for Joy
Pride, Wrath, Envy, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth – oh, what a choice!
OLD SINNERS’ HYMN
Contents
1
The apartment was big; and soul-less as an operating theatre. The walls, furniture and carpets were all white, as if the designer had been a graduate of Antarctica Tech. The paintings on the walls offered splashes of colour, but they were so abstract as to suggest burst blood vessels in the eyes of anyone looking at them. There were computers and phones in every room, including the bathrooms, as if the owner must always be available, even during ablutions or bowel movements. It was post-modern.
Errol Magee had no soul; or if he had, it had never bothered him. He had been educated at a private school where brutality by prefects had been considered part of social education and sodomy looked upon as a minor aberration of sexual education. He had been a brilliant student at school and university, his only blemish as an Australian his total lack of interest in sport. An only child, he had lost his parents during his first year at university. Paid-up Australians both, dismayed by his lack of interest in sport, they had taken up bungee-jumping in the hope of inspiring him into some excitement. Unfortunately, during a double-act in New Zealand, their rope had broken and they had plunged to their death in a splash that was like an explosion of their hopes. Errol had been dismayed by their death and its manner, but after six months he was over his grief and not looking back. That was ten years ago.
Now he was trying on his girlfriend’s new Versace dress and jacket. The dark blue silk went with his eyes, which were his most distinctive feature. He was good-looking in an unremarkable way; his looks sort of crept up on an observer. He was short and slim and the outfit, though a little tight, fitted well. Kylie was much the same build as himself, though with more on the upper deck, and he always liked the outfits she bought with his money. He undid his ponytail and let his blond hair fall loose; he looked at himself in the full-length mirror. Not bad, though the dress and jacket would have looked better worn with something else but his black Reeboks. Kylie’s shoes were too small for him and, anyway, he always felt awkward in high heels, tottering around like a drunken drag queen.
He was not a drag queen; nor even a drag commoner. He was not gay nor bisexual nor perverted; he just liked dressing up. Which was one reason why he had never liked rugby at school, though today’s one-day cricketers, in their fancy pyjamas, would have welcomed him. He had never told Kylie that he liked dressing up in her clothes. Everyone, he had read on the internet, had his or her idiosyncrasies, and this was his.
It had been another bastard of a day, everyone disowning the stuff-ups that had occurred. A year ago the stuff-ups had occurred singly and only occasionally; lately they had come in bunches, haemorrhoids of disaster. For almost three years he had ridden at the top of the rainbow, up there with all the other cyberspace millionaires; then the rainbow had begun to fade and he, like so many of the others, had begun to slide. But, because he had always been less vocal than so many of the others, his slide had been less remarked. He was not a modest man, but his mouth and mind were always connected, with his mind in control.
He had come home, glad to find that Kylie was out at another fashion show. She went to more openings than a battlefield surgeon; he occasionally tagged along, but always avoided the flash of the paparazzi’s cameras; he was never there in the miles of smiles in the Sunday papers. He wanted to be alone tonight, to say goodbye to the apartment. His lease ran out in another week and he wasn’t going to renew it. Twelve thousand dollars a month had once been chicken-feed; for a week or two, till he got out of the country, he would be living on chicken-burgers.
Which was what he had brought home for supper. He had eaten while looking at the ABC news, which was all bad news. He had sat in the ultra-modern kitchen, so sterile-looking that one wondered if food would taint it, and the tears had come as they hadn’t since he was six years old when his father had yelled at him for not being able, for Crissake, to catch a bloody cricket ball. The tears were a mixture of self-pity and anger; the world had no right to treat him as it had. He wept for five minutes, then he got up and went into the en suite bathroom and washed his face. When he had come out into the main bedroom he had seen the open cardboard box on the bed, the Versace dress and jacket draped carelessly out of the box like an invitation. It had been enough.
He looked at himself now in the mirror, pirouetting slowly to let the full skirt flower out. Then he had glided, if one can glide in Reeboks, out of the bedroom into the big unlit living room. He drifted slowly around the room, touching furniture and objects as he had seen Loretta Young and Susan Hayward do in Late Late Movies as they said farewell