The Heart Goes Last (7 page)

She parks the scooter in the lot behind the pharmacy, then walks around to the front. Already her heart is beating faster. She takes a breath, assumes her bustling, efficient pose, consults her little notebook as if there’s something written in it. Then she orders a large box of gauze bandages, putting it on the hospital account. The bandages aren’t needed, but they’re also not remarkable: no one will be keeping track of gauze bandages, especially since keeping track of them happens to be her own job, every other month.

She smiles in her sunniest manner at Bill Nairn, who’s putting in his last hour as pharmacist before shedding his white coat and taking up whatever role he plays inside the Positron Prison walls. Bill smiles back, and they exchange remarks about the lovely weather, then close with goodbyes. She smiles again: she has such guileless teeth: asexual teeth, nothing fanged about them. She used to worry about looking so symmetrical, so blond, but she’s come to think of this as an asset. Her small teeth alarm no one: bland is good camouflage.

She hurries back to the lot, and sure enough there’s a small envelope tucked in under the scooter seat. She palms it, fishtails out of the lot, makes it around the corner to a residential street, parks.

They don’t use their Consilience-issue cellphones to arrange these meetings: it’s too risky, because you never know what the central IT people are tracking. The whole town is under a bell jar: communications can be exchanged inside it, but no words get in or out except through approved gateways. No whines, no complaints, no tattling, no whistle-blowing. The overall message must be tightly controlled: the outside world must be assured that the Consilience/Positron twin city project is working.

And it is working, because look: safe streets, no homelessness, jobs for all!

Though there were some bumps along the way, and those bumps had to be flattened out. But right now Charmaine doesn’t intend to dwell on those discouraging bumps, or on the nature of the flattening.

She unfolds the paper, reads the address. She’ll dispose of the note by burning it, though not out here in the open: a woman on a scooter setting fire to something might attract notice. There aren’t any black cars in view, but it’s rumoured that Surveillance can see around corners.

Today’s address is in a housing development left over from some decade in the mid-twentieth century: one of the many relics from the town’s past. As they’ve all been informed in the backgrounders, the town that’s now become Consilience was founded in the late nineteenth century by a group of Quakers. Brotherly love was what they’d wanted; the town’s name was Harmony, its crest was a beehive, meaning cooperative labour. The first industry was a beet-sugar mill; next came a furniture factory, then a corset company. Then there was an automobile plant – one of those pre-Ford cars – then a camera film corporation, and finally, a state correctional institution.

After the Second World War, the key industries faded until nothing was left of Harmony but a gutted downtown, several crumbling public buildings with white columns, and a lot of repossessed houses not even the banks could sell. And, of course, the correctional institution, which was where the inhabitants had worked, when they’d worked at all.

But now, thinks Charmaine, it’s all different. Such an improvement! Already the gym has been renovated, for instance. And a whole bunch of houses are being upgraded – a fresh batch of applicants will arrive any month now to fill them. Or maybe to fill the houses that aren’t so upgraded, such as the one she and Stan had lived in at first. There had been plumbing problems; more like plumbing
events
, since they were bigger than mere problems. There was the time when it rained so hard and the sewage came spouting up through the kitchen sink: that was bigger than just a problem.

Luckily they’d been approved for a transfer; she assumes their Alternates had moved to the new house as well, but maybe not. She hasn’t thought to ask Max about that – whether he and his wife once lived in that earlier house. It isn’t the kind of thing she talks about with Max.

Every month it’s a new address: better that way. Luckily there are a lot of vacant houses, left over from when the industries were failing and the lenders were foreclosing, and from that later time when so many houses were standing empty because no one wanted to buy them. Max is a member of the Consilience Dwellings Reclamation Team when he’s not living in his prison cell at Positron. The Reclamation Team are the ones who inspect the houses, then tag them either for the wrecking ball and levelling for parkland and community gardens, or else for renovation, so he’s in a position to know which ones are suitable.

Max tries to choose the kind of interior decoration Charmaine prefers: she likes pretty wallpaper, with rosebuds or daisies. He does find the ones with wallpaper like that. But in each house they’ve used, the vandals were there, in the times when they roamed from town to town and from house to house, smashing windows and bottles and drinking and drugging and sleeping on the floor and using the bathtubs as outhouses. That was before they started the Positron Project and put up the walls around Consilience.

The gangs and crazies left their marks on the floral wallpaper: scrawled tags and other things. Vicious drawings. Short, hard words, written in spray paint, or markers, or lipstick, and, a couple of times, something brown and crusted that might have been shit.

“Read to me,” Max had whispered into her ear, in the first house, the first time.

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

“Yes, you do,” Max said. “You do want to.” And she must have wanted to, because those words were spilling out of her mouth. He laughed, picked her up, pushed his hands up under her skirt. She never wears jeans to these meetings, and that’s why. The next minute they were down on the bare floorboards.

“Wait!” she said, gasping with pleasure. “Undo the buttons!”

“I can’t wait,” he said, and it was true, he couldn’t wait, and because he couldn’t, and neither could she. It was like the copy on the back of the most lurid novel in the limited-titles library at Positron. Swept away. Drugged with desire. Like a cyclone. Helpless moaning. All of that. She’d never known about such a force, such an energy. She’d thought it was only in books and TV, or else for other people.

She gathered the buttons up afterwards, pocketed them. Only two had come off. She sewed them on again, later, after her stint in Positron, before returning to the house where she lived with Stan.

She did love Stan, but it was different. A different kind of love. Trusting, sedate. It went with pet fish, in fishbowls – not that they had one of those – and with cats, perhaps. And with eggs for breakfast, poached, snuggled inside their individual poachers. And with babies.

Once Grandma Win had died, Charmaine had to make her own way; it had been thin ice with the cracks showing and disaster always waiting just beneath her, but the trick was to keep gliding. She loved Stan because she liked solid ground under her feet, non-reflective surfaces, movies with neat endings. Closure, they called it. She’d opted for Chief Medications Administrator at Positron Prison when it was offered to her because it involved shelves and inventories, and everything in its place.

Or that’s all she thought it would be; but there are depths, as it turns out. There are other duties not mentioned to her at first, there’s a certain amount of untidiness, there’s navigation to be done. She’s getting proficient at it. And it turns out she’s not as dedicated to tidiness as she used to think.

It was sloppy to have left that note under the refrigerator. And that lipstick kiss was so tawdry. She keeps the lipstick in her locker; she’s only ever used it on that one note. Stan would never put up with her wearing a garish hue like that – Purple Passion is its name, such bad taste.

Which is why she bought it: that’s how she thinks of her feelings toward Max. Purple. Passionate. Garish. And, yes, bad taste. To a man like that, for whom you have feelings like that, you can say all sorts of things,
I’m starved for you
being the mildest of them. Words she would never have used, before. Vandal words. Sometimes she can’t believe what comes out of her mouth; not to mention what goes into it. She does whatever Max wants.

His name isn’t Max, of course, any more than Charmaine’s name is Jasmine. They don’t use their Consilience names: they decided on that the first time, without even talking about it. It’s as if they can read each other’s minds.

No, not minds: each other’s mindlessness. When she’s with Max, she throws away her mind.

That first time had been an accident. Charmaine had stayed behind at the house after Stan left, finishing the final tidy, as she used to do at first, before Max. “You go on ahead,” she’d tell him to get him out of her hair, which was pulled back into her housekeeping ponytail. She liked her cleanup routine, she liked to put on her pinafore apron and her rubber gloves and tick the items off her mental list without being interrupted. Rugs, tubs, sinks. Towels, toilets, sheets. Anyway, Stan hated the sound of the vacuum. “I’ll just make up the bed,” she’d say. “Off you go, hon. See you in a month. Have a good one.”

And that’s what she was doing – making up the bed, humming to herself – when Max walked into the room. He startled her. Cornered her: there was only the one door. A thinnish man, wiry. Not unusually tall. A lot of black hair. Handsome too. A man who’d have choices.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Sorry. I’m early. I live here.” He took a step forward.

“So do I,” Charmaine said. They looked at each other.

“Pink locker?” Another step.

“Yes. You’re the red one.” Backing away. “I’m almost finished here, and then you can …”

“No hurry,” he said. He took another step. “What do you keep inside that pink locker of yours? I’ve often wondered.”

Had he made a joke? Charmaine wasn’t so good at telling when people were making jokes. “Maybe you’d like some coffee,” she said. “In the kitchen. I cleaned the machine, but I can always … It’s not very nice coffee, though.” Charmaine, you’re babbling, she told herself.

“I’m good,” he said. “I’d rather stay here and watch you. I like the way you always make up the bed before you leave. And put out the fresh towels. Like a hotel.”

“It’s okay, I kind of like doing it, I think it looks …” Now she was backed up against the night table. I need to get out of this room, she told herself. Maybe she could glide around him. She moved to the side and forward. “I’m sorry, I have to leave now,” she said in what she hoped was a neutral tone. But he put his hand on her shoulder. He stepped forward again.

“I like your apron,” he said. “Or whatever it is. Does it tie at the back?” The next minute – how did it happen? – her pinafore apron was on the floor, her hair had come loose – had he done that? – and they were kissing, and his hands were under her freshly ironed shirt. “We’ve got a couple of hours,” he said, breaking away. “But we can’t stay here. My wife … Look, I know this place …” He scribbled an address. “Go there now.”

“I’ll just tuck in the sheet,” she said. “It would look wrong otherwise.” He smiled at that. She did tuck in the sheet, though not as tightly as usual, because her hands were shaking. Then she did what he said.

That was their first vacant house. It was dim, there were dead flies, the lights didn’t work, nor the water; the walls had been cracked and stained, but none of it mattered that first time, because she wasn’t noticing those kinds of details. He’d left first, by the side door. Then, after she’d counted to five hundred as he’d suggested, she’d walked out the front door, trying to look hurried and official, and scootered straight to Positron Prison, where she’d checked in, handed over her civvies, taken the mandatory shower, and put on the clean orange prison-issue suit that was waiting for her. After dinner in the women’s hall with the others – it was roast pork with Brussels sprouts – she’d joined her knitting circle as usual, and chatted about this and that, also as usual. But she was sleepwalking.

She ought to have been appalled by herself, by what she’d done. Instead she was amazed, and also jubilant. Had it really happened? Would it happen again? How could she contact him, or even believe in his existence? She couldn’t. It was like standing on a cliff edge. It made her dizzy.

At ten o’clock she went into her double cell, where the woman she shared with was already asleep, and there was the reassuring clang of the door and click of the lock. It felt safe to be caged in, now that she knew she had this other person inside her who was capable of escapades and contortions she’d never known about before. It wasn’t Stan’s fault, it was the fault of chemistry. People said
chemistry
when they meant something else, such as personality, but she does mean chemistry. Smells, textures, flavours, secret ingredients. She sees a lot of chemistry in her work, she knows what it can do. Chemistry can be like magic. It can be merciless.

She slept that night as if drunk. The next day she went about her hospital duties as briskly as usual, hiding behind the grillwork of her smile. Ever since then she’s been waiting: inside Positron while Max inspects vacant dwellings in Consilience; then in the house with Stan, working at her bakery job during the days; she does the pies and the cinnamon buns. Then there’s an hour or two of being Jasmine, with Max, on switchover days, while he’s going into Positron Prison and she’s coming back to civilian life, or vice versa. A vacant house. The anxiety. The haste. The rampage.

Then more waiting. It’s like being stretched so thin you feel you’ll break the very next minute; but she hasn’t broken yet. Though maybe leaving the note was breakage of a sort. Or the beginning of it. She should have had better control.

Stan must have read the note. It has to have been like that. He must have read it and then tucked it back under the fridge, because Max described where he’d found it, and it was a lot farther over to the right than where she’d stashed it. Ever since then, Stan has been so preoccupied he might as well be deaf and blind. When he makes love – that’s how Charmaine thinks of it, as distinct from whatever it is that happens with Max – when Stan makes love, it isn’t to her. Or not his usual idea of her. He’s almost angry.