The Toymaker Page 2

  She kept pinching, harder now, as she turned to the computer and opened the expense report. The chime was the most soothing sound Apple Computers offered, and she’d reserved it to ring out every time anything was charged to the com­pany’s expense account. The account had been set up as a slush fund to woo potential clients, but Adam, ever impulsive, was in the habit of handing out expense cards to their staff as a way of rewarding their loyalty. It was a nice idea, but impractical – and expensive – as each staffer grew bolder with discretionary purchases by the day. Adam, through his well-intentioned largess, had made a mess of things. He was a destructive power both insidious and spectacular, a great storm front of a man who would tear the roof off your life even as floodwaters rose to claim the rest of it.

  It was his fault, for instance, that Tess had found herself, at thirty-four, running a toy company. She wasn’t groomed for it, really wasn’t qualified to clean its toilets; her only training was in the arts, specifically in making puppets.

  She’d been raised in a sprawling Irish-Australian dynasty of artists and bohemians, and puppetry had seemed the only career unique and avant-garde enough to make her stand out from her siblings and cousins.

  Her grandfather, Connor Coughlin, had been at the vanguard of Australian modernism at the precise time that it became briefly fashionable in international art markets, and a certain kind of antipodean swagger could lure pounds, francs, rubles and lira across the equator. In his half-century on Earth, Connor had managed to amass an unbelievable fortune, and nearly a dozen children, sired to Tess’s long-suffering grandmother as well as a rotating stable of models, students, ser­vants and patrons. When he died, this expansive and genetically diverse dynasty immediately began decades of litigation and bacchanal that eradicated the fortune, but not before it had fostered a generation of painters, novelists, poets and musicians who could not comprehend that the money would one day run out.

  For a while Tess had tried to be a musician, then a writer, then, after being dragged to see a puppet show by an interminably dreary date, she stumbled upon her calling. She’d sat through it, Eric Bass’s Autumn Portraits, and watched five puppets paint a portrait of an old man’s waning life in ways that made her thoughtful, fascinated and, despite herself, joyful. By the end, when the bashful, mild-mannered puppeteer crept out from behind the curtain to bow, tears were streaming down her face, and she knew what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

  Encouraged by her theatre-critic mother and novelist father to pursue her dreams, she dipped into her trust fund and flew to New York to study with the Jim Henson Foundation. Three happy years there learning her craft and developing her show, then another making a name for herself touring Europe and North America, before flying home triumphant to find that her parents, having long ago hocked their last Connor Coughlin original, were broke. For the first time in generations, the Coughlins would have to make their own way in the world.

  Too proud to take a job that didn’t fully utilise her expensive, useless education, Tess worked as an entertainer for children’s parties. At first, she put on revamped variations of her show for wealthy families, which she would perform behind a screen while the children sat cross-legged and bored, as their parents drank wine and smirked at the double entendres. She did quite well but gave it up after running into an old rival, now married to an achingly handsome man and towing an even more beautiful toddler, and whose happiness and security eviscerated her and plunged her into an existential crisis. Was that what happiness looked like? How a person was supposed to spend a life? Had she already wasted hers on an art that was, she was beginning to suspect, fundamentally silly? To validate its worth she vowed to take her puppetry out of the small-time and carve an empire from it.

  She booked a spot at a children’s entertainment expo, to try to sell her puppet designs to the champions of the toy industry who had come to purchase new intellectual property. She performed as long and hard as she could, throwing herself around behind a canvas screen until she was sticky and exhausted. The representatives from company after company watched for a while, then walked off expressionless. Taking a break for lunch, she sat dejected and nursed a takeaway coffee and a bucket of chips. Tess refused to give in to self-pity, but she had few other options. Across the aisle, a trampoline company was taking in much of the foot traffic, having hired a couple of sexy teenage dancers to bounce and frolic at regular intervals throughout the day. She was watching the teenagers, wondering where it had all gone wrong and what she was going to do, when a man walked over to her and stole a chip.

  ‘Hey!’ she protested, unnerved. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Sorry,’ the man said. ‘I needed an excuse to come and talk to you.’ He smiled, and she smiled back, charmed by a move that years later he would admit that he’d read about in The Game, but which at that time seemed spontaneous and fun. It made her smile again at him when he asked, ‘Why so serious?’

  ‘Ugh,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to sell my idea to one of these fucking idiot toy companies but they wouldn’t know a good thing if it grabbed them by the balls.’

  ‘That’s weird. I don’t mean to boast, but I like to think I’m an excellent judge of character, especially when grabbed by the balls, and I happen to own one of these fucking idiot toy companies.’ He handed her a card with a picture of two smiling dolls, one boy, one girl, with the colourful legend ‘Mitty & Sarah’ scrawled underneath. Flipping the card over, she read white text on a black background: ‘Adam Kulakov – Owner’. Tess looked up from the card and gave Adam the once-over. He was wearing cargo shorts, runners and a zipped-up motorcycle jacket. It was such an incongruous look that she thought he must be either an imbecile or some fashion-forward genius.

  ‘You don’t say,’ she said.

  ‘I do. What’s more, I’d like to know what you’re selling,’ Adam said. ‘Why don’t you let me buy you some more chips?’

  Tess let him buy her some more chips, and later on dinner, where she drank too much and slept with him, and in true Coughlin tradition, fell pregnant almost immediately. When she realised she was with child, the first thing she did was get roaringly drunk with her friends. ‘You need to get the abortion quick-smart,’ they advised her. ‘Wait too long and it’ll start messing with your hormones and trick you into keeping it.’

  It wasn’t her first pregnancy. In Berlin a couple of years before she’d managed to pick one up, like a nasty infection, from the guy who tended the bar in the small theatre she played for a season, and she’d had it taken care of in brisk German fashion, at a walk-in clinic, without ever telling the man. But this was her first since she’d found herself broke. It rankled to have to ask Adam to help with it, but then again, it was half his mess to clean up. All she needed was a couple hundred dollars.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ she told him, conversationally, in the same tone with which she might send a meal back, ‘that I’m a little bit pregnant.’ Across the table, Adam gasped, but otherwise said nothing, just boggled at her, his big square jaw reaching for the floor. The next words out of her mouth were to be, ‘I’ll take care of it, don’t worry,’ when she realised he wasn’t worried, not at all.

  His happiness was so sudden, so delirious, so infectious, that she found herself unable to tell him that she wanted to terminate, and then, suddenly, realised that she didn’t want to. He was kind, he came from good genes, all careless, clumsy muscle and easy smiles. He had – let’s be honest – money, and while she was still sporting a bohemian carelessness, she sure did miss money.

  When Adam proposed soon after, it gave her the unique sensation of feeling all her dreams of creative supremacy die at once, simultaneously replaced by a prefabricated, beige, quite wonderful and quite ordinary life. She could recall nights spent dozing, while the hormonal chicanery of the baby bombed her brain into contentment, concentrating on her breathing, one hand resting on her stomach as it rose and fell, like her, into a future that she’d never imagined.

  For one thing,
she’d never imagined her life could be so abstinent. After baby Kade came, her sex drive returned with a vengeance, even before her stitches were out, but Adam’s had not. She remembered him sliding her sensible knickers down her thighs and pausing, the tiniest frown on his face as he surveyed her ravaged body.

  It was a cliché, the husband whose home fires had gone out, but clichés often held true, such as the fact that, in the time between their first night together and the birth of their child, she had fallen in love with him. That was the worst realisation of all: that ‘making love’ was not a figure of speech; that the toxic industrial by-product of dirty sex was sweet, unadulterated, selfless love for the goof who, through the heady, sleepless first years of parenthood, she saw less of every day. For the first months he’d been faultless, a creature of inexhaustible paternal joy that kept her buoyant even as she forgot what sleep was. Then, Adam had gone back to work, and started staying longer and longer there, calling just after five o’clock with some excuse or another why he would not be home in the evening. At first she’d been sympathetic, then argumentative, but then, by the middle of Kade’s terrible twos (another cliché, another truism), she would just hang up, put the child to bed, take a valium and order pizza. It was as though her epidural had sent her into a fugue state, from which she woke several years later to recognise nothing of the world, all her friends, and especially her husband, changed beyond recognition. She had found out, too late, like everyone, that the tragedy of marriage was not socio­logical, but geographical; she’d had no idea she could be so lonely.

  When Kade was old enough to be put in childcare, she’d had a vision of what she’d become – a housewife, placated, bovine, schlepping from lunch to gym in her Lululemon widow’s weeds – and had gently pitched the idea of joining the company in some capacity. Adam had been enthusiastic, and set her up in the office next to his, where he could ignore her just as easily as when she had been at home with the baby. No matter; nobody could have it all.

  The quest for perfection was a mug’s game; the secret to happiness was triage. Shortly after the birth of Kade, their squalling little bundle of joy, she had realised that there were no longer enough hours left in her lifetime to accomplish all she wanted to do. Sacrifices would have to be made, quickly, without thinking, and she’d jettisoned hobbies, dreams, friends like dead weight from a sinking airship. She loved her job, loved the company, loved the wealth it brought them, her husband of course, their son most of all, or at least, she was sure she did, and would be able to more fully if she could just get a minute to breathe.

  By the time the baby could walk, she’d found that every pleasure she’d once enjoyed now came with a twinge of guilt because her time could be better spent with the child. She’d been told that becoming a mother would make everything else in her life seem unimportant; no one had warned her that it meant she would never be happy again.

  To parent was to be perennially penitent, mired in micro-regrets, endlessly guilty and cranky. Things had been dire in the first years, but had improved rapidly when she’d made peace with her fallibility, and learned to parcel Kade away for blissful stretches of time: crèche, kindergarten, school, babysitters, Adam’s Grandpa Arkady, or, as a last resort, her own family. Little Kade did not need to be around his mother every minute of his life; apron strings are elastic things.

  She herself had been thrown off the cliff like the Lion King and had learned to survive. Little Kade would be just fine. She loved her child so much that sometimes she thought her heart would burst Ahab-style through her chest. She loved him even more when he was not around.

  She’d tried therapy once, and towards the end of the session the shrink had asked her to think about her ambivalence towards motherhood, which had made her bristle, and fire him. She was not ambivalent, she was exhausted. It was funny, how priorities changed over time; now she craved food less than sleep. Her hierarchy of needs was all scrambled, and the entirety of her life outside of work was sandwiched on Maslow’s pyramid somewhere between shelter and wi-fi. What she needed, more than therapy, was the chance to take a break without worrying about steering the finances of the company away from the red they veered towards anytime she took her hand off the wheel.

  Just now, for instance, she was, through her fug of exhaustion, searching for the errant expense the alarm had signalled. It took her a moment and when she found it, her heart leaped. The charge was small, under twenty dollars, and it was processed by a KFC in an area of town that nobody with a charge card had a reason to be. With mounting excitement, Tess checked back through the financial records and found another inexplicable transaction in the area, then another.

  Several meals, a tab at a kitsch bar she’d once frequented but had grown out of long ago, a jeweller, a hotel; a couple of hundred dollars at a Sportsgirl. A fucking Sportsgirl! Tess could smell blood. If she had found an employee embezzling money she would be so angry, she thought happily. The company was bleeding money, and any excuse to terminate an employee was something to be treasured.

  They could certainly use the spare pay cheque, as Adam was about to start a second meeting with a new assistant, which, now that she thought about it, was another thing she was late for. She would have to track down the rogue expenses later on; it would be something to look forward to.

  Through the glass wall between their offices, she could see Adam preparing for the employee induction by rehearsing his speech, going over some passages with a forefinger, his lips moving slightly as he read. Tess slipped into the office to take her place at Adam’s side, reaching over to give his leg a surreptitious squeeze. He smiled, a million beautiful, goofy teeth, and lightly smacked her thigh.

  A knock at the door and the inductee came in and sat nervously while Adam shuffled papers at his desk. Then he stood, strode over to the window where – cast into silhouette by the light streaming in through the corner office – he would say, ‘Let me tell you a story about my grandfather.’

  __________

  I will not live much longer, Arkady said to himself, and the thought brought a smile to his lips.

  He did not subscribe to the science, which had been so popular in occupied Prague when he’d lived there, that ascribed racial characteristics to individuals. However, he would admit to a certain Russian fatalism, and he had decided less than a day into the journey that he would not survive it, and if he did, for not much longer after that. Arkady knew he was dead long before the train arrived at his destination; he’d heard whispers of what was happening in Poland, had them confirmed by drunken soldiers on leave in beer gardens.

  He was surrounded by people who, if apprehensive, did not know what was coming, although they had enough bits and pieces of lost nightmares to speculate. The collected hypoth­eticals almost drowned out the rumble of the engine, the scream of sleepers below the carriage, but did little to dampen the whimpering and the wailing from some sections of the cattle car.

  The assault on his ears was not as bad as that on his nose. An animal smell: metallic blood, acidic vomit, excrement and fear. The smell ran in rivulets from the passengers; it poured in torrents, in rivers, so that everyone was soaked. It pooled on the floor and steamed through the superheated air of the carriage, the condensation on the ceiling forming thick droplets that shook and rained down on them whenever the train shunted or lurched.

  The people, packed tight as herrings in a jar of brine, swayed and jolted as one, seethed against each other angrily, jostling for a little space, enough to fill tired lungs with air, or wriggle out of a coat.

  Towards the end of the journey, most wore their shirtsleeves or less, cotton and wool waterlogged with perspiration, skin slick against skin. Arkady had been careful to position himself against a wall when the soldiers had forced them into the train, and he’d been grateful to have one surface to lean against that wasn’t a human being.

  Then the train stopped, shuddered and stilled. The people stopped with it, held their breath, waiting, waiting, a minute, an hour, and th
en the carriage doors slid open and the humanity poured out.

  Arkady stumbled, shaky on legs used to swaying with the carriage, and he gasped icy air gratefully, but only for a moment before the wind threaded bitter fingers through his coat and caressed the soaking cloth underneath.

  The passengers shuffled forward, slowly at first, then moving faster as soldiers set to them with truncheons and pistols on either side. They were marched down the platform until they reached a sorting station, where a Schutzstaffel soldier waited, neat and surly, with his SS death’s-head logo shining from his black uniform. As waves of arrivals reached him he yelled out the same phrase, like a grocer hawking goods.

  ‘Men to the left! Women to the right.’

  Four bodies up in the line a young father struggled as they took away his wife, and an officer drew his pistol and fired, then waved the stunned widow on with the pistol, his expression bored and businesslike. All at once Arkady felt grateful that he was here alone, that he had nobody to care for, or to care for him, that everyone who would mourn him was a world away in Moscow, or, better yet, dead. He moved to the left.

  ‘Form fives!’ another soldier barked. ‘Lines of fives!’ Here, the line split into left and right again, the wave of people breaking when it reached a figure who stood eyeing the arrivals. He was striking, handsome in a severe kind of way, sharp in a black SS uniform, with a white doctor’s coat over it. He held a baton, and as the prisoners approached he asked them questions and waved them left or right.

  When he found himself in front of the German, Arkady stared at the ground, trying to look both non-threatening and use­ful, as the man looked Arkady up and down.