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

their connections to the twigs and branches they called home. Occasionally he’d stop to fiddle in the metal case for a tool before looking up again, flicking aside his fringe and closing his right eye, just like he did when painting his little people.

I moved my hands along the bench and gripped the edge, leaving a trail of misted fingerprints. My heart was too loud. Surely he could hear me? Every word in my head banged on my skull like a drum. I shuffled forwards on the bench. As I drew closer to him, even by imperceptible fractions, I began to feed from the current between us in the air, and grew stronger with each draft. I would have guzzled forever in my attempt to satisfy the bottomless cavity inside. I began to feel giddy, and my legs tingled – desperate to spring, or leap or jump. I had no idea what I was going to say, but I needed to show him that he was still with me. Maybe he’d return my shard of heart.

I held my breath before moving, but just as I began to lurch forwards a figure walked up behind Luke. I sat back again, craning my head to see who it was. A woman, about my age, wearing a deep red front-of-house fleece. She leaned in close behind him and kissed him on the ear. He leaned back and said something quietly to her, his eyes still on the starlings. She pointed at something I couldn’t see inside the case and he moved his hands there. Their two faces side by side peered into the case, cheek to cheek. His new curls coiling into her swinging ponytail.

You know, now I think maybe she hadn’t kissed him. It could have been a whisper. He didn’t look at her once, and when I think about it, she didn’t look him in the eye, either. But the closeness of them drove me out, and I didn’t wait to find out what Luke did next. I don’t even remember the drive home. It’s a miracle I made it back whole.

Once I returned to the house, I threw open the front door and strode straight through the hallway, the kitchen, and out through the back door. No need to lock doors behind me now.

I leaned into the shed and picked up the garden axe, testing the weight of its swing as I strode across the wet grass. When I reached the far edge, I got to work on the berry bush, hacking to pieces that persistent fucking bush that I’d never planted, that I’d never wanted, and that kept coming back, again and again and again, like a vampire rising from the grave.

21

What did I originally ask for? At the beginning? I haven’t forgotten.

I never saw Mum die. I never saw her slow decay into grey. I never saw the end of her life because I wasn’t there. After the last November I visited, I didn’t go back. For all those months I let her wilt on her own, drowning in her own body. I only returned when she was already gone.

Maybe this is why I’m alone now. Why I have so little time left, but I’m still waiting with the hot taste of sweet milk on my tongue. Why I’m wearing my “hello” dress, my “I remember all of your sisters” dress. It’s threadbare, thinning like the skin on my face, the last white hairs on my head. If I hold up the hem they’re all still there, ghosts in the silk scent of talcum. My blue bracelet dangles from my wrist, many times mended, but never fully repaired. I’m no seamstress. One final time, I’m waiting for a white van, stamped with the bronze ankh and “E.G.” on its side-doors. This is my last day, my last day of all, and I’m waiting for men whose faces I don’t know to bring our daughter to me – in a box.

Where are they?

I’ve been waiting such a long time. They should be here.

Below the window an immaculate blanket smothers the road, houses, hedges. It won’t stay pristine for long, it never does. Cars are white mountains now, but soon they’ll be dusted with ash. You could draw your name in it. No one’s passed by since dawn, when single figures clad in black marched against the blizzard. Their footprints are hidden under the drifts.

There’s nothing coming yet.

The last moments of life are a room. I can’t be in that space, that dying space where I know she’s been. There’ve been times when I’ve opened the door just a crack, just to see, and I can taste her misery on the air. Yet a spark in the mire – I know she wants me there with her. In her swirling world of oils and watercolours, she centred me in its eye. Those racks of unfinished paintings, some still sticky with oil – most of them were of me. She didn’t know who I was going to be in years to come, but she still tried countless times to capture a piece just for herself.

You see, I can’t be with her in that room. The day I meet her there is the day I come face to face with the shame of it, the blame I placed on Mum for causing her own end when I have done so much worse.

Mum’s end was an end through joy – and are there worse things? I now think there are. Her blood danced in her veins in all the vibrant shades she shaped into poetry. My own blood hardly runs at all, yet I feel the dull slick of it, all the time ticking towards the point when I slow so much that I stop. Stop thinking. Stop being anything that can make a difference or leave anything behind. I’ve become grey, without ever being sick.

We tell our stories to make sense of what we’ve