Free Stark by Ben Elton Page A

brink and hit back.
    ‘Uhm, listen uhm…Oh yeah, Karen isn’t it? We really have to go, maybe catch you, whenever, OK?’ It was good, but not good enough. As he rose the waiter brought the food they had ordered.
    ‘Now, you’re really untogether, CD, are you sure you’re OK…Oh wow, no you’re not, I mean are these shoulders tense or what?…‘ The claws descended on his shoulders and began to knead away like he was tomorrow’s croissant.
    At that moment CD discovered what Rachel and most women learn young, that if someone forceful decides they want to touch you, and they present it as an act of friendship, it is almost impossible to stop them. CD and Rachel had been enjoying Sunday brunch at a cafe, it was a lovely jolly morning despite the heat. CD had been contented, basking in the light of Rachel’s radiant sauciness and now the dark shadow of a wet hippy had fallen upon his happy idyll.
    His food sneered up at him — it’s extremely difficult to tackle waffles and maple syrup when someone is trying to wring your neck. CD did not know it but the solution to his problem was very close. Not the problem of Karen, of course, she was insoluble, like the hairs she had left in his coffee. Nor indeed the problem of how to persuade Rachel to let him have a go at her, that was a toughie too. Just the problem of how to deal with maple syrup. Because thousands of miles away, a highly-trained team of specialists were working to make problems with maple syrup a thing of the past. Working, in fact to make maple syrup a thing of the past.

39: DIE BACK DIPLOMACY
    T he crack unit was headed up by Wayne Strongman, a tough, two-fisted career diplomat who carried a personal phone like it was a side arm, and wore a laminated ID on his pyjamas.
    His job at present was stone-walling the Canadians on the problem of US acid rain destroying the Canadian maple trees. Negative diplomacy it was called — a job he knew well. He had been a top trouble-shooter in the Republican Party Damage Control Group for the last two elections. What Wayne Strongman didn’t know about twisting a statistic could be written on the back of a stockbroker’s tax return.
    ‘The point is,’ he said with the quiet assurance that had made him such a feared prosecuting attorney and such a deeply loathed dinner party guest, ‘that your people have not been able to establish a direct and proven correlation.’
    Henri Le Conte, Strongman’s opposite number, lost his rag. ‘I beg your bugger-up pardon!!’ he said.
    Got him, thought Strongman…An angry man at a conference table is a wide open target, he is a man saying, ‘here is my ass, kick it’. Le Conte rose to the bait, shouting:
    ‘And when every fuck maple tree in Quebec is bastard dead! Then you won’t need damn all bugger correlation! Is that it!’ (It is a strange thing about second languages, no matter how well the foreigner learns them, perhaps to the point where technically they speak better than a native, no one is ever capable of swearing properly in any language other than their own. Le Conte was a French-Canadian and, as he himself often lamented in his strong French accent…‘I never know when I need a bugger, or where to put my bollocks.’)
    Now Strongman was staring at him passively. It enraged Le Conte…
    ‘How much proof is required hell bloody! Do the owners of your factories and power stations have to come to Canada and chop down the fuck trees themselves!!’
    There was an embarrassed silence which Strongman allowed to linger one beat into being seriously uncomfortable. His team knew well enough not to break an embarrassed silence. ‘Sometimes it’s what you don’t say,’ he often told them. Strongman had sent innocent men to the electric chair with a well-timed theatrical pause.
    ‘Henri,’ he said dispassionately to the red-faced French- Canadian. ‘I can understand you being upset. Clearly it’s not just a matter of lost revenue, to you guys the maple tree is your