The Toymaker Read online

  Adam didn’t understand this obsession that modern diners had with trickery and subterfuge. Wasn’t it enough to have plentiful and good food? Why go fucking it up like this? He’d read in Men’s Health that you shouldn’t eat anything that your grandparents wouldn’t recognise as food, and he subscribed to that. What, he wondered, would his no-nonsense grandfather make of the great pretence, where nothing did what it was supposed to do?

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ asked Violet, his mother-in-law, more accurately his stepmother-in-law, leaning in to catch his attention over the clamour of the restaurant and nodding as the plates were cleared.

  ‘It’s something, all right.’

  ‘I just love coming here,’ his father-in-law, Trevor added. ‘It’s probably my favourite place to eat in the world – outside of San Francisco, of course.’

  Adam shovelled more food into his mouth, a strategic move, because chewing would save him from being drawn into a conversation about the wonders of a slow-food diet. According to the menu, they were due another six interminable courses before the lemongrass panna cotta and aloe vera meringue signalled an end to the night. He gestured for the drinks waiter.

  Adam had little time for Tess’s family, particularly her father and his wife, the third Mrs Coughlin in a decade, but barely distinguishable to Adam’s eyes from the second, or the first. She was a thin woman, wiry and yoga-fit, but turgid with old-money pretension and creaking socialist politics that were unbecoming on a woman of advancing years. The sort of politics that only people who had never really worked could hold. They liked this restaurant largely, Adam suspected, because the sheer amount of time you spent ploughing through a banquet made eating feel like an achievement.

  Adam hated the place right down to his guts, with its cavernous dining room, which was not just dimly lit, but pitch-black outside of the pools of red light cast by the lamps over each dining table. When Adam looked out across the rest of the restaurant, each group of diners seemed like they were on a tiny island. He supposed it was designed to promote a feeling of seclusion and elitism, but it just made him feel stranded at the table with his mediocre family-in-law.

  He wished he had his phone so that he could make a show of checking his emails to get out of talking to them, but it was still missing. When he called, it went straight to voicemail. It hadn’t been in the car, or in his office, or the dozen other places he’d directed his new assistant to search.

  Feeling naked without it, Adam cast about for a distrac­tion, and was grateful when a waiter dressed all in black appeared out of the darkness with a tray of drinks, only to be barrelled into by little Kade and his cousins, who’d been careening about between tables. Even through the ambient house music and the delighted screaming of the kids, Adam could hear the tinkling of breaking glass and the pushed-down fury in the waiter’s voice as he apologised to the table. After sending him back for more drinks, Adam called the children over and leaned down so he was at their eye level. The nephews had the excitable inbred quality that lurked inside all Irish, expressing itself like bad poetry across the features. While the genetic lottery had blessed Tess with the clean white skin, inky hair and eyes of the Black Irish, these two unfortunates had the snaggle-toothed, rough-finished pug look that suggested they’d been hacked out of parboiled potato. The effect was enhanced when they stood side by side in the gloom, all big ugly teeth and straggly red hair.

  ‘Listen,’ Adam said to them, ‘why don’t you guys sit down and talk to your grandma?’

  ‘That’s boring.’

  ‘How do you think your grandma would feel if she heard you say that?

  ‘She wouldn’t hear us!’ yelled one.

  ‘Because she can’t hear us!

  ‘Because she’s deaf!’

  ‘Because she’s a big shithead!’ they both chimed and dissolved into hysterical laughter. Adam winced, and for a second fantasised about dragging one of them to the ornamental fountain in the centre of the restaurant and holding the little ranga under the water while miming deafness at the other twin. I can’t hear you! What is it? What’s the matter? The image brought a smile to his face.

  ‘Look, if you just go back to your seats and sit for one hour . . .’ Adam checked his watch. ‘I’ll give you twenty dollars.’

  ‘Fifty!’ said one.

  ‘Each!’ said the other.

  Adam glanced wistfully at the fountain and agreed. ‘Don’t tell your mother, okay? Our little secret.’ The kids mimed zipping their mouths and dashed off to sit placidly at the table. Adam turned back to his father-in-law, who shook his head disapprovingly.

  ‘You know, we did things differently. We never chastised or disciplined our children, because we trusted them to develop a sense of social responsibility. We never once yelled at Tess, because we trusted her to evolve to her full potential on her own.’

  ‘Well, you certainly did something right with that one,’ Adam said brightly, biting his tongue. Privately, he was amazed that Tess had turned out half as well as she had, given the kind of dipshit hippy nonsense she’d been raised on. He thought briefly about the string of sleazy men that Tess had let into her life in the years before she’d met him and wondered if her folks would have been so proud of her if they’d known.

  Adam suspected that he was the best thing that had ever happened to Tess. When they’d met she’d been full of arty pretensions that had made conversing with her both exhausting and intimidating. Thankfully, they’d faded with time, and he’d only become fonder of her over the years. He was still blindsided by her mind, which grew sharper as the rest of her softened, and it was a rare week that he didn’t stop to glory in his luck in marrying her; the sheer fact of her as she went about her day. He glanced over at her, hoping she would catch his eye and come to his rescue, but she was studiously playing with her food with a seriousness that implied she would rather avoid the conversation across the table.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the burble of the room, the low rumble of other powerful people doing important things, and for a second he could pretend that he was at a real business dinner, making real decisions, instead of being condescended to by these subhuman hippies. He reached for his phone and, finding the empty pocket in his jeans yet again, felt suddenly furious.

  Excusing himself, he went out the front of the restaurant to find a payphone. The night was suddenly chilly, the way Melbourne got in the summer when it stopped being a city by the bay and remembered itself as a windswept hamlet under a mountain. A few diners were smoking cigarettes held carefully against the wind and swishing glasses of wine while they spoke. One finished a story and the rest of them burst into laughter.

  Pushing coins into the payphone, Adam checked the answering service at the office and listened to a few work-related calls. He considered calling Clara and swinging by to see her, but remembered that they’d broken up, and he felt that it would be a moral weakness on his behalf to call upon her, like pulling into the McDonald’s drive-through and stuffing his face on his way home from the gym. There was still credit in the payphone, so, on a whim, he punched his own mobile number in. It rang, and, after a few exhilarating trills, it was picked up.

  There was silence on the other end. Adam listened, and thought he could hear, faintly, someone breathing.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’

  ‘Hello, there.’

  ‘Hi.’ Adam, caught on the back foot by hearing a strange voice answer his phone, struggled to think of what to say. ‘Don’t hang up.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, matey,’ said the voice on the other end. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘So you found my phone?’

  ‘Could be. What’s it worth to you?’ The voice was rough; cigarettes and suburbia.

  ‘I’m happy to give you a reward . . .’

  ‘A reward . . .’ The voice on the other end rolled the syllables around thoughtfully. ‘A re-ward, yes. I reckon a reward is just about right.’

  ‘Where are you? Would a hundred bucks
do?’

  ‘It’s a start, but what you’re asking me to do here is be a good Samaritan, and good things happen to good people.’

  Adam thought hard about whether he should meet the voice on the other end of the phone. The man sounded like a fairly scummy piece of shit, probably a bit of a drug addict, maybe a bit desperate, capable of violence. But then, Adam was a big boy – literally, he could bench a tenth of a tonne without breaking a sweat – and he could always run away if things got weird. And he needed that phone, bristling with apps and notes as it was. He also didn’t fancy having to explain to Tess that he’d lost a yet another phone. And besides, his instincts told him to meet the man, and his instincts were rarely wrong.

  They were to meet in one of the forgotten car yards along the Nepean Highway, the first place that had leaped to Adam’s mind when he thought about privacy. It had gone into receivership a year or two earlier, and now was just a dark strip of asphalt where nothing moved but the fading dealership flags whipped by the sea breezes that blew in from the south. It was permanently deserted, except for the occasional carload of bored teenagers who parked there to smoke pot or have sex – he’d gone there with Clara more than once – choosing it because the big concrete shell of the showroom office blocked the view from the road.

  When Adam pulled into the parking lot, the other car was waiting for him, a beat-up old Ford Falcon. He slowed, felt his tyres give slightly as they rolled over cracked bitumen and clumps of weed breaking through the concrete. He turned off the ignition, waited, suddenly frightened. What was he doing here, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night? Why wasn’t he still at dinner with his family? Or, better, home with Tess?

  He wound down the window. Warm night, sea air blowing in from two suburbs over. The other car made no move. Eventually he flashed his lights and, after a moment, a man climbed out of the car and sauntered towards him.

  ‘No need to be scared, mate,’ the man, the same man he’d spoken to on the phone, yelled across the parking lot. White teeth flashed against brown skin. ‘Come on out and say hi.’

  Adam started to feel foolish, remembered who he was, remembered what he stood for, and climbed out of the car, strode out tall to meet the man, and gave him the once-over: Adidas shoes, Puma tracksuit. The man offered his hand, and Adam ignored it.

  ‘You’ve got my phone?’

  The man’s smile dipped, but quickly returned. ‘I do, my friend, I do. And it’s all yours, but I’m going to ask for a little finder’s fee.

  ‘A hundred dollars.’

  The man grimaced, sucked air through his teeth. ‘Oh, mate, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for a little bit more than that. You see . . . the boy who found the phone, the one you assaulted, he happens to be very dear to me.’

  Adam started, a little jag of adrenaline, the quick rush of fear; he was about to be jumped. He took a step back and turned to look at the Falcon, saw four other people waiting in the car, faces shadowed under baseball caps.

  The passenger-side door opened, and the boy from KFC, the one he’d caught watching him and Clara, leaned out, called in a weedy little voice, ‘Oi. Tariq. Hurry it up, mate.’

  At the sad adolescent squeak, Adam’s fear left him as quickly as it had come. He remembered that desperate people, despite having less to lose, were frightened of people with power, people like him. They were like snakes; all he had to do was stamp his feet to scatter them.

  ‘Okay, look, Tariq, is it? I’m sorry I lost my temper at your friend, but he was . . . spying on me.’

  ‘Oh?’ Tariq raised his eyebrows, ‘Spying on what, exactly? What were you up to?’

  ‘That’s not your business.’

  ‘Poor kid just wanted to have a look inside the car. He doesn’t get a chance to check out fancy cars very often, where we’re from. Didn’t know what he’d find behind the tinted windows. What were you doing, anyway, made you so upset? His doctor bills! All those stitches.’ Tariq frowned, whistled, raised his hands towards his face, elbows tight in a what-can-you-do gesture.

  ‘So how much do you want?’

  ‘A grand should do it.’

  Adam almost barked with laughter, but supressed it, held out his hand. ‘Okay. Fine. But give me a look first? How do I know it’s my phone?’

  Adam took the handset, booted it up and saw that yes, it was his. He nodded, then, reaching behind him as if going for his wallet, he dropped the phone to the concrete and raised his foot to stamp on it. He heard it shatter, felt the satisfying pop as the case shattered under his boot, and saw the equally satisfying shock on Tariq’s face.

  ‘You know what? You keep the phone, Tariq. Sell it. Buy yourself something pretty.’

  Tariq looked down at the phone, up again at Adam, grinned. ‘Oh, Adam. Adam Kulakov. What have you done, mate? That seems a little wasteful, doesn’t it? Think of all the poor kids starving in the third world, mate.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Adam bristled. ‘You fucking scabby bogan cunt.’

  Tariq moved forward, but Adam was already skipping back, climbing into his SUV, spinning the wheels. He roared past Tariq and his Falcon, flipping the boy in the passenger seat the bird on his way past. His instincts had proven right. The men were bad news, and he’d rather see his poor phone destroyed than pay them a dollar of his hard-earned. You never give in to bullies; you fight them on your own terms. That, more than anything, was what Grandpa Arkady had taught him about life.

  __________

  Adam left before the end of the meal. Tess had seen him get up from the table and go outside earlier in the evening, and then he’d come back distressed. He ignored the food and fidgeted with his cutlery, and even in the dim light she could see his face and neck were splashed with the red splotches he got when he was working himself into a panic.

  Then he stood up abruptly to go, cutting Trevor off in the middle of a story, lurching awkwardly to his feet and nudging the table. He said his farewells to Tess’s step-mum, nodding anxiously to get away, then he was beside her chair, kissing her goodbye clumsily. ‘I’ve just remembered something I need to take care of at work. It’s urgent, but it’ll be fine. I’ll see you at the house.’

  And he still wasn’t in when she arrived home. She started to call his mobile, remembered that he’d lost it, so got little Kade showered and into bed and padded down to the kitchen. She poured herself a large whiskey, then fetched her pills.

  The pills were a grown-up iteration of a habit she’d picked up in her youth. She’d learned early that she could manage her mood through drugs and alcohol, and she saw no reason to ever stop. If scientists and pharmacists of varying degrees of sophistication and legality had worked out how to tweak a hormone or synapse so her moods could be played like a synthesiser, then why on earth would she object?

  Most nights, to still the endless stream of numbers that coursed through her mind at bedtime, she had a little valium, of which she kept a healthy stockpile, replenishing it once a month by visiting one of the overworked doctors in the bulk-billing clinics she rotated through. She selected a five-milligram pill, necked it with whiskey, then lay down on the couch to listen to the silence.

  As a young woman, whenever she felt overwhelmed by life, she would lock herself away in her room and marinate in sad music until she felt better. Putting on a CD by Leonard Cohen or Patti Smith she would smoke a little pot and steep herself in misery for hours. At the end of it, she always felt much better, the bittersweet artisan angst like a colonic for her own, coursing through her and scouring out her own anxieties, leaving her clean and light. She’d tried to describe the sensation to her roommate once, who’d laughed and said, ‘Yeah, we all do that. In this world you are either unhappy or an idiot. So what?’

  These days, overwhelmed by familial and commercial emergencies, and frequently an unholy fusion of the two, the pockets of silence she found through the day had the same fortifying effect. It was rare that her child wasn’t tearing through the house on a manic upswing about a new toy,
or bawling about a skinned knee; it was even rarer that Adam wasn’t doing the same. There was nothing more valuable to her than silence, and she sunk into the couch, trying to bury herself in the cushions, to sink completely into the fabric. She grabbed a throw rug and pulled it up over her face to make a little shrouded cubby and drown the world out. Soon she was snoring.

  Tears startled her out of sleep. She sat bolt upright, embarrassed, woken from a dream where she was standing over a coffin, weeping, and the sound of her own wailing had woken her. For a while she sat there, teetering between sleep and wakefulness as the world reassembled itself and the dream retreated. She could still hear sobbing, and she realised that the whimpering she could hear through the house was not an echo from her dream.

  Foggy, drugged and half asleep, she went upstairs to check on Kade. She took her time moving through the rooms, taking the stairs carefully, letting her eyes adjust to the soft, precise and expensive lighting in her home. Kade was still in bed, snoring gently, his nightlight, which Tess was fighting a losing campaign to have taken away, wrapping him in cosy shadow. She watched him sleep for a moment, and then checked Arkady’s room.

  Adam’s grandfather had been living with them for the better part of a year. For a while after she’d first become involved in the company, Arkady had seemed content in retirement, happy to just pop by every couple of days to show Tess the secrets of the business. In time, though, as Tess grew more comfortable and he had less and less to do, he’d started to decline. It seemed to her that Arkady simply didn’t know what to do without work. She’d read that a lot of men, especially quiet, powerful types like Arkady, just gave up on life when they were no longer useful. Still, she had been shocked by the change in the old man.