Composite Creatures Read online

  Moving Art into my flat was out of the question. It hardly had enough room for me, and Art needed an office. Art looked into extending his contract but the landlord replied with a clear and definite “No”, never elaborating on why and refusing to meet. Art asked again, even offering to up his rent voluntarily, but the landlord stopped replying to his emails, and instead issued an end of contract letter for his tenancy, signed and predated.

  We started looking at rental properties just out of the city, so I wouldn’t be too far from work and Art could look out to the green belt, with its stretches of seeded earth and the scatterers treading up and down the rows in their overalls and sprinkling the dead soil with good numbers. To me, they looked like the pictures of old beekeepers you’d see in books, but the green of their overalls was almost bleached white from the hip down. Sometimes they’d be driving some sort of tractor that sprayed the fertilisers from a chute at the back, but most kept their practice primitive – walking slowly up and down the furrows, often coughing into their elbows every few feet. A horrible job. And even though the city air clung to my hair and stung my nostrils when leaving Stokers, I still preferred it to the fertilisers when caught in a crosswind. Whatever they were, they burned deep in the chest. But Art said the cleaner air would help him think, so we started searching for a place that would fit the two of us comfortably and that felt like a “step up” from our apartments. Somewhere cosy, with room to grow.

  But the main priority was that the house would need a sizeable, soundproof loft that could be easily accessed and securely sealed.

  We viewed three properties before we found our house on Dukesberry Terrace – a slim, two-bedroomed red-brick with a little yard at the front (for show) and a decent-sized creamy lawn out the back. From the front windows you could watch the terraces coil like a snail shell, dotted with little figures hurrying from A to B. Everyone’s curtains were either closed or obscured by netting, which made me wonder whether they were hiding too. Even if their circumstances weren’t like mine and Art’s, they were all blocking off the world, the light. Perhaps if they knew what we were doing they’d understand. The estate agent turned out to be far more open-minded than Art’s landlord had been, blithely telling us that people here kept to themselves, and that there were other couples just like us across the street and a few doors down. He said there was a community drive to pick up litter every fortnight but taking part was optional, and a fruit seller set up shop on the corner two streets down every Saturday.

  I loved how the house sat propped by its brothers, as if being backed up in a fight or leaning together against a cold wind. Despite the house technically having three floors, the building was still a little shorter than its neighbours, which had additional conservatories, annexes, and extensions built on all the available sides. What were once probably front gardens were now all paved over, with plastic gnomes replacing what would have been flowers. I suppose it was easier than fighting the losing battle every day. Cleaner than coating your front step in fertilisers.

  Our front door was painted purple with fine white streaks through it like the petals on a primrose. We had two ground floor windows and two on the first floor. The house looked like a child’s drawing of what a home should be. There was even a chimney, which I imagined would puff white clouds from its lips.

  We decided to make the place ours before moving in. We painted a room each evening after I’d finished work at Stokers. We’d start out full of chatter, but by the time night came we’d be side by side, stroking the French grey and earthy olive up and down in meditative, easy silence. While painting I sometimes thought I heard the doorbell go, but Art never looked away from the walls so I ignored it too.

  When he wasn’t looking, I watched for little things that Art did that might give his game away. Like when he dropped paint on the hardwood and tried to rub it off secretly with his fist in a sock. How he kept giving me only half the sugar I asked for in my coffee, and never explained why.

  We’d usually lie on the sofa for an hour or so after giving up the brush. When he was absorbed in watching something on TV, he’d rest his head in the spread of his hand and squeeze his scalp. One night we were watching the news, and afterwards a sponsorship clip came up for Easton Grove. He perked up in his chair, his eyes wide and white, when the man and woman began to laugh into the lake again. The woman’s fine gold necklace glittered impossibly.

  “That’ll be us next year, lover,” he whispered, shaking my elbow. “Me and you.”

  In an effort to wake the house up, I went through a phase of buying spidery ferns, trees, and fertilisers at a garden centre after work nearly every day, dripping the compounds they needed onto the roots with love and lining the windowsills with life. Part of me did it because Art had had so many plants in his old flat, and I thought this might help to make the place feel like home. When he saw me carry in the third batch, he let out an “Ohhhhh”, as if he’d only just realised something, and told me that the greenery in his apartment had been artificial and already there when he’d rented it.

  Art wanted to set up his new “aviary” alone. He painted the walls in beetle-shell green, and spent long nights after I’d gone home mounting shelves and ordering his books and papers first one way, and then another way, stacking them up from the floor and along the windowsills. He placed his desk, a square slab of polished oak, in the centre of the room so if you walked in you’d be facing him, sitting in his leather chair.

  I left him to it, and spent the time packing up my flat into boxes labelled “Keep”, “Donate”, and “Bin”. I didn’t want to bring anything that reminded me of the life I’d had, which didn’t leave me with much. Frankly, it was horrifying that I could disappear so easily into a few cardboard boxes. What would Art think when he saw my lack of substance? He’d only been in the UK a few months and already he had awards, certificates, validation.

  I found that most things I didn’t know what to do with lived in the top drawers of cabinets that I never opened – thin rolls of sticky tape, plastic keyrings from museums, cinema tickets, birthday cards. To anyone else it would look like junk. I left this drawer until last, but there’s no avoiding these things forever.

  I poured a glass of wine down my throat before I set to work.

  In the front corner of the drawer was a small wooden box that used to contain an ammonite. You know, the fossil that coils in on itself? It wasn’t lost; I could picture exactly where the ammonite was – sitting in a top drawer in another flat with darker walls but more light. Perhaps being lifted from its secret home by hands that loved old things. Hands that’d once felt like warm butter on my skin and smelled like vanilla.

  On autopilot, I reached to the back and pulled at a plastic bag which clinked as it slid towards me. Inside the bag, the shattered glass shone invitingly like diamond. I knew one of the faces in the photo beneath the glitter was mine, but it looked rounder, or maybe the hair was shorter. Anyway, she wasn’t me.

  I stroked my finger around the edge of the gold picture frame before pressing a fingertip to a spike, holding it there until a dome of red bloomed. I couldn’t feel a thing. I wiped the blood over the two faces with their cheeks pressed together, then stuffed the orange bag and wooden box in the kitchen bin. After that, the rest of the drawer was easier.

  As Art and I spread our haul of new furniture and soft things around the house, it turned out that there wasn’t a lot of room left for memories anyway. We placed our photos side by side on the dark wood mantelpiece in the living room, placed our towels tight together on the bathroom rail, and stacked mugs on the branches of our new mug stand, which twisted up and out from its base like a family tree.

  I was careful to only put my things in the left side of the bedroom, and not be presumptuous. I squished my clothes to the left of the wardrobe, left him three empty drawers, and plumped up the pillows. I brought up the patchwork blanket, and, sure that Art would hate its tastelessness, rolled it up tight and stowed it under my side of the bed where it
wouldn’t be seen.

  Just as I was finishing the bedroom, something fell through the letterbox with a heavy thump. I leapt down the stairs to find a slim blue box with “Arthur and Norah” written in iridescent bronze ink. There was no postmark or address, so I pressed my face to the living room window to see who had dropped it off, but the street was cold and still.

  I sat with the box on the bottom stair. Art was at the market, picking up some bits to see us through. I knew that the Grove would want us to open the box together, to bond, but I couldn’t resist the temptation of some kind of head start. I opened the box gently, so it could be closed seamlessly again afterwards. Inside the nest of tissue were a pair of bronze keyrings, a long and shimmering “Welcome Home” banner, a pair of envelopes – one addressed to each of us, and a window sticker for the front of the house, which read “We are the future”. I pocketed the sticker straight away, almost sure that Art wouldn’t want to broadcast our lives either, but it was easier to not give him the option. Next, I opened the envelope with “Norah” handwritten across the sleeve. Inside was a long list, entitled “The secret persuasions of Arthur McIntyre”, such as spontaneity, banoffee pie, clocks that don’t tick, Indian head massages, and crisp white shirts. I folded up the list and placed it back into the box. No. Wouldn’t it be better for both of us if Art shared those things with me naturally? Besides, without context, what did they even mean? I couldn’t imagine Art wearing a crisp white shirt, so did it mean I should wear one? I wished I could read the list they’d given Art, but I couldn’t think of a way to open the envelope cleanly enough to reseal it convincingly. I didn’t even remember telling the Grove what I liked or didn’t like. How could they know?

  When Art came home, we “discovered” the box on the doormat together. When he read through the contents of the envelope with “Art” swirled on its sleeve, he nodded sagely and winked in my direction. I played along of course. Rather than curl up on the new sofa, we spent our first full night sitting on the kitchen floor, playing Battleships. The house was a home and not a home, and it felt too soon for me to act like being there was routine. Once we finished playing, we headed up to bed together, and I spent the dark hours watching his chest rise and fall, and acclimatising to the sound his breath made against the pillow. I was an explorer, studying a wild beast, with daybreak as his backdrop.

  As a gift to us, and as a much-needed break from decorating and unloading boxes, Easton Grove had booked us a morning session with a portrait photographer, so we could have some decent pictures of us together to put in frames around the house. They would also keep one or two on file, ready in case any press-worthy stories came up in the future.

  We both dressed in the least creased outfits we could find amongst the chaos of cardboard boxes, and made our way there – only a little bit self-conscious about the prospect of showing our best faces to each other and a complete stranger.

  The photographer was a short, greasy-looking man with stringy hair that clung to his cheeks. He seemed totally out of place in the pristine studio, but as we walked in, he sat with his legs spread and shoulders relaxed, as if he belonged there more than anywhere in the world.

  He showed Art and I through the racks of backgrounds Easton Grove had approved, and we sniggered and gave each other plenty of side-eye as we pointed out the worst ones – an empty beach, lined with palms, the plaza in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and grassy banks, peaked with the giant heads of Easter Island. We settled on a mottled blue background with spray-on clouds – like the background in an old graduation picture. It seemed the least ridiculous.

  The photographer had us sit next to each other on a box draped with a blue sheet, and then asked us first to look at each other’s eyebrows, then at an imaginary pool between us, and then at his finger floating – here, then there, then there. Each pose was as difficult to navigate as the last. Art obviously wasn’t sure how much he should touch me, and even when he did pull me close I barely felt the weight of his arm around my shoulders. My hands lay fidgeting in my lap with nothing to do.

  “Try something else. Breathe. Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, lips apart, like this.” The photographer’s nostrils flared obscenely on the inhale, and his jaw dropped as he let out one long exhale. It didn’t look particularly photogenic. “Relax-the-FACIAL-MUSCLES.”

  We both tried it. I took a sneaky look at Art and he was doing it all wrong – tensing his brow, pushing on the outbreath, pursing his lips. The photographer rubbed his red face and got us to stand, bounce on our knees, flap our arms. Then we tried posing while holding hands below the frame and out of shot, both of us looking at our fingers intertwined.

  Eventually the ordeal ended, and the photographer beckoned us over to a screen to see a preview. He scrolled through rows and rows of thumbnails and stopped on one somewhere near the bottom of the file. He pointed at four near identical photos in a row.

  “I think this is the best you can do,” he said. “Sorry. Definitely the best of a bad lot.”

  He gave us the four prints in a sleeve to take home, and when we got back to the house we spread them on the table, both of us grimacing at how awkward we looked. In each of them I was looking at Art as if about to say something, my top lip flattened on the cusp of the letter “B” or maybe “P”. Art was looking at something past me off-camera, his eyes blurred by a half blink.

  I stood one up against a vase, muttering under my breath, “And this is the best we could do.”

  Even though the process had been excruciating, I was still glad of the terrible photo. All that time spent decorating and primping and plumping before we moved in made moving-in-day feel like I was stepping straight into someone else’s life. Even my own stuff took on an uncanny, alien feel in its new setting, and I avoided touching any of it. At least with the photo it looked like I actually did live there.

  The only space we hadn’t already refurbished was the loft.

  Having the loft was part of the tenancy agreement, and we were given free rein to ditch or re-use whatever we found. Most of it was junk; depressed sofa cushions, shoeboxes full of old papers and faded bills, grubby toolboxes rattling with loose screws, and charity bags full of old sheets and Christmas decorations. We hired a skip and poured all of it away, leaving a long cavernous space which seemed somehow larger than the floorplan of the house.

  The loft was flanked by two long wooden benches, the kind older kids sit on in school assembly, and these were the only bits of furniture we kept. We discovered beneath the dust that the wood flooring we’d been promised was still in good condition, though deeply scratched. I crawled on hands and knees, cleaning, polishing, and disinfecting it, while Art danced away from the wispy cobwebs following in his backdraught.

  When the place was clean, we painted the walls and ceiling a deep plum, and replaced the yellow light in the roof with a daylight bulb. There was a little skylight in the far corner, and I scrubbed at the glass until soft lilac shone through.

  With the lights switched off and the water pipes thrumming, the room became a hollow womb, only escapable by the small opening to our first floor. We kept the loft stripped of accessories and anything that could snag or catch, apart from a cardboard box stuffed with a plaid towel, an old chintz bedspread (folded into quarters and pressed into the corner of the loft) and a plastic fruit crate lined by a green fleecy jacket that Art never wore anymore. Finally, we placed an oblong plastic tray in the far corner as instructed, and sprinkled in wooden pellets that smelt of pine. Even after the loft was finished, I took up the paint tins late at night to smooth on further coats of plum, until I was sure that the space was ready for its new occupant.

  We’d been in the house for a fortnight. I picked out a dress printed with black willow trees, and painted my face with sophisticated taupes and tan. I reached for my old starling necklace, but instead picked up a chunky silver choker. Already the weight of it pulling at my neck annoyed me, but I kept it on because it matched. In the bedroom mi
rror I looked like me and not like me. A dream version of me. All grown up, now. I pressed a cold glass of water against my neck to cool the red petals of anxiety blooming up my throat.

  Art sidled into the room, already in tweed trousers and a blue paisley shirt, buttoned tightly to his neck.

  “I’m excited. Are you?” he whispered, leaning in behind me and pressing his chest against my back.

  “Petrified.”

  “Maybe this’ll help. Close your eyes.”

  His hands squeezed my shoulders and I tipped back my head, bathing in the rhythm of his fingers. After a moment or two he let go, and I swayed in the darkness, all alone.

  “Turn around.”

  I spun on my heel and reached out my arms to find him again, but Art was gone. When I opened my eyes, he was kneeling on the floor. I knew straightaway what was happening but I was so taken aback that I couldn’t speak. Art laughed, and reached up for my hand. “Don’t worry, it’s alright. Norah, will you?”

  I feel ashamed of the way I reacted now. But shocks are exactly that – shocks. Fight or flight. I staggered, knocked off balance. “Art, who told you to do that?”

  “No one. This is all me. And you, obviously.”

  My left hand wrapped around my now crimson throat. Married? Us? “Arthur and Norah”. We’d already committed to an entwined life until the end, so why did this feel so different? I suppose I thought we’d talk this sort of thing through and decide together, like we had with everything else. I thought I’d said goodbye to spontaneity, and I’d made my peace with that. Now Art had pulled a stick of dynamite and was wiggling a match dangerously close. Good explosion, or bad explosion?

  “Is that a yes, wifey? And then we can arrive in the New Year in style?”

  What else could I do? I nodded, dumb as a shop mannequin. Art brought my hand up to his face for a kiss, and then retrieved a red box from his pocket. There it was.

  “Call me paranoid, but I didn’t want to get this out until I knew you’d say yes.” He pulled open the box and inside sat a gold ring, set with a white stone flecked with scarlet and green. It looked like stained glass.