Free The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood Page A

thinks Charmaine, it’s all different. Such an improvement! Already the gym has been renovated, for instance. And a whole bunch of houses are being upgraded – a fresh batch of applicants will arrive any month now to fill them. Or maybe to fill the houses that aren’t so upgraded, such as the one she and Stan had lived in at first. There had been plumbing problems; more like plumbing events , since they were bigger than mere problems. There was the time when it rained so hard and the sewage came spouting up through the kitchen sink: that was bigger than just a problem.
    Luckily they’d been approved for a transfer; she assumes their Alternates had moved to the new house as well, but maybe not. She hasn’t thought to ask Max about that – whether he and his wife once lived in that earlier house. It isn’t the kind of thing she talks about with Max.
    Every month it’s a new address: better that way. Luckily there are a lot of vacant houses, left over from when the industries were failing and the lenders were foreclosing, and from that later time when so many houses were standing empty because no one wanted to buy them. Max is a member of the Consilience Dwellings Reclamation Team when he’s not living in his prison cell at Positron. The Reclamation Team are the ones who inspect the houses, then tag them either for the wrecking ball and levelling for parkland and community gardens, or else for renovation, so he’s in a position to know which ones are suitable.
    Max tries to choose the kind of interior decoration Charmaine prefers: she likes pretty wallpaper, with rosebuds or daisies. He does find the ones with wallpaper like that. But in each house they’ve used, the vandals were there, in the times when they roamed from town to town and from house to house, smashing windows and bottles and drinking and drugging and sleeping on the floor and using the bathtubs as outhouses. That was before they started the Positron Project and put up the walls around Consilience.
    The gangs and crazies left their marks on the floral wallpaper: scrawled tags and other things. Vicious drawings. Short, hard words, written in spray paint, or markers, or lipstick, and, a couple of times, something brown and crusted that might have been shit.
    “Read to me,” Max had whispered into her ear, in the first house, the first time.
    “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to.”
    “Yes, you do,” Max said. “You do want to.” And she must have wanted to, because those words were spilling out of her mouth. He laughed, picked her up, pushed his hands up under her skirt. She never wears jeans to these meetings, and that’s why. The next minute they were down on the bare floorboards.
    “Wait!” she said, gasping with pleasure. “Undo the buttons!”
    “I can’t wait,” he said, and it was true, he couldn’t wait, and because he couldn’t, and neither could she. It was like the copy on the back of the most lurid novel in the limited-titles library at Positron. Swept away. Drugged with desire. Like a cyclone. Helpless moaning. All of that. She’d never known about such a force, such an energy. She’d thought it was only in books and TV, or else for other people.
    She gathered the buttons up afterwards, pocketed them. Only two had come off. She sewed them on again, later, after her stint in Positron, before returning to the house where she lived with Stan.
    She did love Stan, but it was different. A different kind of love. Trusting, sedate. It went with pet fish, in fishbowls – not that they had one of those – and with cats, perhaps. And with eggs for breakfast, poached, snuggled inside their individual poachers. And with babies.
    Once Grandma Win had died, Charmaine had to make her own way; it had been thin ice with the cracks showing and disaster always waiting just beneath her, but the trick was to keep gliding. She loved Stan because she liked solid ground under her feet, non-reflective surfaces, movies with neat endings.