The Toymaker Read online

  About the Book

  A person is defined by the secrets they keep . . .

  Adam Kulakov likes his life. He's on the right side of middle age; the toy company he owns brightens the lives of millions of children around the world; and he has more money than he can ever spend, a wife and child he adores, and as many mistresses as he can reasonably hide from them.

  And he is not the only one with secrets. In 1944, Adam's grandfather, Arkady, was imprisoned in Auschwitz and given an impossible choice. Now, as he reaches the end of his life, he has to keep the truth from his family, and hold back the crushing memories of his time with one of history's greatest monsters.

  As a mistake threatens to bring Adam's world tumbling down around him, the past reaches for Arkady. Everything he's spent a lifetime building will be threatened, as will everything Adam and his family think they know of the world.

  Bold, dark and compelling, The Toymaker is a novel about privilege, fear and the great harm we can do when we are afraid of losing what we hold dear.

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Mumma

  ONE

  ‘Let me tell you a story about my grandfather.’ Adam leaned into the sentence, taking care with the syllables, throwing emphasis on the ‘my’, weight on the ‘grandfather’. He loved saying it; he loved to boom it out like he was the invisible, omniscient voice at the start of a movie trailer.

  ‘My grandfather came to this country with nothing, but now, because of his hard work and sacrifice, I have everything. Grandpa was proud of his work, of every little toy that he made. That’s why he was so successful. There’s nothing more important than hard work and sacrifice. To spend your life in service to others is the best thing a man can do with his time on Earth. When you work for a better world, when you are brave in the face of cruelty and stupidity, you earn self-respect, you earn dignity, which is the most important thing you can have in your life.’ Adam paused, letting the import of this sink over the classroom. ‘Because it lasts longer than your own lifetime. You get it from your parents, you pass it on to your own children. It’s important you do that, more important than leaving them with money, although I don’t think my own son would agree with that last part.’ He paused for laughter, but none came, which annoyed him. He looked to the teacher at the back of the room, who gave him the wind-up.

  Dickhead, Adam thought, but he smiled and obliged, skipped to the end of his talk. The kids looked bored anyway. Smack in the middle of their teens, they were too old to be excited by toys, and too young to understand just how exciting the sheer fact of his wealth was.

  Standing at the head of this year ten class, he was grimly reminded that he wasn’t a teenager any more, that he was starting to get old, that these schoolkids, surly and bored and secretly checking their phones under the table, weren’t impressed by him. Then he remembered why he was there in the first place, that he’d been asked to address the students because he was rich and powerful, and a valuable member of the community. If they didn’t know enough about life to be impressed by him, that wasn’t his concern. They would learn what life was, soon enough.

  He looked to the back of the classroom, where Clara was pretending to be absorbed by her phone. He’d known Clara since she was born, peripherally, through friends of the family, had maybe even been to her bat mitzvah, but hadn’t given her much thought until he’d made her acquaintance again recently and found she’d grown from an awkward chubby dud into a voluptuous dark-haired milk-treat.

  A fat little schoolboy sat next to her, casting her big-eyed mooning looks, in a way he must have thought was surreptitious. The kid was clearly in love with her, but Adam knew from long experience that until the kid grew a pair of balls she would friendzone him, at best. He wished he could warn the kid about that, considered walking up to him after class and giving him some wisdom: ‘Listen, buddy, just make a move.’ But no, everyone had to learn on their own. It would be character building for him to lose a few times – Adam couldn’t stand entitled children. He wrapped up his talk, said goodbye to the teacher, and went to the car park to wait.

  He felt like coming the second Clara took him in her mouth, so he forced his thoughts elsewhere. He looked away from his lap, where his fist was knotting her hair into a rough ponytail, and out the window, across the school oval to the swimming pool where kids were taking turns to dive off concrete platforms into the water. He clearly remembered the day that pool opened, as at the base of one of those diving blocks was a small plaque thanking Adam Kulakov for donating the funds for it.

  He’d done that when his son, while on a school excursion to the Shrine of Remembrance, had used his pocketknife to carve his name into the side of a statue commemorating the dead of the Second World War. Kade had been suspended and threatened with expulsion from the elite P–12 college, until Adam and his lawyers worked out recompense. A few hundred thousand dollars later, on top of already extortionate tuition fees, and the school had a shiny new swimming facility. To try to deny little Kade his rightful place at the school, and the attendant place at a sandstone university it would culminate in, was an act of unwarranted aggression from the principal, a pathetic greying man who clearly resented Adam’s status, but not nearly as much as Adam resented him for taking it out on his son.

  As Adam thought about the way he’d handled that situation, the calm gravitas with which he’d talked down the furious school board, slammed the chequebook on the desk and signed the problem away with a flourish, he swelled with pride and came all of a sudden, surprising himself as well as Clara, who gagged briefly but then smoothly swallowed, not missing a beat.

  The calm, practised way Clara had with sex was both appalling and irresistible to Adam. With her he felt a frisson he hadn’t experienced since he had been a teenager. It wasn’t just the way her freshly minted body pumped away atop him in the back seat of his BMW X5. Rather, it was the kind of singular beauty that bloomed at fourteen as the Ashkenazi time bomb of her genetics deployed her puppy fat strategically about the chest and hips, transforming her in the space of a year from big-boned hockey captain to rangy artwork, and rendering her, for the next decade or so at least, delectably fuckable – a beauty he wouldn’t have been able to appreciate when he was fourteen, or even thirty, but at forty, his palate had expanded to fully savour it. Only with his own youth faded had Adam understood the aphorism: youth is wasted on the young.

  He knew that part of it was the danger as well. Sitting in the car park across from the oval at lunchtime, waiting for her, he had found himself growing excited even before he saw her striding across the oval, swinging her schoolbag lazily over one shoulder, spitting out her gum as she got near the BMW. There was an extra little thrill in running his hand up under her skirt while they cruised down the main drag of his beachside suburb, past boutiques and cafes that threatened at any moment to disgorge some gossip-prone acquaintance or another. The possibility that he would be caught, busted, his life brought crashing down around him, was profoundly erotic. That’s what drove him to take these risks – half the fun was pushing the envelope: buying her expensive dinners at his usual haunts, taking her out for cocktails in places he used to go drinking with his wife.

  Clara righted herself, wiping her mouth and sweeping her hair back behind her head with one graceful gesture, and then leaned across his lap to where he kept a bottle of Coke in the beverage holder. She rinsed her mouth, gulped, and smiled.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she a
sked, lightly.

  ‘Better,’ he croaked, his mouth dry. ‘Thank you.’

  She leaned back in the seat and crossed her arms, pursed her lips. ‘I wish you wouldn’t thank me. It’s not like I’m doing you a favour.’

  ‘It seems that way to me,’ he grinned.

  ‘If I didn’t like it I wouldn’t do it.’ It made him happy to hear her say that, although he didn’t believe her in the slightest. He couldn’t really understand the joy with which girls like Clara put themselves through what he considered to be a fairly grotesque chore. With his wife, Tess, oral sex had become something of a mirage; on the horizon but always out of reach, and one that had evaporated almost entirely a few years into the marriage.

  Clara, on the other hand, really seemed to enjoy it, along with other acts he found sparing in his marital bed – complex, pretzeled positions – and had even hinted tantalisingly at a fondness for anal, all of which he attributed to a generational shift. Girls like Clara had grown up with unfettered internet access and had learned about sex from the coalface. They’d practised with boys who were raised to believe that sex started with a blowjob, shifted through a rigmarole of missionary, cowgirl and doggy style, and ended with a facial. What a time to be alive.

  He’d met her on Tinder, where, using a pseudonym, a carefully blurred photo and a spirit of cavalier paranoia, he swiped right on any girl he thought could keep a secret. Clara had been one of the only ones to respond, and he had nearly died of shame and fear when they met in real life and he realised who she was. Once he’d calmed down and she’d convinced him that she wasn’t bait in some elaborate predator trap, he’d set about seducing her.

  Now as they rolled out of the car park, Clara put her legs, sun-tanned and hockey-toned, up on the dashboard, and Adam looked away, suddenly stricken with regret. Whenever he was with her, in the moments just after he had come, Adam felt disgusted by her, seized by a desire for her to slip out of the car and leave him alone.

  The problem with infidelity, as he saw it, was the melancholy that filled him up seconds after he emptied out. Since he’d been a boy, an orgasm was always accompanied by a rush of endorphins that turned his mind into a vacuum, into which crept the terrible suspicion that he was ridiculous. It was always the same feeling, whether thirteen, surrounded by wadded tissues and listening in hushed panic for his mother’s footsteps in the hall, or at forty, climbing off a teenage girl in the back of his car. His natural urge was the overwhelming desire to get as far away as he could, but over time he’d learned to ride out the unsavoury reality of post-coital company, long enough to endure conversation, cuddles, the drive home.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked her.

  She cocked her head and shrugged. ‘What did you have in mind?’

  He laughed. ‘How about some junk food? I feel like being naughty.’

  ‘Do you now?’ she said, pouting. ‘I could be up for that.’ She leaned across and gave him a squeeze.

  ‘Already?’

  ‘Nearly your naptime, Granddad?’

  He laughed again, but it was a little more forced this time. The BMW pulled into the KFC drive-through, where Adam barked an order into the microphone. At the cashier’s booth, he found his wallet was devoid of cash and clicked his tongue, annoyed. He didn’t understand where all his dollars went. No matter how much money he pulled out at the machine, his crisp handfuls of green and gold wilted and vanished by day’s end. Adam frowned, and reached over to search the glove box for change, necessitating an awkward reach under Clara’s calves perched on the dashboard.

  ‘What’s the matter, Adam?’ she asked with mocking sweetness. ‘Do you need to borrow money?’

  Adam forced a smile, hoping the angry flush creeping up his cheeks wasn’t visible. He fished out a company credit card that the girl at the counter swiped, before asking him to drive up to the next window. There, a pale brown kid with glasses and acne handed him a paper bag. He was short and slight, and had to lean right out of his station to pass a tray of drinks to Adam, which was how he caught sight of the schoolgirl in the passenger seat, her legs up on the dash so that her skirt bunched around her hips, and his eyes stuck stupid on her thighs, his sentence trailing away.

  Clara, who had been absorbed in her phone, looked up and caught his eye, twisting her lips in annoyance. Her eyes burned with all the glacial beauty she could summon at a moment’s notice, which was plenty, and froze him to the spot. ‘See anything you like?’

  The kid blanched, looked at Adam, then at Clara, then at Adam again. He paused, half out of the window, holding the tray of drinks aloft. ‘Yes. I mean no. I mean . . .’ the kid started to stutter and Adam felt sorry for him, and amused by his discomfort, and impressed by the scorn Clara could turn on like a spotlight. ‘It’s just, just, a very nice car,’ the kid finished lamely, and dropped his eyes to the wood-panel interior of the vehicle.

  ‘Yes,’ Adam agreed curtly. ‘It is.’

  ‘Is it a Mercedes?’

  ‘No, it’s a BMW.’

  ‘It’s nice.’ The poor boy’s eyes flickered around the cabin in alarm, landing like a skittish bug on the steering wheel, the gearstick, the DVD player, the beverage holders, anywhere but Clara or Adam. He still held the tray out awkwardly towards the car, and only leaned back and dropped his gaze shamefacedly when Adam took the drinks and tapped the accelerator to end the excruciating moment.

  Adam hated eating and driving at the same time, and parked in the deserted car park behind the restaurant, where they would be shielded from the passing traffic. He wolfed down a burger while they laughed about the drive-through clerk’s discomfort.

  ‘I think you’ve got a friend back there,’ teased Adam. ‘Do you want me to get his number for you?’

  Clara’s laugh was icy. ‘Sure, why not? I love black guys.’

  Adam’s face fell. ‘What?’

  ‘Black guys. They have great skin.’ She grinned. ‘And big dicks.’

  ‘Oh.’ Adam frowned, suddenly jealous, inexplicably, because he was not racist, and besides, the kid wasn’t even black, not properly, he was brown. Indian, or more likely Pakistani, and he wasn’t about to feel jealous of a Pakistani.

  Clara saw that she had ruffled Adam, and turned the same mocking smile on him she’d just turned on for the clerk. ‘What’s the matter, Mr Kulakov?’ Her voice was earnest but her eyes were cruel. ‘Are you jealous?’

  ‘No, it’s just . . . Should I be?’

  ‘No, don’t worry about a thing. You have a perfectly nice penis.’

  Her smile widened, almost imperceptibly.

  ‘Nice?’ Adam winced to hear himself trip on the word, squawking when he meant to smirk.

  ‘Yes, nice. Perfectly fine.’ She smiled, carefully wrapped her half-uneaten burger, put it on the dashboard, then leaned over to unfasten his belt buckle. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing, Mr Kulakov.’

  The bracelet he’d bought her tinkled as she worked, and the white-gold charms caught the sunshine and cast dancing sparkles of light around the cabin. Again, a sheer sense of wonder at Clara’s ability came over him, and he tried not to think about how a girl this young could throw herself upon him with a skill that combined instinct and experience for such a result. When he’d asked she’d assured him that he was her first older man, so he guessed that it was simply luck that he’d stumbled upon her. Better him, after all, than some creep.

  He was hard to bursting now, and climbed into the back seat, hit the release levers so the seats swung back into the boot, making one long cargo-bay of the cabin. Clara clambered across and positioned herself on all fours so that he could squeeze up behind her. As tall as the cabin of the SUV was, even with the seat laid down flat, Adam had to crouch with his head bowed and one leg stuck awkwardly out to the side to steer himself into her.

  Clara let out a gasp and began moaning and bucking against him. After a few wild jabs he found his rhythm, and started to grunt and thrust. She switched rapidly between soft, barely breathed words of appr
oval and excited, high-pitched yelps of joy as he accelerated, and she tossed her hair over her shoulders so it lay in a hazy dark fantail across her back. Glancing across to the other side of the cabin, he caught a glimpse of their reflected image in the tinted windows.

  The sight of him thrusting into her made him at once ferociously excited and sad that he would have to end it, tonight probably, after they were done. He wished he didn’t have to, but practicalities were piling up. The logistics of running an affair were difficult enough when both parties were adults with driver’s licences and homes of their own, and besides, nothing could last forever. Still, she looked good, she really did.

  Inspired, he reached out to where his iPhone sat cradled in the bluetooth bracket and snatched it up, then, with one hand on her back, he swiped his thumb across the screen to activate the camera. He took the first shot surreptitiously, which was abysmal, just a blur of skin and hair. Judging her too busy to clock what he was doing, he reached right out across the car to take a wide-angle snap. The photo was perfect, but he had to break rhythm to get it, and Clara groaned, ‘Come on, fuck me,’ and reached back to grab his arse and pull him deeper into her.

  The convergence of the dirty talk, the sensation of sinking deep into her and the perfect image on his phone, which showed him ploughing away, his face gritted and manly, her head thrown to the side and her eyes closed in ecstasy, was too much, and he came, grunting mightily, then collapsed across her back, still inside her. He lay dazed for a second, her skin sticky and warm against his chest, then propped himself up on his elbow and looked out the window to find he was staring straight into the eyes of the clerk who’d just served them.

  __________

  An alarm, a sweet ringing note like an angel breaking a wineglass, startled Tess, and she realised she’d allowed herself to drift away, that for some time her eyes had been focused not on the spreadsheet but on her reflection, wan and sleep-deprived, in the computer monitor. She did not consider vanity one of her flaws, nor inefficiency, and so to find herself staring moonstruck into her own eyes on a workday was mortifying. She frowned, pinched herself mentally, and then when that did not seem to fix her pique, on the soft skin of her left wrist, between a lacquered thumb and forefinger.