The Richest Girl in the World, Part 1/4

No, Katrina is not a narcissist (honest)

Evie’s note. Naturally, I am loathe to indulge in one of my long-winded intros, so I will endeavour to keep this one short, although it is warranted.

I’ll dispense with the mischievous postmodernism to begin with, though. Usually, this Liberal Socialism section, along with Katrina’s Journal, is always as-if-written by her, so you need to bear that in mind (and direct any comments to her - she will be delighted to talk to you). The following piece is also as-if-written by her, but obviously it was written by me being her. This is part of the sort of meta-narrative or extras kind of stuff accompanying the serial. This particular one was in fact written round about this time last year, but at the time I decided not to post it. Partly if I remember because I was a little anxious about what people might think, but now I’m thinking that’s just silly. I mean, yes, there is a lot of silliness involved, but this is somewhat intrinsic to both the character and the story.

There were also a few spoilers, if I remember correctly.

Furthermore, Katrina is perfectly happy to write about this kind of thing precisely because it affords her a definite measure of protection. That’s to say if she is perceived by the general public as some kind of delusional fantasist then they are not going to take her seriously, in which case she is no threat to the Establishment/globalist cabal/bad guys. Instead, she can simply be viewed by the public with fond affections, as a sort of classic English eccentric. Katrina is, it should be noted, perfectly mindful of this.

Another reason why I’m posting this is because many of you may have been missing you weekly dose of Katrina, and likewise many of you haven’t even met her yet. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the serial is currently on an intermission because I’ve found I’m actually going to have to rewrite the whole of the rest of Act One. Not because the first version is rubbish, but because it doesn’t fit properly with the new version of the plot which I have burbling around in my head. Hopefully you’ll be pleased to hear the new version will be more fast-paced and exciting and, perhaps more importantly, doable as a series on Substack. I had come to the realisation that it’s simply not feasible to publish what would eventually be a very long series of at least a dozen books totalling anywhere up to 4 million words. I mean, just do the math! Even at 4,000 words a week that’s 1000 weeks, which is, like twenty years or something. I very much doubt there will be a Substack in twenty years’ time, and if there is it won’t look like it does now and there will be horrendous 1984-style censorship, meaning my Katrina story will be unacceptable to the authorities and would probably end me up in prison. And we wouldn’t want that.

Of course I’m not going to change the plot though. I’ll just have to write it furiously quickly and publish it somehow before it’s too late. Or something. Anyway, I think you get the idea.

I am hoping, then, that Katrina will be able to return in the series (plus the journal) next month. In the meantime, this piece is around 9k words, so it’s easily split into 4 parts, which I can do weekly. And that should keep you going in the meantime. So I’ll do this during the week, and then you’ll get the weekend dose of poetry and microfiction fragments. I will also follow up this piece here in the Lizzy section with Katrina talking a bit more seriously about her utopian parallel world and why it’s a utopia. This was, as it happens, her intention after writing this piece.

Finally, in terms of the narrative, at the moment her journal is in mid-January 2022. So please assume that she is publishing this piece around the same time. Remember also that in the story-world, Katrina has her own Substack, which you may as well think of as this Lizzy section, plus her journal. She would probably add another section as well for various jottings and stories and maybe more in-depth looks at her screenplays and so on. We may see some of that in the Classified-K section for the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff.

Anyway, sorry for that intro but I did need to do that explainer. Plus the update on progress. I will let you go now and pass you over to the very capable of paws of Little Miss Brightside, who is clearly no longer traumatised about finding herself in a dystopian parallel world, and has managed to convince herself that laughing and smiling and being mischievous is just fine. In fact, it’s a survival mechanism.

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When people meet me, and discover my basic biographical facts, they tend to move through a psychologically understandable (thus somewhat predictable) sequence comprising several distinct phases. I was aware of this pre-emptively, so I had to come up with a load of rehearsed spiel, consciously intended to minimise the potential anxiety.

The first phase, then, really is anxiety. Most people, perhaps through no fault of their own (once again, you don’t have an education system), have little to no understanding of my condition, MPD, that is. Their anxieties stem from the mistaken, confused idea that equates ‘split personality’ with ‘schizophrenic’. People are naturally anxious about schizophrenia, given that an unmedicated sufferer may well be prone to violent, psychotic outbursts. That doesn’t happen with me (honest). My condition is completely different and totally unrelated to schizophrenia. In schizophrenia the ‘voices in the head’ are aural hallucinations. In MPD, my very much controlled ‘voices’ are genuine other and fully developed personalities. And none of them are schizophrenic, nor are they prone to manic episodes. And if I don’t want them intruding on my consciousness, they don’t. So, once my new acquaintance is no longer concerned that I’m about to go into little miss Kalashnikov mode (to wit: the irresistible urge to absolutely, positively kill every motherfucker in the room), that’s the point when their anxiety turns to curiosity.

Following my brief explanation of MPD, complete with reassurance and a superficial tour of my internal system, the next phase, then, revolves around my parallel world. Scepticism, naturally, is the immediate reaction. Like I say, they don’t teach people quantum theory in your high schools, let alone multiversal molecule theory. Still, the sceptical phase doesn’t last long, and soon gives way to the aforementioned curiosity. They humour me, in other words.

“So who’s the Prime Minister?” is the predictable first question. The second question, “Who’s the President?”

“President of what?” says I. Yeah, facetiously and disingenuously. I knew perfectly well which President they mean.

Why you seem to have been conditioned into thinking that the identity of those two people is in any way important, well, all my other diatribes here might resolve that issue for you. In our world, most people don’t give a flying rat’s monkey who the PM or the President are. People here, though, especially young people, do get intrigued and somewhat jealous, however, when I tell them we have three PMs, one of whom is Jeremy ‘magic grandpa’ Corbyn, and the President (obviously they mean ‘of the United States’) is John Kennedy, Jnr. In your world, John was murdered just a few days before he had planned to announce his intention to run for the Senate (in New York; as it happens, that seat was taken by a certain Hillary Clinton; she didn’t have anything to do with the assassination, I should add – she may be guilty of many things, but not that one). In our world, that didn’t happen. Anyway, I’ll be writing about that elsewhere. John is a very good friend of mine.

Yep, I do indeed like a little bit of name-dropping. Did I tell you I’m an unrepentant show-off?

The reason people don’t have any political concerns about the identities of such persons is that, well, they don’t have political concerns. We live in an increasingly prosperous, peaceful, multicultural world in which geopolitical anxieties no longer exist. Internal political issues, too, never really exceed the usual ‘oh dear, such and such a minister has been caught with his pants down’ or ‘siphoning off some investment funds’ or ‘is that a wad of notes in your pocket, mister minister, or are you just pleased to see me?’. You get the picture. We don’t really have poverty, and everyone, with a little effort, has the opportunity to make their own dreams, and the means, with the aforementioned effort, to see them realised. So who gives a fuck what the Prime Minister has to say for themselves. Likewise, we have our democratic deterrent, and that’s all Lady Liberty wrote.

This increased prosperity of the global masses, by the way, is perhaps the main reason why I am the richest girl in the world. As you will come to understand.

The next phase, then (trust me, I am getting to the point in the title of this piece – bear with me reader darling), following another elucidation of the parallel world differences (see elsewhere) is a deeper curiosity for more details, in particular about me personally. Why is it me who ended up in this dystopia of yours? Who was I in this other world? Naturally, they also have to overcome the ‘I de-aged thirty-one years’ thing and was actually born 10 December 1972 (as opposed to the 2003 on my newly minted birth certificate – thank you very much, agent support), but humans have a remarkable ability to set aside cognitive dissonance and just, well, go with it, ok?

So they ask me a series of questions. The kind of questions you do ask people when you first meet them. Like ‘what do you do?’. Now that one I’ve always found distasteful – it implies that a person’s value consists solely in what fucking job they do. Maybe it’s a problem of wording – a better formulation would be ‘and what do you do for a living?’. That’s better. So anyway, when they ask me that kind of question I usually start by telling them what I am – or, rather, was (until being rudely transported to your world, that is) – at the age of forty-eight in November 2021. My answer is something like ‘most people know me as Katrina the famous actress’. Sure, I have lots of eccentricities and a rich and dramatic (in real life) biographical history and my Gaiapedia entry is longer than Hitler’s (yeah, we do have our own versions of Godwin’s Law), but since 2008 I have been able to settle back down in my beautiful townhouse in Cambridge, overlooking Jesus Green (flitting between that and my dacha – a farmhouse with three hundred acres of local community-owned mixed organics; well, they own 90%, I own the other 10%), bringing up my three perfect children with my soulmate, Anna, and finally focus all my working attention on what, if I was honest, I always wanted to do since I was young, which is make cool films. Maybe I’m just a storyteller, in that regard. In another age, I would simply be using a different medium. Alongside acting, however, I also write and direct. So, technically, I am a ‘filmmaker’ rather than just an actress. One of the branches of my company, PAWS Ltd., is Paws Productions.

That stuff, my new acquaintances can perfectly well accept. At this stage, remember, they don’t really know how rich I really am, and probably assume I’ve got something like, I don’t know, a hundred million or so. By now, I should add, any scepticism about the existence of this parallel world is no longer a factor. Psychologically and emotionally they simply don’t care, as it doesn’t really affect them personally, and they allow themselves to just be fascinated by the whole thing.

They do, having said that, increasingly become self-aware of a sense of the uncanny – it’s the sheer detail of my parallel world that gets them to kind of half-thinking that maybe, just maybe, it really does exist. It’s partly because I just come out with these seemingly irrelevant anecdotes, in exactly the same way that normal people do when they talk about their lives and their friends and the memories of their own lives. Throwaway comments are far more believable than grandiose claims. See, if my parallel world was a delusion serving some deeply needed psychological pathology (naturally involving the term ‘compensatory mechanism’), then you’d be able to detect the emotional need there. So if I said something like ‘I’ve been in every Bond movie since Goldeneye,’ they would assume this is me trying to make myself out to be special in some way. Or possibly just showing off. But it’s the way that I say it that makes them doubt the delusion.

So they’ll say, ‘so what movies have you been in?’ and ‘are they the same movies as in our world? Or are there new ones?’. My answer to that (I had to tot these up in my head in anticipation of the question) is a bit of both. So, leaving aside all the Bond movies (the latest of which, after Spectre (which has a very different storyline) don’t exist in this world), I have been involved in five movies which also exist in this world. Yeah, of course you want to know which ones. It would be cruel of me to deny you that.

So, in chronological order: Schindler’s Ark (1993) (our version is the same title as the book – with its intended double-meaning; it’s a very similar movie to yours but does have some crucial, mainly psychological, differences – I might tell you about them another time); From Dusk till Dawn (1996) (I played the sexy snake-dance floorshow vampire girl, ‘Santanico Pandemonium’ who gets to bite Tarantino – Salma Hayek played her in your version, which is pretty much identical as far as I could make out); Solaris (2002) (I played Rheya – the original Tarkovsky version is one of my all-time favourite films, so I was somewhat desperate to play this part – I thought your Natasha McElhone did an interesting take on it, and she definitely got the ‘submissive type’ perfect – if you watch her eyes almost permanently glued to George – I did that myself); Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (2013) (yeah – great fun – I got to play Mrs. Bennett – her lines are better than in your version, ‘Ten thousand Mr. Bennett! Ten thousand!’ and, ahem, much as I hate to denigrate any of my fellow actors, but if they do a shit role someone really should point that out to them – your version’s Mrs. Bennett is perhaps the one weak bit in the movie, to put it kindly – her script didn’t help, to be fair); Suffragette (2015) (our version is a little different to yours, but recognisably similar – I played totally against type as a really nasty, evil Tory harridan (I was kind of channelling Thatcher) who hates the very idea of votes for women and suffragettes and is complicit in their torture; I got nominated for best supporting actress for that one).

To these you could add a few productions, variations of which sort of exist in your world. Like my company has produced the definitive versions of the Arthur Ransome books, in which I play the mother. Then there’s the third Bill & Ted movie, which is totally different to yours. It’s called Bill & Ted’s Triumphant Tour (2020), which, having done time travel and heaven and hell, now turns its attention to parallel worlds, which their tour needs to encompass so they make utopias in all of the worlds they inadvertently fucked with when they time-travelled in the first movie (‘bogus’). I play Rufus’ wife, who tells them that Rufus is in the doghouse because he forgot to mention the ‘altering history creates parallel worlds’ caveat. So they essentially have to go around fixing everything, with a little help from some old friends. I’d wanted to be in a Bill & Ted film for years, and in a movie with Keanu, and it was a long time coming. I was going to do The Matrix with him, but that didn’t work out, as I may explain later.

There is one other movie you’d be familiar with, which is Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Our version is, again as far as I can tell, somewhat identical up until the very ending scene in the forest, at which point I suddenly appear and get to shoot Brad Pitt in the balls. So I pick up Landa (Christoph Waltz – yes, he also played Blofeld in our Bond movies), leaving Brad Pitt squirming around in agony in the forest and we drive off. This then sets up the sequel, which obviously doesn’t exist in your world. This is called Gloriana Bitch, in which, quite simply, I get to play a ruthless, half-English, half-German Nazi bitch/assassin on a mission to kill Churchill as revenge for the events of the first movie. Naturally, I do it in classic and bloody Tarantino-esque style, and there is a little twist at the end (a reference to that war film with Michael Caine, The Eagle has Landed). This movie was one of the most fun ones I ever got to do and we simply didn’t hold back in the slightest. What made it more resonant for the audience was the obvious postmodern ‘meta-knowledge’ in the fact that everybody knew perfectly well how much the real me, Katrina, fucking hates Churchill (amongst other crimes, he murdered my family in Dresden in February 1945, along with 250,000 other innocent human beings). So they were partly seeing the character and partly seeing me, which effectively enhanced the character herself.

There was also a slight but noticeable inter-movie reference to Heidi Kruger, another Nazi-esque character I played in a trilogy of movies beginning with Invasion of Hackney (1994), which is essentially gangsters versus monsters set in Hackney, replete with endlessly quotable cool one-liners, and me consciously and blatantly channelling Ripley out of Aliens. This is, in fact, the movie that got me in touch with Quentin, as it came out around the same time as Pulp Fiction, and he really loved it. So he directed the second in the trilogy, Invasion of Harlem (1997) (same essential plot, just set in NYC – the third one is in Hollywood).

We also went on to share the rights to all the Modesty Blaise stories, the first three adaptations of which I starred in (La Machine (1999), The Long Lever (2002), and The Gabriel Set-up (2004); there is also Modesty Blaise: The Beginning (2021) with my daughter Nikita (aged eighteen at the time) playing younger Modesty, with me as older Modesty), with Quentin directing the first one (screenplay by Neil Gaiman, in case you were a fan - I also played Death in Sandman: Insomnia (1998), co-written with Neil of course, which is a sort of prelude to, erm, Preludes & Nocturnes).

So yes, I’m one of those actresses who has a distinct circle of friends with whom I am frequently making movies, given our shared predilections. The other prominent person I am most known to be involved with in filmmaking is Steven Spielberg – obviously starting with Schindler (I played Helen Hirsch, I forgot to mention). The other movies we’ve made together, however, do not exist in your world – somewhat obviously, to be honest, given that I wasn’t here, and many of the stories were my ideas. Perhaps I shall enlighten you (and your version of Steven) at a later date…

Anyhow, I still haven’t gotten on to the fucking title of this journal entry, have I? And I’m already on about 2,200 words.

Oh well, then, I’ll resort to the tried & tested – to be continued…

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Next part next week…