The Crane Wife(12)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘So who’s looking after JP?’ Rachel asked, not taking off her coat.

‘My dad,’ Amanda said, looking through the basket and failing to find anything she liked to eat. She settled on a plastic tub of salad. ‘Is there dressing?’

Another pause, then another quiet, shared laugh between Mei and Rachel. Amanda ignored it and found, at least, a small, very expensive-looking bottle of olive oil. She poured it sparingly over the greens and the other greens and the various other greens besides those. She screwed the cap on too vigorously and felt it snap under her fingers. It now spun fruitlessly and refused to stay on. She carefully put it back into the picnic basket, setting the cap on it in a way that at least made it look closed, checking to be sure that neither Rachel nor Mei had seen.

‘My dad would never babysit,’ Rachel said, pouring a mug of coffee from an outrageously sleek thermos. ‘Never changed a nappy in his life? Didn’t bother learning our names until we were five?’

‘Oh, please,’ Mei said, surprising both Amanda and, it seemed, herself, before quickly re-shaping her face into one of cheerful acquiescence. Amanda didn’t dare hope for solidarity here; it was probably just how much Rachel liked to play up the Australian-ness of her father until he was practically roping cattle with his teeth while surfing and drinking a beer. Does he have that weird Australian pug nose? Amanda had never asked. Or the omnipresent layer of Australian male baby-fat? she’d never queried. Or a ponytail out of an inbred ’70s jug-band? she’d never wondered aloud. She checked herself internally. She was being grossly unfair. But wasn’t grossly unfair sometimes thrilling?

‘Dad’s great with JP,’ she said. ‘He’s very kind, is my father. Gentle.’

‘Mmm,’ Rachel didn’t quite say, looking across the field they’d chosen to some youths also taking advantage of the weather to kick around a football. ‘Jake Gyllenhaal’s younger brother, three o’clock.’

Mei blinked. ‘You know, I never know what you mean by that. You say “three o’clock” like it’s a direction.’

‘It is a direction?’ Rachel said, pointing. ‘Twelve, one, two, three o’clock? Not that difficult?’

They turned and looked at Mr Three O’Clock who, Amanda would never admit out loud, was indeed handsome, if a bit too young even for her, though possibly not for the six-years-older Rachel. His hair was as thick and luscious as a milkshake, and there was no way he didn’t know it. Even at this distance, he gave off self-regard like the Queen gave off forbearance.

‘He looks like he cries when he comes,’ Amanda said, not realising she’d said it out loud until she heard Mei snort with laughter. She turned, but Mei was already retreating again under Rachel’s glare. Mei quickly picked up her phone to keep tracking her daughter. ‘Still in Nando’s,’ she said.

‘Well, at least Marco takes an interest?’ Rachel said. ‘At least he’s not off with some hot new girlfriend in another country? Forgetting every bit of his duty?’

Amanda’s fork stopped halfway between the last bite of the salad and her mouth, momentarily so stung that swift tears filled her eyes. Blunt willpower alone kept them from spreading down her cheeks.

Because it wasn’t like that. Well, it was, but it also wasn’t. Henri was back in France and living with Claudine now but Amanda had basically forced him to go, booting him out of her and JP’s life with a force and constancy that had surprised even her. He called JP every week, though, even if JP’s four-year-old phone skills were barely rudimentary. Henri said he just wanted his son to hear real French, wanted him to hear his name (Jean-Pierre) pronounced properly, wanted him to hear the lullabies his own grandmother had sung to him.

If Amanda’s heart hadn’t ripped freshly in two every time she heard Henri’s voice, it might have even been sweet.

They’d met her last year at university, seeing each other first in a shared tutorial, then overlapping at the same parties. He was stocky, and manly to the point of bullheaded. His hair was going saltily grey even at twenty, and out of every girl in the tutorial, she was the one he sat by, seeing – he eventually told her – a kind of kindred intensity, like she’d not only be able to kill an enemy, but eat him, too.

For her part, she got so giddy every time he was in the same room that she began to live in a state of almost permanent fury. She’d refused to even tell her parents about him for months, lest there be any hint of laughter at her falling so hard, though they would of course have been the last people to do so.

She took most of it out on Henri. ‘You’ve got fire,’ he said, and though it sounded ludicrous even in a French accent, they’d each been so turned on it hardly mattered. It was like a hurricane courting a scorpion. Objects thrown, unbelievable sex, months lived in a kind of constant, shivering fever. It had all felt so young! It had all felt so French! She’d been swept away, but in hindsight only in the sense that a landslide brings down a highway: unstoppable catastrophe, followed by rubble. They’d even argued at their wedding. During the ceremony.

One month into their marriage, she discovered she was three months pregnant and immediately began finding even more fault with him. He didn’t separate the knives into steak versus regular. He piled his fag ends in the potted camellia she’d hung out on their new balcony in a flat he never finished renovating like he promised. And then, one night, during still-rather-amazing seven-months-pregnant make-up sex, he had looked so angry that she’d spontaneously slapped him across the face, hard enough for her wedding ring to cut his cheek, an action that shocked her so deeply she’d stayed at her father’s that night, frightened of what she was capable of doing next.

Henri left the next day. ‘It is not the slap,’ he said, maddeningly calm. ‘A Frenchman can take a slap, Lord knows. It is how your face looked when you did it.’ He took her arm with a gentleness that told her it was over more brutally than any fight ever could have. ‘You fight your hatred for yourself, anyone can see, and you do your best, taking it out on people who you think will be strong enough to handle it. I understand this. I am the same. It is hard but it is bearable if your love for me is bigger than your hate. But it has tipped somewhere along the way, and there is no recovery from that, I do not think. For either of us.’

The pain of this made her anger blaze anew, and she’d swept him away in a torrent of vengeful promises that he’d never see his son, that if he didn’t disappear, she’d tell a judge he slapped her – and what English judge wasn’t prepared to believe that about a Frenchman? – so he’d better leave the country altogether or she’d have him arrested.