by Ben Elton
Max knew that he had to disappear. He could not be sure how Plastic Tolstoy would react to the news that he had been at Nathan’s house on the night when the murderers had done their bloody deed. Would the killers have recognised him under the helmet? He did, after all, have a very fine and distinctive chin. All in all, Max decided that he would like to be away from Hollywood for a while. Ireland seemed as good a place as any.
Except for the fact that he had of course, only thirty-six hours earlier, been ignominiously ejected from that country and had his visa revoked.
Max was thinking straighter than he had done in nearly a decade. Before leaving Nathan’s house, he took Nathan’s passport from where it lay on the desk. He also brought a knife from the kitchen and gently scraped a little of the congealed blood from the corpse’s neck into a small envelope. He did not like doing it. No amount of Virtual Reality blood had prepared him for the real thing — it was much stickier for a start. However, he had no choice. He had to get past passport control and he intended to use a trick that had been employed by a character he had recently played. Max hoped it would not turn out to be just the stuff of fiction.
Lost in LA.
Max drove home and raided his make-up box for a few small items of disguise: facial hair, nose putty, latex. Max was rather proud of still owning his own make-up box, despite enjoying the services of the best facial synthesisers in the business. Like all actors, when he wasn’t dwelling on how wonderful and different being an actor was, Max liked to think of himself as nothing more than a worker, an artisan who did an honest day’s labour for an honest day’s two or three million dollars.
‘It’s a craft, that’s all,’ he would say, ‘and these are the tools of the trade.’
As it happened, the only time Max ever used his make-up box was when he wished to avoid being recognised, which, since he was an actor, was not very often. However, as he ordered a cab to take him out to the airport, Max felt that on this occasion some effort at disguise would be sensible.
This was not because he was fearful that the holographic photograph in Nathan’s passport would give him away, but merely because he knew that he had to travel incognito. Nobody ever looked at the photos on passports any more, the DNA cellular print was foolproof. The traveller inserted his or her passport into a scanner followed by the forefinger of either hand. The machine then took a single-cell-thickness laser scrape from the finger and checked that the DNA from the scrape matched that listed on the passport. The system could not be cheated, unless, of course, a passenger happened to have an envelope full of dried blood belonging to the person from whom he had stolen the passport, in which to dip his finger before sticking it into the machine.
The cab took nearly five hours to reach the airport. This was not because Max instructed the driver to dawdle, or visit the fleshpots, but simply because that was how long it took for the man to stumble upon the correct destination. London is the only city in the world which really takes its taxi driving seriously, and considers it a genuine profession for which a person must be trained. All other cities treat the art of people-moving with various degrees of contempt, ranging from mild to utter. In Los Angeles it goes beyond that. It is almost as if being completely lost all the time is a qualification for the job.
In truth, the only actual job qualification to be a cab driver in most cities is being able to drive (ish). If you can drive a car, you can drive a cab. That’s it, no special skills are required. In LA, people often take up the profession on their first day in town, simply in order to get in from the airport. It’s a curious situation; no other profession takes such a relaxed view as to what is required to enter its ranks. The fact that a person is able to work a stove does not mean they can readily find employment as a chef. Most people are capable of lifting a scalpel and, no doubt, would be equally capable of plunging it into somebody else’s flesh, yet this is not generally considered sufficient justification for allowing them to practise as surgeons. But cab driving insists on no such niggling restrictions. If you’ve got a car and can turn it on then you’re away.
By luck, endless references to the map, appeals for help over the radio and shouted suggestions from passers-by, Max’s driver eventually managed to get him the six miles from one of LA’s premier residential districts to the airport. Max always gave cab drivers the same tip.
‘You’re in America,’ he said and entered the departure hall.
Into Africa.
The passport trick worked at LAX and after the rigours of the cab-ride, Max hoped that he was finally on his way. Unfortunately, the flight took a little longer than expected. It was a sub-orbital, which normally involved a vertical take-off, a brief suspension in the stratosphere whilst the Earth spun beneath it, followed by direct dropdown to one’s destination: two hours on the schedule. But as Max’s flight commenced its descent into Dublin it got hit by a pressure drop and blown out of alignment.
This sort of thing happened all the time. The weather hadn’t been right since they replaced all the real forests with acidic little fern numbers. Billions of Christmas trees just didn’t get the job done. Areas of high and low pressure drifted all over the place and the average conventional flight was punctuated by more altitude variations than a roller-coaster. Passengers would, without warning, find their planes dropping thousands of feet in seconds, causing their backsides to shoot upwards and hit the lockers above them. Some aeronautical experts claimed that there had been instances where terrified passengers had actually managed to crap on top of their own heads.
Anyway, a huge squall over Europe meant that nothing was landing for a while and Max’s flight got diverted into North Africa to wait out the weather. It was a bad day to land in Addis. Sensational news had just been leaked. The locals had discovered that the vast debt-funded constructions to the north of the city which, it had been popularly presumed, were hospitals, power plants and food research centres, were nothing of the kind. What had in fact been built was a vast armoured Claustrosphere complex, into which the government and its business friends would scurry should the Rat Run ever occur.
This type of centralised Claustrosphere ‘town’ was becoming increasingly common in the poorer countries of the world. Countries where there was no question of universal eco-cover, but still plenty of rich and powerful people around who didn’t want to die. Obviously, in the event of Earth death, isolated elite eco-shelters would be extremely vulnerable to terrified dying people. The answer was, of course, collective security.
The Ethiopian president had tried to reason with the angry crowds. He had been disarmingly frank.
‘Come on!’ he said, his voice full of genuine surprise. ‘What’s the problem? Some of us are rich, some of us are poor. What’s new? I’ve got a car, you haven’t. I’ve got enough food, you haven’t. That’s always been the case, it didn’t make you riot then. Why riot now? It’s bloody obvious that anybody who can afford a Claustrosphere is going to get one. Just the way anybody who can afford decent housing and medical care has always got it. There’s no difference. What’s all the fuss about?’
It was a powerful argument. The furious masses paused for thought and the president pressed home his point.
‘Besides which, the honkies and the Japs won’t lend us any money unless we use it to buy their products. Well, we don’t want any more dams, do we? The ones we’ve got turned the country into desert. We’ve got enough guns and helicopter gunships, surely? So I bought Claustrospheres. What did you want me to do? Turn down the money! Say no to billions and billions of dollars and ECUS and Yen? Are you stupid or something?’
The disturbances did not actually reach the airport where Max’s sub-orbital was waiting. The populations of the poor countries had been so decimated by decades of ever-encroaching land-death that there weren’t that many of them left to riot, and those who did were not over fit. In the latter parts of the twentieth century, world leaders had been greatly worried about what they saw as the ever increasing population. They predicte
d that pretty shortly there would be tens of billions of people wandering about the world wondering why they should be the ones who were starving to death. Great barriers were erected in anticipation of the day when the majority of the world’s population would arrive uninvited at the door of the minority of the world’s population and ask to stay for dinner. The Mediterranean Sea became a battle-line, all guns facing south. The Panama canal was similarly armed, as were the Ural Mountains and the borders of the nations of the Pacific rim. In the end, however, the problem never arose. Deforestation, salination and desert growth provided a solution. As large areas of the Earth died, so did the population who had lived upon it. The much feared south-north population shift withered on the vine.
Scenic route.
When Max finally arrived in Dublin, he hired a car and drove straight out of the city, heading north-west.
He had, of course, only the vaguest idea of where he was going. If only he had taken a little more notice of the journey he had taken with Rosalie in the back of the Garda truck. On that occasion, however, Rosalie’s stare had absorbed his entire attention and his one clear memory of the trip was a pair of fierce green eyes drilling into his soul. Beautiful and splendid though those eyes were, they were of little use as a landmark, and Max had little else to go on. The only thing he could remember for sure was that Ruth and Sean’s cottage was about three hours’ drive from Dublin, and that the route ended in a dirt track.
Sitting in the plane on the tarmac at Addis, Max had tried to get his thoughts together. He made a rough guess that the police convoy would have averaged about thirty-five to forty miles an hour over the entire journey, which suggested a distance of between a 110 and a 120 miles from the city. Max had studied the map of Ireland which he found amongst the perfume ads at the back of the unbelievably dull airline magazine. Ireland was a fairly small place and it was clear that unless the Garda had driven by an extremely tortuous route, which seemed unlikely, Max’s goal lay on either the west coast or in the south-west of the country. He knew he could dismiss the North, because it had been the Garda who had arrested him, not United Nations’ forces. Due to the powerful Irish Catholic lobby in Congress, all Americans, even party-heads like Max, knew that the UN kept the peace in the Six Counties, or attempted to, and had done for decades.
Taking up the little vanity bag with which he, as a first-class passenger, had been presented, with compliments of Aer Lingus Orbital, Max removed the drawstring. Using the scale on the map (one centimetre to ten kilometres) he measured the string to approximate the 120 mile radius which he guessed would be the area of his search. Then, tying a pen to one end of the string and pressing the other end on to Dublin with his thumb, Max drew a semi-circular line on the map. The line ran approximately from Sligo in the north-west of Eire, down through Galway and then Limerick, ending up in Cork on the south coast. Max resolved to begin at Sligo and weave his way down the country along this line, in the hope that he might pick up a clue or landmark that he recognised.
At the airport, a nice Avis car-hire lady asked Max where he was off to.
‘Sligo,’ he replied, suddenly feeling rather daunted by the task he had set himself. Certainly, Ireland was small compared to the USA, but it was pretty big compared with one not very large person. For a little while Max’s spirits drooped and as he negotiated Dublin’s urban sprawl he pondered whether he might not be on something of a fool’s errand. He did not even know whether Rosalie was still in the country… she was on the run, after all, and he himself had met her in California. On the other hand, Max was pretty certain that if she wasn’t in Ireland, her grandparents would know where she was.
Once he got away from the city, Max felt better. The bulk of the countryside still operated under ‘day-time’, on account of the European-funded orbital sunscreen and despite the ravages of acid rain the landscape still looked green and blooming. What was more, the winds coming in off the porridge-like Atlantic created a real (albeit false) impression of fresh air. Max, who had lived all his life in a riot-torn super-city had scarcely realised that real green pastures existed anywhere outside of old movies.
‘Now this is cool and indeed righteous,’ he said to himself as he drove along with the roof down. Had he happened to have a Geiger counter, he might have felt differently. But what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, not until fist-sized tumours start popping up all over it, anyway.
Having arrived at Sligo and mooched around the bay for a while, Max headed off slowly towards Galway. He did not really know what he was looking for as he traversed hither and thither along the little roads of West Ireland. He hoped that perhaps something he saw might trigger some recognition. At first, he had presumed that people who looked as disgustingly old as Rosalie’s grandparents would be pretty notorious, but as he drove through village after village he realised that craggy faces and hairy ears seemed to be quite fashionable that year amongst the more mature citizens.
Suddenly though, Max no longer felt in any particular hurry. Despite all the global ructions which had become a part of daily life on Earth, there was something about this part of the world that soothed the soul. It was possible to relax amongst the ancient villages and hills. Max discovered new delights, like lunch, for instance. Max could not remember the last time he had eaten lunch, merely for the simple and private pleasure that could be got from it. In Max’s world, lunch was a thing with which you cloaked your real intentions; getting laid, getting a job, firing a close friend. To rediscover the delight of lunching alone was a pleasure indeed. To be simply sitting with some bread, cheese and pickle, pondering the trivia quiz on the back of a beer mat was a genuine thrill. The pace of life was so much slower than in LA, although Max wondered whether in the long run any less actually got done. Probably, he thought, which was a very good thing.
Of course, not everything about the Irish countryside is so relaxing or idyllic. Socially, things can sometimes get a little more pressurised. It is not so relaxing in this quiet world if you happen to want an abortion, or a divorce, or to screw somebody other than your lawful spouse and perhaps adopt a position other than the missionary. Max fell into none of these categories as he meandered from one gorgeous view to another. Certainly, he would have liked to have screwed Rosalie, and in any and every position she cared to favour. However, since he was not in a position to do this, he confined himself to drinking, eating and enjoying the scenery, and, hence, was made welcome wherever he went. This was Max’s kind of country. You could get a pint of beer in a post office and the licensing laws merely served to confirm the Irish reputation for writing good fiction.
‘What time do you close?’ Max had inquired on his first evening in Galway.
‘Well, we close on the dot of midnight,’ the landlady had replied, ‘but you’ll be all right for a drink until three or four.’
The pub lock-in is a grand old tradition in rural Ireland, which the Garda often seem to see as their duty to protect. As Max was shown out of the back via the cabbage garden, he wondered whether he might not have found his spiritual home.
Chapter Nineteen
Sexual situations
Rendezvous.
In the end it was not Max who found Rosalie but, as before, she who found him. Gossip travels fast in the country and on Max’s fourth day back in Ireland, Rosalie’s grandparents heard word that a rich, mad American was driving from village to village, asking about an old couple called Ruth and Sean who had great taste in vegetables. They of course guessed who it must be and sent word to Rosalie.
She found him in a bed and breakfast in County Cork.
‘Will you get up now, Mr Kennedy?’ (for such was the name Max was travelling under) ‘It’s half past eight already and there’s a young person to see you.’
The voice of his landlady brought Max struggling to consciousness and it was a struggle, for this was a big hangover. He conducted his usual morning reconnaissance, moving his tongue about to see what he had slept in. Crisp, fresh, lin
en. Not bad, he thought. A sheet, that sounded hopeful. Then a worrying idea occurred to him. Maybe it was a shroud. No, it couldn’t be a shroud, he was face down, they don’t bag you up, face down, surely, not in a Catholic country. No, Max decided, he definitely wasn’t dead, although he felt as if he had died and was now being unceremoniously dug up. He tried to recall where he was, and more importantly where he had been. A linen sheet, that must mean a bed. Slowly it all began to come back to him. The fiddler and the bloke with the weird drum that you hit with both ends of the same stick… the singing, his spirited rendition of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ … the eight pints of Murphy’s and eight Paddy chasers. That’s right, he was in Cork, and he was looking for a beautiful girl.
‘What in the name of goodness have you come back for! Shouting about my granny and granddad all over the bloody county? I ought to shoot you where you sleep, that I should, you stupid American bastard.’
That beautiful soft lilt. Music, even on a hangover. He’d found her.
Rosalie walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. The landlady had been slightly scandalised about letting her go up, but short of physically restraining Rosalie there was not a lot she could do. Max turned over under the quilt to face her as Rosalie drew back the curtains. The light was blinding.
‘Please, you’ll rupture my pupils,’ Max protested, grabbing for a pair of shades. Rosalie threw open the windows.
‘Jesus, the stink of booze in here is disgusting.’ She stared down at him with a pitying expression.
‘You still mad at me then?’ Max inquired.
‘Of course I’m still mad at you. Gracious, you make me think you’ve saved me from the cops and then it turns out you’ve completely messed it up. Wouldn’t any girl be angry?’