Ruin Nation Read Online Free PDF Page A

bloody civil conflict. He has the police in his pocket. He soon gains military backing and, with Walmart on-side, he has food, ammunition and very large guns. The smaller supermarket militias can’t compete. They crumble. When Walmart has what it wants, it pulls out to concentrate on East African initiatives, but it doesn’t matter. Malmot has his opportunity. He marches on the capital and  claims it. All dissenting voices disappear. When a brutal order returns to the streets, he assembles a police state and sells off shares in it. He’s smart enough to lurk in the shadows with Bactrian as a mouthpiece. And he’s smart enough to reconvene parliament. But you’ll never vote him out because all the ballot boxes go straight to the shredders.  And no one knows that Malmot is The Laburnum.
    Meanwhile, the remaining animals die. Restaurants offer a ‘veterinary bucket’. Don’t ask what’s in it. Just eat it. It could be the last meat you see in this lifetime. Unless you go to back to Manchester and what they now call the ‘cannibal territories.’
    Global warming continues unabated. Our reservoirs dry up and we become dependent on desalinated seawater. But it’s not safe to drink, so we brew it instead. And now we drink beer for breakfast dinner and tea, from the cradle to the grave. The cannier folk have solar stills to collect water for their children, but the majority of schoolkids are drunks. And their teachers are drunks – although that’s always been the case.
    Old King William’s still on the throne, imploring Africa and the other non-European states for aid, bless him. And my television’s broke and I can’t get the parts. Life goes on. It goes to Hell. And it’s taking us all with it. God, I imagine, finds all this hilarious.
     
    “You make fun ?” says the homeless woman in a croak comprising a dozen accents. Is that Portuguese? I’m sure that last swearword was Czech. The low sun’s in my tired eyes and the stunted trees throw shadows across her wrinkled, riven features. She found me asleep in the gutter. I’m not sure which one of us smells worse.
    “Fun with a capital ‘F’,” I say, as she stares through me. I pinch the silver foil into a sharp crease. She’s asking what I mean. Like a comedian, or something? I say no. I was an army surgeon. Now I make puppets. Nothing important. And I pass her my glittering handiwork.
    “Well, you’re important to me,” she says. “This is the best tinfoil hat I’ve ever seen! I know my thoughts are safe now!”
    And she puts it on her head, picks up the corners of her skirt and starts to dance a slow, solo waltz in the middle of the road. I smile and wish her an unheeded goodbye.
    I start on one of my interminable deliberations on the nature of Fun and why I’m not having any. How I live like a peasant in a crumbling hovel but I’m expected to behave like a gentleman and pay National Insurance for the privilege. How I contribute to a Health Service that doesn’t exist and a pension it’s impossible to collect. Why the council takes a third of my monthly pay and then refuses to empty my bins until I remove the crashed fighter jet in my front garden. Why? I didn’t put it there. It’s metal. Why hasn’t anyone stolen it? Guess it’s too big to move when all you’ve got is a handcart pulled by toddlers.
    If I was let off the leash I could amuse myself, do something interesting with my life. But there are no adventures anymore, no places left to explore in our satellite-mapped country. Everyone’s tried everything and ruined it.
    The sky’s the last frontier. And, sure, I could rejoin an airship gang, build myself a scrapyard zeppelin and take up crapping on holiday jets for a hobby. But I don’t fancy swanning around the heavens, strapped beneath a thousand cubic metres of hydrogen. Been there, done that and lost the woman I loved to overhead power lines.
    All the good uncertainties have gone. There’s just the bad uncertainties now: the