The Improbable Suburban Beginning
The lazy calm of the neat suburban street was rudely shattered by the vehicle’s arrival. It didn’t just make a turn into the residential haven; it barged in with all the subtlety of a gangling, hyperactive puppy. It was a battered Willys Jeep and its Detroit motor was in engaged in a losing battle with an 8-track cartridge player, which was throbbing with some old Led Zeppelin song that seemed to involve a lot of screaming. Mounted on tyres that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a farm tractor and open to the elements the car shrieked to halt outside the home of Alyson Combes and the driver sounded the horn.
Howoogah!
The horn was as raucously unselfconscious as the car and its occupants. The driver was a shaggy-haired man aged around 20 years. His tangled curls were a sun-bleached testimony to that rare phenomenon of a long hot English summer. His front seat passenger was a bronzed blonde girl of about 18. Her fine blond hair was wrapped into a tight knot under a paisley scarf to save it from getting all tangled up in the slipstream. A second girl was wedged in behind the car’s only official seats. This was Laura Sparrow, best friend to Alyson and little sister to the blonde in the front. The driver hit the horn button a second time and across the street a man who was waxing his car in spite of the heat stopped work to stare with frank annoyance at the disturbance.
Howoogah!
“Hey, Ally!” Laura shouted over Mister Plant’s impassioned assertion that his only goal was the western shore. “Alleeeeeee!”
Alyson’s face appeared at her bedroom window. Her face went through a sudden transformation as she recognised her friend. “Laura!” She shouted out with delight over the discordant racket. The Jeep’s driver had begun to rev his engine in time to the pounding bass of the music, and in the still air a haze of blue-grey exhaust was gathering about the car like the smoke from a badly built bonfire.
“We’re going to the fair over at Mountfield,” Laura told her. “Wanna come?”
“Gimme one minute,” Alyson shouted back and she disappeared from sight. Moments later she appeared at the front door where she paused to shout something over her shoulder before jogging down the driveway to where the Willys was parked. She clambered aboard in a most ungainly manner, half falling over her friend as the impatient driver slipped the clutch and sped away at the head of a stinking cloud of fumes.
Introduction
Sasha Fischer was born in my imagination long before his protagnostic challenger, the enigmatic and eclectic, oddball: Tollylister. Fischer has ancestry going back to 19th century Luxembourg (for his surname) plus elements via various maternal and paternal lines that range from the English Aristocracy via a 1960's Parisian showgirl-cum-whore to an African princess. He has achieved phenomenal wealth in a society where the only relevant currency is celebrity or that charlatan's dark cousin: infamy. Fischer is the world's first and last trillionaire. His fortune was misbegotten more by tricks of accountancy than by any act of physical creation of wealth and his colossal economic empire has expanded to the point that it succeeds in holding the first effective monopoly of world power. He controls space, and thereby he holds all the world's telecommunications and IT systems in his hands.
He is neither good nor bad. He is flawed, of course; but he is as powerless to help himself or anyone else because the possession of such huge power is both too easy to lose and too difficult to keep. What can be taken so easily by one man can just as readily be taken from him by another and there are two — at least — who have the will and means to sieze the Fisher's mantle. One is a Colombian paisano turned coke magnate whose power has grown to the extent that he is de facto ruler of South America; the other is a genetically engineered 9 year old child with a terrifyingly original way with software. Fisher's hegemony is under threat and only the aging rock-icon, Tollylister — with his bizarre dress sense, and even stranger morals — seems unconcerned and uninvolved as the world goes quietly to hell around him.
The story was originally conceived as set in the not too distant future but the events of 9/11 were rather too similar to my own future history — I first started on this in 1991-93 and part of the plot's premise concerned a series of shocking events marking the millenium years — and I have been redrafting the plot outlines to rework the foundations of the plot so that it remains standing. The main action centres on the decade of the 2030's and I have left Fischer and Tollylsiter with their orginal birthdates in the 1980's so in one sense, at least, they have both grown up with me.
Much of the story is related through the eyes of the women around these men. Llewella, for example, as Fisher's PA is on the receiving end of her boss's four-letter tirades and his sexual rapciousness in equal measure. Tollylister is pursued through life by a dreadful trail of damaged women and girls; a serial philanderer and lifelong hedonist, Tolly makes Ozzy Osborne look like a kitten but if he is flawed to the point seemingly of irredemption, this fact does not seem that clear at any point ... mostly one can't help liking and feeling sorry for the fellow. His women on the other hand rapidly make apparent their thoroughly loathesome natures as soon as they utter a word.
One of my favourite female characters that I have been building for some time is Meena a woman of Punjabi roots but whose own ruptured past makes a pretty cool story on its own. Her role is pivotal although as I have never actually tried serious plotting I do not yet know exactly how she will fit in. I know where and why she arrives ... but what she does when she gets there will depend a lot on how the main characters are holding up at the time.
I am in no rush to complete this project. I am doing it for my own sake and for mine alone. If someone wants to buy it email me with a serious bid ... I'm not completely unwordly but I san't be holding my breath.
