Killing Adonis

by J M Donellan

“I thought people didn’t like questions in this house?”

  Jack smiles. “People love asking questions in this house, but they hate answering them.”

  There is a pause before Freya continues. “Okay. Well. I have this…condition. It’s rare, and to be honest I don’t really like talking about it. Maybe once we get to know each other a little better? And I would like to get to know you better.”

  He shrugs. “Well, I guess I can’t complain about that. Alright, that’s fair. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve got a somewhat strange and colourful medical history myself. But in the interests of getting to know each other better, can I ask exactly how you ended up here?”

  “I’m supposed to be on a plane today. At ten-fifteen tonight. Economy, window preference. Chicken and pasta meal pre-ordered. I booked nine months in advance. Got one of those super cheap, non-refundable tickets. Ever since I was a teenager my plan was to graduate, get a few years’ experience in nursing, go to East Timor and then save the world one injection at a time. It was a perfect plan.”

  “But the best laid schemes of mice and men, go often askew?”

  “And of altruistic young women too, it would seem.”

  Another pause.

  “So, obviously, I’m going to ask what happened.”

  “And, obviously, I’m going to have to tell you.”

  Freya tries to remember the last time she told this tale. Was it to Jane? Or Murray, the narcissistic surfer she’d wasted a few summer weeks on? She can’t recall. She prepares the story in her head for a few moments before she begins to speak. It spills out of her.

  11

  Valerie

  ***

  “Valerie’s mum always said that she was lucky she wasn’t born in the fifties, when a baby with cystic fibrosis would have been lucky to live six months. I always thought that was stupid. If you’re going to start thinking like that, why not just wish that she was born in the year 2083, when they’ve developed a cure? Then she could probably get some sort of hoverboard or flying car or whatever to go along with it.

  “In any case, professionally speaking, you aren’t supposed to have favourite patients but, of course, everyone does. Valerie was mine. She knew full well she was going to consider herself lucky to ever see her forties, which meant that at seventeen she was technically approaching middle age.

  “When I was a kid my dad got diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he spent a lot of time in hospital. There was this one nurse there, Riley, who used to pal around with me and tell me jokes and stuff. I remember she had this amazing tattoo of Kandinsky’s Three Sounds on her arm. She was the first one to tell me about his work and get me interested in art. She was the kind of role model I wish more girls would have, instead of these vacuous, drugged-up celebrities that seem to plaster TV nowadays. I guess I wanted to be for Valerie what Riley had been for me.

  “Like most CF patients, Val was in the hospital pretty often and I know it’s egotistical, but she reminded me of myself in high school. She was young and sassy but still a little neurotic and unsure. Plus we both had a weird condition that made us into social outcasts. I worked with Valerie for nearly four years. That’s longer than any relationship I’ve ever had with a boy, longer than I’ve ever lived in one house, longer than it took to get my degree. Val became like my little sister. I saw her grow boobs, get and then get rid of braces, saw her face erupt into a screaming red series of acne craters and then slowly heal again. All that shit teenagers have to endure, as if the hormones playing havoc with their brains and loins isn’t enough for them to deal with. Every time she told me about some jerk who had dumped her to go out with one of the bimbos from the netball team I wanted to smash his car with a baseball bat. Every time she told me she got a ‘B’ for a class she could have sworn she was going to fail I wanted to buy her pizza and champagne to celebrate.

  “Val had been doing pretty well for someone with her condition. She was getting to the end of Year Twelve and was all set to enroll in an architecture degree. She told me, ‘I want to leave behind something solid and permanent when my body fucks up on me.’ Don’t even get me started on how long I spent bawling my goddamn eyes out when she told me that.

  “So, at the end of last year, Val scored decent grades, but like a lot of teenage girls who spit on the graves of the founders of the feminist movement, she was more excited about the formal and after-party than her academic success, let alone her future. She’d picked out her dress months before, had the standard argument with her father over the exorbitant price, booked a limo, all that jazz.

  “She’d even been asked out by the boy. What was he called? Tom? Terry? Doesn’t matter. She was a high-school girl and she liked him, which meant, of course, he was the only living human on the planet with the requisite organs that she could even dream of touching. So, the week before the big night she’s running her mouth off talking about the dress and the boy and the party and this that and the other. Then she starts telling me about how she’s ready, you know, to take the next step. I figure, fair enough, she’s seventeen, and from the rose-tinted picture she’s painted me, this Terry sounds like a stand-up guy. Can’t be any worse than my first time, which was in the back of a Barina parked in the garage at Milton Bowl, by the way. They tore that place down years ago but I swear to God every time I go past there the back of my neck starts aching like it’s got a door handle jamming into it.

  “So, she’s asking me advice on all the things—you know, technique, protection, all that. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, which was, ‘Kid, he’s seventeen, you’ll be lucky if the whole event lasts longer than a Pepsi commercial.’ I was very clear about the necessary precautions, though, professional responsibility and all that.

  “Then a few days before the formal, she starts developing this heinous cough. Most people with CF get that; comes from the accumulation of mucus on the lungs. You have your up and down swings, but as a rule, things slowly go from bad to worse. The doctor, this guy named Kapsen, who was about a thousand years old and had all the wit and charm of a bucket of warm molasses, starts insisting that she’s going to need to be kept under observation for at least a week.

  “God, you should have seen her face. She looked like someone had told her that her grandma had been killed and eaten by her own cat. She started bawling her eyes out and she would…not…stop. Her mum was there consoling her, I was trying to tell her everything would be okay, meanwhile Kapsen the cold-hearted is droning on and on to her father as though Valerie isn’t even there.

  “I grab him by the shoulder and pull him into the corridor and growl, ‘If you don’t let that girl out, for that one night, she is going to hate her life so much that she won’t want to go on living.’

  “‘Don’t be ridiculous! She’s a teenager, she’s just being melodramatic. I will not put her health at risk for some debutante ball.’

  “‘Listen, aside from the fact that it hasn’t been called that since before typewriters were cutting-edge, you know this is hardly a life-threatening situation. If you don’t let her out to play dress-ups and feel like a real, normal person for a few hours, you will break that girl’s heart.’

  “He glared at me and stormed off, but the next day instructions were given that Val be allowed out for the evening, so long as she was chaperoned by an adult from one event to the next, made sure to keep her mobile phone with her at all times and returned first thing the following morning. When I told Val, she hugged me so tight she nearly broke my neck.

  “I set up her respirator as she spent the next forty minutes yammering on about how she was going to do her hair and makeup. Through the breathing mask she sounded like Darth Vader at a beauty salon. When Friday finally came round, the doctor told her that she seemed surprisingly healthy and how he was optimistic that things were going well.

  “She looked amazing that night; you should have seen her. Although she insisted on we
aring this ugly charm bracelet that I hadn’t ever seen her take off. She gave me a big hug and I made her promise me that she would drink nothing except juice and soft drink or I would never speak to her again.

  “She agreed and bounded out the door with her dad. He shot me a grin and said, ‘She won’t stop talking about you. I’m starting to get worried she’s going to try and talk us into letting you adopt her.’ They walked outside, pulled their little green Ford out onto the road and had barely driven twenty metres before they were hit by a black BMW and killed upon impact.”

  12

  Simply Sasha

  ***

  “Cut off his head,” snarls Sasha as she swerves across lanes, a chorus of horns and hollering behind her. “I’m serious. This is me, the queen of motherfucking hearts, telling you I want his severed head served to me on a platter by the end of the week. If that tree-hugging, swine-loving piece of shit wants to play with the grown-ups then he’ll have to suffer the consequences. The son of a bitch threw pig’s blood at me, for fuck’s sake! That was a one-of-a-kind Versace dress that cost more than your son’s reconstructive surgery. Don’t get snide with me, I pay you too much for you to ever talk back to me. I’m going to duck home and get changed into something slutty and expensive and then go to Elijah Vincetti’s birthday and hopefully come home with someone rich and tasty. I want it solved by the end of the night.”

  Sasha Fairlane hangs up and throws the custom-made, old-growth African blackwood-encased, blue diamond-encrusted smartphone onto the seat next to her as she pulls into her driveway. Her electric gates part like the legs of a high-class hooker and she drives through. Her house, which recently graced the pages of Home & Design magazine, is a monument to opulence. The French doors cost more than the average Parisian makes in a year, and the six-tier, full-lead crystal chandelier gracing the foyer gives the impression that diamonds are constantly raining from the ceiling.

  She has earned her money through selling lies. Precious few who reach the dizzying heights of obscene wealth that she has attained have the luxury of dealing in truth and goodwill. Sasha’s makeup and fashion line, Simply Sasha, has captured the hearts, eyes, and most importantly, wallets of women all over the globe. Her line of beauty products is desired above all others, and her marketing campaigns, which hard-sell beauty in strictly one-sized, slim-waisted, dead-eyed European model packages, have caused almost as much controversy as they have generated repulsively successful sales figures. When other beauty companies started to embrace the philosophies of “big is beautiful” and “bringing out the inner you,” Sasha pushed in the opposite direction, plastering billboards, magazines, webpages, and TV shows with images of emaciated, photoshopped puppet poppets.

  On an average day, she receives approximately seventy-five thousand letters, emails, cards, and tweets filled with gushing praise along the lines of “OMG I heart yr products soooooo much their the best and your so pretty! thx thx thx! xoxoxox.” She also receives several thousand militant threats from anti-anorexia groups, concerned mothers, feminist campaigners, and animal rights activists. Until yesterday, she couldn’t have cared less, but like the song says, “What a difference a day makes.”

  At 3:03 a.m. yesterday, a young freelance journalist and animal rights activist broke into one of Simply Sasha Inc.’s largest laboratories on the outskirts of Sydney. He filmed two minutes and twenty-three seconds of footage before security guard footsteps echoing down the hallways prompted his exit. He arrived home at 3:33 a.m., edited the footage with some explanatory text and a hastily recorded narration. His mouse clicked.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  By 7:46 a.m., it was one of the most watched videos on YouTube. It was beyond viral; it was pandemic. News and radio stations pulled stories on foreign conflict and celebrity weddings and instead aired the horrific footage of pigs with chemical burns over every part of their bodies, sheep with frothing mouths and red-rimmed eyes, and monkeys with grotesquely distorted features. There were images of flesh and fur and blood and bone strewn like so much wrapping paper on a fifth birthday. By the time stores opened that morning, staff had cleared all Simply Sasha stock from their shelves for fear of rioters tearing apart their pristine displays.

  School buses were packed with incensed tweenies furiously tweeting, texting, and occasionally even talking:

  OMG I dnt thk I could EVA use Simply Sasha Jr’s anti-pre-premature wrinkle cream on my face again aftr hereing it was used on monkees & they’re faces burnt of! WTF!

  When the stock market opened and the armies of caffeine-sipping suits booted up their computers, one thing was clear: Simply Sasha’s profits would be hurting worse than the aforementioned monkees’ faces.

  At this point, Sasha clearly has a lot on her mind. It is for this reason that a few precious seconds manage to trickle by before she notices the stench that invades her nostrils. She has no comparison, no point of reference for the disgusting odour because she is far too wealthy to have ever been within ten kilometres of an environment that could possibly produce smells of this potency.

  Rubbish tips would be one. Or septic tanks. Abattoirs. But perhaps the most accurate description of the various revolting scents sending her recoiling at this precise moment would be the fumes of a killing field, littered with bodies strewn like autumn leaves, limbs either twisted at gruesome angles or scattered several metres from their former hosts. You could close your eyes, but the stench would still be there: overwhelming, overpowering, all-consuming. It is this putrid miasma that now floods Sasha Fairlane’s six million-dollar mansion.

  “Hong! What the fuck is this smell? Get this shit cleaned up right now or I will have you deported back to China so fast your moustache will hurt!”

  Her maid, as it happens, is from Vietnam. The shadowing on her upper lip is the result of burns sustained in a cooking accident as a child. And her name, Huong, when pronounced correctly, actually means “perfume.” Given the current circumstances, Huong might find this mispronunciation ironic, but for the fact that she is currently tied and gagged and trapped in the third-floor linen closet.

  Sasha runs into the kitchen, assuming she will find Huong there. She does not see Huong. She sees blood, thick rivers of it. She sees guts, entrails, vast masses of torn and fractured flesh and fur.

  And then she hears screeching. She turns and sees a pair of abominably deformed monkeys baring their teeth at her. Before her brain can even send the signal to her legs to start running they are on her; tearing, scratching, biting, clawing, screeching.

  When photos of her mutilated face are posted on the Internet some hours later, user realgrrrl346 will comment:

  Well, at least her inner beauty matches her outer now.

  13

  A Gibbous Moon

  ***

  Evelyn stands on the terrace, champagne glass clutched in gold- and diamond-adorned digits. She surveys the army of caterers and designers and photographers scurrying below. She is Cleopatra. She is Joan of Arc. She is Julius Caesar. This is her empire. The sun is sinking below the river, painting the sky pink with broad and confident strokes. Soon the guests will arrive. Everything must be perfect, like her son. Her masterpiece.

  She turns and descends the staircase, sees Harland getting himself yet another drink from the dining room bar. “Harland, darling, let’s save a few bottles for the guests, shall we?”

  “We’ve got enough here to host the G8 summit five times over and you know it. Stop being a cow.”

  Evelyn bites her lip. She feels that familiar fury begin to burn, but now is not the time. Tonight must be perfect. “Harland, I would remind you of the importance of the occasion. Be civil for once in your life, you petulant, grey-haired dolt. This is about our boy. Our perfect boy.”

  Harland downs his drink with a speed that to others might be impressive but to Evelyn is merely vile, and says, “Yes. I’m glad we can agr
ee on that at least. For all our strings of zeroes floating in space in bonds and bank accounts, I’d find the world a very dull and weary place without that boy. There’s nothing in this life I’m half as proud of creating as Elijah.”

  “There, you see dear? You don’t have to be a total cretin all the time, now do you?” Evelyn click-clacks across the floor to scream at the nearest caterer.

  Harland pours another drink.

  ***

  Freya surveys her collection of gloves before deciding on a stark white pair and then chooses a matching dress but with a classic thick black belt and oversized gold buckle. After selecting a red flower hairclip, she surveys the result in the mirror. She tries not to frown at the thighs she wants to believe are not too large but, minor flaws aside, she cuts a striking figure and she knows it.

  “This oughta knock the socks off the lifestyles of the rich and crazy cast out there anyway,” she mutters as she applies final touches of blush and lipstick, then goes downstairs to greet her date.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  “Oh, come on, Eli, that’s what you always say. Today’s your birthday, let’s not be boring!” She has to admit that he does look devastatingly handsome in his tux. “I bet even unconscious you’d knock a few girls off their feet, hey, E? If ol’ Rosaline wasn’t likely to disembowel them with some sort of obscure home-shopping channel kitchen appliance immediately thereafter, of course.”

  Freya combs his hair and straightens his cuff links. “What the hell are you hiding in that sleepy little head of yours anyway?”

  “Just the same cavalcade of lies and delusions as the rest of us.”

  Freya jolts and turns around to see Jack grinning in the doorway.

  “Christ, you scared me!” Freya reminds herself that she really needs to start locking the door behind her. Jack is clad in his usual ripped jeans and black T-shirt, but tonight he’s deigned to add a black jacket with rolled-up sleeves. He looks awkwardly handsome; black-framed glasses and a mosaic of bruises.