Pussy Page 16

  Though they were frightened to disrupt the stillness, the yesterday men and women of Fracassus’s diatribes – the educated, the knowledgeable, the sad, the losers, the Metropolitan retards – dared to let hope penetrate their bunkers. It had all been a fiction. Even Fracassus didn’t seem to believe any of it really. All men have some goodness in them, don’t they, let it only be an inadvertent mote blown out of someone else’s eye. It was a salutary warning. Fracassus had been sent to frighten them out of their complacency. This thing could happen. I’m behind you. Mind your backs.

  Very well. They’d learnt their lesson. They were listening. The people had given them a second chance. In the darkest hours, it was always the people who shone the brightest. Look, and you could see a streak of light. Listen, and you could hear sanity returning to the Republics like water returning to a dried-up riverbed. The sad bought in extra champagne. The losers invited their friends around to party. The retards danced their little disjointed dance.

  But then the wind seemed to turn again. Leaning out of Yoni Cobalt’s window on election night, Kolskeggur Probrius wet his finger.

  Yoni Cobalt felt the muscles in his back tense and then relax.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  He didn’t turn around. He didn’t have the heart to tell her what he knew.

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  Copyright © Howard Jacobson 2017

  Illustrations copyright © Chris Riddell 2017

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  First published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape in 2017

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