Composite Creatures Page 18
The nausea subsiding, I felt more alive than I had in months. The sound of my breath felt obscenely loud in the metallic drum of sky. I’d lived here with Art heading for a year exactly, and I still wasn’t used to the taste. I leapt over the cracks between paving slabs as if they were gullies, ravines, canyons. I’d never moved so fast, so ferally.
The street was silent, lit only by a few orange street-lamps, and above, the purple sludge of space hung low, almost close enough to touch. How long had it been since I thought I’d seen stars? Mum would watch from the kitchen window, binoculars glued to her face, and even when I pulled at her elbow she wouldn’t look down. I thought I’d seen them with Luke once, through the observatory roof, but I don’t know. Maybe it was just rain on the glass. But still… The smoky canopy above the street was like the velvet in the lid of a precious box, so I swung my bag around me like a moon in orbit – stretching out my arms into the soft space above, the thick, warm hug of it. Like water. Freedom. The aching in my feet was gone, my whole body full and whole. I felt like a god, like the world was full of possibility, blessed with time, and it was mine to seize while everyone else slept. I thought back to Mum telling me that she used to ask the clouds for a sign and they’d tell you the future. Even when I was no taller than her elbow I’d shaken my head and rolled my eyes. But here I stood, in what felt like a fallen cloud, all damp and magical lilac, and what could be more fortuitous? I looked up into the sludge and didn’t ask for a future – I thought of Art and commanded it. But what image came into my head instead? Nut. I shook off the rush of feeling and twirled, owning the street, the world – all on my own. Here, loneliness was a virtue, not a drain. I could be the god of loneliness.
Too soon I reached our purple front door, and I leant against it with both palms to centre myself before going inside. I had my key in my hand for some time before I stuck it in the lock. Beside the front door, the living room curtains were drawn, but around them cracks of light shone gold. Had I left the lights on since morning? No, I don’t think I’d even gone in there. I imagined Nut turning on the lights for herself, and settling down on the chintz chair with a cup of tea and a flapjack. I chuckled at the front door and turned the key.
But it wasn’t Nut. It was Art, stretched out on the sofa with a pizza box across his belly, a beer in his hand, and a car chase on TV. Out from the dim light of his study, I was seeing him for the first time in weeks. He was so thin that his shirt collar hung down in front of his chest, and his one visible hand looked practically blue. All white-knuckled and flaking skin. His eyes were sunken, the whites dull.
But still, the worst of it – how many nights had I waited for him to come out of his study? How many nights did I ask him to join me, how many nights did I sit alone while he lost himself within himself upstairs, like a glutton? And here he was, taking the first opportunity when I wasn’t there to sit in our living room like it was an absolutely normal thing to do. He’d even ordered food.
He lifted himself up on his elbows and looked at me up and down, smiling wryly.
“Well hello there, wifey. Good time?”
“What the fuck, Art?”
I needed him to think I wasn’t drunk so I leant backwards on the wall. Art flicked his head from me to the TV and back to me. “What? It’s not porn.”
“Why are you here? What are you doing?”
“I thought I’d take a night off, get some space. It was your idea. My editor’s going to kill me anyway.”
No. No. He’d broken the rules. My skin hurt. The weight of my necklace on the back of my neck, the pinch of my dress at my elbow, my hair sticking to the sides of my face. I wanted to tear it all off and stand there on fire and scream, This is who I am. This is who you’re assigned to.
But I didn’t. If this was all a game to him, I’d roll the dice. The tiny part of me that could still think thanked the god of loneliness for the booze in my blood. I needed its venom.
“What’s happening, Arthur? Where’ve you been? Don’t you want to be with me?”
Art raised his eyebrows and flattened back into the sofa. I suppose in all the distance we’d come, I’d never spoken to him so bluntly. After a few seconds he regrouped, and spoke in a low and level tone, like a teacher to a student. “Are you changing your mind?”
I stood there, too furious to say “No” but terrified to think he thought I’d say “Yes”.
“’Cause you know,” he whispered, stretching his arms wide, “none of this should be a surprise. You knew what I wanted. When I signed on that dotted line, you signed too. Partnership.”
So that was it? If he wanted officiality, I’d give him officiality.
“Partnership?” I spat the word back. “Where is my partner? I never see you – and the only time your show your face is when I’m not here. You have to make a fucking effort, otherwise what’s the point?”
Art pushed himself forward, colour rushing up his neck. “An effort? I am making an effort. You know I’ve struggled to work since all this started. If I can’t make this work, that won’t only be the end of my career but the end of all this,” he gestured at the walls, the ceiling, me. “I don’t have an inheritance to chip away at. I got nothing. I have to make more, all the time. Do you want me to stop earning? Is that what you want?”
Obviously I didn’t, but I’d be damned before I’d let him see it. He deserved nothing.
“Norah,” he reached out a hand to me, palm open. “I’m just doing what we set out to do, together. It’s you that keeps changing the rules.”
Oh, really? It was as if I’d stepped out of my body, just for a second, and watched myself clinging to the wall like a great sucking leech. Was this why Art looked so thin, so exhausted? Was it my fault? No, he was different, and he was trying to save face, surely. He asked me to marry him. Marry him. That doesn’t sound like a business partnership, that’s love. And as you both grow, and progress, your love grows and changes too. It has to, otherwise, it shatters.
Art stood up and wrapped his arms around my waist. His hair pressed against my cheek and the salty tang of chemicals filled my head. Despite myself, I started to feel warm, and stroked my hands up his back. Fights were healthy. Fights were productive. Fights cleared the air. We’d promised to always be honest to each other about what we wanted, maybe this would be our real beginning? Lately we’d hardly spoken to each other about anything other than Nut. What about us?
“Where’s Nut?”
“Hmm?” Art whispered into my ear.
“Where is she?”
“Not sure. I haven’t seen her in a bit. Probably in a boat off to Paraguay or something.”
“I’ll go find her. I’ll come back and we can finish this.” I pressed my lips against Art’s cheek and began my tour of the house, trilling and tutting and calling her name. She was nowhere to be found on the ground floor so (only slightly concerned at this point) I continued my hunt upstairs while Art lounged into the sofa and glued his eyes back on the TV screen. As I stumbled my way upstairs, I hoped Art was still thinking about what had just happened. I hoped it worried him.
“Nu-ut!” I called for her in a sing-song tone, as if we were playing hide and seek. After a few more minutes of searching I called down to Art. “Arthur, where is she?”
I heard the TV go silent and Art appeared at the front of the stairs. “I don’t know, somewhere around the house, I suppose.”
He wasn’t being flippant, but I gritted my teeth as I responded, “I can’t find her anywhere.”
He looked up with a baffled smile and impassive eyes. “She has to be somewhere. I’ve not even been outside today.” Art shuffled to the kitchen, and I heard the creak of cupboard doors being opened and slammed and kitchen chairs being dragged across the floor. I waited on the landing, desperate for him to prove me wrong. He emerged from the kitchen and leapt the stairs two at a time, sticking his head in the bathroom and finally our bedroom. We were both silent as he followed the steps I’d just taken, checking everywhere Nut had
access to.
She couldn’t have vanished.
Tick tick tick tick tick.
A thousand scenes were streaming through my head one after another, and in all them Nut appeared prostrate, trapped in cupboards, crushed under the wheels of a car on the motorway. She’d never seen the world; she wouldn’t have a clue. She wasn’t made to understand a world of threats. She was pliable, personable. If she got into the wrong hands, or if Easton Grove found out about our negligence, we’d be excommunicated. Or worse. I pictured the detention centre, the windowless bunker. We didn’t know what happened inside. Why didn’t we ever ask?
My head was light and fuzzy, the world fading into black and white. If I’d been out only one night and something had happened… What had we done?
“I can’t believe this.” Art held his head in his hands as if trying to unscrew it from his neck. “I haven’t been anywhere, she has to be here.”
I leant back against the wall, my hands spread across the paint and listening for the reassuring heartbeat-like thump-thumpthump-thump of her feet. Perhaps if I pressed my ear to the paint the house would tell me, whisper to me what happened to our little life.
“You don’t think,” Art blurted, “that when you came in just now you let her out?”
No, no, I’d have felt her. That round, voluptuous body would have knocked me to the side if she’d passed by. Nut was not a creature to slink. By now she stood thigh-high, her back the width of a coffee table.
“Norah, did you leave the door open?”
Was this me? My fault? My head. My head.
“I’m not stupid,” I croaked. But still – I glanced at the front door. She could just be on the other side of it, sitting to be let back in, but if she was there it meant it was my negligence, not Art’s. If I looked, I’d be admitting it.
Art reached for his cardigan and snatched the keys from the side-table. While Art went into practical mode, I clung to the bannister with both hands like an old coat.
Losing Nut meant we’d lose everything. We’d have violated our contract with Easton Grove. There’d be no replacements. Everything we had would be meaningless, and everything connecting Art and I would disintegrate. And worst of all – the most plunging feeling deep inside my gut – was that Nut would be alone and suffering without me, thrust into a selfish world she wasn’t made for.
All my fault.
But just as Art stuck the key in the door, there was a thump on the landing. Art flipped his head around, and I followed his eyes to see Nut gambolling down the stairs as if greeting us home. I fell hard on my knees and buried my face into her fleshy middle, the full and hot roundness of her belly overwhelming my face, my hands, my chest.
Behind me Art thumped his elbow against the wall and let out one long breath. “Thank fuck. Where the hell was she?”
I didn’t care and pushed myself under her skin, breathing in her hot musk. Art reached down and pushed the heel of his hand hard across her spine and she flexed against it, grunting with each bump. I sat back into Art’s legs, between my two lifelines, finally able to think.
“No.” Art stepped around me and started up the stairs. Looking up I saw that the door to his study was ajar. It had been closed before, it was always closed whether Art was in there or not. We hadn’t checked the room for Nut because there’s no way she could have got in there.
Art pushed the door open gently and stepped inside. Still holding Nut, I called up to him. “What is it?” The house responded with silence.
“Art?” I pulled myself to my feet and followed him, clicking my fingers at Nut for her to stay by my ankles. Art was standing in the middle of the study staring at the floor. At first, I couldn’t see what he was looking at and the room looked very much like it always does, a jumble of ideas and chaos. Stained mugs and plates with dried-out crumbs were stacked along the windowsill, and the surface of his desk was so full of papers and notebooks that there wasn’t an inch of wood visible. In its own way, the study was the whole house, condensed into one room. A world, poured into a womb.
“Look.” Art pointed at the floor. I stood beside him and followed his gaze to a hip-high mountain of books. This pile wasn’t a random stack like the others; the books had been stacked horizontally, the angle of each adjacent book just so that the wall of the structure curved around. Between each row of closed hardbacks there were stuffed paperbacks or pages of foolscap. The more I looked at it I couldn’t see how I’d assumed it was just another of Art’s hoards. It was an igloo, complete with a small opening at the front.
“She did this,” Art whispered.
“No.” I knelt at the foot of the mountain. “How?”
Art remained stuck to his spot. His face was grey, his lips cracked. “I’ve dreamed of a fort like this. It’s made up of all my favourite places to go. It’s a good dream.”
Nut hadn’t followed us in, and was sitting in the doorway, her tail swishing proudly behind her. Peering into the igloo’s chamber I could see a nest, made of torn-up paper. But it didn’t feel right to stick my arm in. It would be intrusive. Art didn’t seem to think so, and kneeling in front of the hole thrust his arm inside. After a few seconds of fumbling he sat back up, clutching what looked like wet ribbons, ragged and bright. They were paper streamers, half-chewed and torn, and flaking with red and blue and brown, drifting from them like dirty snow.
Art leaned further into the den, sweeping his arm across the floor to gather the shreds. He started to move pieces around as if assembling a jigsaw, but an infuriating second-hand jigsaw that you discover to be missing half the pieces after you’ve committed to it.
As the pieces shifted it began to dawn on me exactly what it was that Nut had dragged back to her cave. All of Art’s paintings of me from my birthday, clawed apart and half-consumed by our first-born.
15
Shocks, jolt.
Though the walls are the same, our clothes are the same, we eat the same food, we speak in the same subtle accent we’re deaf to – the world is a different place. Colours and abrupt sounds shock like a defibrillator, just as we think our hearts are settling. New fears lurk around every corner, the stick ever-raised to whip again.
Never before had I been so utterly responsible for another living thing, a creature that was as unable to articulate its needs as a new-born. What sort of person was I if I couldn’t look after her? Sometimes I’d be doing the dishes or watching TV, and suddenly need to know exactly where Nut was, or I’d be at work and imagine Nut loose in Dukesberry Terrace, hanging out of an upstairs window by a single claw, or lying prostrate across some dark corner, locked in a second seizure. I’d text Art and he’d reply so quickly that I can only guess that he had been sitting with her all that time. Perhaps she was in his study, curled around his ankles or sharing his lunch.
Mistreatment of your ovum organi was an offence resulting in termination of membership, and expulsion from all the benefits that came with it. And where would I end up without the guidance of my mentors? You never heard about anyone this happened to, which made me wonder where they went. Were all we members really as pliable as that?
Losing Nut due to something as stupid as not looking when I opened the door would definitely be seen as negligence, especially since I’d lied about her having her own secure room. There was no way I could return her to the loft now, now that she bumbled around the house like it belonged to her. It would be like removing a child’s favourite toy.
But more than that. Nut had a soul. I could see it now. And when she balanced on my thighs with her hands on my chest, she’d smile and I’d smile back. Her little face brightened a room, and the world was made a better place by her being in it. If only there could be more of you, I’d whisper in her ear, each one helping me to be better.
This was a new kind of love. But if Easton Grove got wind of what had happened they would take her away. And what would happen to her then?
Two more letters arrived in November, each one requesting a house visit. The last one
was posted in a sickly salmon-pink envelope, like a jury summons. But with Art working all hours, Nut needing more and more entertainment, and all the purging still to do in the garden it was easy to find legitimate reasons why we couldn’t squeeze in a visit.
Art never noticed the letters on the doormat, but would stare into the recycling before dropping something into it. He’d pause on the way back to his study, watching Nut and I curling into each other like yin and yang, his lips as dry as chalk. He never said anything, but sometimes I thought I could hear him speaking to someone in his study, his voice low, worried. I could never make out the words, even with my ear pressed against the wood.
As the first frost was starting to settle that November, the ringing of the doorbell began. The first time it happened, I quickly ducked down beneath the windowsill, craning my head to see if it was a face I knew. But I didn’t recognise this one, with the thick black glasses and shaved head. But I knew the tweed, the blue folders. I knew what that meant.
I waited for him to leave before letting my muscles relax, one by one, my eyes squeezed shut. A few seconds later, Art’s cool hand was on my shoulder. “How long can you keep this up, Norah?” he whispered.
The same man came back three times over the next two weeks, always in the evening when I’d finished at Stokers. The final visit came late one night, when I was rinsing the toothpaste from my mouth. I peered out of the bathroom shutters to see the man pressing his face against our living room window. Beside me, Nut rubbed her flank against my hip. She knew. “Shhhh,” I mouthed, as I stroked the skin behind her ear. Just then, Art opened the door to his study and my head flicked round, my finger pressed to my lips. He stood, stock still, his eyes wide and luminous in the dark. “Don’t,” I whispered. “You can’t.”
Two days after that night, the final red letter arrived. No more than ten minutes later, I was in the porch with a screwdriver and scissors, cutting the wire connecting the doorbell to the electricity.
I stopped carrying my phone around, leaving it in different rooms and under cushions. It was easier to swipe and clear the missed calls from withheld numbers than to hold the caller in the palm of my hand. Besides, no one else was trying to contact me. Apart from one night shortly after my birthday meal when I’d had three missed calls from Eleanor, my phone felt like it’d become a single frequency radio to Easton Grove. Eleanor hadn’t left a message or even followed up with a text, so I didn’t call her back.