For the Love of Money

by Bill Whiting

  “What’s all that got to do with not going out and getting pissed?” King asked irritably. “Right now, I’d like a bottle of Scotch down me. Then a nice meal, and then a good sleep in a decent bed. Right now, that’s ambition enough for me.”

  “Look, Bill,” Miller said, in a pleading tone. “That money won’t last long. We need to think about what’s next. We’ve got capital again. We need to get working on a new idea.”

  “You are joking, aren’t you?” King shouted. “We’ve just got our hands on a hundred and fifty grand each, and you want to blow it. No, I’m for the quiet life now, thanks mate. I’m not cut out for this entrepreneurial lark. Once bitten, that’s me.”

  “Me too,” Rachel chipped in. “I never imagined having this much and I’m not losing it now.”

  “Right then,” Miller said. “Right then! Blow your chance. You could be mountains but you’ll settle for being molehills. King of the Molehill: that’ll be you, Bill. Pathetic.”

  “Look, you’re talking balls, Jamie,” King said in a more conciliatory tone. “We can’t risk this money now. Isn’t being bust once often enough for you?”

  “No, I haven’t sunk that far yet,” Miller answered. “You might settle for ordinariness. Mr Bill, ordinary, run-of-the-mill, stuck-in-a-rut King. Forgotten what that wise Chinese bloke told you. What was it – better to be a broken jade than a whole clay pot?”

  Raising his eyebrows, King said, “Oh, you remember that then?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Miller answered.

  King fell quiet for a moment, as he recalled Tony Wei’s advice that it was better to try and fail than never try at all. Then he smiled and said, “Alright then, what’s the bright idea?”

  “The minute we get the money, we need to take a break and think of one. Let’s take a week off in Spain. Marbella: a posh five-star hotel. We’ll get a rest and get some ideas together.”

  Rachel and King looked at each other, smiled and nodded.

  “Right, let’s get thinking,” Miller said.

  “Pissed first,” King answered.

  FIFTEEN

  After two days in Marbella, King was feeling the early pangs of boredom, as well as discomfort from a hangover and sunburn. He had been kept amused for a while by watching people around the expensive hotel’s pool. This was a rich man’s enclave, and the demographic make-up of the clientele held considerable curiosity value.

  The couples staying there seemed largely comprised of tubby and balding men aged fifty to seventy-five, who were paired with slim and good-looking women in their twenties or early thirties. King considered this to be a sign of the ability of the human species to adapt to economic forces; something he thought Darwin might, quite understandably, have overlooked. Although it would have been different in Neanderthal times, it had now evolved that the secret of successful genetic procreation is maximised when very rich men pair with very fertile women. The rich man offers power and security and, in the modern world, is able to provide a level of safe well-being that’s even better than the biggest and fittest brute could provide millions of years ago. The rich modern man is humanity’s equivalent of the dominant gorilla in the jungle. Each has his harem comprising the youngest, most attractive and most fertile mates.

  King then considered that the flaw in this analysis was the absence of children at the hotel. Obviously, this must have resulted from the fact that, being a more complex mammal, man had elevated the purpose of sex from the purely instinctive pro-creational to the exclusively recreational. And certainly, this arrangement seemed to work very well because, for the most part, the couples appeared unusually affectionate and happy. Indeed, much more so than more conventionally matched non-rich couples.

  King’s conclusion was that wealthy people were happy together because they had made a rational choice. They knew exactly and rationally why they were together, whereas most conventional couples, who make an emotional choice, become trapped once the emotions wear thin, and then spend endless years wondering what they ever saw in each other in the first place.

  “Look around here, the plain fact is that the old adage, ‘Money can’t buy you love’, is just bollocks,” King told Miller and Rachel, as they lay in a line on poolside sunbeds.

  “You are just about the most cynical person I’ve ever met,” Rachel said. “They’re just a bunch of sad old men with trophy women. They’re trinkets, those girls, like Rolex watches and flashy cars. That’s not love. Most men might be governed by their balls, and some women are controlled by money and power. But most women aren’t like that at all.”

  “That’s because there’s fewer rich women than rich men,” Miller chipped in. “I mean, how many of those over-sixty female film stars and celebrities do you see falling in love with fat, old, poor men? How many do you see living with retired postmen? Women are just the same. Once they’ve got money, they want a toy boy to go with it.

  “We aren’t like swans or albatrosses, you know, mating for life. We’re more like deer. The top stag wants as many shag-able young females as he can round up and keep – and the females want as much green pasture as they can get from a well-hung stag, who scares the wolves off. It’s as simple as that.”

  “We aren’t animals,” Rachel protested. “Mind, you and Jamie might be exceptions to that.”

  King took a large swig from his gin and tonic, and looked thoughtfully towards Rachel. “Well, anyway, you’re a good-looking catch, Rachel. I bet some of the people round here think we’re two older rich blokes who share you.”

  “What!” Rachel screamed, with a horrified look. “Me, with you two?”

  “There, see,” King said playfully. “Be a bit different, though, if we were a pair of shiny Brazilian footballers, wouldn’t it? Or film stars? See that, Jamie, she’s ashamed of us.”

  “Yeah,” Miller said. “But you know, it’s a funny thing. If you look at the animal world, it’s usually the male which is the most decorative of the species… lions with their big manes; peacocks with their big colourful tails; deer bucks with their magnificent antlers. The females tend to be just plain run-of-the-mill brown things.”

  “So what’s your point?” King asked.

  “No point, really,” Miller answered. “It’s just an astute observation. I mean, perhaps to the neutral eye, the male human would be markedly more attractive than the female human. Obviously, we don’t think that, but imagine if it was chimps which had the biggest brains and they watched TV documentaries about humans living in the jungle. They might see the male human as the better looking.”

  “Good point,” King said. “Perhaps that’s why women are obsessed with diets, make-up, hair styles and clothes. It’s a prehistoric throw-back. They’re sub-consciously trying to compensate for their plain ordinariness compared to men.”

  “Mmm… that’s possible,” Miller agreed. “I wonder what people from outer space would think? Say, eighteen-inch tall stick-like creatures with green fur, three arms and seven heads. They would think humans are the ugliest mammals on earth. They’d say, ‘Look at those horrible bald-bodied things with awful tufts of fur sprouting out in strange isolated places.’ I mean imagine a tiger as hairless as a human, or a completely bald bear?”

  “Yeah,” King agreed, “the Martians would look at Rachel in the nude and go, ‘Yuk’ – like we do when we see some horrible close-up of a parasitic insect.”

  “Shut up, you two, for God’s sake,” Rachel shouted. “You really are getting on my nerves.”

  “We’re just having a civilised conversation,” Miller responded.

  “Well, I’m fed up with your conversations over the past couple of days,” Rachel said. “We’ve had: why did God make wasps? What has the most boring life – a sardine or a fly? Why don’t people on charity runs do something more productive, like sponsored digging old people’s gardens? How would you explain the point of golf to a Martian? You two just talk crap
all the time.”

  “Well, blokes have a much wider range of thought than women do,” King responded. “You can’t expect us to sit here all day talking about relationships, fashion and home makeovers.”

  “That’s crap,” Rachel barked back, “but even it was true, there’s a modicum of sense in it. I mean, what was it at breakfast this morning? Would you rather lose one testicle or go bald? What would be worse – having your car stolen and wrecked or catching a curable, but embarrassing sexual disease? That isn’t conversation, it’s just pointless talk about nothing.”

  Miller and King sat silent for almost a minute. Then Miller said, “If there was a way that satellites could somehow register, you know, put on record, whenever an individual has sexual intercourse, I bet the government would tax it. In principle, it would just be one step on from raising money through speed cameras.”

  After a moment absorbing Miller’s point, King said, “Do you think so? Surely not?”

  “Yeah, they would,” Miller replied. “Governments will tax anything, and especially anything which is enjoyable and rather addictive. Of course they’d say they needed the tax to combat the rise in under-age sex, or the increase in sexually transmitted disease, or to protect social cohesion from rising extra-marital sex. They’d think of a worthy-sounding reason, just as a cover. It wouldn’t be much to start with, say, five pence per person, per shag. But say ten million people have it, twice a week, times fifty-two in a year: that’s a thousand million times five pence, and that must be absolutely millions of quid. Then it would go up to a pound a shag after a few years.”

  “Mmm…” Miller broke in, “what they’d need is an electronic system for detecting all penile and clitoral erections. Say two pence for every stiffy, or two pence per minute for ten minutes and one penny a minute thereafter – and maybe free on Sunday afternoons and bank holidays.”

  “No, wouldn’t work,” King said emphatically. “What if you got a hard on twice a night dreaming and didn’t remember it? Let me see, say twice a night for a year, that would be—”

  “Only about fourteen quid,” Miller interrupted.

  “There’d be a lot of disputes, though,” King said. “They’d need a pretty foolproof detection system, wouldn’t they?”

  “Not so sure about that,” Miller answered. “I mean, would you appeal – especially if you were getting, say, ten stiff dreams a night, and a big tax bill came in? Would you really want to appeal if it went to court and the case was reported in the media? No, it would be more feasible if an actual orgasm was taxed.”

  “Good point,” King said, “and what about all the habitual porn-watching wankers? They’d have to cut down a bit. Can you see thousands of people, marching through London, on an anti-wanking-tax protest? They’d think twice I reckon.”

  “Shut up, both of you – and stop drinking!” Rachel shouted. “We came here to think of ideas to make money. It’s time we did.”

  “You’re right,” Miller said, emptying his glass on the pool side slabs. “We’ll spend a day thinking, and then we’ll get together, and each of us will make a presentation to the others.”

  “Be nice to think of something useful for the world,” Rachel said. “Something we can be proud of. So far, all we’ve done is made money out of inventing news.”

  “Inventing news is useful, Rachel,” King protested. “It’s entertainment. How many news editors sit there on a slow day praying for an earthquake or a school bus crash? Making up scary things is better than wishing for real ones to happen.”

  “That’s true,” Miller said. “The western world is now generally well fed, and if anything, too well fed. Religion, and longing for an after-life, have been dumped because much of the pain of being in this world has gone. They’re interested in this life, not the after one.

  “And what they really want is entertainment and experiences. That’s where all the money is going: into things like extreme sports and adventure travel. And they don’t want boring real news either; they want disaster movie-style news. They don’t want to read dull obituaries about dead scientists or politicians. They want to feel real grief, and be seen on live TV crying at a celebrity’s mass-market funeral event.”

  “Jamie’s right, Rachel,” King said. “First, we need to make loads of money. Then afterwards we can think of something wholesome to do with it. That’s what the mega-rich do. First they get enough money to keep them in heaven on earth. Then they spend some of it on good causes – so they can book a ticket for the heavenly after-life later.

  “That’s real riches, that is. You need to be rich enough to fly to Africa in a fifty-million-dollar private plane: so you can be televised giving money away to starving people.”

  “You are a miserable, depressing cynic, Bill,” Rachel said, “and you too, Jamie.”

  “Okay,” King said, “well, tomorrow we think; and whatever we come up with, let’s try and make it something real and useful.”

  Miller raised his eyebrows sceptically and almost spoke, before thinking better of it.

  Talking time was done. Drinking time was done. Thinking time had come.

  SIXTEEN

  Forty hours later, the three partners gathered in Miller’s hotel suite, each armed with a flip-chart presentation. King was first to present. Attentively, Miller and Rachel sat on a sofa, with notebooks in hand, as King revealed his first chart. It read:

  AIR DEBAUCH

  – the ‘all-frills’ executive airline

  “Now, you may not entirely understand the true beauty of this idea,” King began. “You need to be a long-suffering business flyer to appreciate just how attractive this is; but I want you to try.

  “Someone once said that a man has only one death; but that was long before Boeing invented jumbo jets. And someone once asked, ‘Where does sorrow come from?’ But that was before the airlines redefined the true meaning of unhappiness – and created the sorrow of all sorrows.

  “Take it from me, thanks to long-haul flying, there are hundreds of thousands of well-heeled blokes out there, who have died a thousand deaths and plumbed the deepest depths of despair. But now, step forward Air Debauch, the saviour of the sky.

  “The unique Air Debauch experience starts at check-in, located in a private lounge at the airport. This is a check-in queue with a difference. Every passenger is greeted by a gorgeous topless hostess, and is seated in a comfy wheelchair. The hostess then pops a blanket over his knees and offers him the drink of his choice, plus savoury nibbles. And then, as the queue slowly recedes, she gently massages his shoulders.

  “Once ticketed, the happy passenger is then pushed through emigration and into the wonders of the Air Debauch Hellfire Club Lounge, where more free booze is available, together with gambling machines, Turkish massages and private booths with free telephone sex chat lines.

  “Then, at boarding time, he’s whisked off to his spacious seat on a new ‘All business seats and no riff-raff’ super jumbo and strapped in; then the pilot’s voice comes over the intercom:

  ‘Good evening everyone, this is your captain speaking, and welcome aboard our Air Debauch flight to Hong Kong. You’ll be glad to hear myself and the crew are fairly sober and we expect a smooth flight tonight. If the oxygen masks should drop during the flight, please don’t panic, as it may only mean that someone on the flight deck has farted. Only joking, folks: it’ll be shit-yourself time, really!

  ‘Seriously, though, I’ll let you know when we are safely out into international airspace, when our full facilities will be made available. Thank you.’

  “Fifteen minutes later,” King continued, “the facilities open and the hostesses change from the airline uniform into mini-skirted French maid attire. They then tour the aisles with trays of drinks – and free cigarettes, cannabis and cocaine.

  “The first half of the upper cabin is devoted to the ‘Street of Shame’. It’s got a wide centre ais
le, with small lap-dancing tables all down one side and roulette tables and blackjack gambling booths on the other, plus big screens showing sports and porn programmes.

  “The second half of the upper deck contains the ‘Mile High Club’, where scantily dressed call-girls display their wares in Amsterdam-style windows.

  “After a few hours, the weary ball-drained passengers can stagger back to their fully made-up seat-beds, where they are tucked up and massaged gently to sleep. Then, an hour before landing they are woken with a glass of champagne, given a slap-up breakfast and a choice of three video programmes: Top Twenty Car Crashes of All Time, Top Twenty Female Celebrity Arses of All Time and The All Time Top Ten Car Crashes and Top Ten Female Celebrity Arses. And get this, the viewers all have a voting button, so they can register their opinion as to the best crash and the best arse. And when the poll result is announced, it stimulates an absolutely ideal start-the-day conversation piece.

  “So there it is: Air Debauch, the business blokes’ favourite airline.”

  Rachel and Miller sat open-mouthed and silent.

  “Well, what do you think?” King asked.

  “Nothing there for women travellers then?” Rachel finally said. “You’re an outrageous pig. What goes on inside your head?”

  “No, I thought of that,” King said. “We’d have a women’s section on the plane. The stewards would be young, super-fit, sun-tanned blokes; hung like baboons and dressed just in thongs. Then there’d be lots of female-friendly services, such as fortune tellers, therapists, gynaecologists, hairdressers, manicurists and all that kind of thing. And then there’d be videos featuring the top twenty worst female illnesses and top twenty best celebrity relationships. Think of the terrific women’s conversations that would stimulate, Rachel.”

  “I really think you’ve got a screw loose,” Rachel responded. “Very loose.”