Page 69 of The Bargain

“How romantic. Don’t go falling for me now, love.”

And she’d smirked back, a rictus pained enough to mirror mine.

“I would never do anything so abysmally fucking stupid.”

26

Poster Boy

Desdemona

The first thing I see when I enter the ballroom of the Savoy—once we get past the red carpet, the bursts of camera flashes and the police officers holding back the few protestors waving placards condemning austerity and decrying “Abolish the parasite class!”—is Elias’s face.

Not the Elias I know, though.

This version of Elias is small and thin. I’ve only ever known Elias to be slim and sinewy, muscle and bone and skin with no fat to cushion or soften his features, carved cheeks and prominent cheekbones and networks of veins visible on the surface of his hands. But that’s nothing compared to what he used to look like.

My throat closes up tight. I can’t bear to look—looking is so hateful that my eyes burn. I have to fight the urge to turn my head, drop my gaze, blink away the sting of tears.

In the photographs displayed across the walls, silver spotlights to make them stand out amongst the moulded gilding of the walls and cornices and the amber up-lights, Elias is sitting in school cafeterias, a half-full plastic tray in front of him, his gaze sad and curiously empty.

In some of the pictures, he’s not even ten years old—or looks like he’s not. Maybe that’s just what malnutrition and neglect do to a child. In some pictures, he’s in a threadbare PE kit, the shorts too small, the T-shirt too large, the shoes frayed. His bony legs are splattered with mud, and his chest, underneath the hand-me-down shirt, seems almost concave. His hair, thick and unruly and dark, falls over a pale forehead. His eyes are serious and unsmiling and a little vacant, like he’s not quite inhabiting his body.

Interspersed among the pictures, in a clean, elegant font, are posters that read: Every child deserves a chance and Save our children.

“God, why can’t rich people have less depressing parties?”

At my side, Elias seems at ease, one arm wrapped loosely around my waist. The warmth of his fingers is almost supernatural, the latent heat of an imploding star reaching me through an impossible distance. When I look up at his face—which still bears that carved, emaciated appearance of his youth—it strikes me as so heartbreakingly beautiful that I feel the tears blossom in my eyelashes before I can even catch my breath.

“Fucking hell, love,” Elias murmurs with a small, rueful laugh. “This your first time attending one of these things or what?”

The gutting, awful truth is that it’s not. I’ve attended many charity galas, each cause more tragic than the last. And I know that every one of them should have affected me the way this one does, but the truth is that I’ve never once felt the kind of pain I feel now. An emotion far deeper than empathy, a horrible, yawning despair not for change in the future—but for a past that’s already long gone.

“Shit—alright, don’t cry, sweetheart.” Elias moves his arm slightly, only just enough to curl me inwards into his shoulder, to discreetly swipe at my tears with a thumb. “I appreciate it, I really do, but think ’bout it.” He gestures over his shoulder. “You really wanna give my fuckwit adoptive parents the satisfaction?”

I look at him, and I can’t even speak. I wish I was a thousand miles away, somewhere so impossibly far from here that this place, this moment, would be nothing more than a fading shadow, a memory long-forgotten. And more desperately than anything, I wish I could take him from here, from the Pearsons and their simpering sycophants and this grotesque place and these obscene photos.

Elias, gazing down at me, pulls me into him.

“God, you’re soft,” he says into my hair, almost affectionately. “You’re supposed to be the impregnable, scary head girl, remember?” He laughs, the exhalation of it tickling my cheek. “C’mon, let’s go look at the less depressing pictures.”

He leads me through the crowded ballroom, past men and women in thousand-pound tuxedos and designer gowns, the air glistening with their jewellery and watches and diamonds. He pauses here and there, smiling for a photographer or shaking the hand of someone who wishes to congratulate him on his good fortune or to praise him for what he’s had to survive.

“I’d be nothing without the generosity of the Pearsons,” he says glibly to an aged duchess.

“You two must love each other very much,” the duchess says, a hand pressed to her chest upon which an enormous sapphire gleams like a bulbous blue eye.

I know I’m expected to say something, to recite a quotable line just like Elias is doing so obediently, but I can’t bring myself to say a word, struck through to the very heart by the monstrosity of the situation, the sheer mockery of it.

“Being with Desdemona is like a dream,” Elias says to the duchess. “Every day that goes by I wonder what’ll happen when I wake up.”

The duchess lets out a sympathetic squeal, but Elias is already wheeling away, fingers pressed into my waist. We come to a stop at the top of the ballroom, where soon, all these people will come to drop their donations like the faeces of replete birds, Elias’s entire personhood ground into unrecognisable mush for them to easily digest.

“There, look. Better, no?”

I look up at the photograph Elias is gesturing towards.

It’s him at sixteen—the age he was when I first saw him. He’s wearing the Spearcrest uniform, the iconic crest stitched on the breast pocket of the blazer. In this photograph, his dark hair is shorter, combed back. His skin is clean and glowing, and he’s smiling so wide you can see all his teeth.