K I LLI NG TI ME CATHERINE KNIGHT
Eyes plied open by some poltergeist 4 a.m. torture device Damien scrolled with unblinking, drooling stare at his humming MacBook screen. He clicked feverishly through her profile pictures. Always the same pose. Same angelic expression of rehearsed serenity. The sets change as you channel surf through the images. From beach runs to schoolgirl high-socked in playground, to nightclub lean to trendy frappe sipping café, but always the same doll glass eyes staring out, huge in their dilated blue come-hither call. Neck craned out in right head cock emphasising the Catacomb collection barely concealed beneath the thin film of her skin. Lips, often painted, always parted in slight silent whisper, simpering out breezy promises. You could get lost in the Facebook photo sheen of her face for hours, clicking back through the nine hundred and forty two tagged images of varnished perfection. Slight pointed nose, sucked in cheeks caving under ice cut cheekbone peaks, a waist that defied physics, perked breasts shelved in white sundresses and golden Barbie waves. Lily Evelyn Hughes was by every stretch of Damien’s imagination perfect. And this was a perfection well paid for by her family estate. At fourteen like all society girls coming of age she had her face renovated, fleshed out with putty stretched taut like canvas. Her parents had shipped her off for several months into Dr Reknaw’s care on an Island off the coast of Sydney designed for the sole purpose of remodelling the wealthy. They’d repositioned her eyes, removing them for dry cleaning and re-dying, painting over that green sickly gloss on the whites (an imperfection that often occurred in the small breeding pool of the upper crust.) Her hair had been re-plugged, with adequate Aryan shade selected and chemical treatments injected into her scalp to stop regrowth in its tracks. (A substance also used on her arms, upper lip, legs and pubic flesh to prevent pubescent hair growth). She had a voice box transplant that refreshed her bawdy accent into light soft notes. Her insides had been corseted, Greco-Roman pillars of bone inserted to suspend organs in a precise vase curve. And every year from this point on she’d donated her fat cells to charity, gluggy specimen jars shrink-wrapped for Africa. Dr. Reknaw had even been able to rewire her lungs to ensure she could seductively inhale nicotine sticks to her heart’s content without the nascence of carcinogenic side effects. At the end of her stay Lily was one of the facilities greatest successes. Her face was plastered on every advertising
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