by Lia Weston
I watch the pools forming on the concrete. Drops of water have finally made it through the hoodie and are trickling down my back. ‘I’ll bet.’
‘Did Mum tell you she and Amity got a contract for a fourth book?’
‘No. That’s great.’ I swivel in place. ‘Look, I know you’ll probably say no, but if you need help with money . . .’ Listen to me having an adult conversation in an area I know nothing about. Listen to me pretending that the world isn’t blowing up in chunks around my ears.
‘No, no, we’ll be fine.’
There’s a short silence. I know we’ll be in identical poses, standing awkwardly, one hand jammed in a pocket, unsure what to say, uncomfortable with what needs to be expressed, knowing that we can’t.
Dad breaks the silence. ‘I wanted to tell you we really appreciate what you’re doing with Gen. Really appreciate it. She needs someone to look up to.’
‘She looks up to you too.’
‘Maybe. But she’s rather shut off at the moment.’ There’s an unmistakable note of distress in his voice. ‘Guess it comes with the territory at that age.’
Not for the first time lately, I’m deeply sorry for having my head so far up my ass as a teenager. The general nature of childhood seems to be living as a self-serving narcissist and the general nature of adulthood seems to be trying to make up for it.
I give up attempting to stay even slightly dry and sit down, facing Sophia. The wall is nearly completely, angrily blackened, except the very top, where her fingers reach out of the darkness, still trying to touch the sky. I have run out of paint. I have run out of options. All of my misguided, obliterated dreams sit on that wall. I feel the ramifications of IF’s work, the creatures I have created, the illusions we have unleashed in people’s lives. I said it without thinking to Gen, but I was right: I can’t erase reality. What are the growing-up books, really, besides a cruel reminder at worst and a morbid curiosity at best?
Sophia drowns slowly under her paint in the rain, and I feel heavy as lead with other people’s secrets.
‘Tom, is everything all right?’ Dad says. ‘You don’t seem quite yourself lately.’
‘I’m not sleeping well.’ It’s the perfect response: gets sympathy, explains unusual behaviour, impossible to disprove.
‘Is that all it is?’
‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘That’s really shit about your work, though.’
‘Just how things go sometimes. Something will come up. If it doesn’t, you can Photoshop me into a book where I’m employed.’ He laughs. ‘You had the right idea. Start your own company. I should have done that.’
Now is not the time to tell Dad that I’ve been considering torching the building and moving to Mexico with the insurance money.
I strap my ankle yet again and run unstable loops around the city, oblivious to the ice in my lungs, mind whirring so loud I’m sure other people can hear it. I’m operating on no sleep. Sometimes, after Gen crashes out, I just sit on the balcony.
I watch for the fox every night, but the fox does not come.
Dinner is proving beyond me; I can’t get myself together. Do I tell Mum about Dad’s job? Or Dad about Mum’s affair? Does Mum know I know about Rohan? What is Rohan going do to with IF, let alone Mica and Tarik? Does Felicity know about the AI plan? Does Alex? If they do, why didn’t they tell me? Why the hell doesn’t anyone say anything any more?
Oh, hurray, there’s a new thought: how the fuck am I going to pay my rent?
‘What’s burning?’ says Gen from the lounge room.
‘Did you know that Henry the Eighth had six wives?’
‘You’ve been studying?’
‘Nah, watching Horrible Histories,’ says Gen, crunching nonchalantly on the schnitzel that’s far crispier than it’s supposed to be. I guess she’s getting used to things having a coating – M&Ms, Violet Crumble, chocolate bullets. I probably should feed her some vegetables at some point.
Side by side on the couch, we watch Anne Boleyn being led to the scaffolding. (The DVDs have been exhausted. We are now onto documentaries.) I try to make an origami crane out of a paper napkin. Needless to say, it doesn’t work.
‘Gen, did you run away because of the guy you were dating?’
The crunching abruptly stops. In the silence, there’s the thwack of the executioner’s axe.
‘Iff’s a fecret.’ Gen’s cheeks are full of chicken.
‘Secrets are corrosive.’
‘Whaff’at mean?’
‘Corrosive? It eats away at something, like acid.’
‘Oh.’ Gen swallows. ‘Do you have any secrets?’
‘Of course.’
‘I mean, anything really, really big?’ She digs her fork tines into the plate.
‘Yep.’
She keeps crushing burnt crumbs. I can see the words pressing against her mouth from the inside.
‘How about this,’ I say, ‘I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. I promise I won’t say anything to Mum or Dad.’
‘Or Mica.’
‘Or Mica.’
Gen assesses the escape routes, and then puts her plate on the coffee table. ‘It was Brie.’ She says it so quickly that I have to rewind and replay the phrase in my head. ‘Brie said she’d tell Mum and Dad.’
‘About . . .’ I’m holding a charcoaled oven fry, which has long gone cold. I throw it back on the plate. ‘. . . you and Brie?’
‘She said she’d tell everyone. Everyone at school.’ Gen glances at me quickly.
‘Did she?’
‘Don’t know.’
Well, we haven’t had The Call from Mum, so presumably not. ‘You okay?’
She fiddles with the laces on her hoodie. ‘No.’ Her little face crumples. ‘She said she loved me. But she didn’t.’ Gen covers her face with her hands.
She lets me hug her while she cries.
Brie. Of course; that spring-loaded word at the cinema. Another person to kill.
‘You don’t need her,’ I say when the racking sobs have turned into sniffles. ‘You don’t need to be with someone who’s named after a cheese.’
Gen makes a honking sound which could possibly be a laugh. She sits back up. When she wipes her hands on her legs, her eyelids are pink and swollen like tiny marshmallows.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I say.
Gen swipes at her eyes with the sleeve of her hoodie. ‘You always assumed it was a guy.’
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.’
‘S’all right.’ She shifts and shakes herself like a dog getting out of a pool. ‘Okay. Your turn. And don’t tell me something dumb like you stole a spray gun once, because stuff is going on.’
‘What stuff?’
Gen blows her nose on the origami napkin. ‘Mica said you’d had an argument. Plus you got fired. And like I don’t want to be rude because you’ve been awesome lately, but you don’t really eat at the moment and your face is pretty smashed up.’ She points at her almost untouched glass of Coke. ‘Plus I think there’s vodka or something in that.’
‘There’s not –’ I pick the glass up and smell it.
Gen waits patiently.
I take the glass into the kitchen and return with a fresh booze-free drink. ‘Okay, here’s my secret. I fought with Rohan because he’s taking the composites that we made for our clients and is selling them to a company who will use them in ads.’
‘Your pictures will be like on billboards and stuff,’ breathes Gen. ‘That’s so cool.’
‘It’s not cool, Gen,’ I rub my face, ‘it’s a huge problem.’
‘Oh yeah, I guess.’ She accepts it so naturally. It’s strange to be taken at face value sometimes. ‘So what do we do?’
I put my head in my hands. ‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s all right,’ says Gen. She gets out her phone.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Getting back-up.’
I get up to pour another drink because I think I’m going to need it. Halfway to
the kitchen I stop. ‘Hey, you know how you can work out number puzzles?’
‘I’m like super-good,’ says Gen, still texting.
‘Can you do word puzzles?’
She nods.
I pull the picture of Sophia that was on the fridge out of the bin and write LEONI DUTNOFF on the back. Gen scans it for a moment, takes the pen, writes something underneath and hands the paper to me.
FILE NOT FOUND.
Brilliant.
I am tidying up my art supplies, and definitely not hiding, when I hear Gen open the front door.
‘My brother is an idiot.’
‘You know, in our country, we say “hello”,’ says Mica.
Gen brings her down the hallway.
‘Hey,’ says the idiot.
‘Hey.’ Mica is wearing a More Cowbell T-shirt and is also pretending everything’s fine for Gen’s sake. ‘Your place looks tidier.’
‘I cleaned up a bit.’ It’s amazing how much easier chores are when you’re taking your frustrations out on your house. No wonder all those 1950s housewives had sparkling kitchens. And probably died of ulcers and heart attacks.
‘So what’s the emergency?’ Mica says.
I flatten an empty box of spare blades. ‘I don’t know if emergency is the right word.’
‘Gen said, “It’s an emergency and it’s kind of awesome though I’m not supposed to say that” and hung up.’
‘Catastrophe!’ says Gen, throwing her arms in the air.
‘It’s not awesome, it’s shit,’ I say.
‘Oh, Jesus, what now?’ says Mica, leaning on the doorframe. ‘Don’t tell me we’re suffering through Christmas in September next.’
I start talking. Mr Pyne. The ad. The accidental outing. The plan for the cloud. The plan for AI. And, finally, Rohan and ConText.
Mica looks as if the floor has just dropped away from under her. ‘What . . .’ she finally says when I finish. ‘Why . . . why can’t you . . . I mean, legally, surely . . .’
‘Apparently using the images how we want is built into IF’s user agreement terms.’
‘I’ve never read them.’
‘Nobody reads them,’ I groan. ‘That’s the problem.’
Gen comes and sits on the edge of the desk and pats my arm sympathetically. ‘It’s still your company,’ she says. ‘He can’t fire you. It’s illegal. You have rights.’ The catchcry of the millennial. I don’t have the energy to correct her right now.
Mica studies her lime green thumbnails, eyelids flickering as she thinks.
‘It’s the nightmare we talked about, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘The composites becoming public. People seeing themselves as their parents really want them to be. Or cut out of their own weddings. What about our transitional clients? It’s ethically wrong. It’s morally wrong.’
‘It’s pretty fucked,’ says Gen.
I gently boot her ankle. ‘Don’t swear.’
‘That’s not fair –’ she begins.
‘I should probably tell you something else,’ says Mica, wisely interrupting.
I’m strangely calm. I think it’s because I don’t feel like things can get much worse at this point. Come on, Mica. Tell me you only slept with me on a dare or you’re moving in with Kain. No, wait, forget that last one.
‘Remember the Lang book?’
‘The journalist and the vet?’
‘That’s the one. He’s been arrested on charges of intimidation and stalking.’
‘Of the woman in the book?’
Mica nods. ‘And violating a restraining order.’ She folds her arms. ‘Apparently this is the third IF client. All in the past few months, all similar circumstances.’
‘Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me?’
‘Rohan felt it would cause “unnecessary stress”.’
‘So then how did you find out?’
‘I rang Felicity to wish her a happy birthday. She was weirdly chatty, said something about a Bingamazoo.’
‘Yeah, that’ll do it.’
‘Did that guy get arrested because of pictures you made?’ says Gen.
‘He was insisting he and this woman were married and tried to use IF’s photos as proof,’ says Mica. ‘So, yup.’
‘Your company is evil,’ whispers Gen.
‘Yeah.’ I sigh. ‘I know.’
‘What are we going to do?’ says Mica.
A tiny bright spark at the ‘we’. I search her face for more, but she’s too distressed for bonding right now.
Someone knocks at the door. Mica and I both jump.
‘Oh, awesome,’ says Gen, leaping off the desk. ‘Pizza!’
‘You ordered pizza?’
‘To make up for dinner,’ Gen says. ‘I mean, come on, it was awful.’ She trots off to answer the knock.
There’s a short silence.
Mica walks forward. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and I can see how much it costs her.
‘You don’t need to be. I mean, how stupid –’ I break off and shake my head. ‘You don’t need to be sorry.’
She half laughs. ‘I’ve never been dumped for someone who doesn’t exist.’
I run my nail over the serrated bands on one of my cutters. ‘It’s been a very weird week.’
‘Where’s your wallet?’ shouts Gen.
Mica turns to go and catches sight of the pictures. ‘Whoa,’ she says, taking a few steps back.
‘Yeah,’ I say, looking at the wall of Sophias, ‘I should really take those down.’
‘We need a plan.’ Gen sits on the floor next to the empty pizza box – she ate a large all by herself; I’m so proud – and steeples her greasy fingers like a Bond villain.
‘We need a goal before we can have a plan,’ I say.
‘I thought we had a goal,’ says Mica from the other end of the couch. ‘Shut everything down.’ She looks from me to Gen. ‘Is there an alternative?’
‘ConText can’t use our pictures, it’s as simple as that.’ I roll my beer between my hands.
‘And Rohan will never agree to pull out of the agreement,’ says Mica.
Buried underneath all of the evidence against it is a hope that there’d be some way for IF to survive. But it can’t. ConText and Mr Pyne were the warning shots. The stalking arrest is the death blow. I groan and rest my hands on my cheekbones. ‘All that work. All those fucking years of work.’
‘Don’t swear,’ chirps Gen, and neatly dodges the cushion I lob at her head.
‘Look,’ says Mica, ‘we don’t have to burn it down and salt the earth. There may be a way to keep the files. The point is that we can’t let ConText get them. More importantly, IF can’t continue as it is.’
‘You created the beast. Now you must destroy it,’ says Gen, who’s apparently starring in her own episode of Game of Thrones.
‘But what about you?’ I say to Mica. ‘What about the others? Tarik, Felicity, Alex?’
‘People have lost their jobs before,’ says Mica. ‘People survive. Besides, if they’re shifting to AI, Tarik and I will be fired anyway.’
‘Are you going to eat that?’ says Gen, looking at the piece of pizza on my plate. I’ve picked all the toppings off, so it’s nothing but limp dough with tomato. I hand it over, and stare at the ground.
‘Tom,’ Mica gently touches my knee with her lime-green fingertips. ‘You know there’s no other option. You of all people know the power the composites can have.’
‘What do you mean “of all people”?’ pipes up Gen, mouth full.
‘Okay, so what do we do?’ I say, ignoring Gen’s question.
‘Let’s blackmail Rohan with something really bad,’ says Gen, still chewing. ‘Like he does things with goats or something.’
‘Blackmail’s not a good idea.’ I finish my beer.
‘I think it is,’ says Gen.
‘You also think fudge is a food group.’
She bounces on her crossed ankles. ‘Then what if we break in and steal his laptop and then we can like smash it to pieces.’
‘Okay,’ says Gen, still nonsensically unperturbed. ‘Then let’s get him beaten up. We could like get his thumbs in a hydraulic press and he’ll be like arrrrrrgh!’ And again I wonder what kind of films she’s been watching when I’m not home.
‘Where are you coming up with this stuff?’ says Mica. ‘You’re like a teeny Godfather.’
‘No, Gen, we can’t break Rohan’s thumbs in a hydraulic press,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ says Gen, all Machiavellian avenues exhausted. ‘Hmm.’
‘Can we put up a firewall?’ says Mica. ‘Block the images from getting out?’
‘Tom doesn’t know code,’ says Gen, picking cheese off the pizza box.
I sit up. ‘Do you know the most common way that data gets leaked? By someone downloading it to a portable drive and walking out of the building.’
Mica also sits up. ‘So that’s it. Copy the files you want, then erase the originals. Wipe everything off the system. There’ll be nothing left for ConText to use.’
‘Is that it?’ I say. ‘Just like that?’
‘It’s weirdly low-key, I know,’ says Mica. ‘I was hoping for at least an explosion or something.’
‘Cool,’ says Gen. ‘First we’ll have to break into the server room. I’ll get the password from that Kain guy by kicking him really hard.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘I’ll probably have to do it a lot.’
‘We don’t need a code,’ I say. ‘The server room is Alex’s office. It’s not actually locked.’
‘Oh,’ says Gen, disappointed. ‘So you just walk in, I guess.’
‘And then do the copying and erasing,’ says Mica. ‘How do we do that, exactly?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, getting out my phone, ‘but I know someone who does.’
Alex arrives so quickly I wonder if he’s been killing time in the car park. He brightens at the sight of Mica and almost combusts at the sight of Gen.
‘She’s fourteen,’ I mutter, extinguishing that particular flame.
‘Hey, man, hey,’ he says. ‘Thanks for the invite. Wow, nice pad. Did you do those drawings? Amazing, like, amazing stuff, you should totally do a show or something. I have a friend, sort of, this guy I studied with, and he was the best at like Japanese animation stuff and I think he works for a studio or something now.’
