Composite Creatures Read online

  On its own though, my career history seemed pitiful, so I also included a photograph of the house I grew up in on the Northumberland coast – the rows of houses behind all painted in their pastel colours, prints of two of Mum’s paintings (one of me sitting at a little table with a book and the other of a sea, split by the leap of a blue whale), and a USB stick, containing a file of Edith Piaf songs. I had ummed and ahhed about the music, something about it seemed a bit… pretentious. But I knew the rise and fall of the melodies by heart, and though I didn’t know what the lyrics meant it didn’t matter, because the notes made my blood flow in quixotic waves. I hope Art would understand that, even just a little bit.

  This all would’ve been fine on its own, but my portfolio still lacked the spark that made me, me. This disturbed me, because the gaps say more about you than what’s between the pages. I tried writing something, a poem, a few lines of meaning, but it went nowhere and meant nothing. So after a few increasingly frustrated evenings of scribbling, I scrapped my futile attempt at creativity and instead slipped inside an old photo of a seagull that I’d picked up at an antiques market years before. I wished I still had the feathers in the egg-cups. How significant it would have been to fold something so irrefutable between my pages. But they were all gone now.

  By the time I got home from La Folie, the Shiraz was bubbling back up my throat. I locked the door to my flat and threw myself on the sofa, face-down. The room shuddered and swayed, the walls pulsing with the beat of Art’s voice, every word he’d spoken. It was late and my flat was silent, yet it was so very, very loud.

  I turned on the TV to drown it out, and unzipped Art’s leather folio on the coffee table. He’d included his CV, ironed crisp, detailing his journey from his first job as a junior copywriter to full-time authorship. Here was a list of his published novels, and I counted seventeen, including the one currently in progress. Scanning the list, I hadn’t read any of them, but I’d heard of one or two of the titles, and could remember one or two of the covers. They were all crime novels, not my sort of thing but the sort of paperback people snap up at the airport for holiday reading. I would never have told him this, but I looked down on them. These were lives written to templates, and it made my skin crawl that the main character – though so flawed in all the usual ways – claimed to never see the ending coming.

  But looking at Art’s list of successes was still enviable, and with a sickening jolt I realised that he would be looking at my own paltry resumé right now. I let the CV waft back onto the table and picked up one of the two novels he’d included. The title Frame of Impact groaned in heavy blue and black. I turned it over and on the back was a greyed-out picture of Art sitting in a library, the desk in front of him messy with open volumes and stacks of old hardbacks, as if playing a detective himself. He didn’t look like the Art in the party hat. This was Arthur McIntyre, who didn’t laugh or smile. His eyes were smaller, concealed behind thick-framed acetate glasses that he might’ve found in a fancy-dress shop.

  There was a photo in the folder too: Art when he couldn’t have been more than five or six, standing beside a couple wearing the protective green overalls, wide-brimmed hats, and veils of the scatterers. Behind them stood a row of sealed white tents and chemical sprinkler pipes. Above the awnings and half out of shot, I could just about make out the edge of an iron cage suspended in mid-air – a tractor, or harvester of some sort. Through the mesh, the woman grinned from ear to ear with the same straight and square teeth Art had. The same wide, white eyes, but set into a face that had lost a lot of weight. Skin hung loose beneath her chin, her neck a slim column of blue tendons. The man, who must have been Art’s dad, stood head and shoulders above the woman, and wore a sharp grimace. One arm pinned the woman close to him, while the other held Art’s wrist. Art was half-standing and half-sitting, as if his legs had buckled and the photographer had captured the exact moment he’d started to fall. He was looking away to the right, at something beyond the edge of the snapshot, with his mouth gaping, his eyes angry and small. I propped the photo up against a cup on the coffee table.

  Back to the folder. Next up was a pile of letters, folded carefully into envelopes which were badly crinkled at the corners. I knew what these were. Art had been telling me about a pen-pal he’d had in his early teens who lived in England, a girl the same age named Wendy. They’d been matched up by a school programme and written to each other for four years, comparing their day-today lives and sharing ambitions that transfigured with every letter. They never met in person. Art said that as the years went by he’d get a thrill when a new letter arrived in his mailbox, and he’d rush straight upstairs to his bedroom to read Wendy’s news. But when it came to writing back he’d hit a blank, and end up repeating the same stories, hating himself for his laziness and the banality of what his life must sound like. So he started to make things up, but when he received further replies from Wendy he was surprised to see she wasn’t as captivated as he’d imagined she’d be. She just wrote about herself.

  His stories became more and more elaborate and unrealistic until he ended up writing stories for himself, rather than Wendy. This way, he could live a thousand different lives without lying to anyone. But he kept Wendy’s letters, and when the opportunity came (years later) to move to the UK he snapped up the chance, this being the only other home he felt he knew.

  The final piece of himself Art had included in the folio were a pair of purple socks, spotted with red. They were obviously well worn, the heels thin and threadbare. When the voices began to settle and I could raise my head again, I carried the socks to my bedroom, closed my eyes, and threw them towards the bed. They lay at the foot on the right hand side. I stared at them for some time before stripping and crawling under the covers on the left side, trying to forget that the socks were new and convincing myself that having them there was utterly, utterly normal.

  2

  It seemed that nothing in my own folio turned out to be too horrendous, and Art and I continued to meet up in safe public spaces for “activities”. It all seemed so old-fashioned and formal, and there was something reassuring about that. One thing that I did find odd was that Art was often keen to revisit the same attraction or venue over and over again. At one point, we went to see the same film on four occasions. It wasn’t even a new film. Art talked about that film endlessly; turning what should have been flirtatious after-drinks into a post-midnight panel discussion. The film was about a boy who survives a shipwreck by escaping on a lifeboat, shared with a tiger. After seeing it once, I shared Art’s enthusiasm – revelling in the luscious tapestry of the sea, the animals, and the blazing sun. We debated the possibilities: was it all a dream? Was he dead? Was it all a lie? But after the second viewing, I started to see metaphors for all sorts of things, and by the third I started to feel irritated at the obvious flaws in the boy’s story. I didn’t believe him anymore. Art felt the opposite and sank deeper into the boy’s fantasy with each retelling. By the time we went to see the film for a fourth time I didn’t want to talk about it further, and just let Art waffle on, only adding in an occasional nod or shake of the head.

  One time I wanted to take Art somewhere special to me. I picked him up at his flat and drove him to Copsickle Castle, an ungated ruin free to wander. By day, the place was crushed with couples huddled on picnic blankets, families bending their knees awkwardly to all fit in a photo, and outdoor types spearing the earth with Nordic poles and striding across the yellowing lawn with too-heavy boots. It made the castle look like it was built on a sea of gold, so delicate that you could kick it up with your shoes. This was one of the last “unscattered” places, land made up of what land should be. No chemicals turning the earth, no carcinogens creeping up through the clay. And even though it was no longer green, you might still find a worm after the rain, or even a drunken bumblebee caught in a southern wind.

  Wanting to avoid everyone else, I took Art to the castle on a Thursday after work. Sometimes community groups projected films on the
ruins or acted out amateur plays between the stones at night, when the sky would darken and cast an eerie crimson light across the stage. I wanted it to be about us, so made sure to choose a night where we’d be alone.

  We walked in silence, taking snaps of the lilac smog oozing up from behind the monoliths and climbing the ancient steps to halls where lords once sat. My hands shading my eyes from the setting sun, I waited on one crumbling wall while Art leapt across a crevasse to a square of stones with a central hollow, set like a throne. Art sat in it and surveyed his kingdom below. I teased him then, unapologetically goading him for taking the throne before I had the chance (though I never intended to really). He lifted his chin, and snootily replied that the throne was his, but as his queen I could sit on the arm and shine. From the height of our crumbling turret, the remains of the castle foundations stuck up from the ground like bones.

  After dates like that, we’d come back to my flat for an extra drink or two, learning to be comfortable with our bare toes nudging each other under the table, our hands in each other’s cupboards. At the time, I lived alone and my flat was pure function; a one-room studio, chalked in cheap magnolia. The only real flash of colour was crumpled in a corner beneath a coffee table. A patchwork blanket stitched from mismatched fabrics, with one strip at the end crudely knitted in yellow and shot with holes. I hardly had any knickknacks or anything like that, and instead blue folders blazing with Easton Grove’s bronze ankh lay in piles on the floor, contracts and small print spilling from their edges.

  The flat naturally felt like a “nook”, wherever you sat or stood. The kitchen, living room, and bedroom were all part of the same space but hidden around corners in a horseshoe, with the living room in the centre. The bathroom was the only room with a lock. My only chair - a two seater sofa - was only large enough for one person to lounge or for two people to be uncomfortable. I sat on the floor when Art visited, legs crossed like a child listening in assembly.

  The walls were bare apart from a rattling air purifier and two small oil paintings from Mum. One was a likeness of me in blue dungarees, crouching behind a huge plant pot overflowing with trickling ivy. I look like I’m about four or five, but I have a feeling she painted it from memory long after I’d outgrown hide and seek. The other was a portrait of the two cats she’d kept as a child, in the days before people ranked hygiene over hugs. One was a little black lump with a white nose and squinty eyes, and the other was a mix of tawny, marbled like an exotic butterfly. When I was little, I used to stroke the paint with my little finger, imagining what their fur would feel like. Their names had been Bathsheba and Bertie, and most of Mum’s bedtime stories to me had been about their antics, whether it was how Bathsheba would shuttle up the doorframe like a fireman down a pole but in reverse, or how my grandad would take Bertie out for a walk with a pink harness, much to the sniggering of the neighbours. Mum said Bertie lived to the age of twenty-eight, but I couldn’t see this being true. Twenty-eight is a human age.

  Art’s flat in comparison was an urban ruby. I’d never seen anything like it. He rented it, a refurbished Victorian office space above an architects’ studio. The interior walls were lined in a rich red brick, and the ceiling was a night sky of navy. Unlike my air purifier, which groaned like the exhaust of an old bus, his was tiny and beautiful and silent enough for you to believe it wasn’t even there. All his furniture stood very far apart, so if you lifted your arms and spun them at various points in the flat your fingertips wouldn’t brush anything. Shelves along the walls supported leafy ferns, glossy banana trees, and succulent yuccas. I couldn’t tell if they were real or purely ornamental, even when stroking their waxy skin.

  He’d only been living there four months when I first visited, plenty of time to make the place his. It seems naïve now, but the idea of being locked into his flat made my palms sweat. My plan was to head over there after spending a frantic hour after work transforming myself into someone bright and sparkling. I shouldn’t have driven, but by the time I realised that it shouldn’t be this hard to put the key in the ignition, it was too late to call for a taxi. I practised casually leaning backwards and away from the window, in case I was stopped and needed to dodge a policeman tasting my wine-breath.

  I made it to Art’s without drama, and as I settled into his leather sofa and waited for my next glass to be poured, I began to scan the flat for clues – nudging aside cushions to see what they covered, flicking through the magazines under the coffee table. But this was a show home and I found nothing to give him away. He could easily have been a spy or an assassin. There were no photographs or magazines lying around, no half-eaten meals or empty bottles. The only thing “in progress” was a pile of papers on the arm of a chair – forms and pre-addressed envelopes with “Visa Exemption” in bold across the top and Easton Grove’s blue “sanctioned” stamp over it all.

  Art showed me around, pointing out his many, many books arranged in rows on the ledge where roof met brick, but they were too high for me to read the spines. He introduced his bedroom as “our room” and then brought me to the inner sanctum – his study. In contrast to the rest of the flat, this room was chaos – stacked with piles of paper, ring binders, and slippery plastic folders. Post-its stuck to books, the computer monitor, the legs of his desk. The walls were a mosaic of A3 sheets, nailed into the brick. His scrawls looked like hieroglyphics, mixed in with pie charts, line graphs, and tables of names and plot points. So many lives, condensed into cold, hard, stats. Art called this room his “aviary”.

  I’d brought back one of Art’s books that he’d lent me, and I slotted it into the row of paperbacks on the windowsill. I told Art that I’d enjoyed it, particularly the ending when Ben had climbed the wall and told the world to go fuck itself. He grinned eagerly, and immediately handed me another to read, which I dropped into my handbag quickly. I hadn’t actually read that first book, I’d only flicked to the last chapter, but if you know the end people don’t ever question if you know the beginning.

  It was already late, so we sat at his glass dining table to play a board game. During the hour we spent sinking each other’s battleships, I waited for the wine to work its way into my blood. I became bold – stretching out my naked feet under the glass for a touch of warm ankle or curling toe. My hands danced the table and I used them decadently, flourishing my fingers as I talked about my week. When I laid them back on my lap between gestures, I could feel them shaking.

  Art brought out midnight snacks – cheese and biscuits, grapes, flatbreads and hummus, and though I’d never felt like eating less in my whole life I picked at the grapes, chewing them until I was left with the empty skin. Something about the taste was “off”, a bit like rust or damp stone, and I wondered if he hadn’t scrubbed them like he should. Maybe all that was different in the US.

  At one point when I was listening to Art gush about his recent two weeks in Rome, a small beetle the size of a grain of rice scuttled from the fruit bowl to hide under my plate. A rare little jewel. But when I lifted up my dish the bug was no longer there.

  It must have been 3am or so by the time we stumbled to “our room”. The curtains were open, and through the window I saw the moon, cold and white, punched through a sky already teasing the pink of dawn. We sat on the end of the bed and pressed our lips together, my hand reaching out for his unexplored middle. I had no concept of Art’s dimensions – the width of his torso, or the location of his navel. His body was a vast land for which I owned no map, so I tried to memorise every hill, gully or soft valley, so that I might find my way back.

  Art’s eyes were closed when our faces met. His lips were thin, different, and just as I started to fall into another place I focussed on my breathing, pushing the darkness out with the exhale. Art raised his eyebrows at me, so I brushed off the red rising up my neck as “the wine”, and leant in again, this time – starting with my mind’s eye already pressed somewhere I’d learned to go.

  We sat apart again and peeled off our clothes before climbing i
nto the bed, Art on my right, as if it would always be so. I had removed everything, all trinkets and treasures, and Art had removed everything aside from the blue leather bracelet that set us both apart.

  “You should have left that on,” he whispered.

  We didn’t need to touch each other, the inches between us tickled, and I was struck by how much this arrangement (though so organised) felt so erotic. We were turned on our sides facing each other, the duvet tucked around our necks. Art made no effort at all to hold me, and as the room continued to sway like the deck of a ship, all I could think about was how much of me Art could actually see with his glasses sitting there on the nightstand.

  I had an early booking the next morning to go through my seventh round of genetic counselling. After a brief few minutes of running my fingers through my curls and smudging a lipstick across the apples of my cheeks, I swept out the door – Art and I following each other’s gaze with the same, conspiratorial smile. I travelled to Easton Grove wearing last night’s clothes as a mark of triumph.