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

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.

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