Ben Elton - Stark

Stark

by Ben Elton

1989

Stark has more money than God and the social conscience of a dog on a croquet lawn. Whats more, they know the Earth is dying, so deep in Western Australia a planet-sized plot takes shape. Unfortunately all that stands in the way of the conspiracy are four inept green freaks.

1: BREAKFAST IN CARLO

C arlton is a little coastal town some miles south of Perth in Western Australia. Theyre a strange contrast those two towns. Perth is home to a higher density of millionaires than any other city in the world, but just down the road in Carlton people hang kind of looser. Certainly the place has its fair share of bread-heads and hustlers, but its still got a laid back feel. Boats and cafes and taking it easy are the things a visitor carries away in the memory.

Perth gets up in the morning and says, OK lets do it, lets make money, lets get on with a load of really high-powered stuff right now!

Some mornings Carlton doesnt get up.

Its a nice place to holiday in, or retire to, so actually quite a bit of money is made there in a gentle kind of way, a lot of it by a man called Silvester (or Sly) Moorcock. Sly lived in Perth, he was one of that citys many self-made rich, smug bastards, and finding the need to get further into property for tax reasons, he had bought up all the old granny duplexs and made Carlton (or Carlo to its friends), one of his many possessions. Some of it he knocked down, some of it he rented out. Some of it looked as if hed got half-way through knocking it down but then changed his mind and decided to rent it out. Such a place was occupied by Colin.

Yes, Sly owned Carlo, but he didnt rule the roost not in Colins little part of town anyway. All right, so Sly could have evicted Colin. Also, if Colin had had a job, Sly could have made him redundant. He could have impounded his possessions and done him for non-payment of rent. But so what? Colin didnt really own anything anyway and when its time to move on, its time to move on.

No, Sly didnt bother Colin overmuch. So the guy was a billionaire, what could he really do to you? Nothing. In the searing heat and natural abundance of a Carlton summer, Colin had much more pressing enemies than Sly. Lets face it, Sly was unlikely to appear as if from nowhere, on Colins bread-board and make him feel like throwing up. He wasnt going to creep into the fridge and hide in the folded spout of the milk carton so that when Colin popped back the spout wings, there he would be! all horrid and scuttley! Then, off like a bullet, but not before hed shocked Colin into dropping the milk and ruined Colins day.

Sly Moorcock was more powerful than God in Carlton, but Colin had never had to throw the butter away because hed found Sly having a fuck in it it takes a special kind of bastard to make you do that. Colins enemies were cockroaches, he had no time to worry about billionaires.

2: COCKIES

C ockroaches have an extraordinary physical resilience. You can smash one to bits on your living room floor leaving it in numerous cockroachie pieces and a little later when you have steeled yourself to clearing it up, its gone! Its cleaned itself up! Some say that other cockroaches have simply come and carried it away to have for their dinner but this is not true. Cockroaches are definitely bionic, they can rebuild themselves. If you put the shattered corpse of one in the bin, it will wait until you are gone and then slowly pull itself back together again, gluing on its head with its own horrid goo. Then, when it is ready, a born-again cockie, bigger, scarier and somehow managing to have more legs than it started off with, it will scuttle out, refreshed, from a mound of potato peelings making obscene gestures at you with its little cockroach fist.

Nothing is more deflating than being sneered at by a cockroach. It is said that cockroaches would survive a nuclear war better than anything. They would brush off fall-out like they brush off being smashed to bits with a shoe.

As Colin lay in bed, watching with distaste the phoenix of a new cockie rising out of the ruin of its dead self, it seemed to him eminently likely that in the barren aftermath of the final folly; when the poison winds blow cruelly over the rotting debris of us, the previous top dogs, cockroaches will inherit the earth. After all, they had clearly already inherited Carlton. Colin was thinking of charging them rent.

Perhaps, he thought, the government had been conducting secret nuclear tests and the holocaust had already come to Western Australia.

3: POMMIE POSEUR

C olin was a pom. Hed lived in Oz since he was thirteen but that doesnt make any difference, if youre a pom, youre a pom. The Aussies have a strange double standard when it comes to poms. For instance, they are fairly happy to cheer Lady Di and have a Union Jack on their flag, but that doesnt stop most of them calling you a whingeing pommie wanker if you happen to remark that its hot when the mercurys pushing 40 C.

Colin did not care. However hot it was Colin always thought he was cool small and cool. He was one of those rare people who try to be cool and somehow manage in the process to be a bit cool not much, but a bit. He was so unashamed about his pretensions that they kind of worked. For instance, despite living in Oz, he managed to speak in an accent that was situated somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, half-way between Britain and the USA having arrived at this location via some pretty groovy forties movies and some equally crucial rock lyrics. By rights this should have been horrible, marking Colin down as the worst kind of poseur, but it didnt. It almost did, but it didnt.

Probably it didnt because Colin wouldnt have minded being considered a poseur, in fact he would have thought being called a poseur quite an interesting pose. Everybody poses, the coolest people pose most of all, they just make it seem natural. Colin had a picture on his damp patch of Brando in The Wild One, dressed in leather, leaning on his Triumph with a little peaked cap on his head, tilted to one side, looking slightly off-camera with an expression on his face that seemed tobe saying: Listen, I may be sensitive, confused and inarticulate but I could still beat seventeen types of shit out of you, OK? Now that was posing, but nobody minded because it was Brando. He remained cool, even though he was an utter poseur with a damp patch behind him.

Its all a question of confidence. Colin never had any money, but he acted like he was loaded. Poverty was always a temporary problem for Colin. His present period had lasted about twenty-five years.

His clothes were piss-poor but he wore them with aplomb. He would practise things like opening and lighting his Zippo lighter with just one hand and throwing cigarettes up in the air and catching them in his mouth. Strangely this did not make him look like a total wanker it nearly did, but not quite. There was a tiny degree of charm in the way Colin accepted his many failures with the same easy confidence that he greeted his few successes. When Colin missed his mouth with the fag he acted the same as if hed scored a hit. When he burned his thumb with the lighter he yelped with pain in a manner that suggested that pretty soon anyone who was anyone would be burning their fingers on Zippos and yelping with pain. Colins surname was Dobson. Being aware that James Dean would never have been cast in Rebel if his name had been Colin Dobson, Colin called himself CD. Since the advent of compact discs this had given Colin an opportunity to do his great joke about being perfect, clear and flawless. Astonishingly he managed to deliver this without sounding like the biggest dickhead in history. He came a very close second.

4: BREAKFAST THOUGHTS

C D got out from under his grey duvet and lit a fag, he missed his mouth twice which delayed the evil moment of lighting up by about ten seconds. This was good, CD was trying to introduce a programme of starting later in the day and even ten seconds counted. His problem was he didnt want to give up, he really liked smoking, he was one of that ever dwindling group of people who still thought it looked cool. Like most committed smokers, he worried about it all the time. Unfortunately, whenever he found himself dwelling on the proven dangers of the weed he got so uptight he had to have a fag.