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

up residence at the other end of the gallery behind a cabinet of starlings. He unfolded the stool with a flick and undid the catch on the case, causing it to unfold upwards and outwards, like a doctor’s medical bag.

I tucked in my legs beneath the bench and shrank into the wall. If I craned my head – just so – I could see him through the glass but he wouldn’t be able to see me. From here the starlings looked like they rested on his blazer, on his shoulders, on his fingers. He undid the metal lock and swung the door open with a creak. How easy it would have been for him just to have crawled inside amongst the feathers and closed the door. I could have kept him, then.

And I split again.

The sight of Luke brought back that hot gush of want, and pain, and tearing of flesh from flesh. Skin sizzling on the hob.

Love.

If I hadn’t joined Easton Grove, would we have still been one person?

When I was accepted onto the programme, I hadn’t known what the real cost would be. They didn’t disclose the personals until you passed the initial tests, I suppose because the results of the tests dictated the cost, and how you coped with the cost dictated the personals. It had been the genetic counsellor at the very beginning who’d given me my options and delivered the news that because of my limited funds the shared ovum organi route would be my only viable option. When Easton Grove first began, it had only offered one service, the exclusive ovum organi programme, and if you couldn’t afford your own membership, you couldn’t be part of it. It was as simple as that. For the first ten years or so, Easton Grove became synonymous with tailored suits, Cadillacs with tinted-windows, and an upper class who could afford to be anonymous. Mum was still here when the now-established Grove was in its earliest days, and I remember it being featured on the news from time to time when I came home from school. She’d watch the reports with one eye still on her work, painting grating strokes with a dry and brittle brush.

But at some point something happened, a shift in internal comms. Easton Grove decided that they needed to improve their image, and announced new, accessible, and more affordable options for regular people. They sold it as the perfect solution to glue together a splitting world. This secondary programme involved genetically matching individuals (across continents if necessary) who were biologically similar enough to share an ovum organi, and thereby almost entirely eradicating the risk of the body rejecting non-compatible ovum organi organs. This one ovum organi would sustain both members with donor parts, whilst they shared the financial burden. It was essentially one membership split into two, and so two lives would be combined as one.

Easton Grove spoke to the nation about how families could live longer together – cue the sultry spoken voiceovers over stock footage of young couples in wooden cabins, early-retiree ex-pats on a beach in Acapulco. Cue the first time they used the beautiful summer couple, gazing forever into the pool. It even looked better than the exclusive single membership, because of the togetherness. What a secret to share with someone, what a connection. In a way, it was like taking us back to the Bronze Age, when we worked together to survive. Community, but in this case, a community of two. Everyone was talking about it at work, the hope it gave, but no one ever mentioned the cost.

This was a few years after I’d sold the last of Mum’s backlog. I was sitting in front of the TV eating dinner, and I asked the white walls out loud what I should do. My inheritance sat in the bank, every day reminding me of the fragility of life – even when it was lived to the full – just as Mum’s was. It was her passion liquefied into cold cash and it needed to be used for something important. Looking around, my flat was empty of answers. The only light shone from Mum’s paintings, those portrayals of life that would outlast her. In the hearts of her collectors she’d live forever. She’d achieved a kind of immortality that most people could only dream of. And what had I done to make her proud? I didn’t even know who to be, never mind what to do. If her art was immortal, then perhaps the money earned from them was, too.

I registered my interest on the Easton Grove site the same evening, and the young me in Mum’s painting nodded her head sagely. It took seven years after that for them to contact me back. And the rest is my history.

The contract with Easton Grove had said that Art and I had to appear functioning – more than functioning. They needed the good publicity; emotive stories about two people – brought together to share longevity – building their world around the Grove. A demonstration of an ovum organi partnership transforming into a blossoming love-match. And if the Grove could prove that membership enhanced your life professionally too, well, that just meant more kudos for the programme, more funding, and more interest in their latest experimental research.

I was still with Luke, the first time I met Art. We’d been together for two years, hardly forever in the scheme of things, but he felt like my forever. I didn’t tell him I’d registered until I’d already graduated from phase one. This was my only secret, only shared with Mum’s shadow in the quietest hours of the night. I had to share it with her; her body was part of what these institutes had become. Her blood trickled through their pipes every day.

When Luke and I were together, I pushed this secret out of my mind, and when it crept back in again (reminded by something on TV or by overhearing a conversation