The Heart Goes Last - Страница 40

Steady, he tells himself. “Who ordered this head?” he asks too casually.

Budge gives him a straight look. Is it a warning? “Command performance,” he says. “Very special order. We’ve been told to be very meticulous with it.”

“It’s going right to the top,” says Kevin. “Not my type, personally – too vanilla – but someone up there must like that style.”

“The instructions are extra lifelike,” says Gary.

“We can’t afford to screw it up,” says Tyler.

“Yeah, we really have to tiptoe through the tulips on this one,” says Budge.

Tulips. Tiptoeing. Kindly Budge with the pot belly is supposed to be his subversive contact? Budge, who looks like Charmaine’s happy-gnome coffee cup? Surely not!

“Tiptoe through the what?” he says.

“Tulips,” says Budge. “It’s an old song. Before your time.”

Fucking crap. Spymaster Budge, confirmed. I really need a drink, thinks Stan. Right fucking now!

X | GRIEF THERAPY Handcreep

Charmaine sits in the back seat of the long, smooth, silent car. Beside her is Ed, who has just helped her into it, one hand on her black-suited elbow.

“It’s so good of you to come and collect me,” she says to him tremulously. “In person.” Her lower lip really is quivering, a tear really is trickling out of her eye. She blots it with the tip of her black cotton glove. That glove tip feels like a soft, dry rabbit foot, stroking her gently.

She and Stan once had a rabbit foot. It was in the car when they’d bought it, along with some other junk. Stan wanted to toss it, but Charmaine said they should keep it because some rabbit had sacrificed its life so they could have good luck. Poor rabbit. So sad. The mascara, she thinks: is it running? But it would be crass at this moment to take the compact out of her black clutch bag to see.

“It’s the very least I could do,” says Ed. He sounds almost shy. He pats her arm, a tentative pat that stops short of being too familiar. His voice is flatter and tinnier than it is when it’s coming out of the TV, and he himself is shorter. She’d been sitting down the time he came to Positron and made that scary speech, and then complimented her on the blue teddy bear she’d been knitting; he’d seemed taller then, but she’d been looking up. She guesses he stands on a box when he’s doing the important TV broadcasts about the tremendous progress and how they must all overcome the subversive elements. But right now, if you happened to glance in through the window, not that you could glance in because the glass is tinted, you would never guess that Ed is the big cheese of Consilience. The biggest cheese of all.

Why are important men called big cheeses? Charmaine wonders; she needs to distract herself, she does not want to deal with the fact that Ed has patted her arm again, and this time his hand has hovered, then descended and remained, just below her elbow. You would never say big cheese about a woman, even an important one. And Ed looks sort of like a cheese, because of his slickness; the round kind of cheese with wax all over the outside that kids used to love. They used to trade for that cheese in order to get the wax. It was red, and you could peel it off the cheese and mould it into little figures, like dogs or ducks. That’s what had been valued, the wax; the cheese was only an add-on. It wasn’t flavourful, but at least it wasn’t awful.

Maybe that’s what Ed would be like in bed, she thinks. Not flavourful but not awful. Something you didn’t want that had to be accepted because of something you did want. He would have to be encouraged, he would have to be cheered on. Rapid breathing, false crescendos. Then there would be his gratitude, she’d have to cope with that. She would rather be the one feeling gratitude. Just thinking about all of it makes her tired.

How far could she force herself to go, supposing it comes to that? Because it will, if she allows it. She can tell, because of the look Ed is giving her now, a kind of damp, sickly, pious look. Reverence crossed with hidden lust, but behind that a determination to get what he wants. It’s a dangerous look disguised as niceness. First they wheedle, but if you won’t do that thing they want, they set hurtful.

Never mind, she tells herself. Think about flowers, because now you’re safe. Except she isn’t safe. Maybe no one can ever be safe. You run into your room and you slam the door, but there isn’t any lock.

“It is absolutely the least we could do,” says Ed. “We want to be here for you, in your great loss.”

“Thank you,” Charmaine murmurs. What to do about the hand? She can’t push it away; that would be rude, and she would lose the edge it gives her. Not that she has the edge exactly, but it’s an edge of sorts, as long as she neither offends him nor encourages him. What if she grasped the hand in both of hers and started to cry? No, that might turn him on even more. He might lunge, clumsily. She can’t have him lunging just before the funeral.

“You’ve been brave,” Ed continues. “You’ve been … loyal. You must feel very alone now, as if there’s no one you can confide in.”

“Oh, I do,” says Charmaine. “I do feel alone.” No lie there. “Stan was so –”

But Ed doesn’t want to hear about Stan right now. “We want to assure you that you can rely on us, on all of us in Management here at Consilience. If you have any concerns, any problems, any fears or worries you want to share …”

“Oh, yes. Thank you. That makes me feel so … protected,” she says with a little intake of breath. Fat chance she’d ever share her fears, especially the ones she’s having right now. This is thin ice. Powerful men don’t take well to rejection. Rage could result.

There’s a pause. “You can rely on … me,” says Ed. The hand squeezes.

What a nerve, thinks Charmaine with indignation. Making advances to a widow – to a woman whose husband has just died heroically in a tragic chicken accident. Even if he hasn’t, and even if Ed knows he hasn’t. If he knows, he’ll use that knowledge as a weapon. He’ll whisper her husband-killing guilt into her ear, then he’ll seize her in his cheesy arms and stick his cheesy mouth on hers because she has committed a terrible crime and this is how she’ll be expected to pay.

If he tries that I’ll scream, thinks Charmaine. No, she won’t, because no one would hear her except the driver, who has surely been trained to ignore any noises from the back seat. And a scream would blow her edge right out of the water.

What to do, how to act? She can’t let herself be taken for granted. If Ed must be endured, she’ll need to make him beg a little. If only for form’s sake. It will have to be a negotiation, like asking for a pay raise, not that she ever did that when she had a real job, at Ruby Slippers. But suppose he’s open to a negotiation, what could she get from him in return?

Luckily the car is drawing up to the curb, because they’re at the funeral chapel. Ed has removed his hand, and the door on his side is being opened from the outside, not by the driver but by a man in a black suit. Then her own door is opened and Ed helps her out. There’s a crowd gathered, with that muted look – like stuffed cloth – that people waiting for funerals used to have back when funerals were still done properly. When people still had the money to put into them. Before dead people were simply cast adrift.

Ed offers his arm and leads Charmaine on her shaky black high heels and her slender black suit through the clustered people. They draw back to let her pass because she is sanctified by mourning. She keeps her eyes lowered and does not look around or smile, as if she’s in deep grief.

She is in deep grief. She is.

Quality Control

“Down the hall,” says Budge. “Next stop, Quality Control. Hang in there, we’re almost done.” He pats Stan’s shoulder.

This has to be a signal. Stan clamps down on his urge to laugh. This whole thing is crazed. Charmaine’s head? Budge the spook? You couldn’t make it up. He’s finding it hard to take it seriously. But it is serious.

Quality Control, says Kevin, is where they put the bodies through their paces before they attach the heads. It’s to test the mechanical and the digital, says Gary, especially the writhing and the grinding and the smoothness of the pelvic action. The space is filled with the motion of thighs and abdomens, like some grotesque art installation; there’s a soft pulsing sound and a smell of plastic.

“Waldo, you want a ride round the block on one of these?” says Derek. Stan reflects that, come right down to it, nothing turns him on less than the sight of a dozen headless, naked plastic bodies miming the act of copulation.There’s something insect-like about it.

“I’ll take a rain check,” he says. They all laugh.

“Yeah, right, we didn’t want to either,” says Tyler.

“They fix that smell later on,” says Gary. “They add synthetic pheromones, and then there’s a choice of orange blossom, rose, ylang-ylang, chocolate pudding, or Old Spice.”

“I’d say you need the head, at the very minimum,” says Budge. “They stick them on after the bodies have checked out Affirmative. It’s tricky, a lot of neural connections; all that work would be wasted if the body’s defective.”

Stan looks down the line, to the far side of the room: it’s like an operating theatre over there. Bright overhead lights, air purifiers. They’re even wearing full caps and surgeon’s masks.