by J M Donellan
She wipes her mouth daintily as she whispers, “Okay, enough with the Barbie and Ken act, can we get back to sorting out the cyclone-scale mess that is my life, please?”
He nods before saying, “Sure, that’s enough for now, but remember: personal life, low voice. And I’ll have to throw in a few more comments during the evening.” He calls the waiter over and they order the most expensive items on the menu, in raised voices. The waiter commends them on their excellent choices and scurries to the kitchen.
“Jesus, Cal, I can’t believe these stupid companies pay you to go into places like this and yell about their crappy overpriced products.”
“Lab geeks have proved that pretty young people like us are influential. Be thankful, it’s paying for the ridiculously pricey meal that you’re about to eat. You didn’t complain when I took you on that wine tour flashing our Cartier watches around, did you?”
“Yeah, but we had to give those back.”
“They were three thousand apiece, Frey, and you got to enjoy the four hundred dollars’ worth of wine you drank, and spilt, so quit your moaning. Now tell me, what’s this week’s catastrophe?”
Freya leans in close and says, “You remember how Jane had that weird job offer for me?”
“Yes, you said it sounded strange? What’s the deal?”
“Looking after this comatose guy, changing drips, shaving, bathing, rolling him so he doesn’t get bedsores, basic stuff. I could do it in my sleep. But the pay is ridiculous, plus it’s under the table so I don’t have to pay tax and I get to live in a gigantic mansion.”
“What about your lease?”
“Jane’s going to move into the apartment. She said she’s sick of her stoner housemates playing Call of Duty until three in the morning and wants her own place.”
“So, what’s the catch?”
“Well, the family I’m working for, that I’ll be living with…they’re a little eccentric. That’s what you’re supposed to call rich people, right? Words like ‘nuts’ and ‘bonkers’ are reserved for the plebs, rich people are always ‘eccentric.’ And they are very, very rich. Their place is the kind of joint that Kubla Khan would have lived in if he’d had a little more cash to throw around.”
Callum’s face contorts in confusion. “Cooblah who?”
“Kubla Khan? The historical subject of Coleridge’s most famous poem?”
He shrugs and shakes his head.
“How did you manage to get a perfect 7.0 GPA in Media Studies without ever reading a book? Books are media.”
“Books come from an era when people lost their teeth in their thirties, scientists thought the Earth was flat, and doctors treated mental illnesses by drilling holes in people’s skulls. I’m interested in media with more contemporary relevance.”
“Right, and a future where undergrads dissect the inner meanings of the tweets of Hollywood celebs is going to be such an improvement.”
“Listen, I don’t make fun of what you do. Nor the fact that you are so caught up in the past that you don’t pay enough attention to the present.”
“I’m a healer, I help ease pain and suffering.”
“Oh, you’re so right, honey, the power steering is magnificent!” he exclaims loudly, before dropping back into a conversational tone. “Remind me again, how many testicles did you shave during your prac?”
“Point taken.”
The waiter arrives and fills their glasses with a 1983 Cabernet Sauvignon that Callum has chosen based purely on its ludicrous price tag. The waiter smiles with a cold, professional lack of mirth and then continues on with a nod.
“So, this ‘eccentric’ family? Anyone I would have heard of?” he asks, raising his glass to his lips.
“The Vincettis?” Freya says.
He leans in close and whispers, “Frey, are you fucking insane?”
“Why?”
“Freya, you just chastised me for not reading novels. Have you never read the Financial Review, or the business section of any newspaper?”
“Cal, you know how much I make. Me reading the business section would be like a homeless guy reading the property guide.”
“The Vincettis! Jesus, they’re in the papers so frequently they should have their own column. They make Rupert Murdoch look like a private-school boy with a moderate-sized trust fund.”
“Cal, stop fucking around and tell me what you know about them.”
“I know that you could have found a lot better people to work for. Like the Sopranos, for instance, or Charles Manson.”
“Oh, come on, let’s not be so hyperbolic. What have they actually done?”
Callum leans back and announces, “I know! I heard Brad Pitt drives a Lexus too!” He leans closer and says, “Might be easier to list what they haven’t done, Frey.”
“Quit fooling around, you jerk, and give me some dirt.”
“Honestly, I’ll never drive another car again. I feel like I’ve been behind the wheel of go-carts all my life!”
“Would you cut the product placement proselytising for five goddamn minutes?”
Callum drains his wine, then notices for the first time a blond woman in a potent red dress at the next table casting her eyes up and down his frame. He returns her smile and raises his glass to her. She winks and then throws a contrived smile in the direction of her dinner date as he returns from the bathroom.
“Cal? When you’ve finished eye-fucking that blonde, I could use a little help here.”
“Sorry, part of the job. Okay, I’ll tell you what. I’ve got to slip to the bar and make a little noise there for a few minutes. Why don’t you go to the little girls’ room and powder your nose or whatever, then come back and we’ll talk about exactly what kind of trouble you’re in.”
Freya heads to the bathroom and locks herself in a cubicle. Something about the tarnished silver lock on the door reminds her of the hideous charm bracelet Valerie insisted on wearing every day of her criminally short existence. She remembers every facet and angle of the doctor’s face in the emergency room. The stupid thick platform sneakers he was wearing, the irritating monotone in his voice as he pronounced, “She’s dead.”
Her wrist begins to burn and itch in that same place it always does when she gets stressed. She peels off her glove and scratches at the irritated skin. She lets the salty stream of tears travel down her face, cursing the fact that this will require extensive makeup repair work. She rips away a fistful of toilet paper, pulls out her compact mirror and dabs at the black rivers. A few minutes later she emerges and begins to do a few final touch-ups in the giant mirror. The granite benchtop is cool against her hand.
A teenage girl in high heels opens the bathroom door, teeters towards her and then staggers forward. Freya grabs quickly at her hand to steady her. The girl glances at Freya’s wrists as she pulls her upright. Her gaze hovers on them for a few moments before she looks up at Freya and says, “Thanks, I’m such a klutz in these stupid heels. My mum says they make me look like a lady, and then she won’t even let me drive the Jag. She makes me wear ’em whenever we go to these stupid swanky restaurants filled with posh jerks. No offence.”
Freya smiles and says, “None taken.”
The girl examines her reflection in the mirror and fidgets with her hair awkwardly before turning back to Freya and asking, “So, are you like an ex-emo or something?”
“What? Shit!” Freya scrambles for her gloves and wrenches them over her scars.
“No! Hey! I’m sorry, lady. I didn’t mean anything by it. My friend Megan, she cut herself a few times, too. She had to go see a shrink and everything. Her dad’s kind of an arsehole. He ran off with some skank last summer, thank Christ. Stupid bitch was only a couple of years older than me and Megan.”
Freya shakes her head and finishes putting on the last few touches of eyeliner. “It’s not like that. I’m not a cutter. O
r emo, or whatever. It’s just…I had an accident. There was cake. Everything went red for a while. And now I hate pineapple cutters.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Listen, I hope your friend Megan’s okay. And don’t wear high heels if you don’t want to. Especially if you’re drinking. Not that you should be drinking. Um…okay…well, it’s been nice talking. Stay in school, don’t do drugs, always recycle and…um…never fall in love with a vampire.”
The girl laughs and says, “Got it. Thanks.”
Freya reemerges into the restaurant and spies Callum leaning against the bar chatting to the blonde who had been eyeing him earlier. She strides over and grabs him by the arm, hissing, “Don’t you think we should be getting back to our meal, honey?”
“Well, I’d best be going,” Callum’s admirer says as she treats Freya to a smile that is more a baring of teeth than an expression of warmth, before flashing her eyes at Callum. “So lovely to meet you.”
“Seriously, how can these women not tell that you’re gayer than a San Francisco Kylie Minogue fan convention?” Freya moans as they walk back to their table.
“I can’t help it if I’m a great actor, Freya, and I told you that flirting is highly encouraged. People are much more susceptible to suggestion when they are enamoured.”
“Actor? Puh-lease, you’re an overpaid product pimp. You’re the call-now-for-just-$9.95-with-bonus-kitchen-knives guy, but with better dress sense. Now can we please talk about the Vincettis? What are they supposedly infamous for?”
Callum refills their glasses as the waiter arrives with their food. He places a sliver of barramundi in his mouth and chews it thoughtfully. “The Vincettis have been accused of everything from falsifying drug reports to political bribery to harbouring war criminals to running sweatshops that mysteriously burn down the day before an audit. The Halcyon empire is right up there with the Palmers and the Murdochs in terms of wealth, but their influence reaches way back to the mid-nineteenth century. And although the bulk of Halcyon’s business is in pharmaceuticals, they also make clothes and electronics and manage finance, media, and property.
“It’s a well-known fact, by everyone besides you apparently, that back in the eighties—the golden era of corruption—the Vincettis practically ran this city. It was rumoured they owned half the illegal casinos, although no one could ever prove it, not even during the Fitzgerald anti-corruption inquiry. Some people say they’re Mafia, or Freemasons, even Scientologists. A few kooks claim that they’re Illuminati. A lot of it’s bullshit, naturally, but there are so many conspiracy theories about that family that even if ninety-nine percent of them are completely bogus, they’re still people you’ve got to watch out for.”
Freya’s face colours with a blend of concern and scepticism. “That’s the same logic that UFO freaks use to justify taking out anti-abduction insurance policies. People love making up crazy theories about the rich and famous. It makes the rest of us feel marginally better about being poor schmucks who can’t get into the VIP lounge at the airport. Have they ever been convicted of anything?”
Callum chews, swallows, and fixes Freya with a serious glare before continuing as though he’s presenting a tutorial on white-collar crime to an undergraduate class. “Corporate criminals don’t get convicted, Freya. They get accused, investigated, deferred trial, acquitted, settled out of court, or fined, but never convicted. No one goes to prison. You have to be part of an Enron-level fiasco to actually get sentenced, and in that case one of them, the CEO, Ken Lay, died before he went to prison. And George W. Bush still claimed the bastard as one of his closest personal friends.
“If you walked out of this restaurant right now and robbed a petrol station with a handgun they’d give you at least ten years, but that’s blue-collar crime. If you set up a corporation that steals the life savings of three thousand little old ladies and use it to finance a sweatshop in Indonesia, you get a lengthy trial that you show up to in a suit once every couple of months before passing everything onto a scapegoat or, worst-case scenario, spending a few years in a minimum security facility that’s more like a resort than a prison. Just because they’ve never had some guy with a wig and a gavel yell ‘guilty’ at them doesn’t mean they aren’t. Take that arsehole Wilson Davies who got poisoned the other night. He was linked to sixteen different companies under investigation, but they could never land anything on him because he always pushed everything onto some guy lower down the food chain.”
Freya recalls seeing the photo in the newspaper of a half-naked man sprawled across the floor, limbs at unnatural angles, blood pooled around his face. “He’s the guy found paralysed in a brothel?”
“Yep, someone poisoned his personal stash of Everlastine™, and now it looks like he’ll never move again. The same thing happened to the human test subjects for the beta product in Cambodia a few years back.”
“Seriously? I may not read the business section, but how did I not hear about that?”
“Little brown people who don’t speak English don’t warrant a lot of prime-time news exposure. That slot’s usually jam-packed with celebrity love affairs, right?”
Freya nods in resigned agreement, then takes a moment to drain her glass, returning it to the table with a heavy thunk. “You think the Vincettis are really as bad as that Wilson guy…responsible for killing people?”
“Hard to say. You can operate a company that provides alibis for fucking around on your partner because that’s technically legal, but you pull a stunt like insider trading and the suits will throw you to the dogs. Like I said, the Vincettis have never been convicted of anything, but they’ve been accused of a hell of a lot. Are you comfortable working for people like that?”
“I don’t know. I’m not working for them, really. I’m looking after this guy who’s incapable of doing so himself. It’s not Elijah’s fault if his parents are drug-dealing, sweatshop-owning corporate criminals, is it? He still needs someone to look after him. He’s so…frail and vulnerable.”
“Elijah?”
“The guy in the coma. You should see him, Cal, he looks so strong yet helpless at the same time. Like a living statue—so serene.” There’s a trace of wistfulness in her voice she hopes Callum hasn’t noticed. If he has, he fails to comment.
“I’ve heard of him. He’s supposed to be the family’s outlier, the saint among the thieves. He donated a whole lot of money to Amnesty International a while back. The tabloids lapped that up. How’d he end up in a coma?”
“I wish I knew. They keep the whole thing pretty tightly under wraps, made me sign confidentiality forms and everything.”
“Which you’re obviously doing a marvellous job of adhering to.”
“Puh-lease! Like I could keep my big mouth shut to my best friend about something as weird as this. Of course, it goes without saying that if you whisper a word of it to anyone I will stab you right in your pretty face.”
“Naturally. Which reminds me: I love feeling the wind on my face when I drive with the top down in my new Lexus!”
***
Freya opens the door and trips gracelessly as she steps inside. She places her heels next to the umbrella stand, then goes into the kitchen and fills a glass with vodka, soda, and ice. She swirls it gently in her hand before drinking. She walks down the hall, each creak and footstep loud against the night silence.
She enters her cupboard-sized studio and slips on one of her paint-splattered T-shirts. She sips from the vodka with her left hand and takes a paintbrush in her right. Careful not to smear the stereo with paint as she presses play, she waits until the chaotically coloured sounds of Messiaen’s Turangalîla fill her ears and bring the familiar harlequin clouds swimming before her eyes. She is curiously comforted painting while listening to the music of a man who, like Kandinsky, had the same condition as her.
She transfers the polychromatic waterfalls cascading in front of her pupils onto
the canvas with slow, measured strokes. The wash of white is gradually transformed into a vibrant, stained-glass sea. When she is satisfied that her hand is too tired to wield the brush any longer, she strips down and throws her clothes in the hallway and steps into the shower.
Freya watches the colour run off her skin and swirl down the drain, then dries off and pulls on her pyjamas. She takes a slender, well-worn volume from her bookshelf and collapses on the bed. Her fingers run up and down its battered spine. There on the cover is the face whose contours she has committed to memory, every curve and wrinkle, every fault and facet. She remembers the first time she read the title: Notes on Nursing: What it Is and What it Is Not. By Florence Nightingale.
It had grabbed her by the throat and shoved her nose between its pages. She had checked it out from the library fourteen times before her father finally bought a copy of her very own.
Freya opens to a random page: “Every nurse should be capable of being ‘confidential’…she must be no gossip, no vain talker: she must, I need not say, be strictly sober and honest…” Freya closes the book and stares around the room at her paintings, all cacophonic messes of light and colour.
“Thanks for nothing, Florence.” She turns to the front of the book and reads the note her younger self inscribed so many years ago. As her eyes scan those clumsily scrawled words for the hundredth time, a smile creeps across her face:
Dear growned up Freya, this is you wen you were little, only eight and three qurters (witch is more than half but less than a hole) old. I am writing to you to re-mind you that being a nurse and making people betterer is the most imporantest thing in the world. Pleas remember to grow up to be a great nurse and not decide to becom sumthing boring liek a bank lady or a car selling person becos that would make me cry. You shold go somewhere where there are lots of poor peepul who really need nurses and help them like maybe Africa or Papua New Guinea Pig or some other place what I havunt learned about yet because I havnt learnt all the cunt-trees but is still really poor and has lots of sick people. Pleas read this book lots of times just liek me and remember to be liek Florents Nightingail.