by Ben Elton
70: HULLO YOUNG LOVERS
As it happened, Walter and Zimmerman had cause to know a little of Nagasyu’s brutality. It was one of his ships that they had been shouting at when the harpoon had sailed over their heads and into the whale that they had been trying to protect.
They shouldn’t really have had to be in such a dangerous position, because commercial whaling has finally been outlawed by international agreement. The task now is to restock the species and, of course, only the whales can do that. Unfortunately, there are so few of them left that it will require a level of whale sauciness liable to melt the ice caps. These are hot-blooded creatures and at one hundred and sixty tons they certainly know how to make the earth move. Still it has at least given the horny young whale a new and telling chat up line. ‘Come on darling, we have a duty to restock the species.’ Certainly beats, ‘Look I just think it would be really beautiful, OK? Because I actually love you as a whale, you know? Not just as a sex object.’
Whales are quite shy and secretive about their love-making, which is no mean achievement when one considers that a Blue whale gets to be about one hundred feet long. Anyone who has tried to keep things quiet with parents in the next room will sympathize with two shy young lovers trying to keep the noise down when their combined weight is over three hundred tons.
Unfortunately, despite the commercial ban, whales are not being politely left alone to do the business. Sad to say, Japan, Korea, Norway and Iceland still hunt and kill the tiny whale population that remains, bypassing the law by claiming that the cull continues for ‘scientific’ purposes. The real truth is that so spectacularly huge are these beasts and so efficient have hunting methods become, that despite the appallingly depleted numbers, it remains profitable to go after them.
Nothing kills passion faster than an exploding harpoon in the guts.
71: MASTERMINDS
There is, of course, one truly intriguing whale question which it would be lovely to get an answer to. Whales have the largest brains on earth. What do they do with them? Let’s face it, you don’t need a brain that would get stuck in a lift in order to open your mouth and swim towards a load of stupid plankton.
What do whales do with their brains? Are they philosophers, struggling with the thorny questions of existence? saying to themselves, ‘I know I think, therefore I am, but plankton do not think, therefore they are not, in which case, what have I been living off all these years?’
One of the things they certainly do with their brains is survive. They have survived for millions of years — or at least they did until people started sticking spears into them. The fact that they are not intellectually equipped to deal with this threat does not reflect adversely upon their intelligence. After all, if Albert Einstein had been mugged by Silvester Stallone, he would probably have got his head kicked in. It is to be profoundly hoped that Silvester Stallone is not, at the end of the day, able to claim intellectual superiority over Einstein.
Whales have been lounging about and eating plankton for some fifty million years. Not a bad achievement, especially when compared to humankind’s rather pathetic four hundred thousand. Maybe that’s what whales do with their huge brains — they don’t fuck things up. It takes the human race to the very limits of its intellectual ability to fuck things up in the way it does. The brain- crunching effort that has gone into developing the technology to kill, destroy, poison and pollute, pushes our greatest minds to the very limits of their potential. Perhaps if they had been just a little bit cleverer they wouldn’t have done any of those things in the first place.
Maybe you have to be really clever simply not to fuck things up. Perhaps Mummy and Daddy whale shake their heads sadly over little Timmy, saying in screechy whale talk:
‘Poor Timmy is severely retarded, we’d better send him to a special school. He’s working on a way to pollute the sea with high-level radioactive waste, and he’s too thick to realize that this is stupid.’
Of course, not all creatures who have survived billenium have big brains. The Sea Cucumber, for instance, is nothing more than a machine for sucking sand — so no chance of ‘O’ levels there. Everyone has their way of getting by as age gives way to age. Ways that worked perfectly well, until the bad kid moved in on the block.
72: TIME IS SHORT
Nagasyu didn’t care how many whales he killed. He had bigger fish to fry.
‘Time is short,’ he barked down the phone at Tyron. ‘Amongst other things I have assembled several square miles worth of solar energy panelling. I am anxious to unload, Mr Tyron. Are preparations for the Stark site going ahead smoothly?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Tyron with easy confidence. He knew that if Sly Moorcock could not sort out those Abs, he damn well could.
73: THE FIRST ENEMY OF STARK
At the offices of the Financial Telegraph in London, Linda Reeve was on the phone as well. You wouldn’t really have thought it to look at her but Linda Reeve and the Great Blue whale had something in common. Something even more basic than that they were both mammals. More immediate than that, Linda, like the Blue whale, was largish with nice eyes. The most fundamental thing that Linda Reeve had in common with the Blue whale was that she too was in serious danger of becoming extinct.
Linda was talking to a colleague on the Wall Street Examiner in New York. ‘Have you noticed, Chrissy? It’s happened again, this time with Nagasyu?’
‘What’s happened again?’ the voice crackled back irritably. It was still early in New York and Chrissy was trying to deal with the twin blows of a total smoking ban in her office plus it was de-caf day for the coffee making thing. One of the strange things about life — which one day Chrissy intended to write a brilliant article about — was that despite the fact that she knew that caffeine and de-caf day were strictly alternated, it always seemed to be de-caf day. This, she presumed, was life.
The whole thing made Chrissy fume. Journalists giving up nicotine and caffeine! What price tradition? They’d start telling the truth next. Chrissy was a tough, independent New Yorker, totally unlike her rather stodgy English colleague. Small and dark and energetic, from a big New York Jewish family, she referred to herself as the runt of the litter. ‘Not because I’m small,’ she would say, ‘but because I’m a girl…seven brothers. I think my father wanted his own platoon in the Israeli army.’
Linda knew Chrissy could be a little abrupt at times and so she was not put off by Chrissy’s manner.
‘What I was telling you about,’ continued Linda, patiently — she was a quiet, persevering soul — ‘another liquidation -a pretty big one. What are these people doing with the money they create?’
‘Who knows,’ said Chrissy, biting her nails and finding them a poor drug substitute. ‘Home improvements. Mistresses. This is the free world remember, Linda. People are allowed to do what they like with their money.’ The New Yorker thought Linda’s observations interesting but nothing to get excited about. Certainly not on de-caf’ day. ‘You’ve got to get this thing out of your hair,’ she continued, ‘it’s becoming a drag.’
‘Home improvements, Chrissy? What is he doing?…uhm’ Linda struggled to think of a witty illustration. ‘Uhm…installing, something…uhm very very…expensive…in his home.’ Poor Linda never had been a gagger. She returned to safer, drier territory. ‘He’s realized over ten billion yen and as far as I can see, he hasn’t put it back in the market. Either he’s sitting on it or he’s bought something absolutely coloss’. Christmas, Chrissy! What can you buy for ten billion yen?’
‘Look, Linda, he’s worth fifty. Maybe he got religion and put it in the poor box.’
‘Well I think it’s worth a story.’
‘Oh yeah,’ replied Chrissy sarcastically. ‘Real riveting stuff, Linda, ‘Man Spends His Money’, sounds like a hell of a scoop. You go with it, pal, but I don’t promise that the Examiner will pick up on the syndication.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is a bit vague. Listen, I’ll get back to you if I come up with anything else
,’ said Linda, brightly. ‘I’ll be holding my breath,’ said Chrissy. As Linda put the phone down on her friend she couldn’t help thinking that maybe Chrissy had a point. Chrissy was normally a pretty clear thinker. Linda had known her for a couple of years, although they had never actually managed to meet. There are not many women in financial journalism and each had noticed the other’s articles. It had been Chrissy who had made contact, Linda would have been far too shy. Chrissy suggested that they might loosely stay in touch and swap ideas. Linda, who had few friends, had jumped at the idea. It had been fun, a real friendly chemistry had developed between dull Linda and the American live-wire.
Linda could not blame Chrissy for her dismissive attitude. After all, what did she have? Nothing, just some people choosing to get hold of a chunk of their own money. But there were a lot of them doing it and it was so much money. Linda just felt that something was going on. Maybe nothing bad, almost certainly nothing criminal, but something.
She thought it might be worth a piece on a new puritanism in the financial community. People wanting to return to a less speculative market; wanting their money close to them — almost under the mattress, so to speak. She searched the desk for her tiny Nagasyu word processor, finding it under a book. It certainly was an astonishing bit of technology, slim and beautifully designed. The only problem was you kept losing it.
‘They probably want you to lose it’, Linda and her colleagues would say to each other, but then laugh at the very idea.
She found the screen and began to write.
‘One crash too many,’ she headed it. ‘Why is Tex Slampacker, the Tsar of all the burgers, pulling out of car production? Why has Ocker Tyron, the West Australian highflyer, sold out of the Snowy River irrigation project? At home, the Duke of Cumberminster is no longer a major investor in the Channel Tunnel, he has taken his money and run, why? Today we learn that Mr Nagasyu, the Japanese microelectronics mogul, has realized yet another percentage of his enormous wealth. What has he done with it?’ Linda was pleased, this was beginning to sound good. ‘Of course,’ the article continued, ‘within the vast network of deals and counter-deals, none of these are world shattering questions, but none the less, in all of the above sell-offs, no other major player has stepped in to pick up the dumped assets and the national government has ended up making up the shortfall with public money. It is almost as if there is an orchestrated campaign to take hard currency out of the market-place. Almost as if the very people who built and benefit most from the absurd complications of super-capitalism have lost faith in it. Do they want their money in their pockets where it’s safe? Perhaps the last crash was one too many. Maybe the monster bit its keepers just a little too hard this time.’
There was a fair bit more along these lines, detailing other interesting cases. Linda thought it was a nice, light, magazine type article.
Her editor didn’t.
‘This is little short of prying, Linda. Good Lord, a man’s personal finances are his own affair,’ he spoke as if she had disappointed him.
‘I can take Tyron out of it, if you like,’ Linda replied.
‘The fact that we are published by Ocker Tyron is entirely irrelevant.’ Now the editor was angry. ‘I control editorial policy on this paper, and none other.’ He spoke as if he almost believed it. Perhaps he actually did. There are, after all, none so blind as those who will not see. He continued in a more reasonable, almost placatory tone — perhaps he realized he was protesting a touch too much.
‘Let me ask you this. If you go to the bank and empty your account, say you just walk out of that bank with a couple of thousand or whatever in your pocket, well, surely that’s your business isn’t it? You wouldn’t thank me for prying into it would you? asking you what you wanted the money for and what you were going to do with it? It might be private — you might be having plastic surgery or something. Well, it’s the same with your article. Not one of your people is pulling out of his own industry, they merely appear to be rationalizing the fringes of their operations.’ Linda was a bit taken aback, she hadn’t thought of it as a moral thing. The editor softened further.
‘I mean, stay on it, by all means, no harm there. But you’re going to need a lot more than you’ve got at the moment before I’ll even look at it. All the same, nice to see initiative. Oh, sorry about what I said about plastic surgery, by the way.’
As it happened, Linda had presumed that the comment had only been an example, nothing to do with her. Now of course she was worried — this is how a complex starts.
74: SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL
75: ARISTOS
Ocker Tyron sent for his half-brother, Aristos. He had been saving Aristos for something like this. Aristos was the classic talentless little brother, hanger-on, dickhead. He was twenty- eight and had either dropped out of or fucked up everything he had ever attempted. He smashed up expensive cars, spilt booze on expensive clothes, showed off at night clubs and apart from having access to a lot of cash was a complete and utter drag to be with. Dixie, Ocker’s wife, perhaps recognizing a grosser version of herself, loathed him and constantly lobbied Ocker to drop the embarrassing little freeloader. But Ocker couldn’t — his mother would not hear of it.
Aristos was the result of a brief second marriage that Mrs Tyron had leapt into with a Greek baker about a year after her first husband, Ocker’s father, died.
Ocker’s father’s death loomed large in his legend. He always claimed that his father died of ‘being decent’. This was Ocker’s moral justification for being a professional bastard. He said that his dad had been an honest, friendly, fair-minded man, who knew nothing of the law of the jungle. This was why he had died poor, because he was taken advantage of, an innocent amongst the wolves.
This was all in fact complete rubbish. Old Mr Tyron had been a bitter, vicious, small-minded bigot who died poor because he was crap at his job. None the less, Ocker had used his father’s untimely death to leave school and begin, with almost religious zeal, what was to be a life-long career of shitting on people. Hence, by the time Aristos could talk, his big brother was already well on his way to building one of the largest business empires in Australia. This was Aristos’ problem, old Mrs Tyron claimed, and Ocker had to take note because he idolized his mother. Not because he loved her, deep down he didn’t, he didn’t even particularly respect her. He idolized her because he thought it right and fitting that tough, self-made men such as himself should idolize their mothers — also, it drove his wife, Dixie, crazy. The problem for Ocker was that along with Mum came Aristos. Mrs Tyron believed that Aristos’ stupendous lack of distinction was due to his being intimidated from an early age by Ocker’s equally stupendous abilities and success. She contended that Ocker was indirectly responsible for his brother’s condition.
‘You were always there,’ she would say, in defence of her baby, ‘succeeding, winning. How could little Aristos be himself while he was standing in the big man’s shadow?’
‘I suppose I should apologize that we live in a two million buck house, is that it? That you can give twenty grand to the Methodists and make all those tight-arsed matrons green? Do you wish I had dropped dead lugging crates of lemonade for the Popso Brothers, like Dad? Then maybe little Aristos could be a well-balanced personality. Would you have preferred it that way!!’
‘You leave your father’s memory be!’ Mrs Tyron would say, crocodile tears welling in her eyes. ‘If he was here now he wouldn’t let you talk to me like that, big as you are he’d belt you.’
If Dixie was around during one of these carbon-copy conversations she could never resist the opportunity to have a dig at Mother under the guise of standing up for her man.
‘You shouldn’t speak like that to Ocker,’ she would declaim, false eyelashes flapping in time with her false loyalty, ‘he works terribly hard for us. We all owe him a great deal.’
‘Some of us more than others,’ old Mrs Tyron would sneer significantly. It is a strange thing, but those who are linked to a person by
ties of blood always feel that they have a greater claim over them than those that the person has chosen to share their lives with of their own free will. Hence Mrs Tyron firmly believed that she had more right to be in Ocker Tyron’s life than had Dixie Tyron, despite the fact that Ocker had chosen to be with Dixie and, of course, he had not chosen his mother.
‘Why, you’re not even family,’ old Mrs Tyron would say to the woman whom Ocker had pledged his life to in the sight of Jesus.
During these confrontations, the cause of all the trouble would normally be still snoring in his bed upstairs and this was bitter gall for Ocker. Aristos’ very physical proximity filled Ocker with barely suppressed fury. There was something so utterly unmanly about a twenty-eight-year-old, healthy man living in his brother’s house, hiding behind their mother. Most irritatingly pathetic of all was the fact that Aristos had even begun to learn his mother’s excuses.
‘I know I’m a passenger, Ocker,’ he would whine in what he imagined was an ingratiating tone. ‘But you know…you’ve done so much, I just don’t know where to begin. I suppose it would be different if you were an ordinary bloke, then maybe I wouldn’t feel so bad. Then maybe I could get something together, you know?’