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

own American drawl was amongst them he couldn’t tell, and he couldn’t hear it. Though he tried to be good-humoured about it he was never the same, and pottered about the place in a style much more senior than his years. By then we slept in separate rooms, Art living in a new little annex built into the back of the house. I still don’t go in there, it’s not my space. It’s a foreign land and exploring such a thing is of no interest to me now.

But what did I ask for? In the beginning?

I asked for nothing.

Maybe this was the reason they chose me. When the doctors dug down, sure that I must harbour some deep-seated motive, some ambition I was scared to speak up about, I told them straight, “I’m not asking for anything, because I don’t know if I have anything to give.”

Despite what they tried to make me feel, I’m nothing special. I’m normal. I’m not driven or obsessive over success. No matter how many pastimes or sports I try, I’ve never expected to find one that I’m a secret genius at. I’m every day. I’m you. I’m me. I’m a world, complex and unstructured. Perhaps that was the point. I was a beta for Joe Public. This has been my purpose. I’ve always been a glass of water, poured back and forth whenever they tipped the wrist. They see right through me, know my insides.

But there was something I wanted. I just didn’t know it then. And I got it.

I wanted somewhere safe. This house is part of my body, and without it I’m a thin and weedy thing, a tortoise without its shell. I’m never without my security.

I had Art, the longest marriage of all my friends. Art was my home just as much as the brickwork. Ours was a true partnership, and every time he needed to use our ovum organi I understood and gave him my blessing. Art has not been well over the years. By the time he died at ninety-eight, he housed a hundred different souls inside him. They said it was dementia, but I know it was just too many voices for him to cope with. He couldn’t hear himself. He forgot who he was.

The Easton Grove programme gave Art exactly what he wanted, and me too. To live a life of few surprises. I needed protection and time to work myself out. It’s not their fault that I’ve never worked out who I’m supposed to be.

But maybe none of us do. Maybe that’s what we find out when we live.

I hit a low patch in my fifties, after we’d been together for twenty years or so. I remember it as the first time I stopped leaving the house, answering calls. I still hear Art’s voice, clear as day:

“It’s like we’re on a cliff with a lake under us. You’ve got to jump, Norah, jump in and through the meniscus. I’ll hold your hand. We’ll pass through our reflections and see we were there all the time in the water.”

I wonder if a lack of mistakes means I’ve never broken through the glass. I’m not myself.

The spring after Rosa saw Nut at the New Year’s Eve party, a car Mike was driving went through a red light and hit the back of a transit van. It was late and they’d both been drinking. Mike was under the limit and walked away from the scene whereas Rosa had been broken in two. The bus was empty apart from the driver, so no one else was hurt.

I’d only seen her once after the New Year’s Eve party, a month later when Eleanor had invited us both for a meal in an attempt to bring us back together. Eleanor looked thin, tired. Rosa was late, and she arrived drunk. She told us she’d been for a “few drinks” with Aubrey just around the corner, and when Eleanor asked Rosa why Aubrey hadn’t come to say hi, Rosa just shrugged and said, “She’s got places to be, people to see. You know how it is.”

Mike read a passage at Rosa’s funeral. He acted like he’d written it himself but the words seemed too familiar. I struggled to remember where I’d heard them and I still don’t know, even now. I can still see him, unfolding those little pieces of paper, the sheets rattling between his hands.

“Rosa De Louise lived lightly,” he called across the crematorium. “She hardly had a footprint at all.”

He gasped, and his lips peeled back over his gums. I could see strings of saliva linking the rows of his teeth. The last few words were spat rather than spoken, but I think I heard them right.

“She knew what was important. We were going to do amazing fucking things. Amazing fucking things. And now she can’t.” The last bit he said to everyone. “They’re saving the wrong ones.”

Rosa’s body was taken for its parts, just like everyone else’s.

I didn’t see Aubrey anywhere. I couldn’t imagine her in black, only lying on a beach somewhere or climbing a snowy peak. A stock photo of health. But Aubrey was Rosa’s best friend, so she’ll have been there, maybe up at the front with Eleanor. I scanned the back of the congregation’s heads, wondering if any of them were members of Easton Grove. Would an ovum organi have saved Rosa? I’ve heard incredible feats of medicine, where even the most broken body has been almost two thirds replaced with ovum organi organs. Some premium members have four or five ova organi ready for use all at once, allowing them to drink, overdose, whatever. Live how they like. Maybe Rosa could have still been here, with Mike, if she’d had enough to invest.

After Luke, I did find love again.

I’ve loved and cried with each ovum organi, each new Nut I’ve met. I’ve watched so many grow and saw my husband’s face blossom beneath the fur in all of them even before