Composite Creatures Page 6

  Aubrey was last to go, and raised a palm to Art as she slipped out the door. She didn’t even look at me. I couldn’t let her leave like that, I couldn’t. Lurching forwards, I grabbed her wrist and pulled her around to face me. She jerked her head back, eyes wide, and glanced between my hand and my face as if I was uncontrollable. Me. In that moment I was ready to say anything to make it right, to make it like it used to be. I didn’t want her to go and not come back, and I somehow knew that this could be my last chance to make her see.

  “I’m OK. I’m really OK. I’m happy. I’m going to be fine,” I whispered under my breath.

  At first, she seemed to consider what I’d said, and parted her lips to ready a reply. “How’s Luke?”

  I froze, terrified that Art would hear her from the kitchen. She hadn’t even kept her voice down. How could I answer that, here?

  This time she lowered her tone. “I saw him, you know. Not long ago.”

  That knot in my stomach twisted hard, and I felt a flash of something dark. I let go of her wrist and backed away. My hand felt dirty.

  I stood there, silent, until she reached across and squeezed my wrist, looking at me in a way that made something in the lower part of my stomach do a sharp flip. She was stoking embers I’d buried under coal, and she knew it. I looked away, but already dreaded being left in the dark.

  Aubrey gave a little shake of her head, and was gone.

  I’ve never forgotten how she looked at me then, and how quickly it all changed. How dare she judge me? Us. She didn’t even try.

  I locked the front door and rolled my forehead left and right on the cool wood, letting out one long, deep groan. Behind me, Art’s breath tickled my neck.

  “Why didn’t you tell them?”

  There wasn’t an answer to this. No answer he would have liked. To be honest, I just wasn’t ready to act up to it. I was happy, obviously I was happy, but there’d be questions, then more questions, and I’d need answers, and not instinctual answers that come unstructured. I’d have made a mess of it all, and I’d have let him down. He didn’t deserve that. Imagine how it would feel, to have proposed and then for your fiancée to sound unwilling?

  I turned, and flashed him one of my finest flirtatious smiles.

  “I kind of liked it as our little secret.”

  I sidled up to him, wrapping my arms around his back. He stood still for a moment before taking my waist. I could taste his breath on the air between us, tinted with wine and Art’s unique woody scent.

  “There’s plenty of time to get everyone else in on it. But for now, it’s ours. Our secret.”

  4

  Nut arrived in a small, unmarked white box made from everyday corrugated cardboard. Art carried her in like we’d have carried a new baby in a Moses basket, while I followed behind clutching a rainbow of plastic folders. The house already felt different.

  We’d taken down our meagre Christmas decorations the day before (we’d only hung them up so the house looked festive for the party), and though the place felt lifeless now and drained of colour, that wasn’t why it was odd. The passageway seemed lighter and the doors further away, as if I was psychically stretching out into every room on alert for sharp things or towers likely to fall. I was a thousand eyes cast across the floor and tingled with electricity, ready to release a bolt.

  I dropped the folders at the bottom of the stairs and flung my soaking boots on the shoe pile. Art and I gave each other a look and then began to walk the mile up the stairs, Art balancing the box carefully in his arms. My hand kept slipping on the bannister, and either because of nerves or the cold, I couldn’t feel my feet.

  When we reached the first floor, I stretched up and grabbed the long white cord hanging down from the ceiling. With a gentle pull, the stepladder swung down and landed with a soft thud on the carpet. Art led the way, hugging the box close to his body, his knuckles bone-white. I followed him, and once I reached the loft placed four interlocking baby gates in a square around the hatch, as I’d practised. Two of the corners snapped into place with extra childproof locks, and as the hinge on the third corner was tested it made a shrill whine, despite the fact it was all new equipment and shouldn’t need adjusting so soon.

  “At least we’ll be able to tell if she makes a great escape,” Art whispered. He sat on the polished floor close to the white box, watching me with one hand on his knee and the other fiddling with his collar. I sat beside him and grasped his cold hand for reassurance, though I must admit, my skin bristled with excitement at this new beginning. A huge part of my future, no, wait, our future, was curled up inside this oh-so-average box. Nut was going to be a symbol of our life together, our commitment to each other, all wrapped up in a little furry bundle. Our little bundle of joy.

  “This is it.”

  “I know. I’m ready.”

  Art picked up a pair of nail scissors and carefully snipped the safety tab. Stowing the scissors away in his back pocket, he started to slide open the interlocking flaps at the top of the box, releasing the slip of cardboard holding the front panels in place. I crushed my fist in my mouth as the folds were peeled away one by one, until at last the side of the box nearest Art fell open like a drawbridge to a fort.

  Silence.

  The box was pointing the wrong way for me to see inside and my tongue couldn’t form the words, so my eyes were on Art as his face pressed deep into the cave. He sat motionless, staring as if he’d forgotten what he was looking for or as if he was lost.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” I hardly recognised myself, I sounded so dry.

  Art let out a breath and quickly thrust his hand inside the box, scuttling his fingers along the cardboard base like a spider or tiny man running. He started to make this strange tutting sound that people have always made to animals or babies. I’d done it myself when I’d been to the zoo-museum with Mum. We’d stood there looking at the parrots or the meerkats or the otters (it really didn’t matter) and muttered together, “Click click click click click”, spitting our tongues from the roof of our mouths. To this day, I can’t think of a single animal that made that noise, so I have no idea why we do it. It did attract attention, but has an animal ever done it back? Maybe all this time we’ve got it wrong. As long as we get a reaction, we don’t seem to care. I wonder if Mum did it with Bathsheba and Bertie too. She talked about them like they were family.

  Instinctively I wanted to stop Art. How did he know that he wasn’t coming across as aggressive? I hadn’t read anything anywhere about the sounds she might make. But still, his clicking was hypnotic. From inside the box, there was no sound at all.

  Art shuffled backwards across the floor to create space. What if she was dead? What if she was already horribly mangled and sick, from only being in the house less than five minutes? What if all of this wasn’t going to work? What would happen to us?

  And then I saw her.

  One little foot, no more than a paw, stepped onto the flattened cardboard drawbridge. It couldn’t have been bigger than a strawberry; round, padded and soundless as it moved. Another foot stepped out, and there she was, stumbling like a lamb, just born. A second later and a sweet and musty smell, a bit like talcum powder, followed her into the world.

  I’d not really known what to expect before Nut arrived. The paperwork said each little one would be different, just as every litter contains champions and the obligatory runt. Nut wasn’t a runt, but she wasn’t chunky by any means. From my side angle her body was longer than I’d imagined it would be, and from her rear swayed a long, flexing tail, tipped with black. Her back curved into two rumps, like an ant covered in fat. Round, translucent ears protruded from the top of her head, twitching and flicking, listening to the quiet grind of my knees on the wood floor. From head to toe she was covered in a light layer of downy fur, which when it caught the light shone in shades of lavender and dove-grey. She reminded me of something in a museum, something that had been living and breathing once but shouldn’t exist now, and immediately I wonde
red what Luke would’ve thought of her, how he’d have stroked her head and inspected her toes. How he’d have understood how her heart was just like my heart, and not alien at all. I imagined him pressing his hand against her chest to feel it beat. Frustrated at myself, I pushed him from my mind and shook off his ghost.

  This was the first time in my whole life I’d been close enough to touch something animal. Nut had four legs, a tail, fur. She was all the cats my mum used to own, and she was all the pets owned by generations of families before the trend died. But now, there were too few chances to encounter something in the wild. Mum used to say that the sky had expanded, the birds were getting lost, and all the land-animals were moving underground to escape us. I believed her for a long time, and while Mum searched the skies for feathers I’d spend hours in our back garden digging little holes with a plastic bucket and spade, proclaiming every twig or tree root to be a snake, a ferret, or a gecko.

  But Nut didn’t belong in the wild. She belonged to Art and I together. She was the only thing that did. We owned separate cars, and our various knickknacks, strewn through the house, all still existed in the singular. This book was either mine or his, not ours. But Nut couldn’t be divided.

  We’d set up home for her in the loft for the foreseeable, and had kitted it out following all the official advice, guidance and case studies Google had to offer. The gates around the opening meant that she wouldn’t fall down onto the landing below but we could still keep the hatch open for fresh air and to keep an ear out for trouble. A food dish and a water dish were parked neatly by the hatch entrance, and other than the litter tray, beds, and long benches against the walls, we kept the room empty. Fewer hazards. Fewer stimuli.

  Nut skulked from the box and sat directly between Art and I. Would I be able to lean across and see her properly without frightening her? I shuffled forward, and she flinched – looking up at me with alarm.

  Her face.

  My God, the first time I saw that face. For a moment I saw nothing else, just her nose, her eyes, the shape of her chin. It was a face broader than it was long, and the look it wore was so deeply familiar that for a moment I forgot what I was looking at. The back of my throat burned, and I suddenly felt very, very cold.

  I hadn’t known it would be like this. She looked at me like she owned me.

  Shit shit shit shit shit. Maybe I’d done the wrong thing? Maybe this was all wrong.

  Art’s palms cupped his nose and mouth. “Isn’t she weirdly beautiful? She looks like you!”

  “Stop it, Art.” Obviously she didn’t, but I didn’t tell him the truth. I didn’t want to say it out loud. “Is she a she?”

  Art ducked his head to ground level, peering at the tiny gap between Nut’s paws. “They said she’d probably be a she. I can’t see anything to suggest she’s not.”

  “Does she know she’s a she?”

  “I think she’s just… what she is. I don’t think she knows she’s anything. She just feels the need to breathe, to eat. She wants to stay alive.”

  “But do you think she knows what she is? Or how we’re different to her?”

  Art looked away. “I don’t think she thinks about any of that stuff, Norah. She’s not human.”

  He was right of course, Nut wasn’t human. But she was alive, wasn’t she, looking at me with bright blue eyes and all the whites showing. I tried to shake it off. “She’s a lot more petite than I’d expected, is this what you thought she’d look like? Do you think she’s… alright?”

  Art tipped his head to the side. “Yeah. She’ll be fine. Remember that bit in the manual that each set has lots of different sizes and shapes? This one’s ours. I think she’ll grow quickly. She looks like a fighter.”

  He tapped her on the head with a finger and she raised her moon-face to follow it. He wiggled it in the air then tickled her under the chin. She didn’t indicate that this was good attention, or bad attention, just continued to stare at his finger, and then at his eyes, watching him watch her watch him. I wasn’t sure whether all this touchy-feely stuff was a good idea. Didn’t the manual also say that we should stay back? She was so vulnerable and everything was so new, maybe Art would spread bacteria. I thought back to what I’d read in the car.

  “Maybe we should give her some space. Turn the lights off, make it relaxing. I’ll bring up some food later.”

  Art was busy rubbing Nut’s cheek.

  “OK, I think that’s what they said to do anyway, didn’t they? Keep clear for a couple of days.” He looked at her for a few moments, and I could practically hear his gears grinding. “You know, I thought they were being dumb when they said it’d be difficult, but now I know what they meant.”

  He extended his hand and stroked it slowly down her long, narrow back. She hardly moved, her face still peering up into his face. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to understand him or she was inspecting the roof above, perhaps already planning an escape. Art slid his hand along where Nut’s spine would be, under the haze of grey fur.

  “She does seem a bit thin. I’ll bring her up some of that canned stuff now.”

  He stood, stretching back like a feline, and offered me his hand. I let him pull me up, and as my head lifted the room started to tilt and wiggle, as if I stood surrounded by baking heat. I felt my hand be squeezed, and I was pulled towards the hatch. I didn’t look over my shoulder.

  “I’ll reinforce these gates when I come back up. She’s so small, she could slink right through them.”

  I closed my eyes, thankful that Art and I were still on the same wavelength. I had no idea if she could even think, never mind conspire to come downstairs and encroach on our lives. I’d done a lot more reading than Art had. He’d done everything required of him of course, and read the manual, looked up a few of the websites, even checked into a few online forums to see what other owners were talking about. But I’d gone further, delving deeper and deeper into the experiences people had made public.

  Though none of the material strictly addressed self-awareness, it did seem to imply that Nut wouldn’t be sentient like you or me, but she would have needs, and therefore consciousness. Consciousness just at the level that keeps the brain from switching to dormant mode and letting the vital parts of the body die. But seeing Nut assess her environment, and then the panic in her eyes when I moved too swiftly showed that Nut wanted to live – just like we did. But even a tree will adapt to survive, won’t it? Spreading its leaves to gather in the light and fighting off rival roots where we can’t see.

  When I’d been really young, keeping animals in the house had been more common, though you never knew more than one or two friends whose parents had time for it. I must have only been six or seven when I last visited a friend with a tame animal. In this case it was a bearded dragon, a dinosaur with skin made of stones and a head which would tilt on a pivot. I’d never seen anything like it in all my life, and Marcia’s dad kept it in a huge tank planted with plastic trees and shoots which stretched across the back of the living room. No one ever touched Jambo – his teeth were knives – but he didn’t seem to care about that and spent most of his time sitting facing the large lamp in the top corner.

  A couple of years before Jambo, Marcia’s dad had an old rabbit, a real white one, in a three-story wooden structure in the garden. My mum had told me that if I ever saw a white rabbit I shouldn’t chase him, as he’d lead me down his rabbit hole and I’d get stuck there forever. No coming back. I was terrified by Marcia’s dad’s rabbit, and though there was never a chance of him leading me anywhere, I was convinced that every time I blinked, just before my eyes closed, there was a flash of white.

  This rabbit was huge, with long ears that flopped down like strips of suede, and he had a black spot between his eyes. His name was Smudge. Marcia once stuck her finger through the wire mesh to show off. Smudge hopped over and after a brief wiggle of his nose clamped his teeth firmly around her fingertip. Marcia shrieked and leapt back, blood already trickling down the back of her hand. In my ter
ror I started to cry too, while Smudge just sat there like a docile lump of snow. While Marcia was being patched up, her dad explained softly that Smudge would have expected her finger to be a carrot or a stick of celery, and it wasn’t his fault. I cried in the car home, not so much for Marcia being driven to hospital for a tetanus, but for Smudge, who would be disappointed that he hadn’t chomped down on a carrot after all.

  But neither Jambo nor Smudge left me with the stirrings that Nut had evoked. Maybe they never do, until they’re your own. I read once about a phenomenon which said that every cat-lover thought their cat was the most beautiful, no matter how wonkyfaced or wicked-eyed it might be. And with children, motherhood turns us into lionesses, willing to protect our offspring with tooth and claw. They’re our future, the continuation of our bloodline, though it’s never a future we’ll have much say in.

  But I wondered about Nut.

  Over the first few days, I watched her through the bars of the baby gate from the top step of the ladder with a cup of tea. The hot air in the house all rose to the roof, which is why we thought it’d be the cosiest place for her. The vast size of the loft also meant she had space to run around, though she didn’t do much moving. Twice a day she’d trot around the outside of the room and then flop down in the middle under the skylight, not asleep, but resting with her eyes half-closed in a state of semi-consciousness. We’d been prepared for this, the muscle-run, the instinctual desire in her to expend energy and build her strength.

  It looked like she couldn’t quite work out which sleeping box she liked the best, and went through little phases of choosing one, climbing in, rolling about in it with her feet in the air, and then falling out. First, she chose the plastic fruit crate, and then after a day or two she upgraded to the quartered bedspread, which gave her room to stretch on her back and roll like a fuzzy rolling pin. Though she’d snubbed the cardboard box I didn’t remove it, and within a few days Nut’s main pastime became chewing on its corners and trying to flatten it by climbing on each of its walls. It seemed harmless enough, as long as she didn’t start eating the gnawed-off pieces. She batted the pieces of cardboard around the floor with a front paw before changing her mind again and tearing strips from the box like leaves from a lettuce. She was probably teething.