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

and boiled up a handful of rice. I plated them, squeezing a few drops of lemon juice over the tofu before heading to the living room.

Art wasn’t eating alone. So why should I?

I did a one hundred and eighty degree turn at the living room door, and grabbed a tin of Nut’s feed from the kitchen. I headed up the two sets of stairs to the second floor, setting down my dinner next to the baby gate. Nut was sitting on the paper pad, holding the pencil in her mouth like a moustache. I pulled the pencil from her jaws with the gentlest of coos, and then spooned some of the gelatinous slop into her dish. Grey and formless, it looked awful, but at the sight of the jelly, Nut bumbled over and pushed her face deep in the bowl. Little satisfied slurping and grunting noises filled the air and I relaxed back into my position by the baby gate. As I chewed, I watched Nut’s long tongue lift the jelly into her mouth greedily, and each mouthful she ate nourished me, too. This was just what I needed, after that phone call.

Then, almost without thinking, I lifted a piece of my tofu and offered it to her on the palm of my outstretched hand. Nut’s face flicked up immediately and she ambled over, peering down at it with eyes fixed on the prize. She sniffed at it slowly and suspiciously. I held my hand firm. Nut’s self-restraint was a revelation. The way she’d been guzzling her own food had seemed so desperate that I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t torn my hand off to get at something new and illicit. After a pause, Nut leant forwards and lifted the tofu from my hand with large, flat, gleaming white teeth.

I pulled back my hand sharply. I hadn’t realised her teeth would be so, well, like that. Already. They beamed bulb-like between her lips, a crush of pale pearls, far too big for her. She had a gap between the front two. I pulled my cardigan around my shoulders, shivering. Were those teeth uncomfortable for Nut? She was so young, and still teething. Forcing such oversize lumps through tender gums was a horrible thought. I pressed my tongue to one of my molars, and flicked it off one sharp corner.

Nut licked the floor for any juice she’d dribbled before turning back to her own bowl, unmoved and unthanking. I was pleased. I scooped up the plates and cutlery and headed down the steps, locking the baby gate behind me. I cast a quick look over my shoulder to see Nut sitting in the same spot, watching me over her shoulder, eyes half-closed, tail arcing slowly from side to side.

In the kitchen, I dropped the plates on the table and picked up my phone. I typed Aubrey’s number from memory and held the phone to my ear, breathing slowly – in through the nose and out through the mouth, just like in meditation classes. The line rang. And it rang. And it rang. And I didn’t hang up.

When the time came to go to bed, teeth brushed and body showered, I pulled out the patchwork blanket from beneath the bedframe and spread it across the duvet. I looked at it for a while, tracing my fingers over the chaotic stitches holding the pieces together. As I ran my hand across the knit, my engagement ring, the stone having swung to my palm, snagged on a loop of yarn, and as I pulled away I made one of the gaping holes in it worse.

I cursed under my breath and tried to weave the wool back through so it looked like it did before, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I turned away, and decided that I’d sleep with the blanket on the bed, and put it away again tomorrow before Art came home.

Only once I’d decided this, did I click the red “end” icon on the phone. I stared at the screen for some time after it had switched to darkness. I rose from the bed and switched off the light on the landing, totalling the house in the same void: empty, black.

10

It wasn’t long after that when Art and I had our first joint appointment of the year at Easton Grove.

Knowing us both as they did, I felt sick at the thought of telling them about our engagement. Crazy really. For them this was ideal. How much more stable and committed to the programme could we possibly be? We were perfect press release fodder. But there was still this little niggling feeling that I wasn’t ready to share our story. Perhaps it was that I was still digesting it myself. Once I’d done that I’d be ready to wear the veil of a blushing fiancée, but for now it all was too raw, the bridal shroud a storm cloud.

Art was excited to tell them, and on the drive to the clinic he rolled down the windows so the radio played out loud and melodious on the summer roads. He bobbed his head side to side and sang along, raising his pitch whenever he looked at me to join in. I tried my best, but I didn’t know the words to his music and made do with silent miming. I don’t think Art noticed, he was too busy shouting the lyrics to himself.

At one point my phone buzzed, and as I pulled it out Art gave me a sideways glance. “Put it away,” he sang. “Today’s about us, remember?” I swiped away the message from Rosa and dropped the phone in the glovebox. He was right – I needed to focus.

As we approached the triple gates, a larger crowd than I’d seen in a long time were crowded around one of the security booths. Through the raised hands and placards, I could just about see the tweed-wearing guard behind the glass shouting into a black mobile phone.