he concludes:
“And I’d like to dedicate that song to the all the good people of film and television. I’m sure the irony will be completely lost on you, you vultures! You hyenas!”
He bows, calls the audience ‘Bastards!’ and exits, stage right, into the awaiting arms of a burly stagehand cradling a cosh. He reappears later in the Green Room, straightjacketted and strapped to an upright trolley, much to Ceesal’s delight.
“Well, my dear chap,” Ceesal chuckles, positively jubilant. “I don’t know what to say.”
“You know I’m not finished yet,” Lindberg mumbles through some sort of reinforced muzzle.
“I think, perhaps, you might be.”
“Well, I don’t care,” comes the unconvincing response.
“Good on you! That’s the spirit!”
“Don’t patronise me. This is all your fault.”
“Okay. You know, you’re just being weird now.”
“Look, don’t…. Just don’t. I’ve spoken to my producer and she says they had no intention of firing me.”
“Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? To you. In your delicate condition.”
“You lied to me.”
“Perhaps you deserved it?”
“And what do you mean by that?”
“Exactly what it says on the tin, as they say. But, if I were to add anything, you know, it might be that you could try being a little nicer to those less fortunate than yourself.”
“And what, exactly, do you mean by that?”
“Well, back in the old days… school, you know, and at the gentlemen’s club… You were rather mean to me.”
And, with those cryptic words, Ceesal smiles and gestures the orderly. Lindberg exits backwards on squeaking wheels, issuing threats.
“Now that’s exactly the kind of behaviour I was talking about,” says Ceesal.
Big Tony steps out of the shadows.
“Mr Malmot’s outside,” he says.
“Let him wait,” says Ceesal. “There’s something I have to attend to first.”
Malmot is installed in his London office of red walls, red leather, read pornography and unread reports. The verdigris glass of the table lamp casts unflattering shadows onto his hawk-like face as he ponders the previous night’s events and Lindberg’s mysterious death from carbon monoxide poisoning. Ceesal grins disturbingly.
“The Truth is a person’s honest interpretation of the events that have happened around them,” says the Prime Minister.
“That’s relative Truth. Interpretation is different from reality,” Malmot replies.
“And I’d agree with that,” says Ceesal. “…To a degree.”
“So what are we saying here?” the desiccated weasel creaks, tapping his fountain pen. “That a hosepipe magically attached itself to the ambulance exhaust and passed itself through the window?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” says Ceesal with a smirk. “Perhaps. Or, just maybe, someone tampered with the oxygen cylinders. You know, I couldn’t possibly comment.”
“That would require forward planning. Premeditated murder, you could say.”
“Well, it pays to think ahead.”
“I can’t condone this sort of behaviour. It’s ostentatious!” Malmot chides.
“Oh, come now!” Ceesal laughs. “In the two and a half weeks I’ve known you, you’ve shot two women and had a man starved to death in front of full-length mirror…. And you criticise me for one little gassing, one brief flexing of my murder muscles?”
“You don’t do it in public! There’s a time and a place for everything, Ceesal. And that place is certainly not beneath the nose of the Media. Human life may be cheap, but its opinions aren’t so easily bought.”
“Which should show you where you’re going wrong.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You’re running scared from the press. You should be riding it like a cheap bitch. The minute we have to question the Media’s loyalty is the minute it stops serving our objectives. So why not snuggle into bed with it, whisper sweet nothings into its ear and then slap the little pricktease when it doesn’t put out. It’ll soon come round to the right way of thinking. After all, your only other option is to destroy it completely. And what good would that do?”
Malmot briefly considers an England devoid of television and the rediscovery of the simpler things in life like card games, folktales and unhurried sexual intercourse. Not to mention the ease of ruling an ill-informed populace with no recourse to the press. Suddenly killing the Media seems like a marvellous idea.
They say men divide women into virgins and whores, but it’s actually more of a sliding scale. We balance a new partner’s sexual appetite against the risk of unwittingly raising another man’s bastard. I never had that problem with Rachel, though. We never had kids. In fact, we barely had a relationship.
She never figured in my conversation much either – something she took personally. But careless talk costs marriages as well as lives. With chlamydia crippling fertility and our diseased maternity wards killing as many as they bring into the world, if it weren’t for the council estate slags we’d be an extinct nation. Let the wrong person know that you’ve got a healthy wife of breeding age and he’ll be round with a bunch of flowers for your missus and a machete for you. He’ll be carrying her off on his shoulder whilst you’re trying to scoop your innards back in. So I know it sounds chauvinistic, but I wouldn’t let her out of the house unless she was heavily armed. She seemed to think this was weird.
You’ll know about the mink. They were released from fur farms in the late nineteen nineties and, after a couple of decades spent breeding in the shadows, broke cover and unleashed animal genocide – systematically devouring every small prey species, every medium-sized prey species, and then teaming up to take on everything else – us included. That’s the great joke: we can wear their fur – they don’t mind – so long as we’re inside their stomachs at the time.
With the weight of numbers and evolution on their side, they’re diversifying to fill the ecological niches left by the other animals, including herbivorous roles.
So this is how we find ourselves in our current situation: mink swarming all over our vegetable patch and Rachel trapped in the shed, leaning out of the window with a small calibre air rifle. It’s her own fault. If she hadn’t been outside, burning all my possessions, I wouldn’t have had to lock her in there. Trouble is, the mink have me cornered up a tree and I’m now no longer in a position to let her out.