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

Still, I continued to stroke Mum’s collection of genuine feathers, gliding the silky fronds between my fingers. Something about them always made me want to pull away, but Mum encouraged me to keep going, to know what they felt like. But it was confusing for me. Was the feather still alive, without the body it had been attached to? I wanted to stick their sharp shafts into the skin on the back of my hands and wave them in the wind. “Be gentle, Norah,” she’d whisper, “They’re fragile, and who knows if we’ll find more.”

I wished I could see inside her head. I could almost feel them, her thoughts, or at least the shape of them. She was my mum. But the things she said, the things she lifted from mysterious drawers – they were from another world. She looked up to the sky for things I couldn’t understand, always through her old binoculars; heavy black things, held into shape by stitched skins. She liked to shock me with little facts, things like, “When I was little, the sky was full of diamonds that you could only see at night,” and “Me and your Gran used to lie on our backs and watch fluffy clouds go by. You could see shapes in them, and if you asked the sky a question, it sometimes told you the future.” The more stories she told, the less I believed her, and would gently push my hands in to her belly and say, “You’re fibbing, tell the truth.” But Mum would just shake her head so her red curls bounced over her face and promise that it was real, she’d seen it with her own eyes. One night, she even told me that, “the moon used to be as white as a pearl.” At the time, I didn’t know what a pearl was, which seemed to make her sadder. She pulled me to her side and pressed the binoculars to my face. “Keep looking, Norah. Up there in the dark. The birds – they might come back. They might.”

I don’t know if I believed that. The birds had just disappeared, it was their choice. The news reported a muddle of reasons for it over the years; climate change, lack of habitats, a faltering ecosystem. The fact that the earth and sky are turning plastic. I remember when I was little, seeing on TV the reports about initiatives to encourage the building of bird boxes and custom annexes on business premises. Children’s TV shows had segments where the hosts showed you how to build your own bug-hotel or bird-feeder out of an old pine cone, but I didn’t know anyone who managed to actually bring anything to roost. Later, after I’d discovered the joy of watching the world through Mum’s binoculars, I did ask her when it’d all started, the fading away of wildlife in the wind and soil. But she just looked out of the window and squinted her eyes against the white-grey sky. “It all happened so gradually,” she said. “I don’t think any of us noticed until they’d gone.”

Mum tried to make me believe the miraculous could happen, that surprises were around every corner. But even then, I only nodded and smiled to be nice, to make her feel better. I’ve never understood why people need to believe in something we can’t see. It’s like reality isn’t enough – they constantly need wonder, awe. When Art and I were dating, even in the earliest days, he always threw in the unexpected. For our very first date, we arranged to go for a meal at a French restaurant, La Folie. I spent far too long tangling myself up in dozens of outfits before deciding on a pair of rose-gold trousers and a black chiffon shirt, only a bit sheer.

At thirty-one, I wondered if I was a bit too old for clothes that showed so much, or whether I’d come across as desperate. I ran my hands over the shape of me, repeating to myself the mantra, “I do look good, I do look good.” Even after I’d committed to an outfit, I couldn’t stop faffing. I tried the shirt my usual way of leaving it loose and flowing, but it just didn’t seem right. I then tried tucking it in but I couldn’t stand feeling constrained. In the end I undid the last three buttons and tied the open panels in a bow. Already the chiffon was sticking to my skin. My hair – a fluffy brown nightmare at the best of times – was unusually coy and submitted to being clipped to the side with a gold triangle pin. I painted my skin in bronze and peach, finishing myself as I would a precious gift. When I caught my reflection in the mirror I hardly recognised myself, and fought the instinct to wipe it all away. Maybe it was good that I felt like a stranger. This was the new me – a new beginning. Perhaps a costume was what I needed.

I took a taxi straight to the restaurant, my cheeks burning at how late I was. At one point I lowered the window to cool myself down and the caustic air stung my nostrils. It was so much worse in this area of the city. How could I forget to wear perfume? Stupid. All I could hope was that the restaurant had plenty of scented candles and a top-notch purifier. I rolled the window back up and tried fanning my face with my handbag, but a quick glance at my watch and I was distracted again. First impressions are so important. Though in the end, my lateness probably wasn’t a bad thing – my desperation to get there quickly proved to be the perfect distraction from my beating heart, the mounting sense of panic rising up my throat.

I flew into the restaurant not at all thinking about how I looked or whether the other diners would guess why