by Heide Goody
“Have fun,” he said before calling to the receptionist. “Prospective employees. Come to look around.”
“Did you get in touch beforehand?” asked the receptionist.
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” said Hattie at the same time.
The receptionist looked at us both and sighed slightly. She made a call to someone. “I have some visitors who are thinking of applying for work. Could you please talk to them?”
Moments later, a neat-looking woman arrived. She wore a colourful tunic and had a warm smile. “Hello, I’m Shirley and I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about working here.” She led us through a double door. “Can I ask where you’ve been working up until now?”
“Private work,” I offered, “I’m not permitted to discuss details, of course.”
“I see,” said Shirley. “So, what’s your particular interest here?”
“Babies,” I said. “We’d like to see your, er, baby department.”
“Certainly,” said Shirley. We went through a maze of corridors and up some stairs. We emerged into a large room. “Soft play area. Shoes off for this part.”
We all removed our shoes and walked across a squishy vinyl surface which was covered in colourful blocks and toys. There was a circle of tiny children up ahead. They were impossibly tiny. Did all people start off this small? Some were big enough to sit up by themselves, while others reclined in special seats which bounced lightly.
Hattie gasped. I looked and saw her face crumple into the same adoring expression she had for her Smiley Tots.
A woman was reading the babies a story about a dog. Most of them had their eyes on her, a couple wriggled or crawled in a distracted way, and there was one who wailed softly.
“Don’t let us disturb you, I have some visitors who want to look around,” Shirley said to her.
The woman looked up and smiled. “Well if anyone wants to get hands-on, then Jacob needs a change, I think.” She indicated the wailing baby.
“I’ll do it,” said Hattie eagerly.
Shirley beamed and waved Hattie forward.
“Hello Jacob,” said Hattie, picking him up. “Let’s sort you out, shall we?”
I followed Hattie as she carried Jacob over to an area that was clearly reserved for clean-up. She laid him down on a mat and tickled his toes. He chuckled in delight and Hattie made cooing noises.
Shirley handed something to Hattie. “Clean nappy for you. Wipes are there too.”
Hattie undressed Jacob. I peered over to watch. “Oh my god, that is disgusting!” I hissed.
Jacob had squirted poo into every imaginable crevice and seemed very proud of the appalling mess that he’d made. The smell was overwhelming. I wondered what on earth they could be feeding these infants to make such an appalling stench. Hattie was oblivious to the horror and bent over, carefully cleaning him up, still grinning. He had a little tiny penis, and as I watched, an arc of urine splashed into Hattie’s face.
“Oh Jacob!” she said. “What a little tinker you are!”
She continued to clean and re-dress him. She wiped the urine off her face as if it was nothing. Then she picked him up and put him to her shoulder. “Isn’t he just the sweetest thing you ever saw in your life?” she asked.
I watched and pointed in horror as Jacob vomited down Hattie’s back. “Your back!”
Hattie smiled and carefully put Jacob down to listen to the story before she wiped the vomit off herself. “He can’t help it, he’s only tiny.”
While I hadn’t been at all ready for the mess a baby could inflict, Hattie was in her element. “Do you want to go back now?” I checked.
“Ooh, no, let’s stay for a while,” she said enthusiastically. Hattie inserted herself into the circle of babies and cuddled them as they all listened to the story.
***
Chapter 25 – 13th June – 6 days until Operation Sunrise
At work the next day, I wasn’t sure I’d done the right thing, taking Hattie to the OneStop Daycare centre.
Yes, I had made her very happy for a few hours.
Yes, I had definitely put the incinerated Smiley Tots out of her mind.
Yes, I had certainly mended some bridges in our relationship and that made me feel good.
But at what cost?
Within fifteen minutes of arriving at work, Hattie had jipped images of babies – real human babies, not stylised Smiley Tots – arranged around her cubicle. Every time I walked past her cubicle I saw her looking at them with a curious expression. Wistful. That was the word: wistful.
“Well, don’t them young ’uns look a fine and pretty sight,” Levi said to her. “Although having so many paper images in your workstation could be considered a fire hazard.”
“I think I would like a real one,” she said.
“A real what?”
“Baby.”
He sucked in through his teeth. “That would be a handful and no mistake. But certainly less flammable. Oh, yabetcha.”
It was odd. The man was quite an insufferable prig and yet, I realised, he had a streak of kindness running through him which he did his darnedest to hide. Always a kind word for Hattie, the other workers too, like he really believed he was a kindly shepherd overlooking his flock.
Paulette approached me. “Alice, I’ve been asked to file a report.”
“Oh. What kind of a report?” I asked.
“I’m not sure I can share that detail,” she said. “Let’s just say that it’s a thorough and comprehensive report on some of the things that have happened in the department in recent days.”
“The department?” I asked. “So not me, personally?”
“My office, would you?” She marched away, knowing I had to follow.
Paulette closed the office door behind us, took her seat and studied me.
“How can I help?” I asked eventually. If I could have asked a question more like How can I end this as quickly as possible? I would have gone for it, but I had to appear co-operative.
Clearly I had been uncovered in some way. Of all the things I had done in recent days, any number could be the reason for this. Getting my brain infected with the whale virus. Faking brain scans. Lying to staff. Starting fires. Sneaking to the top floor executive offices.
“The incident I wanted to flesh out a little for the report,” said Paulette, “was the one where you took my bacon sandwich.”
I was stunned. Of all the things I thought she might be about to say, that definitely wouldn’t have made the top ten. I’d almost completely forgotten about it. Her words stimulated the memory of experiencing that overpowering smell for the first time. I licked my lips just thinking about it.
“Right. Bacon sandwich, yes,” I said.
“My recollection is that you said I was to give you my bacon sandwich because Rufus Jaffle had said so, while you were doing a special job for him.” She paused. “Now that I come to write it down, I have questions. For example, how did Rufus Jaffle even know I had a bacon sandwich?”
I saw an immediate problem. I really needed to distance myself from any mention of Rufus Jaffle. I couldn’t have Paulette writing this down, or someone like Henderson would surely join the dots and realise the person who’d been inside Jaffle’s head was the same one who was at the centre of various minor atrocities. He’d reset my brain before you could say plipper.
“I do remember that,” I said to Paulette. “I had such a vivid dream. Weird, huh?”
“What? You dreamt that Rufus Jaffle told you to take my bacon sandwich?”
“Yes,” I said. I hoped the lie would satisfy Paulette without any further embellishment, but she looked as if she had a hundred more questions. I launched a pre-emptive monologue.
“Every once in a while I have a dream that’s so vivid it seems real. As you know, we’d had the presentation about the company’s achievements. I always like to hear about the things we’re helping to do around the world. I think that perhaps Mr Jaffle was in my mi
nd, I guess that’s why he ended up in my dream.”
“So, you haven’t met him in real life?”
“In my dream he was a short, dark haired man. Very serious,” I said. “Do you think he’s like that in real life?”
“I genuinely have no idea,” said Paulette. “So, can I be crystal clear on this? You were acting purely upon a dream when you demanded to have my bacon sandwich?”
“Yes. Sorry. I realise now that I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Did you enjoy the bacon sandwich, Alice?”
Did she think I was stupid enough to fall into a trap like that? “No,” I said – wistfully. “Not really. I like beans better. They’re more practical.”
She made a noise and gave me an odd look: a sort of internalised scowl.
“Is that … it?” I asked.
She continued to look at me. “You can see why I was curious.”
“Oh, absolutely,” I said. “Me and my dreams, eh?” I gave her a jolly smile, a sort of Oh, that Alice, isn’t she a harmless ditz sort of smile.
“I just needed to know,” said Paulette, “before I fill out these reference requests.”
“Sure,” I said, then: “What? Reference requests?”
Paulette studied something on her desk.
“The OneStop Daycare Centre,” she said. “Yourself and a colleague, and a—” she gave a little frown “—and an unknown third person who didn’t register on entry, went for a pre-application visit.” Paulette smiled politely at me. “I didn’t know you had any experience in childcare.”
“Er, no,” I said.
“Or interest.”
“It’s a recent thing. It’s more Hattie’s thing really. She’s got a real, er, passion.”
Paulette put her hands together on the table. “Are you unhappy here?”
“Me? Or both of us?”
“Either.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. The truth – that Hattie was secretly baby-mad and had been pushed in that direction by my own personal awakening – wasn’t going to make things better. “We’re really happy here,” I said.
“Because Jaffle Tech prides itself on being the employer that people want to work for.”
“Especially, Hattie. She loves her job. She really doesn’t want to leave.”
“I thought you said she was the one with the passion.”
“She is, but she’s loyal. She was just … just looking. There’s no harm in looking. Have you … have you invited her in for a little chat?”
Paulette shook her head. “No. She’s not the one with anomalous behaviours on her file.”
“Anomalous. Good word. What behaviours?”
Paulette opened her hands as though the behaviours were concealed in them. “The bacon sandwich.”
“Right, that,” I said.
“The requests for new tunics.”
“Yes,” I nodded. “Some accidents there.”
“Including an engineer’s tunic, I noticed.”
I pursed my lips. That was harder to explain. “I do like exploring other jobs.”
“And dressing up for roles you are not qualified to undertake.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
I met her gaze. I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I wasn’t thinking anything beyond blind panic. “I don’t know what I’m doing half the time,” I heard myself say.
“You have mental absences?” said Paulette.
“What?”
“Fugue states. Black outs. That sounds serious.”
“No, no, no,” I said hurriedly. “I mean that I’m a … whimsical character. Spontaneous. You should see what thoughts go through my head sometime.”
“We can,” said Paulette. “I note here that you’ve been called to have a brain scan on several occasions in the past few weeks. Problems?”
“Not at all. Just one brain scan, but I had to reschedule several times. I’m very busy.”
“You then submitted a privately commissioned scan.”
“I was doing a favour for a friend.”
“You have friends?”
That halted me dead. “Yes, I have friends.”
“The same friend whose Jaffle Port didn’t register at the OneStop Daycare?”
“Lots of friends.”
Paulette breathed in slowly, making a show of thinking. “Your Jaffle rating is a combined scoring system which shows your reliability and efficiency in a wide range of areas,” she said. “A heuristic diagnostic tool to help people understand what kind of – well, neighbour or employee or teammate or whatever – you might be. These recent behaviours of yours are likely to have an adverse effect on your rating.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“These behaviours aren’t wrong per se, Alice. But they are odd. If I’m to provide the requested reference—”
“You don’t have to do that, honestly.”
“But it has been requested. I think I ought to look into these matters a little more deeply. If it’s all right with you, I’m going to interrogate the location tracker log in your port, see where you’ve been, what you’ve been up—”
“Can I refuse?”
“Of course you can,” she said, smiling gently. “But that would be odd in itself. Possibly grounds for us to subpoena said records. As a caring employer, we actively weed out those who are engaged in illegal and anti-social behaviours. Refusing to let your employer access those records would seem suspicious.”
“Of course,” I said for lack of anything else to say.
“Agreed,” said Paulette. And, with that, I realised I had given them a front row seat to all my inexplicable activities since Rufus Jaffle had accidentally awoken me to my full potential.
“Give me a little time and I will call you back in for a clarification interview if necessary,” said Paulette.
I numbly left her office. Clarification interview. That might as well be code for Pre-firing and pre-arrest interview.
What other stones would they turn over? If she combined location information with Jaffle’s own CCTV, they’d see where I’d been, what I’d stolen. I could make no defence. And if Paulette was going to make a full and comprehensive report into Jaffle Tech weirdness involving me, she would probably focus on my unofficial brain scan, which would definitely not withstand careful scrutiny. I wondered if I could get that scan back somehow. I had no idea how to do that, but then another idea occurred to me.
***
Chapter 26
“I want to ask you something,” I said to Helberg when I got home.
“Good. I want to show you something,” he replied. He took my hand and drew me into his office.
“You faked my brain scan,” I said.
“I did. Chuckie Egg, music please.”
The bot began to play some music I had not heard before. I had spent a lot of time at Helberg’s place, listening to music. I could manage it now without crying, although it was a close-run thing. “I don’t want a dancing lesson now,” I said.
“But you do want to dance at the gala,” he said. “Today is salsa.”
“Salsa?”
I quickly jipped it. I’d already tried out some very rudimentary dance moves. I’d seen lots of amazing moves when I searched the archive clips, but Helberg told me most people didn’t dance like that at parties. He had previously recommended something which looked more like walking backwards and forwards while turning bacon on an invisible barbecue. Salsa looked a bit more involved.
“Is this one of those ones where the dancing is a desired expression of a vertical … whatever you said. Basically, upright sex.”
He laughed. “You make it sound like people are only interested in sex.”
“You are.”
“Maybe I’m just a hopeless romantic. The phrase you were reaching for, Alice, is the vertical expression of a horizontal desire.”
“That.”
“Possibly.”
“Look,” I said,
having had my initial conversational thread hijacked, “I need to ask you how easy it would be to fake lots and lots of brain scans.”
“What?” he said. “Uh-huh. Dancing first. Stupid questions later.” He drew me closer in preparation.
“As long as we can’t get pregnant doing the upright sex dance,” I said.
“Who’s getting pregnant?” asked Hattie from the doorway.
“No one,” I said.
“Alice is just asking stupid questions,” muttered Helberg.
“There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers,” said Hattie. “I read that somewhere.”
“Well, whoever said that was also stupid,” said Helberg.
Hattie hovered in the doorway. Helberg looked pointedly at her. I stepped back from him. It felt kind of silly to be that close to him if we weren’t actually going to dance yet.
“I jipped a question today and only got a stupid answer,” said Hattie. “You seem to know stuff, Helberg.”
“Some stuff,” he conceded.
“So how do babies come out?”
He stared at her for a long moment and then did some very awkward but nonetheless quite explanatory gestures.
“No. No. No.” Hattie was adamant. “There’s no possible way a baby can come out of there. I saw them. They’re small, but they’re not that small. No way. It’s just not big enough. I don’t want to go into details, but sometimes it’s a squeeze to get the, you know, other thing out of there. A whole baby? I don’t think so.”
“But you must be able to get an answer by jip— Whoa!” I had just jipped it. It looked like the worst form of torture. “Look at her—! That can’t be right! Was she following the instructions properly?”
Helberg coughed. “I take it we’re all up to speed now? Or at least we accept that babies develop inside a woman’s body and then come out through the vagina.”
Hattie blew out her cheeks and shook her head, so confused she needed to sit down. “So, hang on. If that’s how babies get out, how do they get in there? And why have I never seen it happening?”
“Lots of questions wrapped up in there,” said Helberg slowly, with a quick glance at me.
