by J M Donellan
“More like stark fucking mad.”
“So, at the risk of repeating myself, why are you working for them? You should be in East Timor right now. Is this all because of what happened with Valerie?”
“You don’t get it. I can’t go yet. And yes, it is because of what happened with Valerie. Is that so wrong?”
Callum is eloquently silent as Freya continues, “Anyway, the daughter-in-law, Rosaline, is engaged to Elijah, right? She’s got mood swings like a diva on dexies and she’s obsessed with getting pregnant, despite the fact her fiancé’s in a coma. She even goes to yoga for mums and babies classes, the whole bit. She has a pink and a blue nursery all set up and ready to go. They’re both stuffed with clothes and Golden Books and teddy bears, the whole nine yards. It’s like she’s waiting for Godot to impregnate her.”
“Waiting for who?”
“Godot. You know, in that Beckett play we did in Year Twelve. The guy they spend the whole play waiting for but who never shows up?”
Callum shrugs, then flinches as he is struck in the face by a blueberry. The teenage boys snigger. “I flunked drama.”
“I can’t explain all my metaphors in pop culture terminology, you know.”
“Pity.”
“Okay, so you know what else? They’re throwing this party for Elijah, right, and I had to get him measured for his suit—”
“I thought you said he was in a coma?” A cluster of sugar packets lands on their table. Freya shoots the boys a warning glare, they respond with air violins and over-pronounced pouts.
“Right.”
“So…why does he need a suit?”
“Get this; they’re going to fucking wheel him out into the crowd like Lenin or one of those other snap-frozen dictators.”
“Jesus!”
“I know, right? The weird thing is, I tried looking up information about the accident and there’s almost nothing on the web. I mean, there’s articles that mention it happened, but no details about if there were other cars or passengers involved or alcohol. They’re all short, perfunctory six-line articles with no detail or explanation. I don’t understand how one of the richest people in the country getting into a major accident got almost no news coverage. Plus there’s nothing about him being in the Winter Olympics or composing soundtracks like Rosaline said.”
“Do you think she’s crazy enough to make that kind of thing up?”
“I think a girl who keeps a room filled with dolls and prepared His ’n’ Hers nurseries is all kinds of crazy. But that isn’t even the weirdest part. The place is huge, I couldn’t guess how many rooms, and they’re all protected by these magnetic locks. I have a keycard that lets me into maybe half of them, the rest stay locked. Fair enough, I suppose, but there’s this one room—”
“Where they keep Elijah’s evil twin?” Callum says in a mock theatrical tone.
One of the boys calls out, “Faggot!” Callum bites his lip.
“That’s not fucking funny, Cal. It’s locked with some kind of Fort Knox-style set-up. It’s dead creepy.”
“So, how long do you give yourself before you try to break in?”
“You really think I’d do that kind of thing?”
“Sure, who wouldn’t? It’s like a modern-day Pandora’s box.”
“How come in myths it’s always women who cause all the woes of the world to come hurtling into existence? Eve, Pandora, Lilith, Helen of Troy? Can’t you men take any goddamn responsibility for all the world’s crap?”
“We’ve already had our periodic breakfast-foods-at-inappropriate-times argument, do we have to get into chauvinistic-attitudes-perpetuated-through-myth-culture quarrel tonight as well?”
“Fine. You gonna eat that last pancake?”
“I’ve got something for you to eat right here!” yells the taller of the two boys. The pair of them spray half-eaten pancake across the table as they roar with laughter.
“Hell, no. It’s all yours, my culinary confused friend.”
“Sweet.” Freya shoves a forkful of Strawberry Fields Forever pancake between her teeth and watches the splotches of pink-orange shift into green as the opening chords of an old Aerosmith song begin. “So, you’ll be there at seven?”
“What for?”
“The party. I need a faux date and you’re easily the least unattractive man in this joint.”
“I think I’m planning to have a headache tomorrow night.”
“You can have your damn headache on Sunday! You can’t leave me alone with those aristocrazies! Please say yes.”
Callum rubs his forehead and sighs. “Fine. But there’d better be free booze.”
“By the truckload, I promise.”
“And you have to drive me home.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Right now. I’ve had enough of this pseudo-breakfast travesty. What if someone sees me here?”
“No one else you know is unfashionable enough to set foot in this place.”
“Well, that’s true, nevertheless…“
They throw a handful of notes and coins on the table and stand up. The boys mime blowjobs at them. Callum sighs, looks at Freya and says, “Should we?” nodding in the direction of the boys.
“Yes. I think so.” Freya walks purposefully towards their booth. She locks eyes with each of them in turn, then treats them to a sultry smile. She runs her index finger slowly down her chin, between her breasts, towards her waist. They stare in open-mouthed awe. Her hand reaches the bottom of her skirt and she begins to lift it delicately upwards. She pauses, looks at their dumbfounded expressions, and nods at Callum. He grabs their shirts with confident hands and rips them upwards, leaving their faces and arms buried. Freya snatches up the milkshakes on the table and, amidst a hurricane of teenage profanities, pours them into the laps of the two boys.
Freya takes Callum’s hand and they galumph towards her car, laughing and whooping. She unlocks the doors and fumbles her key in the ignition. The sound of hands pounding the back of her Camry clangs over “Love Will Tear Us Apart” playing on the radio.
“You fucking fag! I’m gonna kill you!”
“You fucking ranga bitch!”
Her shaking hand finally fits the key into the lock as the boys’ furious faces appear in the window next to her. Their hands slam against the glass. The tall one spits on the window. “Bitch! I’m going to cut you up!”
No longer laughing, Freya floors the accelerator and her Camry rumbles out into the street. “Shit. These punks really can’t take a joke,” she says, changing lanes too quickly and inviting the angry horn of a motorcyclist behind her. Her pulse is pounding. In the rearview mirror, Freya watches the boys maintain a surprising speed. “The little bastards can run, I’ll give them that.” The spit slides across her window.
“Freya!” Callum screams, pointing at the figure stepping out onto the road ahead. She brakes hard; the sound of screeching tyres wails through the air as the car fishtails and the world spins and shakes. With white-knuckled hands Freya wrenches the wheel hard into the skid. They twist, slide, and clip a light pole. The impact sends them flying violently forward and back again, the seatbelts stinging at their chests. The sound of shattering glass tremors through the air. The two of them sit frozen in the sudden stillness.
Freya looks up at the figure stepping onto the opposite side of the street and cannot help but smile as she whispers, “It’s her.”
Marilyn Monroe is clad in a sumptuous ensemble consisting of a pearl necklace, purple dress and heels, and her traditional ocean of makeup punctuated by her prominent beauty spot. She smiles and winks at them both, then disappears into the night singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”
9
His Infamous Clark Kent Impression
***
“Be your best self! You have to think, breathe, eat, and live success. Rememb
er to visualise success at all opportunities: standing in line at the bank, waking up in the morning, be your own success story!”
The motivational recording enters the brain of Bradley Macintyre via his headphones as he waits for the train to Central Station and is jostled by a crowd of weary workers making their morning commute. He replays the words in his head as he hears them: be your own success story be your own success story be your own—
“Ow!” The broad-shouldered man in the blue suit does not apologise for knocking him sideways—whether this is because he is unaware of having done so or because he simply does not care is impossible to say. Bradley assumes it is the latter, because he has been an incurable cynic since an early age.
Today he has less reason to be cynical. Although he must endure the sardines-in-moving-tins commute, survival of this journey will reward him with his first day in his new job as personal assistant to James Tellerford, senior Halcyon board member. Bradley had rather hoped that the accusing glare of his girlfriend (a longtime member of PETA, Amnesty International, Red Cross, UNCHR, and Oxfam) would slowly fade as she got used to the fact that he would not be leaving Halcyon, despite what she claimed was a well-documented history of deplorable environmental and human rights abuses.
“Surely, if they were that bad, someone would go to prison?” was his impuissant reply. “I’ve got to work somewhere!”
“Yes, you’ve got to work somewhere, but that somewhere could also be anywhere else!”
Each time they have this argument Bradley is reminded that if she ever gave him the ultimatum of choosing between his job at Halcyon or her, he would choose the former. The decision is now calcified in his brain, prepared for that inevitable conflict. He has already steeled himself not to spit his answer out too quickly when that conversation eventually arrives, lest he make it obvious that he’d already considered this option in some detail.
Bradley takes his morning brew from his favourite coffee stand. Lakshmi—who has the winning smile of a home-shopping advert hostess and has often crept into his private erotic fantasies—hands him his half-strength latte and congratulates him on the new job. She knows what a big deal it is. Maybe he should break it off with Karen and date Lakshmi…
He strolls into the building and nearly spills the coffee all over himself when he is greeted by, “Fifteen minutes early! I knew you were the man for the job, Macintyre! ‘What do you want to hire that snivelling twerp for?’ the boys asked me. ‘Get yourself a nice big-tittied blonde!’ they said. But I told ’em! I told ’em you had potential! And you’d be—Hang on, phone’s ringing, ah, just the bloody wife. Probably moaning about the kitchen fittings again. Did you know that cupboard hinges from France cost three hundred dollars each? What the fuck about frog hinges can justify three hundred dollars for a tiny piece of metal with a rudimentary utilitarian function? Are they carved from metal harvested from meteors by the olive oil-anointed hands of vestal fucking virgins? Still, it’s got to be the best for my Tracy or I’ll never hear the end of it. Eh, what’s that? Oh, thought you were going to say something. Right, follow me, be quick about it. I’m throwing you in the deep end. Best way to learn. Ah, unless you’re teaching a toddler to swim I suppose, in which case, well…Come to think of it that’s rather a terrible analogy, isn’t it? Never mind! It’s on twenty-six, you wanna hit the button? Board meeting. All the big guns. Lamar, Davidson, Morecroft, that Asian bloke…what’s his name? Wang? Wong? Wung? One of those anyway…and the Vincettis themselves. Your job is going to be to take notes on anything and everything and crunch those numbers in your head like I know you can. What’s it they call you? Macintyre, the human calculus? Calculator? Ah, the human abacus! That’s it! Knew it was one of those. Crunch those numbers, and if you see anything worth talking about, write it down and pass it to me, discreetly, mind, like I’m sure you did in high school. Notes about Jenny Redhead and what bra she’s wearing, eh? Got up to a bit of that back in your day, didn’t you? I bet, ha-ha! Alright, this way. And here we are! Where the magic happens. Sit down here. We’re the first ones, which a lot of business types will tell you is poor strategy, but then again, a lot of business types are complete bloody rockmelons. Yes, rockmelons. You know, thick-skinned but watery on the inside? Right, we’re going to sit here, two seats down from the Vincettis. Close, but not presumptuously so. It’s a fine balance, my friend, a fine balance. Don’t talk much, do you? Fine by me, that’s for sure. Nothing wrong with being a little taciturn, far too many blowhards barrelling around these corridors already, no doubt about that. Okay, here they all come, and smile and wave—Oh, and if Harland starts doing his infamous Clark Kent impression, that’s a bad sign, he…”
“What’s his Clark K—”
“Eh? No time for chitchat. Shut your clam-hole and smile politely. I’m not paying you to chinwag.”
The board members file into the room exchanging a monochrome procession of “hellos” and “how’s the family?” as they take their seats. Harland and Evelyn are the last ones in; they are both shining with the blazing red corona of a couple fresh from an argument.
Harland speaks first. “Hello all, we’re going to get straight into it and stick to racing through the highlights with a view to finishing by ten. Any objections? Didn’t think so. First off, performance across all sectors was up 2.3 percent. Not a huge figure, granted, but given recent global financial conditions, certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Good work, ladies and gentlemen. Now, it’s that time of the month, ah, ha…that is to say, hrm…I could have worded that better, couldn’t I? It’s time for the monthly review. Chris, why don’t we start with you?”
“Sure thing, Harland. Well, for starters, we’ve had huge progress with the minimum wage negotiations in Indonesia. Our factories there are very profitable, but the proposed government increases would have forced us to pay the workers an extra 2.5 percent per year, which we obviously weren’t happy about. Now, it did take some…Is this being recorded in the minutes? Can we have this off-record for a second? Thanks. We did have to invest some money paying off a few officials, but that short-term payment is going to save us a tremendous amount in labour costs over the next few years.”
“Well done,” says Harland. “No sense paying more money to have the same bloody job done, is there?”
Bradley, at this point, can hear the voice of his morally beleaguered lover whispering, “See! I told you so!” within the deepest, darkest regions of his psyche. He wills himself to ignore her and maintains a serious, thoughtful composure.
“Alright, Morecroft, you want to go next?”
“Sure, thanks Harland. Now, I’m rather pleased to announce that we’ve seen a slow but steady expansion across Southeast Asia. I’ve been particularly pleased with the synergisation of our production and transportation departments. Now, I don’t want to open the kimono on the entirety of our projects there, but I’ll try and disambiguate some of what we’ve been doing, particularly in regards to actualising net gain on deliverables.” Morecroft is speaking with the giddy excitement masked as even-toned authority of a high-school debate team captain. He appears completely oblivious to Harland’s eye-rolling and fake yawns. “Now, you’ll have to forgive me for dogfooding here, but I’m going to use the…”
Tellerford passes Bradley a note, tapping it against his thigh. Bradley opens it to see the words: Fuck. This is what I warned you about.
He looks at Tellerford with bemusement. Tellerford nods at Harland, who has donned a comically large pair of glasses and is staring at Morecroft with a forcibly bored expression. Slowly, the other board members turn their attention from Morecroft to Harland and begin to nervously chuckle.
“Oh, please, tell me more. This is so interesting,” says Harland in a loud monotone.
Morecroft turns from the projector screen to see Harland in his Clark Kent glasses and immediately deflates. “I’m…I’ll just email you all the notes. I…ah, I have to go to the bathroom.”<
br />
He scurries out of the boardroom and Harland laughs uproariously. Evelyn rolls her eyes at him and the faces of the other board members host expressions ranging from “Dear Lord, how did this man get to be head of a multinational?” to “Please pay attention to how much I am smiling at your pathetic attempt at humour and give me a raise.”
“God, that was even more boring than the last time my wife dragged me to the opera!” says Harland.
“That joke might work, dear, if you’d ever actually attended the opera. Or if you were even remotely funny.”
“Thanks, Evelyn. Always nice to know I’ve got you at my back. Poking knives into it, that is.”
She groans and waves for him to continue.
“You know what? Let’s cut to the chase. Big news is that the three-way merger with Happymax and the Davies Group is very fucking close to being inked. Obviously, the events befalling Wilson Davies and Kyle Engels were cruel and tragic, and we will be making every effort to look after their families in every way possible. However, there’s no shame in taking advantage of a business opportunity, and I’m sure both Engels and Davies would call ‘fair game’ if the tables were turned.
“Clearly this is going to open up all kinds of new revenue sources, supply chains, and diversification options. It will, in addition, allow us to manufacture some of our pharmaceuticals through Davies’ labs, which should give us plausible deniability if we manage to manufacture something that doesn’t fit guidelines but proves profitable. Basically, my lawyers have advised me that we might have an informal grace period of around six months where we can claim their labs were producing products that we weren’t aware were substandard due to the communication problems inherent in acquiring a new corporation of that magnitude.”
At this point, Bradley’s conscience—in the guise of Karen’s high-pitched squeak—has been rattling off a string of obscenities that Bradley can no longer ignore. “Are you saying…Are you saying you’ll make drugs that don’t meet approval…like, on purpose?” He’s regretting the words even as they cascade out of his mouth.
