Pangea’s Mansion

We decided, Pangea and I, that on the day wealth became obsolete, we would spend our final hours feasting on endangered species and indulging our passion for anal sex.

We would sit by her log fire and burn the last trees on earth.

We would take all the cocaine we had and drink poison while watching the sun sink into the sea.

And so when the day came when no one would want for anything ever again, I took the limousine to Pangea’s mansion, with flowers and poison on the seat beside me.

I thanked my driver for his years of discrete service. He told me to go fuck myself then set the limousine alight.

Pangea’s mansion was in something of a state: Her staff had gone, she said. Some had left barbed wire in the caviar; others had defecated in her closets.

‘And they cut the heels off all my shoes,’ she said. ‘All two thousand pairs!’ This seemed to annoy her the most.

In bare feet she tiptoed across her marble floor. ‘Did you bring it?’

I said I had.

‘Good quality?’

I asked, Does it matter?

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if it leaves us drooling like simpletons, we’re going to look very silly aren’t we?’

Pangea served polar bear loin steaks for dinner; they tasted like fish and were hard work, even for those who’d replaced their teeth with diamonds. She’d cooked it herself, and Pangea is an awful chef.

Afterward, we nostrilled two lines of grade-a cocaine, each one a metre long, and then we rutted like dolphins in her swimming pool.

‘I would have missed the wealth,’ she said, taking a wooden phallus from her wall safe and strapping it to her waist.

I said this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

‘Indulge me,’ she said. ‘It’s my last day on earth.’

We took the cyanide on the balcony, and watched the sun set on the Pacific.

She put her head on my shoulder and as our throats dissolved she asked why we had done this.

‘Because some people enjoy being rich,’ I said. ‘We enjoyed everyone else being poor.’