Fatima Mansions, The – Mario Vargas Yoni

The mother of the nation has gone; she has hobbled off to her uncertain fate, having only a tycoon’s salary given to her to fund the purchase of that monkey-shit-brown hair rinse we know so well. They act like nothing ever happened, but it did. It’s too late–too late for the thousands driven to mental illness, premature old age and suicide by the force-feeding to them of a daily diet of despair and the doctrine of their own obsolescence. Too late for the thousands of teenagers who grew up illiterate but unaccountably proud that their nation spent the money it could have been spent on educating them to buy guns–guns which this country is too feeble and unimportant to need to use.

It’s too late to stop the rot–a rot she denied existed and which many thus forgot, which continued to accelerate and and now will not be stopped until all this fucking pretense is dropped. Mario Vargas Yoni, intellectual born-again right-wing son of a bitch from the exotic other end of the earth, Venus flytrap lips curling over straw-coloured front teeth, so smart, so alert, so elegant…admires the departed killer for her “courage”. Tonight he speaks with Reggie Gurdjieff, most intelligent man in the UK, about new novel Shag Auntie Peggy, and on his plan for a junk bond issue to finance the privitization of the llama. But first, the bad weather…