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

you might still find a worm after the rain, or even a drunken bumblebee caught in a southern wind.

Wanting to avoid everyone else, I took Art to the castle on a Thursday after work. Sometimes community groups projected films on the ruins or acted out amateur plays between the stones at night, when the sky would darken and cast an eerie crimson light across the stage. I wanted it to be about us, so made sure to choose a night where we’d be alone.

We walked in silence, taking snaps of the lilac smog oozing up from behind the monoliths and climbing the ancient steps to halls where lords once sat. My hands shading my eyes from the setting sun, I waited on one crumbling wall while Art leapt across a crevasse to a square of stones with a central hollow, set like a throne. Art sat in it and surveyed his kingdom below. I teased him then, unapologetically goading him for taking the throne before I had the chance (though I never intended to really). He lifted his chin, and snootily replied that the throne was his, but as his queen I could sit on the arm and shine. From the height of our crumbling turret, the remains of the castle foundations stuck up from the ground like bones.

After dates like that, we’d come back to my flat for an extra drink or two, learning to be comfortable with our bare toes nudging each other under the table, our hands in each other’s cupboards. At the time, I lived alone and my flat was pure function; a one-room studio, chalked in cheap magnolia. The only real flash of colour was crumpled in a corner beneath a coffee table. A patchwork blanket stitched from mismatched fabrics, with one strip at the end crudely knitted in yellow and shot with holes. I hardly had any knickknacks or anything like that, and instead blue folders blazing with Easton Grove’s bronze ankh lay in piles on the floor, contracts and small print spilling from their edges.

The flat naturally felt like a “nook”, wherever you sat or stood. The kitchen, living room, and bedroom were all part of the same space but hidden around corners in a horseshoe, with the living room in the centre. The bathroom was the only room with a lock. My only chair - a two seater sofa - was only large enough for one person to lounge or for two people to be uncomfortable. I sat on the floor when Art visited, legs crossed like a child listening in assembly.

The walls were bare apart from a rattling air purifier and two small oil paintings from Mum. One was a likeness of me in blue dungarees, crouching behind a huge plant pot overflowing with trickling ivy. I look like I’m about four or five, but I have a feeling she painted it from memory long after I’d outgrown hide and seek. The other was a portrait of the two cats she’d kept as a child, in the days before people ranked hygiene over hugs. One was a little black lump with a white nose and squinty eyes, and the other was a mix of tawny, marbled like an exotic butterfly. When I was little, I used to stroke the paint with my little finger, imagining what their fur would feel like. Their names had been Bathsheba and Bertie, and most of Mum’s bedtime stories to me had been about their antics, whether it was how Bathsheba would shuttle up the doorframe like a fireman down a pole but in reverse, or how my grandad would take Bertie out for a walk with a pink harness, much to the sniggering of the neighbours. Mum said Bertie lived to the age of twenty-eight, but I couldn’t see this being true. Twenty-eight is a human age.

Art’s flat in comparison was an urban ruby. I’d never seen anything like it. He rented it, a refurbished Victorian office space above an architects’ studio. The interior walls were lined in a rich red brick, and the ceiling was a night sky of navy. Unlike my air purifier, which groaned like the exhaust of an old bus, his was tiny and beautiful and silent enough for you to believe it wasn’t even there. All his furniture stood very far apart, so if you lifted your arms and spun them at various points in the flat your fingertips wouldn’t brush anything. Shelves along the walls supported leafy ferns, glossy banana trees, and succulent yuccas. I couldn’t tell if they were real or purely ornamental, even when stroking their waxy skin.

He’d only been living there four months when I first visited, plenty of time to make the place his. It seems naïve now, but the idea of being locked into his flat made my palms sweat. My plan was to head over there after spending a frantic hour after work transforming myself into someone bright and sparkling. I shouldn’t have driven, but by the time I realised that it shouldn’t be this hard to put the key in the ignition, it was too late to call for a taxi. I practised casually leaning backwards and away from the window, in case I was stopped and needed to dodge a policeman tasting my wine-breath.

I made it to Art’s without drama, and as I settled into his leather sofa and waited for my next glass to be poured, I began to scan the flat for clues – nudging aside cushions to see what they covered, flicking through the magazines under the coffee table. But this was a show home and I found nothing to give him away. He could easily have been a spy or an assassin. There were no photographs or magazines lying around, no half-eaten meals or empty bottles. The only thing “in progress” was a pile of papers on the arm of a chair – forms and pre-addressed envelopes with “Visa Exemption” in bold across the top and Easton