The Heart Goes Last - Страница 32

Then a jolt, then a spasm. Like electrocution.

Then she hits the floor.

Blackout.

VIII | ERASE ME Binned

When Stan wakes up, he’s no longer strapped down. He’s curled up on his side, lying on something soft. He’s dizzy, and he’s got a crashing headache, like three prime hangovers all at once.

He unglues his eyelids: several pairs of big white eyes with round black pupils are staring into his. What the shit are these? He struggles to sit up, loses his balance, flounders in a mound of small, yielding, fuzzy bodies. Enormous spiders? Caterpillars? Despite himself, he yelps.

A grip, Stan, he tells himself. Get two, they’re cheap.

Ah. He’s lying in a large bin filled with knitted blue teddy bears. Those are the white round-pupilled eyes watching him. “Fuck,” he says. Then he adds, for good measure, “Fucking hell!” At least he’s got his voice back.

He’s in a warehouse with metal rafters and a dim strip of fluorescent lighting overhead. Peering over the side of the bin, he scopes out the floor: cement. That must be why they put him on top of the teddy bears: there’s nothing else in this place that’s in any way soft. Someone’s been thoughtful.

He feels around his own body: parts all accounted for. Thank crap they got rid of the diaper or whatever that was, though it’s humiliating to visualize the removal process. They’ve even put some new clothes on him: an orange Positron boiler suit plus a fleece jacket. And thick socks, because it’s cold as a witch’s tit in here. Stands to reason: it’s February. And why heat a warehouse with nothing in it but teddy bears?

What next? Where is everyone? Not a good idea to shout. Maybe get up, find the exit? But wait: one of his legs is tethered to the side of the metal bin with, yes, a nylon cuff. That must be to keep him from wandering around, leaving this warehouse, bumping into whoever’s outside the door. Nothing to do but wait until Jocelyn comes and tells him what the fuck he’s supposed to do.

He checks over the warehouse interior once again. More bins like the one he’s lying in, arranged in a row. That’s a freaking large number of teddy bears. Also – over toward what he’s now identified as the doors, a small one for people, a big sliding one for trucks – there are some stacks of long boxes that look a lot like coffins, narrower at one end. He sure hopes he’s not shut up in here with a bunch of soon-to-be-rotting corpses.

Which is what Charmaine must think he already is himself, the sad bitch. Her distress wasn’t faked: those tears were real. She was shaking when she felt his neck and then stuck the needle into it: she must’ve truly believed she was murdering him. She must’ve passed out right after that: in the split second before the drug hit him and he went out in a blissful swirl of coloured lights, he’d heard the impact as she did a vertical face-plant onto the floor.

If he’d had money on the proposition that Charmaine would never go through with it, he’d have lost the bet. She’s amazing in her own way, Charmaine; under all that fluff she has guts, he has to give her that. He thought she’d let love get in the way, that she’d lose her nerve and start whimpering and back off. That she’d maybe throw herself onto him, wreck the plan. So much for his ability to second-guess: Jocelyn’s fix on Charmaine had been better than his.

Poor Charmaine, he thinks. She must be putting herself through hell right now. Remorse, guilt, and so forth. How does he feel about that? Part of him – the vengeful part – is saying, Serves her right. Her and her cheating heart, and he hopes she writhes in anguish and boo-hoos her angelic blue eyes out. Another part is saying, To be fair, Stan, you’ve cheated on her too, both in intention and in deed. True, you thought you were chasing a different purple passion than the one you caught. With whom you had sex on many occasions, and though your heart may not have been into it, your body was. Or into it enough. So let bygones be bygones and wipe the slate.

Yeah, says the vengeful part, but dumb Charmaine doesn’t know about Jocelyn, so if you ever get back together with her you can hold her fling with Max/Phil over her head forever. Tell her you’ve seen the videos. Repeat back to her the things she says on them. Turn her into a handful of soggy tissue. Wipe your boots on her: there would be some satisfaction in that. Not to mention the fact that she murdered you. She’ll be your slave, she’ll never dare say no to you, she’ll wait on you hand and foot.

Either that or she’ll put rodent poison in your coffee. There’s a steely side to her. Don’t discount it. So maybe you should strike first, given the chance. Dump her. Toss her clothes onto the lawn. Lock the door. Or hit her on the head with a brick. Is that what Conor would do?

You forget, he tells himself. I’ll probably never be back inside that house again. Unless something goes wrong once I’m outside the walls, I’ll never be back in Consilience. That life is gone. I’m supposed to be dead.

Should he be angry about that? Maybe not: being dead is for his own good. On the other hand, he didn’t ask to be dead, he didn’t wish it upon himself. He’s simply been assigned, as if he’s a member of an army in which he’s never enlisted. He’s been fucking drafted, against his will, and meanwhile he’s in here chained to a binful of knitted bears, and that sadistic bitch Jocelyn seems to have forgotten all about him, and despite the headache he’s starting to feel hungry. Plus he’s freezing his nuts off. It must be near freezing: he can see his breath in front of him.

He lies down again, covers himself with blue teddy bears. They’ll be some insulation. The only thing to do right now is go to sleep.

Teatime

When Charmaine wakes up, she’s alone. And she’s back in her house. Their house, hers and Stan’s; or rather hers and Stan’s once, but now only hers, because Stan will never be in this house again. Never, never, never, never, never. She starts to cry.

She’s lying on the sofa, the royal blue one with the pretty off-white lilies; though with her face up close to it like this, she can see that it needs a cleaning, because someone’s been spilling coffee on it, and other things. She can remember pretending to dislike this pattern, pretending to want to change it, pretending she was going to look at fabric swatches as an excuse to leave the house early on switchover days so she could be with Max. Stan could be counted on to take no interest whatsoever in slipcovers or wallpaper or any of those things. His lack of interest once annoyed her – weren’t they supposed to be home-building together? – but after that she’d welcomed it, because it was a blind spot of his that gave her some time with Max. Now it makes her cry because Stan is dead.

There. She said it. Dead. She cries harder. She’s sobbing, her breath coming in staccato gulps. Stan, what have I done to you? she thinks. Where have you gone?

Though she’s crying as hard as she can, she nevertheless notices a strange thing: she’s no longer wearing her orange boiler suit. Instead she has on a peach-and-grey checked outfit in a light wool weave, with a flared skirt and a fitted jacket. There’s supposed to be a matching blouse, which is peach imitation silk, with peach flamenco dancer ruffles on the front, but that isn’t the blouse she has on, which is a blue floral print and doesn’t go with the outfit at all. She selected the peach-and-grey ensemble with care from the “Smile in Style” section of the digital catalogue just after she and Stan signed into Consilience. It was a choice between the peach and grey and the other combos, the navy blue and white, which was a little too Chanel for her, and the lime green and orange – no contest there because she can’t wear lime green, it washes her out.

Plus she folded up this outfit and stored it in her pink locker in the cellar along with her other civilian clothes right before going in for her latest stint at Positron. So someone has the code to her locker, and someone has been rummaging through her things. The very same somebody must have taken off the boiler suit and dressed her up in the checked outfit, with the wrong blouse.

“Feeling better now?” says a voice. She looks up from the sofa. Holy heck, it’s Aurora from Human Resources, with the overdone face job that makes her look like a gecko: unmoving cheek muscles, pop eyes. Aurora is about the last person she wants to see, not only here and now but ever.

Aurora’s carrying a tray – Charmaine’s tray, she picked it herself, from the catalogue’s tray options – with a teapot on it. Charmaine’s teapot, though it came with the house. Charmaine feels invaded. How dare Aurora barge into her home while she herself is passed out on the sofa and simply take over the kitchen as if she owns it?

“I’ve made you some nice hot tea,” says Aurora with a pitying, maddening demi-smile. “I understand you’ve had a shock. You hit your head when you fainted, but they don’t think you were concussed. You should have an X-ray though, just to be sure. I’ve arranged that for you, later today.”

Charmaine can’t get out a word. She struggles to control her tears. She’s heaving, she’s gasping; snot is running out of her nose. “Go ahead, have a good cry,” says Aurora, as if granting royal permission. “A good cry clears the air. Not to mention the sinuses,” she adds: her version of a joke.

“Did you open my locker?” Charmaine manages to squeeze out.