Composite Creatures Read online

  No. The only programme which had a chance of waking me up was the news.

  One night that November, I was watching a “breaking news” bulletin on the sofa while I massaged Nut’s shoulder blades. The announcement had been really built up, with teasers during the ad breaks all evening. When the time came, the newsreader could hardly contain her glee. She grinned from ear to ear, her finger scrolling through her tablet as the story unfolded. “A new development in the gifting of life”, she called it. Her voice oddly clucking, she continued to explain that a new programme had launched officially today, and now older people with incurable illnesses could offer to donate their organs to the young as replacements or spares. These “persons in prime” had to be a blood relation and compatible, and in return the older donors received a premium to fund their funerals and settle their affairs. If the donation was a life-terminating one or they died within six months after the procedure, they also received an additional premium to go to a recipient of their choice.

  This system had been in and out of the news for a few years but it wasn’t until then that the law had finally been passed. The breathy newsreader cut to an interview with a flushed governmental official and a weak-chinned NHS senior manager, before showing footage of cheering families standing outside of their local hospitals, the blazing, unnatural sun making their skin glow. The report didn’t say if the hospitals behind the young people reaching for the sky were regional branches of Easton Grove, or whether they were newer organisations springing up around the country, but I’m sure I caught the odd gleam of bronze pinned to the most crisply pressed lapels.

  I tasted bile.

  Though I could appreciate the sense of balance between the old and the new, what frame of mind must you be in to relinquish your life like that? Even if you’d been told your end was coming, what must it feel like to be willing to just give up?

  In amongst all the officials and happy families, they interviewed one woman in her sixties who had campaigned for the law to be passed. She didn’t look sick to me. Straight to camera, she said clearly, “This is an opportunity for us to pass on something truly valuable. Some of us might not have had children of our own, and this way a little bit of us will continue to do good even after we’re gone. Who knows what great deeds we might accomplish? We can only hope that what we pass on is used wisely, and that we’re remembered for it.” Behind her I could see a placard bobbing up and down, with “Taking Back Control” painted in red letters. The interviewee looked straight into the camera lens and said, “We are not the vulnerable. We are the strong.”

  I leaned over and pushed my face into Nut’s back, half-bald and still moulting. She’d lost nearly all the fur on her flanks by now, and you could see her thick pink skin glowing beneath the lingering fuzz. Since Art had told me he didn’t feel right, I’d taken to keeping Nut close to me and periodically checking her soft fingers – newly broken through the buds of her paws – and her toes for missing digits, and running my hands along her back and belly for stitches, or scars. I combed my fingers through her coat, pulling out a grey clump between my fingers. We were both changing, growing into each other. She looked up at me with Art’s eyes and I kissed her on the forehead.

  Nut was my main source of companionship those nights. I used to go out a lot before this life; birthday nights, leaving dos, anniversary parties, or post-work catch-up coffees. I can’t pinpoint the day it all changed, when all my intent curled back on itself so radically. Where had all those friends gone? How hadn’t I noticed them slip away?

  Before Art, I hadn’t really thought about what “love” was, or what it meant. But this doesn’t mean I hadn’t experienced it. I suppose this is where Luke comes in. Luke’s smile lit up a room, drawing people to him because he looked like someone who could make you feel better about yourself. But when they came to him he stuttered, too shy and self-conscious to understand why they would love him. He was tall and carried his head low, hiding beneath a fringe of curls. Words fell from his lips in gusts, as if he pushed his heart (still beating) painfully into the world just to reply to you.

  He didn’t stutter with me. Ever.

  Even that first conversation we had at the bar. Brazen with too many margaritas, I stumbled up towards his friends, made sure I was close enough for him to see me, and danced with my arms in the air in my best attempt to mirror his shine. His friends turned and laughed at me before he did. He watched me with a straight face, hiding behind his hair. I danced harder, flicking my wrists and tipping my shoulders one after the other. I didn’t care where my friends were or who was watching – all my drive was focussed on proving to him I was an equivalent flame. Slowly he started to smile, as if he’d finally understood something. I felt like a beacon in a lighthouse: “I’m here, I’m here”. The next part I remember like a scene in a film; his finishing his drink, placing it on the bar, walking through the crowd, holding my hand. His eyes on my eyes all the time, letting me see through the curtains to where he kept his secrets.

  I didn’t feel like I’d won a prize, I felt like I’d opened a door. And the whole room, dark and dingy with dirtied posters and peeling paint, burst into colour and life. Tingles in every bump from a dancing stranger, in every crack of broken glass beneath our feet.

  I don’t know how long we stood like that, just opening up, but eventually he leaned down, pressed his forehead against mine, and whispered, “Do you want to go somewhere?”

  Now, I wonder whether he didn’t stutter because he didn’t feel afraid of me. Or maybe he didn’t love me as much as all that after all, and he didn’t care enough. I could believe that. I can’t imagine approaching anyone like I did in that bar now – how do I know what they’d do? Or say? How do I dance?

  Luke wasn’t a dancer. He was gentle, uncoordinated and long of limb, but he had the steadiest hand I’d ever seen. Hypnotised, I’d watch him paint his little figurines of soldiers and monsters and things long into the night. Even though his hand wouldn’t appear to move at all, each figure would bloom with colour like a flower creeping open at dawn. I suggested once that the littlest ones must be goblins so he should do them green, but he just laughed, gave me a wry little smile, and told me that they weren’t goblins, they were just children. He painted those with the most care of all.

  I found him and everything he did lulled me into a deep sleep-state. Sometimes we’d just lie on his sofa for a whole weekend, dozing and fiddling with each other’s fingers and toes.

  Those were different days. The sister-me. Luke broke my heart, and even now I hate the day I met him, for life would have been without so much hurt if I hadn’t known he existed. Years later, when I knew he must be long dead, I still felt the blow he struckme.

  But anyway, even in those days I still had my own life outside of Luke. Life flickered by, yet I fit so much more in. But life with Art… no more invitations. Though I sometimes still heard whispers across the office about the same nights out, the same gettogethers. But no one told me about them anymore.

  Later that month, after eight consecutive nights alone on the sofa without sight or sound of Art, I finally dared to break his law and open the door of his study. Just to ask him to the cinema. To see a film I knew he’d like. One evening contrived totally to his pleasure, whether I enjoyed it or not. How could he be angry at me for that?

  “Don’t, Norah. I need to get this. I need to get this right. Please.”

  His face was grey, the words croaking through a dry throat. In my opinion he shouldn’t have been working at all, he was exhausted, but still – he pleaded with me to leave him alone. At least he didn’t make a thing of me breaking into his study.

  Screw him, I thought, and headed downstairs to look for Nut. She trilled when she saw me, and bounded over to rub her cheeks against my calves. I didn’t want her to see me at such a loss. Here I was, depending on Art for entertainment when really I should have my own, right? Unfortunately, though the garden had started as a hobby it had become a manacle, a fight I couldn’t
win. I needed something else.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t think of anything to do; the world was full of things that would be fun to try, in theory. I just didn’t want to be alone. Without a friend to point out the colours, I couldn’t see them.

  Paints. I’d paint it out.

  The birthday art equipment was still in the kitchen cupboard. I dug them out and made my own “aviary” in the corner of the living room, setting the easel in front of our floral armchair. That’s how my mum used to paint, by sinking into an armchair, with drinks, snacks, cigarettes, and all her comforts within arm’s reach. Not that she touched them. When she painted, it was the only time she didn’t need her vices. And now those pictures were hanging in hundreds of homes around the world, all alive.

  My skin prickling, I pulled the patchwork blanket from the top of the bedroom wardrobe and wrapped it around my shoulders. Seeking grounding, I poured myself a scotch from a dusty bottle in the cupboard – my mum’s favourite drink – and downed the entire glass in one blistering swallow. After settling in the chair, I began splashing the watercolour onto the page in wet flourishes, filling the paper with swooning blues, skin-pinks, and merry yellows. But I wasn’t painting anything in particular, I was just covering up the blank space.

  I dropped the brush into the water jar and noticed that I’d already managed to get paint on the patchwork blanket. My stomach lurched and I rubbed it between my fingers, adding a splash of water to dilute it and then cursing, because that water wasn’t clean either. It was just typical of me to ruin it, within seconds of being independent. I took another swig of the scotch and tried to deaden the strange ticking that echoed in the back of my head.

  I cast my painting on the floor and set up a new piece of paper, and with a pencil in my hand started to sketch the outline of my shape. Mum always sketched the top of the head then the feet, filling in the middle and then the background. But where could I be, in this imaginary space? I drew myself standing, but it could’ve been anyone. I sketched in a mane of curls down the front of the body so the figurative me could be looking at something in the distance. But what? Should I draw Art beside me, or Nut?

  Before I put pencil back on paper the phone rang, a sound it took me a few seconds to recognise, muffled beneath a pile of unopened and unread post.

  “Hello, lovely,” Rosa said, her voice breathy and thin. “How... how are you?” She sounded quiet and far away. A stranger.

  A sudden wave of guilt flushed up my neck. “I’m OK, y-you know how it is.” I couldn’t even get those few words out without stammering and I squeezed my eyes shut to hide from myself. I needed to hold it together. She needed to think that I hadn’t been alone all this time since New Year. That I was happy. That everything was perfect.

  Rosa jabbered on for a few minutes about her day at the university and I listened as best as I could, but the flood of words was overwhelming, and all the while I pressed my hand hard over my mouth to hold in the fireworks. By the time she stopped talking, it became even more awkward as it was now blindingly obvious to both of us that I hadn’t even been listening. The silence fizzled. If she was waiting for a reply I wouldn’t be able to help her there, so I desperately tried to think of something perky to say. But it’d been so long since New Year. It was almost winter again, and my world had changed as much as the seasons. Why had Rosa stayed away? In all this time she hadn’t even called to ask about Nut.

  Rosa went on to tell me that she and Eleanor were going for dinner that Friday night, and “if I wanted to come” we could make it a bit of a belated birthday night. Very belated. She said it in that same breathy whisper she’d greeted me with, and as we talked, I kept my ear open for clues to her detachment. She’d already made it seem so easy for me to say no, to wheedle out of it, even though she’d been the one to mention my birthday so many months earlier as a reason to join them. I would never have had to have a reason before, but I supposed everything was different now. This was the new world – split, some of us on one side and some of us on the other. Something in the way she spoke to me made me feel like I’d have to fight to accept the invite and cross the divide. That the whole phone call was “obligation”.

  But maybe I was being touchy. She was still my friend. We hadn’t fought, we hadn’t anything, in fact. No. I’d go, and work out the truth. I’d meet them at the restaurant straight after work – as I likely wouldn’t get out until after 7pm anyway. I’d face them, and I’d face them smiling.

  After hanging up the phone I packed away the easel and paints, and crushed my self-portrait into the recycling. My skin tingled, and I felt more awake than I had done in weeks. Those brief minutes of talking – this is what I needed. This.

  The next day, I went to Stokers dressed for night. My nerves were like date-night nerves, the sort I used to get when Art and I would meet in the early days. In the afternoon, I jotted down some topics on a scrap of paper I could use as conversation starters, safe stuff, in case I dried up. Art’s lecture, the garden. But when it came to Eleanor and Rosa’s lives I had no idea what was going on, so I couldn’t think of anything to ask. Any question would be broad and impersonal. Had it always been so complicated? I hadn’t asked Rosa for any news while she was on the phone. Perhaps her sheepish tone was because she was hiding what she wanted to say, too.

  From around 4pm my skin was prickling and my throat was blossoming. A frantic glance into the bathroom mirror showed me that the rash had bloomed up the sides of my face. I smeared on a stick of concealer, thick and chalky, powdering on a rosy flush to soften the camouflage.

  As I was switching off my workstation, Markus stuck his head out of his office door and beckoned me with a curling finger. He wore the clichéd half-smile of a Bond villain. All these gestures and side-winks in the last few months, it was all new. I was in the infantry and he was in the white tower, and he’d always loved it there, you could tell. Our exchanges had only ever been one or two words as our paths never even came close to crossing. Lately, I was sure he’d even avoided me, sidestepping my cubicle to ask one of my neighbours for a figure or data file he needed. This had always been fine with me. In fact, I welcomed the ease that came with indifference. I never had to look him in the eye, as he never looked into mine.

  But something about Markus was changing. Before, he’d stride, but now he shuffled with little urgent steps. When talking to colleagues in the middle of the office he’d tweak his nose, and sometimes scratch the side of his neck until it raged, red and angry. He kept his head down in the office until he came right past my cubicle and he’d shout “Good morning Norah,” loud enough for everyone to hear, grinning from ear to ear. What made it particularly odd was the way he’d never wait for a response, but would continue on in his mad shuffle, still watching me out of the corner of his eye, and then lock his office door behind him.

  Anyway, I dropped my bag back on my chair and followed Markus into his office. After a quick glance to see who was still in the wider office, he closed the door behind me and gesticulated in the direction of the seat in front of his desk. I hardly had time to sit before he started to talk in a strangely shrill voice:

  “How are you doing, Norah? You’re here late on a Friday.”

  “I’m OK, I was just finishing–”

  “Here’s the thing, Norah, I’ve been watching you for a while and frankly, you’ve been overlooked.”

  “I don’t think–”

  “I have to apologise for that. No, I want to apologise. You get your head down and you work, you’re solid. You don’t shout up but that’s to be commended. The hardest working people do the work, after all. I’m going to look into how I can improve things for you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Markus had been standing, but once he’d finished speaking he sank into his leather chair. Slumped low and fiddling with the edge of the desk, he didn’t meet my eye.

  “Do you accept my apology?”

  I hardly knew what else to say other than a quiet “Yes.” All of his colour
drained, Markus took a deep breath and pushed himself up in his seat. He waved his hand towards the door, regaining a little of his old dismissive style. “Go on, go home. You shouldn’t be here so late anyway.”

  It was such a weird interaction. It was as if he thought I held him to account, and I certainly didn’t. And even though he grovelled, I knew that he didn’t care. What did he mean by “improving things” for me? They were fine as they were. Maybe a bigger cubicle would be nice, or a pay rise. But otherwise it didn’t seem an exciting prospect that my work-life would change. In all this time it hadn’t even crossed my mind to wonder how the different departments worked where I wasn’t involved, or to try to work out what Markus’ job actually was. Like most of my faces, Stokers wasn’t my life, it was a means to an end.

  14

  In the taxi, I couldn’t shake off the peculiar, creeping feeling Markus had left with me. Through the window, a dance of young girls in their glittering dresses mingled with couples hand-inhand, trussed up tightly for each other in coordinating jackets. My outfit already felt tired and ready to be changed, and for the length of the journey I tried to iron out the creases with the flat of my palm.

  We were meeting at a little Japanese place near Eleanor’s estate agents’ office. I loved that restaurant. It wasn’t huge or flashy; it was actually quite small and always dimly lit by antique yellow lanterns on the walls, even on the sunniest of summer days. The light hardly made it through the front windows, so most people passing probably thought the place was closed and didn’t come in. But that’s why I liked it. It felt like a secret den. I’m not sure I’d have made those aesthetic choices myself, but I liked the fact that management had sacrificed success for atmosphere.