by J M Donellan
She glances at her phone on her bedside table and picks it up, spying a torrent of texts laden with Where are you?s and Why haven’t you called me?s. She chooses to ignore these, but can’t go past a message from Jane: OMG did you hear about those poor penguins?
She flips open her laptop and looks at the morning’s headlines: “Celebrity debutante arrested at airport with 2kg of cocaine,” “Scientists unlock the secret to happiness: are you eating enough asparagus?,” “Politician caught in scandal with colleague’s underage daughter,” and finally, “Worst oil spill since 2010 puts thousands of penguins in danger.”
A massive oil spill on the coast of Patagonia early this morning has left thousands of penguins covered in oil. Environmental groups fear that as many as 30,000 Magellanic penguins may freeze to death if they are not attended to immediately.
How can a penguin freeze to death? Freya thinks, just before a scream stabs into her ears.
“Haaaaarrrrlllaaaand!” This is followed by frenzied yells exchanged between Evelyn, Maria, Harland, and Rosaline. Freya can’t quite make out what they are saying, but there is no doubt she won’t be spending much time with serenity today.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
“Freya! Freya! Are you awake?” barks Evelyn.
“Well, actually—”
“There’s been an emergency! Come quickly.”
“Evelyn, I—”
“Quickly!” Freya’s frustration is mildly abated by thoughts of the glorious revenge she will eventually exact on the manic matriarch. She watches Evelyn’s frantic figure scamper away and quickly pulls on underwear, jeans, T-shirt, and armband, then splashes her face with water in an attempt to banish her hangover.
Rosaline greets her at her bedroom door, locking her in an embrace. “Oh Frey, it’s so horrible, isn’t it?”
Freya is nearly choked by Rosaline’s perfectly smooth, tanned arms. “Well, that’s hard to say, given I don’t know what ‘it’ is?”
Rosaline releases her and stares at her with a rabbit-in-the-headlights expression. “No one told you? The penguins! We have to save the penguins!” She takes Freya’s hand in hers and drags her downstairs at breakneck speed.
Freya’s brain, already lumbering with alcohol-induced dehydration, takes some time to join the dots. When the connection sparks, she feels her stomach lurch in disgust, although this might also be the hangover.
“John, Paul, George, and motherfucking Ringo,” she curses to herself.
Freya struggles to ensure her uncoordinated feet manage to make contact with each of the stairs. When she looks up, she sees Harland and Evelyn at the bottom of the staircase, both barking into their mobile phones.
Harland speaks quickly and with composure, “Get Ron onto it. If he’s still in Panama, get Lisa, but by all that’s holy, don’t let Jason anywhere near this, the man’s a walking disaster. Yes, it must be today!”
Evelyn’s tone is like a warrior queen instructing her troops: “Ship them through Exeltonia. Yes. Yes. I’ve got some of my people coming to help with the rest this afternoon. The press release should read: ‘Heroic intervention by the Halcyon Corporation, who stated that care for the environment was foremost on the company’s agenda,’ etc. Excellent. Keep me updated.”
Freya’s face burns with a quiet rage that requires all her powers to restrain. She fortifies her feigned sunny exterior and quietly requests her hangover to fuck off. They did this. They caused a fucking oil spill!
Harland and Evelyn slide their phones back into their pockets with identical smooth and practised actions, like gunslingers re-holstering their six-shooters. Evelyn addresses Freya and Rosaline. “Ladies, thanks for helping us. Your assistance is greatly appreciated. We’ve just received news of a tragic oil spill off the coast of Patagonia. The extent of the damage won’t be known for a few days, but right now there are tens of thousands of penguins freezing to death.”
“Did you say freezing? Don’t penguins like the cold?” Freya darts her eyes around at the various Vincettis, who regard her as though she’s successfully auditioning for the role of village idiot.
“A penguin’s insulation system relies on its feathers. When they get slicked with oil they can’t lock the heat into their bodies and they’ll quickly die. Until they’re able to recover, they’ll need human assistance, which is why we are here.” Harland turns and strides down the main corridor. “Follow me.”
Freya follows, bewildered, as they walk past nursery number one (girl’s version), nursery number two (boy’s version), the ski gear storage facility, the lower floor gym, billiard room number three, and a host of other as yet unexplored rooms before they arrive at their destination.
Ahead of them, at the end of the hall, is Jack’s room. Freya lands her gaze at its white wooden door for a moment, and then a moment more. But it is the adjacent door that grabs her attention. Its large steel lock is the equivalent of fifteen teenage boys yelling, “Double dare!” on a cliff over a lagoon. Freya wants to jump. More than anything else in the world.
Blip!
Harland unlocks the door, flicks on the light and illuminates boxes upon boxes of the tiny woollen mystery objects.
Penguin jumpers! Tiny penguin jumpers.
Harland hands her a large box that’s not so much heavy as cumbersome. “Take this out to the front. Maria’s bringing the car around.”
“Sure thing,” says Freya, her manic grin concealed behind the cardboard. Her hands clutch at the box. She feels like a teenager with the keys to her first car.
Penguin jumpers. I am carrying a box of penguin jumpers.
Outside, Maria folds the seats down in the car to make room for the woolly cargo. “Buenos dias, chiquita.”
“Hola, Señora bonita. ¿Que tal?” says Freya, her tongue fumbling slightly over the Spanish sounds.
“¡Ay! I’m okay, but my knee is hurting a bit. It gets like that sometimes. I’m not so young anymore. I hear Mr Harland is give you some trouble? And that awful lady, Yvette, as well?”
“I see you’ve had your eyes and ears to the ground as always, Maria?”
“Hey, an old lady has to entertain herself somehow. I know nearly everything that happen in this house, except for few things, like what is behind that big locked door.”
Freya plonks the box into the back of the car and looks up at Maria, trying to discern if this is her way of letting Freya know that last night’s escapades did not go unnoticed.
“Anyway, I no remember last time I saw these funny things.” Maria takes a penguin jumper out and holds it up, giggling. “Cute, yes? Like it is for doll?”
“Yeah, pretty cute.” Freya looks up at the second-floor window and glimpses Jack standing next to Elijah’s bed. Oh to be a fly on that wall…“Maria, do you and Jack get along?”
“A lot better now that I no have to clean his room no more!” Maria laughs. “Tell you the truth, I think he is a nice boy, but very strange. He never leave the house. I mean, never. Young rich man like him, he should be out with his friends, a girlfriend maybe? But he just stay in his room, typing, typing, typing his stories. Or sometimes he talks to his brother. I think—”
“Freya! Freya, dear! There’s lots more boxes to be loaded. Be a doll and help us, will you?”
“Sure thing, Evelyn. Be right there,” Freya replies with the most contrived congeniality she can summon.
Rosaline, who is on her way out to the car as Freya heads back into the house, flashes her a pearly, exuberant grin as they pass. “Thanks, Freya! Those penguins need our help!”
Inside, Freya picks up another box of jumpers at the same time as Harland. Their eyes meet for a moment and quickly part, and Freya scurries back to the car before he can say anything. She peeks up at the window into Elijah’s room, but Jack is nowhere to be seen. She loads the box into the car and hurries back inside, avoiding eye contact with Harland as he passes
.
Inside, Evelyn is pacing back and forth in the foyer, bellowing into her phone. “No, we need it on primetime. I want it on CNN, Fox, and all the liberal hippie networks too. Make sure it’s all over Al Jazeera in the Middle East. Tell him to get it done or clean out his desk and put in a job application at Kmart—it’s his choice. Okay, keep me updated. Ciao.” She stabs her finger at the phone and slips it back into her pocket, then flashes Freya a well-practised grin.
“Thank you so much, dear, I do appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
“Harland and I will be busy with this fiasco for the best part of the day, but when we come back this afternoon we’re going to spend some family time with Elijah.” She turns to walk away but then thinks better of it, instead locking Freya with a suddenly sincere gaze. “Freya, about last night. I fear I may owe you an apology. I was not myself.”
I think you were yourself, which was entirely the problem.
“Please accept my apologies. You’ll understand someday when you’re married. Marriage is such a tender trap. I love him to death, but sometimes he can be such a bloody swine.”
Freya winces at that discourteous use of “when you’re married,” as though marriage were as inevitable as rising sea levels. “You can have the evening off if you like. Go and do whatever it is that you do.”
“Thanks. I think I will do whatever it is I do. Have fun with the oil spill.”
Evelyn grimaces and seems about to retaliate but then changes her mind. Following an apology with a tirade would be undignified, after all.
Freya smiles curtly and skips up the stairs, whistling as she examines the peculiar woollen object clutched in her fingers. With each whistle, a cloud of colour dances and fades before her. The momentary distraction these clouds provide prevents her noticing Jack approaching her until she hears his voice.
“Morning.”
“Hi, Jack. Did you hear about—?”
“The oil spill? Yes, I was trying to figure out the safest route from here to my room without encountering anyone who would want to drag me into the whole debacle.”
“Good plan. This was officially the first and last time I’ve ever had to deal with an oil crisis by loading penguin jumpers into a car.”
“Roof?”
“Why, Mr Vincetti aka Velles, it’s as though you read my mind.”
He smiles at her behind his odd blue-white eyes then leads on towards the ladder.
17
Dr Moo
***
“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to share a few of those skeletons in your closet with me,” says Freya. “You can only play the mysterious, tortured artist for so long before it gets annoying.”
It’s bright outside. She shields the sun from her eyes with her hand and looks out at the light bouncing off the river. Somewhere on the other side of the world, oil is dancing with water.
“Take a look at that log in your own eye before you start commenting on my twig.”
“Meaning?”
He nods towards her wrists.
“Okay. Fine. I’ll come clean, but only if you go first.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Come on, blue eyes. There must be a story there you aren’t telling me.”
“Ah. I was wondering when you’d ask about my eyes. Or the bruises. Or both.”
“So, what are you? Shapeshifter or a garden-variety werewolf?”
“Nothing quite so glamorous. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s a condition called Osteogenesis Imperfecta.”
“OI? Brittle bone syndrome?” says Freya, conjuring up her old textbooks’ images of stunted, fragile figures wrapped in elaborate casts and bandages.
“In the common tongue, yes. Type 1, to be specific, although I haven’t got it as bad as some. A little spine curvature, these weird eyes, my hearing’s fading prematurely, but mostly I’m just a very fragile little creature. I bruise easily and my bones are like cardboard. Ever since I was a kid I’ve had to avoid anything physically risky, like skateboarding, jumping castles, bicycles. You know, mostly the fun stuff. Throughout my childhood, Lord and Lady Vincetti insisted I kept to a strict regime of housebound pastimes. I had a home tutor for education and a revolving cast of nannies to clothe and feed me, although none lasted long under Evelyn’s manicured iron fist. Basically I was a lonely, isolated kid who spent his spare time with his nose buried in books.”
“And you grew up to be a writer, that’s so—”
“Trite? Hackneyed? Clichéd?”
“I was going to say poetic, but sure, if you want to get all self-pitying on me.”
“Like I keep saying, I’m not used to keeping sane company. It wasn’t easy watching Elijah shove his relentless pleasure-seeking into my face all the time. His top grades, ski trips, overseas holidays. He’d come back from weeks away in Vienna or Paris or Costa Rica, toss some tasteless five-dollar souvenir in my lap to twist the knife and then run off to whatever new adventure awaited him. When we got a little older, he started bringing home a procession of impossibly beautiful girls. He’d knock on my door and announce, ‘This is Crystal’ or ‘Marian’ or ‘Katrina,’ or whatever the fuck their names were in virtually the same tone he’d use to announce purchasing a new pair of shoes. Meanwhile, I hardly got to leave the house save for the odd specialist’s appointment. At one point, I developed a vitamin D deficiency and ended up looking like Gollum. Of course, my life’s not so horrible; it’s not as though I have some terminal degenerative disease, I’ve just developed a rather potent fear and distaste for the outside world.”
“I treated someone with OI once. Type IV. He had it a lot worse than you, though. Crutches, back brace, the whole nine yards.”
“Really? What happened to him?”
Freya frowns and looks away.
“Ah…” says Jack. “Enough about the waiting room of my youth. I believe it’s your turn to share your origin story.”
“Origin story?”
“Yes. The moment of truth that made you who you are today. The radioactive spider to your Peter Parker. The gamma bomb to your Bruce Banner.”
“If I’d grown up reading comic books I’d be far more pro-nuclear power. They make nuclear radiation look like Popeye’s spinach.”
“You’re stalling.”
She smiles and looks at his eyes, which despite the medical explanation have an almost mystical allure for her. “I’ve told you about Valerie, and now I’m about to share this with you. I hope you know that means something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. But something.”
He nods and squeezes her hand. Once. Gently.
“When I was a kid, I had this doctor called Dr Moo. I’m not kidding, that was his actual name. As in, ‘The cow says…’ I always felt sorry for him, and not just because he had a name like a bass player in a seventies funk band. I mean, surely somewhere in those years of medical instruction they could find time to squeeze in one twenty-minute session entitled ‘Your future life as a doctor: is it time for a name change?’
“Anyway, Dr Moo had the dubious pleasure of being my family doctor ever since the age I figured out that Play-Doh is a wonderful recreational substance and not a brightly coloured source of nutrition. Over the years, I witnessed his hair receding as his waistline expanded. I watched the photos on his desk slowly metamorphose from smiling portraits of himself and his big-bellied bride to a wife and proud child, to wife and child grinning with haphazard teeth, holding a small bundled-up baby sister, and finally his current photo, of him with two teenage daughters and a very noticeably absent Mrs Moo. Whether she passed away or lives on another man’s desk, I can’t say. I’ve never had the guts to ask.”
“Maybe he thinks the same things about you. Wonders if that weird red-headed girl he treats has a good credit rating, a boyfriend, or a drug hab
it.” Freya shrugs.
“I could answer all of those questions with a two-letter word. It’s strange, isn’t it, the way we keep people at arm’s length, relegated to specific roles in our lives? As if the sole purpose of their existence is to appear as a recurring role in our narratives? I can only imagine the grief I’ve brought Dr Moo over the years, but at least I feel safe knowing I’ve helped advance his career. After all, not many doctors get first-hand exposure to a condition like mine. I was eight when he wrote his first paper on me. I remember he gave it to my family to read, and I saw it had my name on it. I figured it was some kind of weird art book. I drew a bunch of unicorns with bats’ wings all over it. I had a thing for bats.
“When Mum told me those pages were very important grown-up documents I expected her to get mad, to start shouting and waving her arms around like one of those giant inflatable figures you see out the front of car yards. But she and Dad just sat at the table with their eyebrows furrowed, staring at the paper as though some evil genie was about to pop out of it. They weren’t touching it, or even moving. The silence was horrible.”
Freya pauses, watches Jack’s hand reach for hers, then retreat. He taps his fingers against the tiles.
“The first time it happened, I was eight years old. I’d been waiting in line—it was about ten kids long—to show my homework to the teacher. I was an impatient little thing. I decided I’d water the flowers while I waited, which was one of our class jobs. I also decided I’d move them onto the windowsill so they could get some more sunlight. I was a short kid, so I was really reaching. On tiptoes and all that.
“I was trying to lift this thing that was way too heavy with my arms that were way too short, and Mr Christopher Rumples Worthington CXI—my teddy bear—was at my feet, and I was reaching, reaching and then someone in the music room next door started playing the trombone. The next part I remember vividly, almost as though it’s happening right now. There were these huge splotches of bright blue that started appearing, like colourful little clouds. With each note, they materialised and then vanished again in this strange procession. I was trying to watch the little coloured clouds, trying to touch them, and I lost my balance. I fell back and screamed. Mr Stevenson came running over as the vase smashed all over the floor.
