by Heide Goody
“You’re a bit late.”
“Late?” It was mid-morning.
She took in my tunic. “You’ve been sent?”
“No, I…”
“Maybe your boss told you to get some…?”
“Flowers,” I said firmly. “I’ve come for some flowers. Some nice ones.”
“Well, you came to the right place.” She smiled. “Any particular sort that you – or your boss – prefer?”
“I don’t know very much about them,” I admitted.
“Well then,” she said, walking round so she could stroll along the display with me, “these ones here are carnations. Very popular.”
“What are those big ones at the back?” I had my eye on some huge yellow flowers that looked a bit like Mr Smiley.
“Sunflowers,” she said. You pay per stem for those. Some of the others come in bunches.”
“Which are the ones I can smell?” I asked, sniffing.
“You’ll be smelling lots of different ones,” she said, “but the roses and the freesias, most likely.”
“And which are those?”
“Fuchsias. Gorgeous, yes?”
“And what colour would you call that?”
“Fuchsia,” said the woman.
“Wow. Is the flower named after the colour or is the colour named after the flower?”
“I couldn’t rightly say,” she said.
I didn’t want to jip it. The mystery of the colour and the flower were enough.
The woman spent another thirty minutes showing me all of the flowers. I bought as many as I could wheel to the gate with one of their big trolleys. I called a car with extra luggage space so I could take them all back home. The smell inside the car for the journey was intoxicating, and every time I looked at the flowers, swaying gently in the boxes as the car moved, I smiled just to see all of the colours.
When I got back it took me six journeys to unload and take all of the flowers upstairs. Of course, I tried to get the Empties to admire the colours as I carried them past, but they wouldn’t even look. I put the flowers outside our door and went inside.
“Hattie, I’ve got a surprise.”
She gave me a suspicious look. Surprises from her roommate Alice were something to be wary of these days.
“Come look,” I said.
Hattie finished dressing a Smiley Tot and followed me out. “Oh my goodness, what are all these?” she asked.
“Flowers!” I cried. “Gorgeous fresh flowers. We can have them all round the apartment, as a display. It will look so amazing.”
“You want to take them inside?”
“Yes.”
“Actually into our home?”
“Yes,” I said. “Look at them, they’re gorgeous!”
“Why?”
“Why are they gorgeous or why do I want to bring them in?”
“Either! Both! I don’t see why you want to bring dead plants into the house.”
“They’re not dead.”
“But bits are falling off them! Is this like the chi-eeese? Are we supposed to eat them?”
“No, they’re not for that.”
“Then what are they for?”
I look at the flowers arranged in the hallway. “They’re not for anything. They just are.”
“Are what?”
I shrugged. “Lovely.”
Hattie glared at me. “I’m not going to slam this door. It’s too noisy and it might chip the woodwork. So, you’ll just have to pretend.”
Hattie slammed the door slowly and quietly in my face. Miserable to see that my quest to brighten the flat had ended in failure, I hauled the flowers downstairs to the lobby.
“That’s a lot of flowers,” said Helberg, loitering in the doorway of his office.
“I wanted to have a mixture of colours,” I said.
“Bought with my money? Never seen the point of cut flowers. Give me a living plant or a painting any day.”
“I’ve already painted the door,” I said.
“I don’t mean paint something. I mean a painting. A picture.”
I thought about the pictures that I’d seen in Rufus Jaffle’s office. I wondered if Hattie would enjoy Dogs Playing Poker. “Pictures – pictures on walls – they’re made out of paint.”
He nodded.
“Ooh.”
The possibilities whirled in my mind. I grabbed some more tins of paint and took them upstairs.
“And what am I supposed to do with these flowers?” Helberg called after me.
***
Chapter 16
I ran down our landing, nearly kicking over Helberg’s bot, Hungry Horace, as it tried and failed to vacuum up the leaves I’d let fall on the floor.
“I don’t like flowers,” said Hattie when I went inside.
“It’s fine. They’re all gone.”
She looked at the paints in my arms.
“The flowers are gone,” I assured her.
Hattie flopped onto the sofa, viciously cuddling an armful of Smiley Tots.
“Yes, you rest. Watch something. I’m just going to paint the wall.”
“What?”
“Helberg gave me the paint,” I said, in an effort to legitimise what I was about to do. “I think we’re almost due some maintenance anyway.”
Hattie glowered and turned back to the screen. I prised the lid off all of the paint tins and tried to remember what the dogs playing cards looked like.
I started with green. There was a green card table at the centre of the picture, so I splashed some green onto the wall behind the sofa. Drips ran down the wall, which was annoying. I looked at the other tins. I needed something that was dog-coloured. There was one called Mahogany which looked good. I dipped in the brush and tried to make something which looked like a dog on the wall. It was tougher than I’d imagined. I summoned a mental picture of a dog, but it was all waggy tail and lolling tongue. I jipped a dog picture instead. It became clearer what I needed to do. I needed a body, a head, a tail and four legs. I swirled paint into a body. First job done. I then made something like a head, on top of the body and then added brush strokes for the legs and the tail. I stood back and looked. The thing on the wall looked more like a bear, or the massive enlargement of a dust mite Hattie had shown me once. Perhaps when my dog was playing cards it would come to life.
“Oh.”
I realised that it would need to be holding the cards with two of its paws, which were currently at the bottom of my dog-bear, just above the floor. Had the picture in Rufus Jaffle’s office had the dogs sitting up? Making a painting was much harder than it looked.
Not to worry, there was plenty of wall left. I decided to paint the kangaroo which haunted my dreams. The brown colour was a decent match. I started with its big legs, coming up in a powerful kick, which I could see very vividly. They came out to the side, which looked impossible, until you saw that the kangaroo had a very large tail that held it off the ground while its legs were elsewhere.
I painted two legs, sticking out towards the dog. I followed that with the tail that anchored it to the ground. Now I just needed to add the body and head. I filled in the space between the tail and the legs, but I couldn’t quite think where the head should be, so I added it on top. I stepped back.
I had created an image which looked very unlike an animal. As I twisted my head one way and then another I decided it looked more like a chair on its side, with a large pile of soil on it. I wondered whether Hattie would be able to see the kangaroo.
“Hey Hattie, what do you think this looks like?” I asked.
Hattie stood up and turned to see. “Oh. There’s stuff all over the wall,” she said in alarm.
“Yes, it’s paint,” I pointed out.
“Paint isn’t supposed to look like mess,” said Hattie.
I thought she was being a bit unreasonable. “It’s not mess, it’s a picture,” I said.
“A picture? Of what?”
“That one there is a dog.”
�
�No it’s not. What’s the big green square?” she asked.
“A card table. The dog was going to be playing cards, but that didn’t work. What about this one? This is a kangaroo.”
She looked long and hard at the wall. I guessed she’d jipped a picture of a kangaroo, but there was no glimmer of recognition in her eyes. She looked up and down the wall and sighed unhappily. Then her gaze dropped and she screamed.
“No!”
“What?”
“I can’t believe it! What did you do?”
I moved forward to where she was pointing.
“No, get back! You’ll get more on them!”
I saw that a drip of paint had landed on one of the Smiley Tots and was running down its face. Hattie dabbed at it with the end of her sleeve, tears running from her eyes.
She scooped up all of the Smiley Tots that were on the sofa. No mean feat as there were at least twelve. She staggered out of the room with them in her outstretched arms.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Alice, but you’ve…” She made a noise like Hungry Horace, a broken sucking sob. “You’re ruining everything!”
She pushed past me and went to her room. This time she did slam the door.
I stood there, not knowing what to do or say. I wanted to tell Hattie that it was just a doll and it didn’t matter, but I knew that her Smiley Tots were so much more to her. Presently, she began to cry, wailing and inconsolable.
I silently put the lids back on the tins and took them back to Helberg.
“Making pictures is hard,” I said, flinging myself into one of his chairs.
“And hello to you,” said Helberg.
“No, I said making—”
“I heard.”
“What have you got that will get paint off things?” I asked.
“Things?”
“Smiley Tots.”
“Have you been painting them too?”
He had been poring over some bits of broken rubbish, but now searched along shelves. “Try this.” He passed me a bottle labelled thinners. “Make sure it doesn’t melt the fabric, it’s quite strong.”
“Will it melt the Smiley Tots?”
“Possibly.”
I growled at myself. “I tried to paint a dog and a kangaroo, but they didn’t look right.”
“Artists take a long time to learn how to paint well,” he said. “Don’t beat yourself up.”
“I have never seen an artist doing painting. Good ones or bad ones. If they take a long time to learn then where are they all doing their learning?”
“Ah, that is a deep and interesting question,” said Helberg, tapping the side of his nose.
“You’re doing that thing again,” I said.
“What thing?”
“Of being annoying. Of saying things that make no sense and making me feel like an idiot.”
“I don’t think you’re an idiot, Alice,” he said. “In fact, quite the opposite. You’ve become quite an interesting person of late.”
“Well, enjoy it while you can,” I said, miserably.
“I intend to. I think we should go on a trip.”
“Are you actually going to teach me something? Actually help me and not just go ‘Ah’ and tap your nose?”
He stood. “Actual help. A small practical lesson.”
I followed him outside and he called a car. “Destination is the museum and art gallery,” he told it. He produced a card-like device and waved it over an interface panel. “Transfer credits for journey optimised for speed.”
“Why are you talking to the car like that?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“Your Jaffle Port takes care of the payment details. You don’t need to tell it what to do or waved cards about.”
“You mean your Jaffle Port does that,” he said.
I was about to ask him what he meant by that but he started talking.
“You can do research about art, and when we look at the paintings I’ll suggest some pointers for things you might want to look up, but let’s start right at the beginning. When do you think people started to make art?”
I had no idea. “When? Crumbs. Was it a long time ago?”
“Yes. A very long time ago,” said Helberg. “There’s a cave in France where there are paintings that are forty thousand years old.”
“No way!”
“Yes. For as long as there have been people, there’s been the irresistible urge to depict the world around us and make marks on whatever is to hand.” He gave me a sideways look. “Is there by any chance an appalling mess on your apartment wall?”
“Might be,” I said. “I don’t think Hattie approves.
“We can tidy it up. Anyway, that’s when people started to make art. When do you think they stopped?”
“Oh,” I said, understanding dawning. “Do you mean that nobody is creating new paintings now? Surely that can’t be true? Not everyone is reduced to Jaffle Standard. Why aren’t people on the premium packages doing painting?”
Helberg sat back in the car seat. “I’m not saying nobody has painted a picture in the last twenty years. I expect that there are people who play around at it, but anyone rich enough to be on Jaffle Premium aren’t necessarily going to follow a passion for painting. We live in age of planned obsolescence, Alice. With machines and bots and Jaffle swarms doing all the work for us, we don’t really need people to do very much at all. The forces that govern society would rather that we, individual humans, don’t get the idea into our heads that we have value, that we contribute.”
“But the people of Jaffle Premium. If they’ve got more access to their brain capacity, shouldn’t they be making greater contributions to society?”
“You’ve met some of them. What do you think?”
I wondered about that. “Surely they’re not all awful?”
“The system works best if we’re all happy as we are; that none of us want things to change.”
“What level are you on, anyway?” I asked.
The look he gave me was deep and unreadable and – though I wasn’t sure what made me think it – it was the most real look he’d ever given me. Like I’d caught a true glimpse of the actual Patrick Helberg for the first time. A shiver ran through me.
He gave a sad little smile which abruptly broadened. “Look, we’re here.”
***
Chapter 17
The car had pulled up outside an imposing old building. It looked as though it had been here for a very long time, with stone pillars and a door that the car could have driven through.
The entrance hall, at the top of a series of stone steps, was cool and very large. The tiles on the floor were coloured, and patterned in a very pleasing way. I stopped to stare at them.
“Is this art?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not really an exhibit,” Helberg said. “It’s part of the aesthetic though.”
I jipped aesthetic and decided it was a word I would use again in the future.
“You should look up the Arts and Crafts movement,” he said. “This building dates from then, and the decor is from that period. Look at the door, for example.”
I saw the door had a large brass handle and a finger plate with ends that looped around, formed curling tendrils which reminded me of how plants looked when they were growing in a garden.
“Lovely.”
“Let’s start in the Medieval gallery,” Helberg said. “You might be interested to see some of the techniques from years ago.”
We went into a large room with paintings on the wall. The room had nothing else inside it apart from the paintings, and benches where you could sit and look at them. We took a seat.
Helberg pointed at an image. “So, do you see how artists of this time had not discovered the thing we call perspective?” he asked.
I jipped what he meant and then looked at the picture. It showed some people in unusual clothing, jostling together under an archway, and thought I understood. It was curiously flat and I coul
d see nothing behind the people.
We sat and looked at it for a few minutes. There were so many amazing features which the artist had taken care to record. Above the arches was some sort of bright orange building. I wondered if it was meant to be a real building. Even the frame was incredible.
“Who made the frame?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Helberg. “Sometimes pictures get new frames. As long as it makes the picture look good, the frame’s doing its job.”
I nodded. “So where are the paintings where they got the hang of perspective?”
Helberg smiled. “There are a great many of those, don’t worry. Ready to move on?”
We moved into a gallery called Early Italian. The paintings were full of stern-faced people with remarkable skin. A good many of them featured the same mother and baby. They must have been very famous, sort of an early version of Mr Smiley.
“Babies…” I said, musing out loud.
“That’s Jesus,” said Helberg, nodding at the baby in the nearest portrait.
“Oh, you know him?”
“Not personally.”
His words chimed with my thoughts. “I don’t know any babies either,” I said.
Helberg seemed to find this amusing.
“No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t see babies around. I was one once, of course. I think.”
“You think?” he said, still smiling.
I jipped where babies came from. I didn’t tell Helberg I was doing that because I didn’t want him to mock me. I had a half-formed notion of how babies were produced; I discovered that half-formed notion was a greatly simplified version of the truth.
“And what’s her name?” I said, pointing.
“Mary?” he said.
I nodded. I looked at Mary and Jesus and was struck how much it reminded me of Hattie with her Smiley Tots. I gasped at the realisation, wondering how I’d never seen it before. Had Hattie ever held a real baby? She would make a wonderful mother, but of course, the prospect was never even considered as an option for people on Jaffle Standard. Their lives were more or less controlled to be sex and child-free.
I looked at Mary. “I bet she’s not on Jaffle Standard,” I said.
“No, I don’t believe so,” smiled Helberg.
