The Crane Wife(15)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘Lily,’ Mehmet said, brushing past him to get his coat.

‘What?’ George said, blinking in surprise, having almost forgotten where he was.

‘Looks like a lily,’ Mehmet said slowly, as if talking to a coma patient. ‘My mother’s favourite flower. Which tells you a whole lot about her, if you ask me. Fragrant and likely to stain.’

Mehmet shrugged on his coat and left, but George sat there for a long while, looking at the cuttings.

A lily. Clearly, a lily. From a book called In the Beauty of the Lilies.

He gave an irritated laugh at his own obviousness, precisely the shallowness of vision that had always prevented him from becoming a proper artist, he felt, and he reached to brush it all into the rubbish bin.

But he stopped. It really was a rather good lily.

And so it began. He started haunting the £1 bins of second-hand bookstores, taking only the most damaged, unloved and unlovable books. He never exactly tried to make themed cuttings – hoping to avoid a repeat of the unsubtle lily – but sometimes a line would strike his fancy from the pages of a sixty-year-old, half-mouldy Agatha Christie, and he’d cut the shapes of a paragraphed hand dangling a multi-claused cigarette. Or a lettered horizon with three haiku-looking moons from the pages of a sci-fi novel he’d never heard of. Or a solitary figure carrying a small child, marked only by a single ‘1’ from the ‘Part 1’ of a history of the siege of Leningrad.

He only ever showed the final outcomes to Amanda – Mehmet saw all of them, since he worked at the shop, but that was a different thing than ‘showing’ – and she was courteous about them, which was disheartening, yes, but still he kept on. Experimenting with glues to find the best way to secure them against a background, testing them under glass or not, in frames or not, bordered, unbordered, small or large. He would sometimes try to make a silhouette from a single cutting, managing once a near-perfect rose (from, as an homage to his lily, a falling-apart copy of Iris Murdoch’s An Accidental Rose), but more often getting results akin to the very goose-like crane that Mehmet had accidentally seen.

He had no ambition about them, would never have even considered they were good enough for public view, but they passed the time. They let his hands work, often detached slightly from his mind, and always headed towards something, a mystery only revealed, sometimes even to him, at the moment of assembling the pieces on a flat background. He finished them in various ways and kept them in a corner of the storeroom that Mehmet, graciously, never rummaged through.

They were a bit of fun, sometimes a bit more than that, but usually nothing much, he’d be the first to say, although he would also insist that they were his nothing much.

Until the day Kumiko had arrived. And changed everything.

She was carrying a suitcase, a small one, such as you’d see – his mind went to the image so quickly it distracted him – on the arm of a forties film heroine at a train station: the case barely more than a small box, clearly empty so the actress wouldn’t be distressed, and hanging from a white-gloved hand that showed no dirt. Yet also clearly a suitcase and not a briefcase or handbag.

She was smaller than average without actually being small, long dark hair cascading down to her shoulders, pale brown eyes watching him, unblinkingly. He couldn’t have put a finger on her nationality just then if you’d asked him. She wore a simple white dress, the same colour as the coat draped over her non-suitcase carrying arm, also like a train-bound forties heroine. Finally, she wore a small red hat perched on the top of her head, an anachronism that somehow fit with all the rest.

Her age was as difficult to fix as her origins. She looked younger than him, possibly thirty-five? But as he stared at her, his speech momentarily having left him, something about her stance, something about the exact simplicity of her dress, about the steady eyes still watching him, seemed suddenly from a figure out of time: a lady of vast estates and influence during an ancient Scottish war, a dauphine dispatched to marry in the wilds of South America, the patient handmaiden to a particularly difficult goddess . . .

He blinked, and she was a woman again. A woman in a simple white dress. With a hat that looked both ninety years out of date and a harbinger of the latest thing.

‘Can I . . . ?’ he finally managed to say.

‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Kumiko.’

No one in the twenty-one year history of the print shop had opened an order this way. George said, ‘I’m George.’

‘George,’ she said. ‘Yes. George.’

‘Is there something we can help you with?’ George said, very, very much not wanting her to leave.

‘I was wondering, please,’ she said, lifting her small case up to the counter, ‘if you could possibly offer advice on how best to print facsimiles of these.’

On closer inspection, the suitcase looked both as if it was made out of paper and as if it was the most expensive piece of luggage George had ever seen. She opened it, undoing small leather straps, and pulled out a stack of large card tiles, each roughly A5-sized and each one black, similar to some of the ones George used for his own book-cut creations.

She set five of them down, one by one, in front of George.

They were pictures, evidently her own work from the way she regarded them, that odd artist’s combination of shy and bold, so expectant of a reaction, good or bad. On one level, they were nothing more than pictures of beautiful things placed against the background of a card. But on further viewing, on a deeper look . . .

Good Lord.

One was a watermill, but nothing nearly so twee as ‘watermill’ suggested. A watermill that seemed to be almost turning from the brook that ran through it, a watermill that existed not in fancy but somewhere specific in the world, a real watermill, a true watermill, near which the great and terrible tragedies of life might have recently happened. And yet also merely a watermill, too, and pretty with it.

There was a dragon in the next one, partially Chinese in style but with the wings of European myth, caught in mid-flight, its eye staring back at the viewer in malevolent mischief. Like the watermill, it was on the border of kitsch, of the sort of tourist tat you could buy for next to nothing from a street vendor. But it didn’t cross that border. This dragon was the one those fake dragons dreamed of being, the meaty, heavy, living, breathing animal behind the myth. This dragon might bite you. This dragon might eat you.

The others were the same, so near easy vulgarity, yet so clearly not. A phoenix rising from the bud of a flower. A stampede of horses cascading down a hill. The cheek and neck of a woman looking away from the artist.