Composite Creatures Caroline Hardaker (smart books to read TXT) 📖

“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 wondered 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