The Crane Wife(11)
Author: Patrick Ness

In this, apparently, they were mistaken.

‘Oh, look!’ said (to select one among many) her newest best friend in college, Karen, who also read Geography and also didn’t see the point of Bristol and also thought that the failure of each and every political philosophy throughout history could be boiled down to the simple, basic truth that People Are Dumb. ‘The Wizard of Oz is on!’

‘Really?’ Amanda said, flopping down on the couch beside her. They’d had a hot night out. Her best clubbing clothes were stuck to her from the evening’s sweat, her feet were killing her in these shoes – women this calcium-dense were not natural matches for high heels – and though she and Karen had danced and drunk and laughed and smoked all night, neither of them had managed to pull or even catch a boy’s eye. To be fair, Karen had a nose issue. And an eyebrow issue. And, well, a limp, but you could hardly see it while they were dancing. Still, they’d had fun. It was all very promising.

With some help from her mother and stepdad Hank – her father was paying the tuition fees and she knew he could barely afford those, so she always lied when he asked if she ever needed anything more – Amanda had just about enough to rent half a two-bedroom near the university for her final year. Karen had responded to Amanda’s notice on the college room exchange site. They’d had coffee, they’d hit it off, they’d moved in. Two weeks and no problems so far.

‘I didn’t even think they bothered showing this on TV any more,’ Karen said enthusiastically, tucking her uneven feet beneath her on the couch. She inhaled deeply, readying herself to join in on the next chorus of ‘We’re Off To See–’

‘I hate this f**king movie,’ Amanda said.

Karen choked on what could only have been the air she just breathed in. ‘You what?’ she coughed, looking like Amanda had just punched her. Actually punched her.

Amanda ploughed on, oblivious. ‘None of it’s real, even in terms of the story. In order for the plot to work at all, everyone has to act like a complete moron, and then they get to the end and not only is there no magic, the wizard is just some show-off loser who’s tricked everyone into following him, and before they can try his ass before the International Courts of Justice, he escapes in a balloon. He’s practically Miloševi[ć].’

She stopped briefly, because she could see the whites around every part of Karen’s eyes, but she hoped it was from the dodgy tablets they’d bought from the overweight boy by the toilets, who’d said they were Ecstasy he’d found in his older brother’s old bedroom, so they could have been up to twenty years expired and were probably, in the end, Panadol.

‘You’re joking, right?’ Karen said.

‘And then she goes back home,’ Amanda sailed right on, thinking, somehow, that this was encouragement, ‘and we’re supposed to be happy that she’s returned to her old, small, black-and-white horizons? That dreams are all well and good, but don’t forget that you’re actually trapped on the farm forever? Same reason I hate the Chronicles of f**king Narnia. Oh, God, and don’t get me started on him.’ The Cowardly Lion minced onscreen. ‘The stuff of nightmares.’

Karen looked incredulous. Or rather, more incredulous. ‘The Cowardly Lion?’

‘Oh, come on. Look at him and tell me you don’t see every paedophile you’d warn your daughter away from. I always think he’s about to whip it out and lay down on top of Dorothy.’ She put on a frankly hideous version of the Cowardly Lion’s voice. ‘Come on, little Dorothy, sit on your Uncle Lion’s lap and he’ll show you why he’s king of the jungle, uh-huh, uh-huh. And then he pushes her to the ground and pulls her panties right on down to those ruby–’

Amanda stopped because the look on Karen’s face was, at last, unmistakeable. Panadol never made anyone look that way.

‘Well, don’t cry about it,’ Amanda said, but it was too late.

Karen, it turned out, had been ‘fiddled with’ – Karen’s own horrible, multiply-repeated phrase – by her grandfather from ages five to fourteen. It only stopped when he’d died. Not only that, when she’d told her parents, they’d thrown her briefly out of the house, allowing her back to do A-levels only when she’d completely recanted.

‘You don’t know,’ she’d sobbed into Amanda’s arms in the long, long hours that followed. ‘You just don’t know.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Amanda said, awkwardly patting Karen’s head. ‘No, I don’t.’

It might have brought them closer together. It probably should have, but instead, Karen started bringing friends over with whom she’d abruptly stop talking whenever Amanda entered the room. And that, once more, was that.

The baffling thing was that she had no idea why. Her childhood had been perfectly normal, from what she could tell. She was still close to both George and Clare, despite the divorce, and there’d never been any undue worry about money or security. It just felt like she’d been born with a small flaw, right at the centre of herself, a flaw somehow too shameful to be shown to anyone else, so she’d spent her life building a carapace around it to keep it hidden. Inevitably, the carapace became her true self, a fact she could never quite see, a fact that might have offered relief. Because all she knew was the truth deep inside of her, the little something wrong no one else could ever, ever know. And if that wasn’t the real her, then what was? At her core, she was broken, and life was just one long attempt to distract people from noticing.

‘Are you having a good time, sweetheart?’ her father would ask in his every-other-day call.

‘Yes, Dad, Jesus,’ she would say to keep from crying.

‘Because everyone says your college years are your best years, but I have to confess, I found them sort of awkward and . . . Well, awkward actually about covers it.’

‘You find everything awkward, George,’ she’d said, bending at the waist to stop the sob rising in her throat.

He’d laughed. ‘I suppose so.’ Which was so upsetting somehow – his kindness, the pointlessness of it – that when he’d asked, ‘Are you sure you don’t need any more money?’, she’d had to hang up on him.

Rachel and Mei sat down, taking up five-sixths of the picnic blanket between them. It wasn’t quite warm enough for a picnic, really, but Rachel liked these sorts of gruelling challenges, wanting to see, Amanda thought, how much she could get her friends to put up with. If you complained, you lost.