Composite Creatures Page 3

I drove the forty or so miles to the clinic straight from Art’s flat, only stopping to pick up an Earl Grey and victory bagel from a service station. I devoured them in my corner of the car park, each mouthful deservedly sweet and full of life. I didn’t care if the heightened sugar levels in my blood would expose my failings. What did it matter? I’d spent the night with Art, and he was wonderful. And he was mine, all but for a signature on a dotted line. But plenty of time for that if that day ever came. Months, years, perhaps. My head swam with all the possible futures we could have – all the places we could go, and things we could see. Art would open so many doors, taking me with him into tomorrow. And more importantly, he wanted me, he seemed to really, genuinely want me. Me. If that wasn’t an occasion for cake, I don’t know what was.

  Easton Grove is such an English name for what it was, a township of small cottage-style surgeries set around a larger central building, housing all the key conference halls, clinics, and laboratories, and fronted by a marble reception where your footsteps echo. Though it couldn’t have been built more than fifteen years before, the main building had been built in the style of an old manor house, with high ceilings and rows of windows with crisscross lead hatching.

  The whole Easton Grove site was set way out of the city, surrounded by acres of forest and fields which changed colour through the seasons, from spring’s yellow stretches of rapeseed to winter’s frost-bitten blue. I had never seen greener grass, and it squeaked beneath your shoes like clingfilm. The air there was sweeter – not fresher, exactly, but like the synthetic scent of laundry liquid. If I’d read the label, I bet it would have said “cool cotton” or “flax”. Everything there seemed artificially bright, as if the smog between earth and the sun had been sterilised. If it wasn’t for the bronze-plated sign embossed with the brass ankh by the front gates, you might’ve thought it was a secluded country community, protected from trespassers and preserved like a pressed flower. Access to the site was via three sets of gates, manned by Grove staff dressed (in my mind) a little too much like farmers, smiling widely in glass booths, clad in checked shirts and earthy corduroys. Sometimes groups of non-members waited outside the gates, clasping the railings and glaring through into the compound, but today there were only one or two stragglers standing on their own, so I let all my muscles relax.

  During my induction phases, the fallow fields and lack of life around the site had left me cold, but that day everything was illuminated. Rooftops shone like hot terracotta, and the stacks of white transporter cartons outside the surgeries reflected the brilliant gold of the sun. Even the ridiculously polished statues of what I suppose were meant to be pheasants and swans beside the path glittered like real silver.

  The air tasted incredible today, so I took the scenic route to reception. On the way, I passed Grove caretakers wearing forensic suits and carrying their crinkling black waste-sacks, and their faces beamed in welcome and pleasure to see me. Lab coats glowed, like the shrouds of saints. A pair of doctors nodded to me like comrades do in films when no words are necessary. Even the gloomy-looking cottages with no windows that sat beneath the hanging branches of the willows didn’t distract me. It was easy to be fooled by them, but as you got closer, you couldn’t help but see the peeling paintwork, the chipped wood panelling. They were just painted pre-fabs, the sort you see when there’s a pop-up blood donation drive or a polling booth. The doors were always closed, and only staff in white coats or tweed went in and out of them during clinic hours. Today though, the sun bleached out the shadows from the trees, and the recordings of birdsong drowned out the strange clangs and thumps that could be heard from within their walls.

  I’d been a delegate of the Easton Grove private healthcare programme for six months at this point, and of the five treatment phases I was on the cusp of breaking into phase four, Establishment, wherein my membership would start to actually roll out. This was the point where each patient reacts a little differently. Some adjusted relatively well, taking their new fitness and nutritional plans on the chin, while others reacted with spite. One woman in my focus group – I think her name was Barbara – stuffed her personalised plans straight in the paper bin, bellowing, “This isn’t where my money goes is it? Fuck this, I could download this shit off the internet. You might as well give me my fucking tarot card reading, as well.” Barbara was marched off to a sealed room by two small nurses dressed in cream tweed and clicking their ballpoint pens, both straining to hide their annoyance behind the smiles (but not concealing it enough). Barbara re-joined the group an hour later, her face flushed, a new plastic sleeve of exercises and food plans rolled in her fist. She didn’t speak to any of us again after that, and listened to the professor’s toxin warnings and nutritional basics with pursed lips and a chin jutting out like the tip of a sword.

  Most patients didn’t make it onto phase four, and disappeared without so much as a sad little wave. It must’ve been devastating to get this far into the programme and then not make the cut, to be relegated to fight for a hospital bed. Some people waited months or even years for a slot to open, and then were told that their initial test results weren’t compatible or their body type just “didn’t fit the strict criteria”. Easton Grove had received plenty of criticism over the years for its inflexibility and unwillingness to admit members from different areas of society. I did think to myself that the exclusivity wouldn’t last – they surely couldn’t keep accepting so few people while the world watched and wilted? Those who didn’t make it into an intake saw the rest of us as withholding some genetic secret, but the truth was that we had no idea why we were chosen.

  In the early days of phase one and two we were all treated the same, and went through identical blood tests, cardio assessments, ultrasounds, invasive extractions, musculo-skeletal exercises, psychological exams and genetic analysis. Some left you sore, and almost all left you feeling strange. We attended the Grove in gangs of forty, sitting together in conference halls with freshly-brewed coffee and piles of fresh fruit. We each held a numbered ticket, and waited until our number was called on one of the mounted TV screens to go in for our next trial.

  It warmed your insides, having so many professionals buzz around you, wanting to know exactly who you were. Two consultants asked about Mum, and though their questions made my throat tighten, each of them squeezed my elbow and made me a sweet milky tea, which did help. It was an acquired taste, that tea. Thick with sugar and cream, but once you’d had a few cups it felt like an instant hug. I’ll never forget how Fia, my ovum organi consultant, tipped her head and smiled as she offered me an embroidered handkerchief to wipe away my tears. “Keep it,” she’d said, so softly. But after our time in the consultation room was up and I returned to the waiting room, I felt alone again. Out of balance. Even though I could still taste the sugar on my lips, I was bruised and longed for my name to be called again so that the next doctor would piece me back together.

  We were encouraged to chat and get to know each other between assessments, but because all the candidates were desperate and no one knew the judging criteria, everyone pressed their truths to their chests and kept neighbours at arm’s length. All the while, consultants dressed in their tweed drifted around the perimeter, swiping on their tablets and occasionally clicking their ballpoint pens as if distracted.

  I didn’t do well, being watched. I clammed up, my mind going completely blank when another applicant asked me a question, even when it was as innocuous as, “How was the road for you, getting here?” Every time I stammered or didn’t follow someone’s thread the consultants tapped their screens and gave me a little smile. In the end I decided to not talk too much and just try to look like I wasn’t panicking. Loosen the jaw, eat a plum.

  Not everyone wanted to be there of course. During one day of assessments, a girl who looked fresh out of school slouched low in the chair opposite. I had been reading a handout entitled “The Greying – How to be Clean, Inside and Out”, but couldn’t resist watching her. She wore a black leather coat and pi
nk Dr Martens, and hid her eyes behind a sweep of glossy chestnut hair. If she did look up and catch my eye, she’d flick her face away before sinking down to face her bony knees, lost again in whatever thought held her. She constantly fidgeted with the studs on her jacket, then a zip, then the loose threads dangling from the conference chair. Her name tag said “16: Jane”, and whenever “16” filled the TV screens she’d stare at it motionless for a good twenty seconds or so before dragging herself upright by the hips, as if her head and torso were more reluctant than her legs to leave the chair.

  But over the course of the day, I think I got the measure of her. She’d have been funded through the programme by her parents, and for some reason was rallying against it. Maybe they’d chosen to fund her membership to the Grove rather than send her to university, or probably more likely Jane was used to being funded and was just damned ungrateful. In a lot of other programmes Jane would have been one of the first to be weeded out, after all there were thousands of people who would slip into her empty chair with no fuss at all, lips buttoned shut. But as is the way of it, Jane lasted the full course, and never for one moment did she look happy about it.

  Jane wasn’t the only delegate at the Grove who exuded the musk of secret wealth. Prospective members had to jump repeated financial hurdles to even get onto the programme. First there was the non-refundable deposit to enter the lottery, and then another upfront cost if you were selected for testing. If after this you were lucky enough to be accepted onto an induction (phase two), you started to pay a monthly fee. Graduating to each phase meant another lump sum, and another adjusted monthly fee. This would continue until you graduated from phase five and became an outpatient member of Easton Grove, and then you just paid your monthly fee indefinitely. There were rumours that the Grove did a lot to help members in financial crisis, but I never met anyone who didn’t exude the comfort that comes from a life without money worries.

  I stuck out like a sore thumb amongst those people. I had no family to raise me in a queen’s chair or a cash-cow career to fall back on. I’d been upfront with the clinic from the start about my financial situation – I was there because of a gift. My funds were finite.

  After Mum’s funeral, I’d started to sort through her rooms, sectioning her life piece by piece into boxes labelled “Keep”, “Charity” and “Bin”. I remember dropping off the donations at the charity shop, the white plastic bags freeing their nicotine musk when the volunteer peered inside.

  I should have been bereft. I was saying goodbye to the dresses and coats I still pictured her in, but all I felt was embarrassment at the smell, and I left without a word.

  The “Keep” box was no larger than a shoebox, around the size for storing knee-length boots. The more stuff I placed in the “Keep” box the heavier I felt, and so I only packed feather-light memories; photographs of us together, letters, even a few scrawled shopping lists she must have written in the early days of illness. I also took her binoculars, her palette – still smeared with a Monet of watercolours – and her table top easel. Finally, I chose one of the feathers from amongst her bookshelves – a soft black thing, about six inches long, shining iridescent blue along its edge. I considered taking her perfume, but the bottled oil smelled like a funeral.

  And then the loft. Stacked behind a tower of cardboard boxes sagging with stuffed toys and plastic games, a pram without its wheels, and steel cases of rusted bolts, screws, and tools, I discovered over forty of her paintings and miniatures, all wrapped in old bedsheets.

  I looked at them all, one by one, holding some for a lot longer than others. There was no theme to them, unless the theme was “Mum”. The Northumberland coast that she loved, the Yorkshire moors. Animals. She used reference photographs to paint wild things where wild things should be. No dead earth. No lilac sky. There were three portraits of me when I was a toddler, and one of Aubrey and I in Mum’s back garden, sitting on the wall with our arms interlocked and our eyes on the sky.

  At first the find felt like treasure, but quickly I felt trapped by it. Anchored by a collection that would fill up my flat and be impossible to hide from. I couldn’t face the still eyes of Mum’s self-portrait, the loose strands of curly red hair dried into the paint, or accept that the world was as colourful as she saw it.

  Of the forty or so paintings I kept only the smallest two. Mum wasn’t famous in any degree, but she did have a regular cohort of collectors. I could only imagine that these paintings were hidden up there because she thought they lacked something, or she hadn’t considered them finished. Sometimes she’d bring out a landscape from years before and start dabbing on more oily layers, her face inches from the canvas. Mostly the added layers were making it all darker, not better, but she’d bat me away, telling me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that she’d changed, so the picture should too.

  Mum hadn’t produced any new work in at least a year before she died, so her collectors were eager for a last piece of posthumous pie. I pulled out of all negotiations, waving off the canvases to the agent without as much as a word. Only a fortnight after emptying the loft of oils and watercolours, I received a letter from the agent with a cheque for more money than Mum had ever earned while living, even with the agent’s fees removed. I hadn’t expected to inherit anything – her cottage was rented, and I hadn’t been surprised to discover that she hadn’t much in terms of savings. There had just been enough to cover a funeral, the price of white roses, and several plates of sad crustless sandwiches, sausage rolls, and Victoria sponge.

  Those paintings paid for my future with Art.

  Art wasn’t there in the initial assessment days of my programme; he came into my focus group during phase three. At this point patients arrived and disappeared weekly, and you got used to keeping a distance.

  I was in the waiting area, drinking from a bottle of mineral water when Art first walked in. He wore a forest green velvet jacket and bright mustard trousers, and darted through the clinic’s duck-egg like a greenfinch. The world didn’t dim around him, my heart didn’t skip a beat, but I felt as if I could know him, and could anticipate his nature if only I knew his voice. He sat directly opposite me on a plush red chair, and after a single scan around the waiting room, picked up a copy of National Geographic and started to read. I knew who he was, even if he didn’t immediately know me. Art was at once a mystery and a map.

  Once I’d passed the medical checkpoints and signed yet more paperwork, our focus groups were brought back together to learn about the Grove’s current research into the biomechanics of the ovum organi. Most people weren’t interested in that bit so much, but the doctors seemed to have anticipated that so they kept it brief and discharged us all with an information pack and instructions to carry on with life as normal while they compiled the results of our assessments and made their final decisions. The doctor’s face was expressionless as he said it, but you could tell that he knew that his words were empty. How could we just forget it, when the email from them in my inbox might mean life or death?

  I opened up the information pack as soon as I got home. The bulk of the material was bound in a single guidebook as thick as my thumb. I’d seen the poster-image on the cover before, in doctors’ waiting rooms, on TV, glossy sponsorship banners at airports. “The Art of Self-Preservation”, written in gold under a bronze ankh. An instantly recognisable garden with the violet heather, golden buttercups, everything wild and lush. A crystal-clear lake in the foreground, a man and woman sitting beside each other on the bank. Both intent on something deep beneath the surface of the water, and grinning at whatever their secret was.

  Tucked into the back of the book was a small envelope stuffed with a twelve-page confidentiality agreement, typed in the tiniest black font. Clipped to the agreement was a pink leaflet apparently detailing “The Potential for Member Reconditioning”, but the writing was even smaller and – frankly – terribly photocopied and completely unreadable. In fact, focussing on the words made me feel nauseous, so I flicked
to the back page and the dotted line, where again they’d included the lakeside photo. Finally, a business card tumbled from the envelope with the details for my personal legal representative at Easton Grove, if I needed a “reassuring helping hand to guide me through the unlikely complications of membership”.

  There was one other envelope, white and labelled with my membership ID. I took three deep breaths before peeling it open and unfolding the single A4 sheet. A copy of a copy, signed by Fia Ostergaard. My vital statistics, blood type, genetic profile – the black and white of what I was. Towards the bottom, I found something that made my lower stomach heave so I folded the sheet into eighths and pressed it into the back of the guidebook. I didn’t want to know more.

  When I look back to those days, I can’t help but cringe at how ignorant I was. How I was sure I understood everything, but in reality, how lightly I walked through the assessments and training. It wasn’t that I hadn’t prepped. I had. I read all the material meticulously, asked all the right questions, showed all the right signs. I was the one with the shining eyes and a hand in the air. I wouldn’t have made it through the programme otherwise. But perhaps it was that there had been so many papers to shuffle, sites to trawl, clinic appointments every week – and of course, Art – that neither of us had time to really digest what we were doing. We wore the facts like badges, never looking down at the truth we’d created.

  Because before Nut arrived I had no idea. Like everyone, I spent all my time listening, not truly thinking. I’ve seen it in others time and time again – relying on that instinctual stab in the belly to tell them something’s wrong before the misfortune slaps them in the face. But the gut can be distracted by other things, and in those instances the stomach-twist never comes.

  And then it’s too late.

  3

  My graduating from phase four synced with Art and I moving in together.