Snuff Fiction

by Robert Rankin

  Heads shook around the table. I looked at Norman and he looked at me.

  ‘And so,’ continued the Doveston, ‘I have drawn up a couple of radical proposals which I feel will sort everything out. Firstly I propose that income tax be abolished.’

  A gasp went up around the table.

  ‘I’ll give that the thumbs up,’ said Norman.

  ‘Please calm down,’ said the Doveston, ‘and allow me to explain.’

  ‘I am calm,’ said Norman.

  ‘He wasn’t talking to you.

  ‘As we all know,’ the Doveston said, ‘no matter how much money you earn, the inland revenue will eventually get all of it. It is damn near impossible to buy anything that does not have a tax on it somewhere. Allow me to advance this argument. Say I have one hundred pounds. I go into an off-licence and buy ten bottles of whisky at ten pounds a bottle. The actual whisky only costs two pounds a bottle, all the rest is tax. So the man in the off-licence now has the difference, twenty pounds. He uses that to fill his car up with petrol. Tax on petrol represents seventy-five per cent of its market price. So now there’s only five pounds left out of my one hundred pounds. The chap at the petrol station spends this on five packets of cigarettes. And we all know how much tax there is on fags. Out of my original one hundred pounds, the government now have all but one. And whatever the man in the fag shop spends that one pound on will have a tax on it somewhere.’

  ‘Yes yes yes,’ said old silly-bollocks. ‘We all know this, although we wouldn’t want the man in the street to know it.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said the Doveston. ‘And we’re not going to tell him. Now this same man in the street is taxed roughly one-third of his weekly earnings in direct taxation. What would happen if he wasn’t?’

  ‘He’d have a third more of his money to spend every week,’ said old silly-bollocks.

  ‘And what would he spend it on?’

  ‘Things, I suppose.’

  ‘Precisely. Things with tax on.’

  ‘Er, excuse me,’ said what’s-his-face, the Foreign Secretary. ‘But if everybody in the country had a third more of their money in their pockets to spend and they did spend it, surely the shops would run out of things to sell?’

  ‘Precisely. And so factories would have to manufacture more things and to do so they would have to take on more staff and so you would cut unemployment at a stroke. And you wouldn’t have to increase anybody’s wages, because they’d all be getting a third more in their pay packets anyway. You’d have full employment and a happy workforce. Hardly the recipe for revolution, is it?’

  ‘There has to be a flaw in this logic,’ I said to Norman.

  ‘There has to be a flaw in this logic,’ said old silly-bollocks. ‘But for the life of me, I can’t see what it is.’

  ‘There is no flaw,’ said the Doveston. ‘And if you increase the purchase tax on all goods by a penny in the pound , which no one will complain about, because they’ll have so much more money to spend, you’ll be able to grab that final pound out of my original one hundred. You’ll get the lot.’

  All around the boardroom table chaps were rising to applaud. Even the woman with the bald head, who usually wears the wig, got up and clapped.

  ‘Bravo,’ cheered Norman.

  ‘Sit down, you stupid sod,’ I told him.

  ‘Yeah, but he’s clever. You have to admit.’

  ‘He said he had a couple of radical proposals. What do you think the second one might be?’

  ‘Now, my second radical proposal is this,’ said the Doveston, once all the clappers had sat themselves down. ‘I propose that the government legalize all drugs.’

  ‘Oh well,’ said Norman. ‘One out of two wasn’t bad. Not for a bloke who’s Richard, anyway.’

  Chaos reigned in the boardroom.

  The Doveston bashed his fists upon the table. Chaos waned and calm returned.

  The Doveston continued. ‘Please hear me out,’ he said. ‘Now, as we all know, the government spends a fortune each year in the war against drugs. It is a war that the government can never win. You can’t stop people enjoying themselves and there are just too many ways of bringing drugs into this country. So why does the government get so up in arms about drugs?’

  ‘Because they’re bad for you,’ said what’s-his-face.

  ‘You are amongst friends here,’ said the Doveston. ‘You can tell the truth.’

  ‘I’ll bet he can’t,’ said old silly-bollocks.

  ‘Can too.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Can too.’

  ‘Go on then,’ said the Doveston. ‘Why does the government get so up in arms about drugs?’

  ‘Because we can’t tax them, of course.’

  ‘Precisely. But you could tax them if they were legal.’

  ‘Don’t think we haven’t thought about it,’ said old silly-bollocks. ‘But no government dare legalize drugs. Even though half the population regularly use them, the other half would vote us out of office.’

  ‘But what if they were legalized, but the man in the street didn’t know they were legalized?’

  ‘I don’t quite see how you could do that.’

  ‘What if you were to take all the money that is wasted each year in the war on drugs, go over to the areas where the drugs are originally grown, the Golden Triangle and so on, and use the money to buy all the crops. Ship them back to England, then market them through the existing network of pushers. You wouldn’t half make a big profit.’

  ‘That’s hardly the same as legalizing them, or taxing them.’

  ‘Well, firstly, the people who take drugs don’t really want them legalized. Half the fun of taking drugs is the “forbidden fruit” aspect. They’re much more exciting to take if they’re illegal. Only the government will know that they’re legal, which is to say that the Royal Navy will import them. You can’t imagine any drug-traffickers wanting to take on the Royal Navy, can you? On arrival here, the drugs will be tested and graded, they could even be trade-marked. They will be top quality, at affordable and competitive prices. Any opposition in the shape of rival drug-importers will soon be put out of business. The profits you make can be called “tax”. I can’t think of a better word, can you?’

  ‘But if the rest of the world found out . . . ?’ Old silly-bollocks wrung his hands.

  ‘You mean if other governments found out? Well, tell them. Tell them all. Get them to do the same. It will put the Mafia out of business and increase government revenues by billions all over the world.’

  ‘But the whole world will get stoned out of its brains.’

  ‘No it won’t. No more people will be taking drugs than there are now. And fewer people in this country will be taking them.’

  ‘How do you work that out?’ old silly-bollocks asked.

  ‘Because a great deal of drug-taking is done out of desperation. By poor unemployed people who have given up hope. In the new income-tax-free society, they’ll all have jobs and money to spend. They won’t be so desperate then, will they?’

  ‘The man’s a genius,’ said Norman.

  ‘The man is a master criminal,’ I said. ‘No wonder he’s so into security. He’s probably expecting the unwelcome arrival of James Bond at any minute.’

  So, what of the Doveston’s radical proposals? What of them indeed. You will of course know that direct taxation ceased at midnight on the final day of the twentieth century, when most of the government’s computer systems self-destructed. But you probably didn’t know that since the summer of 1985 virtually any ‘illegal’ drug that you might have taken in this country was imported, graded and marketed with the approval of HM Government herself.

  And that a penny in the pound on all profit made has gone directly to the man who brokered the original deal with the chaps from the Colombian drugs cartel.

  And this man s name?

  Well, I don’t really have to spell it out. Do I?

  But I’ll tell you what. It’s not Richard.

  18
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  Fame is a process of isolation.

  Alice Wheeler (friend of Kurt Cobain)

  I worked for a full ten years at Castle Doveston.

  Ten bloody years it took me doing it up. And when I had finally finished my labours, the Doveston drew my attention to some of the first rooms I’d decorated and remarked that they were now looking somewhat shabby and would I mind just giving them another lick of paint.

  I did mind and I told him so. I had my conservatory to get started on and I felt I could use a holiday. Mind you, I’m not saying that my years at Castle Doveston weren’t fun. In fact I’m prepared to say that they were some of the happiest years of my life. During those years I must have taken every conceivable drug and indulged in every conceivable form of sexual deviation known to man and beast. There was even some talk of naming a brand of iodine after me.

  And I did get to meet the rich and famous. I got to watch them engaging in the bad behaviour that their status afforded them. And if I wasn’t there to witness it in person, I could always watch it on video the following day.

  My video library became a bit of a legend in Bramfield and I derived a great deal of pleasure from standing in the saloon bar of The Jolly Gardeners, listening to conversations about the rumoured sexual peccadillos of film stars, before chipping in that I had them captured on tape doing worse. I never charged for private screenings, although I made a fair bit of money from marketing bootleg copies.

  I should never have sent that compilation tape off to You’ve Been Framed though.

  The vice squad did me for Possession of Pornographic material. Another two Ps there, you notice. But the case never came to court. The Doveston’s influence saw to that. His video library was far bigger than mine, with its own special magistrates’ section. And anyway, he was by now so hand in glove with the government that all his employees carried diplomatic immunity. Which meant that we could behave very badly and park on double yellow lines.

  It was during this period, of course, that the Doveston became world famous. He had been rich and powerful for years, but he really got off on the fame.

  It was the snuff that did it. The Doveston designer snuff

  The Nineties, you see, were no laughing matter. These were the years of PC. Political Correctness. For which you can read TYRANNY. People were urged into giving things up. They gave up having casual sex. They gave up eating meat.

  They gave up smoking!

  They didn’t want to, but they did. The Secret Government of the World decreed it and it was so. And where people had to be urged that little bit harder, they were. We all know now that AIDS and BSE were not the products of nature. They were engineered. But when it came to smoking, the approach was far more subtle.

  The scare stories that smoking was actually bad for your health were never going to work. No-one in his or her right mind would ever believe such nonsense. So the Secret Government saw to it that smoking was banned in public places. You could no longer smoke in certain restaurants, in cinemas, in art galleries, in theatres and shops and schools and swimming pools. Smoking was forbidden.

  BUT NOT SO THE TAKING OF SNUFF.

  It was almost as if he had seen it coming. Almost as if, perhaps, he’d had a hand in it. He had extensive tobacco plantations by now, in several Third World countries, along with his estates in Virginia. And was it really a coincidence that at a time when he was opening up trade with China, a vast and lucrative market which would surely swallow up everything he could produce, that smoking was suddenly being actively discouraged in the West?

  And you see, the thing about snuff is that it can be produced cheaply from the dried end leaves of tobacco that are not of sufficient quality to use in cigarettes. Every plantation finds itself each year with a surplus of this stuff. It’s usually just mulched up for fertilizer.

  Aha! I hear you cry, the rat is smelled. But what about Political Correctness as a whole? Surely it wasn’t just a callous hoax, played upon a gullible public for motives of profit alone?

  Well sorry, my friends, I’m afraid it was. The fear of AIDS led to the abandoning of casual unprotected sex. Shares in condom companies boomed. The fear of BSE led people to give up eating meat and eat more vegetables. Shares in agri-chemical companies boomed. And so on and so forth and suchlike.

  No matter what you gave up in the cause of PC, it benefited some rich blighter somewhere.

  So what about that snuff?

  The first TV commercial was a masterpiece. It featured an actress from one of the popular ‘soaps’. Normally it is written into the contracts of such actresses that they cannot appear in commercials. Except, of course, if the soap itself is sponsored by the makers of the very product that is being advertised. And when the product is ‘the healthy PC alternative to smoking’, where could be the harm in it?

  It was the very first TV commercial for a branded product ever shown on the BBC.

  And the range of fashion accessories that went with the product! The snuffbox jewellery, the pendants and necklaces, bracelets and brooches. The cufflinks, the hipflasks, the snuff-dispensing pens. All, of course, with their distinctive Gaia logo. What could possibly be more PC?

  But for all the design and the promo and bullshit, what of the product itself? Was the snuff any good? Did it smell nice? Did it give you a buzz? Remember, you had to stick this stuff up your hooter and the taking of snuff had formerly been regarded as solely within the province of dirty old men.

  Well, come on now, what do you think?

  It was bloody marvellous. It smelled like Heaven and set you right up for the day.

  It came in fifty different blends, each the product of years of research and development. And he’d left nothing to chance. He had trademarked the name Doveston’s Snuff. Which is to say that he had not only trademarked his own name, but the word ‘snuff’ too. How he did it is anyone’s guess, although I have a few of my own. And what it meant was that no rival could use the word ‘snuff’ on their product. And there were to be many rivals. Any good idea spawns imitators and I still own in my private collection a packet of Virgin Sniffing Mixture.

  It never caught on.

  The Doveston began to make his first public appearances: on talk shows, at world premières, society functions and fight nights. He was a natural raconteur and the camera loved him. He would turn up on Newsnight, discussing ‘Green Issues’, and on Blue Peter, demonstrating how you could make a snuffbox for Mummy out of sticky-backed plastic and Fairy Liquid bottles with their names blacked out.

  He appeared on the covers of trendy magazines and it wasn’t long before photographers from Hello! were given the secret password to get them through the gates of Castle Doveston.

  And it wasn’t too long after that that the first piece of shit hit the wildly whirling fan. Some stills from a video recording found their way into the hands of a Sunday tabloid journalist. The joyful journalist passed these on to his editor. The elated editor passed on the news that he intended publication to the Doveston. The Doveston apparently then told him to publish and be damned.

  Or so the story goes. Some, who are better informed, tell it that the words used were actually: you‘ll be damned before you publish. If these were the very words used, then they were uncannily prophetic, for the editor died the following day, in a freak accident involving his car-exhaust pipe and a stick of dynamite.

  The incriminating photographs went up with him. Or should that be down, in the case of the damned?

  But the brown stuff always sticks and even as the Doveston was making his way to Buck House to receive his OBE ‘For Services to the British People’ from his grateful monarch, queues of young women were forming outside the offices of the nation’s press, each of these young women being eager to offer details, in exchange for nothing more than large sums of money, of how the man they now called the Sultan of Snuff had tried to coerce them into giving him blow-jobs, or got them to do rude things with cigars.

  And it seemed that every miffed ex-employee, or indee
d anyone who had ever known the Doveston, had some lurid story they wanted to sell. Even Chico’s now-aged aunty, who still ran the ever-popular House of Correction in Brentford, came forward with a ludicrous yarn about the young Doveston sexually molesting her pet chicken and running off with her favourite teapot.

  But all publicity is good publicity and if you are very very rich it doesn’t matter what the tabloids print about you. Or even how true it might be. You sue and you win and the public loves you for it. And the damages make you even richer.

  Mind you, there were moments when things got mighty dangerous. Someone, and it might very well have been the same someone who sent the video stills to the tabloid, someone tipped off a prominent investigative TV journalist that the British government was funding the importation of narcotics and that the Doveston was acting as middle man and taking one per cent of the profits.

  It chills my very soul today when I recall the ghastly details of the freak accident which took that TV journalist from us. May his tortured body rest in peace.

  But oh, I hear you say, enough of this. Relevant as all these details are and necessary to the telling of the tale, we really do want to get on with the guts and the gore.

  Well, all right all right all right. I can beat about the beaver no longer, the story must be told and only I can tell it. The real guts and gore and the madness and mayhem occurred at the Great Millennial Ball.

  Held at Castle Doveston, this was to be the social occasion of the century. Anyone who was anyone had been invited and anyone who wasn’t, wasn’t getting in.

  Evidently I wasn’t anyone, because I hadn’t received an invitation. The first I heard about the ball was when Norman told me about the costume he was working on that ‘would really impress the ladies’.

  Norman had just returned from the balloon trip. What balloon trip? Well, the one the Doveston had organized for his closest friends to rise above the clouds over the English Channel and view the total eclipse of the sun.

  What total eclipse? The one that the rich people watched and we didn’t. That’s what!