Stark (2 page)

7: EASY AS PIE

T
he meat pie plays a significant part in Australian culture. It is far and away that country’s most popular snack, it fills the same place in their hearts and turns that fish and chips used to fill for the British. It is often referred to as a ‘rats coffin’ and the recipe has not changed since it was first discovered being used as part of the lining for Pandora’s box. Consisting of pastry so greasy if you drop one on the floor it will stop the boards creaking, and a substance called ‘meat’ which is made of minced string in gravy.

This horrendous creation, taken almost obligatorily with a squirt of tomato sauce, is delicious. Delicious in a way that only truly awful, stupefyingly, unhealthy food can be. Delicious in a way that vegetables (or indeed anything that is good for you) can only dream of being. Hence it has so far withstood all efforts to ponce it up.

This had been Sly’s old school-friend’s dad’s mistake. He had tried to ponce up the great Australian pie. He did not understand the most important rule of yummy snacks. That they are not yummy despite being so awful, they are yummy because they are so awful…

‘It’s not as if we put peas or carrots in them,’ the old school-friend protested. But secretly he was ashamed, he knew that he and his father were in the wrong. Ham and cheese is a poof’s pie.

‘Not to worry, old school-friend,’ said Sly, who always had trouble with people’s names. ‘Your dad’s company’s still in great nick, you’re very big in doughnuts, you dominate the mock-cream fancies market, and your apple turnover, turnover is the fastest in WA. Christ almighty, heart disease is one of the biggest killers in Australia, that’s a statistic you and your dad can be proud of.’

‘Oh sure, no worries,’ said the friend, ‘I’m not saying we’re in trouble, I mean in real terms the company’s fine, but a cock-up like that hits your share confidence. Market-wise we’re at a bit of a low ebb.’ And that was when Sly had his brilliant idea.

The next day he quit his job as runner for the fast-growing Tyron Organization and went to his bank to borrow a lot of money. He had stumbled upon a fascinating situation, a healthy company with extremely valuable assets, which was temporarily depressed on the market. My, my, my said the spider to the fly.

On the strength of the information he had got from his old school-friend, Sly bought a majority holding in the friend’s family firm at a bargain price and took over as boss. Now a lesser maverick than Sly might have stopped there, content to be the new head of a successful bakery. Remembering the incident only as a stern warning never to chat pies with pals. But Sly was destined to be more than a baker, he wanted to be a bastard. So he smashed the company up, flogging the Cream-Horn machine to one rival, the Viennese Twirl twirler to another. Before long there was nothing left of his old friend’s family firm and Sly was sitting on the foothills of what would one day become a mountain of cash.

Sly soon realized that it did not take a ham and cheese debacle to render healthy companies temporarily vulnerable. So erratic is the stock-market that at a time of depressed trading, any concern, even a very successful one, can find itself laid open. Suddenly, the mere hard assets of a company, the carpets, the typewriters, the amusing stickers that say ‘you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps’, if sold off separately, can add up to a considerably greater value than the sum total of the share value quoted on the index.

The fact that these companies are going concerns that make things and create jobs, is entirely immaterial to the business of asset-stripping. This is scorched earth capitalism, you buy something, smash it up, flog the bits and move on. Then the predator, faced with the question of what to do with the money he or she has made, will probably do it all over again. Cutting a swathe through jobs and dreams, growing bigger and more destructive with every deal.

8: GOLDEN BOY

A
n even more curious side to this strange way of making a living is the way in which it is regarded socially. Sly found himself lauded and held up as a role model to other young Australians. Far from being seen as a vandal whose job was destroying other people’s jobs purely for personal gain, he was presented as someone who created work, bringing money into the state and helping to keep the wheels of commerce turning. His youthful good looks made him popular with all and he quickly found himself regarding women in the way he regarded companies: things to be used and discarded, he would take from them what he desired and move on. Astonishingly, this too won Sly not contempt and condemnation, but jovial respect. It seemed that not only was this man a brilliant operator, but also he was a hell of a lad to boot. Curiously, this side of things had become rather irritating for Sly. He liked power and it is quite difficult to experience power if all gives way before you. You can’t push people round if they’re already bending over backwards, it gets boring. Even the sex began to get on his nerves — even with people bending over backwards. Sly was a fantastically successful individual, but he could not be said to have had a fulfilling personal life.

9: CITY OF ANGELS

A
nd that’s why it felt so good to feel good again. As Sly glided in from LA airport, minor irritations, like deep personal discontent, were forgotten. He had the thrill again. The thrill of being, irrationally, pointlessly and idiotically rich. He felt like he’d arrived, and the reason for this childlike elation was a dinner invitation. Silvester Moorcock had been invited to dinner. Nothing very special about that of course, he’d had dinner before, often. Admittedly, this time he would be dining with some of the richest and most powerful men in the world, but once you’ve eaten smoked salmon mousse out of the bottom of a Penthouse Pet you have high standards as to what makes a meal swing.

It was not the invitation, but what the invitation represented that made Sly hug himself with excitement that night (normally he would have paid someone to do this for him, but he’d been in a hurry at the airport and anyway, it was a very private moment). Sly knew that he was about to be accepted into a club. An exclusive club. So exclusive a club in fact that it had no name and no membership list. It had no premises and you could not apply to join. A person simply drifted into membership having achieved the required qualifications. These qualifications being truly enormous wealth and the social conscience of a dog caught short on a croquet lawn. It was, and is of course, rare to find the former, without the latter.

The venue for the meal was unpretentious enough. A private room in a restaurant in Los Angeles. With certain obvious exceptions, the super-rich are a fairly faceless bunch and do not feel over-paranoid about going out in society, especially a society that provides itself with its own private police force, as Beverly Hills does.

If Los Angeles ever had a town planner, all the movie stars should club together and get him a guide dog. Whoever it was he must have designed the place while his brain was in a meeting. The town is a mess, worse than the suburbs of Perth, thought Sly as he limo’d through the streets. Streets that looked as if someone had dropped a load of buildings on either side and by coincidence they had all landed the right way up.

Los Angeles, like Sly’s native Western Australia, suffered from too much space and too much sunshine. For years and years developers had simply spread out, leaving one shit heap and building another a hundred metres further on, creating hundreds of square miles of depressing, low-rise sprawl. When the oil runs out LA will be completely finished as a city, millions will starve to death. For most people the nearest shop would be five or six hours walk away and, since in areas like Beverly Hills you quite literally get picked up by the law for walking, most people have forgotten how to do it.

Sly’s limo purred up outside ‘California Dreaming’, a restaurant which made a virtue out of what it called its ‘exclusive pricing policy’. The motto was, ‘If you want to eat here, be prepared to sell your house.’ The idea being to keep out scum and riff-raff. It didn’t keep out scum and riff-raff of course, it just kept out people who did not have a ridiculous amount of money.

Probably about a twentieth of the world’s ready cash was represented round the table that night so, not surprisingly, the food was good. Not good enough, of course; it would have been the same quality if only a twenty thousandth of the world’s wealth had been present, or even, horrible thought, a twenty millionth.

This must be one of the principal blights on the horizon of the super-rich: the fact that luxury and quality is finite. Paying a million pounds for a meal would not make it worth a million pounds; it would not make it ten thousand times better than one that cost a hundred pounds; it would probably not even be twice as good. The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value. One day, of course, if there is any justice, heaven will prove to be a store-house of new and unimagined luxuries. The guiltless will scoff great mounds of ambrosia, washing it down with jugfuls of nectar, but it is unlikely that any of the mega-mega-rich will be invited to that particular blow-out.

One presumes that billionaires are not stupid people, they cannot be unaware of the paradox of their great wealth. ‘Just what am I working for!’ they must shout rhetorically at their art collections, full of art which secretly they don’t like. They know the answer of course. They have long since exceeded any possibility of conventional satisfaction. They are working to fuck up the world for everyone else.

10: THE CLUB

A
nd so Sly joined the club, although club is far too small a word to describe it. For the first time Sly, now a bona fide billionaire bastard, was to take his place at a cabinet meeting of the World Government of Money — or convivial dinner party of like-minded colleagues as they would have preferred to put it. In his wanderings around the upper echelons of society, Sly had often heard hints and rumours regarding a shadowy super-elite, a group wielding almost incomprehensible power who were preparing some secret and terrible purpose. Now it seemed he was being asked to take part.

Of course it was not quorate, by no means all the billionaires who were in on the conspiracy were present. They were dotted about the world, joylessly going about their business of fucking things up for everyone else. Their presence was not essential, for the Government of Money is not like a conventional government. It has no debating chamber, nor specific list of representatives. No official documents guarantee its legality. Indeed, many of the people round the table would have strenuously denied that it was a government at all and perhaps even half-believed their denials. But it is a government, as powerful as any. An invisible, amorphous, multi-headed dictatorship of money.

And it had a plan.

As Sly entered the restaurant, thrilled and excited, he had no idea what that plan was, or where it was leading to. As it happened, it was leading to hell and beyond. Sly’s life was about to change utterly. That evening he was to be indoctrinated into the Stark Conspiracy.

11: FOR THOSE IN PERIL FROM THE SEA

S
ome characters in this narrative will loom large, being directly connected, either for or against the great conspiracy which Sly was to join that night. Others must come and go for they are only indirectly connected, but are no less a part of it for that. For the influence of Sly and people like him is impossible to calculate, their tentacles spread across the globe. Sly lived in Oz, he was eating in Los Angeles, but his money was everywhere. His bucks had assumed a life of their own, they were out there doing things of which Sly knew very little and cared even less. Just as long as they went forth and multiplied it was fine by him. His bucks were animals that he had let off the leash. They ran about the world in an uncontrolled frenzy, bursting into the lives of people that Sly would never meet nor think of.

For example, as Sly entered the restaurant in Los Angeles some of his money was floating off the coast of Britain. Of course Sly was aware that a few of his bucks had found a temporary home as a majority holding in a Belgian waste disposal group, his brokers always consulted him before making a share purchase. But what did that tell Sly? nothing about reality. Certainly Sly knew about the company’s collateral, its profit and loss curve, its disposable assets, its history on industrial relations and the chances of an injection of public funds should it hit the skids. But that was all he knew. He saw his investment purely and simply as a device by which to make money. What the company actually did was a matter of supreme indifference to him. He did not know about Captain Robertson; he did not know about the great toilet irony; he did not know about the Pastel family on holiday…

12: BRASS IN MUCK

C
aptain Robertson was a sad and bitter man. All his life he had wanted to be master of a ship. And what sort of ship did he end up being master of? a sludger. Scarcely a dashing or romantic command.

‘What do you do for a living mate?’

‘I lug shit up the Thames and dump it in the North Sea.’ Captain Robertson would occasionally try to cheer himself up. ‘It’s a rotten job but then people have to do toilet,’ he would say to himself as yet another great steaming slick slid out of the bowels of his barge and began its slow journey back to Britain.

Of course he was right, people do have to do toilet. Even the most rabidly concerned environmentalist would be unlikely to volunteer to cork their bot. But it doesn’t have to end up dumped virtually raw in the North Sea. It can in fact be processed and used as fertilizer. It could be re-eaten via a nice healthy cauliflower rather than a deformed fish. But perhaps this would be too long-winded a route by which people — like Sly’s bucks — could go forth and multiply.

The situation is quite ironic really because people are normally so fastidious about their bathroom hygiene. They are happy to invest in a foaming blue-flush which, although costly, is guaranteed to produce a sparkling bowl and lemon- scented toilet freshness that the whole family will enjoy. However, anything that happens beyond the U-bend is somebody else’s business.