by J M Donellan
***
You wouldn’t recognise his face if you saw it in a crowd. You wouldn’t know his name if you saw it printed in a newspaper. You probably wouldn’t even recognise the name of his company if you saw it on a stock listing. All of this is by design. Though his appearance would indicate the contrary, the portly, dishevelled man standing in the hallway with the putrid crimson beard molesting his face is among the richest men in the world. Wilson Davies trades through a labyrinth of shell companies and sub-sub-subcontractors, intentionally managing his operations so that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing nor which filthy places it’s been.
You’d know his products, though, guaranteed. Go and open your bathroom cupboard. There? See that? No, not the condoms you haven’t touched in an embarrassingly long time. Next to those. The pills. The little white packages of magic and chemicals in neat cardboard boxes. He makes those just for you. You and every other sap on the planet seeking a quick fix. Sure, you might think you have a choice of sixteen different brands of painkillers at the supermarket, but in actual fact more than half of them are an identical formula displayed in different-coloured boxes with varying price tags. He owns the patents, he owns the production facilities, and he owns the distribution networks. Collectively, his myriad companies have an annual turnover that would cause the American national deficit to dash to the bathroom and then have a quick lie down on the sofa.
Wilson pops one of his favourite products into his mouth. It’s his Maltese Falcon, his Jewel of the Nile, his Heart of the Ocean: Everlastine™. When his labs showed him the stats on the beta product, he nearly puked with excitement. All the potency of Viagra with the blissful side effects of massively increased tactile sensation and a barely-subtle-enough-to-be-legal euphoria. He’d produced it at a cost of two dollars and forty cents a pill, and it hit the shelves with an asking price of ten times that. He’s always been good at finding ways to make money: withholding AIDS medication in Tanzania to drive up demand, contaminating water supplies in Northern India to create the need for antidiarrhoeals, but nothing came close to spinning money like Everlastine™. When it came to cash, the life-threatening needs of the Third World couldn’t hope to compete with the income-generating sexual neuroses of the First.
Currently, Wilson is working on an extensive campaign to convince women of a newly discovered and yet surprisingly common “Stress-induced Female Sexual Dysfunction Syndrome.” The appropriate placebo has already been developed, branded, and packaged. As soon as the “health reports” are filtered through the appropriate news networks, Wilson will sit back and watch the deluge of dollars fill his numerous offshore bank accounts.
He grins broadly as he slams open the door to Alicia’s room. Her painfully contrived pout and “come hither” gaze clearly demonstrate how much he repulses her. As if he could even begin to care. He pays her well enough to do a decent job of faking it. She’s wearing an elegant silk robe that slides easily down her perfect shoulders. He can feel the Everlastine™ kicking in; a warm familiar rush of strength and vigour storming his senses. He reaches eagerly for her, licking his lips like a Viking prince reaching for a plate of spit-roasted pig.
He feels the warm touch of her skin and then…
And then…
He watches his hand as it slumps limply to his side. A feeling of pins and needles mixed with a burning sensation buzzes through his body, and then there is nothing. Nothing at all. He watches in confused horror as his body slumps backwards off the bed and slams heavily onto the wooden floor, just shy of the plush, inch-thick rug. He watches as a sticky red pool of blood spreads out towards it. He tries to move his arms, wiggle his toes, move his eyebrows and yell. Nothing happens, and then nothing happens again and again and again. His thoughts barrell madly around in his brain, screaming at his nerve clusters and neurological pathways.
Above him he watches Alicia’s wide blue eyes fill with fear and listens to her Hitchcockian scream fill the room. He would like to cover his ears. He would like to do a lot of things. From the periphery of his vision he can barely make out the madam, Sylvia, charging in with her heavily armed doorman, concerned that he has tried to hurt Alicia.
“Call the police,” he hears her crisp voice command. A small storm of terrors and fears jostle for his attention, but fiercest and foremost of them all is:
Is this it? Am I stuck like this? Will I never move again?
Sylvia prods him with her stilettoed foot and sighs before saying, “Motherfucker, that rug is a one-of-a-kind from Kashmir. You owe me three hundred bucks for dry cleaning.”
The tiny lake of blood touches his lips.
If he could taste it,
it would be
sickly
sweet.
3
Elijah
***
The phone’s ringing shakes Freya from the embrace of sleep. She thrashes her hand around the desk trying to smash the sound into a thousand silent pieces. She jerks upright. Her head is pounding like a sweatshop the night before a rush deadline. Finally locating her phone, she stabs at the red button to decline the call but her fine-motor functions are horrendously impaired and her finger lands on the green. A cold, articulate female voice attacks her eardrums from the speaker.
“You have a pretty name. Not common, but not too unusual either. I thoroughly abhor the idea of trying to fumble my tongue around some ridiculous garble of consonants like Agneshka or something. You aren’t vegan or kosher or anything preposterous like that, are you?”
“No, no I’m not…who is this?”
“You should know, we had a lot of applications, but they all wrote insufferably loquacious discourses about themselves and how they joined the medical profession to make the world a better place and so on and so forth. Honestly, young women these days seem to so consistently harbour the misconception that the whole world is interested in their dreary biographies. The job we are offering, a monkey could do. But we want a pretty, quiet monkey who has the good sense to not stick her nose where it doesn’t belong. For which the monkey in question will be very generously compensated.”
“You want a monkey?”
The caller sighs wearily. “Oh dear. You aren’t stupid, are you? Stupid won’t do at all. I have neither the patience nor the inclination to deal with stupid.”
“I can categorically assure you I’m not stupid. I am, however, currently not sure who is accusing me of being so?”
“Your CV, mailed this morning. At 5:43, I see. I like a girl who gets up early and doesn’t fuss around with niceties and chitchat. You are speaking with Evelyn Vincetti. You do still want the job, I assume? You haven’t changed your mind in the six hours since you applied for it? Capriciousness is another habit that I will not suffer in an employee.”
“The job! Yes! Of course, silver card, lots of mon—ah, marvellous opportunities.”
“Quite. You will come to dinner. You will dress elegantly, but not ostentatiously. You will arrive promptly at seven p.m., not a moment before or after. Write this address down.” The words come as a rapid-fire sequence of statements of fact rather than requests. Freya scribbles the address on the envelope of an unpaid bill as Evelyn speaks.
“Any questions?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Correct answer. I look forward to meeting you.”
Freya opens her mouth in an attempt to formulate an appropriately formal expression of gratitude, but finds herself listening to the dull tone of a dead line.
***
“Shit. Shit. Shitshitshitshit.” The hangover Freya is combating is of superhuman strength and, at 6:23 p.m., shows no signs of abating. She groans as she opens her wardrobe door in search of attire that is “elegant but not ostentatious.”
She grabs at dresses one by one and hurls them to the floor, muttering appropriate rejections. “Too slutty, too small, red-wine stain, too ei
ghties, no shoes to match, too boring, tiny tear I got running away from a security guard that I never got around to fixing…This one?”
She throws on the simple blue dress and a pair of white shoes, then darts her eyes back and forth between her box of gloves and her box of large bracelets before deciding on the latter. She removes a simple wooden piece Jane brought her back from Bali that fits snugly over the part of her wrist she needs to conceal. Outside, a car speeds past, blaring some bass-heavy eurotechno which, for a moment, floods her eyes with a kaleidoscopic sea of red and orange as the little Kandinskys dance in front of her face.
“Argh, shit shit shit! I don’t need this, not now, not now…” She bangs at her temple, despite knowing it won’t help. Biting her lip and breathing deeply to calm herself, she darts out the front door, then steps back inside when she realises she has forgotten her keys. Freya runs back up to her apartment, rescues them from the pile of handbag debris she spilled on the hallway floor earlier and clutches them between shaking hands. She steps back outside where the door of her off-white 1993 Toyota Camry greets her with a rusty squeak. She checks her reflection in the rearview mirror and turns the keys in the ignition. The clunking engine sounds like it’s chuckling at her hangover.
***
“Jesus fucking on a motorcycle…” Freya whispers. She checks the address on the envelope, then the number on the letterbox, then checks again. The mammoth mansion sprawled across the riverfront looks like the kind of place God would have as his weekender. As Freya exits her Camry, she catches a glimpse of a gargantuan yacht moored out the back of the mansion. She guesses it’s roughly twice the size of her entire apartment.
Motion-sensing lights fill the driveway as she approaches. She squints through the glare and struggles to keep her balance as she trudges through the gravel, each step punctuating the percussion in her brain. She breathes deeply, uses her phone to quickly check her hair and rings the doorbell.
She hears the ring somewhere inside and eventually the door is opened by an imposingly large and sombre grey-haired man in his fifties. His piercing brown eyes remind her of the look she imagines a lion bestows on an antelope when it doesn’t feel particularly hungry. “You must be the girl,” he states in a tone suggesting the observation is vaguely unsatisfactory. “Come in. You are on time. That’s a good enough start.”
Freya follows him into the lobby and discovers that the mansion’s interior is even more remarkable than the outside. The main hall is a countryside of polished marble, paintings, vases, sculptures, and antique furniture that could give the Guggenheim a run for its money. Behind it lies a vast ballroom staircase that has been oddly augmented with a rubber ramp. Flanking the enormous staircase are corridors with red carpet runners that sit on top of the marble like long tongues in the mouth of a pale white china doll. Each of these corridors hosts a cavalcade of thick oak doors adorned with elaborate vine carvings. She is smart enough not to let an awed gasp escape her lips as she crosses the floor into the dining room.
A table with heavy mahogany legs carved into the feet of some great mythical beast and set with glistening silver and crystal runs almost the full length of the room. Two blond women seated at its far end stand to greet her. The first, who appears to be in her late twenties, has exactly the petite figure that Freya is fond of reproachfully critiquing. She welcomes Freya with the pearly white smile of a real estate agent. The other woman is middle-aged but has clearly employed every available means of alteration and augmentation to appear as though she was born after the invention of the compact disc. She greets Freya with a mirthless display of teeth as she takes her hand.
“Hi, I’m Freya, lovely to meet you,” Freya uses her best firm-and-confident-because-I-want-this-job voice.
“I had hoped you’d be a little thinner,” the older woman says, not so much to Freya as to herself. She casts her eyes up and down Freya as though examining a wall hanging at an auction. “Still, you are quite presentable. Bright eyes, that’s a good quality. I’m Evelyn. Do you drink Merlot?”
Freya answers, “Yes,” though it’s her second preference to slamming the arrogant Evelyn to the floor like a Mexican wrestler.
“I’m Rosaline!” says the younger woman as she shakes Freya’s hand with new-puppy zeal.
“Freya. Nice to meet you.” Her disgust for Evelyn is overtaken by the confusion of her hand being worked up and down in an earthquake of ebullience.
“And you met my husband, Harland, of course,” says Evelyn, waving her hand towards the man standing behind Freya.
“I did, yes.”
“Wonderful. Well, we’re nearly all ready to get started then. Maria!” she bellows. A small, rotund Latina woman appears from the kitchen.
“Yes, Mrs?”
“Fetch Jack, would you? We’re ready to eat now.”
“Mr Jack, he ask can I take dinner to him in his room. He busy working.”
“If you can call it working. Very well, Maria, bring dinner out for the rest of us now.”
“Yes, Mrs.”
As Harland takes his seat at the head of the table, Freya feels he would make a convincing Mafia don or corrupt ambassador. He sits with his shoulders set straight against the high-backed chair and raises a glass of red wine to his lips with unhurried stoicism. Freya catches a glimpse of the bottle’s label. The wine is older than she is.
Evelyn vanquishes the rest of her wine, brings her hands together in a firm clap and announces, “So! Freya. Now that you’re here we can get down to business. I’ll outline what’s prohibited. If you have a problem with any of that, there’s obviously no point wasting one another’s time, is there? Should you agree to abstain from everything I list for you, we can get you started straightaway. Sound good? Excellent.
“First of all, no fraternising of any kind on these premises. Your friends, boyfriends, second cousins, book club, long-lost sisters, and Tupperware parties are not welcome here. You want to socialise, you do it elsewhere. There is to be no smoking in the house or anywhere on the grounds. No illegal drugs of any kind are to be brought onto the premises, and believe me, if there are we will know about it and it shall not end well for you.”
Evelyn studies Freya’s face for a moment, looking for signs of resistance. Freya does her best impression of a smiling, courteous employee.
“Next, and this is critically important…do not ask questions. Not about our business, not about our personal lives, not even about the weather. Should any of us wish to communicate with you we shall initiate that interaction and you may continue accordingly. You are to be our employee, not our friend. Our last nurse failed this horribly, with regrettable consequences….
“Everything that goes on here, Freya, stays within these walls. This is our sanctuary and we will not tolerate an employee spreading gossip and slander. Harland,” says Evelyn, turning to her husband, “anything you wish to add?”
“Evelyn, you know how this works. I handle the business, earning the money and doing the things that actually matter. The tiny kingdom of this house is yours and yours alone to administer.”
Evelyn narrows her eyes at him before turning back to Freya. “Do you anticipate any problems in adhering to our rules?”
Freya pushes aside the various venomous responses clamouring for release and answers simply, “None at all.” Her gift for feigning congeniality is unparalleled. Years of restraining herself from strangling annoying hospital patients have taught her to conceal her anger, bottle it, and then release it like a pressure cannon at the appropriate juncture.
“Excellent. You will be paid two thousand dollars per week, in cash. This income is not to be reported to the tax department or anyone else in government. Harland will set up a phantom job for you in one of our businesses so that you will have some vocation to offer future employers. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run to the lavatory. Talk among yourselves.” Evelyn’s heels make a series of
loud, commanding clicks across the marble floor as she exits.
“Don’t mind her, she’s kind of a bitch but at least she tells it to you straight,” says Harland as Maria places a plate of lobster and salad before him. Freya resists the urge to lunge at hers with her bare hands, taking her cues from Harland as to how to disassemble it daintily.
“Yeah, she’s a doll really!” Rosaline giggles. “Plus you and me are gonna be such good friends, talk about girl stuff, go shopping, all that jazz. Hey, you could even come to my Zumbalates class with me!”
Rosaline reminds Freya of a girl who joined her high school after ten years of home schooling. A decade locked inside her storage-container-sized apartment with only her mother and their six cats for company had made her disconcertingly perky. She makes a mental note to google “Zumbalates” in order to find out what it is without having to endure some twenty-minute dissertation. “Sure, that sounds great,” she lies politely. Rosaline flashes her real estate agent smile as Freya captures the first bite of lobster and her body trembles with ferocious satisfaction. For this kind of food and pay, I’d work for Mussolini.
“That’s an interesting bracelet you have there! Can I have a look?” Rosaline’s hand darts out across the table to touch it, shifting it a fraction down Freya’s arm before she snatches it away. She wonders if Harland glimpsed what was hiding underneath, but he merely regards her with a stony face.
“It was my grandmother’s. Family heirloom and all that. I didn’t mean to be so jumpy.”
“Oh, honey, I totally understand. I shouldn’t have been so presumptuous.”
“How’s the lobster?” Harland’s tone indicates he doesn’t care for a response.
“Best I’ve had all week!” chirps Freya, telling the truth for the first time this evening.
***
Maria clears the culinary battlefield; remnants of lobster and soufflé are strewn amid the rubble of resplendent silver cutlery.
“Well, I trust you enjoyed your meal, Freya?” Evelyn asks, smiling with a faint glimmer of sincerity that appears foreign on the landscape of her face.
