Composite Creatures Page 20

  I wasn’t stupid, Fia was leading me down some alley. The bald man was still staring at me, his face expressionless apart from the odd glance up at Markus, twitching in his seat.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Norah,” Fia replied, her face all open with mock surprise. “You’re not usually so abrupt – is something going on at home?”

  What do you want?

  “He’s doing just fine. We’re doing fine. All open, honest,” I spat my last words, “like in the contract. Cut us and we bleed the same bronze.”

  Fia sat back in her chair and spoke slowly. “Do you need any tips from us on keeping everything nice and sweet? Perhaps for his Christmas gifts? When we spoke to him recently he didn’t sound very–”

  “No, Fia. Stop now.” I stood up, my words loud, and I knew I’d made a mistake. In a split second, the bald man was on his feet too, towering almost a whole foot over me. For a mad moment, I actually had to stop myself from reaching out and touching his skull or even clasping that hot dome in my palm. I think I just wanted to remind myself of his vulnerability, his humanity. After all, like all of us, he was just blood, bones and a heart. He wasn’t just a hired goon – he would have had a family, a home. But instead, I sat down again, my knees melting beneath my weight. Fia cleared her throat.

  “Anyway,” she breezed, as if the last minute hadn’t just happened, “while we’re here, we wanted to give you your Christmas gift. From Easton Grove, to you.” She nodded at Markus, who caught her signal despite his eyes still being closed. Perhaps they weren’t closed, but just appeared that way through puffiness? Markus began to speak, his voice hoarse and mechanical.

  “An opportunity has come up, and it’s perfect for you. It’s about time you moved up the ladder. It’s more responsibility. More pay. More prospects. Are you ready?”

  Up the ladder? Here? Up the ladder. Up the ladder into the loft at Stokers. My own dark loft, with a hatch that opens at my keepers’ bequest. Moving upstairs was moving into darkness, not the light.

  Escape. Escape. Gush out honesty. For once, honesty.

  “I- I don’t know,” I blurted. Fia was eyeing me up like a meal. “I’ve been thinking of something else,” I said. “Something creative. My mum was a painter, she was really good. I think I’d like to do some classes. Maybe see how good I get, get some advice.”

  The three of them stared at me. Fia’s eyebrows merged with her hairline. Dark patches ate Markus’ shirt.

  “But Norah,” Fia laughed, “that doesn’t sound very stable, does it? How far do you expect to get with that? It’s too late for you to start again.”

  “I’ll just do an evening class,” I whispered. “This might be the thing I’m actually good at. Something creative, like Arthur.” I tried to smile. “If anyone here has time, surely it’s me.”

  I plucked the words I used like fish from a pond. But I could tell from their faces I’d gone too far, strayed too close to the deep waters. They knew me, what I was made of, what I tasted like.

  Fia spoke slowly. “It might be that we can arrange a night class for you. A hobby class. But I think that’s as far as that’ll go. Norah, you’re our shining example of what members of the Grove are capable of. We all want to be proud of you. Make us proud of you.”

  She reached across and placed her hand over my offered heart. It was almost… romantic. She stroked my knuckle with her thumb, back and forwards, back and forwards. Was it love?

  “I’ll try,” I whispered.

  “I- I think you’ll like it.” Markus stuttered, shuffling his papers with an eye on Fia and the man in blue. On top of the pile was a dull grey envelope with the bronze ankh and Markus’ name on it. The paper looked wrinkled, damp, as if it’d been clenched in sweaty hands. Everyone was watching me, waiting for me to make my next move in the game.

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  “You’ll be managing the staff on this floor, the clerks who process small claims. You’ve got enough experience of the day-today, anyway.” Markus laughed, his face a shining ruby. The papers under his hands were softening in the damp, becoming waves on his desk.

  “But Markus,” I said. “Isn’t that your job? Where are you going?”

  “It’s fine,” he said, a bit too loudly. The blue envelope was in his hands now, shaking ever so slightly. “It’s fine. I’ll find something. It’s a big world out there. It’s exciting. Exciting.”

  Fia sighed, tutting under her breath. “Merry Christmas, Norah. We thought you deserved that. You’re going places now. Setting down roots. Think of yourself. Just imagine where you might be in the years to come. This chair, this office. This could be big.”

  * * *

  I stopped off on the drive home at a newsagent, one of those shops on a corner that specialises in paraphernalia to get you through the weekend. I went out of my way to find one I didn’t pass every day. I scanned the shelves of sugary delights and creamy desserts, passing by the gossip magazines and beer and wine and gin. People came and went, pushing by me without a glance. People totally preoccupied with their own lives, the short pleasures they could afford for less than ten pounds.

  Light-headed and empty-handed, I made my way to the front counter where a tired-looking man stood, framed by tall plastic stands slotted with scratch-cards and lottery tickets. He looked around the fifty-mark, though had probably seen more than fifty years’ worth of trouble.

  I handed over a twenty-pound note and pointed behind the counter to a row of old familiar packets. He picked one up and tossed it across the countertop with my change and a green lighter. I slid them towards me like a player in a saloon and let them fall into my handbag.

  My bag sat on the passenger seat all the way home. I ignored it until I pulled up outside the house, the street glowing with the eerie half-light of amber lamps on frost. I pulled the box from my bag and removed the cellophane in one graceful twist and tug. The pack clicked open and the twenty foam tips shone pristine like white towers. I removed one, twiddling it between my fingers and letting that old smell take me back to when I was little. Funnily, those deathsticks reminded me of a time when I didn’t worry. When doubts flitted by like leaves, coming and going on the wind.

  I flicked the lighter with a thumb, enjoying the sharp gear working my skin. Beside me the house skulked darker than its neighbours, shrinking behind their garlanded walls. It looked overshadowed, a child between custodians. The runt. Or a convict, led to internment by two jailors. It was hard to believe that the house wasn’t slowly being crushed by its neighbours, caving in on itself inch by inch.

  When had Art spoken to Easton Grove? He hadn’t said a word about it. What was he telling them? How could I ask him?

  I slotted the cigarette and the lighter back into the pack and thrust them inside the glovebox. The smell. I rubbed my palms up and down my trousers to remove the scent, fluffed up my hair between my fingers, and stepped out of the car into the freezing night.

  I held my breath as I entered the house, dropping my bag by the door like I always did.

  “Art?” I kicked off my shoes, giving my fingers a subtle sniff while I searched for him. No reply. The house was cold, almost as cold as outside. A breeze from the kitchen licked my face with an icy tongue.

  Still wrapped in my coat and hat, I ran to the kitchen to find the backdoor completely open, swinging slightly in the breeze. I went to lock it, but something stopped me. I didn’t want to look. Such inexplicable fear of what I might see.

  Art was standing in the middle of the garden with his back to the house. By a strange optical illusion, the light from next door’s Christmas decorations flickered beneath his feet as if he stood on water.

  “Art?”

  He didn’t turn or reply. I couldn’t see what he was looking at in the darkness and was too afraid to step towards him and find out. I felt a brush by my ankles and leapt to the side. It was Nut, curling herself around my legs, seeking comfort in the cold dew. And she was outside, Art had let her outside
. This wasn’t right. What had he done? Why would he be so careless after last time?

  “Arthur – Nut’s here, help me!” I wrapped my arms around Nut’s waist and tried to hoist her up but she was too heavy, her body too long for me to lift.

  “Art, I can’t do it on my own!”

  He didn’t move again but I wasn’t about to let Nut go to see what was wrong with him – every second she was there she was buffing the lawn chemicals into her skin, and in a moment could disappear into the dark beneath that bastard bush at the end of the garden.

  I managed to get her back to the house by dragging her, walking backwards with my spine bent. Nut didn’t try to get away but didn’t help much either. Her feet skated the lawn, her eyes on the clear sky and the stars above.

  I got her into the kitchen and shut the door, brushing the blades of grass and dead leaves from her back. She’d lost the juvenile fur from her face completely now, and her skin was clear, beautiful, and white. But there, below her lip, was a definite dark smear, as if something black had trickled there and been wiped off. A stain. Perhaps she’d been eating insects or berries from the bush. Her eyes were bright; she seemed OK. Time to worry if the berries were toxic in a minute.

  As Nut trotted off to the living room, I returned to the garden where Art still stood. I didn’t say anything, and wrapped my arms around him from behind, placing my head on his shoulder. Perhaps Art had always been the more sensitive one after all. I felt his hands on mine, damp and freezing. His feet were bare and blue, swollen lumps of flesh in the grass.

  I kissed his cheek and spun him around to face me. He looked right through me at the house, his eyes sunken into deep pits.

  “Norah, they know. You need to be careful.”

  I squeezed his upper arms, holding him close to me. Feel my heart. “Did you tell them?”

  He looked at me and then at the grass, his mouth pinched tight. After a ragged gasp of air he shook his head.

  “Then they don’t know anything,” I said. Art’s eyes were as wide as I’d ever seen them, and I unexpectedly remembered Mum’s words about the moon being white as a pearl long ago. But was it as white as Art’s eyes? No. Nothing could ever be as luminous, hovering in the green night-smog.

  “Norah, I’m not quite myself.”

  “I know.” So many problems that I couldn’t help, so I tried to rub some warmth into his arms. What could I do? We were locked together in this now. “It’s getting to me too. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I didn’t know.”

  Art shook his head and a little stream of blood, thin and mixed with spit, leaked from the side of his mouth. He looked like he was dying.

  “Your lip…”

  He brushed his mouth with the back of his hand and gave it only a glance before dropping his arm to his side. “That. That’s nothing. It’s fine. It’s fine. But Norah, I can hear her. I can hear Nut, now more than ever. In my head.” He clamped his hands over his ears. His voice sounded odd, slightly lisping, like his tongue was swollen.

  A brush by my ankle and Nut was there again, walking around our ankles in a figure of eight, only stopping to lick the frost from Art’s naked feet.

  16

  All Christmas, we kept ourselves locked in. Since Nut was now tall enough to reach up and use a door handle, we couldn’t take any chances. A locked door meant no one would leave, but then no one would come in either.

  Since that night in the garden, I’d been careful as to what I left lying around. I buried the cigarettes in the glovebox, and hardly left a room without carrying cups, plates or piles of papers. I vacuumed compulsively, emptying bag after bag of Nut’s shed fur straight into the bin outside. I was clearing conversation-starters, triggers, mistakes. Every dirty smudge was a smudge on me, a clue to tell Easton Grove that I wasn’t living my best life. I wasn’t capable. That I needed them to intervene. That I was thinking against them. Christmas might be the only time left sacred and free. Fia had a key, but even that wouldn’t let her in when the chain was on. Maybe that would be enough time to bundle Nut somewhere, perhaps back in the loft. Art would have to help, there’d be no way I could get her up the ladder on my own. Keeping on the double-lock would mean an extra few seconds to flatten my hair and pretend everything was fine. It was fine.

  Swallowing a lump in my throat, I spent the weekend before Christmas cleaning out the red loft again, sweeping the floor of Nut’s fallen fur, cleaning her beds, wiping clear the skylight. I plugged in the lamps and I filled a litter tray with white crystals. Art watched from his study as I carried up the cleaning supplies, his face blank, hands wrapped around the nape of his neck. I didn’t want him to speak. This was beyond him now.

  Outside was a dull, white watercolour. It hadn’t snowed yet, but the sky weighed heavy with the expectancy of it, as if the cloud was a canopy filled with mud. One sharp thrust upward and all the weather would come pouring down, like it had built up over a thousand years.

  So I prepared our Noah’s Ark. Downstairs, I purged the kitchen of potted carcasses. Despite them all sitting in a row and sharing the same light, each plant had died in its own discrete way. Most had shrivelled back into a gnarled stump, and others had become mushy, sinking down like a creamy concertina. Aubrey’s succulent had finally given up its last leaf, and the stalk stood obscenely naked, coiling towards the sun like an earthworm. I tossed them all into the composter and left the empty pots by the back door. I’d replace them with artificial plants later, once New Year had come and gone. I wiped down the windowsill and filled the empty space with Christmas cards from names I didn’t know, signed in bronze ink.

  I kept the lights in the house dim and everything in soft focus. I could stumble around, sherry in hand, eyes half-closed and still make it safely from room to room. Art said that it was as if I was preparing the house for hibernation, and maybe I was.

  Even Nut seemed soothed by the semi-darkness. Her morning and afternoon runs around the ground floor took on a sluggish lilt, as if her body weighed more than her feet could handle, and her face scrunched with the effort of keeping up the pace. When she flopped, exhausted, by the sofa, she’d roll onto her back and expose her bald belly for a rub. I blew raspberries on it and she’d twist her spine left and right, her four legs kicking at empty air. She should be wearing a Santa hat or something, I thought.

  I’d brought down Aubrey’s patchwork blanket and folded it into a corner of the living room for Nut to nap on, like how we’d done with Art’s fleece in the loft almost a year ago. But while she’d ignored his jacket, Nut rolled and twisted in the patchwork, gnawing the corners and rolling the bones of her fingers into the soft knit. It made my heart flutter.

  I started to think about baking, cooking, all those extra hours in the kitchen spent preparing feasts that happen in most homes at Christmas. Maybe that’s more for when there are kids running around hungry. It was a weight off my shoulders to know that I didn’t have that to worry about, but maybe it would’ve been worth it to have the magic of the season brought back a little.

  It was too late to make a Christmas pudding. Mum always made one – she called it a “rum dumpling”, sodden with all the booze she could get her hands on. “If you’re not drinking with every bite, it’s not Christmas,” she’d say. I wondered if she made one for her final Christmas, the year I didn’t go back. I must’ve told Luke once about the rum dumplings, because I remember him attempting a Christmas pudding in secret, feeding it whisky, sherry and port until it bled. That ever-hungry beast must have cost him an absolute fortune. It quivered like a jelly. It also tasted awful, and I told him so, but not before he spat out a charred mouthful into the sink. I kept going back to it though over the next few days, letting a spoonful of that heavy pulp rest on my tongue.

  I asked Art if he wanted me to go out and buy one but he pulled a face. I brought home a trifle, piled high with fruit and cream. I let Nut lick some from the tip of my finger, sending warm little sparks up my arm. She stood up on her hind legs for more, stret
ching her arms across the kitchen counter for treats to grab. Like that, her head was as high as my rib cage, her middle so thick that it obstructed her reach across the table top. We stood together like that while I made a batch of brownies for Christmas Eve. I narrated the baking process as I went along, “This is a whisk, to mix the egg and sugar, like this.” My whisking flicked little droplets of egg in Nut’s eyes and though she blinked furiously to protect her blues, she never wavered in wanting to take part, occasionally shuffling on her back legs to get a better view. I used to watch Mum bake in the same way, waiting for a finger-dip in the boozy batter. I dipped my finger in the chocolate cake mix and rolled it across Nut’s lips.

  After the half an hour in the oven was up, we bounded over to see the results – a soft and squidgy chocolate feast. I cut the hot sponge into even squares and four little cubes for Nut. After some gentle prodding to make sure they were cool enough, I placed one on the edge of the kitchen counter for her to reach up and grab. “You get the first taste, Nut. You made this cake yourself.”

  Nut stood up on her hind legs and swiped the cube into her waiting jaws. Her finger bones were so developed now that she could’ve picked up the cube if she’d wanted to. Instead, she batted it towards her like a cat, and after experiencing an odd spark of annoyance I remembered to be relieved. I let the feeling waft over me coolly, fanned by the wings of amnesty’s butterfly.

  Once the brownies had cooled, I brought Art a piece with a coffee. Though the curtains were open the study was dark, only lit by a little Tiffany table lamp. The walls looked black. Art was sitting on the floor in the corner by Nut’s book-den, an open hardback across his lap.

  I knelt beside him and closed the cover of the book, Huckleberry Finn. “It’s Christmas Eve. Come downstairs.”