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

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