“And peace is Hell. All peace brings is dissent and cries of ‘I want this and my human rights entitle me to that’ and ‘I’ve got curly hair so if you don’t give me a diamond-covered house you’re oppressing me!’. Every little oik wants his share of utopia, but he’s damned if he’ll put the graft in to get it. And our beloved ministers are already plotting how to waste our limited resources to give it to them.”
“And so I killed them all,” interrupts a disembodied voice, a voice like bacteria multiplying in a wound. “Systematically. One by one, and in the most devilishly amusing ways. In fact, it’s become something of a hobby of mine – pruning the parliamentary rosebush. I believe I’m on my third.”
I’ve heard those tones before. I didn’t like them then and I certainly don’t like them now. I don’t like the black, backlit shadow that moves independently across the paper walls of our fake dental laboratory. I don’t like the knowledge that those self-same paper walls are all that separate us from the tangle of tree roots that somehow form the body of one Mr Malmot. I don’t like his long, grey fingernails gouging through them.
“And I stepped unto the breach once more,” seeps that terrible voice, as his sepulchral skull oozes through the torn partition. “And I made all the right noises. And I promised to hand over power as soon as free and fair elections took place. But, you see, I didn’t. I synthesized democracy instead. I rigged up a government from my own stooges. Clever, yes?
“But this is the really clever part: not even they know! They’re all such dissipated dreamers, they don’t suspect a damn thing! They think the daily achievement of nothing is normal!”
“Parliament’s just a pantomime performance for the public,” Calamari explains. “The military runs this country.”
“And I run the military,” Malmot laughs.
“Impressive,” I say.
“Impressive? Yes. I’m proud of my achievements. But interesting? Well, I’m afraid not. I’m sick of staging parliament, Jupiter. I’m a soldier not a playwright. I don’t care about story arcs; I don’t give a damn about character motivation for ethnic minority candidates in Kent. I’m not Shakespeare. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but what about the tank? I find heavy artillery the most direct form of communication, don’t you?”
“It does what it’s meant to do, Sir.”
“It does what it’s designed for,” Malmot replies. “And a democracy, for all its much-vaunted, high-minded intentions, does not. Dictatorship is a simple and honest system. Straightforward and efficient. Democracy is like running a cookbook through a shredder and expecting the wastepaper to make a recipe. It’s a jumble sale jigsaw with half the pieces missing.”
“But people like freedom of choice, Sir.”
“What makes you assume they have it? However, point that out and they don’t take kindly to it. So we’re not going to. We’re going to make them believe they’ve chosen dictatorship themselves, that they’re a part of it. And once they’ve tried it they’ll love it. Give a man a flag and a gun and he’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. And I don’t care what anyone says – there’s not a woman out there who wouldn’t trade two good husbands for a mean-eyed bastard in a black uniform.”
Have you heard of ‘Wernicke’s disease’? It affects heavy drinkers. A deficiency of vitamin B1, or thiamine, leads to a blurring of consciousness and damage to the optic nerves. I’m suspecting I’ve got it. More worrying though, the DT’s have hold of me and I’m feeling increasingly odd.
Delirium tremens last between three and ten days. Sufferers experience both visual and auditory hallucinations with a fatality rate of between one and twenty percent. So, looking on the less-than-bright-side, there’s a one in five chance that I might die. And whilst I’m staring Death in the face, shaking and sweating, my head full of blue devils and pink elephants, my stomach trying to crawl out of my mouth, Malmot chooses to tell me that the dead man we’ve reanimated is former Prime Minister Bactrian. We’re to take him on a campaign tour – part propaganda mission and part test to see if our drunken nation notices anything odd about him. If not, well, the plan is to slaughter all the Opposition and Independent Members of Parliament and make their robotised corpses behave so badly they disgrace British democracy forever. I take all this as calmly as I can. I vomit for an hour solid.
I’m left with Calamine, who instantly becomes tolerable again.
“So we’re to part ways,” he says.
“Good,” I reply, “because you never stick up for me when he’s around.”
“I’ve been too busy watching my own back to watch yours. Haven’t you noticed? I’m not exactly Mr Popular these days. Seems they don’t like independent thought.”
“Planning a Night Of The Long Knives, is he?”
“When isn’t he?”
It occurs to me that Calamine might be plotting something himself. I’d like to know what. But he won’t be drawn on the subject. Not straight away. He returns to the matter in hand.
“Now this is the situation: you and your fat, mental friend are to complete former Prime Minister Bactrian and then report to Calamari at this address.” He hands me a business card. It seems to be for a brothel. “In between, you’re to pick up two suits from this address,” another business card, “and make yourselves presentable. You’ll be going on tour with Calamari and assisting with maintenance and operation. Always refer to former Prime Minister Bactrian as ‘former Prime Minister Bactrian’. Not, ‘The Dead Guy’, ‘Old Coffin Bollocks’, or anything of the like. ‘Former Prime Minister Bactrian.’ Understand?”
“I understand,” I say, less than graciously. “Do we have to take Elton?”
“I thought he was your assistant?”
“He’s a human hemorrhoid. I’d rather he stays here until we’re suicidal enough to need him.”
“Okay. That’s fine. Now, Women. We can provide you with women along the way. We run things on military lines and understand necessity. However, I will level with you and tell you that we can’t guarantee the quality. So, if you choose to remain faithful to whoever, I would suggest that you ride her before reporting. You won’t be coming home for a while.”
“You’re a cunt,” I tell him. I would add ‘insensitive’ but it sounds so wet liberal.
“I’d call myself a pragmatist. It’s a mindset that exists outside of standard romantic notions of honour and decency. If you have any common sense you’ll follow my example.”
He throws me something.
“Officer’s stripes? I was never an officer?”
“I thought all army doctors were officers?”
“Not me. I was generally referred to as ‘Hey, you!’.”
“Well, be something greater than yourself,” he says. “Or, at least, fake it until you can. Trust me, you’ll need all the rank you can get when we bury democracy.
These are the other things Calamine tells me:
1: The infantile bickering of the petit bourgeois will never advance society.
2: Complete freedom means the time, space and opportunity to complicate your existence with irrelevant crap.
3: Dictatorship is just a derogatory term for a one party system. A one party system need not be corrupt.
Although, let’s be realistic…
4: It always is.
So…
5: Let’s build civilisation on our own terms, rather than those of genocidal mad men. Meaning…
6: Malmot.
And so…
7: I’m to report to him secretly.