Stark by Ben Elton Read Free Book Online Page A

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