Composite Creatures, Caroline Hardaker [best ebook reader for laptop txt] 📗

UK, and with that came assurance that I was fit and healthy, with a long time yet ahead to find my place. The staff there had my back, and cared about my every movement in case I took a step wrong. And of course, there was Nut. Our shared little creature, a fluffy grey comma, every day growing bigger and connecting mine and Art’s hearts.

It was past 10pm when I picked up the box of acrylics. I arranged the glorious palette on my left and a fresh jar of water to my right. The brush rolled between my fingers and I wondered if this was how a pen sat in Art’s hand, or if this was how my mum had fiddled with her tools, between the middle digit and thumb. Jutting her chin and biting the tip of her tongue until it bulged like a cherry. Her hair streaked with crusty paint in all the colours of nature.

She loved landscapes the most.

Most of my memories were of her looking out of a window with a sketchpad, or taking me to a part of the countryside with (to my young mind) nothing in it. Low hills of stubborn rock and yellow heath, skinny trees sticking up between stones like broken fence posts. No flourishing copses or snow-peaked mountains like in magazines. I’d sit next to her with a book or a game, not able to understand why she picked those scenes to paint. She didn’t even look happy when she worked at it, and she’d correct invisible mistake after invisible mistake, all while sighing and tutting and muttering under her breath as if disappointed with the view. In the end, the finished painting never looked anything like the land. Sometimes she’d look between the two and cry, but when I clutched her arm and asked her to tell me why, she wouldn’t. She just squinted up her eyes and wiped my face as if I was the one weeping.

Surely much less difficult, I was going to paint my own portrait. If Art didn’t want me practising his portrait I wouldn’t – I’d work on myself, an entirely different shape. I kept the paints quite dry for added control, and started from the outside, working in. I drew a dark circle then stopped – the brush hovering above the paper. When it came to my insides, I didn’t know where to start. I started to pile on paint in sloppy layers. My hair became an amorphous cloud, and the colour I mixed for my face made me look like I was on the verge of a heart attack. I had to give it to Art for his attempts to add dimension with blues and greens. To me, I was as flat and formless as a magnolia wall.

I didn’t stick at it long, and put away the paints in a fit of misery. Absent-mindedly, I picked up my phone and (already irritated by various notifications on the screen) I swiped them away without opening. I’d read the names before the messages cleared – Eleanor and Rosa. Nothing from Aubrey. She wouldn’t have missed my birthday, I was sure of that, so maybe by staying silent she was trying to make some sort of point. It didn’t matter anyway. Any of it. I had more on my plate than they could understand right now, and I needed to focus on this house, this space. Art. Nut. Myself. I switched off my phone and left it on the arm of the chair as I stood tall and took one long deep breath.

Earlier, while we’d been eating cake, Art had mounted his crispy portrait of me in a wooden frame. I held it in front of this wall and that wall, seeking a home for this version of me. But everywhere felt wrong, as if I was laying myself bare for surgery, each wall a sterile and fluorescent-lit operating table.

7

Mum was always a painter.

That’s how I remember her now. Overalls streaked with irreversible oils, hands calloused, fingernails packed beneath with powdered colour. She took parts of reality and mixed them together to her own recipe, creating a world for me to grow up in.

I don’t remember Mum having many close friends before she died, but that didn’t seem odd at the time. She had me, and she had enough arguments in her head to listen to. I sometimes caught her talking to herself in the shower, or when sitting at the dining room table sketching out a new painting. If she caught me spying, she’d chuckle and say, “Keep on the right side of yourself, my lass. Everyone deserves a bit of sweet-talking sometimes.”

It never bothered me that Mum didn’t surround herself with like-minds, because it never bothered her. It’s natural that you see friends less as you get older, anyway. Life becomes more about you, and your small body swims a constant sea of commitments. There’s so much more to do. So much more to think about.

It was so much simpler before. At university, the little flat Aubrey and I shared in second and third year was the whole world.

In those days she wore her blonde hair down to her hips and shooed off any suggestion of having it trimmed, though the ends lay brittle on her back. We’d connected over shared loves of bloated haggis, horrible soap operas and books set before we were born. We split ourselves open and then stitched ourselves together, sharing everything in that parasitical way only students do. We were crawling the world’s ladder, side by side, each of us so confident of our individuality that (unknown to us at the time) is fed to us by our friends. We hung up fairy lights, stuck up the “People or Planet?” and “Earth’s Eviction Notice” posters we’d all been given by the Students’ Union, and made up for lack of furniture with cushions and cheap fleece blankets.

The truth is, I lost interest in other people, and