Shortcuts

by Grant Stone

  ‘It has been a while, no?’ she asked, passing me the glass of port.

  ‘Yes.’ My voice was husky, and I cleared it, and took a sip. I stared down at the contents of the glass. ‘I’ve mostly been in Asia this year. China. And India.’

  ‘I have missed you.’

  With her heels on she was as tall as me, but she took them off, one by one, and I watched her toes wriggle in the thick fur rug. Her nails were painted red, her toes slender and perfect. She grabbed my chin, and raised my eyes to her face.

  ‘What does India have that you cannot find here?’ Her thick black hair was pulled back, piled high upon her head, her dark eyes thickly outlined. She had told me once that during the Second World War her pregnant grandmother had jumped on a boat that took her unborn mother all the way across the Black Sea, to an isolated township in Russia. And on that same night she told me that her mother only lived to the young age of 18. I remember lying there, doing the maths, realising that despite all visible evidence Madame Bellarina must be at least seventy years old.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered.

  She knelt, and began undoing my shoelaces. The fire was becoming unbearably hot, and I loosened my tie with my free hand. I stood awkwardly on one leg, then the other, as she removed each of my shoes. As she straightened up I noticed that she was wearing the diamond earrings I had bought her. But the diamond necklace – that wasn’t from me.

  I touched it. She brushed my hand away.

  ‘Do you have many suitors?’ I asked, feeling myself blush.

  She leaned in, on tiptoes, and kissed me on the nose. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, taking my glass of port and placing it on the mantelpiece. ‘But you, Carl, are my favourite.’

  JENNY SMELLED OF SOAP and washing powder. Before it started going grey her hair was the colour of Old English Breakfast, brewing in the pot. She’d grow it long, then cut it short, never entirely satisfied with it. Her eyes slanted down at the edges, giving her a melancholy look. I used to think that she was lovely. We met at a book fair, in Oamaru of all places. I was down for my grandfather’s funeral and she was helping her sister with a newborn baby. My nephew-to-be. She came out of the public bathroom with a piece of toilet paper stuck to her shoe, and I mentioned it to her. That was how it started. Both glad to get away from our families, we walked up and down Oamaru’s long main street about five times, past the fish and chip shops and the second-hand stores, the families buying cream-filled lamingtons on a Saturday afternoon. When I finally built up the courage to ask her back to my motel her cheeks flushed a deep pink. She told me she had to get back to her sister.

  Back in Auckland, a month or so later, I tracked her down online and asked her out. She was doing a kite-making course in the evenings, and we took one of her colourful beasts up Mt Eden. It flew five seconds at most, then promptly crashed into a tree. Watching Jenny back at her kitchen table amidst pottles of glue and paint, the paintbrush held between her teeth as she readjusted the dragon’s goggling eyes, I fell in love with her. Like a painful blow to my chest.

  Those memories have been coming back to me recently. The ones from before Rachel was born, before we bought the first house, before we had a mortgage. Before my work took me away. Back when Jenny was slim, beautiful and red-haired, and I truly believed I’d never love another woman.

  Jenny was never elegant. Never breathtaking, enigmatic, or even carefree. She didn’t wear perfume. The one time I tried buying her something with diamonds on it, she donated it to the Salvation Army; she obviously had no idea how much it cost. She liked to buy plain terracotta flower pots, and painted them in bright stripes. She made a terrific pavlova. In the months leading up to Nico’s birth she knitted enough hats and booties to keep a nursery of little kiddies warm. And she always made a point of meeting me at the airport when I returned home. No matter what the time. Even when things weren’t good between us.

  They say that when you lose someone you love you lose a part of yourself. Personally I think that’s sentimental bullshit. Jenny and I weren’t Siamese twins; we weren’t connected by the arm or hip; we didn’t share a psychic bond. If anything, I’ve gained something these past two years she’s been gone. A new piece to me that’s lodged firmly inside, which I can’t pick loose. Next to all those memories. It’s a pointy-edged chip of guilt. Relentless, painful guilt.

  IT WAS DARK OUTSIDE, some early hour just before sunrise. Maybe after. It was hard to tell since the sky was full of clouds. I stood on Madame Bellarina’s private balcony, sipping slowly from the tall glass of water I’d poured myself from the crystal jug she keeps beside her bed. I felt like shit. In the alleyway below, a man on a forklift shifted crates into the back of the small grocery store. I could see his breath. My coat was still down in the lobby, but I had one of Madame Bellarina’s thick, woollen shawls wrapped around my shoulders. Cinnamon and sandalwood.

  I eased myself into one of Madame Bellarina’s ornate iron chairs, put the glass on the table so I could better massage my throbbing temples. This was the kind of moment when I wished I’d never given up smoking. Jenny had always believed it was her badgering that had finally done it, and would savour her victory by pointing out smokers and commenting on how dirty their habit looked, expecting me to agree. In all actuality it was because they’d made it so damn hard for us. You can’t smoke in parks. You can’t smoke on the street. You can’t smoke within five metres of a child without a street cam picking it up. My hasty, self-conscious puff was interrupted too many times by my vice informing me of my instant fine, and so I eventually gave it up.

  I was in trouble. Not catastrophically so, but still it was trouble. I had promised her a car. Last night. In the quiet before we slept, as I held her against my side and smelled her cinnamon hair and thought about the man who had given her the diamond necklace, I’d asked Madame Bellarina if there was anything I could get for her. Buy for her. She had rolled over and kissed my neck, and told me she needed a new car. But she’d been more specific than that. She’d had the exact car in mind, told me the exact street corner to meet her on during my lunch break.

  I squeezed the bridge of my nose, screwing my eyes up tight. She knew my first name. She knew I worked for an international finance consultancy firm. She knew I had a wife and a grown daughter, and that I was from New Zealand. She knew I had money enough to buy her diamond earrings. I’d been careful to never tell her a lot about myself, but I bet it was more than I knew about her. Bellarina probably wasn’t even her name.

  I’d catch a taxi back to the hotel, I decided, sleep a few hours, try to freshen up. I could make it into the office by 9.00 if I skipped breakfast and drank coffee instead. There was a fire escape leading down to the street from Madame Bellarina’s balcony. I’d freeze my nuts off looking for a taxi without my coat, but at least I wouldn’t have to stumble through the maze that was Madame Bellarina’s brothel in the dark. It was all doable. Everything was going to be all right. I would shuffle the accounts in some way. I’d hidden large expenditures before.

  As I slipped back through the heavy velvet curtain into Madame Bellarina’s room and searched for my tie beneath her cream negligee, I wondered if it was okay to kiss a sleeping woman if she wasn’t your wife.

  THE LIGHTS TURNED ON automatically when I entered my hotel room, and I immediately dimmed them. My throat felt as dry as a cardboard tube. In the bathroom I inspected myself in the mirror. Oh hell. I looked like a grey, wrinkly old fuck. I splashed some water at myself, but it didn’t much help.

  As soon as I collapsed onto the bed and kicked off my shoes I heard her. Screaming. I could hear Jenny’s Tiny screaming from my bedside drawer.

  I tugged the drawer open and pulled it out. It was warm in my hand.

  ‘Carl!’ Jenny’s voice shrieked at me. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling for hours!’

  I could hear her sobbing, the sound breaking up and crackling through the speakers; her Tiny’s face appeared as emotionless as usual. ‘I’ve been stuck
, trapped in your drawer! Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve been working all night, I just got back,’ I lied. ‘But what’s going on, Jenny? I switched you off after we last spoke. Why are you still turned on?’ It was then that I noticed that her Tiny’s left leg was mangled, misshapen.

  ‘You switched me off, but you switched me straight back on again! You jammed me in your drawer, Carl, and twisted the ankle. I think you broke the leg! My leg feels all tight, like there’s something tied around it. I can’t make the feeling go away. And I can’t turn myself off! I push my switch and nothing happens! I’m going crazy here. I couldn’t look after Nico properly, Rachel had to come and pick him up. I’ve got a terrible headache, I feel nauseous, I feel so sick. It’s been horribly dark, darkness covering everything. And why did you even put my Tiny in your drawer?’ Her voice rose several pitches. ‘I leave your Tiny out where I can see him at all times! I even take him in the car with me!’ Her voice broke and I heard more staticky sobbing.

  I turned the Tiny over in my hands, trying to see if I could straighten the leg. It was well and truly broken. The ankle flopped from side to side uselessly.

  ‘It’s 6.30am over there!’ Jenny cried.

  I realised I’d turned her Tiny to face my bedroom clock, and swore under my breath.

  ‘Were you...’ I heard her choke. ‘Were you drinking again, Carl?’

  I stared into her Tiny’s brown eyes, and a small cement brick settled in my gut.

  ‘Michel had a bottle of Max Walker,’ I said.

  ‘Carl, how could you?’

  ‘I thought one wouldn’t hurt. But one became two, became three... I’m sorry, Jenny.’

  She said nothing. I couldn’t even hear sniffling.

  ‘Jenny, love?’

  Her voice was icy underneath the sound of her blocked nose. ‘I am not happy about this. You’ve let me down more than you can know. I needed you tonight. You weren’t there.’

  JENNY HAD ALREADY CONTACTED the Tiny product representatives, had spent most of her evening on her vice being transferred from this person to that, but I gave them a try anyway. No one could be of any help. Until then they’d believed it impossible for someone to become locked to their Tiny. All it takes to end the connection is for one side to be turned off – by twisting the Tiny’s ankle, or by switching the ear switch off at source. Although it seemed plausible that the Tiny might get stuck in an ‘on’ position, no one could explain why Jenny’s ear switch wasn’t working. The unhelpful woman on the holo-screen advised me to send Jenny’s Tiny to them in the post, so that they could forward it on to be repaired.

  ‘Not happening,’ Jenny objected. ‘I’m not having half my consciousness trapped inside a courier box. The Tinys are manufactured in Sweden. It could take days, and it would be freezing inside the cargo hold of a plane. There’s no way we’re doing that.’

  ‘Then I’ll cut it open and crush the battery inside.’

  ‘But that will render the lifetime warranty void,’ Jenny told me. ‘I’d already asked them that.’

  ‘But isn’t it the best option?’

  There was a knock at the door. Room service had come with the wake-up coffee I’d ordered, meaning it was 8.30 already. I walked out into the hallway and made a quick call to Michel, apologising that I’d be in a little later than usual. He’d cleared his entire schedule for the week I was in the city, and I knew he came in to the office early, so I hoped he wouldn’t be too annoyed. Halfway through the call a message popped up on the bottom left hand side of the holo-screen, from an unknown number. ‘I enjoyed your company last night’, it read. ‘See you at half 12. MB.’ I stared at it for a few seconds, stunned that she knew my number, stunned that she’d messaged me, and then realised with a shock that I’d left my business cards in the inner pocket of my coat. Now she knew as much as she needed to. Michel was looking at me as if he expected an answer to something he’d said. I apologised again and told him I’d be as quick as I could.

  ‘I’m going to have to go to work soon, love,’ I said, returning to the Tiny’s side. I picked it up and carefully removed its shirt from its miniature limbs, pulling the shirt over its head. I never usually undressed it, at least not when Jenny was switched on inside of it. The breasts were too familiar. The mole on her shoulder. The scar from the Caesarian. It didn’t seem right. I prodded at the chest and stomach.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jenny coughed. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘I’m looking for the battery.’

  ‘No, Carl, don’t. Please don’t. They cost us a fortune, remember?’

  I remembered, all right. Remembered standing in the lab with the green walls, and the green lino floor, being scanned from top to bottom by lab technicians in green lab coats. They were all young, glossy, shipped over from Australia and working out of a private hospital in Remuera. I was naked, standing dead still while glancing down at my grey chest hairs and shrivelled cock. Why did Jenny want to duplicate this old fart? A girl drew purple lines on my skin. She kept huffing on her wrist watch before pressing her hands against me. It took hours.

  Those little dolls cost me more than a year of my annual salary. Jenny had insisted that we get them, had implied that our marriage was in jeopardy. It had seemed such a frivolous waste, an extravagant novelty, even though I’d never known Jenny to be extravagant or to frivolously waste anything. She even used the same teabags more than once to save money.

  I got the money back, of course. And much more. The large settlement I received from the Tiny Corp once all this business ended will be enough to take care of Jenny for the rest of her life. I’m sure that more than a few of the Tiny hardware developers were fired over the incident; they could never explain what went wrong. I realised though, later, that I’d lied in court when I’d told them that Jenny’s switch had worked perfectly up until that one time when it didn’t. Because, in actual fact, we’d never tested it. I always turned her Tiny off first. I could never end the conversation fast enough.

  ‘Look, either I cut this open and smash the battery, or I post it to Sweden, right?’ I wanted to get to work. I wanted to think about the Madame Bellarina situation. I wanted to drink my coffee.

  ‘You could take it to Sweden,’ Jenny said quietly.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jenny, are you serious?’

  ‘It’s much cheaper than getting a new Tiny. And you’d be with me on the plane. I wouldn’t be alone.’

  ‘I’ve got to get to work. We’ll talk about it when I get back this afternoon.’

  ‘What? You can’t just leave me here. I’m feeling utterly wretched.’

  ‘I know, love. But what do you expect me to do about it?’

  Jenny started to vomit loudly.

  THE OFFICE THEY’D ALLOCATED me for my visit was on the 92nd floor, but I realised I was very close to being unpardonably late so asked the elevator to take me straight to the top.

  ‘Express,’ I added.

  ‘Mot de passe est requis; password is required,’ the female elevator voice declared softly.

  ‘Oh damn, what was it now?’ I patted my trouser pockets out of habit, as if a password might be sitting at the bottom of one. The old-style black and white analogue clock hanging in the foyer showed the time as 9.27. ‘Oh Christ, just take me up. No, no! I know, it’s 7. 2. 2. 3.’

  The doors closed, and I felt the sudden upward movement in my stomach and knees. Once beyond the first few floors the exterior fell away, and through the floor-to-ceiling elevator window I watched the ground dropping swiftly from my feet as the panoramic view of Fleuve Saint-Laurent widened.

  Montreal transforms during springtime from dirty grey to vibrant green. The snow recedes, revealing a hidden treasure trove of trash and frozen dog shit, and the leaves unfurl. When I was in my early forties I spent a stint there during winter. It was bloody cold – cold enough for my eyeballs to freeze on the outside, causing me to stumble around the salty streets in a steamy blur, but giving me plenty of excuses to drink the mulled wine that the
pub around the corner from my hotel made in huge quantities. I’d drink the wine while watching people circle the park outside, teenagers holding hands, expert skaters. At the time, Jenny was having trouble with Rach, who was going through that ‘emo’ stage that was all the rage with the teenagers back then. Cropped black hair, grimy thumb-holes in her sleeves, all that. Jenny would call me, tearfully re-enacting their latest row in detail. There was nothing I could do about it.

  Nearing the top floor, I opened my suit jacket just enough to see Jenny’s Tiny resting in the inner pocket.

  ‘I want out of here,’ she said. She must have perceived the change in light.

  ‘I’ve told you,’ I sighed. ‘You can’t come out. What happens up here is confidential, between myself and the Chief Financial Officer. It’s not exactly the kind of thing I can bring my wife along to. Now be quiet. Once I’ve said g’day to him I’ll tell him I need to go get my papers, and I’ll leave you in my office.’

  The elevator door opened. The receptionist, Paulette or Pauline or some name like that, threw off her headpiece when she saw me, and sprang from her seat. She immediately hurried me down the corridor and, to my dismay, led me past Michel’s office to the main boardroom. As she knocked politely on the door I racked my brain, trying to figure out what Michel had told me on the phone that morning. Michel opened the door, looking more than a little peeved.

  ‘I’m very sorry I’m late,’ I said. ‘There’s been a bit of an emergency.’

  Behind Michel twelve people sat around the long mahogany table. Their expressions were the familiar practiced neutral, except for the woman sitting nearest to the door, who turned around and smiled maliciously.

  ‘An emergency?’ Michel stepped aside to let me in. ‘I hope not serious.’

  The table was set with water jugs and tall glasses; each of the twelve people had a holo portfolio hovering in front of them. I now noticed the tall blonde woman sitting at the far head of the table, and instantly recognised her as Jane Frank, their CEO. She was notorious for leaving her New York office and dropping in unannounced. It was said that wherever she went, at least one person was fired. I reached up and covered the bulge in my jacket. ‘Michel, can I please speak to you privately?’