Composite Creatures

by Caroline Hardaker

  I don’t know what I expected to see. The bed left unmade, a sealed envelope on the pillow? Or signs of a struggle – pillows slashed with wild bloody stripes, finger-pinches of stuffing drifting on the up-draft. Maybe a fallen fingernail, a puddle of red and the edges rusting.

  Instead, Art was folded beneath the covers, fully dressed, still wearing his glasses. His mouth hung open, consuming one unstuffed corner of the duvet. Nut was there, sleeping, stretched out behind Art’s back. In that moment, the bed was split by a terrible mirror, both bodies totally unaware of how each life depended on the other. Take away the skins and together they formed one glutinous mass. The lump on the bed was both Art and Nut together, as it was meant to be.

  I watched them for some time from the doorway before Nut raised her head, blinking at me in the light. It was still early, not yet past 6am. She’d be starting her territory-run soon and would wake Art. I had perhaps half an hour before I wasn’t in control anymore. This was it.

  I knelt down and smoothed the back of her head, lulling her to drowse a little more. At the same time, I slipped my arm under the bed and pulled out an old blue duffle-bag with a broken zip. It wasn’t all that big, but the suitcases were stacked on top of the wardrobe and there was no way I’d get those down without waking him.

  What could I grab? What could I take?

  There was no plan. I hadn’t thought anything through.

  There was just this instinctual need to protect, protect, protect this creature as vital to me as a liver or beating heart. She was the closest thing I had to family, she was blood, and her life, though small, was just as valid as mine, if not more so because she was an innocent. How long do ova organi live? Does anyone even know? Do Easton Grove know? Would one live forever if we didn’t consume it? How long had the oldest ovum organi lasted, before she was cracked open like an egg?

  That was it – perhaps Nut deserved to be here more than we did. In the end.

  All the wondering, lost in the metropolis of me. All that postmodern, existentialist, self-interested crap. Maybe I’m not meant to create something. Maybe I’m meant to help her live on. Maybe I’m meant to save her. And maybe one day Art will understand and take me back.

  But this lie poured over me, black like oil. “You will save me?” he’d asked. “You promise to save me?” And I’d said “Yes”. Always. To do what I was doing could kill him. He’d taken a tooth, but what next? A kidney. A liver. A heart. Bones. There would be nothing of her left. If he and Easton Grove were still going through with this, they couldn’t understand the extent of their invention. But I did.

  There wasn’t a lot I could grab for myself; everything was in the wardrobes, and the more noise I made the greater the chance of Art trying to stop me. I so needed him to stay asleep. Doing this would mean I was breaking every contract, every law. I didn’t for a second think that the Grove would just let us go. We might be hunted down. If Art wasn’t involved then at least he’d be left out of it.

  I didn’t want to leave him, I didn’t, so don’t think I didn’t care. We might have been matched by Easton Grove but we’d worked at this together. They couldn’t have known the system would work so well. Art wasn’t perfect but I liked him. I understood him. He’d be OK. No matter what I did, Art would still be a member of Easton Grove, he’d still be under their protection. If his book turned out to be everything he’d promised them it would be, they might make him his own ovum organi and he wouldn’t need anyone to share it with. She would pump with his blood alone. Look at him with only his face. He could be better off.

  But Nut only had this one chance. She was more than the sum of her parts.

  She was Nut.

  I carried some jeans and a dirty jumper downstairs, coaxing Nut behind me with a teasingly closed fist. Thinking I had inside there some piece of human food, she followed silently with saucer-eyes, absolutely on her best behaviour. When we reached the kitchen, I gave up the game and started pulling out tins of her food and shoving them into the holdall. Nut grunted in disappointment and leaned back into her haunches, flexing her fingers back before tapping them on the wooden floor impatiently.

  What else would Nut want to bring? It didn’t even cross my mind to grab photos of Mum, or her paintings, or anything else that was me before all this happened. Would Nut want her toys? Her own food bowl? Or would she be OK without the past? Would she adapt?

  I grabbed them regardless and lifted the duffle bag onto the kitchen table, ready to go. The rain was still tipping against the windows, so I grabbed Art’s jacket and snatched my keys from the windowsill, already mentally coordinating how I’d fit Nut in the back seat. She was too big for the footwell, maybe the boot would work…

  And then there was a knock at the front door and I dropped my keys.

  I froze. Acid cut the back of my throat.

  The letterbox. “Norah?” A woman’s voice.

  I pressed myself back into the kitchen and out of sight. Silent.

  “We can help, Norah. We have answers.” A man. He sounded young. And then, silky smooth, like warm milk, “It’s going to be alright.”

  I know that I could’ve gone through the back door with Nut. There was a gate at the side of the fence. There was an escape route right there, feet from where we stood. But in that second everything changed. I was a child, longing for the arms of those who would make everything better. Feed me sugar. Hold me tight in the dark.

  A moment later, the key was in the lock and it slammed against the chain.

  “Norah? We’re here to help you. We know everything.”

  Deep in my head, tick tick tick tick tick, the pens clicking in those early assessments. The need to please. The desperate desire for someone to wrap me in their arms and tell me that everything would be alright. I clunked to the door on wooden feet. Perhaps part of me still thought I could deter them and smuggle Nut out when they’d gone. You’d think that’s what it was, but I can’t remember thinking that at all. The truth is that I didn’t think a thing. I just wanted it to end. Ownership of myself had expired, the real owners were back in the house.

  Small and indistinct, I unhooked the chain and flung the door wide, beaming my broadest grin. This was the first of January after all. Happy New Year.

  “Hell-o Nor-ah,” crooned Fia.

  She stood on the step clad in a white puffer jacket which reached down to her ankles. Her round face was buried in a nest of black fur, and split by a tight-lipped smile. Behind her stood two other figures in the snow: the bald man, Mr Martin, and the young placement student from mine and Art’s last check-up together during the summer. Nathan. Why was he still there? That was months ago.

  “Happy New Year, Fia. And Nathan,” I breathed. Light, light as air.

  Fia clutched a briefcase close to her chest, “Will you let us come in?”

  I showed them through to the living room, nudging closed the door to the kitchen with the tip of my toe and muttering, “Keep the warm air in.” Thank God I wasn’t already wearing my shoes. Or Art’s coat.

  Fia peeled off her parka and offered it to me in both arms, “Otherwise I won’t feel the benefit, right?”

  Why were they here? How did they know? Were they listening, had they bugged the house after all? I fingered my leather ID bracelet, flipping it over to see if there were any little holes or a catch for a battery or something. Nothing. It just looked like what it was, a piece of metal, a microchip, and a strip of blue leather. Besides, I hadn’t said anything out loud, and I was still in the house. If I was being tracked, I hadn’t done anything wrong yet.

  I hung the sodden mound of fabric on the coat stand and quickly checked that Nut was still in the kitchen. She was, and she was starting to scratch the ground the way she always did before the territory-run.

  When I returned to the living room – light as air, light as air – Art was there, already dressed in jeans and the same shirt as the day before. He was sitting on the chair and had been gesticulating with his left hand while rubbing his
chin with the right. Leaning forward like that, the cotton hung from his middle and fell in folds around his waist. It never used to do that. He pushed his knuckles deep into his eye sockets, kneading them slowly behind his glasses.

  “Art?”

  He stopped speaking and looked up at me, checking me from a safe distance. He lifted himself slowly, uncurling his back and stretching himself as tall as he could.

  My Art.

  He wouldn’t talk to them before he’d talk to me, surely? He stepped towards me, whispering so close to my nose that I wasn’t sure what he’d said, and followed the bald man to the kitchen with one last look over his shoulder. He might have said “I love you,” or it might’ve been “I have you.”

  “Sit down, Norah.”

  I stayed standing. “Why are you here so early?”

  Fia sighed, smoothing the leather with iron-palms. “How’re you doing, dear?”

  “I’m alright. It’s early, we had a party last night. I drank far too much.”

  “Oh dear. We’ll get you in for a physical soon, how’s that? There’s a new research programme you’re eligible for which ups your recovery time after alcohol. Would you like to try it? Shall I put you down for it? It’s proving to be quite popular. We can sign you both up.”

  I didn’t take the bait, but instead said, “How do I go back to the beginning?”

  “Sorry?” She looked genuinely taken aback. “Back to when?”

  “Back to the beginning of this whole thing. I want to know my rights. I’ve got this far and I don’t even know what happens if I changed my mind.”

  “Changed your mind.” Fia tipped her head. “Why would you do that?”

  Full thrust. No more tiptoes.

  “It’s not your fault,” I blurted, “but there’s been a mistake. With our ovum organi. She’s not like the others, what you said they’d be like. Something went wrong when you made her.”

  “Oh right… Have you reported it? We can take her in today and do an assessment.”

  “No, you can’t. It’s not right. I signed up for an ovum organi – a lump of skin, bone, and muscle that wouldn’t engage, wouldn’t talk. Would exist – just… exist. An organ-egg, right? But this one, she’s like us.”

  Fia narrowed her eyes. “OK. What’s physically wrong with her?”

  “You don’t know?” I laughed, “I’ll bring her in.”

  I must have looked mad. I felt mad. In the kitchen, Nut was tearing around the room, circling Art and Mr Martin who sat at the dining table with an open briefcase. I couldn’t see inside it. Art looked grim. He fiddled with the zip of the duffle bag as the bald man scribbled into a notepad. I ignored them and tried to distract Nut from her hypnosis, grabbing at her on each lap. Both of them just watched me, didn’t help, didn’t interrupt. I was as wild as Nut then, and the expressions they wore said to me one thing – that I was on my own muscle-run and needed to get it out of my system. Don’t disturb it, let nature run its course.

  “Please, Nut,” I begged. “Please.”

  Every time I placed my hands on her shoulders she twisted from my reach. Nothing could stop her running, fleeing from a predator, survival her only instinct. She galloped without sideways thoughts, driven by the need to grow, be strong.

  I read later that it felt like electricity, building up around the sternum. The ovum organi’s first instinct is to stretch, and then to release the charge by tensing the muscle groups one by one. But when this didn’t work (and they were designed not to), this cup of electricity overflowed and caused the current to burn through the axons to the nerve-endings. The sensation would only end when the energy had been expended, the muscles exhausted. It sounded like torture.

  The bald man stood up and handed me a mug. He’d made me tea. When? Art watched the cup warily, as if ready to launch himself out of the way if I threw it. The man had his head tilted down, peering up at me over his glasses. He wafted his hands up at me, like you do when you air a bedsheet, and I took a sip of the steaming brew.

  I had to go back to face them. In the living room, Fia and Nathan were waiting in silence.

  “She’s running now, but you just need to see her for yourself. She’s different.”

  Fia had already slipped her tablet from the leather folder and was scrolling. “We carried out a routine examination two weeks ago, and she seemed to be recovering well from the seizure this summer. She was well enough to donate to Arthur. A molar, I think.”

  The blood. I’d seen the blood. That night in the garden. The night Art had warned me. I imagined them all smuggling Nut out of the house or even worse – the dirty procedure happening within these very walls. Was Nut’s blood on the carpet somewhere, trodden into the pile beneath my feet? Was I just as grubby as the act was?

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “It didn’t belong to him.”

  “It did, though,” Fia responded. “He pays for it every month. Like you do.”

  Nathan leaned forward like it was his turn to sing. All together now.

  “You both deserve this. The world’s so hard, Norah. There’s hardly a minute left in the day to work ourselves out. We need longer years. Would you give that up, now that it’s genuinely owed?”

  He didn’t see. Neither of them knew. I had to whisper it in case Nut heard. I edged close, grasping Fia’s arm in case she moved back. I had to make them understand before they took her away, before they drank her dry. “Nut knows things. She knows everything that’s going on. She’s alive.”

  Fia mouthed a silent “Ohhhh,” and turned to Nathan. Maybe he knew more about this. Maybe this was what his research was all about? He smiled. “Of course she is. She’s as living as you or me. She is alive. But she wasn’t born, she was made. She was made of your matter, not of your mind. And we own that which we make, don’t we?” He patted the leather folder on the coffee table. “It’s in our code of ethics. A lamp lights and extinguishes.”

  Fia sat forward. “Norah, Nathan’s been doing some work for us writing our new code of ethics. It’s just been signed off, which means everything you’re feeling is understood. Studied. It’s acceptable. Natural, even. It’s all part of the process. Once you’ve read the manifesto you’ll see that everything we’re doing is morally sound.”

  If Nathan knew the ethics, maybe I could make him see?

  I shuffled across on my knees, ignoring the hot fire of pain on the coarse jute rug. “But a lamp is just an object. This is a soul. What happens to that when she’s all used up? Does your code of ethics cover that?”

  Nathan leaned into me and held my shoulders firmly, pinning my arms to my sides. It was intimate, and I felt loved, by a near perfect stranger – yes – but it was still beautiful. Like floating in a warm pool. A geyser, bubbling with kisses, scented with lavender. From Nathan’s fingers poured golden honey to fill my bones. He lifted the mug of sweet tea to my lips again.

  “If she has a soul then that belongs to you and Arthur. And won’t that feel wonderful, to become one with it again?” He turned to the window, at the grey sludge of sky. “It’s bad out there, Norah. She’s not made for it. She’s raw. Where safer for her to be than where she can be warm, loved, remembered?”

  What was he saying? Did he mean here? In my house?

  He looked back at me with soft eyes. “We took your stem cells to make her. All this is returning her to you. And think about it – when she returns to Art in body then he’s taking on a part of your genetic material too.”

  “How amazing that’ll feel,” Fia hummed. “How together you’ll be. So much love.”

  The ticking in my head had been replaced with cotton wool. I licked my lips. “What’s in this tea?”

  “So much love,” Nathan whispered.

  Unity. Love. The room was slipping in and out of focus. They were still missing the point. “But Nut will be dead. Where’s the love in that?”

  My voice was quiet. Nathan stroked my hair away from my face. His eyes were as green as sea glass. “We make ano
ther from the same material. Another ‘Nut’, you call her? Another one. Exactly the same. So you’ll always have her with you until the day you die. She’ll outlive you, Norah. She’s not going anywhere.”

  “Really? Another Nut?” I daren’t believe it. “The same?”

  Fia smiled with her lips tight. “And newer and fresher and cleaner. All little again and covered in fur.”

  “The same,” promised Nathan. “Born again. Whole and happy and unspoiled.”

  20

  In my second year of university, when I was around nineteen, Aubrey would wake me up first thing with a shake of my shoulder, whispering, “The sun’s out, let’s go play.” She never took stillness for an answer, and would jiggle the bits of me she could find to irritate me – first my arm, then my wrist, and finally rocking my body side to side under the covers until I, moaning, buried my head under the duvet and finally relented.

  Even though I’d sit there sullen, squinting through sleep at my bowl of Crunchy Nut, I couldn’t help but feel a spark of excitement. When Aubrey was in one of her good moods, only good things could happen. She grasped new people with fire in her belly and always made sure she pulled me into the mix. It didn’t matter whether we drove to a new city or to a rural retreat for the day, it never took long before grey-faced flies were caught in Aubrey’s web. Sometimes she brought her guitar and played on a park bench. Bees would swarm to the honey, and I – already drunk on nectar – would sip on an iced tea and drink in a share of her gold.

  We achieved nothing, those days. We’d return to the flat with empty hands and empty pockets, the same way we’d left. But this was a cause for celebration. If we returned home without baggage then we were free and weightless for the next adventure, our internal worlds all the richer for memories.

  Years earlier, if Mum had a prospector or a buyer visit she’d send me out into the garden to play, much in the same way. Our garden was long and splayed out at the far edges. You could follow a little gravel path around a small copse of trees in the centre, and if you didn’t mind your shins getting scratched by the nettles you could follow the path all around the hawthorns until you ended up at the opposite side of the house, where an apt patch of dock leaves sprouted, ready for you to pick a fuzzy petal and rub where it stung.