“You don’t need a toy, make your own fun,” she’d say, propelling me through the back door with a glass of juice “Make something good and bring it inside.”
If I’d gone out on my own whim, I’d have been stuck for what to do, but the fact that she’d told me there was fun to be had meant I had to find it. But every time I ventured out, I forgot my previous exploits and had to learn my mistakes again. I’d flip over stones to inspect the wrigglings beneath, forgetting that I found the curling woodlice repulsive or that a worm’s squirming reminded me of the parts of a person that should be on the inside. I’d decide to look for sweeter creatures: minky mice with wrinkled noses, chocolate moles poking from the soil like a bristly flower bud. Maybe even a naked chick, fallen from a nest in the trees. My hunts always ended in disappointment.
My idea of the natural world was a fairy tale, based on the storybooks I read at school or the stretching cats in Mum’s paintings. She captured wild things amidst the slow tide of extinction. She looked over her shoulder as the planet moved forward. And even now, I still see that garden in glorious technicolour. No roses are that violet, no trees are that ferociously green.
When Mum hollered for me to come in, usually hours later, she’d run her fingers through my hair, pulling out the tiny twigs and leaves. If I’d caught the sun, she’d stroke white lotion over my face with broad motions. It smelled like lavender, only slightly off. She’d ask me what adventures I’d had, what I’d seen and done, and when I told her I hadn’t seen anything, I hadn’t discovered anything, she tutted loudly, clicking her tongue, and held me across from her between those strong worldly arms.
“But you know more than you did this morning, so you’ve brought something back with you, haven’t you?”
I woke up in an empty bed, too soon. It wasn’t yet light.
The label on the bottle had said the pill would work for twelve hours, but here I was – awake and wearing the same prickling skin. I lay on my side, my hands pressed to my thighs, clutching myself as tightly as a life-raft.
Alone.
This was a new silence. The clock’s tick was a meteor, the silence between was the swoop of an owl. The pause had a soft, wobbling quality. Above me the ceiling groaned, and swayed like the sail of a ship. Voices, ghosts, or neighbours – it didn’t matter. I’d never heard the neighbours before. I didn’t even know who they were.
This felt OK. Nothing burned or ached. Perhaps this was peace.
Alone, I had no one to answer to, no more questions. I could summon company at the stir of a memory, turning it to shadow with a flick of a fingertip. If only I could live in there.
I squeezed my sides with hands that would have normally sought out the firm mass of Nut or Art. If I listened hard enough, could I hear them still? Did they leave a part of them here, even when they were gone? I’m sure if I’d walked into Art’s study I’d have been bombarded with what he heard every day – words and mantras and verses pasted on the walls. But I wasn’t ready for that. It was enough to listen to the paintwork, and to the house for the thumps of its bleeding heart.
Would I be able to feel it, at the point one of them ended? And which would I feel the most?
For how long would Nut have lived out there if we’d left through the back door? How long before she’d become pink and raw, all light too bright, her lungs full up with smoke?
Cruelty. It would have been torture.
I looked at the clock and saw it was only 6.27am. They wouldn’t be in surgery until 8am. I lay there, stranded between getting up to distract myself or reaching out to feel what Nut and Art were experiencing. Was Nut scared, in an unknown place? Art had promised to stay close to her for as long as he could, despite Fia’s grimace. Despite not moving a muscle, my heart hammered against my chest. It might’ve been that no matter what I did I’d feel it – the draw of the knife, the heavy lift of hands.
When they made the new Nut, would they use the same stem cells as the first time? Would she fall asleep, lulled by drugs, and wake up anew? No ache in her jaw, no cut in her belly? There wasn’t anything about it in the manuals. They made it sound like the end of one ovum organi and the beginning of the next just… happened. As if Easton Grove hadn’t anticipated the question. No fuss. No confusion.
But now I needed to know what made up Nut, how much of her was love, and how much would be the same as before. Would she know me? Would she remember her last frightened moments? Quite possibly the original DNA samples were finite, but even then each sample would contain new cells, and so yield different results. Or are all ova organi cloned from one single perfect embryo? That must be it. Nathan said she’d be the same Nut, exactly the same. I had to believe that. They wouldn’t say it without it being true. Caregivers don’t take, do they?
I’d have liked to be there when they made her again, but I wouldn’t ask that. Instead, I wrapped myself in one of the blankets they’d left behind, monogrammed in gold with “Property of E.G.”, and thought solely of her when the clock struck 8am, as a way of saying goodbye. For the next hour, my hand held my heart in one piece as I imagined my second ovum organi being born and delivered to me in her vulnerable and dependent state. This would be my chance to do it right from the start. No dark time in the loft, no confinement. I’d need to make sure everything was ready for her here, from the softest beds to the juiciest toys. Maybe I’d give her toys from the beginning this time; she did love them. It’d be perfect. I’d learned so much, I could do it better than before. Give Nut a better start. My stomach fluttered with the delicious thrill of it all.
Art would be back in two days. He would be spending his thirty-ninth birthday recovering from Nut’s birthday gift, a new piece of himself that was only one year old. I considered getting out the easel and carrying on our birthday tradition, now that it was Art’s turn to be captured. But I couldn’t remember his face well enough to copy it. So as I lay there, I imagined Art’s body next to me, socks on the floor, his glasses on the bedside table. Scars spelling out a name. I tried to see him as he was when we met in the waiting room, or on that first date with the party hats. His wide grin, the gap between his front teeth. But aside from the mouth, I couldn’t see him. His face was a lightbulb, blinding and featureless. I couldn’t see his eyes – those windows inwards – so I drew them in my mind’s eye, guessing where they belonged in his landscape.
I played with his face, fancying it might be different when he came back. It might be nice, I thought, if he did look different. A new start for us. All three of us. Because wherever Art goes now, there we are. The three of us. Woven into his being. Maybe he’ll look more like me.
This silence was worth dancing in. I rose and floated through each room’s harmonious note. Our bedroom was the chamber of a singing bowl. The bathroom was a whisper. The living room was the bellow of a didgeridoo. The kitchen – a symphony of white winter light. I didn’t want to listen to Art’s study, but I stuck my head in anyway. It sounded like a crowd of men and women, shouting.
I should have been back at work but the Grove had signed me off for two weeks. The form said that I’d developed “generalised anxiety disorder”, triggered by Art’s looming surgery. They’d assured Stokers that I’d be managing it in two weeks and ready to move into the new office, surrounded by things which weren’t mine and that I didn’t understand.
I sat up and pulled on an orange knitted jumper that lay beside the bed. The ribs sat high on my waist, and the cuffs dug into my forearms. I couldn’t remember Art ever wearing it, but it must’ve been his. It didn’t fit me. I heaved myself out of bed and tore through the wardrobe but all I found were tops and trousers that I didn’t recognise. Clothes in shades I hadn’t even seen before.
This was ridiculous. It didn’t matter whose clothes I chose, I just needed to not be naked. I needed armour. I reached into the pile at the back of the wardrobe and zipped myself into the first pieces I picked up – some jeans, a checked black and white shirt, and a navy hoodie. The Heritage Museum opened
at 9am, so I’d get there just as they were propping open the gates. I wouldn’t use the main entrance though, I’d use the side door.
I wouldn’t need anything else, so I grabbed my car keys from the kitchen counter on my way out. The keys had been thrown beside a messy pile of unread post and catalogues. Poking out from the heap was the top half of a photograph – me, looking vaguely happy at Art, while he, always with his attention on other things, sat captivated by something going on behind me, off-camera. Our studio session, over a year ago. I slid the photo out and held it up to the light. There, in the bottom half of the photo. Art’s knuckles holding his knees so tightly that his trousers were bunching up in green waves. And my hands grasping Art’s wrist so desperately that the skin on his arm burned red and angry under my embrace.
As I pulled up outside the museum, there were three other cars already there, two red and one bottle green. I parked on the bonnet-side of the red Polo, so my car couldn’t be seen from the green one if its owner approached from the museum entrance.
I waited in the front seat, twisting my hands around the rim of the steering wheel. I was afraid. I wanted to walk in and be greeted with that same old smell, the smell of varnished wood and chemicals on fur. I wanted to pass the Anglo-Saxon gallery, see the same gold glint of riches behind inch-thick glass, smell the heady purple of frankincense, and step into the reconstructed Temple of Mithras, tomb-like, lit only by projections of flaming torches.
I hadn’t been back in a year and a half. Was it too much to ask for time to have completely stopped within those brick walls? By their nature, museums shouldn’t change. They’re monuments to memory. If I peered into the Roman jewellery cabinet, the women who wore the trinkets would press their gold-looped fingers to the other side of the glass. It was a promise.
I slipped in through the side fire escape, propped ajar as ever it was by a plastic chair. I headed straight up the stairs to the natural history gallery, a labyrinth of lofty glass coffins, each one split into two halves by a glass shelf. The upper half would contain stuffed sparrows, falcons, robins, and underneath would be a staged display of moles burrowing beneath the earth, or rabbits in their warren, sniffing the air for danger coming. The gallery was always in semi-darkness, to protect the fur, feathers, and flesh.
Weaving my way through the cabinets, I tucked myself into the corner behind my favourite case – the seagulls. Three great white and grey sky-sharks, clutching bare rock with their bills open, their little clay tongues poking out and tasting the wind. One had its wings outstretched like two boundless kites, their edges sharp enough to slice through storms. They didn’t look real, they looked designed, like what someone might paint if they were dreaming up a sky god, or anthropomorphising a luxury yacht. I could imagine them carrying souls from one land to another. Was it gulls that gave a sailor hope when lost without sight of the coast? Or was that the albatross?
And then, he was there.
Truly there. In the flesh. Surrounded by birds, and living, breathing, full of blood. He looked bigger somehow, and had grown his hair out so it curled under his ears in sandy coils. He carried a metal case and a small fold up stool, and took 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, bu
t 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 on the street) I kissed him and shook it out again.
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.
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