Composite Creatures Page 9

  Aubrey looked at me then, a lock of yellow hair between her teeth. “Isn’t he the one who makes the squirrels?”

  The man in tweed smiled down at the press. “Not only are we committed to restoring the National Health Service to its former glory, but we’re committed to sharing our resources to a better end. So each man, woman and child born today enters a world where they can win.”

  It all seemed like the sort of stuff that happened to other people. I’d never even had a broken bone. Though I would never have admitted it to Aubrey, I was still a child, soft and sticky. There was nothing in me that wanted to win any race. Happiness was on the sofa, raising an eyebrow at satirical soap operas and eating cheap pizza. The future could wait.

  Aubrey was more outward-looking; she’d already planned out several lives for herself. In typical me-style, I hadn’t fixed my mind on anything, but it didn’t worry me. Loads of my other friends were in a similar position, and even though they never said it aloud, I could tell they half-willed their parents to absorb them into their businesses. An easy life with instant monetary payback.

  I played with the idea of moving back home after finishing, doing a bit of painting with Mum, helping her with her equipment on trips to far-flung landscapes. When I told Aubrey about it she started to imagine herself enacting them too.

  Even before she met Mum, she loved the idea of her and her big red hair and ability to swear in French, German, and Chinese. The first time Aubrey came home with me, she was so quiet and red-faced that Mum asked what I even saw in her – so sure was she that I’d latched on to the first person who was nice to me. But like a sunflower Aubrey soon followed the light, even playing her guitar one night in the garden. Mum sang along with made-up words in an order that didn’t make sense and slapped her bare knees to an irregular beat, always with a smouldering cigarette clipped between her fingertips. It was hard to be embarrassed for her when she was having a far better time than anyone else. Mum always did have this uncanny ability to make you embarrassed about your own normality.

  That was the night we stayed out in the dark and thought we saw a vole, burrowing through Mum’s back fence towards the bog which used to be a river. We stood around it like three mountains, not breathing, holding on to each other to be still. It had wedged itself between two stones, flicking its tail up and out of the crack like a tentacle.

  “Is it still alive?” I asked. “It doesn’t look right.”

  Mum leaned in, hacked up a ball of phlegm, and pointed a stubby finger at the tail. “It’s not natural. Look, the line up the tail.” She stood up straight and coughed into her palm. “I know they’re doing it to repopulate, but any idiot can tell they’re not the same.”

  Between second and third year I earned a few extra pounds working in a café in York, mostly spilling drinks and charging the wrong prices, so I didn’t go home all that much. I spoke to Mum on the phone, of course, but my attention was elsewhere and frankly so was hers. Our calls ended quickly, and our conversations often dried up before they began. It had always just been the two of us, but now I was enjoying my freedom. As the phone calls became further apart, Mum’s voice on the line became quieter and quieter, as if she was already travelling away from me at great speed. I took her for granted, and assumed that when the time came for me to settle down, I could catch the same train as always, sit with her, and it would be just like old times.

  During third year, I decided to make a surprise visit home in the November. It’d been eight months since I’d seen the house.

  I’d spoken to her earlier that week and she’d told me she was having a quiet week in, no stress, just enjoying the view. But that Friday night when I rang the doorbell and she answered it, reality turned inside out. Mum was a wraith, leaning on the doorframe with a purple hand. She swayed side to side as if drunk, and all the soft flesh around her cheeks had melted away. She was both small and childlike, old and sharp-boned. The greying. She stared at me like I was a stranger, a spirit visiting from a long-forgotten past. Without speaking, she turned away and walked into the dim light of the house, leaving the door ajar.

  I felt sick.

  As I followed her over the threshold, the house smelt different. The air hung thickly, still and cloying. I found her in her living room, sat on her usual yellow chair, her head bent low over her knees.

  She said it started with feeling like she had a cold.

  When it went on for more than a couple of weeks she wondered if she’d developed hay fever from all the days out on the moors. She stocked up on over-the-counter medication but when they didn’t help and she’d started to cough up phlegm, she decided to sit it out in the comfort of her armchair. It took her another month to phone for an appointment. Once she found out that she had stage four lung cancer she went back home to that velvet armchair and hardly ever left it. She just sat there, enjoying the view.

  She didn’t consent to a day’s worth of chemotherapy or any other treatment, determined to let her body do what it wanted to do. She was adamant that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her days “vomiting into the kitchen sink”, and would do as she “bloody well pleased”. We fought. I couldn’t believe that she’d kept it from me all this time, and she was furious that I felt free to tell her how to live her life after (in her own words) “hardly seeing the world outside your shell at all”. And throughout it all, as I screamed and she bellowed back, wheezing, she never dropped that cigarette. She never gave up on the thing which killed her. I tried to knock it from her hand and she leapt away, hissing, “Are you trying to kill us both?”

  I returned to university two days later, just as I’d planned to. She didn’t even try to stop me. She wanted me to go. I left her in bed on the Sunday afternoon, reading a pile of magazines she’d had delivered for as long as I remembered, but never before had time to read.

  She waved me out the door with a careless flick of the wrist, “Go, I’m finally enjoying myself. I’ll speak to you in the week.”

  But she didn’t ring me. And I didn’t ring her. She had kept this huge secret from me, and in my own way I was releasing myself from the problem by letting it be her secret again.

  Aubrey was there for me those next months, listening, helping, and researching the outlook for lung cancer, even though Mum had already told me what would happen. But you never believe it, do you?

  She died the following June, at home with her carer, Moira, by her side. Mum had needed a permanent shunt to drain the fluid build-up, and as time went by she needed help with everything, from making her morning porridge to lifting her head. Short and wiry Moira was militant, her hands thin and deft as blades but they always moved softly, slowly, as if trained to sweep through a flock of birds without frightening them.

  I spoke to Moira on the phone a lot towards the end, but never saw her in the flesh until I went back to the house to see Mum before being taken away. Seeing Mum in her bed, she wasn’t her. There was nothing of the body that held me when I fell down, when I needed comfort. Her hair was streaked with white, and her skin had burnished, as if she’d spent her last weeks sunning herself in the garden. Looking down at her, I remember thinking this isn’t her. This isn’t her. Where’s she gone? And Aubrey held my hand and sobbed beside me. Moira wrapped her arms around Aubrey first and only then seemed to notice me standing there, and moved over with a sheepish drag of her feet.

  It’s the natural way of it, for a child to see their parent die. But it’s cruel, isn’t it? It’s the death of a place, a time. When she leaves, a mum takes a part of you, the part where you’re still young and full of potential. That’s the version of you that could turn out to be anyone. She takes memories only the two of you share, and without anyone else to share them they may as well be made up. What you’re left with are all the things you’ve done on your own, which for some people might be a great load of good things. But me – I was fresh from the egg. I hadn’t done anything other than reading, studying, and staying in with Aubrey. I’d only lived through a thirty-
eight-inch screen. I had no idea where I was going to go next or what I was going to do. Mum had always been the sun and I a body in her orbit, finding my way by her light, no matter how far I’d strayed.

  The summer Mum died, I found a little flat to rent near her cottage so I wasn’t too far away to sort out the paintings and belongings before the landlord rented her property to someone else. He gave me three months to do this on account of Mum having lived there for twenty-two years.

  Once everything had been sold or donated, I got myself a job as a waitress in an Irish pub for a few months before being taken on at Stokers. It was the perfect time for it to happen for two reasons; one being that I had been truly terrible at waitressing; messing up orders, dropping glasses, and regularly phasing out. Sometimes I’d come to after a rough shake of my shoulder, and I’d find myself staring into the kitchen’s sink or at a readied order, already going cold.

  The insurance job, though just an admin role, had the appeal of being steady hours, a steady wage and a steady stream of three or four simple tasks on loop every day. It didn’t even occur to me that this might not suit everyone until two of the new intake left after the first week without telling anyone, and the remaining three stayed on for another month but did so with their heads bowed in misery.

  Between the restaurant and starting at Stokers, I didn’t see Aubrey for a few months. She moved home to Inverness, just as I’d hoped to do with Mum. She still messaged me every day, but it was a relief that she wasn’t around. My days were full of doing, doing, doing, and the thought of stopping to talk it all through was unbearable. Just not possible. Besides, the tone of her messages had changed so that they didn’t always sound like the Aubrey I needed. She often sent me quotes from strange political websites and questions out of the blue about animals and souls and even artificial intelligence, but if I’m honest I just didn’t care. What did those things matter now? From a distance, a squirrel in a tree is just a squirrel, whether it’s stitched together or born. It’s still out of reach. Aubrey was blurring reality with science fiction and I was too frustrated to draw the line for her, so instead I tried to be polite, filling my replies with the quizzical emojis I thought she wanted. But as time went by, it was easier to mark her messages as unread and store my phone somewhere out of sight.

  By Christmas that year, the hills and lochs had offered all they could to Aubrey, and she wanted to be part of the world again. She found a flat to rent a ten-minute drive from me, and bagged a full-time job in a music shop, one of those little places often found down some steps, where they sell old LPs and second-hand record players. She settled right into it, even bringing her guitar to work sometimes and tuning the strings behind the counter.

  At first, she wanted to meet up a lot but I hadn’t the time, and it took many requests from her and firm answers from me before she started to respect my balance. Still, it was never the same. Aubrey was different. I don’t know if it was those few months in Inverness or what, but she seemed so much more pushy, always getting at me to try new things, meet new people, and “move out of my comfort zone”.

  One time she even booked a last-minute weekend away for us in Edinburgh without telling me. The hotel, the train. Everything. While there, we’d be going zorbing, where you roll down a hill in one of those inflatable bags of air. When she told me, I just sat there, spaghetti sliding off my fork. After a pause in which she grinned and (I’m sure) self-congratulated, I told her there was no way. It was too last minute, and I had plans that I couldn’t cancel. She shook her head and went anyway, taking another friend in my place. I spent the weekend in the flat, hearing from no one. It was delicious time for me to be alone, scheduled in fair and square.

  Aubrey’s reckless activities worried me a bit. She focussed so much on the peripheries that she never could see what was in front of her. But believe it or not, I sometimes got the feeling that I frustrated her. I never saw it coming until I’d already done something that she deemed to be wrong. It always happened when we trod old ground.

  “Have you visited her?” Aubrey said, her voice slow. “Out there?”

  Mum’s ashes were mixed into sand on the Northumberland coast. I’d gone alone, and after watching the tide creeping in in its subtle way over the wet slick, emptied the canister unceremoniously over the side of a dune. Within a few seconds I already couldn’t tell where the ash stopped being ash and became sand, dead shells, and broken glass. I’d pulled Mum’s last feather from my pocket and rolled the shaft between my fingers before releasing it. Rather than it lifting on the wind like I thought it might, the cold gust dragged it slowly across the beach, never quite out of sight. I turned away and headed back to the car anyway.

  “No,” I replied. “She’s not there. All the good bits are gone. I only scattered the parts that killed her.”

  The bereavement staff never told you where the tissue donations went, just that there was some good to come out of the horror of death. Not to think of the body, but to think of how smiles and love would carry on. But the folders of information that you went through weeks, months later, gave guarded hints that the vast majority of donations didn’t go to people in need. And by then the NHS was deep in service to some early iteration of Easton Grove and hungry to benefit from the offal of its research.

  Aubrey read this paperwork before I did. She had them all spread across the floor of my flat while she crouched on her knees, squinting in the low light. Her face was squeezed between her fists as she stared at the words, and I saw her lips silently mouth “Fuck.”

  I was on the phone at the time to Mum’s landlord, and when I started to say the things you do to get someone to hang up, Aubrey began piling up the papers and stuffing them into a brown envelope. This she put into a shoebox with other letters and forms to store. She gave me the brightest smile when I hung up, and it was for that reason I needed to see what had disturbed her enough to lie.

  After she’d gone, I pulled out the envelope and discovered that not one piece of Mum was still helping anyone. All the parts, roughly scooped from her middle, were sent to private institutes for genetic research into DNA manipulation. There was no mention of investigating cancer, the greying, or even anything else that could save a life. The last letter in the pile was a copy of the agreement I’d blindly signed to not follow up on the donations, and to trust that Mum’s last act was to further the same technology that had been used to synthesise natural creatures, and feed original research into longevity, living batteries, second chances.

  Surprisingly, the idea of Mum’s parts not living on in someone else didn’t upset me. I was relieved. A warm tingle ran down my back. It felt good to know that Mum’s kidneys weren’t working to clean out a stranger’s mistakes, or that her eyes weren’t looking at things in new ways and betraying their history. I preferred the sterile, neater option. It felt more like an end. Like freedom.

  My quiet disturbed Aubrey, and so it was probably a strategic move to introduce me to Rosa and Eleanor. Fresh faces, open me up. So imagine her shock when I actually enjoyed myself. I loved that I was a complete unknown to them. When the four of us met, we talked in a vacuum. Everything we discussed only mattered at that table and would never shake the world. This was extremely comforting. Whatever I said, I could predict the response to the degree that I could direct dialogue to hear that which made me feel better.

  This birthday with Art, my thirty-second birthday, was the first time I hadn’t been asked by any of them to go for a meal or a drink. Aside from Aubrey’s recent hostility, I could only imagine that I hadn’t heard from Rosa or Eleanor because I had Art, and maybe even Nut. Rather than feel sad, I felt surprisingly emancipated, and for once in my life I wasn’t answering the call of others. I called the shots.

  Soon after my birthday, I dreamed that Art and I were digging a hole in the middle of the back lawn.

  As our shovels met the earth, the ground started to sag and give, sucking us into the deep soil like quicksand. We threw aside our shovels and scram
bled against tumbling rock and stone to escape, pulling up clumps of turf in our fists. When I turned to check that Art was safe; I saw that he’d climbed onto the opposite side of the sinkhole and we were now separated by an expanding chasm. Making a megaphone with his cupped hands, he shouted at me to jump across to meet him, presumably because his side of the garden was the one with our house in. Though he must have been no further than ten feet away his voice was distant and echo-y, as if he was calling from across a vast lake.

  Just as I was considering making the impossible leap, the sinkhole retched, and regurgitated the nose of a huge, moaning white cow. Her head ducked and bobbed as she worked herself free, her nostrils snorting out lumps of soil and long, sticky worms. With one last heave, her enormous frame emerged from the wet earth by the strength of her spindly legs.

  Standing sidelong, she took up the whole width of the lawn and obscured my view of Art completely, her deep huffs masking the sound of Art’s call. Both terrified and entranced, I longed to touch the oily hair that fell in loose curls around her eyes and under that expansive mud-stained belly like a waterfall. The cow rocked on her heels before turning slowly towards the far end of the garden. I pressed my back against the fence to let her pass, and as I watched her go it occurred to me that I couldn’t see any udders. This felt so completely wrong that I had to question whether this cow was a cow or some other animal in disguise.

  I turned back to Art to alert him to this but he’d vanished, and the only explanation I could think of was that he must have tried to rescue me and slipped into the sinkhole. But looking into the deep, I could only see old pieces of trash; a broken washing machine, a kettle, three worn out shoes. No trace of Art. I fell to my knees and cried, the heels of my hands already sinking into the soft and yielding mud. Entirely weakened, I let myself be taken, and my last sight before being consumed was of our house, red against a blazing blue summer sky, and the silhouette of Art through his study window, working with his head down at his desk.