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

having so many professionals buzz around you, wanting to know exactly who you were. Two consultants asked about Mum, and though their questions made my throat tighten, each of them squeezed my elbow and made me a sweet milky tea, which did help. It was an acquired taste, that tea. Thick with sugar and cream, but once you’d had a few cups it felt like an instant hug. I’ll never forget how Fia, my ovum organi consultant, tipped her head and smiled as she offered me an embroidered handkerchief to wipe away my tears. “Keep it,” she’d said, so softly. But after our time in the consultation room was up and I returned to the waiting room, I felt alone again. Out of balance. Even though I could still taste the sugar on my lips, I was bruised and longed for my name to be called again so that the next doctor would piece me back together.

We were encouraged to chat and get to know each other between assessments, but because all the candidates were desperate and no one knew the judging criteria, everyone pressed their truths to their chests and kept neighbours at arm’s length. All the while, consultants dressed in their tweed drifted around the perimeter, swiping on their tablets and occasionally clicking their ballpoint pens as if distracted.

I didn’t do well, being watched. I clammed up, my mind going completely blank when another applicant asked me a question, even when it was as innocuous as, “How was the road for you, getting here?” Every time I stammered or didn’t follow someone’s thread the consultants tapped their screens and gave me a little smile. In the end I decided to not talk too much and just try to look like I wasn’t panicking. Loosen the jaw, eat a plum.

Not everyone wanted to be there of course. During one day of assessments, a girl who looked fresh out of school slouched low in the chair opposite. I had been reading a handout entitled “The Greying – How to be Clean, Inside and Out”, but couldn’t resist watching her. She wore a black leather coat and pink Dr Martens, and hid her eyes behind a sweep of glossy chestnut hair. If she did look up and catch my eye, she’d flick her face away before sinking down to face her bony knees, lost again in whatever thought held her. She constantly fidgeted with the studs on her jacket, then a zip, then the loose threads dangling from the conference chair. Her name tag said “16: Jane”, and whenever “16” filled the TV screens she’d stare at it motionless for a good twenty seconds or so before dragging herself upright by the hips, as if her head and torso were more reluctant than her legs to leave the chair.

But over the course of the day, I think I got the measure of her. She’d have been funded through the programme by her parents, and for some reason was rallying against it. Maybe they’d chosen to fund her membership to the Grove rather than send her to university, or probably more likely Jane was used to being funded and was just damned ungrateful. In a lot of other programmes Jane would have been one of the first to be weeded out, after all there were thousands of people who would slip into her empty chair with no fuss at all, lips buttoned shut. But as is the way of it, Jane lasted the full course, and never for one moment did she look happy about it.

Jane wasn’t the only delegate at the Grove who exuded the musk of secret wealth. Prospective members had to jump repeated financial hurdles to even get onto the programme. First there was the non-refundable deposit to enter the lottery, and then another upfront cost if you were selected for testing. If after this you were lucky enough to be accepted onto an induction (phase two), you started to pay a monthly fee. Graduating to each phase meant another lump sum, and another adjusted monthly fee. This would continue until you graduated from phase five and became an outpatient member of Easton Grove, and then you just paid your monthly fee indefinitely. There were rumours that the Grove did a lot to help members in financial crisis, but I never met anyone who didn’t exude the comfort that comes from a life without money worries.

I stuck out like a sore thumb amongst those people. I had no family to raise me in a queen’s chair or a cash-cow career to fall back on. I’d been upfront with the clinic from the start about my financial situation – I was there because of a gift. My funds were finite.

After Mum’s funeral, I’d started to sort through her rooms, sectioning her life piece by piece into boxes labelled “Keep”, “Charity” and “Bin”. I remember dropping off the donations at the charity shop, the white plastic bags freeing their nicotine musk when the volunteer peered inside.

I should have been bereft. I was saying goodbye to the dresses and coats I still pictured her in, but all I felt was embarrassment at the smell, and I left without a word.

The “Keep” box was no larger than a shoebox, around the size for storing knee-length boots. The more stuff I placed in the “Keep” box the heavier I felt, and so I only packed feather-light memories; photographs of us together, letters, even a few scrawled shopping lists she must have written in the early days of illness. I also took her binoculars, her palette – still smeared with a Monet of watercolours – and her table top easel. Finally, I chose one of the feathers from amongst her bookshelves – a soft black thing, about six inches long, shining iridescent blue along its edge. I considered taking her perfume, but the bottled oil smelled like a funeral.

And then the loft. Stacked behind a tower of cardboard boxes sagging with stuffed toys and plastic