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

Easton Grove is such an English name for what it was, a township of small cottage-style surgeries set around a larger central building, housing all the key conference halls, clinics, and laboratories, and fronted by a marble reception where your footsteps echo. Though it couldn’t have been built more than fifteen years before, the main building had been built in the style of an old manor house, with high ceilings and rows of windows with crisscross lead hatching.

The whole Easton Grove site was set way out of the city, surrounded by acres of forest and fields which changed colour through the seasons, from spring’s yellow stretches of rapeseed to winter’s frost-bitten blue. I had never seen greener grass, and it squeaked beneath your shoes like clingfilm. The air there was sweeter – not fresher, exactly, but like the synthetic scent of laundry liquid. If I’d read the label, I bet it would have said “cool cotton” or “flax”. Everything there seemed artificially bright, as if the smog between earth and the sun had been sterilised. If it wasn’t for the bronze-plated sign embossed with the brass ankh by the front gates, you might’ve thought it was a secluded country community, protected from trespassers and preserved like a pressed flower. Access to the site was via three sets of gates, manned by Grove staff dressed (in my mind) a little too much like farmers, smiling widely in glass booths, clad in checked shirts and earthy corduroys. Sometimes groups of non-members waited outside the gates, clasping the railings and glaring through into the compound, but today there were only one or two stragglers standing on their own, so I let all my muscles relax.

During my induction phases, the fallow fields and lack of life around the site had left me cold, but that day everything was illuminated. Rooftops shone like hot terracotta, and the stacks of white transporter cartons outside the surgeries reflected the brilliant gold of the sun. Even the ridiculously polished statues of what I suppose were meant to be pheasants and swans beside the path glittered like real silver.

The air tasted incredible today, so I took the scenic route to reception. On the way, I passed Grove caretakers wearing forensic suits and carrying their crinkling black waste-sacks, and their faces beamed in welcome and pleasure to see me. Lab coats glowed, like the shrouds of saints. A pair of doctors nodded to me like comrades do in films when no words are necessary. Even the gloomy-looking cottages with no windows that sat beneath the hanging branches of the willows didn’t distract me. It was easy to be fooled by them, but as you got closer, you couldn’t help but see the peeling paintwork, the chipped wood panelling. They were just painted pre-fabs, the sort you see when there’s a pop-up blood donation drive or a polling booth. The doors were always closed, and only staff in white coats or tweed went in and out of them during clinic hours. Today though, the sun bleached out the shadows from the trees, and the recordings of birdsong drowned out the strange clangs and thumps that could be heard from within their walls.

I’d been a delegate of the Easton Grove private healthcare programme for six months at this point, and of the five treatment phases I was on the cusp of breaking into phase four, Establishment, wherein my membership would start to actually roll out. This was the point where each patient reacts a little differently. Some adjusted relatively well, taking their new fitness and nutritional plans on the chin, while others reacted with spite. One woman in my focus group – I think her name was Barbara – stuffed her personalised plans straight in the paper bin, bellowing, “This isn’t where my money goes is it? Fuck this, I could download this shit off the internet. You might as well give me my fucking tarot card reading, as well.” Barbara was marched off to a sealed room by two small nurses dressed in cream tweed and clicking their ballpoint pens, both straining to hide their annoyance behind the smiles (but not concealing it enough). Barbara re-joined the group an hour later, her face flushed, a new plastic sleeve of exercises and food plans rolled in her fist. She didn’t speak to any of us again after that, and listened to the professor’s toxin warnings and nutritional basics with pursed lips and a chin jutting out like the tip of a sword.

Most patients didn’t make it onto phase four, and disappeared without so much as a sad little wave. It must’ve been devastating to get this far into the programme and then not make the cut, to be relegated to fight for a hospital bed. Some people waited months or even years for a slot to open, and then were told that their initial test results weren’t compatible or their body type just “didn’t fit the strict criteria”. Easton Grove had received plenty of criticism over the years for its inflexibility and unwillingness to admit members from different areas of society. I did think to myself that the exclusivity wouldn’t last – they surely couldn’t keep accepting so few people while the world watched and wilted? Those who didn’t make it into an intake saw the rest of us as withholding some genetic secret, but the truth was that we had no idea why we were chosen.

In the early days of phase one and two we were all treated the same, and went through identical blood tests, cardio assessments, ultrasounds, invasive extractions, musculo-skeletal exercises, psychological exams and genetic analysis. Some left you sore, and almost all left you feeling strange. We attended the Grove in gangs of forty, sitting together in conference halls with freshly-brewed coffee and piles of fresh fruit. We each held a numbered ticket, and waited until our number was called on one of the mounted TV screens to go in for our next trial.

It warmed your insides,