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

Art showed me around, pointing out his many, many books arranged in rows on the ledge where roof met brick, but they were too high for me to read the spines. He introduced his bedroom as “our room” and then brought me to the inner sanctum – his study. In contrast to the rest of the flat, this room was chaos – stacked with piles of paper, ring binders, and slippery plastic folders. Post-its stuck to books, the computer monitor, the legs of his desk. The walls were a mosaic of A3 sheets, nailed into the brick. His scrawls looked like hieroglyphics, mixed in with pie charts, line graphs, and tables of names and plot points. So many lives, condensed into cold, hard, stats. Art called this room his “aviary”.

I’d brought back one of Art’s books that he’d lent me, and I slotted it into the row of paperbacks on the windowsill. I told Art that I’d enjoyed it, particularly the ending when Ben had climbed the wall and told the world to go fuck itself. He grinned eagerly, and immediately handed me another to read, which I dropped into my handbag quickly. I hadn’t actually read that first book, I’d only flicked to the last chapter, but if you know the end people don’t ever question if you know the beginning.

It was already late, so we sat at his glass dining table to play a board game. During the hour we spent sinking each other’s battleships, I waited for the wine to work its way into my blood. I became bold – stretching out my naked feet under the glass for a touch of warm ankle or curling toe. My hands danced the table and I used them decadently, flourishing my fingers as I talked about my week. When I laid them back on my lap between gestures, I could feel them shaking.

Art brought out midnight snacks – cheese and biscuits, grapes, flatbreads and hummus, and though I’d never felt like eating less in my whole life I picked at the grapes, chewing them until I was left with the empty skin. Something about the taste was “off”, a bit like rust or damp stone, and I wondered if he hadn’t scrubbed them like he should. Maybe all that was different in the US.

At one point when I was listening to Art gush about his recent two weeks in Rome, a small beetle the size of a grain of rice scuttled from the fruit bowl to hide under my plate. A rare little jewel. But when I lifted up my dish the bug was no longer there.

It must have been 3am or so by the time we stumbled to “our room”. The curtains were open, and through the window I saw the moon, cold and white, punched through a sky already teasing the pink of dawn. We sat on the end of the bed and pressed our lips together, my hand reaching out for his unexplored middle. I had no concept of Art’s dimensions – the width of his torso, or the location of his navel. His body was a vast land for which I owned no map, so I tried to memorise every hill, gully or soft valley, so that I might find my way back.

Art’s eyes were closed when our faces met. His lips were thin, different, and just as I started to fall into another place I focussed on my breathing, pushing the darkness out with the exhale. Art raised his eyebrows at me, so I brushed off the red rising up my neck as “the wine”, and leant in again, this time – starting with my mind’s eye already pressed somewhere I’d learned to go.

We sat apart again and peeled off our clothes before climbing into the bed, Art on my right, as if it would always be so. I had removed everything, all trinkets and treasures, and Art had removed everything aside from the blue leather bracelet that set us both apart.

“You should have left that on,” he whispered.

We didn’t need to touch each other, the inches between us tickled, and I was struck by how much this arrangement (though so organised) felt so erotic. We were turned on our sides facing each other, the duvet tucked around our necks. Art made no effort at all to hold me, and as the room continued to sway like the deck of a ship, all I could think about was how much of me Art could actually see with his glasses sitting there on the nightstand.

I had an early booking the next morning to go through my seventh round of genetic counselling. After a brief few minutes of running my fingers through my curls and smudging a lipstick across the apples of my cheeks, I swept out the door – Art and I following each other’s gaze with the same, conspiratorial smile. I travelled to Easton Grove wearing last night’s clothes as a mark of triumph.

I drove the forty or so miles to the clinic straight from Art’s flat, only stopping to pick up an Earl Grey and victory bagel from a service station. I devoured them in my corner of the car park, each mouthful deservedly sweet and full of life. I didn’t care if the heightened sugar levels in my blood would expose my failings. What did it matter? I’d spent the night with Art, and he was wonderful. And he was mine, all but for a signature on a dotted line. But plenty of time for that if that day ever came. Months, years, perhaps. My head swam with all the possible futures we could have – all the places we could go, and things we could see. Art would open so many doors, taking me with him into tomorrow. And more importantly, he wanted me, he seemed to really, genuinely want me. Me. If that wasn’t an occasion for cake, I don’t know