by Ben Elton
8: GOLDEN BOY
An even more curious side to this strange way of making a living is the way in which it is regarded socially. Sly found himself lauded and held up as a role model to other young Australians. Far from being seen as a vandal whose job was destroying other people’s jobs purely for personal gain, he was presented as someone who created work, bringing money into the state and helping to keep the wheels of commerce turning. His youthful good looks made him popular with all and he quickly found himself regarding women in the way he regarded companies: things to be used and discarded, he would take from them what he desired and move on. Astonishingly, this too won Sly not contempt and condemnation, but jovial respect. It seemed that not only was this man a brilliant operator, but also he was a hell of a lad to boot. Curiously, this side of things had become rather irritating for Sly. He liked power and it is quite difficult to experience power if all gives way before you. You can’t push people round if they’re already bending over backwards, it gets boring. Even the sex began to get on his nerves — even with people bending over backwards. Sly was a fantastically successful individual, but he could not be said to have had a fulfilling personal life.
9: CITY OF ANGELS
And that’s why it felt so good to feel good again. As Sly glided in from LA airport, minor irritations, like deep personal discontent, were forgotten. He had the thrill again. The thrill of being, irrationally, pointlessly and idiotically rich. He felt like he’d arrived, and the reason for this childlike elation was a dinner invitation. Silvester Moorcock had been invited to dinner. Nothing very special about that of course, he’d had dinner before, often. Admittedly, this time he would be dining with some of the richest and most powerful men in the world, but once you’ve eaten smoked salmon mousse out of the bottom of a Penthouse Pet you have high standards as to what makes a meal swing.
It was not the invitation, but what the invitation represented that made Sly hug himself with excitement that night (normally he would have paid someone to do this for him, but he’d been in a hurry at the airport and anyway, it was a very private moment). Sly knew that he was about to be accepted into a club. An exclusive club. So exclusive a club in fact that it had no name and no membership list. It had no premises and you could not apply to join. A person simply drifted into membership having achieved the required qualifications. These qualifications being truly enormous wealth and the social conscience of a dog caught short on a croquet lawn. It was, and is of course, rare to find the former, without the latter.
The venue for the meal was unpretentious enough. A private room in a restaurant in Los Angeles. With certain obvious exceptions, the super-rich are a fairly faceless bunch and do not feel over-paranoid about going out in society, especially a society that provides itself with its own private police force, as Beverly Hills does.
If Los Angeles ever had a town planner, all the movie stars should club together and get him a guide dog. Whoever it was he must have designed the place while his brain was in a meeting. The town is a mess, worse than the suburbs of Perth, thought Sly as he limo’d through the streets. Streets that looked as if someone had dropped a load of buildings on either side and by coincidence they had all landed the right way up.
Los Angeles, like Sly’s native Western Australia, suffered from too much space and too much sunshine. For years and years developers had simply spread out, leaving one shit heap and building another a hundred metres further on, creating hundreds of square miles of depressing, low-rise sprawl. When the oil runs out LA will be completely finished as a city, millions will starve to death. For most people the nearest shop would be five or six hours walk away and, since in areas like Beverly Hills you quite literally get picked up by the law for walking, most people have forgotten how to do it.
Sly’s limo purred up outside ‘California Dreaming’, a restaurant which made a virtue out of what it called its ‘exclusive pricing policy’. The motto was, ‘If you want to eat here, be prepared to sell your house.’ The idea being to keep out scum and riff-raff. It didn’t keep out scum and riff-raff of course, it just kept out people who did not have a ridiculous amount of money.
Probably about a twentieth of the world’s ready cash was represented round the table that night so, not surprisingly, the food was good. Not good enough, of course; it would have been the same quality if only a twenty thousandth of the world’s wealth had been present, or even, horrible thought, a twenty millionth.
This must be one of the principal blights on the horizon of the super-rich: the fact that luxury and quality is finite. Paying a million pounds for a meal would not make it worth a million pounds; it would not make it ten thousand times better than one that cost a hundred pounds; it would probably not even be twice as good. The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value. One day, of course, if there is any justice, heaven will prove to be a store-house of new and unimagined luxuries. The guiltless will scoff great mounds of ambrosia, washing it down with jugfuls of nectar, but it is unlikely that any of the mega-mega-rich will be invited to that particular blow-out.
One presumes that billionaires are not stupid people, they cannot be unaware of the paradox of their great wealth. ‘Just what am I working for!’ they must shout rhetorically at their art collections, full of art which secretly they don’t like. They know the answer of course. They have long since exceeded any possibility of conventional satisfaction. They are working to fuck up the world for everyone else.
10: THE CLUB
And so Sly joined the club, although club is far too small a word to describe it. For the first time Sly, now a bona fide billionaire bastard, was to take his place at a cabinet meeting of the World Government of Money — or convivial dinner party of like-minded colleagues as they would have preferred to put it. In his wanderings around the upper echelons of society, Sly had often heard hints and rumours regarding a shadowy super-elite, a group wielding almost incomprehensible power who were preparing some secret and terrible purpose. Now it seemed he was being asked to take part.
Of course it was not quorate, by no means all the billionaires who were in on the conspiracy were present. They were dotted about the world, joylessly going about their business of fucking things up for everyone else. Their presence was not essential, for the Government of Money is not like a conventional government. It has no debating chamber, nor specific list of representatives. No official documents guarantee its legality. Indeed, many of the people round the table would have strenuously denied that it was a government at all and perhaps even half-believed their denials. But it is a government, as powerful as any. An invisible, amorphous, multi-headed dictatorship of money.
And it had a plan.
As Sly entered the restaurant, thrilled and excited, he had no idea what that plan was, or where it was leading to. As it happened, it was leading to hell and beyond. Sly’s life was about to change utterly. That evening he was to be indoctrinated into the Stark Conspiracy.
11: FOR THOSE IN PERIL FROM THE SEA
Some characters in this narrative will loom large, being directly connected, either for or against the great conspiracy which Sly was to join that night. Others must come and go for they are only indirectly connected, but are no less a part of it for that. For the influence of Sly and people like him is impossible to calculate, their tentacles spread across the globe. Sly lived in Oz, he was eating in Los Angeles, but his money was everywhere. His bucks had assumed a life of their own, they were out there doing things of which Sly knew very little and cared even less. Just as long as they went forth and multiplied it was fine by him. His bucks were animals that he had let off the leash. They ran about the world in an uncontrolled frenzy, bursting into the lives of people that Sly would never meet nor think of.
For example, as Sly entered the restaurant in Los Angeles some of his money was floating off the coast of Britain. Of course Sly was aware that a few of his bucks had found a temporary hom
e as a majority holding in a Belgian waste disposal group, his brokers always consulted him before making a share purchase. But what did that tell Sly? nothing about reality. Certainly Sly knew about the company’s collateral, its profit and loss curve, its disposable assets, its history on industrial relations and the chances of an injection of public funds should it hit the skids. But that was all he knew. He saw his investment purely and simply as a device by which to make money. What the company actually did was a matter of supreme indifference to him. He did not know about Captain Robertson; he did not know about the great toilet irony; he did not know about the Pastel family on holiday…
12: BRASS IN MUCK
Captain Robertson was a sad and bitter man. All his life he had wanted to be master of a ship. And what sort of ship did he end up being master of? a sludger. Scarcely a dashing or romantic command.
‘What do you do for a living mate?’
‘I lug shit up the Thames and dump it in the North Sea.’ Captain Robertson would occasionally try to cheer himself up. ‘It’s a rotten job but then people have to do toilet,’ he would say to himself as yet another great steaming slick slid out of the bowels of his barge and began its slow journey back to Britain.
Of course he was right, people do have to do toilet. Even the most rabidly concerned environmentalist would be unlikely to volunteer to cork their bot. But it doesn’t have to end up dumped virtually raw in the North Sea. It can in fact be processed and used as fertilizer. It could be re-eaten via a nice healthy cauliflower rather than a deformed fish. But perhaps this would be too long-winded a route by which people — like Sly’s bucks — could go forth and multiply.
The situation is quite ironic really because people are normally so fastidious about their bathroom hygiene. They are happy to invest in a foaming blue-flush which, although costly, is guaranteed to produce a sparkling bowl and lemon- scented toilet freshness that the whole family will enjoy. However, anything that happens beyond the U-bend is somebody else’s business.
13: THE PASTEL FAMILY ON HOLIDAY
The Pastels had had a lovely day wandering around in the freezing rain and the whole family were getting peckish. ‘Now then, kids,’ said Mr Pastel, ‘I’ll tell you what we’re going to have for our tea…Mussels, that’s what, just like your mother and I had on our honeymoon.’
So they did, they had mussels and the whole family got the utter and total shits, because the mussels weren’t just like on the honeymoon, since then the world had changed and the mussels with it.
Mussels and oysters feed by filtering tiny particles out of the sea water. These days that includes chemical wastes, agricultural poison and heavy metals. Also an awful lot of bacteria and viruses from human excreta, which cooking and cleaning does not always remove (cooking and cleaning the mussels that is, very few people cook and clean their excreta). Poor Mummy Pastel ended up with acute viral gastroenteritis and died, but we’ve all got to go sometime.
Sly didn’t know Mrs Pastel, she didn’t know him, but they were bound together in life and death by money.
14: COURT, HIPPIES AND LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
Anyway, back to CD who had just finished his Weetabix, well, finished the part he was going to eat. He was not a very good eater, especially when he was uptight and this morning was a bummer because he had to go to court, which for sure is the kind of thing to ruin a guy’s day.
He took some care in selecting what to wear. He had a pretty minimal wardrobe, but you have to make the effort if you’re appearing in court. After some thought he selected a pair of pretend Levis with a designer tear on the knee (he’d actually done it on a nail but in the world of being groovy you take your luck where you find it). He also wore his metal- tipped cowboy boots, an ace shirt which had metal tips on the collar, an ecologically sound tie with a picture of a steaming whale carcass on it and the slogan ‘Stop the bloody whaling’, and a sports jacket. CD still turned up the lapels of his sports jacket, even though no one else had done this since 1978. To this ensemble he added his droopy, mirrored shades.
I cannot see, CD thought to himself, eyeing his reflection in the broken wardrobe door he used for a mirror, any judge trying to deny that I am looking good, I mean bitching. Perhaps he couldn’t see because he had his shades on.
However, whatever the judge thought of it, and however prejudicial the mirrored shades may have been to his sentence, CD was later to thank his lucky stars that he had elected to go to court strutting like an ace king of teenage cool, because it was at the court that he met Rachel. And when a guy meets the girl of his dreams he should for def be wearing his pretend torn Levis, metal-tipped boots and shades.
So love found CD at the Carlton Criminal Court. An unlikely location being as how the place was about as romantic as anal warts. The Old Bailey it was not, no ancient oak and dignity for the Carlo crim processing plant, just veneered chipboard and nineteen-year-old coppers showing off.
CD hated young coppers. Getting busted by someone who could be your dad was one thing, but getting pushed around by a couple of teenage casuals was quite another. Older cops were all right on the whole. For a start they were bored with their jobs and wanted to get home for their tea. Also, their egos were sufficiently well-developed not to need massaging on every piss-poor little bust they made. The problem with some young coppers is that they’re exactly the same as the blokes they’re called upon to nick. Putting them in uniform doesn’t make any difference.
It was CD’s contempt for this type of cop, the smug, strutting, government sponsored juvenile delinquents, that got him the black eye.
‘Just because you’ve got a big shiny uniform doesn’t mean you’ve got a big shiny dick,’ he had remarked casually to the walking zit who had collared him…and there he was, in the gutter going ‘No, please, please, don’t hit me again, please.’
CD’s crime was to paint CND symbols in the middle of the road. The straight white lines were already there so it seemed silly not to complete the pattern. It wasn’t the sort of thing CD was wont to do under normal circumstances. He was an intelligent bloke and he knew that this action would not reduce the nuclear arsenal by so much as one radioactive pea-shooter. What’s more, he was extremely dubious as to the propaganda value of his protest. It was difficult to imagine an average punter walking along the street, seeing the symbols, slapping his forehead as if to say, how could I have been so blind and shouting ‘of course, that’s it! We must ban the bomb’. It just wasn’t going to happen that way.
Although CD was unquestionably against the bomb, this was not the reason for his crime. He had actually committed it because he was drunk and because he wanted to go to bed with the girl from the day-centre for peace studies, and painting tarmac was her idea of a romantic evening.
15: KAREN THE HIPPY
I really think it will be a valid statement,’ this insanely deluded girl had whined. ‘It will prove to people that there is an opposition, that they don’t have to sit down and take it.’
Looking back on the whole incident, CD was at a loss to work out why he had conceived a desire for this monumentally stupid person. Thinking about it in retrospect he wouldn’t have thought it could be done.
It wasn’t that Karen was unattractive, she was very attractive in a wet kind of way. She had an immense mass of highly frizzed hair and was very tactile.
‘He was sad and uptight and scared so I gave him a cuddle and I think it helped,’ she would say with stupefying complacency. Karen was under the erroneous impression that she had a soothing, calming personality and was therefore an immense pillar of slightly mystical womanly strength to those who knew her.
Worse than that, she was one of that large group of men and women who are convinced that they can give massages, forcing them on any acquaintance who unwisely admits to anything from a slight headache to being about to attempt suicide. This type of ‘massage’ consists exclusively of grabbing the subject’s shoulders from behind and kneading away as if making pastry. The idea being that e
very muscle in the subject’s body instantly dissolves into a warm fluidity, releasing years of built-up twentieth century tension.
In reality the victim sits there, gritting their teeth, suppressing their fury and probably laying the groundwork for an enormous ulcer. Karen normally spoke in a kind of highly sincere, little girly voice that made you want to kill. It was meant to imply the pure simplicity of true knowledge and self-awareness. In fact it implied grounds for justifiable homicide.
‘I think it would be really nice and pretty to have the peace group outside, away from man-made structures because I think that would be very ironic and apt.’ Why were the people who wanted the right things usually such wankers? CD had thought when he met Karen. Surely it didn’t have to be that way. If it did it definitely knackered any possibility of ever gaining mass popular support for anything.
CD thought back to the lads he had been at school with. He felt fairly confident that it would take something more convincing than the offer of a massage from Karen to turn them onto an alternative culture. The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth.
CD met Karen at a benefit concert to support a women’s peace camp situated outside some mysterious US communications installation up in the Northern Territory. This was a pretty good cause and he was there partly because he was happy to support it, but mainly he was there because he had worked behind the bar and it was twenty-five bucks. That particular gig was the easiest money CD had made in quite a while. It had been organized and published by Karen and people like Karen, hence for the first hour there was only them, CD and the band there. The hippies had spent so much time discussing whether sausage-rolls were offensive to nonmeat- eaters they had forgotten to put their poster up in the community bookshop. Karen was fairly outraged.