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

It didn’t feel like a betrayal because I never thought it’d actually happen.

We’d talked about Easton Grove of course, who hadn’t? But I’d been careful not to gauge how he really felt about it because I didn’t want to be wounded. When I once did ask him outright, brimming with wine and superciliousness, he twisted his face up and said he didn’t think it’d last. “It doesn’t have legs,” was the phrase he used. “Hollow people.”

I suppose I always hoped that he would be a member too, one day. We couldn’t share an ovum organi but if we both shared with other people… No, I’m not sure how that would have worked out. I was dreaming.

I lied to him a lot, before I told the truth.

I’d gone around to his flat for the night. He knew something was wrong as soon as he opened the door and immediately wrapped soothing words around me in ribbons. I needed to do it quick, there was no time, so I cut him before we even sat down. He stared at me as if he didn’t understand, so I went on, and on, talking about my “genetic weaknesses”. It wasn’t exactly a lie, it was just sleight of hand. Who’s to say that I wasn’t predisposed to the cancer that had carried Mum off? And I didn’t even know what had happened to my father, whoever he was. But my real weaknesses were emotional.

Even then, I lied to tell the truth.

He didn’t beg. I thought he would. I’d imagined him crying, hooking me back by my heart, but there was just a lot of silence, thin air, light-headedness. I even goaded him, asking didn’t he care, didn’t he want to save me. After a long pause in which he stared at his open hands laid across his knees, he said that he couldn’t try to stop me saving my life, but that I had to leave. He didn’t look at me, he just pointed at the exit and broke off a piece of me in the process. That’s a hurt that can’t be fixed. I told myself and him that I was within my rights to decide how I wanted to live my life, and anyone that didn’t want a part of it wasn’t worth my time. He never returned the piece of me he kept.

I didn’t reach out to him again after that, what was the point? He made it clear that he didn’t want me to, and he never reached out to me either. It would’ve been pointless anyway. How could I build a life with Art when I was in love with Luke? How would it have made me look – leaving him behind when I lived my best life? I would have had to watch him die.

Aubrey never forgave me for what I did to him. Maybe she cared for Luke more than she did for me. She smirked and squinted her eyes at me when I told her I’d ended it, as if she was waiting for the punchline of a terrible joke. She didn’t speak for a few minutes, and neither did I. I waited, tasting my bitter coffee in tiny sips and strong-arming my mind back to when we lived together, and when silence meant peace.

Her first words said it all. She asked how Luke was. When I said he’d be OK, she clasped her hands to the back of her neck and glared at her knees. I was Prometheus on the rock, and already I could see her sharpening her eagle’s beak. She knew I was split, hurting, with hardly a minute to stitch my wounds and yet she still flew at me full force – rising on a storm of contempt.

I’d confused her, I get that, she thought she knew me and I’d betrayed that.

Slowly she stood, and without a word picked up her rucksack and strode to the door, her red heels sitting on the folded backs of her shoes.

Initially I was speechless. She was turning her back when I was most alone. I had no one, no one, and she was walking away as if she was better than me. But then I got angry. In that split second, I remembered every time I’d seen her at her worst – twisting with jealousy or hawking cruelties, and before I realised what I was doing I was screaming and screaming and screaming at her. My throat burned and I spat blood.

I must have terrified her.

“I’m going to see him,” she said, quietly. “I can’t believe what you’re doing.”

If you have to chain someone to you, it’s not worth them being too close. No trust. The two most important people in my life had left me behind, and both with the same last look over their shoulders. A glistening look, pale and perplexed, as if the me they’d known had died.

That day in the museum was the first time I’d seen Luke since that night in his flat, and in heart and soul I was right back there, self in shards. He might’ve even been wearing the same clothes. It was unbearably hot inside my layers, and though I longed to loosen them, find myself some air, I couldn’t even shuffle an inch in case he saw me. His hands and face were all I could see, the rest of the gallery was all wavy, as if we stood on a griddle.

Remembering to breathe, I took long slow drags of air through my nose. I wondered if he’d help me if I fainted right here on the floor. Would I look the same to him now? Should I speak? Go up to him and face him through the case, a ghost incanted back?

All of his attention was on the display, the stuffed figures inches from his face. I watched as he wrapped little pieces of wire around the bird’s tiny claws, strengthening