This Other Eden

by Ben Elton

  Where the rudeness gets nasty is when it is delivered on behalf of a star. This is because of the great agent’s dilemma, the terrible cross which all agents have to bear, that which turns young, starry-eyed enthusiasts who ‘love this business’ into hardened, chain-smoking attack animals.

  The agent’s dilemma is this: no matter how hard they work, they can never succeed. The success or failure of their clients only ever means failure to them. For an agent will never be loved or appreciated by those on whose behalf they labour. Never. Agents were born to be resented.

  It starts at the bottom. When an actor is out of work and it is three months since they were even invited up for an audition, they become obsessed with the notion that their agent is crap.

  ‘No, seriously, I really am thinking of changing my agent,’ the actor will assure his or her friends. ‘I mean she just hasn’t got me a thing. Not a bloody thing! I mean, I wouldn’t mind but I’m actually quite bloody good.’

  A subtle variation of this whine is the conviction that the agent is actually capable of getting work, but for some reason does not care to do so for them. Actors conceive this latter prejudice if anybody else on the agent’s books happens to have landed an audition for a soap powder commercial in the previous five years.

  Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, a glint of hope peeks into the actor’s life. After making two hundred calls the agent lands the actor an audition and, astonishingly, the actor gets the job. At this point there is a brief moment when the agent may bask in a thimbleful of the actor’s affection. They will lunch together to celebrate the start of a great career and the agent will order good Californian chardonnay. Even as the glasses clink, however, the actor will secretly be thinking that his or her success in getting a job was really no thanks to the agent at all. It was, in fact, entirely due to the brilliant way that he or she handled the audition. Anyone, after all, can make a phone call.

  If this brief moment of glory is a one-off and the actor fails to capitalise on it, he or she will soon return to the conviction that the agent is either crap, or uninterested in them. However, if the actor’s career takes off and they find themselves in demand, then the agent will have to swallow a bitter pill indeed. For the actor will now be thinking that work is available to them anyway, so what does the agent do? What skill, they ask themselves, does it require to find work for somebody who everybody already wants?

  ‘I really don’t know,’ the actor will tell their friends, ‘what I’m paying my ten per cent for.’

  It is this terrible betrayal which truly leads agents to their joyless life of rudeness. Because they become obsessed with demonstrating to their star clients what it is that the star clients are paying their ten per cents for.

  ‘You will not believe what the studio’s opening offer was,’ the agent will assure the star. ‘No, I’m not even going to tell you. It was an insult and an offence and you should not even have to hear about it but let me tell you, it was a disgrace. I just told them to stuff it, shove it and take a hike and, believe me, I wasn’t that restrained. Anyway, they’ve come back with a figure which is at least located on planet Earth.’

  The agent’s job is to make themselves appear indispensable. What they are saying to their clients is this, ‘You are too important and famous to have to deal with any shit, anytime, anywhere. I will take the shit away from you. Trust me. I will be rude for you.’

  The agent creates the impression that the star is surrounded by people who are hell bent on ripping them off, taking advantage of them, demeaning them and generally putting shit on them (shit, which, of course, the star does not need right now!). The suggestion being that without the agent endlessly being rude on their behalf, the star would live a life no better than that of a sewer rat.

  ‘You mean they flew you on a scheduled flight? Booked you a suite with no spa bath? Put you in worse seats than so and so? The car was how many seconds late? … I don’t believe it! This is simply unacceptable! Don’t you worry about it, though, leave it with me. You do not need this shit! You should not have to deal with this shit!’

  It is not just the agents of course who act in this way. The life of a star is filled with people making complaints and being rude on the star’s behalf, for which they receive a percentage of the star’s earnings. If many stars turn eventually into ego-monsters, they are certainly given plenty of encouragement.

  Power struggle.

  Geraldine, having turned her back on Judy and Rosalie, was speaking on the phone.

  ‘Yes, thank you, I should like to speak to Plastic Tolstoy’s office. Yes, now! My name is Geraldine Koch and I represent…‘

  Geraldine got no further because at that point Rosalie knocked the phone from her hand and ground it under her heel.

  ‘Phone calls can be traced, you know, Miss Koch. I thought we’d told you. Tolstoy is trying to kill Max.’

  Geraldine could not believe what had just happened. Somebody had touched her phone! In fact, not just touched it, destroyed it! That was a personal violation. Her phone was the medium of her artistry. To destroy it was like taking an artist’s brush, or breaking a musician’s instrument. Fortunately, she was carrying eight more. Geraldine rounded on Rosalie.

  ‘Now listen to me, young lady, I don’t know who the hell you are but I am Max’s agent —‘

  ‘And I am his wife!’

  This stopped Geraldine in her tracks. Wives were tricky things. They could poison the air between agent and star or they could sweeten it. You had to keep on the right side of wives. On the other hand, you didn’t want to get too close to them because it left you in a very tricky position when the star dumped the wife and married the nanny. If the new wife felt that the agent was too chummy with the old wife, then the agent’s life would become hell until they had ingratiated themselves with the new wife. Unfortunately, by the time they had done this, the new wife could easily be an old wife. Wives certainly were tricky things. In the long run, it was kids that were the determining factor in an agent’s attitude. If there were kids, the wife had to be taken very seriously indeed.

  ‘Well, congratulations, my dear,’ said Geraldine, testing the water, ‘and may one ask if we can expect to hear the patter of tiny feet?’

  Rosalie was a little taken aback by the question but she saw no reason to deny it.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, we are expecting.’

  ‘But my darling that’s wonderful,’ said Geraldine, thinking to herself, ‘Damn, some waitress has trapped Max with a pregnancy and now we’re stuck with the little bitch.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do. Anything at all,’ Geraldine said.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact there is,’ said Rosalie. ‘Max wants to recuperate discreetly in Europe. So what we need is an air ambulance and four false passports with Euro visas in them.’

  Geraldine was delighted. Nothing pleases an agent more than to sort out difficult things for their clients’ spouses, especially if those things are slightly dodgy. It puts the spouse in the agent’s debt. Geraldine reckoned that obtaining false visas would provide her with a good deal of leverage with Max in the future. Little did poor Geraldine know that there was in fact not a great deal of future left.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Debauchery and murder

  Caligula’s Palace.

  Jurgen Thor was in the middle of an orgy when Rosalie called him. His once pristine bedroom, which had been so stylishly furnished with its single enormous bed and a few floor cushions, was now a mass of naked bodies, water couches, bondage gear and various other sexual paraphernalia. There was booze and drugs aplenty and Jurgen was a little drunk when he picked up the phone.

  ‘Jurgen Thor? It’s me, Rosalie Connolly,’ the soft Irish voice said. ‘I came to see you a few weeks back, I was with Max Maximus. Do you remember?’

  Did he remember? Rosalie could not know it but Jurgen Thor could never forget that night. It haunted his dreams. Scarcely a night went by now when he did not awake in a sweat
with the vision of a dead girl screaming at him from the bottom of a deep dark chasm.

  ‘Yes, I remember everything. I heard you had left us, Rosalie.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t, and I need to see you again, urgently.’

  Jurgen may have been drunk, but not so much that he was immune to the memory of those flashing green eyes and the pale skin. The beautiful voice brought it all back to him very clearly. The earlier part of that terrible evening, the pleasanter part, when he had still been in control and girls had still done what he told them to without having to be murdered first. Yes, that bit had been fun in its way, showing off to the lovely young woman, soiling her with the knowledge of her compromise. That soft voice also brought a more distant night back to Jurgen’s mind. A night when it had been just him and Rosalie, alone. Now that had been a truly wonderful night. She had been weaker then, and he stronger. Then she had really been his possession. But that was in a different time, when he had still been at the height of his powers, not like now. Even so, it was fun to look back. Yes, Jurgen had fond memories of Rosalie. How nice, he thought in his alcoholic haze, it would be to see her again. He was wrong.

  ‘You need to see me, huh, baby doll?’ Jurgen breathed into the phone, trying to sound sexy but in fact merely giving Rosalie the impression that he had a cold. ‘Well, come on over to my place. Hey, girl! We’re having a party!’

  Rosalie put the phone down feeling a little puzzled. Jurgen had sounded strange. Could he have been drunk? It seemed unlikely, his capacity to hold his booze had always been legendary. Rosalie was not of course to know just how much Jurgen Thor had been letting himself go of late. The man was slowly giving up. The process had begun even before he had found himself forced to murder poor Scout. He was weighed down with the knowledge of doom. The end was coming and he wished that it would hurry up and come. He was fed up with waiting and fed up with lying.

  Scout’s death had accelerated this process. Once she started returning each night to interrupt his sleep, Jurgen began to sag. It was as if a ball which had been firm and strong with tension for so long had finally been punctured. It only takes a little hole, and all the air soon rushes out, leaving the ball looking much the same, but useless for all that.

  In an effort to regain his former aggressive joie de vivre, Jurgen had started to party, in fact, to orgy. He had jettisoned the sexual habits he had practised for decades in favour of a wild free-for-all. No more for him the private one-on-one seduction, of which he had been the master for so long. He could no longer do it. Private sex reminded him of Scout, and he had enough of Scout to contend with in his dreams without seeing her in the faces of the women he screwed. Jurgen had never imagined that such a little murder would affect him so. He had lived a rough life and seen and done many terrible things, and yet he simply could not shake the death of this one innocent from his mind. He supposed it was because she had died to protect a lie. He had killed her to defend the indefensible, and now he was paying the price. He could not even make love to a woman if he was alone with her, he had to have a crowd around him. Jurgen was scared of the dark.

  Late-comer.

  All the lights in the mountain home were blazing as Rosalie guided her little monocopter down through the darkness and on to Jurgen’s rooftop heli-pad. She was surprised to see a number of aircraft already parked, their blades folded down to make more space. Despite this evidence that Jurgen had company, it was all strangely quiet. No one had come up on to the roof to meet her, which was very much a break with Jurgen Thor’s old ways. In the past he had been extremely security conscious, never allowing people to land on his roof unchallenged.

  There was no bell to ring, none had ever been needed because the occupants of the house always heard any approaching aircraft from miles away. Rosalie was forced to bang and kick upon the door in an effort to attract attention. For a while she got nowhere and began to wonder if she would ever succeed in gaining access to Jurgen’s lair. There was music playing somewhere, but she could hear no talk or laughter. She became alarmed. Had some terrible gas leak or something occurred? Were they all dead?

  Finally she heard footsteps on the stairs within and the door was opened by a dreamy-looking young woman, completely naked, with quite the largest breasts and the smallest pupils that Rosalie had ever seen.

  ‘Hi,’ said the very stoned woman. ‘Aren’t the stars amazing. People never take time to look at things, do they? I mean, really look at them. Come on in.’

  Rosalie followed the girl down the spiral staircase and found herself yet again in Jurgen Thor’s bedroom. How different it was from the other two occasions on which she had seen it. Then it had been a chic and elegant palace of seduction, now it looked like Sodom and Gomorrah must have looked on the days when the populace had decided to stop being so prissy, throw inhibition to the wind and get properly naughty.

  There must have been thirty naked bodies in the room. Jurgen never had any problem assembling a decent guest-list for his orgies. People were thrilled to be invited to his legendary and, until recently, totally exclusive private home. Jurgen was one of the most important and respected people in the world, everybody wanted to know him. Society beauties flocked around, as did free-spirited Natura hippie girls … they always had. Jurgen was never shy of making the most of this popularity for the purpose of sexual conquest, these days he just did it in bulk, that was all.

  For a nice Catholic girl the whole outrageous scene was something of a shock, and as she looked around the room Rosalie might have thought that she was dreaming, except that these were not the sort of dreams that she had.

  ‘What on earth have you all been doing?’ Rosalie asked, perhaps rather stupidly.

  ‘We’ve been making good thoughts and feelings,’ the large-breasted girl replied. ‘They’ll emanate out from this place and make the whole world beautiful again.’ Which was not a bad excuse for getting rat-faced drunk and shagging a lot of virtual strangers.

  The girl drifted away, leaving Rosalie alone on the stairs. Most of the company were asleep, or unconscious more like, to judge from their unnatural positions. A few couples however were still lazily making love in a distant, soporific kind of a way. One or two others were drinking and smoking, staring trance-like into the middle distance and nodding sagely, as if in agreement with some brilliant point, even though no one had actually said anything. Jurgen Thor himself lay in the centre of it all, unconscious upon his great bed, prostrate amongst no less than four women, one of whom was still half awake and sleepily blowing Jurgen’s sleepy member.

  Jurgen was still a magnificent figure of a man, but Rosalie could not help but feel a bit queasy, contemplating the state he was in. She liked a party as much as the next girl, but to be so off your head that you could have somebody going down on you and not even notice was slightly sick-making, in Rosalie’s opinion. However, she was not there to moralise, she had a desperately important job to do, and she needed Jurgen Thor.

  Rosalie picked her way across the prostrate bodies stranded on the floor.

  ‘Excuse me… I’m awfully sorry… Oh, my God! Did I just tread on your thing? Sorry,’ she mumbled to the sleeping forms as she made her way to the bed.

  ‘Jurgen,’ she said, gently shaking the great man’s shoulder. ‘Jurgen?’

  She got no further because at that moment her attention was distracted somewhat. She was standing beside the bed and the girl who had been concentrating on Jurgen’s loins had reached out a hand, and was now using it to massage the inside of Rosalie’s leg.

  ‘Would you not do that, please?’ Rosalie said to the spaced-out girl.

  ‘Hey, come on,’ the girl replied, looking up from the parts that she had been nibbling. ‘Jurgen’s rules, right? Everybody has to party. So get naked, lady, no spectators allowed.’ With that, the girl moved her hand up to the top of Rosalie’s inner leg, with the clear intention of unzipping her trousers.

  ‘I said would you not do that, please,’ said Rosalie, and pointed her gun into the
girl’s face.

  ‘Wow! Are you the cops?’ the girl asked, quickly removing her hand. But Rosalie had no wish to converse with this rampant space cadet any further. She shook Jurgen by the shoulder and loudly demanded that he wake up. He did so with a scream that briefly roused the room.

  ‘She’s falling!’ he shouted, before coming slowly round and focusing on Rosalie. ‘Welcome to ancient Rome, yes, baby. My name is Caligula and the world is coming to an end. You have been designated my latest concubine.’ He made a lunge at Rosalie but she backed away.

  ‘Let’s get out of here, Jurgen, I have to talk to you.’

  But Jurgen had already drifted back into fitful unconsciousness and Rosalie was forced to try and rouse him further.

  ‘Jurgen, it’s urgent! It’s Mother Earth business!’ she said, shaking him again. ‘You have to get out of bed and talk to me.’

  ‘If you haven’t come to party, don’t bother knocking on my door.’ Jurgen giggled and again made a grab at Rosalie. This time he found his mark and roughly took hold of one of her breasts. She hit him in the face, hard, and with a clenched fist. His hand dropped away but apart from that he scarcely seemed to notice. He certainly registered no pain, his eyes just rolled a little and he laughed again.