No Fury Like That

by Lisa de Nikolits

  I had known that the treatments were failing him but I can’t bear to lose him, not now. I hail a cab and rush to the vet and fortunately they take us straight to the back. Duchess is heavy and limp in my arms but he is purring and his eyes are closed, and I hug him to me.

  The vet calls up his file and I put Duchess on the steel table and the vet examines him and when he turns to me, I can’t bear to read the message that his eyes are so clearly giving me.

  “There’s no choice,” he says. “I am very sorry, Julia. It’s time for you to say goodbye. Do you want us to take him and do it, or do you want to be with him?”

  I am crying, rivers of hot tears. “I must be with him,” I say and I follow the vet into another room.

  “I am sorry, baby,” I tell Duchess, “I love you so much, you’ve always been my best friend, you crazy boy. Mommy’s going to miss you so much.”

  The vet gives him the injection and Duchess purrs and he slowly goes to sleep and all the weight leaves his body and he is so light, while I feel as heavy as lead, and I can’t stop crying.

  “Would you like him cremated? You can keep the ashes.”

  I nod that I would.

  “It will take a week,” the vet says. “We’ll call you. I’ll take him from you now.”

  I can hardly bear to let Duchess go. I finally hand him over and when he is gone and my arms are empty, my whole life feels bereft and without hope or meaning.

  I walk out and find a cab and somehow, I get myself home.

  Now, everything is gone. Everything. But surely Junior will have called? Surely he will have texted me or contacted me or something? I can’t believe that after everything, he would just dump me like that, cut me off, and leave me bleeding.

  I sit down on the sofa and pick up my phone but the screen is insultingly blank and I wish I could smash the phone into a thousand pieces. I think of calling him but I stop myself. No. Never. Fuck him. I will not pander to his ego. I want to kill him.

  I scroll through the pictures I have of him, flicking through selfies of us smiling, holding champagne glasses, decked out in fine evening wear, at formal dinners with celebrities, him sleeping next to me, him holding his dick, his tiny Chapstick dick, with his monogrammed cufflinks clearly visible and his sparse ginger-blond pubes a fine fuzz on those tiny, acorn-like balls.

  Filled with vicious glee, I have an idea. I want to email that picture to everybody in the company but I can’t do it from my phone.

  I jump up and hurry out. I go to an internet café and I sit in the darkness among the gamers and the backpackers and I create an anonymous email account, janesmith1234@eezymail.com, and I email the pic to myself from my phone.

  I painstakingly type in the addresses of my team along with Junior’s Board of Directors and every other contact that I can find on my phone. It takes a while.

  I type the subject line, It takes big balls (or not) to be a great leader. I pause for a moment. Is this a terrible thing to do? But then I have a vision of myself hiding behind a pillar while he danced off to breakfast and there is no doubt in my mind. I press send.

  I delete the anonymous account and I don’t have to wait long before my phone buzzes and “Junior” flashes onto the screen.

  I leave the café and I stand outside in the glaring sun, holding my phone and watching it vibrate like a crazy thing while he calls and calls and I don’t pick up.

  26. THE FIRST TIME JUNIOR TRIES TO KILL ME

  I SIT DOWN ON A PARK BENCH and shake my head as if I’m trying to get water out of my ears. I feel really weird, stoned and in a fog. I guess the shock is finally kicking in. I need sugar.

  I spot The Artful Dodger across the street and I am grateful for the cool quiet of the empty pub. I order a triple Woodford Reserve, figuring that alcohol has sugar in it. My phone continues to buzz and by now, the text messages are pouring in.

  I down my triple and order another. I start reading my text messages and to my surprise, some of my team express dismay at what had happened to me. But they are the obsequious ass-creepers who probably think they’d better say something or I’ll hold it against them forever, not knowing, as I do, that my days of power and glory are gone.

  I sip the second drink more slowly and read the messages from Junior. To say he was livid was an understatement. He called me names I didn’t even know he knew. I didn’t even know I knew. I grin. I finish my second drink and think about having another but I am feeling really out of it and when I get off my chair, I stagger slightly.

  “You okay?” the bartender asks.

  “Yeah. Just had my ass fired today,” I tell him. “A bit of a shock to the system.”

  “No kidding.” He looks sympathetic. “But I can tell, if anybody will land on their feet, it’s you. I know these things,” he taps his nose and I smile weakly.

  “Great, thanks.”

  I walk unsteadily home and make my way up to my apartment. I live above a pizza parlour and the narrow old wooden stairs are a challenge in my weakened state and I pause for a moment, gathering strength.

  The pizza joint is a family-owned affair, proudly in business since 1971. Carlos, the granddad, comes out and asks me if I am okay and I sit down on one of the stairs and face him.

  “I got fired, Carlos,” I say. “I feel kind of weird. And I lost Duchess, the vet had to put him down.” I start crying again.

  “Ah, I am very sorry, bella,” he said. “Come back down, have a soda. You need some sugar. You’re in shock.”

  “Thanks Carlos, but I just need to lie down. I’ll be alright.”

  He looks at me. “You want Marcello to walk you up? I keep meaning to get those stairs fixed.” Carlos owns the building.

  “No, really, I’m fine. Thank you, Carlos.”

  “Okay, but come down later, we make you a pie. You gotta eat, you too thin. You work too hard. Maybe this a good thing, you learn to live a little bit. Life is good, Julia, life is more than work.”

  I am going to throw up. I haul myself up. “Yes, Carlos. See you later, thank you.”

  I hold tightly onto the railing and crawl up the rest of the stairs. I have just reached the top when I hear a commotion below and I peer down the dimly-lit stairs. It is hard to see what is going on but I don’t have to wait long to find out what is causing the racket. Junior, much like a small, rabid, red-eyed bull, is charging up the stairs, his face purple and swollen with rage, his eyes bulging.

  “You fucking BITCH,” he yells and he lunges for me, and grabs me by the throat. I am taken aback by how strong he is and I claw at his hands, trying to scratch him but my fists flail uselessly.

  I can’t breathe and my legs are kicking out wildly and I finally manage to scratch his arms and his hands. My chest feels like it is going to explode and every cell in my body is screaming for oxygen. I grunt and thrash about as much as I can, but I am dying. Junior has me pinned up against the wall and he is throttling me and the world starts to turn black and I vaguely hear a voice shouting. I think it’s Junior but then I hear a pounding noise and Junior drops me, and I fall in a crumpled heap on the floor.

  Marcello has saved me. He saw Junior pull up in his Lamborghini and he saw him run up the stairs. He had called out to Junior, asking him what he wanted, but all he got in reply was a furious growl.

  “Something’s not right,” Marcello said to Carlos.

  “So, go look,” Carlos had grunted and, in that tiny window of time, Junior nearly killed me.

  When I come to, I am in a hospital bed with a security guard outside my door. My throat is on fire and I can’t swallow and even my eyes hurt. Everything hurts. How can everything hurt so much?

  “You’re awake,” a cheerful nurse appears at my side. “Good. I’ll call the doctor.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” the doctor tells me, and I want to say something but I can’t talk.

  �
�No permanent damage done,” he says. “You’ll be fine but it will take some time before you will get your voice back. Don’t even try to speak now. You need to rest and relax and recover. We’ll keep you here for another day, as a precaution. Do you have anybody we can call? We couldn’t find any next of kin.”

  I shake my head.

  “Try to sip on some iced water,” the doctor says. “We’ve got you on hydration fluids and this button activates your painkiller, you can press it every hour. If you press it more, it won’t work.” He smiles briefly and leaves.

  I want to ask him about Junior. I wave my hand in the air and the nurse stops and looks at me.

  “Sweetie, I’ll get a notepad, hang on, two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” She reappears, raises the bed and hands me a notepad and a pen.

  Junior? Man who tried to kill me—what happened to him? It is such a terrible scrawl that I’m surprised she can even read it.

  “He was arrested,” she says “but he made bail. He wanted to have you arrested for slander, bullying, social media abuse, defamation of character, and a bunch of other things but he tried to kill you and that trumps what you did. I tell you, it’s been the only thing people have been talking about.”

  How long have I been here?

  “You came in on Thursday evening, it’s now Saturday morning. Here,” she says and she hands me a remote, “you can watch it on TV. They’ve still got it on a loop, you can’t miss it.”

  I flick the TV on and there we are, Junior and I, in all our sordid glory.

  “Her revenge nearly killed her! Fired media mogul’s mistress seeks revenge and nearly pays the price with her life.” There are pictures of Junior and me at various events, laughing, not a care in the world. Then there’s a clip of Junior being led into the police department, hands cuffed behind his back, his face impassive.

  The reporter said that Mrs. Davidson-Loach could not be reached for comment but she asked that the media respect the family’s privacy during this challenging time.

  Junior’s lawyer explains in great detail, using tangled legalese, that his client had become momentarily unhinged, and had acted extremely uncharacteristically as a consequence of the abuse he had suffered. “Clearly, he wasn’t thinking straight,” the lawyer adds. “The attack was in no way planned or premeditated, Mr. Davidson-Loach merely wanted to talk to Ms. Redner and explain the level of pain and trauma that she had caused, but when he saw her, he momentarily lost control of his mental faculties. If anybody is to blame, it’s Ms. Redner.”

  “But she had just been fired,” the reporter points out. “She too was under a lot of stress that day. She had worked for the company for over seventeen years and he gave her the boot. I heard he didn’t fire her in person, that she was walked out by some hired axe. You have to acknowledge that would be tough.”

  “Tough yes, but there’s no excuse for what she did.”

  “She emailed a picture,” the reporter challenges. “He tried to kill her. There’s a difference.”

  “She murdered his reputation,” the lawyer counters. “She murdered his career.”

  “Will you be pressing charges against her?”

  The lawyer is silent for a moment. “I am urging my client to drop the charges and we are hoping Ms. Redner will do the same. They both acted in haste, from a place of pain and momentary insanity, and it would be best if they got on with their lives and put this whole sorry incident behind them.”

  “That was legal representation for Patrick Ralph Davidson-Loach IV, the full name of the man known as Junior. We’ve interviewed former employees of Ms. Redner and Mr. Davidson-Loach, and while there is full support for him, who people have characterized as a fun-loving go-getter and risk-taker, the views of Ms. Redner are not as kind.”

  The camera turns to my art director who already looks as if he’s been spitting venom for hours. He is not one of the ones who emailed me with regrets about what had happened. “Bitch,” he said. “I’m not sure if I am allowed to say that on TV, but she was the meanest bitch I have ever worked for. We weren’t allowed to say good morning to her. We had to tiptoe around her, and we had to fetch her dry cleaning, get her lattes. I’m an art director not an editorial assistant. And the way she could talk to you! She got off on it. And stuff … man, she took everything: pens, pencils, post-it notes, and all the stuff the agencies would send her. She got tons of free stuff, high-end makeup and cosmetics and fragrances and only once did we see any of it, the rest of the time, she took it all. The one time, she had a beauty sale and I swear she made over a thousand bucks, maybe two, and she said she was giving the money to Sick Kids but I swear she took it.”

  I am not coming across in a good light.

  Next they have one of the copywriters, a girl I nearly even liked. I wait to hear what she has to say. “Well, she’s very damaged. I don’t know anything about her childhood or her past but she’s clearly damaged. All she did was work although she did enjoy having sex. Before she took up with Junior, she had sex with the boy models on shoots and she was quite blatant about it. In the middle of shooting, she’d say she needed to give the model some direction and she’d lead him away, but everyone knew what they were doing. And some of these guys were like twenty and she must be what, nearly fifty?”

  Nearly fifty? I would have choked but my poor broken throat can’t manage it. I thought they thought I was thirty. I’m not fifty, I am forty-two, and I thought I looked much younger than that.

  “But I liked her,” the girl adds. “I did. In a way.”

  “Sounds like not many people liked her,” the reporter comments and she swings her focus back to the camera.

  “We haven’t been able to find out much about Ms. Redner’s past, or her private life. We do know that her very public affair with Mr. Davidson-Loach went on for two years. Davidson-Loach the IV comes from old money, bankers who lost everything because his father gambled it away. Davidson-Loach married Sharon Besting, heiress to the Besting discount furniture chain. Davidson-Loach is unavailable for comment and we assume he is at the family cottage, trying to put the pieces of his life back together. He has officially taken a leave of absence from work, and we are unclear as to how long that will be in effect for, or whether, in fact, he will be returning at all. The acting-CEO of the company where both Ms. Redner and Junior worked has declined to comment.”

  I turn off the television and lie there, surrounded by hospital sounds. Unsurprisingly, popular opinion is not in my favour, not that it ever has ever been but it hasn’t mattered before. I had the power to make up for it and I hadn’t given a damn.

  My throat is killing me. I hit the painkiller button but I am sure nothing is happening so I summon the nurse by hanging onto her bell.

  “I heard you the first time, Julia,” she says and I want to tell her that she is being overly familiar by calling me by my first name but I can’t talk.

  I hold up the pain button and she shakes her head. “You’re maxed out,” she says. “You’ll have to wait.” And she walks out. She walks out!

  I buzz her again and again and she comes back. “Listen,” she says “I’m legally not allowed to turn the call button off in case you have a real emergency, but if you call me again to ask me for drugs that I can’t give you, I’m going to yank that thing out of the wall and pretend that the cleaners forgot to put it back when they were polishing the floor. Are we clear?”

  I nod and she walks out again. I lie in my bed thinking. There are no flowers, no calls, and no visitors. Back in the day, the day of my sweet reign, if I had so much as stubbed my toe, the room would have been filled with designer bouquets from boutique flower stores. I would have been besieged by fawning underlings who I would have sent rushing to Victoria’s Secret for bed jackets. I would have imperiously dictated notes and instructions and they would have fallen all over themselves to scurry and obey.

  Now, I have nothing. And there is
no one.

  “Code Orange, Code Orange, looking for a missing patient, patient is in his early thirties, has short dark hair, is five-foot six, wearing a fedora hat, green sweatpants, and a black leather jacket. If you see this man, call security immediately. Code Orange, Code Orange.”

  The message is repeated and I wonder about the missing man wearing a fedora hat and green sweatpants Is he dangerous? Mentally deranged? I don’t care. I want more drugs. I push the button again but nothing happens.

  I sit up slowly and take stock of my situation. My IV machine is on wheels and there are two thick cables plugged into the wall. I work at yanking them out, which isn’t easy—they are wedged in tight and my whole body hurts with the effort. I loop the cables onto my IV trolley and ease myself off the bed, hanging onto it for a moment for support, but I don’t feel dizzy and I slowly make my way to the washroom. I am in a room for two but the other bed is empty.

  When I look in the mirror, an ungodly sound fills the room and I realize that the moan of horror is coming from me. My hand fly to my throat, my poor, damaged, bruised throat. The bruising extends down to my chest but the worst of it are my eyes. The whites of my eyes are a vivid, blood-filled red and there are motley scarlet patches on my cheeks.

  I touch my face slowly. Junior really did try to kill me. I wonder if the police are obliged to press charges or if, as the lawyer had said, it is up to me. I don’t want to drop the charges. I want the son-of-a-bitch to go to prison for the rest of his life and while I know that will never happen, the least I can do is try.

  27. BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO

  I STAND IN THE HOSPITAL WASHROOM and hold my hands under the hot, running water and try not to look at the broken woman in the mirror. My body has been attacked, but my spirit is more determined than ever to make Junior pay. I ease the door open and walk slowly back to my bed. As I round a corner, I see a news reporter standing at the doorway of my room, with a cameraman at her side. Their eyes widen when they see me and the reporter starts talking but I hold up an imperious hand and she falls silent.