Killing Adonis

by J M Donellan

  “You can, but unfortunately I’m not sure that I can give you a clear answer. I think she had some sort of disagreement with Mum and it was all rather unpleasant and uncomfortable for a while there, and then the next morning she was gone. Evelyn can be slightly…temperamental.”

  In the same way that a force ten gale can be slightly disruptive, thinks Freya. “I’m sorry about your brother. He was…is an amazing person.”

  Jack grimaces and says, “So people keep saying. Elijah, the golden child. Elijah, the polymath. Collecting accolades like a masochist collects scrapes and bruises, cut down in the prime of his brilliant life.”

  Freya registers the subtle hint of scorn, files it for closer observation, and continues the conversation under the pretence of normalcy. “Were you close?”

  “In as much as a dove can be close to a Concorde. But yes, we spent a lot of time together, before it happened.”

  “Um…can I…? I know Evelyn said I’m not supposed to ask…”

  “You want to know how he ended up like Sleeping Beauty?”

  “Yes.”

  Jack casts his eyes down and says, “You shouldn’t ask about that. It’s not something we talk about. Ever. That, and the contents of the Danger Room next door.”

  “Danger Room?”

  “Yeah, you know, like in the X-Men? Where they ran holographic training scenarios? The room could be anything they wanted? Our Danger Room is the same. No one knows what’s in it, so it’s become a playground for fantasy and speculation. It is whatever you need it to be.”

  “No one knows what’s in there? Not even you?”

  “Especially not me.” His face contorts into a frown. “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “I’m sorry, I know that’s against the rules. I should go.” She stands and moves to leave, knocking over a copy of Fantastic Four #381 (FOUR…NO MORE!) but Jack grabs her hand. His grip is firm like wet sand, strong enough to hold form but supple enough to disintegrate under the application of minimal force.

  “Please, don’t.” There’s a barely discernible tremor of desperation in his voice. “It’s nice to have the company. It’s been a while since I’ve had anyone visit.”

  “I would never have guessed,” says Freya, noticing the collection of Hustler magazines slumped beneath his desk.

  “Yes, the place is in such a mess. I keep trying to clean it. The problem is that cleaning gets my head very clear and focused, and as soon as my head is clear and focused I have an idea and then I have to write it down and once I’ve written it down I have to start working on it and once I’ve started working on it I have to review it and once I’ve reviewed it I have to refine it…hence the state of disrepair.”

  “Doesn’t Maria clean for you?”

  He laughs and says, “She tried, for a while—a long while, actually, bless her. But then I told her to not worry about doing anything besides the odd bit of dusting when I noticed she had started crossing herself and hanging her head like she was walking to the gallows every time she opened my door. Plus, I don’t like to be disturbed when I’m working.”

  “What is it exactly that you do…you know, when you aren’t introducing typewriters to walls at a high velocity?”

  He smiles and looks to the corner of the room and mumbles, “Oh, you know, bit of this, bit of that.”

  Freya’s head whirls with images of book cooking, hacking, identity theft, money laundering. “Uh-huh,” she replies. “You’re quite enigmagnetic, you know that?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Enigmagnetic. Someone who is both enigmatic and magnetically interesting. It’s a word my friend Callum and I made up.”

  Jack blushes to a warm red, which looks strange against the bluish hue of his eyes. “Ha. That’s cute. I’ll take that as a compliment. Anyway, my apologies. I get a bit funny talking about my work sometimes. Um…well, perhaps you might know Chaos in the Kingdom of Cynthia Green?”

  “By Jason Velles? Are you kidding me? I fucking love that book!”

  His face erupts into a luminous grin. “Well, I can honestly say I never get tired of hearing that.”

  Realisation dawns on Freya like a Tesla coil. “Really? Are you kidding me?”

  “I know, I know…Same initials. Not very subtle as far as pseudonyms go.”

  “You wrote that? Are you serious? Why didn’t you use your real name?”

  “You’d be amazed how quickly manuscripts written by the son of infamously wealthy parents of dubious character get turned away. In any case, I wanted to create something new for myself. Something separate from my family name. From their empire.” He pronounces the word “empire” as though it is a heinous vulgarity.

  “I literally read that book six times. I was hooked right from the tagline. ‘The multitudinous struggles of a young black paraplegic Muslim lesbian in the twenty-first-century corporate legal battlefield’. How did you even come up with that?”

  He shrugs and responds, “Cleaning.”

  “I can’t believe you wrote that book! I always pictured you as some rotund old Englishman with sepia teeth and an overbite.”

  “You have a peculiar way of complimenting a guy, you know that?”

  “Are you working on anything now?”

  He nods and shuffles uncomfortably. “Well, yes, I’m always working on something or other. I have a drawer filled with abortions. Ah…abandoned manuscripts. I call my books my children and hence the abandoned ones…well, you get the picture. I apologise. It’s quite crude, I know. In any case, right now my main project is something I’ve been working on sporadically for a few years. It’s called The Sins of Adonis. Tentatively.”

  “Can I hear some?”

  He quivers as though he’s suddenly realised he’s forgotten his own birthday and then nods. He rummages in one of the drawers of his desk and throws a stapler, rubber-band ball, and old-fashioned fob watch onto the floor. He carefully removes a single white feather, stares at it for a few reverent moments and then places it carefully on his desk. He produces a pile of crumpled pages and reads:

  The first time I saw her I felt the jaws of lust grip me with a ferocity I had never known before. Of all the girls I have defiled, none had ever been so pure, so innocent, so unbesmirched as her. She looked as though she was composed of nursery rhymes and fables. As though she was wandering through life waiting for the rest of the world to become the technicolour musical that already was in her—

  He stops and discards the sheet of paper to the floor. “God. I don’t know where this stuff is coming from. Lately I can’t write anything except…” He picks up the white feather and scratches at the desk with its point. “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”

  “It’s really not. It sounds very dark, but I’m intrigued.”

  “Please, I don’t need you to be condescending,” he says with the petulance of a three-year-old denied an ice cream.

  She examines the peaks and valleys of his handsome but beard-needing face. She pictures him lying serene, connected to a vast web of beeping monitors and machines. “You look a lot like him, you know.”

  “Yes. I know,” he replies, with a note of irritation. “Well, I should get back to not writing. You probably don’t want to be here when the next typing appliance attempts to fly. That was the third typewriter I’ve smashed this year. I guess it’s obvious why I don’t use computers anymore.”

  “Sure. I need to go check your brother’s beepers in any case.”

  “Beepers?”

  “His machines and things. You know, because they beep.”

  “Yes. I get it. You’re a little odd, you know.”

  Freya smiles and says, “Now that’s the pot calling the kettle a common kitchen utensil for the heating of water, don’t you think?”

  He walks over to the door and opens it for her. It’s only as he does so that she notices the scattered b
ruises populating his arm.

  “I didn’t mean it pejoratively. Odd is good. I’m quite fond of odd.”

  The door closes gently behind her.

  6

  Happymax

  ***

  If there’s one thing old money hates, it’s new money. And if there’s one thing new money hates, it’s newer money. Kyle Engels is freshly minted and despised by anyone rich enough to know the asking price for a Maserati.

  Six years ago, Kyle invested his life savings (thirteen thousand, four hundred and fifteen dollars, and thirty-five cents) in a randomly selected stock for a freshman dare in his college house. Luckily for Kyle, that stock was Halcyon Inc, which then went on to enjoy record-breaking growth over the next few years. He’d quit university a few months before graduating, having become so abundantly wealthy that something as abhorrently upper-middle class as a degree in communications was nothing if not laughable.

  After twelve months of blowing the fiscal equivalent of West Africa’s aid debt in the incessant pursuit of pleasure, he had the moderately good sense to reason that even the largest bank account is frustratingly finite, so he acquired a financial adviser. His adviser possessed sufficient good sense to realise that he could skim copious quantities of capital from Kyle without him being any the wiser, and used the money to set up a company producing toys. Crap toys. The cheap plastic kind in exhibition showbags that fall apart after two days of play, which, fortunately, is about the same time spoiled little rugrats lose interest in them and start yammering for the next flashy plastic thing that has caught their gaze. Happymax made the kind of toys that cause grandparents to moan about sturdy wooden trucks that had lasted for years “back in my day” and had been passed onto Jimmy so-and-so who had consequently unscrewed one of the little bolts and swallowed it thinking it to be a delicious metal lolly and had ended up in hospital but hadn’t that doctor been a nice young man, Swedish wasn’t he? Or Swiss? One of those funny European places that make chocolate in any case…

  The point being that Happymax made toys that ended up on TV current affairs programs with presenters feigning grave concern as they read from the teleprompter about the monsters daring to profit from harming children. Happymax’s toys frequently broke, occasionally splintered, sometimes came coated in toxic lead paint and, once in a while, blasted battery acid over the face of some toddler who may well have grown up to be a famous surgeon or painter or journalist or filmmaker or photographer but we’ll never know now because they all ended up in the emergency ward with a non-functioning retina.

  Kyle had blithely signed whatever waivers and contracts his morally unencumbered adviser had placed in front of him, usually with the pen shaking in his hand because of cocaine or ketamine use or whatever designer drug had been fashionable among the young and well-to-do that season. Although Kyle’s role had been more third violin than conductor in the whole affair, he had tacitly funded enterprises that had maimed, mauled, and marred children across three continents.

  All of this more or less explains why Kyle has come to find himself stirring out of the marshmallowy haze of an MDMA trip, tied up, with his face lying on a toy railway track and, furthermore, why the track is currently supporting a miniature steam train laden with a precariously balanced vial of battery acid chugging directly towards his bright blue eyes.

  ***

  Excerpt from The Sins of Adonis

  One of the central dilemmas of being rich, powerful and handsome is that finding challenges becomes increasingly difficult. The more money you have, the more people seem inclined to give you things for free. The more women you’ve slept with, the more they seem to sense your prowess and surrender themselves without letting you enjoy the thrill of the hunt.

  I’d been told that Chloe’s legs would be harder to part than the Red Sea, but in the end I had to do little more than compliment her hair and hand her a glass of champagne. I’ve exhausted an extensive selection of high-grade narcotics, ruined a few careers for the fun of it and crashed a few companies so I could sample the aroma of lives being incinerated. Having done all that, the dreary and inevitable question is: what next, what to get for the man who has everything?

  Well, something he has to take, of course. I’ve tried other men’s wives, and I can safely say that the ghastly bourgeois sexual appetites weren’t half as fulfilling as watching their husbands’ faces collapse when I revealed the habits I’d introduced them to under my tender tutelage. I’ve tried theft, beginning with prized heirlooms and personal possessions. Sending that anonymous email snap of Peter’s prized 1914 Rolex watch in the hands of the Indonesian monkey that I’d tossed it to was a delicious experience. The impotent rage he fired back, even more so. I also particularly enjoyed sending Penny the footage of her beloved vintage Aston Martin rolling off a cliff into the embrace of an icy cold river several hundred metres below. The sound was glorious, though the joy was fleeting.

  Honestly, the only field left to me to explore is violence. Of course, there’s no way in hell that I’m letting any harm come to these chiselled features. I can’t exactly involve myself with the local neighbourhood fight club. Rich people are even more superficial than the plebs. Just look at the helium-headed, basketball-chested blondes that most of the rich old coots in their twilight years clutch with their hoary old talons.

  No, I can’t be in the business of collecting scars and bruises. So my violence might have to be of the more underhanded variety. If I’m going to have to play the stealthy hunter, I might as well pick my targets carefully.

  Mother always said shoot for the stars. I’d rather shoot at them.

  7

  Just Think of the Money and Free Booze

  ***

  Freya is shoved from the arms of sleep by the sounds of slamming doors and ferocious arguing. She glances at the glowing green LCD display of her clock: 3:43 a.m., a time when she prefers to be either very drunk or very asleep, preferably both.

  The arguing continues. Something is smashed. Another something topples over. A third something rolls and thuds against a wall. Freya stares at the ceiling, waiting to fall asleep again.

  ***

  “If you are intending to sleep in with the specific intent of lowering my opinion of you then I must say you are doing an appallingly splendid job.” Evelyn’s voice snaps her savagely back into the waking world. “You should have been in Elijah’s room at eight o’clock sharp.”

  Freya squints at the clock. It’s 8:02 a.m.

  “I believe I went to great lengths to emphasise the word sharp. We aren’t running on island time here. Today is a big day, we’ve got a lot to do before tomorrow night, there’s no time to waste. Hurry up and get dressed. I need you to run some errands.”

  Freya is so impressed by the fact that Evelyn is already clothed, composed, coated in several ounces of makeup, and spitting commands mere hours after her late-night/early-morning altercation that she fails to muster a response to her collection of commands and casual racism. Evelyn stands in the doorway waiting for Freya to obey her orders.

  “Eveeeeeelyn?” Rosaline’s squeal calls out from the central living room. “The caterer is here!”

  Evelyn disappears in a tornado of vexation and perfume.

  Freya stumbles out of bed and runs to close the door as she hears another pair of feet scurrying by. She leans her cold, naked skin against its frame and sighs heavily. “Just think of the money and the free booze,” she reminds herself.

  She dives into an uncharacteristically simple outfit of jeans and a black tank top, runs a comb through her hair and reaches for the door. It is only when her hand touches the cold steel of the door handle that she glances down at her left wrist and realises she has left it scandalously uncovered. She grabs a woven cloth armband that Jane bought her in Vietnam and ties it over her skin. Outside her door, everything is happening at the same time as everything else.

  A team of chefs
and kitchen hands scrambles between the kitchen and dining room with trays and trolleys, Evelyn barks directives at anyone within earshot, cleaners are vacuuming and dusting and sweeping, and Rosaline is flicking through colour swatches with a tall chestnut-haired man in a sleek grey suit. A woman with impossibly thick, black-rimmed glasses strides from wall to wall, adjusting picture frames and making notes. Her legs are a pair of tapering tall stories that begin in offensively overpriced high heels and culminate in an ending known only to a handful of rich white men with stock portfolios and country club memberships.

  “Did I just wander into that singing candlestick scene from Beauty and the Beast?” Freya says quietly, endeavouring to avoid eye contact with any of the several dozen people scurrying around. Among the chaos and confusion, it takes her a moment to remember exactly where Elijah’s room is.

  She swipes her keycard, enters, and closes the door behind her.

  “You’re late.”

  For a split second she is stunned with disbelief at the fact that her patient is not only conversational but admonishing her, before she realises the comment has come from the far corner of the room. Harland is staring out the window, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Sorry. I’m still getting used to…everything.”

  Harland turns to face her. The tiny lines and shadows colonising his face betray his fatigue. “Well, I suppose we can take the fact that you have so recently relocated into consideration, but don’t think for a moment that this kind of tardiness will be tolerated.”

  “Of course not. Again, I’m sorry.”

  “And don’t try blaming the traffic on the Western Freeway, either.”

  “The…traffic?”

  Harland exhales heavily and runs his fingers through his silver hair. “You know, when I crack jokes at board meetings the room roars with laughter. It may have something to do with the fact that every man and woman there owes their fortune to me, but still…It’s his birthday tomorrow, you know?”