Composite Creatures Read online

  As the call went on, she would let out little gasps between yeses that faded to soft whimpers. I couldn’t even make out her final few words before the call ended. The weirdest thing about it all was that though the call seemed to end badly she didn’t get up, she didn’t leave. She stayed at her desk until the end of the day, and considering that call happened before lunch this seemed like a crazy amount of time to sit on such bad news.

  At the end of the day, I tried to catch a glimpse of her as I pulled on my winter coat. Her desk was a snowscape of crumpled tissue, some spotted bright red. I don’t know if she registered that I was looking at her or not, but she was staring up at me regardless, her whole body frozen and her eyes a dead void. The skin above her lip was flecked with dried blood. I quickly picked up my bag and turned away, my palms sweating and my breath coming out in ragged gasps.

  Art was in his study when I told him about it, and he just sat there listening, his face blank. While I was talking he fiddled with his pen, spinning it like a baton. After I finished, I asked him whether he thought I should’ve done or said anything but he just pouted, tapped the pen on the table, and said he didn’t know. He looked so thoroughly uninterested that I was convinced he hadn’t listened to my story at all, and had phased out halfway through, but nevertheless he was quiet for the rest of the night. He ate dinner in his study, and I didn’t see him again until I collected him to come to bed. As he climbed under the covers, he reached out and grabbed my hand, rubbing his thumb along my wrist. “It’s hard, but there’s nothing we can do for people like that,” he whispered. “We have to forget that we’re different to other people.”

  Maybe it did stick with him, now that I think about it.

  Above our heads, I could make out the soft thump, thump, thump of Nut’s nightly exercise around the loft. She was getting heavier, her body filling out with blood, and it wasn’t easy to ignore her steps while the rest of the house slept.

  “Norah.” Art squeezed my hand tighter, his eyes desperately asking. “You would save me, wouldn’t you? You would help me?”

  “Of course,” I whispered. “I promise.”

  Art was right, of course. We can only help people like us. If I’d said something to Joyce she’d have known I didn’t have a clue what she was going through, so how could I have understood what she needed? Joyce didn’t know what had happened with my mum, but that was a different life. Anything I’d have said would have been flaunting my fortune in her face. So I’d headed home as fit and agile as a cat, still with all nine lives intact.

  Through the ceiling, the padding stopped, and for a split second I wondered if Nut would dream while she slept.

  Art leaned towards me and slapped his hands on the duvet cover, causing the petals to flutter up in the air before coming to rest again. I took another slurp of the pink fizz and the bubbles tickled my throat. I don’t think I liked alcohol that early.

  “Come on, Milady, your main gift’s downstairs.”

  My head still woozy with sleep, I let Art lead me by the hand down the dark stairs, lit only by the eerie flush of dawn. I passed a scatter of blue envelopes on the doormat bearing my name and the bronze ankh, and was puzzled for a second at how early the postman must’ve been to deliver them.

  Art dragged me on down the corridor to the kitchen. Against the dining table stood an easel mounted with a stack of A3 paper. One of the dining chairs sat in front of it, and on the seat was a stack of watercolours, oils, chalks, pencils… Colours and colours and colours.

  “Oh, Arthur.”

  Sliding open a box of oil pastels and running a finger along a shaft of indigo, I picked up an old heavy scent met by fresher outdoor air – afternoons in the sun, my head on Mum’s shoulder, my fingers playing with a coil of rusty hair. Feet resting in cool patches of clover. But instead Art was beside me, his eyes on myeyes.

  “Happy birthday,” he whispered.

  I inspected the packs one after another without letting go of a single one. So much joy from something so simple. Each one took me back to somewhere else; the musk of Mum’s art cupboard, the waxy membrane inside the drawers. Wrapped in Mum’s coat on the moors. All those years dipping paint-soaked brushes in water to watch the colours bleed, learning to smudge away blunders with a blunt thumb. Why hadn’t I thought about picking up the palette knife myself? In seconds I was back there, and all it took was a rainbow.

  Art pointed at the boxes in my hands. “Choose your weapon.”

  It had to be the watercolours.

  Art swept the others to the side and placed the pack beside the easel. Pressing my drink back in my hand, he pushed me down by my shoulders into the chair. With a flamboyant wave of his arm, he sidled behind the easel and started to tear open the paints, winking conspiratorially around the edge of the mounted paper. A satisfying clunk and splash, as several brushes were plunged into a jar. A few glassy taps later, Art began sweeping the pad in wild abstract strokes. He obviously hadn’t used watercolours before, as the paper wasn’t taped down. I watched as the crisp edges became warped, unbalanced, curling in on themselves.

  “You do know you don’t use watercolours like that, you idiot.”

  He peeked over the top of the paper, and tilted his head this way and that to find my best angle. I lived up to it, turning my head in profile. My eyes are little, and I forced them open so much that my left lid flickered with the effort.

  Art pointed his brush at me. “I’m the creative here – I can use them however I want, Muse.”

  “How do you know I’m not a creative genius? I’m the daughter of a famous artist. You’re an Arthur, and ‘author’, not an ‘art’.”

  “You throw the word ‘Art’ at me fifteen times a day, it’s about time I lived up to it, don’t you think? No one ever called me that before you.”

  Was that true? I was sure he’d introduced himself as Art when we first met. I wouldn’t have just started calling him that, surely?

  While I puzzled over that, he continued to paint in eclectic flourishes, fired up by the challenge. I rubbed my twitching eyelid with a knuckle.

  “What are you even doing?”

  He let out a huge sigh and dropped the brush back in the jar with a wet ’plop’.

  “I’m recording you for future prosperity. I’m going to capture you, Norah, right here and now, on your birthday morn. And I’m going to do it for as long as I still have fingers, and you still have a face.”

  “Why stop then? I doubt the result would be different if you held the brush between your toes.”

  “How dare thee.”

  “And if I don’t have a face? Doesn’t say much for your capturing of my inner soul, does it? Sexist pig.”

  Art closed his eyes, and bowed his head gravely. “Hmmm. I wouldn’t want that, it’s not good for publicity.” He sliced a pointed finger through the air. “Alright. Let it hereby be said that I’ll continue to capture you, even if my arms end in stumps and your face slides right off your skull.”

  “Deal.”

  I leapt from the chair to plant a kiss on Art’s forehead. “And then I’ll paint you afterwards.”

  He shook his head. “No. You have to wait until my birthday next January. That’s the tradition. We paint each other on our birthdays. That way it means something.”

  That was almost a year away. I felt guilty. It had been Art’s birthday six weeks before and I’d only given him the study lamp he’d asked for.

  “Then I’ll get some practice in.”

  “Nope, this is spontaneous soul-catching. No cheating, no practising.” He winked and flicked me back to the chair with his finger. “Don’t want you getting better than me.”

  I sat back down in silence, my chest a little bit tighter than it was before. Looking down, my knees were spotted with splashes of green watercolour from Art’s palette. I licked my thumb and rubbed the marks until my skin drank them in.

  We spent the rest of the sitting in quiet, me trapped in time while Art swept his paint into the blank c
orners. I had no idea how such bright and violent strokes could possibly mirror this still and silent me. Art finished his masterpiece by swearing at the paper, one hand still clutching his paintbrush and in the other… a roaring hairdryer.

  On announcing that the portrait was finally completed, he asked me to close my eyes while he spun the easel. At the press of his lips on my nose, I saw myself.

  Art had painted me from the waist up, wearing my cotton robe. I had been right – he wasn’t an artist. My hair was wild, coiling like a tangle of hazel branches. My face was an egg – a blank and milky oval which could have belonged to anyone, crisscrossed with pale blue and green, a pursed little mouth, and a pink blob for a nose. The eyes weren’t mine. Mine squint, but Art had made them bright almonds, almost feline in their curves. He had the colour right though, a muddy brown. The sweeping abstract strokes must have been the background, which he’d filled in with wide emerald stripes, a bit like ferns. The portrait had the shape of me, but I couldn’t help but think Art had tried to show something I wasn’t. I didn’t mind though. I wanted to be those colours.

  We left the portrait on the dining table to dry, taping down the corners to halt any further warping. The rest of the day was spent in a semi-doze. I went up to the loft to visit Nut every few hours, refilling her food bowl with jellied vitamins and tinned slop, clicking and tutting under my breath to prick up her tail and send her galloping towards the food. Art retreated to his study again, only returning to watch me blow out the candles and cut the cake when night came. We sat for a calm and lovely twenty minutes together, legs entwined on the sofa, stuffing our faces with three-quarters of a cake meant to serve eight. All the while we sniggered under our breath like schoolchildren at what Easton Grove would have thought of our greed.

  As Art padded back up the stairs, I burrowed down beneath the blankets, still smiling. So much had changed for me in the last year. I’d met Art, and he’d brought out a side of me I’d never imagined in a million years to be there. I was interesting. I had moved into a house, a grown-up house, on a street shared by established families and successful couples. You never saw an unhappy face. I felt safe, and for the first time I had back-ups. I was now a member of one of the most exclusive healthcare systems in the UK, and with that came assurance that I was fit and healthy, with a long time yet ahead to find my place. The staff there had my back, and cared about my every movement in case I took a step wrong. And of course, there was Nut. Our shared little creature, a fluffy grey comma, every day growing bigger and connecting mine and Art’s hearts.

  It was past 10pm when I picked up the box of acrylics. I arranged the glorious palette on my left and a fresh jar of water to my right. The brush rolled between my fingers and I wondered if this was how a pen sat in Art’s hand, or if this was how my mum had fiddled with her tools, between the middle digit and thumb. Jutting her chin and biting the tip of her tongue until it bulged like a cherry. Her hair streaked with crusty paint in all the colours of nature.

  She loved landscapes the most.

  Most of my memories were of her looking out of a window with a sketchpad, or taking me to a part of the countryside with (to my young mind) nothing in it. Low hills of stubborn rock and yellow heath, skinny trees sticking up between stones like broken fence posts. No flourishing copses or snow-peaked mountains like in magazines. I’d sit next to her with a book or a game, not able to understand why she picked those scenes to paint. She didn’t even look happy when she worked at it, and she’d correct invisible mistake after invisible mistake, all while sighing and tutting and muttering under her breath as if disappointed with the view. In the end, the finished painting never looked anything like the land. Sometimes she’d look between the two and cry, but when I clutched her arm and asked her to tell me why, she wouldn’t. She just squinted up her eyes and wiped my face as if I was the one weeping.

  Surely much less difficult, I was going to paint my own portrait. If Art didn’t want me practising his portrait I wouldn’t – I’d work on myself, an entirely different shape. I kept the paints quite dry for added control, and started from the outside, working in. I drew a dark circle then stopped – the brush hovering above the paper. When it came to my insides, I didn’t know where to start. I started to pile on paint in sloppy layers. My hair became an amorphous cloud, and the colour I mixed for my face made me look like I was on the verge of a heart attack. I had to give it to Art for his attempts to add dimension with blues and greens. To me, I was as flat and formless as a magnolia wall.

  I didn’t stick at it long, and put away the paints in a fit of misery. Absent-mindedly, I picked up my phone and (already irritated by various notifications on the screen) I swiped them away without opening. I’d read the names before the messages cleared – Eleanor and Rosa. Nothing from Aubrey. She wouldn’t have missed my birthday, I was sure of that, so maybe by staying silent she was trying to make some sort of point. It didn’t matter anyway. Any of it. I had more on my plate than they could understand right now, and I needed to focus on this house, this space. Art. Nut. Myself. I switched off my phone and left it on the arm of the chair as I stood tall and took one long deep breath.

  Earlier, while we’d been eating cake, Art had mounted his crispy portrait of me in a wooden frame. I held it in front of this wall and that wall, seeking a home for this version of me. But everywhere felt wrong, as if I was laying myself bare for surgery, each wall a sterile and fluorescent-lit operating table.

  7

  Mum was always a painter.

  That’s how I remember her now. Overalls streaked with irreversible oils, hands calloused, fingernails packed beneath with powdered colour. She took parts of reality and mixed them together to her own recipe, creating a world for me to grow up in.

  I don’t remember Mum having many close friends before she died, but that didn’t seem odd at the time. She had me, and she had enough arguments in her head to listen to. I sometimes caught her talking to herself in the shower, or when sitting at the dining room table sketching out a new painting. If she caught me spying, she’d chuckle and say, “Keep on the right side of yourself, my lass. Everyone deserves a bit of sweet-talking sometimes.”

  It never bothered me that Mum didn’t surround herself with like-minds, because it never bothered her. It’s natural that you see friends less as you get older, anyway. Life becomes more about you, and your small body swims a constant sea of commitments. There’s so much more to do. So much more to think about.

  It was so much simpler before. At university, the little flat Aubrey and I shared in second and third year was the whole world.

  In those days she wore her blonde hair down to her hips and shooed off any suggestion of having it trimmed, though the ends lay brittle on her back. We’d connected over shared loves of bloated haggis, horrible soap operas and books set before we were born. We split ourselves open and then stitched ourselves together, sharing everything in that parasitical way only students do. We were crawling the world’s ladder, side by side, each of us so confident of our individuality that (unknown to us at the time) is fed to us by our friends. We hung up fairy lights, stuck up the “People or Planet?” and “Earth’s Eviction Notice” posters we’d all been given by the Students’ Union, and made up for lack of furniture with cushions and cheap fleece blankets.

  The truth is, I lost interest in other people, and when our course mates were heading out to house parties or the uni’s monthly safeguard socials, my planet shrank. In a sea of greying skin and worried voices, I’d never felt more alive. When Aubrey’s personal tutor reprimanded her for not attending a free cancer-prevention seminar she was furious, bursting through the front door and shouting, “What does it matter? It’s in us now – we’re breathing it in every day. If I’m a fucking Jack-in-a-box, I’m going to live like one.” And then she stuck her head out the window and screamed “Boo!” down into the street in one long howl.

  Aubrey always wanted to do the thing she wasn’t doing. “What’s the use of sociology, r
eally? It’s fucking people skills, isn’t it?” she’d moan. She’d want to go back to the beginning and try English literature, or run her fingers over her face and say it should’ve been biology, or even music. She played acoustic guitar every day, singing hoarse and husky country songs about love and firemen and French toast. She’d sometimes say they were her own songs and then laugh at me for believing her. But she’d often leave notebooks open on the coffee table scrawled with black-inked lyrics, covering everything from her ex-boyfriend’s sexual habits to the texture of her favourite cheese (always brie). I’d sometimes sing along, mumbling old mantras to her new tunes.

  Renting a two-bedroom flat wiped out our student loans almost straightaway, so we engaged with the world through TV. In choosing between diluting our dynamic with more students or poverty, we chose poverty. Together, we guffawed at the ridiculousness of made-for-TV movies, pointed and gasped at old nature documentaries, and watched the news the day the National Health Service publicly signed with a private institute to make up for lost funding. I can still remember bits of the NHS Chief Executive’s speech, spoken with sad eyes and quivering chins. “Today, we mark our professional honesty by opening our doors to innovation,” followed with something like, “We are in a needs-must scenario. Life has been handed an eviction notice. This contract,” here he gestured at the paper he’d signed, “will save lives. Design. Inventiveness. Entrepreneurialism. This is what will save the NHS. We all deserve to be saved.” And then the head of an unnamed private institute, a clean-shaven man in tweed who looked too young to be there, stepped up to the microphone.