Well, I’d have taken my pistol and blown the swine into bite-sized chunks. But then my critical faculties only go so far before deferring to the more damaged aspects of my personality. I walk the fine line between very clever and very stupid and it’s a constant source of infuriation for all concerned. Rachel, however, can keep her temper with anything but my good self and knows that the pistol is louder and draws attention. Given what we’ve got growing in the garden, well, attention’s something we don’t need. Our supposedly Non-Genetically Modified seeds have turned out to be GM after all. Worse still, Novelty GM: an erotic tableau of genitalia-shaped vegetables erupting from our once wholesome little allotment. You can’t turn your head for peapod pornography.
Bad science smells and the mink won’t touch our filthy crop. But they’re happy to conduct their business amongst it, preventing us from removing the offending evidence.
Now this is serious stuff. I’ve seen an eighty-year-old grandmother put in the stocks for an accidental arse cantaloupe. If the cops find our crops, we’ll be looking at a minimum six month stretch.
But why’s vag veg such a threat to society? Surely it’s all just innocent fun? Well, no, I’m afraid, it’s not. The government’s knee-jerk response to endemic alcoholism and the wholesale commodification of the female body is draconian obscenity law. So, whilst it’s impossible not to drink booze and prostitution remains our sole profitable industry, it’s illegal to be seen intoxicated or to have your photo taken with your tits out. All this, despite complete and total public indifference.
So, I was unlucky. Black-market products are a law unto themselves and you expect a few curious foreign phrases on the packaging. Thank God we didn’t plant the ‘Sodomy Beans’. Or the ‘Spurting Cock Zucchinis’.
Malmot’s always been odd. Or, perhaps, I should use the past tense there. After all, he’s been dead these past twenty years. In fact, it remains one of my proudest achievements that, even in my dotage, my prostate remains healthy enough to urinate on his grave – liberally and without the slightest discomfort – at least twice yearly. But my internal plumbing is beside the point. You’ll be wondering the reason for the sudden narrative-shift. Well, the simple fact, and one I feel I should clarify, is that I’m dictating this memoir from my deathbed. I have a young, female journalist recording my every semi-senile utterance. If my words seem to wander into the one-sided, it’s because I’m responding to her continual interruptions (all cynical attempts to build up her own part in History by the way. She isn’t doing this for love of The Leader).
Now I’m not new to dictating. Fact is, I’ve made something of a career of it. And, like most folk in the trade, I run the constant risk of overthrow. So whilst you may be reading this in your school, in its hundredth, leather-bound reprint, saluting my picture – and I sincerely hope that you are – it’s more likely you’re a NATO General plucking the pages from my dead fingers as your troops hoist my corpse up the nearest lamppost. I’m a pragmatist, you see. At best, I’ve hopped across the border with my elite guard, my faithful doctor, a sympathetic writer and died fighting with a gun in my hand. More realistically, I’ve left this world as I came into it: with my head between some woman’s thighs. That way, if they do display my body in public, at least I’ll be grinning with my tongue stuck out. But I digress.
Malmot’s always been odd. It’s all that wailing and gnashing of teeth he does. The outside world, well, you get that icy facade. I used to think he had no emotions. Then I saw him hunched up in a hotel room, whinnying and smacking himself in the head with his fist. That’s when I realised there was something deeply wrong going on in there.
But you’ll never get anything out of him. He may let slip something that hints to something else. Occasionally. When he’s drunk. But you’ll only half-hear it. Through a wall. And the words get drowned out by the sobbing.
I know things about him, however. Things that, perhaps, it would be insensitive to tell you. But I never hesitated to bad-mouth the swine when he was alive so I figure it would be the wrong kind of hypocrisy to start speaking well of him now.
That smacking himself on the head, I’ve seen autistics do that before. Don’t know why. I don’t know anything about autism. I can tell you about the gnashing of teeth, though, and how it’s not really gnashing. It’s more of a kind of chattering. Like a monkey. And that’s the thing… He grew up wanting to be a monkey. It was the only way to get affection.
Nanny didn’t like men, she told him. But she found monkeys morbidly amusing.
“I’ve always found simians preferable to the human male,” she said, doubtless whilst dragging him around by the earlobe. “They don’t lie. They don’t make false promises. They’re not dirty and disgusting. So just you follow your Nanny’s advice and mind you don’t grow up into one! Dirty, dirty, disgusting things! With just one thing on their dirty, dirty, disgusting minds!”
More astute parents might’ve noticed that their child’s primary carer was psychosexually deranged, advertised mainly in phone booths and spent whole hours diddling herself with a broom handle. They were unaware of the educational excursions to strip clubs and brothels. They didn’t see him playing lookout as she entertained sailors in back alleys, and they certainly didn’t see her pole dancing with a garter stuffed with banknotes and a peacock feather sticking out of her backside.
“These are the wages of sin,” she would tell the young Malmot, rubbing the notes beneath his nose. “And this,” she said, taking his hand and sliding it inside her hastily replaced underwear, “is the factory that Satan’s workers toil in.”
“Satan pays well,” says the seven-year-old Malmot. “Did you find it hard to get a job with him?”
“The nuns at the convent wrote me a good reference,” she answers.
So you can talk of Reactive Attachment Disorder and what it did to the poor little mite, but, if anyone should be suffering emotional deprivation caused by separation from their parents, it’s me. After all, my mother was electrocuted and my father went mad and spent his last days in a lunatic asylum. I’d have killed to have two living parents and a perverted nanny. I would have known what to do with her.
Malmot’s window is open. The room reeks. Ceesal has brought a succession of increasingly weird people through the door in recent hours and if their ideas didn’t stink then their aftershave did: a communications expert who just shouted; a female public relations expert who wouldn’t listen; a black race relations expert who was adopted and had never met another black person in his life and, finally, an effeminate man who wanted to see the national flag ‘rebranded’ in pink to make it more ‘inclusive’. Thank God they were gone now.
Ceesal has changed. He won’t take orders. He refuses to sign things without taking them away first. He’s slimmer now, dresses better and his speech is peppered with anachronistic slang. He calls people ‘guys’ and constantly invades their personal space.
“This is not the business of governing,” Malmot growls to Ceesal.
“You’re right,” the horrid grimace replies. “It’s the Future!”
“It’s dragging up mistakes from the past.”
“No, old man!” Ceesal snaps. “You’re the past. You know, the word on the street is that this party’s out of touch. Well, I’m gonna change that! I’m gonna make us hip! I’m gonna make us happening!”
No, thinks Malmot, you’re just a preening sociopath who wants to be loved. And it’s that desperation that’ll make people hate you.