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

Nut was stretched out on her side as if leaping, her paws contracted inwards as if pulling the shape of her into a protective round. I rubbed her sides vigorously to bring life back whilst also trying not to recoil at her rigid muscles, the stiffened skin. It wasn’t like touching Nut at all, it was touching something wrong, something alien. A terrifyingly real doll, stuffed inside Nut’s membrane.

From the far end of the tunnel, I could hear Art on the phone and shouting up at me to check her mouth for a foreign body. Pulling my sleeves over my hands, I tried clumsily to turn her head, but her neck was unbending, locked back in a tight arc. I tried to bring her back by saying her name over and over, as if she’d hear me and come galloping from sleep just for another lick across my knuckles.

This is why all the material tells us not to give names. It means we can’t call them back when it’s time for them to die. Lest we forget, Easton Grove’s ethos is the art of self-preservation.

I have to give them credit, the staff at the Grove are militant.

After hanging up, Art scaled the steps and in one silky motion lifted Nut like a serving platter and carried her to the car in his arms. Without a word, he climbed into the back seat with Nut across his lap. I slipped into the driver’s seat, my hands shaking on the steering wheel. My mind blank, I had no idea how to start. I couldn’t connect.

A hand gripped my shoulder. “Turn the key. I can’t drive. We need to go.”

All the way to the Grove I couldn’t look away from the road, and every few minutes was convinced that I could see creatures darting from the dark to cast themselves beneath the wheels. I couldn’t have stopped for them anyway and whenever I remembered to breathe, the air tasted bitter like medication.

Four staff in white coats were waiting for us at reception, and next to them stood a metal gurney, like one of those stainless-steel trolleys tea ladies used to wheel around office buildings, only longer. A man with a red tie took Nut from Art and laid her on the tray. A flock of white coats swooped around us, each applying his or her own instrument to Nut like synchronised swimmers. One consultant stepped forward out of nowhere and offered us milky tea, her voice soft and slow. I noticed that she was wearing a lot of make-up, badly concealing dark half-moons under her eyes. Her face looked sticky. I was still standing in the waiting area when the tea arrived, steaming, in a bone china teacup painted with miniature pink posies.

By now it was near midnight, and the other members in the waiting area all seemed to be in a similar state of shock. A man in a leather jacket opposite us was twitching his head left and right, his hand squeezing his thigh in short sharp bursts. A few seats along from him a middle-aged woman in a tired-looking brown suit spent the entire time staring at the ceiling. She’d taken her shoes off, and was repeatedly running her hands through her hair, giving her the look of someone that had spent time hanging upside down. Above our heads, the ceiling was painted with the most ridiculous caricatures of birds that I’d ever seen. All the wings were stunted, and their long necks twisted in ways which weren’t natural. Some were almost tied in knots. It made me feel sick to look at it.

Art was sitting with his head in his hands, trying to massage sobriety into his scalp. But what frustrated me most was the slow, floating walk of the staff passing through as if they had all the time in the world.

It felt all too familiar even with distance, the standing and sitting dead. But the time before, that waiting room was dark, with threadbare curtains and chairs backed with sackcloth. A bowl of scentless potpourri on a coffee table. A magazine from three years before, with “The Greying: Pollution’s Wife, and Our Inescapable Fate?” written across the cover in bold black. A dark wood door to the old hospital chapel, abandoned and forgotten.

That night Aubrey was there, squeezing my hand a little harder each time I tried to let go, and working hard to meet my eyes whenever they looked up. I was desperately cutting myself off because as soon as our faces met she peeled me open. She would say with those eyes, “I know what you’re feeling, I understand”, but she didn’t know. Not all of it. That if it hadn’t been for her, maybe I’d have noticed what was happening with Mum before she was already half-gone. And I could have stopped it. I could have bought Mum more time.

But after Mum’s death I was still lost in Aubrey, I needed the warm cocoon of her skin, and I curled up into her like a snail in an old shell, disappearing completely. That day, Aubrey was my voice, answering for me and calling me back whenever I started to sink. She pointed at the dotted lines I needed to mark to claim Mum’s personal effects, and she fought a fight I hadn’t the stomach for when it came to the advanced donations – extracting the entirety of the bone marrow for storage. While I sat scanning the same words on the pages over and over, I heard her flat out “No,” and then further away, “She doesn’t want it. She needs to move on.”

But I did sign the paperwork in the end, and that was the confirmation Aubrey stuffed in the shoebox, later. The staff must have snuck the form into a pile of other things, desperate to move the whole thing on with as little fuss as possible. I don’t know what I’d have done at the time, if I’d known what