Wright Left

by Peter Marks

  Grabbing another icon embroidered towel, she cleared the foam coat from mirror in front of her. ‘You can’t possibly be that terrified of yourself?’ She enquired, checking the mirror double for any new and unwanted line or wrinkle. ‘Are you?’ She wondered.

  ‘Am I what?’

  ‘Terrified of your own image?’

  ‘No, just disappointed.’ He advised, skinning a pillow and placing the hide over his head. ‘Also, I wouldn’t want to scare myself to death,’ Wright added, in muffled reply.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m too rich to die,’ the carcass crowed.

  Stepping from the bathroom, wrapped towel clinging wet to pronounced curves, she shook her head to untangle the long saturated locks. Turning to the bed, she discovered a thing lying there with a pillowcase for a head. And obviously a pea for a brain.

  Anyway, whatever it was, was settled where Nathan should have been. It was propped there amongst the overworked satin sheets laughing to itself, mumbling something about pillow talk and smoking a cigarette through the filter fabric. Shaking a scrubbed head slowly from side to side in perplexed astonishment, Michele sighed. Standing over it, she wondered what the hell it was up to (up to 100mgn. a day she guessed). Each time she’d asked Nathan a serious question he’d replied with some lunatic antic. This time he’d mutated. Become a smoke breathing, pillow sucking geek dressed in the same pyjamas as the Ku Klux Klan.

  Obviously this was the Wright way of avoiding a direct answer.

  What was so wrong with the usual male strategy, she wondered. Why didn’t he do what other men did? Why not simply lie? Then swear on a stack of Bibles he was telling the truth? Surely he couldn’t be serious about the mirrors. He was wealthy beyond comprehension. He was famous and he wasn’t old. Why, he only looked about twenty-eight. Thirty-two at most. In an adolescent sort of way he was quite charming. Certainly, he wasn’t stupid. And he sure wasn’t ugly. He was actually rather handsome - in a boyish way. Certainly, Michelle frowned, he wasn’t repulsive enough to require all reflecting surfaces in his immediate proximity censored with shave cream.

  On getting to know him, he wasn’t at all like she’d imagined. He wasn’t like the pompous, arrogant shits’ most of the super rich she had had the misfortune to met airhostessing. Or holidaying in Cannes, the Bahamas or Monte Carlo, sure had been. Definitely, the Boss had not been what she’d expected based on her previous experiences with the overloaded.

  Standing, watching him, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d so enjoyed being such a easy lay. Then again, she also couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this drunk either.

  ‘Joined the Clan have we?’ She enquired, removing the pillowcase, trying to butt the cigarette out in the marble ashtray that had been on the floor, by the bed. But was now under her underwear.

  Concerned for their safety, she freed the drowned lace panties from the disgusting pit. They looked as if someone had been cremated in them. Trying to hide what she was doing, her back to Nathan, she shook them as clean as she could. But they were still more charcoal than charming. God, they smelt like she’d slept with the entire membership of the London Metropolitan Fire Brigade. So she quickly dismissed any thoughts of re-entry.

  Wright, still stuck in bed, lit another cigarette to replace the other Michele had just murdered.

  ‘You call almost giving me a heart attack, light exercise? I’m too old for this, you know. My pulmonary system could attack me at any moment,’ he imagined, his heart not yet completely broken.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she laughed, placing the ashen laced underwear in the pocket of Wright's baseball jacket as a memento of her. And his cancerous preoccupation.

  ‘You don’t have to leave you know. In this kingdom, I’m God. And what I say goes.’

  ‘Exactly. So I’m leaving.’

  ‘But I’ll be alone and defenceless,’ Wright whined. ‘Who’ll protect me from the cutthroats and brigands of my mutinous crew. They want to throw me overboard, you know. Abandon me to the sharks. Make me walk the plank, cut my jib and splice my mainsail...’ He ranted.

  Firmly under the covers, watching her dress in the mute light of a European sunset, gazing contentedly at the final stages of near nakedness, he smiled the smile of the utterly content as she layered delicate underclothing upon taut flesh. Then SS uniform over lace cream slip.

  ‘Nathan, I hate to spoil your paranoia. But this plane is no pirate ship,’ she whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling on her stockings. ‘You’re not Peter Pan and I’m no Tinkerbell... and Captain Hook is a retired pop singer currently undergoing treatment for groupie withdrawal in a clinic Switzerland.’

  ‘Doctor Hook.’ Nathan interjected.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Doctor Hook. Doctor Hook was the pop singer. Captain Hook was...’

  ‘A Hollywood hooker maybe? Wendy’s fishing rod? Tinkerbell’s tooth pick? I wasn’t trying to be literal Nathan.’ She haggled, hitching up her dress, suggestively clipping the silken leg flatterers onto the black suspender belt Nathan had been using to catapult cashew nuts about the room an hour or so earlier.

  ‘Now go back to sleep. I’ll wake you an hour or so out from London.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘With a sledge-hammer. Or a herd of stampeding elephants. Maybe I’ll put a stick of dynamite between the sheets ...or even better, set it between your legs. Perhaps I’ll use a bottle of champagne and bounce it on your head and Christen you the Good Ship Lolly-pop. I haven’t decided yet,’ Michele threatened, wandering to the corner mirror for a final check.

  With elegant ease, she brushed the long blonde strands into an attractive gathering. Satisfied that all was in order - make-up, lips, hair, uniform all correctly assembled, she turned to leave. Opening the door, she bid a fond farewell to the one she had so recently bed ridden.

  ‘Maybe, if you’re lucky, I can talk my tongue into doing some overtime,’ she tantalised, loosing the moist softness over thick red lips.

  Leaving the room, she hoped she’d not have to reveal exactly what she’d been up to.

  She knew this would be unavoidable if she had to bend over to pick some drunk Wanker from the floor before making it to the spare pair of panties she’d secreted in the left pocket of her Louis Vitton Handbag. Then the jig would be up. Then all would see.

  And all would be revealed.

  ________________

  Nathan, lying there, Michelle departed, at last believed there was indeed a heaven on, or more precisely 30,000 feet above, earth. Thought how much, how long he’d prayed for the life, for the women, he now had.

  Repeatedly.

  ________________

  So how had IT happened?

  Perhaps dragging you through an extremely dull past isn’t the most entertaining way of giving you some insight into Nathan Wright’s present. But you don’t get a choice if you’re game to continue reading.

  The way I figure it, the moron hauled me through his coma lethal life. So why shouldn’t you be forced to follow? From here on in, it’s your show. You’ll have to separate me from him, him from me and figure out just who’s doing the talking.

  (Or, if you have the sense the Lord gave a ground-hog, embrace illiteracy instead).

  P.S. If you’re the slightest bit interested, the best thing that ever happened to him starts with sex and ends in pain. C’est l’amour.

  .

  Chapter Five

  DEAD WRONG

  STILETTO ON CONCRETE. It was the ominous echo of heel on home. The front door, painted stop red, slammed shut and a matched set of ice cheeks, turned vivid blue from an artic afternoon, struggled into the dim hallway.

  With some effort Jenny had made it through the door. Her stockings were laddered, her eyes mapped weary in fine threads of blood ribbon and framed bruise blue thanks to last night’s sleepless sex. Her nose wept, she looked like she’d died yesterday and the hem of her green woolle
n dress crept stealthily toward the Sunday shaven armpits.

  Essentially, she looked about as healthy as Nathan’s bank balance.

  With the cloud cold now safely behind her, the warm interior began to bounce the winter chill from her polar bones. Leaning momentarily against the blue hall wall, her icicle hands were out of glove coat pockets for the first time since she’d left the office. Standing there, breathing vaporous warmth on her near-dead digits, she saw Nathan’s cat dart out from behind the hall curtain. Apparently it was in hot pursuit of some phantom mouse. But as this event was of no real interest to her, she turned away thinking the damn daft hunter would be far better occupied chasing the rather large rat she lived with.

  Rubbing her hands together, Jenny wondered if Nathan was home.

  Pausing momentarily by the door to chase paste strands from her pink brown eyes, she walked slowly to the mirror by the unmade bed. Her hair was a mess. It was Coiffure by Hurricane. More stuck than styled, the mass adhered like a helmet to her head compliments of the wind tunnel walk home from the High Street. With an energetic toss, she threw the no longer needed cocoon coat on the arm of the chair by the window. Then it was back to the mirror.

  ‘Oh my God, that can’t be me,’ she snarled, shocked. Then embarrassed by the vision reflecting the disaster. Deciding that such a sight was better left to the eyeless, Jenny immediately fled the awful image, suckling a tan handbag to a lemon lambs-wool chest.

  Sniffling moistly, she reached into the bag, searching for the monogrammed white handkerchief that had been her last birthday present from her much loved, but totally mundane, mother. (Who was forever giving her such thoroughly practical gifts like this. Or socks. Or underwear or saucepan’s. But usually the shits for being so deliberately unimaginative).

  Ambling through the lounge room door, she was mumbling incantations over the bosom clutched bag in an attempt to locate her black leather diary, trying to lure it from the ghost reaches within where it hid lost amongst all the other treasures she deemed necessary to lug through life.

  Dumping a crowd of keys on a book infested sideboard, she glanced up from the just found file and noticed there was a rather large rodent loose in the lounge.

  Stretched out like a wet towel in the warm room, watching the TV, it seemed oblivious to her entry. Obviously comfortable, firmly indolent, the beast shifted lazily amongst the cushion folds of a fast disintegrating armchair. Two odd socked feet were busy defying gravity against the far wall of the curtain dark room.

  ‘Seen the afternoon paper?’ Asked the TV watching rodent.

  ‘Get stuffed Nathan,’ she recommended, dishevelled and demonstrative, immediately leaving to search for some rat poison. To donate to his dinner.

  Well, well. Another good day at the office Wright surmised, bending forward to switch channels, wondering why she was working on a Saturday. And why the house was so empty of others.

  Comfortable again, glad that she’d taken her terrible temperament elsewhere, Wright sat back, drinking pitch coffee from a bucket mug before making a sudden, startling discovery. It wasn’t Saturday.

  Courtesy of the hourly news bulletin, Nathan was informed that today was Friday. Not Saturday. So certainly not the day he’d thought it was and it dawned on him that the working week had retired as effortlessly as he’d seemed to.

  Reclining confused, his face the pallor of bone china, he did his best to try and comprehend his mistake. Nathan was mystified. And hung-over. In the backyard the wind howled savage through the forest gums while inside, deep in thought, Wright would have sworn on a stack of Bible’s Babel high that it was Saturday. But it wasn’t. The man on the TV had said so. The miserable fuckhead had advised him it was Friday. Even though Nathan was sure (to quite certain) he’d already experienced it. Yesterday.

  Booze, sure plays havoc with the memory, he sighed and thought about going to work. Then thought about going to Rome, Paris or London.

  Or to hospital to have his head, liver and kidneys examined.

  ________________

  Nathan N. Wright was stuck in Melbourne. He was as unhappy about this fact as those stuck sharing his moaning about it were.

  He was stretched out in the lounge room of a large house in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern, an area known for its greenery, its charm, and its total lack of diligent socialists. Most of its residents were, by attitude and by ballot, Liberal. Most were wealthy so could bloody well afford to be.

  Malvern was tree lined streets and massed parklands, an amalgam of the too old and the too affluent. The sort of suburb where people took the yuppie for a walk and left the dog at home to protect the valuables.

  ‘Welcome to Malvern and the upwardly mobile.’ Wright was fond of saying as he lay, as he so often did, horizontal and smirking on the yellow plastic banana lounge in the back yard on a balmy summer day, quite at rest sipping gin slings and being as downright immobile as his bum could stand (or rest, in this particular instance). Here, under the Southern Cross, downunder, underdone, Wright shared his roof with the mould and the damp. And those who payed the rent more promptly than he did (destitute Peruvian’s payed quicker than Wright did).

  Cruel fate had forced five others to pay for the privilege of Wright’s companionship - one male, four females (apart from Wright that is. And apart from Wright was just where the women intended staying). They were five fatalities who slept in four separate bedrooms along with three prowling cats, two large spiders and a partridge in the pear tree out back. Wright at home.

  Here, there, mid-life, mid-crisis, the roof gave him shelter, his house-mates gave him companionship, the cats’ hay-fever and the spiders’ nightmares.

  And the partridge indigestion when a gastronome Wright finally caught and cooked it.

  ________________

  Nathan Wright, freelance designer and bon vivant (freelance unemployed and bon mort Jenny said) sat bewildered by this free Friday. He thought maybe he should donate it to the Salvation Army. But he didn’t get the chance. Jenny delayed his charitable impulse by wandering back into the lounge.

  Switching the light on, momentarily blinding the two-eyed sloth in the armchair, she sauntered through the door eating an extremely large apple mumbling, between shark bites, that he was the laziest person she’d ever had the misfortune to meet. Though Wright tended to agree, he was sitting comfortably content, nose in mug, cigarette in hand and counting his ten cobweb toes so he ignored the inference. Was casually able to until she tried to sandwich him between the zillion leaves of the Melbourne telephone directory.

  As Jenny had been unable to get through to her boyfriend on the phone, she needed something to keep her amused. Something to fill the minutes until she tried his number again. So she decided to add Nathan to the listings, deciding to kill time by killing Nathan.

  With practiced ferocity, she hurled the massive book at the man immovable (in support of her prognosis). He ducked, she frowned. Then an arrow apple core followed hurled listings. But neither made an impression as Nathan nonchalantly, with experienced ease, avoided all in-comings. Then, with his brain giving him hell, his kidneys bequeathing a lifetime of dialysis, the laziest man on earth moved. He stooped forward to change channels and suggested Jenny buggar off. Jenny suggested he shove his head up a dead bears bum and, warning him she’d be back. Said she’d get him sooner or later so he may as well suicide now. And save her the trouble.

  ‘Can’t you find anything better to do than harass me?’ Wright enquired, munching on what was left of a jam doughnut he’d found under the couch.

  ‘The only thing better than harassing you would be to weld you to the tip of an interballistic missile and catapult you to God..’ She sniffed, searching her bag again. ‘Why aren’t you at work?’

  ‘Why aren’t you locked up?’

  ‘Why aren’t you six foot under?’

  ‘Six foot under what? Seven foot? So only one foot?’

  ‘In the grave I hope...’

>   ‘In your dreams, oh delirious one...’ Wright advised, throwing back the last few inches of cold coffee.

  It was no use. Jenny gave up.

  As usual, Wright made about as much sense as the evolutionary process that had spawned him. So she left. Target practice over, Wright sadly still in one piece, she headed for the kitchen where she got herself a cup of hot cocoa in an effort to persuade the grip chill to finally leave her frosted frame.

  ________________

  It was five o’clock. Nathan was sitting intent and in a trance as a puerile attempt to convert the masses came loudly ebullient onto the television screen a few inches from his bemused face. It was an advertisement for God and Jesus performed by a cataleptic cast of singing, dancing and generally rejoicing but horribly misguided Christians who, in convinced fervour, seemed to revel in their religion.

  Unlike the heretic Wright.

  Wright wasn’t duped. Nor was he on speaking terms with God or Jesus (or Budda, Sheba, Zeus or The Great Celestial Ether either for that matter) for Wright had prayed. But he hadn’t been answered.

  In particular, in the case of Christianity, he’d continually tested the theory of God and Jesus by requesting they assist him, figuring that if either entity really did exist in any helpful, practical or avaricious form then the time had come for them to reveal themselves. To him. By helping him. Then he’d happily convert.

  He’d pray regularly. Visit the marble Madonna’s’ and chant Gregorian sleeping psalms if only God or his Son (or the Anti-Christ for all Wright cared) would show up and help him. To money, to fame. To international honours. But basically to women.

  But nothing ever happened. There’d been no reply, no contact. No wealth had found him, no twin blonde nymphomaniacs had appeared panting between the sheets of his bed. The clouds hadn’t parted, no bush had burned, his enemies hadn’t self immolated. Wright hadn’t received so much as a postcard from either of them so he remained sceptical (but he kept asking any-way).