This Other Eden (19 page)

‘What
about us?’ the city dwellers’ representatives would occasionally ask. They
would have liked to have asked more frequently, but they could not normally
get past the near-constant demonstrations organised by the farmers. It was an
accepted feature of European government that it existed under a state of siege
and that mad farmers in huge combine harvesters would spend their lives
blockading the various buildings designated for democratic debate and terrorist
attack.

The
representatives of the Euro city dwellers knew that their requests for
BioShields were useless. Euro administration was entirely crisis-led. Every
time the coffers in Brussels were deemed to be sufficiently full to start
thinking about sun-screening cities, another civil war would break out. These
wars smouldered endlessly across the vast continent from Lisbon to the Urals
and could break out at any time, meaning, of course that all the cash had to be
spent sending soldiers to observe the genocide and say very firmly how horrid
it was.

The
European Federation’s budget priorities were quite clear and had been for over
half a century: first, the bureaucratic apparatus itself; second, the
agricultural subsidy, third, observing genocide whenever it occurred and making
a point of saying what a bad ‘thing it was, fourth, everything else. Sadly,
there was very rarely any money left for fourth, so any city that wanted an
eco-defence was forced to pay for it from its own local taxes.

Hence,
some of the countryside was on day-time, but not all, and some of the cities
were on night-time, but again not all of them. The situation was much the same
in America and South East Asia. It was of course far more confused in Russia
where the whole thing changed on a twenty-four-hour basis and, indeed, from
street to street. It was quite possible for a Russian to get out of bed, ready
for a full eight hours’ work, walk five minutes up the road and arrive in time
to clock off at the end of the working day. By this means it was possible for
people to rack up vast amounts of overtime and still spend upwards of
twenty-three hours out of twenty-four in bed.

An
actor does his research.

Max and Nathan were
sitting in the bar of the Dublin Shelbourne Hotel at about three-thirty in the
morning, watching the office workers drift in for an after-work refresher. They
were waiting for their drinks. It had already been half an hour, but that is
nothing at all if you have ordered Guinness. It is an article of faith for
bar-staff in Dublin that a pint is not worth drinking unless it has taken about
an hour to pour and another hour to settle. Those with any experience in these
things ring the pub and put in an order before leaving home, but Max and Nathan
hadn’t worked that out yet.

They
had been in Dublin for three days, searching for Rosalie, and had so far drawn
a blank. The reason for trying to locate Rosalie, apart from the fact that Max
had developed a crush on her, was in order to use her to research the movie
that Plastic Tolstoy had commissioned. They wanted to get inside a Mother Earth
unit. Actually, it was Max who wanted to get inside a Mother Earth unit. He was
thrilled with excitement at the idea. Nathan would quite happily have made the
whole thing up. He was not big on research.

‘Shakespeare
had no experience of the Roman Empire but he still wrote
Julius Caesar,’
he
was fond of saying. In Nathan’s opinion, if you took the experience and reality
theory to its proper conclusion, he could only ever write about emotionally
shattered middle-class Englishmen who had screwed up their lives and lost the
only person they had ever loved.

‘Exactly,’
said Max. ‘And that’s just about all most English writers do ever write about.
I admire that, it has integrity it’s dull, but it has integrity.’

Max
believed that artists had to inhabit the thing which they wished to portray.

‘You
have to live the experience.
Be
the experience. If you’re lying to
yourself, then you’ll be lying to the audience and, believe me, they’ll know.’

‘Oh,
for God’s sake, Max,’ said Nathan. ‘The last thing I wrote, a bloke cut off his
own leg because a rat was eating it.’

‘Then
you should have cut your leg off,’ said Max piously. ‘My last role was about
this guy who is indulgence-obsessed, right? It was a harrowing drama about a
man addicted to having a great time. All he does is eat, drink and screw
beautiful women. The guy’s a hollow shell, right? His existence is empty and
pointless. Do you think that scared me off? Do you think I shirked confronting
the debilitating properties of excess? No way, man. I did my research! I went
out and ate and drank and screwed around like some jerk trying to party himself
to death. That’s the point, man. I have commitment. Without commitment you’re
Jack Shit.’

‘OK, so
what about
Yellow Ribbon,
when you played that POW who got tortured and
put in solitary for twenty years?’

‘I
researched that.’

‘You
did?’ Max was surprised.

‘Sure.
The thing I figured was that the horror of the guy’s situation had to lie in
his
back history,
right? Back history is the whole thing for an actor. I
thought, the guy gets tortured, right? So what? A lot of guys get tortured. How
can I make this torture different? How can I make it
special?
Then it
hits me. I think, if this man has lived a life of unadulterated luxury, that
would make his suffering more acute and more ironic. You see what I’m saying.
To give the characterisation depth, in my own mind I needed to juxtapose his
present torture and loneliness with a previous life of …

‘Eating,
drinking and screwing beautiful women?’ Nathan inquired.

‘Exactly.
I felt if I could get that side of things right, the suffering would develop
naturally from there.

Picked
up by the greenies.

A sweet-looking little old
lady approached Max and Nathan at their table.

‘Mr
Maximus?’ the sweet old lady inquired.

‘Sure,
it would be a pleasure,’ said Max, producing a pen and paper. ‘Whom shall I
dedicate it to?’

Although
Max was disguised, he was still being recognised and always gave autographs
when asked. This was partly because he was a nice person who did not like to
disappoint people and partly because he was normally followed around by ten or
fifteen journalists, waiting for him to refuse to sign an autograph, so that
they could write stories about how rude and arrogant he was and how he had
forgotten the people who made him what he was. On this occasion, however, Max
need not have worried.

‘I
don’t want a fucking autograph,’ the sweet-looking little old lady said.
‘You’ve been making inquiries at the Natura shop about a friend of mine. Follow
me.’

They
walked outside into the darkened, bustling street. In the park opposite the
hotel some kids were playing a game of fluoro-soccer. The bright, glowing
shoulder sashes danced about in pursuit of the moon-like ball. Max and Nathan
stood on the pavement whilst the sweet old lady made a signal. Up the street a
large car pulled into the traffic and across towards the hotel entrance. It was
a big new Japanese limo, a real Eco-car, greener than green, as befitted a
Natura vehicle. So copious were its filters that it emitted not one single
poisonous gas of any sort. You could have put a flatulent elephant on the back
seat and nobody would have been any the wiser.

Not for
the first time, Nathan wondered where the hell these people got their funding.
Natura always had the best transport. Mother Earth always had the best assault
choppers. Whilst the IRA and the Basque separatists were making bombs out of
fertiliser in their back garages, Mother Earth bought the best, direct from
British and German businessmen, paying top dollar.

‘Nice
car,’ Nathan observed. ‘How many tin rattling volunteers does it take to buy
one of those?’

‘Get
in,’ said the woman, as the hotel doorman opened the back door for them.

They
got in the car, Nathan experiencing his never-ending hotel dilemma of whether
to tip the doorman or not. Max, of course, had no such problem. He was so rich
and famous it would not have occurred to him to do something so mundane as tip
a person. Max had people to do that for him. In fact, he was so big and special
that even his people were too important to tip, they too had people to do
things like that. It is a strange fact of power, fame, riches and general
celebrity that the more you have, the more you get. Real celebrities never pay
for a ticket to a show. They endlessly eat for free, it being generally assumed
that, by simply gracing an event with their presence, the mega-sleb is making
contribution enough. It is, in fact, possible to be so rich that you have no
need for money at all.

Nathan
tipped the doorman the price of a pint for five seconds’ labour that he would
have preferred to have done himself, and they got in the car. Once inside
Nathan noticed that the rear windows were all blacked out. Max did not notice
because, despite it being night-time, he was wearing shades. The sweet-looking,
foul-mouthed old lady did not join them and they were left alone as the big
limo pulled away. They could not see the driver because there was a screen
between the front and the back of the car. Max lifted the screen. There were
two men in the front.

‘Hey
guys,’ he said. ‘Where are we going?’

The
front passenger pointed an automatic pistol in Max’s face.

‘Put
the blind back down. If you lift it up again, even once, I’ll kill you.’

Max put
the blind down and looked at Nathan. Nathan was white with fear and shock. Max
pulled the blind back up again. He and the gunman stared at each other for a few
very tense moments as Nathan struggled to maintain control of his bowels.

‘Ha! I
knew you wouldn’t do it,’ Max said and dropped the screen again. ‘You have to
call guys like that,’ he said to Nathan. ‘It’s a point of principle.’

They
drove for at least three hours. First along straightish roads, then on what
they guessed were winding country lanes and finally along what were clearly
dirt tracks. Nathan passed the time by continuing to dwell on the cruel irony
of his longing for Flossie.

‘You
see, I know now that I’ve always loved her. How could I not have known it then?
I suppose, in a way, I made my biggest mistakes early on in the relationship,
when I thought we were still happy…’

Max
wondered whether, if he lifted the blind again, he could persuade the gunman to
shoot Nathan.

The
little stone cottage.

Max and Nathan were led
blindfolded into a room filled with a wonderful smell. They heard their captors
retreat and the door close behind them. The two men stood for a moment,
unseeing and, they thought, alone, breathing in the splendid aroma.

‘Cool
smell,’ ventured Max.

‘Yes,’
Nathan replied.

Something
about the smell struck a chord in Nathan’s memory. It took him far back to his
childhood. Back past years and years of tired, joyless, fantastically expensive
media lunches in Soho, back to an almost forgotten time when he had still
enjoyed food. A time when the only connection between the words ‘eating’ and
‘meeting’ was that they rhymed. A time before irradiation, before menus
featured ‘lite alternatives’ and butter carried a government health warning.
Yes, that smell took him back. It also plonked him right down in the present.
He was hungry, very hungry.

‘Stew,’
he said out loud. ‘Stew with dumplings.’

‘That’s
right, it’s nearly ready,’ they heard a soft, female voice say. It was an
oldish voice with a strong Irish accent. ‘You can take your blindfolds off now,
boys.’

The two
men removed their blindfolds and found themselves in the kitchen of a little
stone cottage. An old lady was sitting at a wooden table. A very old lady. Max
would have put her at a hundred and fifty plus. Her hair was grey and there was
far too much skin on her face, enough skin, in fact, for two faces, Max
thought, maybe three. This wasn’t age, this was disease. Max felt a little ill
just looking at her. What sort of horrible affliction could cause such
deformity? Was the woman a leper? Whatever it was, Max sure didn’t want to
catch it. He moved a step back towards the door.

The
woman was peeling a pile of strange brown lumpy things, stranger even than she
was. They looked like tumours hacked from the body of a fourth world nuclear
power worker. Beside the tumours, spread out on a bit of newspaper were some
weird, bent, orangey long things with hairs growing out of them and knobbly bits
sprouting out at various angles. Neither Nathan nor Max had ever seen anything
like these ugly-looking lumps. Instantly, the hunger which they had been
feeling so keenly vanished. They did not want tumours with their stew, no
matter how nice the smell. Nor hairy lumps. Perhaps it was eating the tumours
and lumps that had made the old lady look the way she did.