If Achilles was dipped in the River Styx as a child in order to attain invulnerability, then Felix Desdemona surely was beaten half to death by a horseshoe in his youth, such was the unbridled fortune which blessed his early years. Whether or not his parents prophesied his meteoric rise and named their son by this auspicious divination, it is without argument that Felix navigated his infancy, adolescence and young adulthood with implausible fortune. On the day he departed his mother’s womb, his father found a winning lottery ticket on the floor of the hospital waiting room and the next day the Desdemona family became multi-millionaires. At the tender age of three months, he escaped the watches of his babysitting grandmother and attempted to descend the long flight of steps in their new country house. He smashed his head innumerable times. The astounded paediatrician found no traces of skull damage or any signs of injury whatsoever. His parents called him their little lucky charm; national newspapers nicknamed him Superbaby. Not once over the next five years did young Felix visit a doctor or a hospital. By the time he was six, his father was a highly-successful venture capitalist and his mother realised her lifelong dream of becoming a published writer, penning a line of popular mystery titles. Felix took up cricket at an early age and the only time he was ever out in an innings was when he became bored on the field and kicked his own wicket on purpose. If anything went wrong in his childhood, the unending luck created an arrogant, reckless and conceited individual who was unaware of the plights and tribulations of the common person.
At fourteen, Felix had become a revered figure at school. He attracted the boys and girls equally. The closest to him were not friends, but a circle of followers, and he led them on dangerous adventures every week. They took faith in his unlimited good fortune and repressed their own fears -- the confidence of Felix was so overpowering they could do nothing but agree with what he suggested.
One Wednesday morning, Felix was bored, as always, throwing stones at pigeons in the quad, invariably breaking wings with unerring accuracy. He stopped after a while and turned to his sycophants, who cautiously awaited a chance to outdo their counterparts and demonstrate the greatest degree of deference. “This is dull. Let’s go play a trick on Rhubarb Face, the tedious old bastard. He needs a bit of excitement to spice up his boring existence.” Rhubarb Face was the moniker Felix had created for the ancient Mr. Woodward, whose cheeks were permanently a deep pink, and taught the children History.
In their hearts the flatterers cried out in united wariness. But the pressure of the group is always greater than the principles of the individual, and all the followers grinned and nodded with false pleasure. Only Snail, the small, frail boy, two years the younger of Felix, who was a newcomer to the pack of minions, expressed reservations. Snail was the nickname Felix had attributed to the boy, who was unable to prevent a steady stream of mucus oozing from his nostrils daily. “B-but F-Felix,” Snail whispered, “Mr. Woodward is still sick from his accident. A fright could hurt him!” The accident the headmaster had told them all about was a heart attack which occurred two months ago while Mr. Woodward was cooking a casserole in his kitchen.
There was a collective, audible intake of breaths by the rest of the group.
Felix sighed, and clouted Snail across the back of the head. “Don’t be such a bore, Snail. Nothing will go wrong. Nothing ever goes wrong.”
Snail whimpered and his eyes grew scared. His mind was conflicted between impressing his idol and the sensible nature his parents had tried to imbue in their child.
“Well whatever, Snail, we’re going either way. You can stay here and cry if you’d like. Just don’t go telling. Nobody likes a grass,” Felix sneered, and walked briskly towards the outside window of the office of Rhubarb Face.
The group slithered away after him. Snail let out a little sob and ran in pursuit, knowing he was doing the wrong thing but, too desperate for Felix to like him, let all his good intentions disappear without a trace.
They gathered underneath the windowsill hidden from view. Felix, with a snigger, picked Snail to be the one to tap on the window to draw Rhubarb Face towards the threshold. Under the fierce stares of the group, he could do nothing to resist. His innards twisted, but he forced his shaking hand to clatter on the glass. He withdrew it sharply. They could hear no indication of movement from inside the room, only a deep spluttering cough. When nothing happened again, one of the older boys hit Snail hard on the right arm. Snail acquiesced and repeated the knock, harder this time, twice. The unmistakeable scraping of a chair and the shifting of feet on the floor pre-empted the inquisitive words of Mr. Woodward. “What the devil?”
The windowsill protruded far from the wall and the poor sight of Rhubarb Face prevented him from noticing the small crowd of schoolboys hidden beneath him. He squinted instead at the far sides of the quad, looking for the origins of the noises from other quarters. Just as he was about to forget all about it and return to his reading on Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, Felix sprang up and shouted with the full force of his voice. The attack caught Rhubarb Face utterly off-guard and he countered with a high-pitched shriek, before stumbling backward and hitting the floorboards with a sickening crunch. The group zoomed away like a swarm of bees and scattered to every available exit. Everyone made it inside before the curious eyes of the headmaster, who had been passing by in an adjacent corridor, except the unfortunate Snail. His clumsy right foot had caught on a tree root and he’d fallen badly to the ground. The headmaster angrily grabbed Snail’s arm and pulled him away to his office, while other teachers hasted to the aid of Rhubarb Face. Felix, fawned on equally by many of the staff, was never implicated and slipped away with no suspicion. Snail was suspended for his treatment of poor Mr. Woodward and later withdrawn from school by his deeply conservative Anglican parents. Mr. Woodward himself did not suffer any further heart problems but twisted his ankle and hurt his head in the fall, developed a phobia of schoolchildren and was never able to teach again.
*
Four years later, Felix surprised everybody and resisted the advice to enter university. Over-enthusiastic mentors had proclaimed his rise to the Prime Minister’s office as inevitable. But instead of further education, he invested arbitrarily in any company that caught his interest, ignoring his father’s considerable experience. Within a year he had quadrupled his already significant wealth. He became a national celebrity and took up residence in a vast apartment in London near Kensington Gardens, where a string of beautiful and famous women were photographed entering and exiting at all hours. Some said he was the luckiest man in the world. He became acquainted with the young hip circles of the city before opening a chain of trendy clubs, which became infamous for attracting vast numbers of celebrities and paparazzi like leeches. Nothing Felix touched went awry. By the age of 20, he was the most successful person of his generation.
His father died of a heart attack while playing golf. His mother, distraught by her husband’s death, slipped into a circle of depression and eventually committed suicide by drowning himself in the River Thames. Felix, who assumed he loved his parents but like most children had never considered it consciously, suffered an unfamiliar sense of emptiness at their death. Since his move away to London he had barely seen them, and felt a little guilt at not going home more, but in all truthfulness, his relationship with his parents had been perfunctory rather than willing. Nonetheless, for the first time in his life, he felt an acute sense of confused pain.
He tried to fill his new vacant feeling with faith. Felix attended church once a week, and looked for unconditional love from God, who he had never believed in till now. The source of his luck could only be from the Almighty himself. He was Chosen by his Lord. It steadied him in the aftermath of his parents’ death. But it was not everything. The emptiness did not disappear by reading the Bible and his new ways. He began to feel envy at the married couples that came to church, with their small children, and watched how they laughed and glowed, incandescent with a mysterious happiness. Although Felix understood their lives were not always so tranquil, these brief moments he spied imbued in him an inextinguishable desire to experience the same as them. The jealousy grew in him like a tumour.
He hated and misunderstood love. How elusive and incomprehensible it all was. Sex was enjoyable but he realised it was not everything. And so he prayed to God and asked him for love.
He hired a new assistant. Freya -- a pretty, intelligent girl -- was too studious and strait-laced for Felix, who favoured wild women but for some reason he approved her over countless other applicants. Over time, Freya became his only confidant, the only person who he talked to about life. She was his first ever true friend.
“What do you want in life, Felix?” she asked, over a bottle of wine one evening after work. They sat in the garden of his new purchase, a tall and classical house. Peach clouds floated in an azure sky as the sun began to set. Felix had learnt that alcohol never made him embarrassingly drunk, so he enjoyed the varied tastes of different grapes. He considered her question. It was hard for him to find an answer, because everything he ever did was based on instinct, rather than rational though. Something had always stirred him towards a purpose. When he had to think, his thoughts were muddled.
“I have everything I want. I am richer than almost anyone. I can have any woman I want. I am the most famous man in London; everyone either wants to be me, or be with me,” he said, although the confidence was not altogether natural. “What could I possibly need?”
“Friendship? Love? Are you truly happy?” Freya asked, staring deep into his eyes. Her small hand crawled across the table and found his. “Do you not see anything past sex and money?”
Felix did not know what to say. Freya always made him feel like this – unsure, lost, and stupid somehow. She managed to exploit his weaknesses and turn him fragile, like no-one else ever did. Everyone he had ever known had grovelled to him, telling him how brilliant he was, never with a word of negativity. He moved his hand away from hers and finished his glass of wine, before pouring another. “I am happy. I always have been,” he said, lying.
She saw straight through it. “You don’t believe that, Felix. There is something beneath all your cool, calm exterior. I know it. Every so often I see snippets and glances, but you hide it, scared to show anybody you might not be perfect. You might be extraordinarily lucky, but luck is not equivalent to happiness. You’re scared. Scared to show anything of yourself. You’ve never had to.”
Felix lit a cigarette and ignored her for several minutes, smoking in awkward silence.
He realised he had an incredible desire to sleep with Freya. On her first day she had made it explicit that a level of decorum should be maintained in a professional workplace when Felix had tried to flirt. Her propriety made her unattainable. And in that she became more alluring than ever. He gazed at her diminutive blue eyes.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered, her voice stammering, her hands shaking.
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to have sex with you, Felix,” she said with a hardened tone, though she was visibly nervous. “I’m not that kind of girl. You can’t throw your lucky dice and make me take my clothes off.”
Felix, for a brief second, felt shame. “I didn’t expect--”
“Don’t. Ever.”
“Freya, it’s not like that,” Felix said, and found himself in a situation he had never experienced. He was not sure what to do. His confidence vanished. “I love this time I spend with you. You’re ... you’re the only person who cares for me, now my parents are gone.”
Freya looked away from him and couldn’t meet his glare. Felix realised she was crying, and felt even more lost. It was in that confused moment he realised he knew next to nothing about life or people. The unknown scared him more than anything else. He placed his hand on hers again and they watched the sun fall beyond the horizon in a blaze of peach and orange.
*
Felix and Freya fell in love. It was fast and bewildering and new and beautiful and scary. In a matter of weeks they became so close they were inseparable. The newspapers lost interest with the newly reclusive Felix Desdemona, who spent his days talking and laughing with his assistant. They spent weekends in the country, lying all day in bed, making love, drinking wine and smoking. Engulfed in one another, they forgot about everything else. Nothing else mattered anymore. Freya introduced Felix to literature, and poetry, and music, pleasures he had always given no thought to, considering them a waste of time. One night, with Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites sweetly floating in their ears, they read poems to one another.
Freya had just finished one and Felix felt entranced. “That just seems to say everything I feel in the most eloquent way possible. “My heart broke loose upon the wind ... it’s perfect. I know he’s talking about finding poetry, but it has such a parallel. Who was it again?”
“Pablo Neruda. It’s even more elegant in the original Spanish,” she said, and kissed him. “But my parents thought it better to teach me French.”
“Don’t you think it is crazy I don’t even know where you’re from?” he said.
“Yes,” she replied, placing her arms around his neck. “It’s Norway, for the record.”
“A Scandinavian girl. Lucky me.”
It felt like a hazy dream, where the world paused and let them enjoy unrestricted happiness for a short while, and then would mercilessly, unexpectedly, take it away. A phone call was the beginning of the end. It awoke them from their slumbers one late morning, ringing endlessly from downstairs. Freya murmured for him to leave it, but something compelled him to answer the call and so he jumped half the stairs and picked it up. The woman on the other end spoke with a timid voice. She sounded distraught.
“This is Freya’s mother, I need to speak to her,” she said. Felix took the handset up to his room and handed it to a groggy and half-asleep Freya. He gave them some privacy and went out to smoke. When he came back everything had changed. She was fully-dressed and had a haunted, empty look.
“Darling, what’s up?” he said as he held her close. “What was all that about?”
She spoke as best as she could without breaking down. “My father. He’s ... gone. He’s dead.”
“Oh God,” is all he could reply, and nestled her head deep into his chest, and kissed her on her pale forehead.
Then she packed all her things and booked a plane that night to Oslo. Like that, his world collapsed.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said as they shared a long farewell.
But she didn’t nod. “Felix... I don’t know when I’ll be back. My mother is all alone, and I need to be at home for my family. I’m not sure when I’ll be back to England.”
There was nothing he could say to persuade her to come back; he didn’t even try. She had bigger problems to contend with now. For the first time in his life he experienced the bitter taste of bad luck.
*
Three months later, in a cafe on the bank of the Thames, they shared a bottle of wine. It was Freya’s idea. She had just returned to the country and looked him immediately. They arranged to meet over drinks. Felix was apprehensive, and didn’t tell her he had found someone new – Hayley Reynolds, a stunning actress, who with her wild spirit was the antithesis of Freya.
“I missed you,” she whispered, holding his hand.
“It’s been so long,” Felix replied. In the months since she left, he had returned to residence in London and opened a new publishing business. The natural luck of his earlier years he could no longer rely on and progress had been slow trying to cut into the market. “It was so hard when you left.”
“It was difficult for me too. My father died and I had to leave you when all I wanted to do was stay with you so you could keep me safe,” she said. “I had to go, then, Felix. But what we had ... it was something worth saving. My feelings haven’t changed.”
Felix sighed, and withdrew his hand from hers. “Freya, I wanted to tell you in person. I’m with someone at the moment.” Her reaction was calm. She looked out over the river with a resigned gaze. He continued: “What we had was incredible, but it was so short and rushed, that I never had time to think. It felt like a dream. And when it ended, I went back to reality."
“She won’t love you, you know. Not like I do.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s okay.” Freya said, and rose from her chair. “I don’t think there’s any reason to wish you luck in life, Felix. I just hope you know what to do if it ever disappears.”
The words etched themselves upon his memory. He let her go and finished the wine himself. A week later, Hayley Reynolds was in the arms of a hunky fellow actor, with the romance all over the tabloids. It was the unluckiest he had ever felt. And by the time he realised his utter foolishness, Freya refused to take any of his calls, and never replied to one of his texts, e-mails or letters.
In the darkest corner of his bedroom he hid and cried for the first time in his life.
*
Heartbreak transformed implausible fortune into unexplainable adversity. Everything Felix touched turned not to gold but to ruin. Every stock he had invested his wealth into crashed with impossible bad luck; in the turn of one day, the crash of the markets turned him from an extremely affluent man to a moderately poor one. He faced bankruptcy, forced to sell his properties in London, and his parents’ home, and instead bought a small house on the outskirts to live in. In the blink of an eyelid Felix began to think both God and Love had abandoned him simultaneously. It was not just wealth. One morning, crossing the street to buy the daily paper, Felix was run down by an ambulance and flew twenty feet, crashing heavily into the road. The irony was lost on him. He suffered several broken ribs, internal bleedings and a fractured leg. The recovery was long and arduous, and made even more difficult when he contracted MRSA while in hospital. When a few months later he was discharged, his house had been broken into and vandalised. Brightly-coloured graffiti sprawled unintelligible symbols all over the brickwork. Inside, all the books Freya had given him, with their special messages inside, and her favourite quotes underlined, and her preferred poems marked with little stars, were missing. They had been indiscriminate in their thorough destruction.
The only surviving book he could find was The Divine Comedy by Dante.
He abandoned church, and prayer, and burnt the bible in the fireplace. He raged at how God had forsaken him, how it was his fault Freya was never coming back, how he had ripped the last shreds of fortune from him, how he had cursed his life by making it so imbalanced– what happened to the usual haphazard nature of luck? Why did he have to suffer all the good luck first, only to have it torn away and replaced by disaster?
It continued in unbelievable ways fuelled by his blasphemy. He would cut his fingers on the simplest preparation of food. He could never find his wallet. He ran out of money and realised he had no talents or skills to even attempt to find a job. In his solitude he took to reading Dante and doing nothing else. It was the second part that fascinated him: the descriptions of the seven terraces of purgatory, and the insane nature of such an illogical system. It is a strange that such a deeply religious text moved him more and more towards disbelief. God became a mockery, a ridiculous notion that sounded silly and wishful to Felix, something humans had created to establish order in their lives. But Felix knew the universe was inherently chaotic. There were no other explanations. Nothing or anything ever made any sense. Over the next few weeks he slipped into a devastating sickness. Although he had no money to buy food anymore, his body would reject anything he tried to force down anyway. He felt nauseous and dizzy all day long. His body withered and he became a skinny shadow of a man. By the fourth week he called a doctor.
He was told that his body was shutting down and consuming his organs for an unidentifiable reason, and given one week to live. The doctor prescribed him strong drugs that would numb the pain and allow him to move normally for the last days of his life.
Felix could do nothing but laugh. He knew now that God didn’t exist. He knew it in his heart and in his bones and in his blood. With the last seven days of his life, he would commit every sin he could and spit on the image of the Almighty. There was no heaven. There was no hell. He would just rot in the ground and nobody would remember him.
*
On Monday he realised it had been six months without sex. Filled with desire, he drove his car out in the evening to the seedy streets of the city, by the pink neon lights and the graffiti. He picked up the first hooker he could find on the corner, followed her inside, and shut his eyes and tried to think of Freya when she lay beneath him, but it was too long ago and her face had faded in his memory. Afterwards, the girl demanded the money, and Felix smiled and said she was out of luck. He beat her to death with the lamp and wiped his hands on the sheets and painted lines of blood.
At the crack of dawn on Tuesday he mugged a businessman waiting for a bus. It was so swift and exhilarating. The murder last night had filled him with adrenaline. Felix went home and found one of the few suits the robbers had left, a dark blue pinstripe. He combed his hair and shaved his beard and went to the most expensive restaurant in the city, and ordered a hamburger for £45, and washed it down with two bottles of champagne, costing £450 each. He ate six other courses and become so full that it hurt, and paid for it all using the stolen credit card. He got blind drunk and started abusing the staff until he was politely asked to leave. His stomach rumbled and he threw the contents of his meal back onto the table in front of him, where it slid and dripped onto the marble floor. When he asked for a refund, a member of the security staff dragged him to the front doors and pushed him into the street. He couldn’t sleep at home because when he got back to his street there was a police car outside his house. In the park, hidden in the bushes, he tried to sleep but could do nothing but think of Freya.
On Wednesday he started the day by saying: “I make my own luck now.” He ignored the advice of his doctor and took more than the recommended four pills a day, swallowing all eight at once. The pain disappeared. He stole a knife and a balaclava from two separate stores, and was almost spotted by a policeman patrolling the streets, but escaped down an alley. He studied his target: a small but luxurious jewellery store. He had noticed they were lax in their security protocols, and safe in the knowledge God was imaginary and the universe was chaotic and luck was a fallacy, he knew that all a man needed to do was seize the moment. In the evening five minutes before closing time he robbed it. He was agile and quick and had the knife at the girl’s throat with lightning speed, slicing it slightly so the blood dripped down onto her outfit, until she unlocked the cabinet and he took his winnings. He had to fight his way out. A brave idiot tried to prevent him escaping but he sliced him across the face and ran out into the street laughing. No-one stopped him after that. At night-time he dumped the gold watches and bracelets and rings into a dustbin and hid in an abandoned warehouse.
By Thursday he lost his mind. He took all the rest of his pills at once and in his paranoid and perplexing state-of-mind he was filled with an overwhelming rage at the universe. There was a park nearby, loud with the cries of children. The sun burned brightly in the warm morning. He liked the way the knife reflected the sunlight so perfectly as he slashed and stabbed and thrust it into the flesh of every human being he could find. They ran but he ran faster and hunted them down like prey and when he had finished his hands and face were covered in sticky, dark blood. As he wiped it from his eyes and was tackled from many sides at once and fell into darkness.
*
He was pronounced too ill to attend court and they shackled him to a solitary bed in a secure hospital guarded day and night.
In his fever the concept of time began to escape him entirely. The drugs they gave him made him drift in and out of consciousness until he was unsure of the differences between dreams and reality, and forget everything, until the only word he could speak was Freya. Freya. Freya.
And then she appeared before him bathed in light like an angel. She had never looked more beautiful.
“Felix? Is that really you? Oh dear Lord...” the woman said and water fell from her eyes. “God , I don’t know what to say, after all this time.”
And he remembered words. They appeared in his mouth from the deep recesses of his memory and he recited them. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
The woman wiped her eyes and stayed quiet for a very long time “Oh Felix what have they done to you? My poor baby. Do you even understand anything I’m saying? I bet you can’t, oh God, I bet you can’t.”
“Freya.”
“Yes, yes, it’s me, I’m here.”
“Freya. Freya. Freyafreyafreyafreyafreya.”
“I love you,” she whispered, and water came from her eyes again. Her image faded and started to slip away. He closed his eyes and whether he fell asleep he wasn’t sure, but her voice continued. “You had a gift. You just used it for all the wrong things. You had all that unlimited luck but you never cared to share it with anyone but yourself, you were so unbelievably selfish ... and when it was taken away, you lashed out at the world for ruining you, but it was your entire fault. God gave you a special gift and you never used it. And in the chance he gave you to redeem your soul you instead slipped into further sin. Goodbye, Felix.”
With the last world he world seemed to shake and move and shift until everything that was blurred transformed into beautiful clarity. The confusion was purged like a cancer. For a brief moment, he remembered everything that had ever been. Starting with his name. Then the enormity of everything he had done and the meaningless of his death swept over him and it was so gut-wrenching he screamed. The noise echoed down the countless corridors. When he stopped, his face was wet with tears. “So sorry, Freya.”
She wasn’t there anymore. He was in the room, alone, close to death. He couldn’t even begin to fathom when she visited, or whether it was really her at all, whether it was all a vivid nightmare, when everything began to blow away like dust.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
And he whispered, scared by resurgent emptiness, for God to save his soul.
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