by Ben Elton
Sly didn’t mind. He was in a kind of mischievous mood what with selling off all his stuff. ‘That’s OK. It’s pretty late to call, but that’s OK. Are you in bed?’ Messing around with all his money had made Sly feel powerful and randy. It was very late, he just presumed the woman was a drunk gold- digger chancing her arm.
‘What!!’ said a shocked voice, to Sly’s satisfaction.
‘I said, are you in…’
‘I’m phoning from London.’
Linda did not like his tone. She put on her firm voice. This was the voice that she always dreamt of using to the horrible young men whose job it was to hang off scaffolding all over London and make women feel uptight. Linda, although by no means particularly attractive, had a big bust. This one quirk of fate had meant that for her entire life, since the age of thirteen, the mere sight of scaffolding or road works had made her tense up and scurry along, blushing with anger and looking at her feet. Of course you don’t need to have big tits to get intimidated, all women are scrutinized. All over any city, at any time of the day, there are women crossing roads to avoid the men hanging off scaffolding. They should add a bit to the road work warnings on the radio, ‘and a lot of building in the High Street today so delays for motorists, and, of course, female pedestrians can expect to be biting their lips with anger and embarrassment as their bodies are assessed and commented on.’
On the phone Linda would be the toughie she would love to have been in the streets. ‘I am not in bed, I am working, Mr Moorcock. My name is Linda Reeve, I’m with the Financial Telegraph.’
All Sly’s smugness evaporated instantly. It wasn’t that he was doing anything guilty, he just felt guilty and who could blame him? After all, he was personally involved in attempting to perpetrate one of the greatest moral outrages in history, including the invention of Pot Noodles. Anyone would feel guilty.
‘Oh yeah, what do you want?’
Sly was making no further effort at flirtatious charm. He didn’t care if it was Marilyn Monroe on the other end of the line, she was a journo and the last thing on earth he wanted right now was interest from journos.
‘Uhm-uhm, we-we at-at the-the FT-FT,’ Linda said, the line had suddenly got worse and she was trying to ignore the off-putting echo of her own voice coming back at her as it bounced around the globe.
‘We were wondering why you’re selling so much of your stuff-stuff.’ She had not meant to put it as frankly as that, she had meant to speak briskly of ‘asset stripping’ and ‘large scale dumps’, but the echo, and the fact that she was actually talking to the man himself, had pretty much thrown her. Not half a much as she had thrown Sly though. What the fuck did she have on him?
He was sufficiently shaken to make a big mistake. He started to deny something that clearly she had already established.
‘Selling my stuff? Come on, what are you talking about?’ Sly realized as he spoke that with this tack he would hang himself. The bitch wouldn’t have phoned him if she didn’t have something. Sly turned mid-sentence, ‘Listen lady, I don’t know who you are, or even why I’m talking to you, but you’d better get back to the woman’s page, OK? Do some fashion stuff or something. Selling? I’m rationalizing, OK? Dodging and weaving, pulling out, putting in. Nobody hits a moving target and you can quote me. Now I’ve really got to…’
Sly’s second mistake was trying to patronize Linda. He guessed it as he was doing it. People who got to work for the Financial Telegraph, especially women, couldn’t be bullshitted as easily as that.
‘Mr Moorcock,’ replied Linda, now feeling a lot better, ‘Mr Moorcock, you have dumped a ouija board factory, two local newspapers, a pharmaceutical lab, part of an oil-well, a chain of sweetshops, a TV station in Papua New Guinea, electronics, fertilizer, weapons, do I have to go on? And yet I cannot detect a single reinvestment. You must have over a hundred and fifty million Australian dollars in your wallet now.’
‘Woah! Hang on a minute here, Ms Reeve,’ snapped Sly, shaken. ‘What is this? Snooping? We have laws you know…’
‘The information is there for anyone who cares to look,’ Linda interrupted, thrilled that she seemed to have got to him. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’
Sly wanted to finish the conversation before he put his foot in it any further.
‘The information is there, my dear, now it’s up to you to interpret it. Let me give you a hint. I am a very rich man while you probably make no more than 20K sterling per annum. This is because I have ideas. I have ideas and you snoop. If I told you my ideas, maybe you’d be as rich as me, which is why I’m not going to tell you them. So far your facts are correct, I’ve flogged a few of my small holdings. But any peeping Tom could come up with that. Ring me back when you’ve figured out what I’m up to, baby. G’day from WA.’
He put the phone down and he was shaking.
His last shot had been good, Linda thought he sounded like a confident man with an idea to make money…maybe he was. On the other hand, she had definitely got to him at first, and there were the others…Her search would continue, to discover what, if anything, was going on and if there was one last edible choccy in the box.
86: FACEFULL’S
It had been an unpleasant jolt but Sly wasn’t over worried. He reckoned he had handled the situation pretty well and, after all, it was only a dumb pom journo. For the remainder of the night he carried on the lonely task of unloading his assets and by mid-morning on the following day he was close to fulfilling his financial obligations to Stark.
He decided he deserved a treat and so he went out for a burger. A burger in a public eatery. Sometimes he got like that, fed up with top-class food and top-class poncey people. Sometimes he liked to eat plain grub in lively, real places, served by spunky students in mini-skirts, working their way through college.
He liked to sit alone, away from the hundreds of people whose lives were in his hands. Anonymous, watching the world go by for a moment. He especially liked to watch the girls. Real girls. Girls who ignored him, girls who wore clothes rather than bait. Girls who had their own stuff to do. He was watching a group now, three of them, maybe they were from an office, they were so lively and unaffected. Why shouldn’t they be? They got three hundred bucks at the end of each week and spent it. What was there to be affected about?
Sly had never really got used to mega-wealth. He was a bobby sox and apple pie man at heart. But, you can’t fake it, you can’t live a simple life when you’ve got a complex and enormous income, no matter how much you want to.
And so, occasionally, Sly would sneak out of the office just for a look at the real world — the one he had left behind when he first stitched up his friend’s pie factory. He would sneak out to look at real girls and eat real food. Actually, finding real food was becoming more and more difficult as Sly was about to discover. The yuppy decade had ruined simple food. Now every bank clerk thought he was a gourmet. Burger cuisine had arrived. Facefull’s was the sort of place that would not let food alone, they had to ponce it up in some way or other. Sly could only presume that the reason for this was so that they could charge more for it.
‘Ten bucks for a bit of fried chicken!’
‘We’ll you’re paying for the Chinese lettuce and the little miniature tomatoes, aren’t you?’
Looking around him, Sly made a mental note to move into burger franchises and designer vegetables, but then he remembered that Stark was soon to make that part of his life a thing of the past.
He accepted a menu from a waitress in a huge T-shirt, belted at the waist to make a dress. In Sly’s jaded mood she seemed to be a living embodiment of freshness and vitality. He smiled his winning smile. She thought, shit, the leerers never tip.
The menu was three square feet of laminated plastic. The thing flapped around like a sail in a transatlantic yacht race, you could have gone surfing on it.
The reason for the menu’s great size was not because the selection was fabulously extensive. On the contrary, the choice was minimal, burgers, steaks, ribs, chicken and
a thing called seafood, which was white and covered in breadcrumbs. The problem was that each dish apparently required a stomach turningly trite description, presumably so that the diner was left in no doubt about just how horrible the meal was going to be.
‘Facefull’s saucy prawns between the sheets. Gorgeous juicy prawns stretched temptingly between luscious layered squirts of the chef’s own sauce! — Irresistible!’
Sly had never met the chef but he was damn sure that he could do without a squirt of his sauce. Sly wanted a burger, so with incisive intuition he ordered a thing called ‘The Facefull Burger: Just a plain facefull looking for a home! Juicy ground beef on sesame, a touch of mayo’, a little exotic salad and oh, by the way, our fries are the best.’
This description was off-putting enough, but it sounded like gastronomic heaven compared with what Sly got. They had not mentioned Kiwi fruit, nor the avocado and they definitely hadn’t warned him about the pine kernels. These were not the things a person wanted to have to scrape off his food when he fancies a plain burger. The touch of mayo’ had become about a pint of sickly sweet slime. There were currants in the salad and the fries were thick cut and done in their jackets!
With sinking heart Sly realized that he was in a burger joint that was too trendy to peel its potatoes. Sly went back to staring at the waitresses.
87: THE ECOACTION TEAM
Linda Reeve, the dumb pom journo, was not going to be the only ripple in Sly’s pond that day. Another one was drawing up outside the brasserie in a beautiful old red Holden with white-wall tyres.
The red-head in the huge hat, who was driving, turned to her companions.
‘Colin, you stay here with Zimm, OK. Me and Walter will go in and talk to him,’ said Rachel.
‘Cool,’ said CD, who clearly thought it wasn’t. His idea of a great day out was not sitting in a car minding a half-mad bollockless psycho with a chip on his shoulder. On the other hand, CD was a reasonable guy and he realized that Zimmerman might be rather a liability in a fashionable eatery. Since Zimm’s terrible injury he had developed a considerable empathy for bullocks and with it a deep hatred for anyone who served or ate veal. He didn’t often go to restaurants, but when he did, there would be big trouble if he found veal on the menu.
‘OK, I’ll stay with Zimm,’ he said.
‘You stay where you like, kid,’ said Zimm, ‘I want a burger.’ So all four of them trooped in. The manager did not like the look of them, but the man in the shorts was so huge he decided to let discretion be the better part of valour. Had he looked a little closer he would have been more concerned about the tall, thin guy in the singlet.
Zimm’s mind was racing and the place was liberally stuffed with large potted plants, and he was trying hard to hang on to himself. If he wasn’t careful he would be back in the jungle once more and go for the nearest Asian businessman.
CD saw the signs and hustled him through, noting to his horror a couple of thick jowled arsehole young execs tucking into veal schnitzel and talking very loudly to show how cool and confident they were. Luckily Zimm did not notice the veal. The restaurant, pursuing their unswerving policy of fucking up food, had elected to put tinned apricots on top of it so Zimm thought they were eating ice cream sundaes.
Rachel and Walt spotted Sly at his corner table. They went over and stood in front of him.
‘Yes,’ said Sly, looking up, glad of the excuse to stop struggling with the crappy food. Sly was a cool hand and was not to be phased by a group of strange looking hippies approaching him, even if one of them was blocking out the sun. He presumed that they were there to persuade him to join a new religion. Besides, not fifteen feet away was a table full of his goons, sipping mineral water and just itching to kill someone.
‘We got to talk to you about Bullens Creek, man,’ Walter drawled. ‘They hit the kids as well, you know, your thugs just hit whatever. How do you sleep, man?’
Sly felt he didn’t deserve this. Twice in ten hours it had happened, first the journo bitch onto his sell-offs and now, strange giant hippies talking about Bullens Creek. The goons were getting up from their table but Sly waved them back, he needed to know what was going down.
Sly had not heard about the terrible racist attack on the Bullens Creek community — not many people had. The reason for this being that Ocker Tyron owned both local papers plus one of the TV channels. News tends to be rather selectively reported when the people who are making it own the means of telling it.
‘What’s Bullens Creek to you, Mister?’ said Sly.
There was something about Walter that made Sly take him seriously. It wasn’t his size, not entirely anyway…there was a sort of monkish sincerity about him. Sly was always suspicious of true believers, you couldn’t bribe them and hitting them didn’t help. You had to talk to them. The lean one was even more disconcerting. Sly was a very practised judge of character and strength and this guy looked off the scale. Maybe he was just a very well-formed hippy but he looked kind of like a killer to Sly. And then…then there was the girl. She had something too, Sly couldn’t put his finger on it. But he would have liked to.
He did not notice CD.
‘Mr Culboon and his people were going to pay you, bastard, but you had to make sure didn’t you? You’re fucking scum, man, that’s what you are.’ Sly nearly fell off his seat! What the hell did this bunch of penniless looking hippies know about Culboon? Surely they weren’t a group of eccentric billionaires who were in on Stark as well?
‘You’d better sit down and explain what your problem is,’ he said tersely. It was a corner table for four so there was only room for Walter. Zimm, Rachel and CD hovered…
‘Your goons want to know whether you want them to take us,’ Zimmerman said, eyeing the table around which Sly’s men were sat. Zimm’s arms hung loosely by his sides, the fingers alternately stretching and relaxing.
‘Business associates,’ said Sly, again waving his security back. ‘Drink?’
‘I don’t drink with vicious, violent scum,’ said Walter.
‘Yeah, well me neither, normally,’ said CD, ‘but I’ll have a Facefull Forcefield.’
He had always wanted to have a really enormous, extravagantly expensive cocktail and he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity now one had presented itself. Faced with this collapse of solidarity, the other three said they’d have beers. Sly gave the order and behind the bar the Facefull Forcefield was prepared. This, like all the other cocktails, consisted of whisking up a load of fruit juice and cream, adding about one measure of mixed spirits, putting six straws and a small fruit salad on top and charging fifteen dollars for it. CD thought it was fantastic.
‘What do you know about the Culboon business?’ Sly asked.
‘I know one thing, man. I know that although I am a completely committed man of peace, my friend Zimmerman is a war-crazed loon and he wants to kill you for what you did.’
Sly looked at Zimmerman. Zimmerman looked back and said:
‘If you’re not eating that can I finish your food?’
Sly gladly offered him the plate and prevailed upon Walter to explain himself. He learnt that Walter and Culboon were old friends and that he, Walter, had been distressed to get a call to say that a gang of Nazis had attacked the community.
‘I mean, man, you know you guys are just utter pigs, right? The dude was coming round, he was cool to take your bread and split.’
Rachel squirmed in silent embarrassment at this awesome lexicon of completely unfashionable terms. CD thought it sounded great. Zimmerman wasn’t listening, he was trying to decide whether there really was a tinned pear with cloves on top of his burger or whether he was suffering from LS D flashback.
Walter continued in the same aggrieved terms:
‘I mean, why can’t people just be cool? First the plane all day, freaking all the kids out, then the fascists. I mean, just what is in your head, man? I’ll tell you, bad shit, that’s what. You have a head full of bad shit. You should see a doctor, yeah and what’s
more, you’re going to need one when Zimmerman’s finished with you.’
Walter turned to Zimm for confirmation but Zimm had his own problems. Were those tomatoes really only the size of grapes? They seemed to be, they certainly looked that way. Then again, Zimmerman had once seen a huge pink dragon in a bikini emerge from the top of his commanding officer’s head, so he was aware that appearances could be deceptive. But man, if they were real, those two little balls were just about the smallest tomatoes he had ever seen. After a while they started to remind him of something, and his eyes filled with tears.
Sly was very worried. What did they know? What were they talking about? Who the fuck were they? And why did the tough one look so homicidally upset?
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what this is about. Sure I have an interest in Bullens but this is the first I’ve heard of any attack.’
This was too much for Rachel.
‘Oh come on, Moorcock. First you offer a huge amount of money for their land, God knows why, then when they hesitate for one second they get beaten up. What do you take us for, a bunch of airheads?’
Sly decided not to answer that one. He was still confused but he was also relieved. They didn’t know why he wanted the land, they didn’t even seem interested.
‘I mean, why the hell do you even want the land?’ said Rachel.
For the first time, Sly found himself disliking the girl. Also, the tough hippy was beginning to look alarmingly volatile, he sure looked angry. Sly decided to try and take control.
‘Look, I can see that it’s going to be difficult to prove that I had nothing to do with this, but I didn’t,’ said Sly truthfully and firmly — although he was beginning to form a pretty sound theory about who had. Christ, Ocker Tyron was a vicious, stupid bastard. Why couldn’t he have left things up to Sly?
The situation was tricky. Sly shot a glance at Zimmerman, who was obviously getting ready to explode. Sly had to allay their suspicions and stop them probing any further. He had to try and get the proof they needed to show that he had not been involved. The restaurant was nearly empty now. He produced a portable telephone and offered it to Rachel. ‘Dial the Bullens Creek police station, here’s the number.’