Composite Creatures Read online

  Art stapled a layer of steel mesh around the baby gates in case Nut tried to squeeze through, but she never approached the bars, at least while I was watching. She didn’t seem to question the barriers of her world. She accepted her lot with heart and soul and gut, as if all she needed existed within those four walls. She didn’t climb the benches to seek the light, or even sniff for wisps of air through weaknesses in the roof slates (of which there were many). She seemed content, and the more I watched her, the more I felt utter relief that she didn’t cry for me, didn’t show any signs of confusion at us disappearing downstairs.

  A weight was lifting, a weight that had been thrust on my shoulders since Nut first turned her face to me. It was going to be all right.

  Of course, Nut wasn’t supposed to be happy or sad; my reading so far into the biology had told me that. But the reality was always going to differ from the theory, wasn’t it? Nut lived in the immediate present, and didn’t question any other moment than the one she existed in. No before, no after. Just Nut, in the skin of Nut. Maybe this is true contentment. The manual suggested it was the presence of a survival memory which humans have lost, which comes with no sense of regret, or loss or anticipation of failure. With that mindset, you could attempt the same feat over and over, and no matter how many times you failed you wouldn’t be discouraged.

  I made sure there wasn’t anything in the loft to provide an education. No predators to dodge, no prey to catch, nothing that might disturb or teach her skills she wouldn’t need. Offering a little rubber toy to chew on rather than the cardboard box could be disastrous if the shaping of a mouse or haddock convinced her through learned behaviour that she should be stalking food or hunting for pleasure. As she’d never be leaving our home, there was no way she’d be able to do those things, and I couldn’t stand the idea of causing her to want more, all for the sake of a squeezy rubber mouse.

  You may think that I was thinking about this far too much, and I’d done far more reading that anyone else would have done in the situation, or more than you’d have done yourself. But you have to remember, animal psychology is an abstract concept, and I just wanted to do things right. The look in Nut’s eyes that first day had frightened me backwards, and a single stupid decision could destroy everything.

  5

  Nut had arrived on a Friday. That weekend was spent hiking up and down the ladder every hour making visits to her in secret, so as to not disturb her settling in. At one point Art suggested that I cover my head with a pillowcase as a sort of disguise, and I did it too, until the Sunday afternoon when he saw me descend the ladder whilst wearing it and he took pity. Turns out he didn’t think I’d take him seriously. I do wonder if he’d known for longer and laughed at me for longer than he let on.

  It didn’t matter anyway. Whether I wore the pillowcase or not, Nut didn’t pay me the slightest bit of attention. Most of the time she slept in the cat bed, a faceless bundle of grey fluff. Art took her sleeping pattern as a sign that we didn’t need to check up on her so much, she was fine, but it made me need to visit the loft even more – just to make sure she opened her eyes. Before we went to bed on the Sunday, we made a pact that we wouldn’t go up during the night at all, that we could “lay off it now”, and we’d close the loft hatch in case Nut chewed through the mesh and fell onto the landing. I was convinced that I wouldn’t sleep a wink, but Art wrapped his arms around me and I slept like a baby. I don’t even remember dreaming.

  There was a huge part of me that was relieved to be going back to the office the following Monday. I liked the driving to work, sailing along on anonymous roads that lead to endless places I could get to, if I wanted to. This Monday I felt particularly liberated, but with the luxury of a buried ember to heat my middle. I had a secret, and I smuggled this not-so-secret secret into work with me, hidden beneath my coat. I had a living house to go back to now, a home complete with its own beating heart. This heart was my heart, also. This was the dark and delicious thought that would feed me for the first couple of hours, while being back at work was still a novelty.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’d struggled to leave her that morning, but I knew that it was better to get used to it sooner rather than later. Besides, Art would be in his study, and he’d promised to get up and check on her every two hours. I asked him to text me every time he did, so I could be sure. It’s not that I didn’t trust him to keep his promises, I just knew how consumed he became when hammering away at the keyboard or drawing up outlines.

  I strode into work with my head held high – feeling a million dollars. And while I shone, the office buzzed around me like a monochromatic hive. I hadn’t known it until then, but I was still on high alert. Every microfibre on my cubicle’s felt walls tickled, and every sigh or throat being cleared was a shock from silence. My face was red, bloating with all the blood, and I couldn’t ignore the feeling that I had a flashing sign above my head. Bodies bristled when I passed by, and yet I couldn’t catch anyone’s eye. And though in itself that wasn’t too weird, the longer I stood at my desk and scanned the office, the more peculiar it became that no one at all looked up. Everyone was completely still. When a woman whose face I vaguely knew from the second floor shuffled by my desk with a stack of folders I offered a sheepish smile, but she averted her eyes and carried on towards the lifts. There was a chance that she hadn’t seen me I suppose, but we’d been only inches apart. It didn’t seem likely.

  I set down my bag and settled into my chair, letting myself sink into the comfort of confined spaces. Though a lot of people complain about them, I liked my cubicle. Because no one could see me, I didn’t have to imitate anyone else anymore. All my skin-tugging idiosyncrasies didn’t matter. I could sit there twitching, stroking and fiddling all day long like a monkey in a tree. All I was judged on was my output, and that I could control. There, it was up to me if I burned myself out or gave myself a day to drift off. And returning to work that morning, fresh from our first weekend with Nut, having my own walls felt better than ever.

  On that first day back, I resisted thinking about the house. Work was another planet, but because I was waiting for Art’s check-ins I couldn’t relax. I felt a crazy urge to scale my cubicle, like Nut would, just to release some tension, my weight folding the walls flat beneath me. Would anyone even look up if I sat amongst the melee, gnawing on a piece of plywood?

  By midday I hadn’t heard from Art at all and my skin was breaking out in a sweat. Didn’t he realise how stressed this was making me? He wouldn’t be doing this on purpose… Could something have happened? I broke my silence and messaged him in the most bright and breezy manner I could manage, sticking an extra couple of kisses onto the end to prove my triviality. He replied within a minute with a short message saying everything was fine, Nut had eaten half a tin of feed, and he was having trouble concentrating so was thinking about going out in the afternoon for a drive.

  My gut clenched. How could he possibly leave her alone? Sickly sweet, I suggested that tomorrow might be better for that, and that he maybe just needed an afternoon watching a film or two on the sofa. But I suppose the pressure of not writing was too much, and he remained adamant that going out was what he needed. We played message tennis, my coy and pleading messages becoming longer and longer while Art’s became shorter and shorter, until he stopped replying entirely. At first I thought he’d taken a break to just do the rounds with Nut but the silence endured for minute after minute after minute, until it’d been nearly half an hour and I still hadn’t heard back. For the first time in months I felt utterly alone. What had I done? Had I pushed him too hard, pushed him away already?

  No, it was me that needed to get perspective here. It was nearly 2.30pm, he was probably eating lunch. It was long after the time I usually ate it too. I’d normally stay in my cubicle, idly scrolling through articles I didn’t read on my phone, but I’d done enough phone watching already today.

  I picked up my bag and made my way to the shared cafeteria, a square and windowless room painte
d in buttercup and crammed with plastic tables. Each table had four silver seats, but because the tables were so small the chairs couldn’t be parked beneath and so stuck out in the aisles. I hardly ever went in there; the yellow gave me a headache and the sound of metal chair legs screeching across the tile floor made my skin itch.

  Looking around, every table had at least three or four people already sitting there. Most were pale and scowling into their plates, crushed too close to each other to look up without awkwardness. Some tables were so packed with drinks and plates and laptops that the cut flowers in vases had been relegated to the floor. Several had been knocked over by unseeing ankles, and leaked puddles of milky water around sneakers and stilettos.

  Sitting at an allocated six inches of grubby plastic wouldn’t help, so I returned to my cubicle and opened up a joyless bag of granola. I couldn’t bear to look at my phone again for Art’s non-existent message, so I worked through lunch, punching at the keyboard one-handed in a far more forceful way than I expect I normally did.

  “You should get some fresh air, it’s bright outside. All the snow’s melting.”

  My mouth crammed with oats, I looked up into the face of a man I recognised from three cubicles along. Jerry, Joey, Joseph? He smiled down at me and patted the edge of my cubicle before disappearing again behind the waves of wall. Even if my mouth hadn’t been packed with nuts, I don’t know what I’d have said. He was the first person to have spoken to me all day. He seemed nice. Maybe he didn’t know what I was part of, or maybe he didn’t care. Some people didn’t, but their voices were always quieter than those who objected.

  When the day finally ended, I drove home grasping the steering wheel and battling the distant thrum of a migraine. When a man dressed in a tattered jacket and camo pants staggered across the street in front of me with a placard I almost didn’t brake quick enough. I skidded to a stop and he bounced softly off the bumper into the middle of the road. He didn’t even look, just stood there, stunned, somehow still holding his painted sign aloft;

  When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.

  – Psalm 104:30

  After a few seconds he jerked his body and continued to stumble across the road, all the while mumbling something that I couldn’t make out, his eyes on my eyes through the windshield. He moved like his legs were wood.

  It didn’t mean anything. How could he know?

  I swallowed the lump in my throat and gripped the steering wheel until horns on every side of me were blaring. I shook myself off and started the car, squinting against the too-bright-light. I needed to go. I needed to get back to Art. Would he worry, if I didn’t come home one day after work? Would he call the hospitals and rush to my side, or would he assume I was a liability? Sick too soon. Dead weight. I hadn’t heard from him since morning. Would he even notice? Perhaps I should bring him something. Should I be apologising? What if I’d ruined things already? What if this was a side of me he didn’t like?

  As I turned the corner onto our street I couldn’t decide if I wanted Art to be there or not. Who would I be for him today? I approached the house, sensing for the heartbeat that had carried me through the morning but the pulse was slow, dull. The door opened without any obstructions, and there – at the end of the hallway – I spotted the point of Art’s elbow beneath a rolled-up green sleeve, and the clatter of a plate being washed.

  Normal. Normal.

  Not even a whiff of atmosphere. It could have been the day before today, or the day before that, a day when we hadn’t fought or clawed away each other’s skin. The relief. He mustn’t have heard me come in, as he didn’t turn or alter his dance of splash-rubrotate-dunk-splash-clatter.

  I had to make sure everything was alright.

  I dropped my bag by the stairs, flung off my boots, leapt the stairs two at a time, and scaled the ladder like a spider up wallpaper. I stopped with my head through the hatch and she was right there, sitting behind the baby gate, this fluffy and perfect grey lump – no taller than the stretch of my hand. Her eyes were a marshland, blue speckled with flakes of gold around the pupil. They were far too big for her face, and in the loft’s red gloom they shone, flickering as if on the verge of tears. A little pink tongue emerged and delicately licked the flecks of jelly from her muzzle.

  “Hello, Nut.”

  She didn’t move, just continued to stare me down with those bulbous, cartoonish eyes. From beneath the ladder there was a shuffle, and out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Art standing beneath the ladder and drying his hands on a tea towel, his eyes looking up at me dolefully.

  “Errr, no kisses?”

  I took a long, deep breath. His cheek felt hot under my lips, and I pushed my beating heart against his to remember the life we shared.

  6

  And so you adapt. One day bleeds into the next, and though the tide washes in and out, it’s the same sea. You’ve plugged your toes in the same sand. This beach isn’t going anywhere.

  It took a few weeks before I started to relax into our new routine. I spent a lot of January second-guessing everything around me, from the brand of tinned slush we gave Nut (was this one that would definitely help her grow?), to the posturing of cushions and lamps. Art kept prodding me about why I still hadn’t told anyone about our engagement, and each time I answered him with a breath in his ear, a brush cheek-on-cheek. Sensual movements. I flipped reality, squeezing myself into a “truth” where there were fewer questions, more squeezes of my arm. But there wasn’t a moment of the day when I didn’t feel the weight of that opal, or the treacherous swing of the gold – ready to slip from my finger if I stopped concentrating.

  I wondered whether I should get Art an engagement present in return, but nothing seemed right. Apart from his laptop and vast collection of notebooks and novels there wasn’t much he prized. Besides, before I had the chance to do anything it was my birthday. Thirty-two this time. It sprung on me suddenly – probably because everything was so different, the world was spinning faster. All those birthdays before, all the drinks clinked in the air by Aubrey, Rosa and Eleanor to commiserate another year gone, belonged to another lifetime. This time there had been no build-up, and when I’d spoken to Eleanor by text the week before, she hadn’t even mentioned it. It was as if with Art and Nut in my life, perhaps I wouldn’t get any older at all.

  But when March arrived, I awoke to the sound of trumpets.

  “HAPPY BIRTHDAY WIFE-TO-BE!”

  I pulled down the duvet to see Art at the foot of the bed, not actually playing a trumpet, but holding his phone in place of a saxophone, bouncing his knee to the rousing tune of “Congratulations”. I sat up in a bed of petal spray in bright shades of red, plum, and violet. Some were so silky that I could hardly feel them between my fingertips.

  “They’re beautiful. Are they real?”

  “Does it matter?” Art slid one across the duvet with his thumb. “They’re all for you. No half measures today. Drink!” He thrust a small glass of something pink and chemical-looking between my eyes. “Just in case you can’t see it, you know, with getting older and your eyesight failing, n’all.”

  I took the glass and took a swig, crossing my eyes as I did it for good measure. The fizz hit my empty stomach immediately, and I felt a strong urge to eat whatever the petals were just to soak it up.

  “Still want to marry an old maid?”

  “Not sure. It wasn’t part of the deal that you’d turn thirty-two.”

  “May I remind you that you’re thirty-eight?”

  “But with the face of an angel. I mean – look at this skin.”

  Art pushed his cheeks together between his palms and fluttered his eyelids. Disgusting.

  “As long as I don’t end up looking like a devil in comparison.”

  I imagined myself thin, wizened, bald apart from a fuzz of grey around my face. Chin too, most likely. And Art beside me, looking like my adopted grandson, looking up at me with those saucer eyes.

&
nbsp; Art was often met with surprise when people learned his age, particularly at conferences. I didn’t see it, but then again I woke up with the stubbled Art and went to bed with the Art with shadows beneath his eyes. Everywhere else, he was paid to be perky, paid to grin with his short white teeth.

  I’d watched online videos of Art answering questions at book launches and events and it always struck me how incredibly earnest and open he looked. When asked a question, he’d pause for a second or two and then open his whole face to answer. It lit up the camera. The audience hung on his every word like he was telling them their futures, their cards pulled from his mysterious tarot. Maybe you had to be there, but listening objectively, I didn’t think he said anything particularly insightful. Perhaps it was the way he said it, or that the audience was already in love with the idea of his words and he didn’t need to do all that much at all.

  It did make me wonder whether I had it in me to hypnotise like he did. After all, Art and I were compatible, two side by side pieces of a wider jigsaw. Maybe I just hadn’t found my niche yet. To have one person hanging on your every word… I’ve never even been close. Even I get distracted when I’m talking.

  A week or so before my birthday, after I’d been back at work for almost two months, I’d told Art a story about a conversation I’d heard through my cubicle wall. Joyce, my neighbour, was crying. She was on the phone and I could tell by the voice she put on that it was someone she didn’t really know. She enunciated every syllable, and repeated the alien-word “Yes” every few seconds or so. I listened to this woman on the phone every day and she never said “Yes”. Usually, she’d say “Yeah,” or “Aye”. Joyce then asked if he was going to be OK, what could she do, where was he. I couldn’t help it, but I immediately pictured her son, David, (he was twenty-five or twenty-six at the time) crushed in a car accident, or her husband, thin and curled like a weed, receiving some test results.