I’ve got an idea for a story. It’s based on a true story, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a great story. A man, a student, decides to pay his way through college by being a sperm donor.
This bloke – we’ll call him Will – is studying to be a doctor. He’s tall and blond, strong and athletic. He’s the perfect specimen. The sort of bloke your mother would want you to marry. This guy offers his sperm and it goes to the top of the sperm charts. So every two weeks he goes to the clinic, gives his sperm, dances off with a cheque and as far as he knows it’s all good.
But he’s got a secret, a secret even he doesn’t know. He (and here we’ve got to work on this a bit) has got some sort of madness in his genes, a psychopathic madness – a congenital psychopathic madness.
So later, maybe 10 years down the line, and this woman called Janice is having trouble with her daughter Molly. Anyway, Molly is very bright, but she’s got an evil streak, a mean side to her. And Janice doesn’t know what to do. She can’t ask her partner because she doesn’t have a partner. She never has had. A few lost loves, the usual catalogue of losers and chancers, nearlys and almosts. When Janice was 31, she met the man of her life, the Big Love. But – and we don’t need to go into the detail here – he was a twat; a lying, cheating, no-good dirty low-down hound dog. He wrecked her life and she swore, she absolutely swore, never to fall for a man again. She’d have a baby.
Anyway, Janice tries all sorts of things and, in the end, she goes to a parent-child therapy class because – obviously, she thinks that it’s all her fault. While she’s there, she meets another woman, like her, the mother of a 10 year old girl. They start talking.
Can you guess where this one’s going? OK, let’s spell it out a bit more.
This other woman, her story is remarkably similar to Janice. She’s a lesbian but, that apart, it’s the same. Lost love, disappointment, betrayal. Refuge sought in a baby. Her baby is basically a good kid, but has got an evil streak. The same evil streak as Molly.
Now you know what’s going to happen. They start talking, they realise they both got pregnant after going to sperm donor centre in Eastbourne. Now then – this is the next question: how many other babies were born between 1980 and 1985?
So OK. That’s the pitch. It’s like a cross between The Boys From Brazil and maybe The Midwitch Cuckoos.
How many are there? Does something happen to them to ‘kick-start’ the inner madness that propels them? Shall we turn them into an army?
So? What do you think?
“Yeah, man. It’s really cool. Really cool. I think you’re on to a winner there. It’s like… about a doctor, yeah?”
Bastard hippies. That’s what happens, You think you’re having a chat with them and they haven’t been there at all. They haven’t been there cos they’ve taken up residency on Planet Zonk. Taken up residency, settled down, paying council tax.
During the day the Palace was like a ghost town. I guess a few people were out at work or doing whatever it was that constituted work in this place, but most people were still passed out from the night before.
There were basically two groups the English teachers and the people who weren’t. The English teachers were here to make money, save money and get out. They worked normal hours, did normal things, played the game. The people who weren’t did none of those things. To each, the others were like ghosts, ships that passed in the corridors. Freshly showered people having breakfast crossed paths with strung out night owls brewing coffee. What I liked about all this was that back home each side would have viewed the other with suspicion and probably a little fear. Here it was acceptance. You do what you do, I’ll do what I do and that’s cool.
The women who weren’t English teachers worked in hostess bars and if there’s anything like them anywhere else… I haven’t seen it. They’re bars, but, well it’s not a brothel but they’re not far off. But it’s not about sex. Or it’s not always sex. Or it’s not actual sex. So anyway. Hostess bars. They’re clubs – you’ve got to be a member. Only men go. There’s a bar, and a bit of a dancefloor. They’re full of attractive, mostly blonde, mostly European women. The women sit in a kind of gallery area. The men walk in, look around the gallery and choose their woman. They have a drink, a dance, talk. And that’s it. These blokes, otherwise respectable businessmen – salarymen – pay the club and the girls just to spend time with the girls. So, yes, a brothel in that the women are bought and paid for. But not a brothel because the women aren’t bought for the usual stuff you pay for in brothels.
It’s prostitution without the sex. Maybe a cross between no-sex prostitution and counseling. If the girls are nice and friendly, they get tips. And the more the blokes drink, the more they tip. You get the idea.
“Listen,” I said to one of the girls when I first found out about this lark. “I know why you do it, but what’s in it for them? Why do they want to hang out with girls who they know are being paid to be there?”
“Because they like being seen with Western women. For some reason they think it looks impressive.”
“But I don’t get it. How does that even begin to work? If you want to hang out with a Western girl and you want to be seen hanging out with a Western girl and you go to a club and pay to hang out with a Western girl…. The only people who’re going to see you are other blokes who are paying to hang out with Western girls and the Western girls who are being paid to be there and who wouldn’t give a fuck anyway.”
Mark had a slightly different take.
“You think those cunts go there cos they wanna just hang out with hot Eurochicks? You think they go there and hand over fistfuls of Yen because it makes them look good? Mate, what fucking planet are you from? What do you think goes on behind the scenes? You’re so fucking soft sometimes. Where you’re from, I’d make a fucking fortune if they’re all like you.”