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

I tugged at his hand, pulling him down to Nut and I. “Sit with us.”

He sank to a crouch and let his hand be guided across her wide, white back.

“Why did they go? Are we really that terrible?” He mumbled the words under his breath, inside out. I could practically see his capillaries, everything slowing down. I stroked his cheek.

“Arthur. How could you take her tooth?”

“I didn’t get to explain it to them. I didn’t tell them I was sick.”

“Do you feel her? In you?”

“I didn’t tell them.”

He was on a different plane; I couldn’t reach him. I cupped his cheek in my hand.

“They knew, Art. I’m sure they knew.”

But no, no. Not sick. Not truly sick. Not that type of sick. Not yet. It was too soon. He would have told me.

“Art, what’s happening?” My voice trembled.

“You remember that we were bio-matched to share her?” he said, his hands clasping his elbows. “She’s not just yours, she’s mine too. And now I need her. I need you both.”

Art had given up a lot – moving his entire life from Wisconsin to meet his closest biological match. He’d always said that his life in the US was a time he wanted to cut off, like a limb that wouldn’t heal. And now he needed to slice more life away in order to save himself. All the time, Art had been raw, and I’d never noticed. He’d always looked eerily familiar. From the first time I saw him sitting across from me in the waiting room, and then when I saw him flitting along the corridors, bright as a bird, I knew it was him. He smiled a lot, and that made it all OK. Already he reassured me, and now he needed me to return the favour.

“I love you, Norah.”

He wanted me to say it back. He looked like a child, but he wasn’t. I was so aware that he was a grown man who was inching closer to a choice that we couldn’t turn back from. I didn’t say those three little words back to him. They weren’t in me anymore.

Art let out a juddering sigh and squeezed his eyes shut. “It’s booked for a few days’ time. It’s now,” he whispered. “I won’t be gone long. I’ll be back before you know it, don’t worry.”

Cold lips pressed on my forehead, and my third eye peered down Art’s throat for the fault, the failure. Was it the greying? Perhaps from his youth in the US? Had he played in his parents’ overalls, never washing his hands after pressing them into the chemicals? I pulled Nut towards me, probably a little roughly because she let out a whimper and buried her head in the crook of my arm. Within seconds she was chewing the sleeve of my dress, placating the tension in her spine, her neck, with each rotation of her jaw.

I spoke with a fictional voice. “Have you spoken to Easton Grove?” I didn’t sound like me. I was a canary, singing in a cage. An actor, reading a script. Art stroked his fingers down the joints of Nut’s spine. Each lump was an onion bulb, pushing through a pigskin.

“She’s a dinosaur, isn’t she?” he muttered. “A fossil, already a fossil.”

My heart high in my throat, I gave a dull thump of a word in reply. Art turned to Nut fully, exploring those ridges with his fingertips before rolling his hands around her expanse to her hips, straining under her weight. The lump of a knee, a foot, so like my own. Toenails.

In a second I could see it – Nut broken in two on a steel table, Art above with a sacrificial knife. He cuts deep, deep between the teats and yank, yank, yanks the blade towards him as if gutting a wriggling fish, then parts the wet lips of her belly. In he dives, his hands pressed together in prayer. Down to the waist in Nut, Art wriggles left and right before emerging, shining black, and holding a fist of beating red matter, just matter. And all the while Nut’s legs are waving in the air and she’s looking at him with his own face, his own eyes, that one gaping hole at the back of her jaw potent and wanting for a thumb to fill it.

But there on the stairs, Art was close enough to kiss her. “She’s us, trapped in amber.” He squeezed her middle, pressing probe-like thumbs into the thick layer of fat, “Already a fossil.” Nut flicked her head back on her neck and croaked.

It sounded like “No.”

19

Mum used to play a game. Whenever I was too sick to go to school, she’d make me eat fruit on the hour, every hour, from when she first arose to paint to the last hours of light.

At first I wouldn’t care and savour the sugar, not minding when I wasted the peach-juice by letting it run down my chin because I knew another treat was coming soon. But by mid-afternoon I didn’t want to eat any more. Every bite bit me back, and made my stomach burn with all the acids. Bitter replaced sweet.

“Come on, another piece and you’ll be full of power-ups,” she said, blowing out a stream of smoke like a wizard. “We’re not stopping until you’re bouncing off the walls.”

It felt like a game, even when it hurt. Us against the virus. Mum was scared of the virus, she’d do anything she could to beat it quickly, while it was still weak. Even when I was faking it, she made me eat fruit. Even when she must’ve known that I just didn’t want to go to school that day. But whether I was really sick or pretending, the quicker I got better, the more she made me swallow.

“We’re winning! Another. Another!” Her red hair bobbed on her shoulders. “Another piece, Norah, and you’ll live forever. I’ll make sure of it.”

Art stumbled