Read Online The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online Page B

humiliations had taught him to value those. He liked the retro thing about Charmaine, the cookie-ad thing, her prissiness, the way she hardly ever swore. When they’d got married they’d pictured kids, once they could afford them. They still do picture them. Maybe that will happen soon, now that they’re no longer living in their car.
    He keys in the code on his locker, waits for it to flash CLOSED, climbs the cellar stairs, leaves the house. Once outside, he taps a second code into the signal pad beside the door, coding himself out.
    Over at Positron, Jasmine and Max must already have changed into the civvies they stored there last month. Now they must be checking out of their prison wings and ditching their orange prison uniforms at the main desk. Very soon they’ll hop onto their scooters and make their way to this house. Stan has a voyeur’s urge to hide behind the hedge, that cedar hedge he trimmed last week, tidying up the slapdash job done by Max during his last sojourn. He’ll wait until they’re both inside, then peer through the windows. He’s figured out the sight lines, he’s left the ground-floor blinds up a crack. If they go upstairs, though, he’ll have no option but to set up the extension ladder, and he knows how screechy and metallic that would be.
    And what if he falls off? Worse, if Max leans out the window, stark naked, and pushes him off? He doesn’t know anything about Max, except from what’s implied in that note; also, Max had first choice of lockers, and he chose the red one. He must be aggressive. Stan wouldn’t wish to be pushed off an extension ladder by an angry naked man, a naked man to whose rippling epidermis he now adds copious tattoos. Most likely Max also has a shaved head, covered in scars and welts from all the times he’s broken men’s teeth and jaws with the sheer force of his bullet-shaped skull.
    Stan’s own skull still has a cushion of sandy hair, but it’s thinning, even though he’s only thirty-two. He’s never used his skull to butt anyone in the mouth, though he’s willing to bet Max has. Most likely Max once worked as a bodyguard for some black-jacketed, gold-chained, coke-pushing, girl-enslaving money lord, in his life before Positron. Someone like Conor, only a larger, tougher, meaner, more powerful Conor. On level ground, Stan might be able to hold his own against such a man, but on that ladder he’d be off balance. And he’d land in the hedge, bashing a jagged hole in it, after all his careful trimming.
    That asswipe Max is even worse with the hedge than he is with the lawn. Stan found the hedge trimmer in the garage, its blade gummed up with slaughtered foliage. But there’s no chance Max is able to focus on hedge trimming, since Jasmine leaps on the poor sod every time she sees him in his leather work gloves and starts pawing at his belt buckle.
    All things considered, better not to peer in the window.
Switch
    It’s a beautiful cloudless day, not too hot for the first of August. Charmaine finds switchover days almost festive: when it’s not raining, the streets are full of people, smiling, greeting one another, some walking, some on their colour-coded scooters, the odd one in a golf cart. Now and then one of the dark Surveillance cars glides through them: there are more of those cars on switchover days.
    Everyone seems quite happy: having two lives means there’s always something different to look forward to. It’s like having a vacation every month. But which life is the vacation and which is the work? Charmaine hardly knows.
    Making her way to the Consilience town pharmacy on her pink-and-purple electric scooter, she checks her watch: she doesn’t have much time. She needs to key in at Positron by five-thirty at the latest, and it’s already three. She told Stan she had to do some ordering for the prison hospital: that’s why she was in a rush to leave the house. The month before last, her excuse was slipcovers – didn’t he agree about the