The Price of Everything

Dolly was one of life’s moaners, although coming from a well-to-do family that was semi-famous. Despite living in a large, comfortable home and being sent to good schools and colleges, she had grown into a lazy bully of a girl. She felt she deserved very high regard from all and to be admired for whatever she turned her hands to. Without a doubt, all men should be mesmerised by her face, which had regularly been under the surgeon's knife, as well as her liposuctioned waist and thighs that were expected to be lusted after by all who saw her.  

She often thought about how lucky she was with her position within the family. She was the second-born and the only female. Her father, a highly successful businessman, was besotted with her but, conversely, completely lacked pleasantness toward others except those he was trying to extract large sums of money from. 

The older child, Bobby, greatly disappointed the father. Bobby was born with a delightful disposition, and no amount of bullying and belittling could make Bobby act as if he were the heir apparent to the corrupt family business. Bobby felt that the family's grasping greediness and supreme belief in its superiority over others sat very unpleasantly with him. He hated watching how all staff were obsequious and fawning no matter how rude and vile the father or his sister chose to be. Bobby, by contrast, was charming and kind to all he had dealings with, which just sent his father into a rage. “Thank goodness I have Dolly”, thought Frank, the father.  

Vile, spoilt, nasty, selfish, cruel Dolly. She was everything his father had longed for in Bobby. Her father adored Dolly’s desire for and love of money. Her entitlement to everything was a joy to behold. Dolly never found anyone bereft of faults; hence, everyone fell far short of Dolly’s expectations.

There was little love lost between Bobby and Dolly. Bobby lacked that competitive spirit, that “kill or be killed” personality that Dolly and her father admired. Bobby would report to his father’s office each day and watch the father behave rudely and threateningly toward anyone unfortunate enough to have dealings with the family business.  

Frank, the father, felt he had engendered a reputation of extreme power and admiration from all who encountered him. Unfortunately, in reality, the reputation he had achieved was fear and loathing. Behind his back, most staff laughed at him as they thought he lacked educational standards and just came over as an unpleasant oaf.

Bobby’s future in the business had been planned out more or less since his birth. Poor Bobby’s character of kindness and honesty, which always shone through, was ultimately at odds with the family business and Frank’s threatening persona. One of Bobby’s expected tasks was to bring a feeling of terror and fear to subordinate customers while bleeding them dry of cash emanating from the high interest levels of outstanding loans.  

Bobby repeatedly failed at this appalling game, forcing his enraged father to visit the customer while demanding that Bobby accompany him. These visits rarely lasted long, leaving Bobby horror-struck as he watched the father stuff large quantities of currency into his pockets. Behind them were left shivering, terrified, shaking wrecks anxiously recovering from the father’s visit and wondering how they would manage to function on the small amount left to them after the alarming visit.  

The father would eventually furiously say:

“Why can’t you be more like Dolly?”

Bobby would think to himself: 

"Where the hell did I come from? This family is truly horrible. All who know us hate us. I can’t determine why my father thinks we are admired. We are, at best, criminals, and to think of ourselves as businessmen requires a huge imagination. What will happen if my father is ever arrested? Will I be arrested, too?”

Meanwhile, Dolly lived the life of a besotted, spoilt brat, totally oblivious to the goings on in the family business.  Her father influenced her to believe no one was good enough for her - until she met James. James’ family was very similar to their own. They ran a similar business and were as successful, wealthy, and corrupt as Frank. Both families were incredibly unpleasant and dishonest but believed they were highly admired people. Further, James could do what Bobby couldn’t. Involved as he was in loan sharking, he had no difficulty in attacking customers who fell short and threatened and bullied all perceived victims with impunity.

James seemed to accept the marble false beauty of Dolly’s face and figure and joined her for their regular joint botox and filler appointments. Bobby thought they both looked like wax figures from Madam Tussauds and was amazed that two such nasty people could look similar. Before long, James and Dolly agreed to marry, and the two wax figurines joined each other in matrimony. Bobby felt even less part of the family now that James and his father had become part of his family.  

When large family dinners were organised, both families sat and made some of the most disgusting, frequently racist comments about the less fortunate of this world. Bobby could hardly bring himself to eat whilst sitting in their company. When he could take no more, Bobby would beg to be excused from the table. Frank would slowly shake his head in disappointment, watching Bobby leave.

“Has he always been this soft?” sneered Carl, James’ father.

“You need to get him out of the business”, said James. “What about Dolly taking over? You need an heir for the business.”

Dolly sat with a silly smile on a face that rendered little movement due to the Botox. Inwardly, she had no intentions of working for the business. She had done as little as she possibly could all her life and had no intentions of making any changes. Most of the conversations at the dinner table went entirely over her head. All she cared about was how pretty she looked, and by keeping her mouth shut, she continued to be loved and admired by Frank and James. How could someone as shallow as Dolly take over the family business? She couldn’t understand anything about the company and, more importantly, had no intentions of finding anything about the family business.

One night, after an evening of particularly vile comments, Bobby, unusually quieter than usual, asked to leave the table. As he left, the table guests swopped victim, and now it was Bobby’s turn to be annihilated. As they sat laughing at the lack of success Bobby had brought to their corrupt firms, they heard a loud thump. It was as if something weighty had been dropped on the floor. The dinner party guests looked at one another, slowly pushing their chairs out and standing uncertainly.  

“Did you hear that?” asked Carl.

They all murmured, “Yes”.

The sound had been weighty, almost like a heavy piece of furniture had fallen over. The silence that followed the thud was strange. They would have expected to hear feet walking towards the ‘thud’, but it was eerily quiet upstairs.

Frank looked at the dinner guests, and the dinner guests looked back. No one moved. Frank, sighing, walked into the lobby and shouted up the stairs, “Was that you, Bobby? Did you drop something?”.

He turned around and clicked his fingers at the maid, merely pointing his bony index finger up the stairs. She ran up the stairs until she came to Bobby’s door and began to knock loudly.

“Mr Bobby, are you OK?” she called.

“Get in there, girl, for god’s sake?” said the father nastily. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, he looked at the flustered maid as his unappealing face took on a more unpleasant expression.

She nervously opened Bobby’s door and immediately started screaming. The father knew it was Bobby's end and didn’t even walk up the stairs. The dinner guests remained in the dining room, waiting for confirmation. The maid continued screaming.

**************

From the night Bobby died, Dolly’s life changed dramatically. While still trying to come to terms with an unexplained suicide in the family, a few days after the funeral, the police arrived at the house.  Vacuus Dolly, whilst still in a state of shock, had even more nightmares to contend with. Her life, which previously had given her all she could desire, slowly unravelled.  

She was amazed when an army of uniformed officials arrived at the house. She watched Frank, full of bluster, threats and nastiness, being led away in handcuffs and shoved in the back of a black van.  

Running up to the person clearly in charge, she said: “His eldest son has just died. You are being very cruel and unpleasant. A mistake must have been made.”  

“Are you the sister, Dolly?” asked the official. She nodded.  

“You’re the lucky one. Just before he killed himself, your brother contacted us to tell us exactly what was going on in the business; he made it clear that you had zero influence or knowledge regarding the business. If he hadn’t, you’d be sitting in the same van as your father. By the way, your husband and father-in-law were also arrested earlier today.”  

“Ring your father’s lawyer - he’s going to need one.” said someone as Dolly disappeared into the vast mansion.

Frank, Carl and James were arrested pending criminal investigations into their protection racketeering businesses. Dolly, too distressed over all the events occurring around her, just sat for days trying to work out why Bobby had hung himself and, worse, why he had contacted the authorities and told lies about her father and husband. Why would Bobby do this?

Dolly visited her family in their cells regularly until Frank had confidently turned to his ‘beautiful daughter’ suggesting she take over the company's running from the family accountant. Frank thought she seemed to possess the hutzpah that had bypassed Bobby.  To his horror, he found that Dolly claimed no knowledge regarding how the family made its money and, worse, had no desire to work for the business. Frank whispered to Dolly from his prison cell the importance of keeping all the paperwork hidden, how necessary it was to keep two sets of ‘books’ running, and how no one should ever see the books as they were wildly different.  

Dolly wept and looked horror-struck that her beloved father would suggest she work full-time running a corrupt company. Losing his temper, a common event witnessed during his interactions with Bobby, Frank screamed at Dolly that nothing would be left for the greedy girl without her diligent work on their wealth and investments.  

“Plus”, Frank warned her ominously, “if you don’t keep the financial secrets safe and hidden, you’ll likely end up in jail with James and me.”

The more Frank told his daughter what was expected of her, the more she felt her great love for Frank diminishing. James, the husband, had been metaphorically thrown aside. With his new lack of wealth and his once handsome Botoxed face hanging in wrinkles, Dolly couldn’t honestly see what had been so attractive about him. Without the substantial cushion of wealth, James’ already unpleasant character had taken on a new viciousness. Dolly went around in a daze. Not only had she learned how much her brother had meant to her, but also how much her love for the others was rapidly diminishing.

The family locked in its various cells longed to spend hours moaning about Bobby.

“It’s all that useless brother of yours fault. What had possessed him to send copies of the Firm’s finances to the Inland Revenue? What had possessed him to rehouse some of the families we’d thrown out on the streets on the condition they would be prosecuting witnesses for the court cases against us all?”. Dolly felt a faint smile as she thought about Bobby’s last actions. How had she not noticed before that her family was decidedly unpleasant? Looking at her fingers and toes adorned in diamonds and sapphires, she couldn’t believe she had never questioned any of the family’s wealth.

Dolly went home and wept and wept. She now lacked the wealth and life of comfort she had always known. Strangely, her new circumstances had begun to affect her personality and character, and in deference to Bobby, she was evolving into a much pleasanter person.

“Why, oh, why was I so cruel and unpleasant to Bobby?” she thought. Quite honestly, always being aware of his disappointment to Frank, she’d been brought up to consider him weak and disappointing. However, with her new unfettered vision, she truly regretted his loss.  

Eventually, Frank, Craig and James were given lengthy jail sentences for engaging in violent loan sharking and protection racketeering. Dolly had listened to the cases presented in the courthouse and was horrified by what she heard. The wickedness and depravity orchestrated by these three men towards people trying to keep their businesses functioning was shocking.

As the lonely, sad woman slowly climbed the stairs to the family business's head office, she was overwhelmed with empathy, love and loss for the one decent family member.

Dolly quickly discovered she was no longer the Toast of the Town, and her sycophantic friends soon dumped her. Each day presented challenges previously unknown to the cosseted Dolly. Even before the money disappeared, all the staff from the business and the house happily left, leaving Dolly to learn how to tackle menial tasks that initially were a complete mystery to her.  

One dark, stormy evening, as she sat alone in the gloomy house, she began to think of suicide and ending it, just as Bobby had done. Sniffling and overwhelmed with sorrow for herself, she suddenly felt the creeping realisation that Bobby had planned his suicide to help others, not to bring misery.  

“What would Bobby have done with the business if he’d lived? He certainly wouldn’t have continued with things as they were. He would have tried to help others as he’d always done.”

Over the ensuing years, Dolly attended counselling sessions and worked hard to remove herself from the family and its evil corruption. The business no longer existed, and most of the assets she once owned had all been sold off, but with the bit left, she set up a help centre to assist the families who had suffered at the hands of her family.  

Slowly, Dolly worked hard to become the person Bobbly would be proud of. As days turned into months and years, the people at the help centre were often heard saying how much she had changed into a female version of her delightful brother, Bobby.