The French and Zee Germans

"We're not a very pleasant people, The English.

The French speak in Music, but English only soars when we start being bloody 'orrible to people."

Lister spent the next few days going to pieces.

There seemed little point in getting dressed, and so he wandered around naked, swigging from a bottle of whisky.

He didn't know what to do.

He didn't know if there was anything to do.

And worst of all, he didn't much care.

He slept wherever he fell, a painful, dreamless sleep. He hardly ate, and drank a small loch-worth of whisky. He didn't even like whisky, but beer was too cumbersome to carry around in sufficient quantities to achieve oblivion.

He lost a stone in weight, and started shouting at people who weren't there.

Every evening, at around 5 p.m. he'd stagger, stark naked, into the Drive Room and, waving his whisky bottle dangerously in the air, he'd belch incoherent obscenities at Holly's huge visage on the gigantic monitor screen.

Sometimes Lister imagined he'd heard the phone ring, and he'd rush to pick it up.

On the evening of the fifth day as he staggered through the Red Dwarf shopping mall, toasting invisible crowds, he keeled over and blacked out.

When he woke up in the medical unit, a man with an 'H' on his forehead was looking down at him with undisguised contempt.

You're a hologram,' said Lister.

'So I am,' said Rimmer.

'You died in the accident,' said Lister.

'So I did,' said Rimmer.

'What's it like?'

'Death?' Rimmer mused. 'It's like going on holiday with a group of Germans.' 

He cradled his head in his hands. 'I'm so depressed I want to weep. To be cut down in my prime - a boy of thirty-one, with the body of a thirty-year-old. It's unbearable. All my plans; my career, my future; everything hinged on my being alive. It was mandatory.'

'What happened to me? Did I black out?'

'Excuse me, I'm talking about my being dead.'

'Sorry. I thought you'd finished.'

'I'm so depressed,' repeated Rimmer, 'so depressed.'

Over the next couple of days, Lister slowly recovered in the medical bay. One morning, while Rimmer was off reading the How to Cope With Your Own Death booklet for the fifteenth time, Lister took the opportunity to ask Holly why he'd brought Rimmer back.

'You'd gone to pieces. You couldn't cope. You needed a companion.'

'But Rimmer??'

'I did a probability study,' lied Holly, 'and it turns out Rimmer is absolutely the best person to keep you sane.'

'Rimmer?'

Holly's disembodied head tilted forward in a nod.

'Why not Petersen?'

'A man who buys a methane-filled twenty-four bed-roomed bijou residence on an oxygenless moon whose only distinction is that it rotates in the opposite direction from its mother planet - you seriously expect me to bring him back to keep you sane? Gordon Bennett - he couldn't even keep himself sane, let alone anyone else.'

'Yeah, but at least we had things in common.'

'The only thing you had in common was your mutual interest in consuming ridiculous amounts of alcohol.' 

'Selby? Chen?'

'Ditto.'

'What about Krissie?'

'Dave, she finished with you.'

'But, Rimmer?? Anyone would have been better than Rimmer. Anyone. Hermann Goering would have been better than Rimmer. All right, he was a drug-crazed Nazi transvestite, but at last we could have gone dancing.'

'It was Jean-Paul Sartre,' said Holly, thinking it may very well actually have been Albert Camus, or Flaubert, or perhaps it was even Sacha Distel, 'who said hell was being trapped for eternity in a room with your friends.'

'Sure,' said Lister, 'but all Sartre's mates were French.'