Turbulence

by Maggie Rainey-Smith

  Paris’s empty chair at reception was a silent rebuke to both of them. She wasn’t officially due for another half-hour, but was often early. Mt Albert and Ajax were on the factory floor already, setting up the new production run for the Tahitian bar stools. Sergio was back and overseeing staff in the correct use of the machinery. Any signs of discontent or anarchy were lost in the early morning focus, the intensity of men, machinery and metal.

  Adam drank his under-brewed tea, delivered by the temp, who reminded him that Heather was under the knife today for her carpal tunnel and wouldn’t be back until the following week. A new technique, evidently, which meant a quick recovery but required light duties for the following four weeks.

  Well, nothing new about that! Adam ought to send flowers, but it was usually Heather who set up these things. He called through to Paris (now arrived) and asked her to organise flowers. She said it wasn’t her job, and he ought to ask the temp. The temp looked blank, and asked which florist. He hunted for the Yellow Pages, found that Heather’s computer was sitting on top of them (a health and safety measure), and resorted to an online search that brought up several options offering him medium, premium and superior bunches of flowers. What was Heather worth? And which was better, premium or superior? He really couldn’t say, but the florist could. It would cost him more for a superior bunch than it would for a premium bunch. He felt like debating the literal meaning of each word with the florist, but she seduced him with a question about Fly Buys.

  Extra air points always lifted his spirits. He checked his PC calendar and three overdue tasks landscaped their way towards him. He pushed snooze, hesitating on one hour, one day and two days before pushing one week. He was tired of being bullied by the computer. Then, feeling guilty, he peeked back at the postponed tasks to check that none of them was really important. One was, so he reinstated it for two hours’ time and went to the kitchen to make a decent brew of tea.

  A good cup of tea and a secret ciggie would do the trick. He could look at the production figures, negotiate with Ajax and Mt Albert over pay rates and maybe even assist Mt Albert Bus Stop’s cousin with his immigration papers. Mt Albert’s cousin had a surprisingly ordinary name. He was called Sandy — short for Sandringham, which was where his parents had lived in Auckland. That was before they’d been deported as overstayers, and before Sandringham was born.

  In the broom cupboard, ciggie in hand, Adam looked out the louvre window to the hills. Some people found Wellington claustrophobic, felt enclosed by the hills, worried about earthquakes, feared isolation. The hills were a comfort to him. He loved the bush brushing the motorway, houses hanging out of the hills, water nestling in a giant’s armpit.

  Martin handed Adam the newspaper, folded to show a headline from the inside front page. They were in the production room preparing for a meeting, and Martin continued writing in green ink on the whiteboard as Adam read. The article was about South Island horticultural workers who had been arrested and deported as overstayers. Martin didn’t agree with Adam’s benevolent attitude towards Mt Albert’s family; he wanted more university-qualified technical staff who would push the wage bill through the roof. Adam never quite knew if his benevolence was about low wages, or if he really cared about his staff and their families. The two were so closely interwoven that his motives had become clouded. A manufacturer in Auckland had made a name for himself by turning his back on technology to maintain higher staffing levels and thereby provide employment. And Adam had heard a supermarket manager wax lyrical about paying low wages to over-qualified immigrants, who then went on to become professionals in their actual area of expertise — as if the whole exchange was a win-win thing. He’d liked that idea. How could you lose? Imagine having a heart surgeon collecting supermarket trolleys: there’d be a level of accuracy and precision that the ordinary layabout just wouldn’t be able to bring to the job.

  Adam’s workforce had more to do with history. There hadn’t been any technical graduates wanting to work for him when he’d first set up, and if there had been, they wouldn’t have wanted the overtime Adam needed to push product through. He was grateful to Ajax and Mt Albert, and gratitude necessitated some sort of loyalty payment — like sponsoring family members to work in his factory. Win-win. It was an area of his life that he felt he could contain and rationalise.

  His own family was another matter. Win-win with Louise was a complicated dance of independence. Too much winning on either side led to resentment, and then … win-win wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. One of them got bored, and they needed the struggle, the tension, to stay engaged.

  He looked up. Martin had drawn a flow chart: squares, rectangles, circles and arrows. Something as simple as a saddle seat or bar stool translated into a complex process of intersecting possibilities. The factory guys ambled in with their coffees and took seats. Sergio sat up the front. He’d recovered from his humiliation and was out to prove he really did know fuck all and that Martin knew fuck nothing. Martin was wearing his Wild Palms tie — blue with tropical palms floating on what might be tiny coral reefs. Was it provocative? Perhaps it was friendly? After all, they were discussing progress on the Tahitian order.

  The square and the rectangle went unchallenged, but at the circle, Sergio interrupted Martin and hijacked the flow chart. He disputed Martin’s theory on the 80–20 rule, rubbished the Pareto justifications, and pointed out that what was actually holding up progress was all of the production meetings to discuss progress, rather than any lack of progress.

  The word progress rolled off Sergio’s Slavic tongue like a Soviet tanker invading Prague; unexpected and potent. Martin’s rhetoric had been wrested from him and used against him.

  Adam silently agreed. It wouldn’t do for management to part ranks publicly, but he enjoyed watching Martin squirm, although not for long. Martin recovered and spent the next half an hour (impeding progress) pointing out how the circle (which for an engineer, Adam noted, lacked precision) was the point where materials and human resources had the best opportunity to leverage off one another in order to increase the capacity for both quality and quantity.

  It wasn’t even a spectacular order. One hotel — not that many bar stools — and Martin had turned it into an academic thesis. Yet despite, or perhaps because of it, Adam was (grudgingly) proud of Martin. He admired Martin’s passion for the product. He knew how it felt to be driven by an idea, to create a product, to meet a deadline, to harness manpower and drive for perfection. Sergio and Martin were driving for the same goal. The difference, as Adam saw it, was that Sergio was the heart surgeon with a supermarket trolley and Martin was a lad from the suburbs whose mother expected him to do well and who did … because he could, having grown up with a good education in the land of plenty, where money could turn mediocrity into management. And then Adam chided himself, because he had hand-picked Martin, and not because he was mediocre. But if you compared the two journeys — Sergio’s dislocation from a disintegrating Soviet Union, and Martin’s journey — there were definite discrepancies. There was also the lurking possibility that Sergio knew as much, or more than Martin.

  The meeting finally ended with a compromise reached between Martin and Sergio on the number of production meetings versus the number of bar stools. Fewer meetings, more stools; it seemed like a fairly good compromise. Sergio even gave Martin a light punch on the right shoulder, which, from where Adam was sitting, looked friendly. And, although Martin brushed his shoulder where Sergio’s fist had landed, he did so in an abstracted way, not, it seemed, with any particular purpose.

  Adam contemplated the time wasted on production meetings and new processes since Martin had come on board. He also recognised that without Martin his business would have remained static, and static was a kind of death. The overall wage bill had risen; production had risen, but not in direct ratio to the wage bill; costs for computer-driven technology (not to mention computers) had gone through the roof — and that reminded him, the roof needed repairs. All this activity, all
this technology … one day, his failing factory might be attractive to someone who saw all the technology and fancied he could do something with it.

  Before he’d hired Martin, inefficiencies counter-balanced by low wages had enabled Adam the satisfaction of being an altmuligmand. He’d enjoyed being the one who knew how every piece of equipment worked, when to slow production down, when to speed it up. Best of all was the panic when a deadline loomed and they had neither the manpower nor the material, but still they managed. Adam was the classic technician written about in business magazines; the sort of man who ought never to run his own factory because he lacked objectivity.

  Nowadays, everyone preached objectivity — a neutering of passion was how he saw it. You became objective as a last resort. It implied a lack of interest; it meant detachment. And so here he was, detached, disinterested and if not depressed, then close enough.

  For him, though, depression was not doable. He’d watched it once. Judy did depression after Michael — he had been her witness. They never spoke of it to anyone, just like they never spoke about what had been said the morning of Michael’s death. In grief, they were united. Guilt became an adhesive. It was too awful to imagine this separately. Adam felt — was — responsible. Judy fell into fragments and he helped her to reassemble the pieces until eventually, neither of them knew which pieces fitted where. Judy’s grief shaped his guilt, gave it a dimension, depth, definition. He nursed his guilt as if holding an infant, something so precious and tender that only the gentlest, most loving attention would do.

  They pretended that everything was normal (as normal as any married couple who have just lost their four-year-old under the wheels of the car that Daddy drove).

  They even considered another baby.

  Sometimes he wondered what would have happened …

  Instead: frantic, angry sex, spawning nothing but sadness, and finally, after eighteen months, separation. They sucked the life out of each other in search of redemption, and then Judy found Phillip. She met him at work. He made her smile again, took her seriously, didn’t notice her depression, and with medication and support, it lifted.

  Sergio was standing at the door, hand raised as if to rap on the architrave, mouth open as if to speak (either about to leave or about to enter). Adam wondered how long Sergio had been standing there. He realised he had his head lodged between his hands, that he was holding on to his head as if to stop it falling off. He imagined, for a moment, his head rolling on to the desk without him; all that guilt and sadness severed forever.

  ‘Adam, it is your help I need?’

  Sergio waved papers in front of Adam, looking sheepish and proud all at once. Adam read the papers and realised that Sergio was applying for citizenship and he wanted Adam to be his sponsor. He wondered privately about Sergio’s limited grasp of English and was about to express his thoughts when Sergio burst into song.

  It was the New Zealand national anthem, in Maori, with a Russian accent. Sergio was beaming with pride, having rehearsed the entire first verse to perfection. Adam was one of those New Zealanders who mumbled his way through the Maori version, with hearty emphasis on vowel sounds at line endings. He used the excuse (mainly to himself) that they didn’t teach te reo when he went to school — but the argument was wearing thin, especially now, listening to Sergio’s heartfelt rendition.

  There was something beautiful about Sergio standing in the doorway singing his heart out, unabashed, eager to join a society that Adam had taken for granted forever. He thought of Hagen giving up his Danish citizenship to become a Kiwi. He thought of Mt Albert and Sandringham and realised he knew very little about any of their lives or what drove them to abandon their homeland to live here. He envied their courage, their commitment to a future.

  He joined Sergio at the end, gave it his very best and together, a South Island boy and a Soviet lad …

  ‘Ah-or-tay-ah-roar-or-arrrrrrrrrrrrr!’

  Martin appeared behind Sergio, obviously keen to know what was going on. He shook his head, tugged at his Tahitian tie and looked bemused. Sergio wrapped Adam in a bear hug that he had neither time nor reason to resist. Martin made a hasty exit, stepping backwards into Paris, who interrupted Sergio’s embrace to inform Adam that Hagen was at reception.

  League of bloody nations.

  Hagen was looking flash, with his I’m not wearing a tie, but get a look at this Italian suit look. It was, Hagen told Adam, part of his campaign with the local council in the valley. He hoped to win a contract to work with them. Hagen admitted admiration for what Louise was doing in Wellington and thought he could do something similar on a smaller scale. He was heading for an appointment right this moment and wanted to know if Adam would være så venlig and act as a referee.

  Well, twice in one morning. An agent for Sergio, a referee for Hagen. Adam agreed. They would meet after Hagen’s appointment and chew the fat — which meant lunch and a beer somewhere, without alerting Martin. He’d need some extra-strong mints (breath, alcohol, his factory rules) and he knew just where to find them.

  The temp, whom he had so far succeeded in ignoring, now required his acknowledgement. She was sitting at Heather’s desk and the mints he wanted were in the third drawer down, right next to her hitherto irrelevant little white knee. He observed the definition of leg and kneecap, the slopes, the absolute alabaster of it all, and then pulled himself together. It was a trick he’d learned: he thought of it as subverting software, pushing the escape button, ignoring the task bar … not so much cancel as end now. He moved his focus from her knee to her studded nose. A safe shutdown.

  The temp handed him the mints, her pale arm extended over the desk. Yup, he’d been right the first time. Alabaster with purple puncture wounds. He’d have to talk to Martin about this. The new agency that had called earlier in the week, perhaps they could find a replacement.

  Hagen was picking him up outside the factory — had insisted on it. And when Hagen appeared at noon, on the dot, he was driving a brand-new car.

  So over lunch, instead of Hagen’s Why Not the Valley? campaign, they talked engines, horsepower, leather upholstery, and discussed the camber of the road on certain exhilarating corners on the Rimutaka hill. Satisfying. And after a second beer (a half, a half) he realised that Hagen hadn’t called in about his valley campaign, but merely to share his joy and pride in his latest purchase — just the sort of uncomplicated joy that Adam agreed with. Hagen’s pride was about making it, getting there, wherever that economic line in the sand was for an immigrant, no matter which culture they’d come from. It was about re-creation. A celebration uncensored. Hubris, it got bad press — the trick was not to overindulge it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Shopping for a wetsuit with Frankie meant he could slip by the office on Saturday and pick up some paperwork. Paperwork he’d overlooked when his long lunch with Hagen grew longer. Ajax would be there spray-painting. (He had his own set of keys.) But essentially, on a Saturday, Adam could reclaim the Pygmalion myth, indulge his creation fantasy. And who better to share it with than an uncritical witness like Frankie, who loved the factory?

  It was either The Warehouse or the dive school. Louise insisted the purchase be price-driven, but Adam knew that if he wanted to milk this experience for all it was worth, it had nothing to do with price. It was about choice, style, enthusiasm and comparison … what other fifteen-year-olds were wearing. After all, he was the benefactor. They weren’t going to tell Louise (he didn’t often go behind her back), and if Frankie had been a demanding kid he wouldn’t be doing this. But deep down this was about their relationship. He knew, too, that if they spent enough time this Saturday, somehow the whole Dam-dad thing might surface.

  Ness had told Louise she thought it was a good idea to ignore the whole issue and it would go away. Heaps of people thought Adam was her father and she didn’t correct them. It wasn’t, after all, a defining thing; it wouldn’t change anything. What did it matter what other people thought? Louise didn’t agree, but sh
e and Adam were both impressed with Ness’s response. It meant there was only one casualty to deal with and that was Frankie.

  Adam wondered if Ness would tell George. Maybe this was Frankie’s angle all along: pretend George wasn’t her dad and provoke him into ownership. Adam realised there was no easy solution, but that it was an evolving situation. For years they’d had the lid on it. Now the lid had been lifted. As with wine when cellared for a long time, it either improved or deteriorated, and you never knew until you tasted it. With this particular vintage, there were competing flavours and an unintended effervescence. They were sniffing, swirling it around, and had yet to swallow.

  ‘Hey, Fat-Dam,’ said Frankie, pushing lightly on Adam’s paunch (only Frankie could say fat without offence). He’d tried the shirt-hanging-out trick that Hagen did, but it didn’t work, so he’d loosened his belt one notch and breathed in. His paunch remained.

  ‘Hey, Mudface.’ He gestured, indicating the smudge of Marmite at the edge of Frankie’s mouth.

  She stuck her tongue out, wiped her upper lip from right to left and then dropped her upper lip right over her lower one and sucked.

  Adam grabbed a paper towel, spat on it and held it up in mock consternation as if he was about to wipe Frankie’s face. She dodged and ran, and he ran after her.

  ‘Fatso,’ she yelled as she tore out the door.

  ‘Mudface,’ yelled Adam and the two of them tore around the front garden, leaping shrubs and shrieking until Louise put her head out the door and reminded them it was only half past eight in the morning, and the neighbours might still be sleeping. But he could see from her droll smile that Louise really approved more than she disapproved.

  He knew, too, how lucky he was to share these madcap moments with Frankie. George had chosen to miss all this. Being pissed off with Frankie’s mother was no reason to miss out on the irretrievable joy of fatherhood. It crossed his mind for half a minute that he ought to phone George. But how could he? If George had rejected Frankie and Frankie was now rejecting George, it wasn’t up to Adam to play peacemaker — not when he was responsible for George leaving in the first place.