by Liam Pieper
And the endless, pointless paperwork! He’d finally got around to auditing the overheads of the organisation, starting with overstocked merchandise. Sitting back down at his desk to attempt it again, he found he simply didn’t have the headspace to concentrate on the rows and columns of numbers, so, closing the document, he went down to the warehouse and climbed into the Kindergarten.
The ‘Kindergarten’ was the nickname for the storage area where they kept everything that would never sell again. Overstock, factory seconds, product damaged by flood or fire; it was all stacked up in three storeys of pallets, with the newest stock piled loosely in half-open crates on the top. The first time little Kade had seen it, with toys strewn everywhere and packing paper blowing about, he’d pointed out that it looked like his kindy, only much, much better, and the name stuck. These days, when Tess wasn’t around and Adam was looking after their son, Adam would send him over to the Kindergarten and let him play with the toys.
Adam climbed up into the Kindergarten and strolled through the maze of product. Staring at the rows and rows of dusty, imperfect and outdated Mitty & Sarah merchandise, Adam realised that he’d walked past them nearly every day for five years and never wondered at their provenance. He climbed up to the lowest crate, peeled open a cardboard box and retrieved a vintage Mitty & Sarah model town – it was an item popular in the early nineties. Once a bestseller, these days it barely moved and thousands of units languished in the warehouse.
He sighed, sifting through his feelings, a complex mix of pride at what he’d built, annoyance at a world that was growing indifferent to the toys they sold, rage at the incompetence of his team that had let business stagnate, and the nagging feeling that he’d fucked it up somehow.
He couldn’t tell how much overstock was here just by looking at it, and no great inspiration was coming to him, so he gritted his teeth and headed back towards his office. With no great desire to rush back to the tyranny of maths, he dawdled, made a cup of coffee, shot the shit with some of the factory hands, and trudged into his office, where he was dismayed to see someone waiting for him. A man was sprawled on his couch, his feet up on the coffee table, his hands flipping through Adam’s latest GQ, which he hadn’t even cracked the spine on yet. His temper rose, the bile flaring up at the intrusion, and the impertinence of someone barging in on him without an appointment, which quickly turned into fury towards his assistant for showing the man into the office. He rounded on her, moulded his face into an expression he hoped showed her she’d fucked up and that her job was forfeit, and asked with controlled rage, ‘Who is that man in my office?’
‘He said he was a friend of yours. T something? Tariq?’
‘Oh.’
As he entered, the man made no move to stand, but swung his legs off the coffee table so that he was sitting hunched over, relaxed, his hands draped loosely over his knees. It was, Adam saw with mounting alarm, the man from the parking lot. In the daylight he was mid thirties, maybe, but a rough thirties: balding, with a worn, sunken face that had weathered too much too soon.
‘Hello, gangster,’ the man said. His accent was Australian, the double-thick accent of a young immigrant, adopting broad vowels to mask other cultural deficiencies, more Aussie than the real thing. ‘You have a lovely office here. Very posh.’
‘You aren’t really supposed to be in here, Mr . . . Tariq, was it?
‘Lot of people aren’t meant to be in a lot of places, Adam. Even when a fella’s got permission, there’s someplace a man shouldn’t go. Call it a grey area.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Oh, well, see the thing is, you left your phone behind after our last date. Remember that night? Warm night, sea breeze. Charming conversation. So I followed you around for a little while, looking for a chance to give it back to you. Thing is, I followed you here, and I realised, that, actually, you maybe have a little bit of money.’
‘Okay then.’ Adam spoke through gritted teeth. ‘What do you want?’
‘I want to make you an offer, Mr Kulakov. One I think you’d do well to consider.’ Tariq reached into his jacket pocket and laid a shattered iPhone on the desk. Adam, in full righteous flight, did not respond straightaway, so Tariq continued unfazed. ‘Beautiful things, these phones, Adam,’ he said. ‘These new ones, they automatically back up everything onto a remote server, so, say you drop your phone, say the screen gets shattered, it’s just so easy to get in there and download what’s on it. Especially if you don’t bother locking the thing. So nothing is ever really lost. Every note, every email. Every photo.’ The man’s eyes, big and black, twinkled, and a mocking smile crept up his face. ‘And all that just sitting there, waiting. A man can just reach out and . . .’ Tariq mimed reaching up and plucking a piece of fruit ‘. . . grab it. That’s the best thing about living in the future, Adam Kulakov. No more secrets.’
Adam thought back to that almost forgotten night weeks ago and regretted the smugness with which he had smashed the phone and driven off. Now he sat down opposite the man, picked up the phone, examined it. The screen was shattered, but when he turned the power on, it booted up. ‘Fine, tell me what you want. What did we agree on? One hundred dollars?’
‘That would have been nice! But that was before I had a look on your phone.’ Tariq shrugged. ‘And before I started going through your happy snaps. Forgive me, but I found one I liked so much I just had to print it out.’ He reached into his pocket again, and pulled out a photo that Adam had forgotten he’d ever taken, the one of him leering into the camera over Clara’s back, his face clearly visible, her skirt with its school logo on it bunched up around her hips, and his world fell apart. He stroked the photo to see if it was real, and the cheap ink came off on his fingers.
‘Of course,’ continued Tariq, ‘I can’t say I blame you. I’d hit that too, if I was a younger man. The arse on it! I was always a sucker for a school uniform. And this photo, Adam, it really brings out your eyes.’
Adam breathed in, out, fought the rising panic. ‘How much do you want?’
‘How much do you reckon it’s worth, Adam, for you to not be outed as a fiddler? That’s what you are, Adam, a kiddie fiddler. This photo, well, it puts you square on the roof, doesn’t it?’
‘Tell me a fucking figure.’
‘I thought we could come up with a figure together, can’t we, Mr Kulakov? I thought you people were supposed to be good with money?’
‘And what if I say no?’
Tariq smiled, shook his head sympathetically, then slowly, lazily, reached out and struck Adam across the face with the back on his hand. The blow caught him across side of the head, and he sat, shocked, as his assailant leaned in, smiling, and placed a collegiate hand on Adam’s shoulder, which made him shrink away. ‘Adam, look,’ Tariq said. ‘You need to understand something. I’m a piece of shit, a man with a record, one with nothing to lose. I’m everything your newspapers warn you about and I can beat the shit out of you and ruin your life, because I’ve got nothing to lose. Do you understand? Do we understand each other? But all I want from you is a little bit of money, and I’ll go away, and you can go back to your charmed life making toys and raping girls and whatnot.’ He stood, tugged on his hoodie to straighten it, and retrieved a slip of paper from its front pocket. ‘Here’s me bank account. I’ll give you a week to pop fifty K in there, nice and easy. Otherwise, I burn your life down. Have a lovely day, now, pumpkin.’
Tariq laid the photo on the table beside the broken phone and took his leave. He stepped neatly around Adam and smiled cheerfully at the assistant on the way out.
Once he was safely alone in the office, Adam let himself panic. He picked up the photo and stared at it for a long moment, this cursed, profane, sacred object, the unearthly doom of Clara’s beauty, the milky expanse of her flank, his own stupid, gormless face, teeth gritted in pleasure and concentration as he reached out with the phone to capture the angle; ruin. Stricken, he scrunched up the photo and tucked it safely away inside his leather ja
cket, in the secret pocket over the heart.
He paced back and forth, breathing hard, playing out the incident in his head, trying to think of what to do next. Abruptly, he realised he was making a weird keening noise in his throat and knew where he’d heard it before.
His son had a habit of curling into a ball when he was scared or nervous, and rocking back and forth making a high-pitched groaning noise, and the only thing that would calm him was if Adam scooped him up and stroked the boy’s head, his fingertips shushing him gently until he relaxed. As little Kade had got older and wasn’t growing out of the habit, Tess had started to worry, but Adam knew that children grow at different speeds. If the boy wanted his father, that was fine. Now, freaking out in his office, Adam wished someone would soothe him the same way, and with the realisation that there was no one to help him his wailing got louder.
He looked through the glass partition of his office at his assistant, who stared back at him wide-eyed. Mortification. Had she seen him cry? Had she seen him being slapped? He needed privacy, so he barged through the door, past the girl, all thoughts of firing her forgotten, and ran for the car park and the safety of his car.
He spun the wheels on the BMW, clipping the fence with the rear bumper as he skidded out of the lot. Frantic, he turned the wrong way through the estate and found himself looking for a way out. Rows and rows of identical factory offices stretched out, distinguishable from each other only by giant, colourful plastic signs perched on the front gate and the logos on the container trucks that rumbled up the drive. None of these factories had been around a few years ago; they had all sprung up not long after his, built cheap on cheap land. As he drove past the buildings he caught flashes of rolling green hills that were once eucalyptus forests, then grazing meadows, and in the next few months would become truck depots and canneries.
When the industrial estate ended, the residential area began, huge culs-de-sac reached with a sharp turn off the highway, all built around artificial lakes lying empty due to drought. The buildings here, too, were identical, homes bought off the rack and built cheap, squat and nasty, each little neighbourhood a landscaped gulag.
He’d calmed down a little by the time he reached his destination, a tight collection of chain stores clustered around a food court. The mall had been built in a rush, to serve the suburbs which had been built to service industry, and little thought had been put into the planning, with one roundabout leading in and out of the complex, which was thronged with a deciduous traffic jam. He inched through it, tooting impatiently, until he found a park outside his bank, where he ran to the ATM and started pulling out wads of cash. The machine wouldn’t give him the money he needed, so he entered the bank and pushed his way to the front of the queue, where the cashier explained that she couldn’t give out that kind of cash without notice.
Adam took this news badly, started yelling, and only stopped when he realised that cash would be no use to him anyway, that he was in a panic, wasn’t thinking straight. He walked slowly out to the car, and as he climbed back behind the wheel he recalled that Tess had limited the amount of cash he could draw from any of their accounts to curb his impulse buying. Foolishly, he had let her, although at the time he’d argued, only half seriously, ‘What about emergencies?’ at which she’d patted him on the hand and said, sotto voce, ‘If you need more than that, come tell Mummy and I’ll take care of it.’ He’d laughed then, but now Tess could account for almost every dollar in their accounts, and she had lately been asking uncomfortable questions about staff credit card purchases. There was no way he could get the money he needed without alerting her that something was terribly wrong.
As he digested this, a series of horrifying realisations unfurled inside him and the manic wave he’d been sailing on all month crashed. The sobs burst up from his gut, and, appalled, he tried to choke them off, which only squeezed them into strangled wails. Before long he was bawling, eyes squeezed shut, head pressed against the steering wheel, knees drawn up to meet it. He sat like that for a moment, knees smarting, the oak steering wheel pressing into his thighs.
With the stereo in his car turned way up, he screamed in frustration, at his unexpected nemesis, and at his wife, her claws encircling his money, at the injustice of this life. He felt a sudden urge to confess everything – to his wife, to the police, to his grandfather. That’s who he could turn to: Arkady would know what to do. Whenever Adam had messed up as a child, he’d always gone to his grandfather to solve his problems, with his calm, old-world composure, unflappable in the face of any adversity.
Adam was on the verge of reaching for the phone when he recalled his grandfather’s condition, lying broken and fading in a hospital bed, and his fear turned into shame once again. What would his grandfather do in this situation? Adam reasoned that it was a silly question. Arkady wouldn’t have let himself be manoeuvred into this mess, would have avoided it, would have kept his dick in his perfectly creased trousers.
Adam drove aimlessly for a while, and then pulled off the road to cry again. He stared blankly ahead, deep in thought, snuffling. He cast about for a tissue to blow his nose with, reached into his jacket, where his fingers touched the scrunched-up photo of him and Clara, and withdrew his hand with a whimper. Digging into his other pockets, he retrieved a couple of receipts, and then found his pocketknife. He had carried a penknife since he was a little boy, when it had been his favourite toy. His grandfather had bought him an authentic Swiss Army model in Europe and he still treasured it. Once, at the height of hostilities between his parents, Adam had run away from home. He’d packed his backpack with sandwiches, clothes, a blanket, the knife tucked safely in the centre of his bag, and had trekked tearfully into the park, where he’d sat by the pond, lonely, feeding his dinner to the ducks until long after dark. He sustained himself with the hope that some vagrant would appear and murder him; imagined his funeral, the tears, the recrimination, his mum and dad’s shame over driving him from home, until finally, cold and hungry, he slid back into the house to find that no one had noticed him missing. That had stung, and he remembered folding out the main blade and looking at his warped reflection, as slowly his self-pity settled and reshaped itself into the realisation that his parents’ apathy was a blessing; he could do anything, could get away with anything.
He stared at the knife now, blankly, until his eyes sharpened as an idea started to form. Inspiration struck, and Adam stopped mid sob. This situation was like any other, an opportunity. This goon with his clumsy attempt at blackmail had given him lemons, so Adam would make lemonade. He would make his own luck. All the money he would ever need was in the company, going to waste.
First he tried Marketing, told them he was working on a new project and asked them to work out exactly how much they could cut from the charitable spend of the organisation. The answer was distressingly low; all of it was intricately tied up with their tax return, and nothing could be spared. He would find no help there.
His next stop was the production department and Shubangi, the head of product. She was by far his favourite employee. She had a knack for taking his ideas, making them workable and then presenting them back to him as his own. Better, she seemed to genuinely like him. If anyone could help him out of this mess, it was Shubangi.
‘Oh, hey,’ she chirped as he walked in. ‘What brings you to visit us long-suffering elves in design?’
‘Can you keep a secret?’
‘Possibly. This secret of yours, is it expensive?’
‘Very.’
He explained that he needed to find fifty thousand dollars in savings for a new project he was working on, that he couldn’t talk about it, and asked what could be cut from production. Shubangi thought about it for a moment, brows knitted in concentration, then sucked air in through her teeth unhappily.
‘There’s not really much I can do, imports-wise,’ she said. As it was, the vast majority of the products they sold these days were not Mitty & Sarah designs at all. Instead, once a year, Shubangi handed Ad
am a catalogue of inexpensive toys from generic Chinese manufacturers that were predicted to trend in the coming season, he selected a bunch, and Shubangi sent away for them to be branded in Mitty & Sarah colours.
The idea was the same as when Arkady had made the switch from hand-carving the toys he sold to buying them from factories. The maths was simple: make a toy for fifty cents, sell it for a dollar; or better: buy it for ten cents from a factory in the developing world, and sell it in the first world for ten times that.
It was a business model that had worked for half a century, and had survived wars, outlasted the Soviets, outlasted even Communist China, the powerhouse that had quietly packed away its revolution and emerged the most savage capitalist state the world had ever known. In the end, there was no army, siege engine, weapon of war or ideology that conquered the world as effectively as the conglomerate. McDonald’s beat Machiavelli, every time.
Unfortunately for Adam, the system was eating its young. As the money the West had pumped into China started to reproduce and send back its seeds to buy up huge swathes of Western industry, production costs in China were on the rise. Now there was nowhere you could buy the toy you needed for the price you wanted. China was no longer desperate for wealth, and there was no fat left to cut.
Because of this, there were, Shubangi assured him, no expenses left to cannibalise. ‘Our only really unnecessary overhead is the original flagship Sarah doll, which is a huge production cost. We’ve been running at a loss on that one for years. We could cut that line and save the money easily, although your grandfather might have a few things to say about that.’
Adam thought hard for a minute. ‘Is there some way we could bring down production costs on the dolls themselves? I mean, where are they produced now? Is there someplace we could move them to where they could do them cheaper?’