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

and freezing. His feet were bare and blue, swollen lumps of flesh in the grass.

I kissed his cheek and spun him around to face me. He looked right through me at the house, his eyes sunken into deep pits.

“Norah, they know. You need to be careful.”

I squeezed his upper arms, holding him close to me. Feel my heart. “Did you tell them?”

He looked at me and then at the grass, his mouth pinched tight. After a ragged gasp of air he shook his head.

“Then they don’t know anything,” I said. Art’s eyes were as wide as I’d ever seen them, and I unexpectedly remembered Mum’s words about the moon being white as a pearl long ago. But was it as white as Art’s eyes? No. Nothing could ever be as luminous, hovering in the green night-smog.

“Norah, I’m not quite myself.”

“I know.” So many problems that I couldn’t help, so I tried to rub some warmth into his arms. What could I do? We were locked together in this now. “It’s getting to me too. I don’t know what we’re going to do. I didn’t know.”

Art shook his head and a little stream of blood, thin and mixed with spit, leaked from the side of his mouth. He looked like he was dying.

“Your lip…”

He brushed his mouth with the back of his hand and gave it only a glance before dropping his arm to his side. “That. That’s nothing. It’s fine. It’s fine. But Norah, I can hear her. I can hear Nut, now more than ever. In my head.” He clamped his hands over his ears. His voice sounded odd, slightly lisping, like his tongue was swollen.

A brush by my ankle and Nut was there again, walking around our ankles in a figure of eight, only stopping to lick the frost from Art’s naked feet.

16

All Christmas, we kept ourselves locked in. Since Nut was now tall enough to reach up and use a door handle, we couldn’t take any chances. A locked door meant no one would leave, but then no one would come in either.

Since that night in the garden, I’d been careful as to what I left lying around. I buried the cigarettes in the glovebox, and hardly left a room without carrying cups, plates or piles of papers. I vacuumed compulsively, emptying bag after bag of Nut’s shed fur straight into the bin outside. I was clearing conversation-starters, triggers, mistakes. Every dirty smudge was a smudge on me, a clue to tell Easton Grove that I wasn’t living my best life. I wasn’t capable. That I needed them to intervene. That I was thinking against them. Christmas might be the only time left sacred and free. Fia had a key, but even that wouldn’t let her in when the chain was on. Maybe that would be enough time to bundle Nut somewhere, perhaps back in the loft. Art would have to help, there’d be no way I could get her up the ladder on my own. Keeping on the double-lock would mean an extra few seconds to flatten my hair and pretend everything was fine. It was fine.

Swallowing a lump in my throat, I spent the weekend before Christmas cleaning out the red loft again, sweeping the floor of Nut’s fallen fur, cleaning her beds, wiping clear the skylight. I plugged in the lamps and I filled a litter tray with white crystals. Art watched from his study as I carried up the cleaning supplies, his face blank, hands wrapped around the nape of his neck. I didn’t want him to speak. This was beyond him now.

Outside was a dull, white watercolour. It hadn’t snowed yet, but the sky weighed heavy with the expectancy of it, as if the cloud was a canopy filled with mud. One sharp thrust upward and all the weather would come pouring down, like it had built up over a thousand years.

So I prepared our Noah’s Ark. Downstairs, I purged the kitchen of potted carcasses. Despite them all sitting in a row and sharing the same light, each plant had died in its own discrete way. Most had shrivelled back into a gnarled stump, and others had become mushy, sinking down like a creamy concertina. Aubrey’s succulent had finally given up its last leaf, and the stalk stood obscenely naked, coiling towards the sun like an earthworm. I tossed them all into the composter and left the empty pots by the back door. I’d replace them with artificial plants later, once New Year had come and gone. I wiped down the windowsill and filled the empty space with Christmas cards from names I didn’t know, signed in bronze ink.

I kept the lights in the house dim and everything in soft focus. I could stumble around, sherry in hand, eyes half-closed and still make it safely from room to room. Art said that it was as if I was preparing the house for hibernation, and maybe I was.

Even Nut seemed soothed by the semi-darkness. Her morning and afternoon runs around the ground floor took on a sluggish lilt, as if her body weighed more than her feet could handle, and her face scrunched with the effort of keeping up the pace. When she flopped, exhausted, by the sofa, she’d roll onto her back and expose her bald belly for a rub. I blew raspberries on it and she’d twist her spine left and right, her four legs kicking at empty air. She should be wearing a Santa hat or something, I thought.

I’d brought down Aubrey’s patchwork blanket and folded it into a corner of the living room for Nut to nap on, like how we’d done with Art’s fleece in the loft almost a year ago. But while she’d ignored his jacket, Nut rolled and twisted in the patchwork, gnawing the corners and rolling the bones of her fingers into the soft knit. It made my heart flutter.

I started to think about baking, cooking, all those extra hours