Stark (5 page)

22: A PLAN(ISH)

C
D decided to pull himself together and concentrate. It was clear to him that a degree of serendipity was going to be required to nudge along the essential process of wooing the gorgeous Rachel. This was obvious from one glance at the differentials. She was a love goddess; she was the font from which all beauty flowed; she was a sexual weapons system waiting for a crazy man to push her button — and he was a pratt.

Playing an honest hand CD was destined for disaster on the courtship front, so he was going to have to lie. He recalled that at their first meeting at the Pissed Parrot, Rachel had expressed interest in his bullshit about peace freak connections. So a committed ‘citizen of the world’ approach seemed to be the clearest route up her dress. This was fine as far as CD was concerned. He did not care who he pretended to be. He was so obsessively hot for Rachel’s action that he would have gone on a diet and claimed to be Mother Theresa if it had promised even the chance of a feel-up.

As it happened there would be no element of hypocrisy in the little charade CD was planning that could besmirch the purity of his horrendous horniness. CD was hip to all the principles held dear by the peace lot, he just felt that clothes- wise a small thermonuclear blast would definitely improve their appearance. After all, there isn’t really much you can do with a tie-dye T-shirt except atomize it into oblivion so that it may never return to offend the eye.

Reflecting on these reflections, CD determined that if he had to play a bit of a hippy, it would at least be a tastily dressed one. He would show Rachel that a concern for the future of the planet and crucial threads were not mutually exclusive. It was possible to desire peace on earth and not look like you’d been dragged through a puddle on the way to a jumble sale. Who could tell, maybe besides making Rachel his own for all eternity he would do those hippies some good!

As he dressed, CD stared out of the window to the place where Dave used to play when CD had first come to live in his little duplex. CD didn’t know Dave. Dave was not destined to play any part in the story of Stark. In fact he was already dead. But his story is connected, as all stories are. He was, like CD and Rachel and poor Mrs Pastel, a tiny piece of the same giant jigsaw; a bit player in the same titanic tragedy for which Stark believed itself to have a solution.

23: DAVE AND BILL: AN INVOLUNTARY KILLING

D
ave was killed by Bill.

They never even met, but Bill killed Dave as surely as if he’d shot him in the skull. Obviously Bill never meant to do it, but few of the terrible things done in the world are meant.

24: DULL

I
t happened this way. Bill had given his life to nylon — he was very into nylon. Some people are into leather or PVC, Bill was into nylon. Not wearing it, you understand, or stretching it tight across the buttocks of a close friend and popping his thumb through at the point of least resistance. It was the structure of nylon which fascinated Bill. It needs a special type of person to be seriously into hydrocarbons. Basically you need to be very dull. Not dull in the way that is normally classed as dull, the sports bore or the person who reads the books about the SAS that you can buy reduced at station bookstalls…

‘Oh yes, it’s the most rigorous training in the world. Apparently they were put on full standby red-alert mode maximum kill facility alert, the moment the Home Secretary got the news.’

Much duller than that, dull to the point where it is almost a creative act. Those who met Bill often wondered if they were missing something…‘I suppose I’m very stupid,’ they would say, ‘but I really don’t see the fascination.’

Any single-mindedness is obviously in danger of being dull. Single-mindedness about something that is already dull is clearly double dull. The problem is that a dull person remorselessly pursuing a dull idea can appear a bit like a clever and inspired person who can see something that others can not. The well-adjusted observer begins to doubt his or her critical faculties and asks if perhaps there might not be something in it after all. This can be a bit worrying in the case of the various political and religious maniacs who want everyone to think the way they do. But in Bill’s case, it was not worrying, just very very dull.

If you went for a drink with Bill he would somehow work the conversation round to carbon research. His only other skill besides carbon research was working the conversation round to carbon research and, it has to be said, he was pretty good at it.

‘Fancy a drink, Bill?’

‘I’d rather do a bit of carbon research.’

But Bill was all right, he bored people but he didn’t eat them. The world and its spouse had no reason to regret Bill’s birth. Not, that is, until he killed Dave.

The chain of events that put Bill on the path to murder started right back when he was at school. He was a total and utter fart as a kid, thin, farty and dull, dull, dull. The sort of kid who was ‘really incredibly into science’ and used this as a substitute for a personality. Every class has a couple. They take great pride in carrying sciencey things in the pockets of their blazers. Electrical screwdrivers, conversion tables, bits of wire. Their conversation is monumentally dull because they feel the need to announce their scientific obsessions in even the most commonplace sentences. If they did not do this they would cease to exist and be marked absent on the register.

‘Is that your chair, Jenkins?’

‘Specifically and fundamentally,’ replies Jenkins, ‘you would not be a hundred and eighty degrees off in presuming the affirmative.’ And then Jenkins would look pleased and slightly embarrassed as if having delivered rather a good joke.

Bill and his ilk are awkward kids; always grinning and getting taller. They go around at break-time offering to prove by equation that one and one equals three, but then get it all wrong.

As they grow older these people get into Deep Purple and Bowie and grow their hair in greasy mops. They start drinking cider and blackcurrant and go to university and say things like: ‘Last night we got what I believe is technically described as rat-arsed.’

Inevitably, as a recreational subsection of their dullness, they become Real Ale bores and they are the most boring of all Real Ale bores because they can tell you the specific gravity of the beer they are drinking. Worse, they know what specific gravity is.

Such a fellow killed Dave.

Dave, who was not remotely boring and, were you lucky enough to meet him, would keep you enthralled for hours. Not that that makes any difference to the crime. If Dave had killed Bill it would have been just as wrong, but he didn’t. Bill killed Dave.

25: THE SUBLIME AND THE RIDICULOUS

B
ill was actually pretty bright. Whereas most science farties end up as computer programmers, he was destined for bigger things. He took three pure science ‘A’ levels and went to university determined to get into nylon. It was in the middle of Bill’s second year — during his brief dissolute phase, when he seemed to be paying more attention to the Silly Buggers Society than to nylon — that Dave was born.

On the same night that Bill tried gamely to walk the length of the student union bar with a full half-pint of Real Ale balanced on his head and a radish up his arse, at the same moment, far away, Dave drew his first breath. Talk about the sublime and the ridiculous.

Ironically it was also that evening, the evening bloody murder began to creep slowly into Bill’s life, that he found love. The killer met his moll. He met her upstairs at the student union, in the smaller Bistro Bar — so called because you could buy wine there. Her name was Jane and Bill boldly asked to sit beside her, remembering too late to remove the radish. Jane had witnessed his earlier cavortings and pretended to be totally contemptuous of them, but really she thought the whole thing pretty exciting stuff. This was because Jane was nearly as dull as Bill — her idea of a rave was a Cadbury’s Creme Egg. She thought Bill sophisticated and a proper hoot. So worldly and romantic with his extensive knowledge of early Bowie and nylon and the future calendar of the Silly Buggers Soc’: ‘We’re going to dress up in girls’ nighties and push a double bed up the High Street to raise money for cancer.’

And so it was that on the night Bill got his first ever girlfriend — a night of fumbling and snogging and that triumphant feeling of having grown up — on that night of all nights, Dave was born and Dave was doomed. Bill the nice, dull, git with the brand new, dull, bossy girlfriend, was to be his nemesis. There would be a terrible bloody murder; a frenzy of panic, agony and desperate violence, a moment’s shocked disbelief and it would be over. Dave was twenty-one years younger than Bill. It’s hard to say why but somehow this made what happened all the sadder.

26: MODERN BIRTH

T
hese days giving birth underwater is very fashionable, middle-class mums will travel to France and spend a fortune so that some hippy French doctor can grab them by the tits in the shallow end of a school swimming pool. The theory seems to be that the warm water is highly reminiscent of the womb, so you drop your sprog in the pool to comfort it. Of course, your average womb hasn’t normally had a class full of little boys pissing in it a few hours earlier and the acoustics of a cold meat storehouse. Also few wombs are lined with luminous white tiles and administered by a bloke who’s a dead spit of Adolf Hitler, except for the mop and bucket. None the less, apparently the awesome transition from Mum’s tum to big bad world is less traumatic if done via the local baths.

Dave’s family had been giving birth underwater for generations. But not for them the sanitized safety of a Jacuzzi and a French quack with a degree in being groovy. There were no doctors present at this birth, just two midwives, not professionals, friends, but friends who had done it before lots of times. There wouldn’t be a problem. No birth is easy but as they go this one wasn’t too bad. Dave’s mum heaved and strained, the midwives coaxed and prodded about a bit to help ease him out and eventually he came, breech born, head last, but in perfect nick. The umbilical cord was broken pretty sharpish, as is necessary, and the midwives swam Dave to the surface in order that he might take his first breath. This is how dolphins are born.

27: DEATH OF A STRANGER

V
ery little is known about dolphins — by humans that is, probably dolphins themselves know a little more. However, enough can certainly be guessed at for them to be raised far above the level of ‘dumb animal’. Their intelligence, ability to communicate and social interaction are so clear that it seems reasonable to assume that they also possess personalities, feelings and emotions. Despite the genocide that has been wreaked upon them, they still seem to bear humanity no ill will. In fact, there are countless stories of dolphins aiding humans in distress. Documented instances of them warding off sharks at their own personal risk and also of nudging the unconscious survivors of shipwrecks to the shore. These, like the practise of midwifery, are not fanciful human inventions but the facts regarding another race of beings.

One day Dave was swimming about minding his own business, when he was caught in a fishing net which, despite possessing a phenomenally sophisticated sonar system, he had not noticed. After a brief and desperate period of thrashing about helplessly, Dave drowned, unable to get to the surface for the oxygen he required.

The net was made of a revolutionary new nylon that is lighter and stronger than previous nets. It is also undetectable by dolphin radar. Bill had been pleased with the development. He had been a crucial cog in the research team that had come up with a very slightly more efficient and profitable way of going fishing. You can’t stop progress and, after all, it’s only a few dolphins.

28: THE PURSUIT OF LOVE. THE DINNER GOES ON

29: DREAM DATE

He picked Rachel up in a cab. CD did not drive and Rachel wanted to drink. The memory of her recent bust and straining licence was fresh in her mind and she was taking no risks.

CD was wearing a cream three-piece suit, wide lapels and slightly flared trousers. Flares keep threatening to make a comeback and so to CD’s mind he looked five minutes ahead of the next fashion, rather than ten years behind the last one. CD was a true optimist.

He had added a CND stud earring for style, also to confirm his character as a committed activist and finally because he believed it made him look swarthy and romantic. His aftershave was seriously whiffy and the cowboy boots, newly polished (right round to the heels as well) were a walking dream.

‘CD,’ he said to himself as he contemplated his reflection in the broken wardrobe door, ‘you are a love rocket, primed, charged and already requesting flight clearance from mission control.’ He was, indeed, a true optimist.

When Rachel opened the door CD nearly lost his cool and blasted off there and then. She was orgasmic! Sauciness beyond his wildest dreams! — and CD had had some pretty wild dreams. She had on a little black cocktail number and the baddest suede, pointy, red shoes you ever saw. CD nearly flipped when he noticed they too had metal tips. Was this a sign? Of course it was; they were as one. Rachel wore nothing else, no jacket, no tights, it was a real hot night and it was getting hotter by degrees as CD’s mercury threatened to burst out of the top of his tube.

‘No rush, the guy’s meter’s running,’ said CD who was in much the same position himself.

‘I’m ready,’ replied Rachel.

CD nearly fell over — down boy, down! This was more than he had dared hope for! What sort of phrase was that to use at eight-thirty! The temptress, the teasing, taunting, tempting sauce bucket! Clearly she wanted him, that much was obvious, wanted him badly. ‘I’m ready,’ she had said…God that was fast work, this lady wanted it all and she wanted it now. Why else would she put it that way? She could have said anything…she could have said…uhm ‘we can leave immediately’ or…well anything, but no, she said ‘I’m ready.’ Said it? she breathed it. If that wasn’t the old green light to oblivion thought CD, he was a stupid wanker. And, of course, he was right. It wasn’t and he was.