Confessions of the Greatest Martyr of All Time
by MɅGENTɅ
Honestly, I love working with producer Spangle Limbrick on my tracks. We put out my first single in 2016, which was called ‘Confessions’. I created the song by telling Spangle that it had to be a hit about a person admitting truths about things. Then Spangle worked his magic.
Spangle’s best friend is the director Zee Zee Bateman. He brought Zee Zee to a party I was throwing in Saint-Tropez. He told Zee Zee to cast me in his next movie, which was being made in Australia. Zee Zee sent me the script. He begged me to play an oil heiress. It was a challenging role. I had to draw on my real-life experiences as an oil heiress. But I did it for Zee Zee.
I liked Australia. I got to pat a koala that had been rescued from a fire. It was a bit burnt but I was fine. The paparazzi couldn’t get enough of me. They hung around while we were filming a scene on a yacht in Sydney Harbour. In my scene, I was meant to be having an orgy with three giant CGI octopuses. But when the pics were published, they made it look like I was having an orgy alone in real life. This kind of thing always happens to me. Whatever. The important thing is, on that boat, I found God.
When Zee Zee’s movie wrapped, I flew to India and took photos in front of the Taj Mahal. I posed with my hands in the shape of a heart. I went to Burma. The monks in my temple were total babes. They all had crushes on me. I really got into the chanting—it helped me engage my diaphragm and hit my highest-ever notes while harmonising with the monk babes on their spiritual plane. Overall it was a cool lifestyle, so I became a mystic. To shed the weight of past selves, I dropped my surname and went by just ‘MɅGENTɅ’—the powerful ancient Pleiadian word for purplish-red. I jetted back to Australia and ascended into the 5D, which is the fifth dimension, if you weren’t aware.
My ex-bestie Julie Koh found out about this new chapter in my life. We knew each other when we were little girls running around on my dad’s yacht in Monaco. My dad, of course, is oil baron Baron Sheridan. No one knew much about Julie’s family except that they were Australian and nouveau riche. But the number one rule for heiresses is that we never, ever, ever, talk about finances, so I’ll leave it at that. Julie and I got really close but then she started obsessing over me. It was weird. She copied everything I said and bought all the dresses I bought. Then she got worse. I did the 40-Hour Famine, so she did a 41-Hour Famine. I liked magic and could turn a flame into a plastic rose. So Julie decided to show off a trick where she set a €100 note on fire without actually burning it. She went all over town making bets with adults about the notes in their wallets. She cleaned them out then turned up, all smug, at my family villa. She called my name from the top of our spiral staircase and threw the cash down, obviously aiming at my head. It was not classy. I told her it was clear she was new money and iced her out of my inner circle.
I hadn’t heard from her in a billion years when she started following me on Instagram. She didn’t like my posts but she watched every story. I knew something was up. Since I was now a powerful mystic, I posted about being a dove in a past life. A few hours later, she posted about being a swan. I posted about my former life as an Egyptian princess. She claimed to have been a Siamese queen, and said her Asiatic eyelids echoed her royal lineage. (They were taped.) I posted a photo of my golden aura and then she uploaded one where hers was the white light of the angels. I talked about my visions of Archangel Gabriel and she described her ‘tête-à-tête’ with Saint Francis of Assisi in the astral realm. She started a TikTok account and her career exploded. She performed miracles live, like waking people from comas by channelling their dead aunts. Everyone started saying she was a modern saint.
On one of her TikToks she claimed she had taken a vow of poverty. In the video, she took followers on a tour of her sanctuary. It was a penthouse in Coogee with beach views. It belonged to one of her simps. I told my driver to find it and drop me there. (I would never make him wait.) Simps were lined up around the block. I pushed my way to the front of the queue and saw a fan leaving the penthouse, crying with joy. I stepped forward but a huge guy blocked my way. He made a face at the bleeding wounds on my palms, which had appeared that morning. He asked if I’d ‘manifested an appointment’.
‘The meeting is predestined,’ she said behind him. He bowed and left. She stood in the doorway, draped in a white bedsheet and bleeding from all orifices. The sheet was stained with red. I stared at the blood leaking out of her eyes and mouth. She kept wiping it away with the back of her hand. The audacity of it all. It was simply not fashion-forward.
We communicated with our minds, like in Star Wars. She called me dear child and said that she remembered me from all her previous lifetimes—I had always been a small cockroach crawling across her kitchen floor. I said that I had never been an insect and that I had performed a tonne of miracles in this life, including a one-day-only levitation above the DFO Homebush factory outlet, to inspire all the poor people. She said she had walked on water, strolling around Bin Chicken Island seven times. I said that I had materialised and dematerialised in the first carriage of a train on the Cronulla line. She said that was funny—she had appeared on the cricket pitch during the Ashes at the Gabba while simultaneously materialising on the summit of Kilimanjaro. She had cricketers and porters as witnesses. I said I only needed thirty minutes of sleep a night. She said she had not slept since 2002. I said that I had fasted for three months. She said she had stopped eating and drinking completely and lived only on the highest vibrational light. I said she was lying. I said that knowing her, she was sneaking meals by lying down and pretending to astral-project while faking to her simps that a lost soul called Jerry or something was possessing her empty body demanding mille-feuille and 1996 Dom Perignon Rose Gold. I told her she was a fraud, just like when we were little. She said she was shocked—was I questioning her abilities? I said that she was a villa of lies—that she wouldn’t even say hi to a leper if she saw one. And that’s when her bloody eyes went really cold and she turned to the simps and shouted: ‘Get me a leper! Get me a leper!’ A simp on her right apologised and said that they didn’t have a proper leper but they did have a Chinese grocer who had dropped by with a delivery. And she said that if he didn’t get a leper, she would self-combust. So I lol’d and she burst into flames. ‘Admit it!’ she screamed. ‘I’ve always been as good as you!’
The simps ran for buckets of water. They aimed it at her but, of course, got me instead. Dripping wet, I saw the dreamscape open before me and had a vision of the two of us through time. In every incarnation, we stood on either side of this doorway, one of us in flames. I couldn’t help but wonder: were we, two independent single ladies, really going to destroy our friendship in the name of professional rivalry, time after time? I had to be the bigger bombshell. The wounds in my hands wept as I fell at her feet and admitted that she was not just as good as me—she was the better martyr. The fire died out. We made a blood pact to give up our callings as saints.
I left the penthouse to commune with the sea. Hands stinging from the salt water, I dialled Spangle. He said he was visiting a friend in hospital and could he call back. I said that sometimes he forgets how much I’ve done for his career, with no reward. It was like he hadn’t heard me. He said he was stepping out of the room and then he went on forever about the intense pain and guilt he felt about not being present with his friend during her dying moments. I got a flash of inspiration. From a truly new spiritual plane came a voice unlike my own, as I told Spangle the follow-up to my hit single ‘Confessions’ had to be about a person lamenting the intense pain and guilt she feels about a big lie she told a little bitch who was literally on fire. So that is the story behind my critically acclaimed global number one banger, ‘Confessions of the Greatest Martyr of All Time’.
Julie Koh is the author of Capital Misfits and Portable Curiosities. The latter was shortlisted for several awards and led to Julie being named a 2017 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Her short stories have been published widely, including in the Best Australian Stories and Best Australian Comedy Writing. She has written radio plays for ABC Radio National and the libretto for the satirical opera Chop Chef.
