The Killing of Christian Said

As far as Christian was concerned, they were relatives, not family.



"Christian, you should calm down and let's chat, let's talk, okay, breathe."

He glanced at the tag of Tina Coker’s white jacket, the small brown woman currently strapped into her psychiatrist persona. Then went back to gnawing at his middle nail, it was all the way down now, near pink skin, bitten bloody, like his career would be in a few hours if that video ever got out. Calm down, right, calm down, breathe, bite, breathe- in the windowless room, every breath felt like drowning- real drowning, like that time they went to the beach and father had been too busy (always too flopping busy), trying to make the vacation children laugh, with his red nose he carried everywhere and that buffoonish, rainbow hair. The middle nail was bleeding now.

So his father had been trying to make the rich pink children laugh and one of them had thrown a pail of sea water into his father's face and called him Raj and asked him if he owned a quickie mart; and his father, his father with his diminutive, wrinkled brown face, drenched, eyeballs convulsing from the salt,  had laughed and said "hohoho, no kiddo, but I bet I could make some quickie marts outta these here balloons, now I bet one of ya has a birthday coming up, how bout you ask your parents if you need a clown eh?"

He was 10, his nail was halfway done then, and that suffocating feeling had gripped his airway, tightening with the other children’s guffaws until he had run to his mother at the other end of the pier. Run to her for comfort away from this grotesqueness masquerading as his father, only to find her, with her dyed urine hair and her sequined blue costume roiling her stretch marked stomach for the vacation children's parents, a bowl of one dollar bills in front of her, some Arab type of music (it was Algerian, the Bou Saada music of the original Ouled Nail 'belly dancers', she would correct passionately, he knew this, somewhere, inside, deep, but at 10 years old he knew how to hurt her as he was learning to hurt himself so he called it that Arab music, and then when 9/11 happened, he called it, that terrorist music) yelping in the background. The vacation children's parents were clapping and echoing their spawn's laughter, mocking laughter that made him retch at the sudden lack of oxygen and run towards the foam.

The next thing he remembered was waking up on damp hot sand, 2 anxious faces hovering over him- an Indian man in a red nose and a rainbow wig, a middle aged white woman with peroxide hair and blue sequins- and he decided then and there that these people were relatives and not family. No, his life would be different, he would get a respectable, normal job, live a respectable, normal life, Be respected, be normal in the ways that these people never were.

That was Christian Stevens' (ne Said) former life. And 25 years later, 25 years of all nighters at homeless scented public libraries, working 2, 3, 4 minimum wage jobs to pay his way through a middling state school, of kissing ass, sometimes literally just to be let into a newsroom, he'd finally made it as the top news anchor, the Walter Cronkite of Derrytown, Nebraska they called him, respected, and yes envied by his colleagues. Now he was Christian Stevens the 'orphan' with the respectable, normal non-rainbow haircut and sensible 3 piece Men's Warehouse suits, no sequins here, no ma'am.

Everything was going swimmingly until someone emailed him that video, that video of that day on the beach that revealed his unspeakable origins- a buffoonish clown and a washed up belly dancer and the laughter that followed. Seated at his desk that day, he'd felt that familiar drowning suffocation squeeze his throat and quickly deleted the video, before slamming down his laptop, looking around frantically, thankful it was 11pm and most people had left the station for the night.

Most people that is except Tina.

Which brought him back to the situation at hand. Tina, tiny Tina who was finishing up her janitorial duties for the day and was currently tied down to a chair in a basement storage unit in the station with heavy duty tape had now switched tactics from psychiatrist to pleading victim:

'Please, Christian, you don't have to do this, I didn't see anything, just a little, I won't tell anyone what I saw or what you told me, please don't do anything you'll regret . I won't say anything to anyone, I promise, pleaaaase', that last one had ended in a high whine when he brought out the red fire extinguisher and raised it over her skull.

It was no hard feelings Tina, he had to do this, because he was respected and normal and it had taken 25 years, countless skin bleaching creams, a nose job, a faked birth certificate and accompanying name change and some unspeakable acts with 6 directors in NewsCorp to get normality and respectability far removed from those people who were relatives and not family.

And with that last thought, shutting out the screams now, the ululating 'no please don't's that were Tina's final will and testament, he brought the extinguisher crashing down on the last vestiges of Christian Said.