by J M Donellan
“You have the same name as your brother?”
“My parents wanted the name Elijah for their golden child, and my osteogenesis denied me the throne. Some weird-eyed glass-boned freak carrying the name would have ruined their fantasy world.”
“Your family doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record of honesty. Why should I believe anything you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I can’t make you believe me if you don’t want to. Although you probably don’t have a lot of other options around here.”
“You saying it’s the truth doesn’t make it so. Jesus, Jack. You sleep with me and then I find out you’re hiding weird secrets like this? Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Because I thought you’d get scared about what goes on around here, most of which I don’t understand myself, and I thought you’d want to leave. I don’t want you to go.”
As he has been speaking, his voice has been decrescendoeing from hysterical to mournful to imploring. “I really, really don’t want you to leave.”
She lands the caramel in her mouth and looks at his eyes as she chews, searching for a signal as to whether or not he is lying. He stares back. His eyes, whites tinted with blue, are pleading but sincere.
“I wanted to come after you, to find you. To race out and explain.”
“So, why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t have your number, and I suppose I could have run around town yelling your name but I’m not sure that would have been particularly effective. Also…I couldn’t get…you know, outside.”
“What do you mean?”
“I went to the door, and I looked outside and I wanted to go out, more than I’ve wanted to in years, but then I started thinking about germs and cars and knives and unregistered automatic weapons and industrial accidents and I…couldn’t.”
“Jack, I didn’t realise you had it that bad.”
“I hate it here, but I can’t leave. I can’t.” Jack looks at her and gently places his arm around her shoulder. She leans into him. He feels frail, like papier-mâché.
“But I’m glad you came home.”
“Yes, I’m glad I came home, too.” The word “home” tastes like slightly burnt biscuits.
25
How to Dress for a Funeral
***
Freya feels disgusted with herself for googling “how to dress for a funeral,” but is even more appalled when she finds a plethora of articles devoted to it, including one stipulating that “little boys should be dressed in a suit that looks like Daddy’s.”
1 Dress respectfully. Dark shades and colours are most fitting.
She selects a sensible black dress.
2 An excess of makeup is not considered appropriate.
Freya splashes water on her face and scrubs, but can’t scrub away the black bags beneath her eyes. It feels like weeks since she’s slept well.
3 Consider the temperature and dress accordingly.
She pulls on a pair of elbow-length white gloves, watching her scars slide beneath the silk.
She checks her reflection and tries to calm her battling guilt and anger, then remembers she had promised Niki she’d try to find something belonging to Maria. She pokes her head out into the hallway to scan for any lurking Vincettis, dives out the door and down the stairs. When she reaches Maria’s room she slips inside the open door, trying not to think about the fact that the people who killed her sleep only a few doors away. Trying not to think about what she is going to tell Maria’s family.
There. Shining on the dresser. An old, but polished, silver hairbrush amid a clutter of bobby pins and sewing needles.
She grabs it, runs back to her room and quietly presses the door closed behind her, then enjoys exactly seventeen seconds of brief and blissful calm before a sharp knocking sound interrupts it.
“Freya? Freya, are you ready?”
“Just about!”
Evelyn Vincetti translates this to mean “enter at will” and throws the door open. She is wearing a garishly red dress, potent red lipstick, and a gold necklace that wouldn’t be out of place around the neck of a crunk rapper.
9 Above all, be respectful and discreet rather than ostentatious.
“Hurry up, dear! It’s terribly poor taste to be late for a funeral.”
***
They are painfully, strenuously silent. Harland tries not to look at Evelyn; Evelyn tries to glare at Freya without her noticing; Freya’s gaze is fixed firmly out the window. Their chauffeur, a wiry young man with a finely trimmed beard, glances at them occasionally in the rearview mirror.
“Jack won’t be able to make it. He’s feeling unwell,” Evelyn says for the third time. Harland snorts.
Freya decides the only way she could be more uncomfortable is if a rogue monkey escaped from the zoo, climbed in through the window and started masturbating in front of them.
“And Rosaline and Elijah are coming in the other car,” Evelyn adds, also for the third time. She sighs. “Funerals are always such atrocious affairs, aren’t they?”
The hairbrush in Freya’s handbag feels oddly heavy. Perhaps there would be some justice in beating Lord and Lady Vincetti over the head with it. But no, revenge is a dish that must not only be served cold, but with a pleasant smile.
Several aeons later they arrive at Maria’s brother’s house, where most of the Suarezes are waiting outside amongst a cluster of white-clad tables. Freya steps out of the car and waves a thank you to the chauffeur as her handbag starts singing. She zips it open and takes out her phone. She’s been waiting for this call.
“Hello?”
“I’ve got the results for you.”
“Took you long enough! What kept you? World of Warcraft?”
“Gimme a break. I have an arsehole of a boss who keeps his desk stacked with high fee-paying paternity cases. Criminal investigations, especially freebies, get put on the backburner. You’re lucky I got it done this month, what with all the seventeen-year-old girls checking if it was Joe Plumber or Jim Bartender who knocked them up.”
“You really have to shelve criminal investigations for paternity cases?”
“We’re a private firm. Paternity cases turn over faster and for a higher fee. It’s simple economics: we make more money terrifying young men with the news they’re now fathers than by relieving middle-aged men about the ultimate ends of their daughters. Murder investigations have to take a backseat.”
“Glad to see the system still works.”
“In any case, before I even start asking you about where you got this stuff…”
“Hey—”
“Before I do that, I have the results. The hair samples are from five males and six females. The blood sample matched one of the brunette women. I also ran an auto-check on the samples against our own records, something we do as a default in case there’s a match with one of our past clients.”
“And…?”
“It isn’t good news.”
“Listen, I’m at a funeral. Things can’t get much worse than that.”
“You’re on your phone at a funeral?”
6 Talking on mobile phones is disrespectful. Avoid distractions and focus on celebrating the life of your loved one.
“I don’t have time for your views on funeral etiquette right now, just tell me.”
“Like I said, most of our work is paternity testing, and when I ran the scan I found something in our database from a while back, long before my time. It was eighteen years ago, a paternity case for a Hilary Green.”
“I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“You do, actually. She married the guy…his name was James Thompson. Happy ending, right? And she’d already picked out a name for their kid: Valerie.”
“Valerie Thompson? My Valerie Thompson?”
“DNA don’t tell no lies.”
/> “Jesus brotherfucking Christ!”
“You’ve got a mouth like a sailor from a bad home, you know that? And you owe me big time. I accept cash, cheque, vodka, and sexual favours.”
“I’ll get back to you on that. For now you’ll have to make do with my undying gratitude. Bye.”
Questions hurtle through her head like a litter of kittens in a tumble dryer. She walks over to the nearest table and grabs hold of it to steady herself. Her hands are trembling.
“Señorita, may I offer you a drink?” asks the young Latino behind the trestle table stacked with drinks. Freya appreciates the addition of a makeshift bar at a funeral and wonders why it isn’t standard practice.
“Christ Almighty, can you ever. You know how to make a Moscow Mule? Um…¿moscú mula? No, that’s okay, I’ll do it.” Freya grabs at the various bottles and garnishes required to make her preferred poison as the bartender looks on in bemusement. He says, “My condolences to you. I did not know Señora Maria well, but the Colombians in this city, we keep pretty close together. I met her a few times. She was a strong woman.”
“I’ll drink to that. To Maria!” Freya raises her glass, downs its contents in a few eager gulps and slams it back on the table.
The procession begins to make its way inside the house. Freya follows them, moving through the rows of hired fold-up chairs and choosing one as far away as she can get from the Vincettis. Rosaline and Elijah are at the back of the room, his gurney parked in a quiet corner. Elijah is dressed in a sharp-looking suit with a white carnation pinned to his lapel, causing a few guests to wonder if the funeral party has been double-booked. Maria’s family regards him with a curious mix of disdain and fear. Rosaline pouts and dabs her red-rimmed eyes with a lace handkerchief.
A Colombian priest stands at the front of the assembly and begins the service in rapid-fire Spanish. Freya catches only the odd reference to God and sadness as the words flit past her. A woman in the back row collapses into hysterical sobbing. Freya gently rubs her fingers along her itchy wrists and thinks about the last funeral she attended.
Valerie had looked so beautiful in her red satin dress.
***
“María fue una mujer muy bonita, estaba llena de color y la luz, y ahora ella está muerta…”
“Ah, lo siento, I don’t, ah, more slowly please! I…”
The old man’s dribbled, drunken Spanish washes over her and it soon becomes clear he is not interested in conversing, so much as talking.
11 You are not a grief counsellor, but be prepared to offer a shoulder to cry on.
Freya nods at appropriate intervals and continues drinking. All around her Maria’s relatives and friends are crying and laughing. Candles light the darkened living room and cast an eerie glow over the proceedings. Outside, a guitar is strumming and a group of men are wailing a song with a singularly Colombian melancholy.
Flecks of spit from the old man’s mouth shower Freya’s face. She tries to wipe them away unobtrusively; the Funeral Etiquette Guide had nothing to say about this problem. After a few minutes more of tequila spray and sobbing, she starts to back away. He does not seem to notice. She leaves him talking to a bowl of chips and a tequila bottle and walks outside.
Freya sits on the stairs to the back deck and looks out at the city below. She wishes that she smoked, if only to distract her from thinking that she is sitting on the back steps of a stranger’s house celebrating the wrongly truncated life of Maria Suarez.
“Hi, Freya. I’m so sorry I haven’t had a chance to speak to you.”
“It’s okay, Niki. I understand. You have a beautiful house. This is an amazing view.”
“Thank you. It’s tricky with six of us crammed in, but Colombians are used to that.” She sits next to Freya and swigs from her beer. “I still half-expect to wake up tomorrow morning to the smell of her huevos rancheros.”
A pause. Sipping of drinks. Shuffling of feet.
“Did you get that thing I asked you for?”
“Oh! Yes.” Freya opens her bag and delicately removes the hairbrush.
“My grandmother gave this to her. It’s beautiful, no?”
Niki unwraps the black shawl from around her neck and takes the hairbrush from Freya’s fingers. “Were you wearing those same gloves when you picked this up the first time?”
“I was. Why? Are you worried about fingerprints?”
“You could say that.”
Niki turns the brush over, the moonlight reflects off the silver. “Freya, you don’t know me, but you were a friend to Maria and, to Colombians, a friend of my friend is my friend. La amiga de me amiga es me amiga también. You understand? And I think I can trust you. Would you come for a little walk with me? In the garden?”
Freya follows her through the minefield of bottles littering the grass as Niki leads her to a stone bench hidden behind an immense jacaranda tree. The perfect place, thinks Freya, for kids to hold a secret spy club, or for Satanists to murmur a few incantations.
“Sit here,” Niki says, patting the stone next to her. The seat is cold and hard. The slurs of mourning and singing hover in the night air. Back at the house, a baritone is singing a hoarse but beautiful requiem. “That’s my uncle Jorge singing. He has a magnificent voice. In Bogotá, he could pack out theatres.”
“Those lyrics…it’s about a bird?”
“Yes. Lost dove take your last flight / strange new skies await you / you have lingered too long in earth’s embrace / bright days lay ahead of you. It sounds better in Spanish.”
Niki closes her eyes to drink in her uncle’s words. “My aunty, she may have mentioned this, but all the women in our family, they have something. Well, not exactly the same, but…we call it el regalo especiale.”
“The special gift?”
“Yes. For Maria, she would sometimes have dreams; see things that had not yet happened. I also have this kind of gift, but for me it’s not the same. I can’t see forwards, only backwards. If I have an object someone has touched recently, especially if they were close to me, if they are my blood, then I can sense what they were thinking and how they were feeling when they touched it. I know this sounds strange.”
No more unusual than seeing music as colours.
“I’m going to do a reading, with Maria’s brush. Will you stay with me? When I read an object from my family, the connection is very strong. Sometimes overwhelming. I don’t want to scare you, but if anything bad starts to happen, I want you to grab the brush from my hands. You are a nurse, right? Can I trust you to look after me?”
“Caring for ESP patients isn’t exactly part of the core job description, but sure. Whatever you need.”
Niki smiles warmly at Freya, then straightens her back and breathes deeply, in and out, three times. She starts mumbling a mantra in Spanish, too quiet to be overheard, then lifts the brush between her hands. Her lips cease to move and her whole frame becomes as still as the stone on which they are sitting.
Niki doesn’t even appear to be breathing. Shadows hang on her face like a veil. Seconds swell into minutes yet still there is only silence. Beads of sweat trail down Niki’s face. The brush begins to tremble in her hands. Freya leans in close. She reaches her fingers out to Niki’s cheek and lets them hover a centimetre from her skin. “Niki?” she whispers. Nothing. “Hello? Are you in there?”
Niki’s head snaps back and her hands fling out as though she’s been shot. A hacking, guttural wail vaults out of her throat as her eyes open and she drops the brush onto the grass.
“Niki! Are you okay?”
Niki takes a few seconds to respond. “Yes, I’m fine. More or less. Although my head feels like it’s filled with razorblades and tequila.” She heaves a few breaths and rubs at her forehead, her fingers trembling. Freya tries to put her arm around her, but Niki pats her hand and pushes it away politely but firmly. “You’ve been very good to my fa
mily.”
“It’s the least I—”
“But you’ve also been keeping secrets from us. You know it was not a heart attack that killed her.”
Freya feels like Judas munching on the entrée at the Last Supper. “Niki, I don’t know anything for sure. I think that maybe, just maybe the Vincettis…But I don’t have any proof! Psychic readings of hairbrushes aren’t admissible evidence in a courtroom.”
“Fuck evidence! Mi tía está muerta! I saw it, Freya. I saw her drink that champagne and then fall writhing to the ground. I saw her face wretched with agony and I watched the air escape her chest. What do you expect me to do, sit here and twiddle my thumbs?”
“These are powerful people, Niki. You can’t attack them without proof or they’ll sue you for defamation, take your house and whatever they like. They pull a lot of important strings in this town.”
Niki spits and rattles off a stream of Spanish curses. “If this happened in Colombia, things would be very different.”
“You need evidence. We need evidence. I think the Vincettis did this and plenty more besides. We just need to prove it.”
“How?”
Freya looks at the hairbrush reflecting the pale light of the moon. She bends to pick it up. Despite her gloves, she can feel the metal handle glowing with a gentle, pulsing heat.
Section V
Relapse
***
“I have known patients dying of sheer pain, exhaustion, and want of sleep, from one of the
most lingering and painful diseases known,
persevere, till within a few days of death,
not only the healthy colour of the cheek,
but the mottled appearance of a robust child.”
Florence Nightingale,
Notes on Nursing: What it Is and What it Is Not
***
Excerpt from The Sins of Adonis
Yvette’s incessant whining has been driving me ballistic. If she didn’t have the sexual repertoire of a geisha coupled with the pre-cocaine addiction body of a lingerie model, I would have stopped tolerating her long ago. Does she really expect me to cohabitate with her in some pathetic ode to mediocrity? The whole point of a woman like Yvette even existing is to stir and entice the baser instincts. The silly little tart should stick to what she’s good at.