Read an extract from Somebody Down There Likes Me by Robert Lukins.
Against the backdrop of the last decadent gasps of the twentieth century, the Gulch family have led a charmed existence in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Belle Haven, Connecticut. Now, the empire they have built is on the edge of collapse, and as the decades of fraud and criminality that lie beneath the family's incredible wealth is exposed, the Gulch children are summoned.
Kick Gulch, desperate and broke, is drawn back into the unreal world she thought she'd escaped forever.
Her brother, Lincoln, one of Belle Haven's shining stars, is revelling in its culture of power and excess, and masterminding his ascendancy.
At the head of the family are Honey and Fax, circling each other as the authorities close in. Fax is drawn out of his dream life of drug-fuelled fantasies, while Honey is willing to reshape the world to see what they have built survive.
As tensions rise and conspiracies are forced to the surface, the truth behind the disappearance of Kick's high school friend comes into question, with each of them facing the complicity of their silence.
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HONEY
She puts down the phone. The caterers had taken an age to confirm but all was on track for that weekend’s dinner to be pushed back a fortnight. Honey had thought of cancelling but in the end it seems the smarter move for their social diary to remain populated. They need smart moves, so the dinner with Chuck and Gigi Attlee will appear to be going ahead. The year before Honey had squeezed half a million out of Chuck for the Operation Opera Fund, which of course Gigi took credit for, and so the ego circle jerk had come to a predictable end.
Chuck is a bore of cosmic proportions and Gigi is a ditz in an unamusing way, so pushing them off the calendar’s edge brings Honey a fleeting smile.
The great and unavoidable chore of the benefits, the galas, the nights in celebration, commemoration, honouring, supporting. It was unbearable, always, but an essential and constituent part of doing business and so Honey had accepted it long ago. She would have Fax warned several days in advance and assign a small team to the task of ensuring the man is present, presentable and passably sober. For his part, Fax promised thirty minutes of attendance, in which he would smile, pose and shake hands. At the half-hour mark an assistant would dutifully appear to call Fax away for some regrettable, urgent business matter. Honey would stay and perform the necessary rituals, while projecting her consciousness to the most distant astral plane she could reach. It was an arrangement she and her husband had agreed to years before and executed with surgical precision. The Friday night just gone they had been at the club to raise money for veterans. Someone had thought a musical act essential and so she had been required to sit through forty-five minutes of Eric Clapton and his weaponised monotone. ‘Tears in Heaven’ got the chequebooks open, though. Thinking back, maybe it was veterinarians.
Downstairs, Lincoln finally arrives and is in one of his tiresome, determined moods. He loiters around her, fishing for gossip on Kick’s return and the family meeting. Honey bats him away, and when he heads for the pool she tells a maid to follow and fix him some food. To insist. Lincoln is more compliant and certainly quieter after a peanut butter sandwich.
It’s been that way since he was a toddler. He was always so slow to register his needs. So lacking in self-awareness. Thinking of him hungry stings Honey now just as her child’s troubles always did, though he would never believe it. Her instinct is to worry and it still produces that compression of her chest, just as it did when he would scream as a baby or come home from school heartbroken after all the teasing. He’s forever an infant and she’s forever its mother.
She’s letting herself get distracted.
Honey goes to her office and makes calls. The directors, the officers, the VPs. Despite years of running the company, during which time she has made tens of thousands of phone calls, she still gets this anxious scratch in her throat that needs clearing. Still has to hold herself for a few seconds and become steady. It’s not nerves, why would it be, but it has the same effect. She’s at the steering wheel of a business with sixty-five billion dollars in assets under management but she still has to take a deep breath before calling to change her appointment with the masseuse. There’s the person we’re born and then the person we build.
Honey goes to find Fax and discovers him upstairs in his archive room, which means his mind is deeply elsewhere, so she shakes him by the shoulders to be sure of his attention.
‘I need you to do this right,’ she says.
‘I know.’
‘I need you to be present. Awake, okay? You’re taking the lead here, like we said.’
Fax brings a dumb smile to his face and looks into Honey’s eyes. ‘Like we said.’
He goes back to his desk, where he has photographs and papers laid out across a white surface. She stands by the door as he takes more pictures out of a sleeve. Honey knows better than to look but she catches sight of the black-and-white image of a car overturned in water. Chappaquiddick, for fuck’s sake.
‘Fax, I need you awake for this.’
‘Yes.’
‘The children.’
‘Hmm.’
The front door is open and they are staring at each other from either side of it, Honey and Kick, actors unsure of their cues on the first day of rehearsal. It’s Honey who breaks first, beckoning her daughter inside and indicating for the driver to follow with the suitcase.
‘Come in,’ Honey says. ‘Come, come.’ She raises her hostess smile and puts her hand lightly at the centre of Kick’s back, ushering her into the foyer. Smart moves. ‘I’ve had your room readied for you upstairs. The flight was no trouble?’
Kick has stopped near the base of the staircase, looking up into the chandelier’s constellation of orbs. One hundred and eleven hand-blown Italian glass globes hung by gossamer-fine wire to create a spiralling galaxy. The designer had gone mad for it and Honey had no objection and so there it hangs, a colossal dust trap ever spiralling.
Kick stares into the heart of it as she speaks. ‘This is a mistake. I’m sorry. I can’t do this. I can’t.’
She turns and heads outside and Honey follows. They reach the lawn and Honey is holding her daughter by the arm. She had expected this kind of show.
‘Mother, I can’t do it,’ Kick repeats, slow and sure. ‘It’s been too long. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come.’
‘Shh. Come, shh.’
They stand locked together for a time. Honey holding Kick’s bicep and Kick gripping her mother’s wrist in resistance. The mother is shushing and the daughter has closed her eyes and they stand like this for long enough that the driver comes out to take his next instruction. Honey coos at her daughter and gives the driver a deathly grimace that sends him back inside.
‘Kick, no, don’t be sorry. Don’t you dare, and don’t leave, please. Look, you’ve got your mother saying please. Can you believe it? Think of how desperate I must be. Please, please, please! We need you, my girl.’
Kick opens her eyes and Honey sees she is about to become furious.
‘Be as angry as you like,’ Honey says, ‘but come inside. Please. I’ll say it as many times as you like. Please, please infinity.’
The smart move now is silence and so Honey steps back. She waits. She then keeps a step behind as Kick makes her way back into the house and Honey says nothing as she follows her daughter upstairs to the guest room.
‘I’ll leave you to get settled.’ Honey taps on the doorframe. ‘Your brother is down in the pool. You should join him. Your father and I will meet you there.’
‘I’m not going to swim.’
‘It might be nice after your flight.’
‘I don’t have a swimsuit.’
‘I’ve had one taken out for you from your old closet. It’ll still fit, I bet. You’re looking great, Kick. Just great.’
Her daughter looks tired and sad and beaten and it’s a horror to see. Honey feels that compression of her chest. If only the children could understand the instincts she suppresses. Smart moves. Only smart moves here.
‘I’ll leave you to get settled,’ Honey says. ‘We’ll see you down at the pool.’
Extracted from Somebody Down There Likes Me by Robert Lukins.
Somebody Down There Likes Me
by Robert Lukins
A brilliant, slyly humorous dissection of wealth, power and the tragedies even money can't fix.
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