Composite Creatures Page 10

  I awoke as the mud slicked over the world.

  It wasn’t yet day, and there was no sign at all of the sun. I reached over for Art’s reassuring warmth but my hand grasped at a cold bedsheet, nothing more. There were still a few silk petals on my pillow from yesterday.

  Next to Art’s side of the bed the door stood ajar. I pushed away the bedcovers and picked up my dressing gown. Wrapped up tightly, I padded to the landing, lit only by a strip of yellow under the closed bathroom door. The house was in utter silence. I stood outside the bathroom for some time before turning back to the landing, my focus now on the loft hatch. I pulled on the cord and quietly coaxed the ladder onto the carpet. I climbed it on all fours and stood with my head above the parapet, squinting as my eyes adjusted to the dark.

  It was even blacker up here than down below, the glow of the moon not making much of an impact through the skylight. Reaching through the bars of the gate, I flicked the switch of the portable lamp Art had positioned near the hatch. As the loft slowly illuminated, I spotted Nut sitting at the far end of the space, awake, ears pricked and tail madly swishing in a figure of eight behind her. She was staring straight at me, her body quivering in high alert.

  In those two short months she’d grown a lot, at least trebling in length from nose to hind. Her slender shape had become thicker, coated in a layer of fat which shifted in waves when she ran, and a little pouch of it hung below her midriff. During the day she’d gamble around the loft at quite a pace, running in circles around the space and leaping over any crates or baskets in her racetrack. Her legs had started to become more refined, the twists of muscle more apparent, and where she stood, her elongated toes spread confidently across the wooden floor.

  But that night she’d given up on running, and her attention was all on me. Some deep instinct told me I shouldn’t stay too still. Isn’t that what a predator would do; skulk and stare? To make sure she knew I wasn’t hiding, I lifted my arm and drummed my fingers on the edge of the wooden floor in a repeated tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. Nut immediately skulked towards me, her head lowered and black pupils dilated. Now she stalked me like I was the piece of meat, and ignoring the nagging voice that so often told me I was wrong, I continued to dance my fingers on the wood. Nut came to a stop in front of me and flopped down passively on her soft belly, crossing her eyes as she pressed her nose against my fingers.

  As I considered how much she might be able to pick up about where I’d been the previous day or what I’d eaten by my smell, I felt a strange gritty sensation across the back of my thumb. Through the bars of the baby gate, Nut was stroking her tongue slowly across my knuckles, her eyes closed in what looked like bliss.

  Oh, Nut.

  This was terrifying. New. It had said nothing in the guidebooks or prep material about this. And always, that little voice, screaming at me that I shouldn’t let this happen.

  Could she taste something on me? Was she hungry? Was she trying to get a better sense of me? The thing is, it felt so caring, this soft working of my hand. As if she was using the most intimate means she could to communicate. I imagined myself licking her back, dragging my tongue against her fur, each of us scratching each other’s inner itches.

  I didn’t want her to stop.

  I scratched behind her ear with my other hand and she rolled her neck to press the back of her head hard against my fingernails. Without words, she was talking to me, telling me that she wanted me there.

  Nut shouldn’t be doing this, she shouldn’t be aware of pleasure or seeking it, not here, not living in this red loft. I had had no warning. It was me that sought her out for comfort, not the other way around.

  I should check the manuals, I should check the manuals again just in case.

  I pulled away and retreated down the ladder, giving one last look to the little round face peering down at me from the darkness. Art was still in the bathroom but the door was now ajar. I tapped it open with the tips of my fingers until there was enough space to stick my head through. I kept my voice low, soothing.

  “Arthur?”

  Art stood in front of the sink, staring down at something I couldn’t see in the basin. He didn’t turn or show a sign that he knew I was there.

  “Arthur.”

  There was the slightest movement as he let out a sigh. He shook his head slowly, side to side. “It’s OK, just g- go. S’fine.” He stuttered on the “g”, and I felt a sickening lurch.

  Hold onto the doorframe, deep breaths. Be present. Don’t go back.

  I didn’t believe that everything was fine. Art was lying. But I left him there and returned to our bed to slip into memories of the cow-dream I’d risen to escape from.

  8

  It wasn’t until early summer and we’d been living together six months or so that the signs of moving were permanently hidden. But even then the dust hadn’t quite settled.

  Art and I were both on edge, with each other and the house. I’d spent most of my twenties in my own flat, and it had been far easier then to live in balance with my environment. I’d put things in a certain place, and they’d stay there until I moved them again. I had secret drawers and cupboards for the scissors, the sewing kit, the egg timer. I have a good memory for places.

  But in Dukesberry Terrace, trinkets and treasures migrated around the house. Art would decide that there was a better place for something, or he’d use the scissors and never put them back, instead tidying them away to some dark corner only he knew about. Sometimes picture frames moved from one end of a ledge to another, and Art would be adamant that he hadn’t touched them. It was always my treasures that were on the move, while Art’s things stuck out amongst the stampede, immovable as mountains. I couldn’t help but feel like these walking memories were playing some cruel emotional game I didn’t understand, so I focussed my attention outdoors.

  The house opened up at the back to a long lawn which tapered to a point. The effect was such that the far fence looked further away than it actually was, and only by walking from the back door to the shrub at the end would you discover the truth to the distortion. The lawn was patchy and uneven, bordered by shallow troughs of pale and dusty earth.

  Despite how dead the soil looked, it was still punctured by sprigs of creamy weeds, tiny leaves, and sickly-looking clovers. The only green thing of any substance was a huge shrub at the garden’s apex. The leaves were dark jade, stiff, the edges curling like the watercolour paper before we taped it down. It looked like a holly bush, apart from the tiny white berries which were starting to cluster at the end of each branch. All in all, the shrub stood up to my shoulder, and underneath the matrix of twigs, the bush-stem was thick and gnarled through many years of weathering storms.

  A wooden fence protected the garden from anyone looking in, and I wanted the space to be a sanctuary. I could just imagine myself sitting on a cloud of lush green to the sound of trickling water over stone, and the soft breeze sloughing through red Japanese maples. I researched how I’d go about creating my own zen garden, and then when I discovered how much this would actually cost I moved onto a cottage garden, then a Mediterranean garden, then a modernist garden – complete with clean lines and evergreens. I looked at the lawn from all angles to work out what I could do with each section, even getting an aerial view through the study window while Art watched me from behind his desk with one eyebrow raised.

  I wrote page after page of Latin botanical names until the words blurred together and the lists lost all meaning. At one point, I started to draw the layout of a pond, working out where its banks would lie, and what I’d plant in it. I imagined Art and I sitting by its edge with homemade lemonade, looking deep into the water for signs of life. But after spending too long crossing out all the plants that I’d been sure I’d wanted just to make room for the trench, I suddenly realised that I didn’t even want a pond. The whole idea was ludicrous. We hadn’t the room and the prospect of a gaping chasm in the lawn made me nauseous. And what would I do, get some bioplastic ducks to float blindly
on it? A few mechanical koi to swim in endless circles? Stupid. I brought out yet another new piece of paper to start again, but by then my mind had gone blank, and I’d forgotten what I’d wanted in the beginning.

  One Saturday morning in July, I piled up all the papers, stuck them under the Easton Grove manuals on the end of the kitchen counter, and didn’t look at them again. I drove to the garden centre and returned home with four crates of plants and bulbs I didn’t know the names of, all wrapped in orange netting. Art showed a bit of interest, reading some of the labels and picking his favourites. A few of them he’d heard of, and he told me that they’d grown in his parents’ garden in Wisconsin. He smiled wistfully as he said it, and I wanted to ask more but his attention was already on the next plant, the next label. The moment had passed.

  Art helped me carry them into the garden and lay them out on the grass. We arranged them along the dusty border, reading the labels as we went to check if they preferred sunlight or shade.

  My houseplants, though I’d been meticulous with neutralising the soil and making sure they had the best of the sun, were all in varying states of failure. Despite the fact that they were all similar species, each had developed completely different problems. Some had gone flaccid, their soft and fleshy stems bending under the weight of their leaves. Some had shrunken back, their stalks dry and bone-like. Some had lost their green and were turning grey, like ghosts. All of the others were dropping leaves at a pace I couldn’t match, and I went from room to room, watering and feeding them with the feeling that I was sending them to their doom, but watering and feeding them anyway. Only Aubrey’s succulent seemed to be doing OK, holding tight to its plump, lavender petals.

  I took photos of where the plants would go in the border, and asked Art to return the pots to their crates. Probably humouring me, he did it without saying anything and carried the crates into the kitchen one after another.

  Before planting, I needed to purge the soil of all the roots sapping what meagre nutrients it had left. I started at the wall nearest the back door, thinking I’d work around the garden clockwise, meeting the mega-shrub in the middle, and then keep going clockwise until I met the house again. Once I’d cleared a space, I’d sprinkle on the good numbers and neutraliser to do its work before planting the new flowers. Art pulled up a deckchair on the lawn and curled up within its arms with an old hardback. I couldn’t see the name. He didn’t look up, other than to occasionally say, “You should be wearing a mask, doing that.”

  It didn’t bother me that he wasn’t helping, I hadn’t asked him to after all, and in a way I wanted the garden to be mine. Just how I wanted it. And the only way to make something truly yours is to make it yourself. It would have been nice if he’d offered, but this way the flowers would grow where I buried them. These memories would be staying put.

  But weeding was tough work. Pulling up twisted nettles and dandelions was easy, but the soil was littered with thousands of sickly buds as if attacked with spray paint. And Art was right about the mask. Soon, my throat was so raw that every breath rasped, but still I wouldn’t stop. I needed to see it through. Art suggested just using a big shovel and mixing it all in but then the roots would have still been there, deep in the mix, and would sprout again in search of light. I couldn’t have that, so I spent an hour or so each evening after work with a tiny trowel, digging out each offender by the stalk and placing it in a glass bowl. Even Art couldn’t deny that the patch of soil I was working on looked pretty flawless. Every so often he’d touch my shoulder, and remind me in a soft voice to head inside and sterilise my hands. The gardening gloves weren’t helping all that much anymore, and my hands were burning beneath the latex.

  After layering on balms and new gloves I persevered, but by the time I reached three-quarters of the way around, the yellow spray was already starting to reappear at the beginning again, the tiny stalks already bending under their weighty heads. So I went back to the beginning, tearing out the new-borns before heading back to the three-quarter point. I was putting out little fires everywhere. Every time I turned around, another flame had sparked, and so I couldn’t catch my breath, but kept digging, until eventually I threw down the trowel and rested my spinning head on my knees.

  All the time this was going on, the prickly shrub was growing, looming over the house, the berries luminous white, like fat little moons. Frustrated with the endless tending on all fours I went at the bush with shears, hacking it as far back as it would go, right to the bare black bark. While I swept up the branches Art came out of the house to see what I’d done. It was the first time I’d seen Art show real distaste. He clicked his teeth and twisted his face as if he’d tasted something rotten.

  “It was too big, Art. You’ll have to help me dig it out.”

  But he didn’t help me; instead he bluntly reminded me of the four crates still on the kitchen floor. Abandoned and suffocated by their tiny pots, they’d already started to wilt and dry. By that point I was short-tempered, I know I was, and I told Art to “Bring them out then if you’re so worried. Bring them out.” He did it without a word, dumping the crates onto the lawn and stalking back inside, slamming the kitchen door behind him. I wondered if he was still in the kitchen, quietly seething at what I’d done or whether he’d gone back up to his study to sulk. I couldn’t see any movement through his study window, so maybe he’d headed up to check on Nut, whispering to her about how I don’t have it in me to nurture anything.

  Having sat on the kitchen floor for over a week, the plants in the crates were showing many signs of neglect. Some had turned a sorry shade of yellow, and others looked like they’d been executed, their blossoming heads decapitated from skinny bodies. I dug a hole in the border at random and picked up the first plant I could reach. I thrust it in the hole and squeezed the earth around it without even checking that the stalk was level.

  I continued in this way with all four crates, planting a wild and unconducted chorus of orange, rose, violet, and inky blue amongst the speckled soil. Finally, I took a canister of fertiliser and dowsed the earth all along the border before standing back to survey my handiwork. Somehow, even though I’d planted around thirty-five little plants, they all seemed so small and indistinct in the grand scale of things. Sometimes it’s better to not get perspective, to not be faced with the cold, hard truth.

  And then, something moving. Stirring beneath the red petals of some unnamed plant. I teased away the leaves and stalled, unable to move a muscle.

  “Art!” And then louder, “Arthur!”

  He must have only been in the kitchen, because in seconds he was by my side, peering down with me into the border. Stretched out beneath the fall of scarlet lay a green, shining frog. I’d never seen such a thing. Its limbs shone like plastic twine, a wide bowl of lump-encrusted back-skin split along a deep spinal ridge. Its eyes were black and glassy, and stared eerily to both the left and the right.

  I could practically hear its skin sizzling.

  We stood there motionless for some time, all three of us too afraid to move. I didn’t need to look for a seam, a flaw. The frog was indescribably actual, as if it was somehow more than itself. Vibrating too quick for our eyes to see.

  After some minutes Art leant over and whispered in my ear that he’d go and get a bowl. He ran off at a pace, returning with a shallow saucer of cold tap water. But by the time he set down the dish, the frog had gone.

  9

  I woke up so many mornings that summer convinced that the frog had come into the house and was now squatting next to my face on the pillow. I’d be in a dream, and then the plug would be pulled and the world would swirl around me until I hit the bed with a jolt. Face deep in sheets. For weeks I met the day confused and dizzy, sure that there was something wet and sinewy hiding around a corner.

  I’d only seen a frog once before, but it had been dead for a few days. Luke had brought it home in a plastic Tupperware box. As a taxidermist, Luke already knew how to capture life in a curled lip or curious eye. Whene
ver the police got a report of a fallen sparrow or rabbit caught under the wheels of a car, a museum got the cadaver. If it was something unusual, it’d go to a research institute then a national museum, but if it was a species they already had in the archive, the remains went to a regional museum. And so Luke became a precious thing, a keeper of the secret way to open up a skin, clean out the rot and swell a belly.

  By the time the bodies were brought in, they were usually already in a pretty bad state of decay. Being frozen stopped them getting worse, but whenever Luke laid a stiffened corpse under the lamps on his dining table, I had to turn away. No matter what the species, they were always dark and twisted things. So I’d turn to the TV’s latest breaking news on genetic chimeras or the natural history books on his side table, bright with the beautiful illustrations I preferred to the rotting things he cut, stuffed and stitched.

  Luke was always baffled by this, and I think he thought (wrongly) that it was death I didn’t want to see. He’d beckon me over, saying, “Touch something real, Norah. This bird came from a bird. Once it’s behind glass, that’s it.” And so, once he’d worked his magic, I’d stroke the blue jay’s feathers for him, or the shafts rising from a hedgehog’s back. Those feathers felt different to the ones I’d caressed as a child. Never as smooth. Congealed, tacky, and when I pulled away, oil clung to my fingers.

  These finds were so few and far between that each one could’ve been the last, and we both revered and dreaded the bodies laid on his altar. Years later, I’d wonder how few years in the grand scheme of things Luke’s hands had left to give life, and who else would be left to do it with as much love.

  The frog in the garden reminded me of those cadavers. Beneath the duvet I pressed my clammy hands against my sides and tried not to blink in case I saw it again.