Now I’ve fired a gun in combat and I’ve seen the Red Mist turn men into animals. I’ve seen them glaze over and hunt their fellow man like hounds running down a fox. I’ve seen it on the battlefield. Hell, I was seeing it in the playground when I was seven. Violence is always just a hair’s breadth beneath the surface. We’ve cracked that surface and now we’re reaping what we’ve sown.
The fire escape doors splinter open and what bursts out clearly wants to kick someone until his skull splits open. There’s ten of them, armed with chairlegs and bloody shards of mirror; and I don’t plan on being the next thing they pulp. I see a ventilation duct, dark, dirty, dripping, looking like something you’d plug a colostomy bag into. Suddenly, I’m on Calamine’s shoulders, and, before I know it, I’m levering the grill off and I’m in that duct. And then we’re both inside. And they can follow us in, I reason, but it’s a confined space and, if they want me, they’ll have to queue. And I’ll take the face off at least one of them before I go. And I make some heroic statement to this effect, which Calamine finds uproariously funny.
“We have pistols,” he reminds me. And when somebody invades our privacy, he puts a bullet between their eyes and laughs even louder. No one seems to bother us after that.
“So what have you been up to?” he asks. “Apart from the obvious?”
“So that’s the first best way to wind up a leftie,” says Malmot with a curdled chuckle, when we’ve reconvened in the big, black armoured bus. “Not because it’s disgusting and so plainly stupid, but because the production of semen is a solely male preserve and the pro-feminist factions perceive it as sexist.”
“And eight hundred people died because of a perception,” says I.
“Eight hundred people were admitted to hospital over a perception,” Malmot corrects me. “Seven hundred and fifty of them critical. Fatalities are separate. No word of them yet. Still the counting up to do. Standard practice is to pile up all the bits in a room and see how many complete bodies you can make.”
“Fun for all the family, then,” I hear myself comment. I can’t say I’m feeling so proud of myself anymore.
“Don’t be such a fuddy duddy,” Malmot snaps. “People have been killing each other over perceptions and misinterpretations for thousands of years. Who are you to go against precedent?” And then the smile creeps back across his face. “But let’s not argue over that now. Oh, we’ve crippled the Opposition, all right. And once we’ve sent Nelson Churchill out Jew-baiting and lynched Laeticia Veetabycs for twinky-snatching, there’ll be rioting from Land’s End to the Hadrian’s Wall Blockade. They’ll be deader than stone dead ducks.”
“What about the other parties?” I ask.
“Oh, they’ll try to capitalise on the chaos,” says Malmot, “just as we intend to. But the beauty of these single-issue organisations is that they tend to embarrass themselves the minute they emerge from their dank, backroom boltholes. England has an allergy to tie-dye ponchos, you know, and self-righteous, barely-literate protest songs. Some pansy calls for peace and the general public respond by praying for a tank battalion. We’re going to give them that battalion.
Chapter Five
Corrosive Urine and Other Forms of Passive Resistance
It’s time to get out of London. We get a couple of hundred miles, maybe, and then we break down. It’s my fault. I have trouble with authority.
It’s childish, I know, but I’d taken to urinating against the wheel arches under cover of night. It was my little gesture of disrespect. What I hadn’t realised was that I’m some sort of biological freak. I’d given up alcohol and my body was expelling the toxins, with the result that my urine turned highly caustic.
And so we’re driving along when, suddenly, there’s a screeching, a grinding and all the noises in-between, sparks trailing down the road behind us and the back wheels flying past us and off across the motorway. My piss has eaten through the axle.
“That was an armoured transmission,” says Calamari bemused. I say nothing. I hide.
I’m keeping myself nicely out of the way when I notice something unusuaclass="underline" tyre tracks disappearing into nowhere. I trace them through tangled, brambled undergrowth into a deep ditch, where I discover an overgrown wonderland of massive pornographic vegetables: Novelty GM, the feral crop of a crashed lorry.
The mummified driver hangs entwined in wrist-thick tendrils, garlanded with nippled tomatoes and crowned with an arse-like pumpkin.
I beckon Speechwriter over. He misreads my grim smile.
“Don’t you feel any kind of sympathy?” he says, exploding into wet-liberal apoplexy. “What kind of a man are you? You! You, with your corrosive urine and your tinkering around in dead people’s innards and your starting riots and your stupid false moustaches?! Is your mother proud of you?!”
“Yes,” I tell the pompous little twat. “She was. But now she’s dead. She was hit by lightning and burned from the inside out, right in front of me. I was ten. Is your mother proud of you?”
Speechwriter doesn’t know what to say to that. Speechwriter’s mum runs yoga retreats and has an open relationship with some hippy fuckwit who paints his bollocks with woad.
A tow truck pulls in, sees me holding a gargantuan carrot phallus and pulls straight out again.
“This may take some time,” Calamari says.
We’re in a pub. I’m drinking the only non-alcoholic option available: my own distilled urine. And if that’s not enough to curdle the soul, we’re in Lincolnshire.
If all’s going to plan, a contingent of phoney ‘Brownshirts’ should be marching upon New Downing Street right about now. Soon after, they’ll be bombed by whatever collection of aeroplane parts our engineers can coax into the sky. We don’t know what form this aircraft will take but we’re all agreed it should be called ‘The Phoenix’. The propaganda opportunity’s too good to miss.
Calamari has a warped idea of relaxation. If he’s not punching children in the arm with a sharpened corkscrew, he’s suggesting we all go for a leisurely narrowboat trip down the remnants of the Grand Union Canal. But there isn’t much of the canal left to cruise down, so we’ve run aground and decamped to a delightful dive situated between an abandoned themepark, the various sites of an electricity plant and the Rampton mental hospital. It’s weird and I don’t like it, but we’re stuck in stasis until Malmot makes contact. When? We don’t know. I mean, how long does it take to destroy a capital city?
In this little backwater, the only contact with civilised society is the weekly shipment of Country and Western records from some mythic nearby town. Television’s referred to as ‘the Devil’s Box’ and the genepool’s so tiny it makes Battencross Manor look healthy. There’s one attractive woman here and she’s deceased. Her plaster death mask stares out from behind the bar.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
The landlord, broad and barrel-chested, fight-mashed face and a nose like a sheep’s stomach, pivots on the heels of his cowboy boots.
“Mother,” he says, expanding our matriarchal theme.
“Yours?”
“Everyone’s,” is his teary-eyed and deeply worrying answer.
“The last human being in Lincolnshire,” mutters Speechwriter. “Before they de-evolved back into apes.”
Our armed escorts – the State Security Staff, or whatever you want to call them – they’re outside, kicking something. No one seems concerned by the gunshots. I sip my horrid drink. Speechwriter’s being thoughtful.