Epub ISBN: 9781409085782
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About the Author
Ben Elton is one of Britains most provocative and entertaining writers. He has written twelve bestselling novels which include Stark , Popcorn (Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award), Dead Famous , High Society (WHSmith Peoples Choice Award), Past Mortem (Prix Polar International), Chart Throb and The First Casualty .
His multi-award-winning TV writing and performance credits include The Young Ones , Blackadder 2 , and , Mr Bean , Saturday Live , The Man from Auntie and The Thin Blue Line . He has written several smash-hit West End plays, including the Olivier Award-winning Popcorn , and the books for the hit musicals The Beautiful Game and the global phenomenon We Will Rock You , which he also directs.
Ben is also one of the countrys most popular and influential stand-up comedians. He is married with three children.
MELTDOWN
Ben Elton
LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND JOHANNESBURG
Good and thick
Jimmy Corby graduated from Sussex in 1993. He celebrated with five friends: Rupert, David, Henry, Robbo and Lizzie.
These six were to remain friends throughout the nineties and for most of the noughties.
Mates. Proper mates.
Through good and bad.
Through thick and thin.
Except that there never really was any bad.
And there wasnt an awful lot of thin either.
Apart from Ruperts Amanda. And Henrys Jane. And Davids Laura. They were all very thin. But by choice.
Good and thick. Thats how the times had been.
Jimmy and his friends stuck together through good and thick.
Tired and broke
Jimmy scarcely noticed being tired any more; it had become as much a part of his life as eating or breathing. Of course hed been tired sometimes in his old life. His fantasy life.
Seriously knackered , or so in his innocence he had believed. When shouting himself hoarse during an allnighter with the Tokyo Exchange or pissed up at 5am in a pub with some of the guys, watching a live fight from Vegas. Or enjoying his second straight dawn, loved up on a beach in Ibiza with a bottle of Krug between his knees and a gap-year holiday-hippy chick on either side. Yes. Hed been tired. But not really tired. Tired to his core, tired in his blood . Tired to the point where he doubted his sanity. Tired until his mind dislocated itself from his body and just sort of floated a few feet above it as he went through the motions of being alive.
These days that was how tired Jimmy felt all the time . And there would be no respite, not for years.
He could hear the screaming long before he opened the front door. The screaming never seemed to stop. They could have recorded his life and used it as the soundtrack for a slasher movie. Both of the younger ones had clearly gone off at the same time and were competing to see who could drive their mother insane first. Jimmy knew exactly the sort of night that awaited him. Because it would be the same as last night. And the night before. The same as every night since that tearful moment when Jodie, the rock, the treasure, the person without whom they simply could not do , had left.
Jimmy thought about taking a last turn round the block. Of grabbing a few moments more of stumbling, agonized, half-conscious, semi-zombieficated peace before entering the maelstrom that was his home (or the banks home since he had been forced to mortgage his entire equity in a failed effort to get on top of his mounting debts). But Jimmy was an honourable bloke. He loved Monica. He might have failed her utterly like the sad swine that he was, but he loved her and he knew she needed him, if only to give her three minutes respite to pop to the loo.
One by one he unlocked the four beautifully tooled Chubb deadlocks set perfectly along the rich, shiny edge of the huge bright-red front door of which he had once been so proud. Despite its great weight the door swung open smoothly. Of course it did, it was so expertly hung. Hung on its eight big brass hinges. Such a full, heavy, clunkingly satisfying movement. A Romanian guy had done it; they still understood wood in Eastern Europe. Jimmy had admired the guy at the time but now he envied him. He envied him so much. To have a trade . To be able to actually do something. A real, palpable, physical skill that you could offer for hire. How good would that be? Particularly now that the market for aggressive, cocky wankers shouting themselves hoarse into a telephone had so comprehensively dried up.
The marble-clad hall was empty, of course. Empty and echoing as the red door shooshed and clunked shut behind him. No welcoming cocktail served by a lovely, eager, semi-posh girl with a degree in Fine Food and Catering, fresh-faced, chef-coated and anxious to explain the details of that evenings menu.
Hi, Jimmy. Cool day? Wicked. Hope youre in the mood for Chinese duck? Ive been marinating it since two and my black bean sauce is awesome.
No. That was history. Jessica had gone the way of Jodie. Her fabulous catering and hospitality skills were now being wasted at a Garfunkels while she searched for a new private chefs position, along with all the other drifting Jessicas for whom the supply of mega-rich employers was so rapidly shrinking.
She was gone and the big marble hall was empty and cold. The only thing in it besides Jimmy was screams. Bloodcurdling, brain-mashing, life-sapping screams.
The volume ramped up massively as, head bowed with exhaustion, he made his way down into the basement. As he went, he noted that only one of the little lights that had once glowed so subtly beneath the thick frosted glass of the stairs was still working. How long had Monica agonized over the lighting? It had seemed so important at the time. She had had a pile of catalogues and magazines. A pile . All devoted exclusively to internal lighting.
Now there was just a single working bulb left. One by one the others had all gone out. Monica would probably see it as a metaphor for their vanished hopes and dreams. Or was it a simile? Jimmy wasnt sure; he wasnt bright that way, like Monica.
On the other hand, what had they been dreaming of in the first place, illuminating the steps of their basement staircase internally? It seemed rather a strange idea now, viewed from his new perspective. Now that his dreams involved feeding his children. But it really had seemed important at the time.
He would have liked to replace those bulbs. As a gesture of defiance, to prove to himself that he was still good for something. That he might be down but at least he could make the discreet interior lighting hidden in his basement stairs work. But he couldnt even do that. He didnt know if they had any spare bulbs. If they did have, he didnt know where they were kept, and anyway he wouldnt have known how to take the frosted glass off the stairs to get rid of the dead ones. Someone had always sorted that kind of stuff out for them.
Those were the days, when they had somebody to sort out their kids and somebody to sort out their light bulbs.
A nice little earner
The stairs had shone and twinkled like Piccadilly Circus a year earlier, looking as bright and jolly as Jimmy did himself as he perused the stock market on the gleaming new seventeen-inch MacBook that nestled on the breakfast bar among the cereal boxes.
Wow, he said. Whatever youre getting Rupert for Christmas, it isnt enough.
