Stark by Ben Elton Read Free Book Online Page B

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