A Snowball in Hell by Christopher Brookmyre

Author:Christopher Brookmyre [Brookmyre, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780748131921
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-06-15T22:00:00+00:00

The transformed man

Well, haven’t I just got them all guessing? Ooh, the tension, the suspense, the deliciously tantalising frustration of not knowing. More speculation – not to mention genuine excitement – over the result of this poll than the last two General Elections. And what’s got them dancing on a string, struggling to contain themselves, like kiddies outside a locked bathroom door after way too much skoosh, is that unlike those elections, right now there’s no guarantee they’ll ever be told the outcome, and that’s just fucking killing them. Wonder how much money I could auction the answer for at the moment, what any of the tabloids, or maybe Sky News, might pay for this particular exclusive.

Truth is, I’m looking at the winner right now. She’s lying next to the bag I’m about to fit her body into: one of those big nylon affairs with several pairs of rollers, for taking your golf clubs on holiday. What a prize she’s bagged, too, if you’ll forgive the indulgence of a little pun. The country’s never been so interested in her throughout the entirety of her cheap and desperate little life. Wasn’t that what she wanted? And not forgetting the runner-up prize, that’s a beauty too. Come on, Bully, let’s show her what she could have won: a nation’s sincerest concern for her welfare. Promises that they’d do anything and everything in their power to save her. Oh, the fucking humanity. Stop it, I’ve got something in my eye.

So who gets what? Who was the winner? Oh tell us, Simon, please, please, please just tell us.

Fuck’s sake, what does it matter? Flip a coin: that’s what I did. Jesus, did these cunts really think I sat totting up what was in all those papers, or fast-forwarding hours of Sky-Plus recorded telly coverage in order to gauge who was getting the most play? Did I fuck. And if I was interested, I wouldn’t have had to bother, given the number of estimated (if contradictory) running totals that were being kept by the media themselves.

Utterly fucking pitiful, and nothing more than a procrastinatory distraction to focus upon in the absence of any apparent purpose to the whole thing. But now I’ve closed that option, and it’s time for them to really embarrass themselves by filling their pages and their airtime with stabs in the dark as to what it all means, both for me personally and – God spare us – for society as a whole.

In short, what they are looking for is a motive, a grand scheme to explain why I have visited this upon them. It was easier back in the days when they could just use labels like ‘sick’, ‘monster’ and ‘evil’ (all the more convincing reversed out of black in full caps and a massive font size), but in the information age, even the average Sun reader knows emotive labels still don’t actually tell you anything.

What is the bigger picture here, they demand to know. Why is he doing it?

Happily,

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