The Heart Goes Last - Страница 15

He’d identified the problem – frayed wiring – and spent a couple of evenings in their garage fixing the short-outs so the scooter was operating just right and he could drive it down to the depot to do some more work on it, or that’s what he told Charmaine.

Really he wanted to have the scooter all to himself. In two more weeks – on the first day of October – it will be turned over to Jasmine, and he wants to customize it in advance of that event.

Why has it taken him so long to figure this out? This method of tracing Jasmine? When it’s been right in front of him all this time! All he needs is a second Consilience smartphone; with a little hackwork and manipulation, he can then synch his own to it and embed the doctored phone in the scooter. Then he can track where Jasmine goes when he’s in prison and recover that stored information via his own phone once he gets out. No one in the Project can access outside Wi-Fi, but they can communicate on the Consilience Wi-Fi network within the system, and view maps of the town on the Consilience interactive GPS, and that’s all he needs.

It was easy enough to get hold of Charmaine’s phone. She’d been so preoccupied lately she convinced herself she must have set it down somewhere, maybe at work, and who knows what happened to it? She reported it gone and they issued her another one. So far, so good. He’ll be in the slammer all October, managing the chickens, but when he comes out on November 1 he’ll be able to reconstruct the pathways Jasmine has been following in his absence.

And eventually those pathways will lead him somehow to a point of intersection – a place where he might be able to catch a glimpse of her, or even ambush her. On a switchover day, he’ll bump into her in the supermarket aisle, or what passes for a supermarket in Consilience. He’ll linger on a street corner. He’ll crouch behind a shrub, on a vacant lot. Then, before she knows it, he’ll have his mouth on those cherry-flavoured lips, and she’ll crumple; she won’t be able to resist, any more than paper can resist a lit match. Whoosh! Up in flames! Ring of fire! What a picture. He can barely stand it.

You’re nuts, he tells himself. You’re a stalker. You are a freaking maniac. You might get caught. Then what, smartass? Off to the hospital for your so-called health problems? What do they do in Positron to lunatics like you?

Nevertheless, he proceeds. The seat of the scooter is the best place to hide the extra phone. He cuts a slit in the fake leather, low down at the side, where it won’t be noticed. There. Done. He uses a line of superglue to seal the cut; nobody who isn’t looking would ever spot it.

“Good as new,” he tells Charmaine as he returns her scooter. She exclaims with joy, a cooing sound he used to find provocative but now finds sickly sweet, then gives him a perfunctory hug.

“I’m so grateful,” she tells him. But not grateful enough by a long shot. When he crawls on top of her that night and tries a few new gambits, hoping for more than her limited repertoire of little gasping breaths followed by a sigh, she starts to giggle and says he’s tickling. Which is not very fucking encouraging. He might as well be porking a chicken.

But never mind. Now that he can follow Jasmine, divine her every move, read her mind, she’s almost within reach. Meanwhile, he can practise for a couple of weeks by tracking Charmaine around on the scooter. It will be boring, because where can she go? The bakery where she works, the shops, the house, the bakery, the shops. She’s so predictable. No news there. But he’ll be able to tell whether his two-phone system is working or not.

Pushover

It’s already the first of October. Another switchover day. Where has the time gone?

Charmaine lies tangled in her shed clothes on the floor of the vacant house – quite a solid house this time, slated for reno rather than demolition. The wallpaper is subdued, an embossed ivy-leaf design in eggshell and truffle. The writing stands out on it: dark red paint, black marker. Short, forceful words, sudden and hard. She says them over to herself like a charm.

“You’re such a surprise,” Max says to her. Murmurs in her ear, which he’s nibbling. Will this be a two-in-a-row day? she wonders. She arrived at the vacant house early, hoping it would be. “Cool as a cucumber,” Max continues, “but then … That husband of yours is one lucky guy.”

“I’m not the same with him,” she says. She wishes he wouldn’t ask her to talk about Stan. It’s not fair.

“Tell me how you are, with him,” says Max. “No. Tell me how you’d be with a perfect stranger.” He wants her to turn him on by describing mild atrocities. A few ropes, modified screaming. It’s a game they sometimes play, now that it’s fall and they know each other better.

Now she has to think about Stan. Stan in real life. “Max,” she says. “I need us to be serious.”

“I am serious,” says Max, moving his mouth down her neck.

“No, listen. I think he suspects me of something.” Why does she even think that? Because Stan’s been looking at her, or rather looking through her, as if she’s made of glass. That’s scarier than if he’d been crabby or angry, or outright accused her.

“How could he?” says Max. His head comes up: he’s alarmed. If Stan walked in through the front door, Max would be out the window like a shot. That’s what he’d do, she knows by now; that’s the realistic truth. She shouldn’t spook him too much, because she doesn’t want him fleeing, not before there’s a need. She wants to clutch him against her, the way kids clutch their stuffed animals: the thought of letting him go makes her sadder than anything.

“I don’t think he knows,” she says. “Not knows. As such. But he looks at me funny.”

“Is that all?” says Max. “Hey. I look at you funny too. Who wouldn’t?” He takes hold of her hair, turns her head, gives her a brief kiss. “Are you worried?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. He has a temper,” she says. “He might get violent.” That has an effect on Max.

“I would,” he says. “Hey. I would love to get violent with you.” He raises his hand; she flinches away, as he wants her to. Now they’re entwined again, snarled up in random cloth, falling down into namelessness.

Eyes closed, getting her breath back, she realizes how worried she is really: on a scale of one to ten, it’s at least an eight. What if Stan really does know? And what if he cares? He could get ugly, but how ugly? He could turn threatening. His brother Conor is that way, from what Stan’s told her: he’d think nothing of bashing a girl senseless if she cheated on him. What if Stan has a bad part like that hidden inside him?

Maybe she should protect herself now, while she can. If she saved just a little from each Procedure vial – if she pocketed one of the needles instead of depositing it for recycling – would anyone notice? She’d have to slide the needle in while Stan was asleep, so he’d be denied a beatific exit. Which would be unfair. But there’s a downside to everything.

What would she do with the body? That would be a problem. Dig a hole in the lawn? Someone would see. She has a wild thought of stashing it in her pink locker, supposing she could even drag it down there: Stan is quite heavy. Also she might have to cut part of him off to make him fit in, though the lockers are big. But if she left him there it would make a horrible stench, and the next time Max’s wife, Jocelyn, came down to the cellar to open her purple locker she’d be sure to smell it.

Max has never said much about Jocelyn, despite Charmaine’s gentle pestering. At the outset she’d vowed never to be jealous, because isn’t she herself the one Max truly wants? And she isn’t jealous: curiosity isn’t the same as jealousy. But whenever she asks, Max stonewalls her. “You don’t need to know,” he says.

She pictures Jocelyn as a rangy, aristocratic woman with her hair skinned back from her head, like a ballerina or a schoolteacher in old movies. A distant, snobby, disapproving woman. Sometimes she has the feeling that Jocelyn knows about her and is contemptuous of her. Worse: that Max has told Jocelyn about her, that they both think she’s a credulous pushover and a dime-a-dozen little slut, that they laugh together about her. But that’s paranoid.

She doesn’t think Max would be much help with Stan, supposing Stan was dead. Yes, Max is overpoweringly sexy, but he doesn’t have backbone, he doesn’t have grit, not the way Charmaine herself has them. He’d leave her holding the bag, the bagful of danger. The bagful of Stan, because she’d have to put Stan into a bag of some kind, she wouldn’t be able to look at him in cold blood that way. Lying inert and defenceless. She’d remember too much about how it was when they were in love, and then when they first got married, and had sex in the ocean, and he had that green shirt with the penguins on it … Just thinking about that shirt while at the same time thinking about Stan being dead makes her want to cry.

So maybe she does love him. Yes, of course she does! Think of how lucky she was to meet him, after Grandma Win died and she was all by herself, since her mother was gone and her father was gone in a different way, plus she had no wish to see that person ever again. Think of everything she and Stan have been through together, of what they had, what they lost, what they still had in spite of those losses. Think of how loyal he’s been to her.

Be the person you’ve always wanted to be, they’d said at Positron. Is this the person she’s always wanted to be? A person so slack, so quick to give herself over, so easily rendered helpless, so lacking in, lacking in what? But whatever she’s lacking in, she would never want to harm Stan.