a short chapter

“Fill it up,” shouted Bob, eyes bloodshot with celebratory booze, limp penis sagging worthless beneath unkempt gut, itself white bloated fleshy awful under open silk kimono, how gruesome, how wrong. “Fill it all the way right up to the goddamn crest of the top, spill it if you must, open another case, two more cases, open every bloody case but fill that tub until it can fill no further!”

“Get your black ass filling,” blurted a reeling and coke-fuelled Prime Minister, dropping a full tumbler of good scotch, swamping around shards of crystal and ice across the marble bathroom floor. He pulled blindly at a mound of cash, more notes than the servant had ever seen, and flapped them all into a soggy wedge amongst his own spilt drink. “We want that fucking bath filled, you lazy bastard. This is a party.”

“Party,” Bob yelled, painfully wrenching the puke of the drunk in a golden arc, somewhere in the vicinity of the toilet.

“A party, and a fucking celebration,” slurred the PM aggressively. He had the toned body of a bitter man, and the sweat and grinding of his teeth had smeared his public mask into something quite horrific.

The servant, obedient, silent, resentful, uncorked another bottle, Dom Pérignon, and poured it into the bath. He was dressed up like an exploited bellboy from some not-so-distant past, a dancing minstrel, uniform hat balanced on the top of his head and matching with his brass-buttoned monkey jacket. Bob dressed all of his servants up like this, wrote it into their tenuous contracts. He employed an exclusively black staff. One could only hope to speculate as to why this was, speculation which would no doubt lead to an unpleasant and sinister evaluation of the character of the man. He was that kind of person. Every bit the bastard.

The bath, like the room which housed it, was vulgar, garish and unnecessary. A pimp’s bath, thought the servant, a low grade whitey pimp bath. He looked at the two naked men – supposed pillars of the political community, fucked as they were, slipping about on the ice and the spilled champagne bubbles that would dry sticky and rancid on the bathroom floor; men so unfalteringly convinced of their own worth to the world and the importance of all they stood for – and as the first pangs of pity rose inside his good Christian heart he swallowed deeply, self-consciously, replacing those pangs with a blossoming hatred of their very existences. Nauseated by the obscenity of these two filthy shits his mind wandered to revenge, as the gold-legged, free-standing, six-berth bathtub fizzed and popped, and another case of the inestimably fine champagne was cracked open so that the conceited sons-of-bitches could roll their pompous white asses in the luxury of a homoerotic and very much behind-closed-doors wine bath that only the loneliest single men with the smallest of penises and the blackest of souls and way too much money would even consider engaging in.

After all, these men were not politicians for whom he had voted, or indeed would ever vote. They were scoundrels. Scoundrels and crooks. They thought he was a dusky dumb manservant, a primate who learned the methods of house service only through painstaking repetition, but he was smarter than they thought and he knew, knew what they were celebrating, knew what their big political initiative was.

Nuclear. Powered. Heart. It had launched that morning, to overwhelming success, demand, public response.

He could read, he overheard, and he knew enough about things to know that something was afoot, something as unsavoury as a piece of chocolate. A bony finger raised all the way to the heavens in some universally offensive gesticulation. A lengthy shit left tall and spiralling on the doorstep of humanity. In their overzealous conversations they crooned about hearts, and about viruses, genetic modifications as weapons, about emotional sabotage and severed human responses, all by-products of the heart’s installation procedure. Like any good man of decent heart who spends a lifetime in the service of the morally questionable, the penny had dropped, as it were, and he wanted desperately to hold onto that decent heart of his. And he wanted revenge. For God, for himself, for the man he might have been, given half the chance. It had been nearly thirty years on this wonderful earth and he finally wanted his voice to be heard. Not too much to ask.

“For God’s sake, that’ll have to do you lazy nobody,” said the Prime Minister viciously, as the last slurp of bubbly thundered like pus from a manipulated adolescent pimple from the bottom of the thirty-first bottle. Bob sniggered like a secretive schoolboy, trying to stifle his sycophantic giggles in a quiet classroom. “Now get the fuck out of here.”

The servant bit his tongue and felt his arms trembling, with shock or offense or anger, as though the muscle would tear through the skin and glisten so powerful and impressive in the glare of the ceiling-mounted light source, the halogen spotlights. He bent to clear the empty bottles from the floor.

“Leave that there you ignorant bastard,” the PM went on, climbing into the champagne. It reached up to his knees. They were ugly.

“Get the hell out of here, invisible man,” laughed Bob, who pulled himself up from where he was stretched, singing drunkenly on the floor, using the edge of the bathtub and his elbows to try to stabilise his ascent. He grinned, drooling grimly, and plunged his head under the heavily carbonated liquid, trying to drink the plentiful alcohol with all the frenzy of a rugby team initiation ceremony and not a celebration of his own party’s financial and political monopoly. He gagged after a few seconds, you could see it happening below the surface of the champagne, and his doubled-over torso was wracked by violent spasms, long-forgotten muscles jiving with nausea under his reams of fish-white stomach flab. He pulled his head out, showering the servant and the mirror and the bathroom units with wine and blowing 12.5% ABV snot bubbles from his gasping nostrils. He collapsed, destroyed by his own stupid laughter.

“Not invisible enough, eh charcoal?” The Prime Minister was cupping his genitals with one hand in the champagne bath. Feeling sick with the both of them, but more sick with himself, the servant left the bathroom and closed the door behind him, all the while pulping both of their faces into unrecognisable tissue mash with screams and blood and retribution in the depths of his mind.

Bob pulled himself up again and rolled over the edge of the tub, hitting the champagne surface hard and sending bottles-worth of the stuff across the floor. His drenched kimono floated on the surface and his cheeks were reddened by burst blood vessels. He had the kind of face that only demonstrated how bloody awful it really was in the penetrating light of a bathroom, a light that stripped you of bullshit, a face imploding from the inside out, blood and veins and muscle tissue all vying for a way out. Contrarily, the Prime Minister seemed not to have a single drop of blood in his entire body, artificially bronzed, clinically angled and inescapably inhuman. Evil licked him like tongues on ice cream. It was a scene of almost suicidal grotesquery.

They looked at each other in the bizarre quiet that can sometimes befall intense drunkenness. Nude toes wiggled above the sticky fluid, his and his. The silence became sniggers became chortles became guffaws became smug repulsive laughter.

“We’ve done it,” said Bob. “We’ve fucking done it!”

The Prime Minister stood up, his slender body dripping champagne from the pubic hair and the asshole, and he reached for a couple of fresh bottles from the case. He popped the corks and passed one over to Bob as he sat back down.

“To the nuclear powered heart,” he said, raising his bottle in toast.

“To us,” said Bob, as if in the throes of seduction. “Partners in crime and world domination!” He was an annoying thick drunk, vulgar and mindless, thought the Prime Minister. No doubt an observation of particularly significant revelation. It was a dog-eat-dog world, politics. He snorted, and looked at Bob with a murderous glare.

“To us,” he eventually concurred, and took a long measured pull on his champagne. He threw the bottle to smash against the wall and jerked towards Bob through the champagne bath and kissed him violently on the mouth, with splinters of good green glass falling into their hair, which was now one in the shock intimate passion of their successes.

Goals, like excesses in testosterone and certain recreational drugs, can do strange things to a man.

an excerpt

When the ceremony came it was an excruciating spectacle. The roads through central London were all closed to traffic, as vast parades of mourning Britons staggered lamenting across the rivers of macadam. They wept for the life of this man who they had never known, bundled into intimacy by the persuasive forces of the media, sympathy manipulated by poor syntax and repetition. They left flowers outside Scotland Yard, thousands of pounds worth of rotting memorial wreaths, genetically modified specifically for the occasion, childish poems scrawled in devastated script on the cards provided. Television had created a weird digitised familial bond with the dead fat police commissioner, everyone felt it, civilians weeping as they would never weep for their real flesh and blood families. It was as though the continual broadcasting had forged a closeness unattainable in real relationships, somehow so much more than actual experience, unsullied by the difficulties inherent in first-hand emotional encounters. News cameras captured their faces, sobbing uncontrollably, hyperventilating even. It no longer mattered specifically who was being mourned, and many of the mourners probably didn’t even know who it was they were weeping for, but the flowers piled up to waist, chest, head height in the streets, the commissioner’s face printed onto commemorative Union Jack flags and hung in the windows of private residences, and the awful spoken tributes were spluttered out between dry heaves, the personal reminiscences of a new kind of impersonal twenty-first century relationship, the imagined closeness of distant strangers, tenderly remembering this man they had first met only days before, just minutes after his death behind the sanctuary of widescreen, another pixellated actors face sent to the TVs around which homes had grown, a face that had since been with them forever, a new memory, implanted like a microchip in their lonely malleable minds.