by Heide Goody
“No.”
“Hattie? Are you hurt?”
Hattie was sobbing uncontrollably. “My tots. All of my tots.”
The army of cutesy baby dolls had been reduced to a stinking heap of melted plastic and burned fabric. Levi went over and tried to find one that was less damaged. He picked one up by its head. Its ghoulish, blackened face stared at us, accusation blazing from its hollow eye sockets. As we stared in horror, the rest of the body plopped to the floor, leaving Levi holding only the head.
Hattie wailed. “All gone! All gone! My tots! All of them!”
Levi put his arms awkwardly around her quivering frame. Hattie howled into his shoulder. The noise in his ear must have been deafening, but he only winced a little bit. I could already see snot and tears on his pristine uniform.
A Jaffle Swarm of insects had flown in from somewhere and circled the office space. In a distant control room, fire chiefs would be assessing the situation.
“You.” Hattie lifted her head and pointed at me. “You’re the one who made all of this happen. This is the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
“I didn’t mean to… It shouldn’t have…”
“I can never forgive you, Alice.”
I was stunned. I knew that Hattie was ridiculously attached to the tots, but surely she knew, deep down that they were just things and that they could be replaced? As for it being my fault, that was a bit of a leap. Anyone could see that it was an accident.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “That shouldn’t have happened. The bottle said the liquid was inflammable. Inflammable.” Belatedly I jipped the meaning of the word. “Oh.”
The sprinklers had stopped. Levi carefully disentangled himself from Hattie, leaving trailers of tearful snottiness between them. “Alice, a word in—” He looked round. “In that meeting room. Now.”
I had a feeling that Levi wasn’t viewing this as an accident either.
I went into the conference room, with Levi hot on my heels. There were papers around on the table. I think I had glimpsed some executive from the upper floors in here, having a chat with our section heads. A plate of luxury biscuits in the middle of the table was slowly going soggy in an inch of sprinkler water.
“Well, look who’s slap-bang in the middle of another major incident,” said Levi, glaring at me.
“Well look who’s staring at someone who’s in need of a new uniform, instead of helping,” I snapped.
“I’ve already sent a request for new clothing.” He hesitated and then whipped off his jacket and put it around my shoulders. Levi jackletless, his strong arms exposed, him covering me protectively. In my dreams, this would have been super exciting and sexy. Right now, I felt like an idiot child.
“I need to write up a major incident report, yabetcha,” he said. “Your testimony is obviously required, but I will be relying upon key witnesses to provide their version of events.”
“There’s been a fire,” I said.
“I might need more detail than that.”
I shook my head irritably. “There’s been a fire. Levi, you are just a security guard.”
“Just a security guard? Hoo-ee!”
“If there’s an investigation to be made then that’s up to the fire department or the insurers or…”
“Are you questioning my authority, miss?” he said.
“That is exactly what I’m doing!” I retorted.
“You’ll be suspended from work for the duration of my investigation,” he said. “I can’t have ya fraternizing with potential witnesses.”
“Suspended? You don’t have the authority!”
He puffed up his chest and his moustache quivered. Even in the circumstances, I was slightly aroused, and then hated myself for it.
“You’ll be aware that the terms and conditions of your employment are conditional on certain behaviours?” he said. “I have the power to suggest that you were not only in breach of your duty to safeguard your colleagues, but that you may also be guilty of gross misconduct.” I started to speak but he cut across me. “Your line manager will be made aware of the situation. You will now watch the film, as is required for all employees when they need to be reminded of how seriously we take this—”
The door opened and a company fire marshal burst in. “Did you not hear the alarms?” he exclaimed.
“I’m in the middle of an interview,” said Levi.
“Evacuate. Now!”
Levi gave the marshal a frosty stare. I looked aside, embarrassed and then saw the plipper. It was on the conference table, underneath a fat wad of meeting papers, in a protective blister-pack, new and unused. While Levi and the fire marshal loudly contested who had jurisdiction over whom, I picked up the pile of papers, the plipper sandwiched in the middle.
“What are you doing?” said the fire marshal.
Panic swelled inside me but I kept it down. “These are important papers. I didn’t want them to get any wetter.”
“We do not stop to pick up personal belongings in an emergency, miss,” said Levi severely.
The fire marshal gave Levi a withering look. “Just get out, the pair of you.”
I walked out, wearing nothing but my underwear and Levi’s jacket about my shoulders. Levi, put in his place, could do nothing but follow. As I reached the door to the stairs, he called out.
“Wait!”
I turned. He scrabbled under a turned over partition as early responder fire department drones searched for any remnants of the fire. He grabbed something from the soaked and sooty edges of the scene.
He came towards me with something held victoriously in his hand. It was a dusty, mouldy and now ash-covered ring.
“Is that Brandine’s bagel?” I said.
“A persistent investigator always finds the truth,” he said.
“She dropped it behind her desk?”
“The truth!” he insisted.
***
I went straight home and strode into the apartment complex. The Empties outside the building didn’t stare at the mostly naked woman walking by. They stared at nothing at all.
“This is an exciting new look for you,” said Helberg as I entered the lobby. He saw the look on my face. “You want to come in for a coffee? Something stronger? Maybe with a side order of clothes?”
I went into his office and fell onto the squashy couch in exhausted disbelief. I instantly decided I never wanted to get up again. Helberg draped something over me. I felt the touch of a thick, soft blanket.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Anything for my favourite madwoman. What’s this?”
He picked through the papers I had let drop to the floor. Many of the pages were melted together but I had successfully smuggled the plipper out of Jaffle Tech.
“Plipper,” I said, morosely.
He turned the blister pack over in his hand.
“I stole it,” I added.
“Why?”
“Thought you might like to take a look at it.”
“Thought I’d like to take a look at your company’s latest nightmare device?” He shrugged and nodded at the same time. He put the plipper on his desk and began tidying the dropped papers, skim-reading the first few pages as he did.
“This is soaked. You’re naked. I suspect there’s some story behind this,” he said.
I groaned. “I’m a horrible human being.”
“No,” he tutted. “That’s not true. Now that you’ve taken to walking around in your underwear, I think I’ve seen most of you, and I’d score you as a solid seven, possible even an eight.”
“Horrible on the inside,” I grumped.
“Still a solid seven or eight,” he said. “Like the rest of us. What you are is human, very, very human.”
“I set fire to the office, destroyed Hattie’s Smiley Tots, stole company property and I’m going to get suspended from my job.”
“Okay,” said Helberg. “Maybe a six.”
***
Chapter 21 – 9th June –
10 days until Operation Sunrise
I was indeed suspended from work, pending an investigation. Paulette tried to dress it up as recovery time from the shock at being caught in a fire in the workplace, but it was what it was. I was told to go away and not come back in until invited.
The following days were very uncomfortable at home. Hattie’s hostility towards me was so intense that being in the same room as her was hard work. She would pointedly ignore me, then address comments to the blackened head Levi had picked out of the fire. I have no idea why she’d even taken it, but she used it to punish me.
“Oh look, Derek, I see Alice hasn’t put the beans back in the cupboard.”
“Derek, can you remember when you had a body? It was such a lovely little body, wasn’t it?”
“I need to take really good care of you now, Derek, or Alice will find a way to take you away from me.”
I spent an increasing amount of time down in Helberg’s flat.
“So,” he said loudly, out of nowhere, as though he had suddenly decided he’d had enough of my miserable mood. “Have you been to an upscale party before?”
“What?”
“The Jaffle Tech gala. A party. Where there’s music and hors d’oeuvres and so on?”
“I, er…” I played for time while I jipped the meaning of hors d’oeuvres. I was relieved to discover that it was a fancy name for food of some sort. “Well, I’ve eaten food before, obviously. There are some things that I’m not keen on, like garlic, but I’ll just avoid those.”
“You’ll avoid garlic? How will you know?”
“It’s pretty obvious,” I said. “A weird roundish thing, covered in paper. I could spot it a mile off.”
“I think you and your fairy godmother might have some work to do,” said Helberg. “Follow me.”
It turned out that he had a kitchen just off his back office. There was a confused and cluttered warren of rooms in that part of the apartment complex, as though built for a purpose long since forgotten. Not only did he have a kitchen but he knew what to do with it.
He showed me the freezer and explained the difference between that and the fridge. There seems to be a lot of science involved in cookery. The freezer is much colder and keeps certain things for a long time, but you can’t just eat them, because they are frozen. This sounded like a lot of trouble to me, but Helberg tapped the side of his nose and got out some little beige discs. He put them on a metal tray which went into the oven.
“These always make an appearance at parties. Finger foods, you see: you eat them without a knife and fork.” He eyed me, as if a sudden thought had come to him. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“I know what a knife and fork is,” I said.
“But have you ever eaten with them?”
“No.”
“Probably a lesson for another day. Let’s concentrate on finger foods. Just because they’re called that, don’t be fooled. It’s not necessarily straightforward. Into the oven with these and then we’ll make a couple of fillings.”
He went back to the freezer and scrabbled in the depths. Then he put a board onto the table and took a large knife from the drawer. The knife seemed outlandishly big. I couldn’t imagine what he would need such a large blade for.
“Garlic!” he said, brandishing a cluster of the hateful stuff in his outstretched hand. “This is what we do.”
He put the garlic on the board and leaned on it with his hand. It came apart into smaller pieces. He took one of the pieces and used the side of the knife blade to squash it. I wondered if he really knew what he was doing. Even I knew that you didn’t use a knife like that. He lifted the blade and picked the papery stuff away. I peered and he was left with a creamy-coloured lump, and that distinctive, pungent smell filled the room. Then he used the knife (the right way up this time) to chop the garlic into tiny pieces.
He fetched something from the fridge. It was a startling red globe.
“What’s that?”
“A tomato. You can try some in a few minutes.”
I watched as he carefully chopped the tomato up and put it in a bowl with the garlic. He took another bowl and tipped in some little pink things which looked like severed fingers. He squirted some gloopy liquid over the mixture, added powder from a jar, and stirred it with a spoon.
He looked up and beamed. “I think the vol au vents should be about ready.”
When he opened the oven, there was a blast of heat accompanied by a delicious smell. He pulled the tray out. The weird little discs had transformed into fluffy brown things, much taller than when they started. I touched one. It broke apart with the smallest of prods.
“Oops, sorry,” I said.
“You’re starting to see what one of your challenges will be,” said Helberg. “Learning to eat this sort of thing without covering yourself and your fellow guests with mess is essential.”
“It’s like a test?” I said.
“Everything at a high-class party is like a test.”
He took one of them and put it on a plate. He flipped off the top. It resembled a tiny cup. “Huh, that’s neat,” I said.
He took a spoonful of the gloopy pink things and put them in the cup. He handed me the plate.
“Prawn vol au vent. Very tasty, but potentially messy to eat. Your mission is to eat some or all of this without spilling bits. Or—” he added, looking at me opening my mouth as wide as it would go, “—without looking like it’s feeding time at the zoo. Try to be delicate and elegant.”
“How do I do that?” I asked. It sounded impossible.
He shrugged. “I’m not really sure. Give it a shot.”
I bit into the thing. I could feel it crumbling into pieces. I grunted in frustration. It was smooshed against my mouth, but I knew the moment I took it away, there would be a cascade of mess. I inched my hand underneath to catch as much as I could as I lowered the half-crushed thing. My method almost worked. I looked up to see whether Helberg was critiquing my performance, but he was spooning the tomato mixture into some of the pastry cases. I pushed the remains of the first vol au vent into my mouth. It wasn’t all that elegant, but I thought I’d got away with it.
“Don’t make sucking, slurping noises, it’s considered impolite,” said Helberg.
I made a muted “Uh huh” noise.
“So is talking with your mouth full,” he said.
I finished and licked my lips. “That was nice. What did you say it was?”
“Prawns,” said Helberg. “Delicious, but delicate. If you see something with prawns in it that looks dried out or a bit old, avoid it. You might end up with a stomach upset. Now try the tomato one.”
I tackled this one more carefully, making sure I left myself with a second half that was more easily contained.
“A triumph!” he said, as I finished it off.
“That was garlic,” I said. “I could taste it, but only a little bit. It was good.”
He nodded. “Less is more with garlic. Now let’s look at some of the other things you might come across at a buffet.” He stared up, seeking inspiration. I guessed it was a while since he went to a party.
“You did fine with the vol au vents, so anything else in pastry is covered. Things on sticks: don’t eat the stick.”
“Why put it on a stick then?” I asked.
He shrugged. “So you can pick it up. You don’t want a load of people rummaging through a dish of olives or something with their dirty fingers.”
“Olives, I tried those. There’s a pit in the middle.”
“In the world of buffet food, you’ll often find that the pit has been replaced with something else. Let me see if I’ve got some to show you.”
Helberg went to a cupboard. It was filled with an amazing range of jars and tins. He pushed some aside, and then found what he was looking for. “Olives stuffed with anchovies.”
If I understood him right, this was a small, bitter fruit with a fish in the middle. Of course it was.
He went to a d
rawer and found a tub filled with tiny wooden sticks. He took the lid off the jar and speared an olive with a stick. He handed it to me and speared another for himself.
I popped it into my mouth. It was much more enjoyable when I wasn’t worrying about the pit. There was a strange new flavour, which must have been the anchovy. It was on the very edge of being disgusting. If I’d had a whole mouthful of that flavour it would have been quite unpleasant, but this tiny, acrid burst of flavour was intriguing and delicious.
“That was amazing!”
“Good. You’re doing great,” said Helberg. “Now, what else. You know there’s going to be music, don’t you?”
“Yes!” I said, excited. “Like the Smiley theme tune. Smiley, Smiley, have you any fun? Yes I do, for everyone!”
Helberg shook his head. “Do you know that the tune you just sang is an old nursery rhyme for children? It’s called Baa Baa Black Sheep. They just changed the words.”
“Oh.”
In truth, as I’d sung the words, it sounded less thrilling to my ears than it used to, and only partly due to my singing. I felt as though I’d left Smiley behind since my unauthorised brain upgrade. Worse still, I had started to see the Smiley products as something bad, especially in the way they exploited people like Hattie. She more or less worked so she could afford more Smiley Tots.
“So the music you’re talking about,” I said, “is something different?”
“Oh yes. Let’s start with something fairly bland. We don’t want to overwhelm you.” He turned to fiddle with a machine. “This one’s called The Girl from Ipanema.” He turned back to me. “What?”
Tears were running down my face. I had no idea what was happening. The music was so beautiful, so wonderfully clever, it overwhelmed me and I was left gasping, unable to form words.
He turned it off. “Too much?”
I nodded.
“Let’s try something else.” He thought for a moment. “We’ll go with some Beatles.” He pressed a button.
I shook my head with amazement. There was singing, and it was more than one person. How did they do that thing where their voices blended together? I sobbed again.
