Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker (best story books to read .TXT) 📗

games, a pram without its wheels, and steel cases of rusted bolts, screws, and tools, I discovered over forty of her paintings and miniatures, all wrapped in old bedsheets.

I looked at them all, one by one, holding some for a lot longer than others. There was no theme to them, unless the theme was “Mum”. The Northumberland coast that she loved, the Yorkshire moors. Animals. She used reference photographs to paint wild things where wild things should be. No dead earth. No lilac sky. There were three portraits of me when I was a toddler, and one of Aubrey and I in Mum’s back garden, sitting on the wall with our arms interlocked and our eyes on the sky.

At first the find felt like treasure, but quickly I felt trapped by it. Anchored by a collection that would fill up my flat and be impossible to hide from. I couldn’t face the still eyes of Mum’s self-portrait, the loose strands of curly red hair dried into the paint, or accept that the world was as colourful as she saw it.

Of the forty or so paintings I kept only the smallest two. Mum wasn’t famous in any degree, but she did have a regular cohort of collectors. I could only imagine that these paintings were hidden up there because she thought they lacked something, or she hadn’t considered them finished. Sometimes she’d bring out a landscape from years before and start dabbing on more oily layers, her face inches from the canvas. Mostly the added layers were making it all darker, not better, but she’d bat me away, telling me that I didn’t know what I was talking about and that she’d changed, so the picture should too.

Mum hadn’t produced any new work in at least a year before she died, so her collectors were eager for a last piece of posthumous pie. I pulled out of all negotiations, waving off the canvases to the agent without as much as a word. Only a fortnight after emptying the loft of oils and watercolours, I received a letter from the agent with a cheque for more money than Mum had ever earned while living, even with the agent’s fees removed. I hadn’t expected to inherit anything – her cottage was rented, and I hadn’t been surprised to discover that she hadn’t much in terms of savings. There had just been enough to cover a funeral, the price of white roses, and several plates of sad crustless sandwiches, sausage rolls, and Victoria sponge.

Those paintings paid for my future with Art.

Art wasn’t there in the initial assessment days of my programme; he came into my focus group during phase three. At this point patients arrived and disappeared weekly, and you got used to keeping a distance.

I was in the waiting area, drinking from a bottle of mineral water when Art first walked in. He wore a forest green velvet jacket and bright mustard trousers, and darted through the clinic’s duck-egg like a greenfinch. The world didn’t dim around him, my heart didn’t skip a beat, but I felt as if I could know him, and could anticipate his nature if only I knew his voice. He sat directly opposite me on a plush red chair, and after a single scan around the waiting room, picked up a copy of National Geographic and started to read. I knew who he was, even if he didn’t immediately know me. Art was at once a mystery and a map.

Once I’d passed the medical checkpoints and signed yet more paperwork, our focus groups were brought back together to learn about the Grove’s current research into the biomechanics of the ovum organi. Most people weren’t interested in that bit so much, but the doctors seemed to have anticipated that so they kept it brief and discharged us all with an information pack and instructions to carry on with life as normal while they compiled the results of our assessments and made their final decisions. The doctor’s face was expressionless as he said it, but you could tell that he knew that his words were empty. How could we just forget it, when the email from them in my inbox might mean life or death?

I opened up the information pack as soon as I got home. The bulk of the material was bound in a single guidebook as thick as my thumb. I’d seen the poster-image on the cover before, in doctors’ waiting rooms, on TV, glossy sponsorship banners at airports. “The Art of Self-Preservation”, written in gold under a bronze ankh. An instantly recognisable garden with the violet heather, golden buttercups, everything wild and lush. A crystal-clear lake in the foreground, a man and woman sitting beside each other on the bank. Both intent on something deep beneath the surface of the water, and grinning at whatever their secret was.

Tucked into the back of the book was a small envelope stuffed with a twelve-page confidentiality agreement, typed in the tiniest black font. Clipped to the agreement was a pink leaflet apparently detailing “The Potential for Member Reconditioning”, but the writing was even smaller and – frankly – terribly photocopied and completely unreadable. In fact, focussing on the words made me feel nauseous, so I flicked to the back page and the dotted line, where again they’d included the lakeside photo. Finally, a business card tumbled from the envelope with the details for my personal legal representative at Easton Grove, if I needed a “reassuring helping hand to guide me through the unlikely complications of membership”.

There was one other envelope, white and labelled with my membership ID. I took three deep breaths before peeling it open and unfolding the single A4 sheet. A copy of a copy, signed by Fia Ostergaard. My vital statistics, blood type, genetic profile – the black and white of what I was. Towards the bottom, I found something that made my lower stomach heave so I folded the sheet into eighths and pressed it into