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

was a long list, entitled “The secret persuasions of Arthur McIntyre”, such as spontaneity, banoffee pie, clocks that don’t tick, Indian head massages, and crisp white shirts. I folded up the list and placed it back into the box. No. Wouldn’t it be better for both of us if Art shared those things with me naturally? Besides, without context, what did they even mean? I couldn’t imagine Art wearing a crisp white shirt, so did it mean I should wear one? I wished I could read the list they’d given Art, but I couldn’t think of a way to open the envelope cleanly enough to reseal it convincingly. I didn’t even remember telling the Grove what I liked or didn’t like. How could they know?

When Art came home, we “discovered” the box on the doormat together. When he read through the contents of the envelope with “Art” swirled on its sleeve, he nodded sagely and winked in my direction. I played along of course. Rather than curl up on the new sofa, we spent our first full night sitting on the kitchen floor, playing Battleships. The house was a home and not a home, and it felt too soon for me to act like being there was routine. Once we finished playing, we headed up to bed together, and I spent the dark hours watching his chest rise and fall, and acclimatising to the sound his breath made against the pillow. I was an explorer, studying a wild beast, with daybreak as his backdrop.

As a gift to us, and as a much-needed break from decorating and unloading boxes, Easton Grove had booked us a morning session with a portrait photographer, so we could have some decent pictures of us together to put in frames around the house. They would also keep one or two on file, ready in case any press-worthy stories came up in the future.

We both dressed in the least creased outfits we could find amongst the chaos of cardboard boxes, and made our way there – only a little bit self-conscious about the prospect of showing our best faces to each other and a complete stranger.

The photographer was a short, greasy-looking man with stringy hair that clung to his cheeks. He seemed totally out of place in the pristine studio, but as we walked in, he sat with his legs spread and shoulders relaxed, as if he belonged there more than anywhere in the world.

He showed Art and I through the racks of backgrounds Easton Grove had approved, and we sniggered and gave each other plenty of side-eye as we pointed out the worst ones – an empty beach, lined with palms, the plaza in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and grassy banks, peaked with the giant heads of Easter Island. We settled on a mottled blue background with spray-on clouds – like the background in an old graduation picture. It seemed the least ridiculous.

The photographer had us sit next to each other on a box draped with a blue sheet, and then asked us first to look at each other’s eyebrows, then at an imaginary pool between us, and then at his finger floating – here, then there, then there. Each pose was as difficult to navigate as the last. Art obviously wasn’t sure how much he should touch me, and even when he did pull me close I barely felt the weight of his arm around my shoulders. My hands lay fidgeting in my lap with nothing to do.

“Try something else. Breathe. Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth, lips apart, like this.” The photographer’s nostrils flared obscenely on the inhale, and his jaw dropped as he let out one long exhale. It didn’t look particularly photogenic. “Relax-the-FACIAL-MUSCLES.”

We both tried it. I took a sneaky look at Art and he was doing it all wrong – tensing his brow, pushing on the outbreath, pursing his lips. The photographer rubbed his red face and got us to stand, bounce on our knees, flap our arms. Then we tried posing while holding hands below the frame and out of shot, both of us looking at our fingers intertwined.

Eventually the ordeal ended, and the photographer beckoned us over to a screen to see a preview. He scrolled through rows and rows of thumbnails and stopped on one somewhere near the bottom of the file. He pointed at four near identical photos in a row.

“I think this is the best you can do,” he said. “Sorry. Definitely the best of a bad lot.”

He gave us the four prints in a sleeve to take home, and when we got back to the house we spread them on the table, both of us grimacing at how awkward we looked. In each of them I was looking at Art as if about to say something, my top lip flattened on the cusp of the letter “B” or maybe “P”. Art was looking at something past me off-camera, his eyes blurred by a half blink.

I stood one up against a vase, muttering under my breath, “And this is the best we could do.”

Even though the process had been excruciating, I was still glad of the terrible photo. All that time spent decorating and primping and plumping before we moved in made moving-in-day feel like I was stepping straight into someone else’s life. Even my own stuff took on an uncanny, alien feel in its new setting, and I avoided touching any of it. At least with the photo it looked like I actually did live there.

The only space we hadn’t already refurbished was the loft.

Having the loft was part of the tenancy agreement, and we were given free rein to ditch or re-use whatever we found. Most of it was junk; depressed sofa cushions, shoeboxes full of old papers and faded bills, grubby toolboxes rattling with loose screws, and charity bags full of old sheets and Christmas decorations. We hired a skip and