Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker (novel books to read .txt) 📕

ledge to another, and Art would be adamant that he hadn’t touched them. It was always my treasures that were on the move, while Art’s things stuck out amongst the stampede, immovable as mountains. I couldn’t help but feel like these walking memories were playing some cruel emotional game I didn’t understand, so I focussed my attention outdoors.

The house opened up at the back to a long lawn which tapered to a point. The effect was such that the far fence looked further away than it actually was, and only by walking from the back door to the shrub at the end would you discover the truth to the distortion. The lawn was patchy and uneven, bordered by shallow troughs of pale and dusty earth.

Despite how dead the soil looked, it was still punctured by sprigs of creamy weeds, tiny leaves, and sickly-looking clovers. The only green thing of any substance was a huge shrub at the garden’s apex. The leaves were dark jade, stiff, the edges curling like the watercolour paper before we taped it down. It looked like a holly bush, apart from the tiny white berries which were starting to cluster at the end of each branch. All in all, the shrub stood up to my shoulder, and underneath the matrix of twigs, the bush-stem was thick and gnarled through many years of weathering storms.

A wooden fence protected the garden from anyone looking in, and I wanted the space to be a sanctuary. I could just imagine myself sitting on a cloud of lush green to the sound of trickling water over stone, and the soft breeze sloughing through red Japanese maples. I researched how I’d go about creating my own zen garden, and then when I discovered how much this would actually cost I moved onto a cottage garden, then a Mediterranean garden, then a modernist garden – complete with clean lines and evergreens. I looked at the lawn from all angles to work out what I could do with each section, even getting an aerial view through the study window while Art watched me from behind his desk with one eyebrow raised.

I wrote page after page of Latin botanical names until the words blurred together and the lists lost all meaning. At one point, I started to draw the layout of a pond, working out where its banks would lie, and what I’d plant in it. I imagined Art and I sitting by its edge with homemade lemonade, looking deep into the water for signs of life. But after spending too long crossing out all the plants that I’d been sure I’d wanted just to make room for the trench, I suddenly realised that I didn’t even want a pond. The whole idea was ludicrous. We hadn’t the room and the prospect of a gaping chasm in the lawn made me nauseous. And what would I do, get some bioplastic ducks to float blindly on it? A few mechanical koi to swim in endless circles? Stupid. I brought out yet another new piece of paper to start again, but by then my mind had gone blank, and I’d forgotten what I’d wanted in the beginning.

One Saturday morning in July, I piled up all the papers, stuck them under the Easton Grove manuals on the end of the kitchen counter, and didn’t look at them again. I drove to the garden centre and returned home with four crates of plants and bulbs I didn’t know the names of, all wrapped in orange netting. Art showed a bit of interest, reading some of the labels and picking his favourites. A few of them he’d heard of, and he told me that they’d grown in his parents’ garden in Wisconsin. He smiled wistfully as he said it, and I wanted to ask more but his attention was already on the next plant, the next label. The moment had passed.

Art helped me carry them into the garden and lay them out on the grass. We arranged them along the dusty border, reading the labels as we went to check if they preferred sunlight or shade.

My houseplants, though I’d been meticulous with neutralising the soil and making sure they had the best of the sun, were all in varying states of failure. Despite the fact that they were all similar species, each had developed completely different problems. Some had gone flaccid, their soft and fleshy stems bending under the weight of their leaves. Some had shrunken back, their stalks dry and bone-like. Some had lost their green and were turning grey, like ghosts. All of the others were dropping leaves at a pace I couldn’t match, and I went from room to room, watering and feeding them with the feeling that I was sending them to their doom, but watering and feeding them anyway. Only Aubrey’s succulent seemed to be doing OK, holding tight to its plump, lavender petals.

I took photos of where the plants would go in the border, and asked Art to return the pots to their crates. Probably humouring me, he did it without saying anything and carried the crates into the kitchen one after another.

Before planting, I needed to purge the soil of all the roots sapping what meagre nutrients it had left. I started at the wall nearest the back door, thinking I’d work around the garden clockwise, meeting the mega-shrub in the middle, and then keep going clockwise until I met the house again. Once I’d cleared a space, I’d sprinkle on the good numbers and neutraliser to do its work before planting the new flowers. Art pulled up a deckchair on the lawn and curled up within its arms with an old hardback. I couldn’t see the name. He didn’t look up, other than to occasionally say, “You should be wearing a mask, doing that.”

It didn’t bother me that he wasn’t helping, I hadn’t asked him to after all, and in a way I wanted the garden to be mine. Just how I