New Animal by Ella Baxter (speed reading book .TXT) 📕

I’m here. My body and mind seem at ease in this environment. I am pleased and relieved. It’s a strange thing to have a physical form that grows and moves around you. I have always been the pilot of this mass, not particularly integrated with it. But now, as I look down at the length of myself, I feel combined. Grieving my mother’s physical form has made me connect to my own. We are our bodies, at the end of the day. I touch my own cheek with one palm. I am using a part of myself to touch another part, I am two parts of a whole. I shake my head, because it’s all quite unbelievable.

I hear the door to the bathroom open.

‘Amelia, I’m so sorry to disturb you, but there’s someone here to see you and, well, we’ve put him in the arrangements office because he was starting to make quite a fuss.’

‘Who?’ I ask, standing up. ‘Who is here?’

I leave the cubicle and find Shell standing outside the bathroom door, nervously dipping a teabag in and out of a large pink cup. It’s shaped like a clam and the handle is a long crab claw. I can tell she loves it. She probably has ten cups of tea a day in it.

‘We’ve tried to calm him down,’ she tells me, ‘but it doesn’t seem to be working.’

I stride towards the office, and as I near it, I hear the honk of someone blowing their nose.

‘Vincent!’ I call.

‘Amelia Aurelia! Let me out at once!’

I can see they’ve blocked him in using one of the ornamental pillars, and I lean it on its edge to roll it aside.

‘This is a new low!’ Vincent says when I open the door. He points to the urn shaped like a weeping cherub. He then widens his eyes while pointing at a minuscule dead spider near the skirting board, before stabbing his finger at a ball of dust under the table.

‘I am not to be detained here,’ he says, now pointing over my shoulder at Shell, who stands behind me. ‘How would you like this to go online?’ Vincent’s eyes are so wide I can see white all the way around his irises, but he doesn’t look angry, just incredibly stressed. I have an overwhelming feeling of tenderness for him and his ability to cause such chaos.

‘I’m going to hug you,’ I say, moving towards him. ‘Stay still.’

Immediately, he drops his hand and closes his eyes, waiting for me, and I embrace him. His body softens against me.

‘Jack has poisoned you against me, hasn’t he?’

I keep holding on to him. ‘No one has poisoned me against you.’

‘And I bet you haven’t thought once about me and my pain.’ Vincent takes a large, shaky breath, and rests his head on my shoulder.

‘I have,’ I say. ‘I’ve thought about it heaps.’

I let go of him, and he pulls a chair out from the table and sits down.

‘Your brother got a python finally.’ He wipes his nose. ‘He named it Jeffrey and won’t put it back in its enclosure.’

‘That’s awful,’ I say. ‘What terrible timing.’ I put my hand on his back.

‘Carmen doesn’t believe animals should be in cages.’ He wipes his eyes. ‘Do you have any idea how it triggers my anxiety to have a snake crawling around the house? I can’t even sit on the sofa anymore because it likes to warm up between the cushions.’

‘Uncool.’ I shake my head and pat him in the same rhythmic way that Vlad patted me.

‘You probably would have sat on the thing by now and broken it. Jeffrey wouldn’t last a day around you.’

Tears run down his cheeks and drop into his lap, soaking into his pants.

‘Why didn’t you come to the funeral?’ he asks.

‘I couldn’t,’ I say.

‘None of us wanted to be there! But you go to funerals because you have to!’

He’s wearing an old skivvy, and as he wipes his eyes on his sleeve, I notice that it’s the one my mother banned him from wearing because he sewed shoulder pads into it. I lean down and squeeze him again.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, not realising how much I mean this until it’s out, and into his ears.

‘Jack said I can stay with you until my flight leaves tomorrow.’

This is a surprise, and I blink a few times, processing it.

He picks up Simon’s backpacking rucksack and puts it over one shoulder. He lifts his chin, arranging himself in a dignified posture.

‘I am calm, and it is safe to let me out now,’ he announces in a loud voice. ‘My daughter can verify this!’

Shell appears in the doorway, smiling warily. ‘All good?’ She addresses me, but nods towards him.

‘He’s fine now,’ I say. ‘It’s just an emotional time.’

Vincent walks towards the door, stopping to look back at me. ‘I’ll see you at Jack’s.’

I perform some perfunctory tasks over the next few hours while obsessing about what Jack and Vincent might be talking about without my careful monitoring.

I message Jack: How’s it going?

He replies: Yes!

It’s such a Vincent thing to do, to come unannounced and uninvited. He’s willing to risk it all. God knows what is happening between the two of them. As if this family needs any more drama or pain. They are both so unbelievably self-involved. And here I am, the piggy in the middle, trying to mourn my mother in peace. It will be the wedding portrait in the hall that will undo Vincent. My god. I should be there. I take the bins out and wipe all the keyboards with a felt cloth while Shell hovers nearby, asking stunningly probing questions.

As I wipe down the countertop, she washes her hands thoroughly at the sink.

‘So you have two fathers, and you call them both by their first names, but has it always been that way?’

I accidentally drop the cloth and stand staring at it for a moment, before bending down with a groan and picking it up.

‘And your mother died, and now you’re