The Heart Goes Last - Страница 51

Blush Pink is the colour she’s allowed. Nothing flaming, nothing flagrant, nothing fuchsia. Aurora bought the Blush Pink for her and presented it in that smug way she has. “Here you are, this shade is very popular among the twelve-year-olds, I’m told, so I’m sure it will convey the right message.” Aurora gives a lot of thought to those details, which is helpful, but she can feel herself reaching the moment when she’s going to yell. Darn it, leave me alone! Stop bugging me! Something like that.

Painting her toenails gives her a lift. That’s what most men never understand, how it’s a real pick-me-up to be able to change the colour of your toes. Stan got mad at her once when they were living in the car, because she spent some of her PixelDust tip money – he didn’t say spend, he said fucking blew – on a little bottle of polish in a lovely silvery coral shade. They had a tiff about that, because she said it was her money, she’d earned it herself, and it wasn’t as if the polish cost a lot, and then he accused her of throwing it up to him that he didn’t have a job, and then she said she was not throwing it up, she only wanted her toes to look nice for him, and he said he didn’t give a fucking fuck about her fucking toe colour, and then she cried.

She has a little cry now, remembering it. How bad are things when you can get nostalgic about living in your car? But it isn’t the car that makes her sad, it’s the absence of Stan. And not knowing if he’s mad at her. Really mad, not just fucking fuck toe colour mad. They’re not the same thing at all.

She tries not to think about Stan not being here any more, because what is is, as Grandma Win used to say, and what can’t be cured must be endured, and laugh and the world laughs with you but cry and you cry alone. Maybe it served her right for talking back to Stan, that time in the car.

(I’ll teach you to talk back! Now who said that? And how had she talked back? Did crying count as talking back? Yes, it did, because after that something bad happened. Let that be a lesson to you. But what was the lesson?)

She lets her mind go blank. Then, after a while of staring at the map with red and orange pins all over it like measles, she thinks, Ed will need a lamp for that stand-up desk, which gives her the excuse to go to the Consilience digital catalogue. She browses here and there to find the right section, pausing maybe too long at Ladies’ Fashions and Cosmetic Magic, and orders the appropriate lighting device.

Then it’s time to go home. So she does go home. Not that it’s really a home. More of a mere house, because as Grandma Win said, it’s love that makes a house a home.

Sometimes she wishes Grandma Win would bug off out of her head.

Aurora is ensconced on the living room sofa. She’s having a cup of tea and a date square. Would Charmaine care to join her she asks with her wide, tight smile? As if she’s the darned hostess, thinks Charmaine, and I’m simply a visitor. But she passes over this, because what the hey, she has to get along with this woman, so she’ll suck it up.

“No tea, thank you,” she says. “But I could really use a drink. I bet there’s some olives or something in the fridge too.” There were olives last time she looked, but food has been appearing and disappearing out of that fridge like it has a bad case of gnomes.

“Certainly,” says Aurora as Charmaine sinks into the easy chair, kicking off her shoes. There’s a pause while each of them waits to see if the other one’s going to get the drink. Darn it, thinks Charmaine, why should I be her maid? If she wants to be the hostess here, let her darn well do it.

After a moment Aurora sets down her cup, pushes up from the sofa, takes the olives out of the fridge and puts them in an olive dish, then rummages among the liquor bottles, because there aren’t very many of them. Though more than there used to be: Jocelyn has a special allowance, she’s not limited the way the rest of them are, so it’s her that’s bringing in the booze. Consilience takes a dim view of drunks because they aren’t productive and they develop medical problems, and why should everyone pay because one individual has no self-control? That’s been on the TV quite a lot recently. Charmaine wonders if there’s bootlegging going on, or maybe people making moonshine out of potato peelings or something. Or more drinking because they’re getting bored.

“Campari and soda?” says Aurora.

What’s that, thinks Charmaine, some snobby drink unknown to us hicks? “Whatever,” she says, “as long as it’s got a kick to it.”

The drink is reddish and a little bitter, but now she feels better.

Aurora waits until Charmaine’s drunk half. Then she announces, “I’m staying here this weekend. Jocelyn thought it would be best. I can keep an eye on you, just in case anything unexpected happens.”

Oh heck, Charmaine thinks. She’s been looking forward to having some Me Time. She’d enjoy a long soak in the tub, in behind the shower curtain where the camera can’t see her, and without having to worry about another person who might want to get in there to floss their teeth. “Oh, I don’t want to put you out,” she says. “I don’t think anything unexpected … I’m fine, really. I don’t need –”

“I’m sure that’s true,” says Aurora in her tone that means the opposite. “But think of it this way. What if he decides to pay you a visit?”

A big What If, thinks Charmaine. She doesn’t need to ask who he is, but she doubts very much that he’ll be visiting, since from what Jocelyn says his dick is in a cast. “I don’t think he will,” she says. “Not this weekend.”

“You never know,” says Aurora. “I understand he can be impetuous. Anyway, he’ll be happy to hear you’ve had a chaperone. I also understand he can be quite jealous. And we wouldn’t want any undue suspicions to arise, would we?”

It’s better than she thought it would be, the weekend with Aurora. You should never pass up the chance to learn something new, and Charmaine learns several things. First of all, she learns that Aurora can make good scrambled eggs. Second, she learns that Ed is planning some sort of a trip, and that Charmaine will be invited on it, but Aurora doesn’t know where or when, so right now it’s only a heads-up.

And third, she learns that Aurora’s face is not her original face. It’s always been obvious that she’s had work done, Charmaine has known that from the get-go, but what Aurora tells her goes way beyond mere work.

“You may have wondered about my face” is how Aurora opens the face round. This is on the Sunday, after they’ve watched Some Like It Hot while eating popcorn and drinking beer, not that Charmaine likes beer that much but it seemed like the right thing to do. Then they got into the mixed drinks, which by this time are unusual, since the ingredient options are running out.

Now they’re feeling like old best girfriends from school, or at least Charmaine is feeling like that. Not that she had any best girlfriends from school, not really close ones. When she was little she wasn’t allowed to have them, and then later she didn’t want to have them, because they would ask too much about her life. So maybe she’s having a best girlfriend now. Though it might just be the effect of her fourth Campari and soda, or is it a gin and tonic, or maybe something with vodka.

“Your face? What do you mean?” says Charmaine, trying to be kind and helpful while at the same time paying attention.

“You don’t have to pretend,” says Aurora. “I know what I look like. I know it’s too … tight. But I used to look very different. And then, for a while, I looked … I didn’t have any face at all.”

“No face?” says Charmaine. “Everyone has a face!”

“Mine got scraped off,” says Aurora.

“You’re kidding!” says Charmaine, and then she can’t help laughing because it’s too ridiculous, a scraped-off face, like scraping icing off a cake, and then Aurora laughs too, as much as she can, considering.

“I was in a roller-derby accident,” she says when they’re finished laughing. “It was a charity thing, for the image consultant agency I was working for then. We were raising money for lung cancer. I guess I shouldn’t have volunteered, but I really wanted to help out. You know.”

“Oh, yes. I know. But roller skates, that’s dangerous,” says Charmaine. She wouldn’t have spotted Aurora as being that athletic. Face scraped off! It hurts her to think about it. Aurora is looking blurry, and Charmaine can almost see underneath her skin. Hurt is what’s under there. So much hurt.

“Yes. I was young then, I thought I was tough. I shouldn’t even say accident, it was a deliberate trip for Maris in Accounts. She had it in for me because of this man called Chet, not that there was anything. And I landed right on my face, at top speed. I came out looking like hamburger.”

“Oh,” says Charmaine, sobering up a little. “Oh, terrible.”

“I couldn’t even sue,” says Aurora. “There wasn’t even a category.”

“Of course not,” says Charmaine sympathetically. “Darned insurance companies.”

“So they offered me a full-face transplant,” says Aurora. “For signing up at Positron.”

“They did?” says Charmaine. “You can do that with faces?” Pop your face off and pop another one on – you could be a whole different person, on the outside, not just on the inside.

“Yes. They were at the experimental stage and there I was. I was custom-made for them. They wanted to see if they could transplant a whole face. Why suffer is how they put it.”