by Heide Goody
“I am helping you,” I said. “I’m helping you by going upstairs. I’ll be back soon.”
I went outside. In the corridor, I took off my sodden shoes. My socks were just as wet so I took them off too.
I stopped in at my apartment. Hattie was fixing beans for dinner. She had her favourite Smiley Tot sitting in a high chair, positioned as though it was watching her. Hattie would claim she had no favourites among her Smiley Tots but this was a lie.
“I’ve got to go upstairs,” I said.
“Why?”
“There’s some sort of leak. You want to come?”
“Why?” said Hattie.
“To explore. It’ll be an adventure.”
“I don’t think I want an adventure,” said Hattie, quite seriously. “Don’t be long. I’ve got today’s chores to do and it’s Smiley Out and About soon.”
“And today’s jobs are…?”
“Polish the ceiling in here, test the soap dispensers and synchronise the windows,” said Hattie.
“Of course,” I said. I had a respectable approach to cleanliness but nowhere near as exacting as Hattie. Cleaning and Smiley Tots. Smiley Tots and cleaning. It was like my roommate was constantly in preparation for something, something vitally important that was never going to happen.
I went to the stairwell and climbed to the next floor. I counted along the doors until I found the apartment that was directly above the Swanager and Pedstone’s. I raised my hand to knock on the door but then saw that the door was broken and ajar. There was tape across the door which read, Emergency Responder Scene – Police Aware.
I touched the door and it swung inwards. I stepped inside the gloomy space and recoiled slightly at the musty smell. The floor was wet here too.
“Hello?”
“Welcome home, tenant,” said the apartment.
“Ah, no. I…”
The ceiling lights came on, sparked noisily and then went out again.
“Hello?” I said.
There was no reply this time.
I walked further inside. There was the sound of trickling water from somewhere. A fine layer of dust covered everything that wasn’t wet. Hattie would be horrified by the neglect if she could see this apartment. It looked as though nobody had lived here for weeks, maybe months. I went back through to the lounge. There were a few small remnants of the previous occupancy.
A basket sat on the soaked floor, thick with cobwebby balls of fibres and some curious pointed sticks.
There were some books on a shelf. I stared at them with suspicion. They belonged in the same outmoded world as physical stationery, they were an old-world curiosity that probably harboured a great many germs.
On another shelf were framed photographs. I picked one up. It showed two people, a blonde woman and a silver-haired man, in thick clothing and strange goggles, standing in what looked like a very hostile environment. The ground was white with snow, and the people appeared to be deep in unpaved countryside. Despite the danger of their situation, the people in the photograph had smiles on their faces.
I could not imagine why that might be.
I put the frame down, confused. I picked up another. The same two people were immersed in water up to their waists. I gasped in horror. How had they managed to get themselves into such danger? And why were they smiling in this photograph as well?
I realised that underneath the frames were some fat plastic books. I slid one out from underneath the frames and wiped the dust off it with my hand. It had a shiny cover that declared it to be a photograph album. I was about to open it when I remembered the running water, the sound of trickling that had slipped into background noise but had never gone away.
I located the bathroom and found a tap pouring water into a sink that overflowed onto the floor. There was a disconcerting downward bulge in the floor that I guessed corresponded with the hole in Swanager’s ceiling. I trod carefully, round to the sink and pulled the plug out. I tried to turn the tap off, but the top just span round in my hand. Challenged but not put off, I searched around, found a shut-off valve on the pipe, just below the sink, and turned it. The flow of water stopped.
“There,” I called out, hoping Swanager could hear. “I’ve stopped the leak.”
“My apartment’s still wet,” Swanager shouted back.
“I don’t have all the answers,” I said, more to herself than anyone.
I backed out of the bathroom where thick black mould spanned the walls. The smell was strongest in here, as if the tap had been leaking in a smaller way for a very long time.
I instinctively went back to the photograph album. I opened it and looked at the photos within.
“I don’t have all the answers,” I repeated.
***
“...thirty five, thirty six and we’re home,” I said to myself.
I entered my apartment, wet socks and shoes in one hand, the photograph album in the other. Hattie stood on the kitchen table, vigorously attacking the ceiling tiles with polish and duster.
“I’ve got blue beans and red beans,” she said, without looking down.
“Red beans?”
“Apparently there was a problem at the factory. The latest batches of blue beans are red. Do you want the blue ones or the red ones?”
“Which do you prefer?” I said.
“I asked you.”
I waited. Hattie looked down, consternated. “I don’t like change,” she said and then saw me properly. “What happened to your shoes?”
“Swanager’s apartment was indeed wet. I’ve put a call in to Helberg.”
Hattie looked at the dirty water dripping on the floor. “I’m going to have to clean that.”
“Sorry. You clean up. I’ll serve. Blue beans for you.”
While shoes and socks dried in the utility closet, we ate beans at the kitchen table. It transpired that red beans tasted exactly the same as blue beans.
Hattie amused herself by adjusting and admiring the Smiley Tot in the high chair. I studied the photograph album, turning pages slowly, feeling a growing anxiety at each mysterious image.
The album contain dozens of pictures of the same couple. Some of the pictures showed them eating and drinking the most impractical things. I found one that showed a picture of the silver-haired man with a monster on a plate in front of him. There was no other word for it: a monster. It was a livid pinky brown and it had giant scary claws that dwarfed its alien body. The man held up the claws in his hands and smiled broadly. I was troubled by the image and couldn’t imagine what it depicted.
The plate suggested that this scene was somehow connected to food. Was the monster the meal – no! – or was it the monster that was being fed? Fed what? And why?
Sometimes, when we watched TV, we might accidentally flick through some of the channels that were clearly not meant for us but for people on Jaffle Enhanced or Jaffle Premium. Those TV channels were not forbidden or blocked for people operating on Jaffle Standard; they simply held no interest for us.
Among them were the bizarre cooking shows that demonstrated some really time-consuming and strange ways to prepare food. It was a mystery to Hattie and I why anybody would perform all of those extra tasks with raw food and saucepans when the bean dispensers were so convenient, and delivered optimal nutrition every time. Was that monster the kind of thing to be served up (or fed) on one of those shows?
Worse still was Drama. Drama was confusing and disturbing, and featured scenes with people who failed to smile and spent a lot of time arguing and making each other unhappy. I couldn’t see any appeal in that at all.
It was time for Smiley Out and About, our favourite show. The streaming had already started but Hattie didn’t leave the kitchen until she’d put our plates in to wash. We then settled in the living room. We had a wide sofa and two armchairs and yet there was barely enough room. Fifteen Smiley Tots had prime viewing positions in three rows on the sofa. Hattie sat with a Smiley Tot in each arm.
“Oh, Mr Smiley!” said Hatt
ie with relief as she saw his beaming face shining from the screen. She relaxed then, holding her tots tightly. The show was our favourite. Mr Smiley was a large, yellow face with a lovely smile. People on the show would be doing their everyday work, just like I and Hattie did, and then Mr Smiley’s face would appear, shining above them, and they would be surprised and delighted to see him. Who wouldn’t be?
“Oh look, gardeners, a bit like the ones that work near our office,” said Hattie, looking at the screen. “See that man there? He looks a little bit unhappy. I really hope that Mr Smiley cheers him up.”
There was a pause of a few seconds. Hattie and I leaned forward in anticipation. Mr Smiley appeared above the man and beamed at him. The man smiled, looking much happier than before.
“Oh look! Look at his face! How lovely!” Hattie jigged in her seat and I was swept up in the moment as well. We watched Mr Smiley perform his tricks for several other people, each of them pleased to see the sunny smile shining down upon them. When Mr Smiley was out, everything seemed fine.
***
Chapter 4
“Why are we tiptoeing?” said Hattie.
“We’re not tiptoeing,” I said.
“And why are you whispering?” said Hattie in a voice that was not a whisper.
“Shh,” I said. “We’re not whispering.”
“You are!”
“Shhh!”
We crept past Swanager’s damp apartment. Or at least I did; Hattie just tramped behind me, squelching through the dampness which had spread from the apartment and across the hallway. After yesterday’s experiences, I was keen to simply get to work without delays. It was bad enough having to wait for Hattie to get the Smiley Tots dressed for another day of sitting about the apartment.
No, I shook my head at myself. I shouldn’t blame Hattie. Hattie’s routines were important to her and morning was a busy time.
We reached the stairs without getting collared by our neighbour and went down to the ground floor. The sweeping bot, Jet-Set Willy, was gone from the stairs. Someone had either righted it or it had managed to roll back onto its feet. As we descended, my attention flicked momentarily to my Jaffle Port – there were no jams on the pay-per-metre and the weather forecast was for uninterrupted sunshine. Today, I decided, was going to be a day for punctuality, perfect adherence to company rules and super-efficient brain utilisation.
In the lobby, a hand stretched out of the darkness of the complex manager’s office and clicked its fingers at me.
I wasn’t sure how I knew the finger clicking was for me but the fingers were pale and slender and belonged to Patrick Helberg.
“Good morning, Helberg,” I said and made to continue out the door.
Helberg whistled shrilly and the hand beckoned. “This way, O valued tenant.”
I looked to Hattie. She shrugged and shooed me in. I dipped behind the counter and stood at the doorway. “Good morning, Helberg. Is this about Swanager’s problem?”
“Job number four-three-eight. Damp apartment. I sent Hungry Horace to investigate.”
Hungry Horace was another of the refurbished bots that Helberg entrusted far too much of his actual job to. If I wasn’t mistaken, Hungry Horace was a vacuum cleaner bot that kept leaving incontinent piles of dust in the corridors. I couldn’t imagine what Horace could do about a waterlogged apartment.
“There was a problem with water from the apartment above,” I tried to explain. “I…” I faltered.
The complex manager’s office was a clutter of equipment, tools, foodstuffs and bits and bobs that were surely ornamental or I had no idea what they were for. I knew Helberg had an apartment in the complex but it looked like this was his true home. Half-eaten sandwiches sat next to dismembered bot parts and sheaves of unsorted papers. It wasn’t any of this that made me stop. It was the screen. On the screen behind him was a … well, I wasn’t sure what it was.
It was a series of images, a film of sorts, although I couldn’t be sure what the story might be. If forced to guess, I would have had to have said it was a news story about some very hungry people who had lost all their clothes. Perhaps they were poor people but they didn’t look very poor. Even with no clothes on they had an air of self-satisfied pleasure.
There were men and there were women and they were doing things. There was some sort of massage going on and something a bit like tickling. Rubbing. Rubbing was the verb that I would deem most accurate. And inserting. There was lots of emphasis on inserting and this made the people make noises. There were moans, the kind you made when you sat down with a nice plate of beans after a long day at work. And there were grunts, the kind you made when you’d got all the way to the office and realise you’d left something important at home. And the camera lingered on certain bits of the body that I instinctively felt didn’t need lingering on. Bits of the body, glistening pink.
I had seen images like this before. Flick through enough TV stations and you’d find stuff like this but, in those instances, I had flicked on by because it clearly wasn’t for me. But here it was presented to me as something I couldn’t just flick on by.
Helberg saw me looking.
“You like this kind of thing?” he said.
“No,” I said and felt oddly uncomfortable and didn’t know why.
“I thought you Jaffle employees were all on Premium.” He shrugged, threw down the electric motor he had been fiddling with and gave me a fixed stare. “Are you a registered and graded plumber?”
“No.”
“But it was you seen breaking and entering the apartment above Swanager’s yesterday.”
“Oh no, that’s not what I was doing,” I said, “I went up there to turn the water off.”
“Registered and graded plumber?”
“No.”
“Then it was breaking and entering,” said Helberg. “That’s a criminal offence and I’d need to call the police.” He glanced up, jipping his Jaffle Port. “They’ll fine you, even downgrade you to Jaffle Lite. You can be like one of those sad, orange losers with the vacant stares –”
“Helberg,” I said, trying desperately to sound reasonable. “Surely, you can see that I’m not a criminal.”
“Valued tenant, what am I to think?”
Valued tenant. He spoke in a manner that was deliberately old-fashioned, archaic even. But, like Swanager’s old lady mannerisms, it was just an act. Helberg was my age, younger even.
He glanced round as one of the naked men on the screen bent his attention to doing something that I felt was surely unhygienic. “The only other possibility is that you are the tenant of that apartment,” he said.
“I just popped in.”
“To see who? The Adlers, lovely tenants both, were moved into sheltered housing months ago. No. Breaking and entering it is. But…” He stroked his chin. “I like you, Alice. You’re a…” He leaned sideways, his chair creaking. He appeared to be craning round to look at my waist, my buttocks. I wondered if I’d sat in something, if I had something stuck to my backside. I looked; there was nothing there. I wondered what he was going to say I was and what it had to do with my buttocks.
“Now, since I do like you,” said Helberg, “I could be nice and suggest you take over the tenancy of that apartment – ”
“I was there for less than five minutes.”
“One day’s tenancy it is, then perhaps I can save you from criminal proceedings.”
A woman on the screen sighed heavily, which was just how I felt.
“One day?” I said.
“One day. Standard rate.”
He held out his hand. I swiped. He blinked.
“Oh,” he said. “There are insufficient funds in your account.”
I reeled. Quite apart from being very wrong, something wasn’t adding up. “That’s not possible,” I said. “A day’s rent. I can cover that.”
“A day’s rent indeed, valued tenant, plus the water bill for that apartment, taken from the reading made when the last tenant left. My, you do use a l
ot of water.”
“What? No—”
“The bill is fifteen hundred.”
“I don’t have fifteen hundred.”
“I can see that,” said Helberg, “I’ve taken what’s there and if you don’t pay the balance within a week then eviction is the next step.”
“That’s not right! I went up there to help and I turned the water off. I didn’t turn it on!”
“And I can only commend you for choosing to limit your water usage,” said Helberg. “That’s free advice from me, I should charge you for that really but I will let you off considering you are renting two apartments and you’re such a...”
His eyes flicked to my buttocks again.
“I don’t think it was a person who turned the water on,” I said. “I think the tap broke.”
“Criminal damage, eh? Either way, it’s you,” said Helberg. “So, that’s a week to get me the rest of the money.”
I stared in disbelief. On the screen, someone groaned like a woman who had just been charged money she didn’t have for an apartment she didn’t live in with a water problem she didn’t cause.
***
Hattie stood waiting in the pick-up zone outside. Empties still sat along the kerb, taking up most of the room. Someone ought to do something about them but I had no idea who to call. One of the Empties looked at me but I ignored it.
Everything all right?” asked Hattie.
I shook my head as I waved a car over. “No. Not really. You know when you try to do the right thing, and somehow it goes really, really wrong?”
“Ah yes,” said Hattie with a nod. “I sometimes get the twins’ outfits the wrong way round. It bothers me all day when I do that.”
“Right,” I said, with a sideways glance at Hattie. “Yes. Well this might be a little bit worse than two Smiley Tots wearing the wrong clothes.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Believe this.”
I ushered Hattie into the car, climbed in after her and swiped to pay. “Jaffle Park,” I told the car. “Helberg has taken all of my money,” I said to Hattie.