The Crane Wife(16)
Author: Patrick Ness

They should have looked cheap. They should have looked tacky and home-made. They should have looked like the worst kind of car boot sale rubbish, the work of a plump, hopeless woman with no other options than an early death by drink.

But these. These were breathtaking.

And what tumbled George’s heart, what made his stomach feel as if he’d swallowed a fluttering balloon, was that they weren’t drawings or carvings or paintings or watercolours.

They were cuttings. Each was made with what looked like slices of an impossible array of feathers.

‘These are . . .’ George said, unable to think of exactly what to say, so he simply said it again. ‘These are . . .’

‘They are not quite there yet, I know,’ Kumiko said. ‘They lack something. But they are mine.’

She seemed to hesitate in the face of George’s intense consideration of the pictures. He looked at them as if he were a kidnap victim and they were his long-sought ransom. He felt as if he was losing his balance, as if vertigo had given his ears a thump, and he raised his hands to steady himself on the counter.

‘Oh!’ Kumiko said, and he saw her smiling down at his left hand.

There was his own cutting, utterly dismal, painfully amateur in comparison, still gripped in the hand that had tried to hide it from Mehmet. He moved to hide it again, but her eyes were already on it, and they weren’t scornful, weren’t mocking.

They were delighted.

‘You’ve made a crane,’ she said.

She was from ‘all over’, she said when he asked her over dinner that night, and had been a sort of teacher. Overseas. In developing countries.

‘It sounds noble,’ she said. ‘I do not want it to sound like that. Like some great woman offering her services to poor, adoring unfortunates. Not at all. It was not like that. It was like . . .’

She trailed off, looking into the dark wood panelling that overpowered the ceilings and the walls. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, George had taken her to a self-consciously old-fashioned ‘English’ restaurant, such as men in morning suits might have eaten at anywhere from 1780 to 1965. A small sign above the door read ‘Est 1997’. He’d been surprised she’d accepted his invitation, surprised she’d been free at no notice whatsoever, but she said she was new to this place and not, at the moment, overflowing with friends.

She’d used that word. Overflowing.

‘The teaching,’ she said, furrowing her brow, ‘the interaction, I should say, was like a hello and a goodbye, all at once, every day. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Not even a little,’ George said. She spoke in an accent he couldn’t place. French? French/Russian? Spanish/Maltese? South African/Nepalese/Canadian? But also English, and possibly Japanese like her name but also neither or any, as if every place she may have travelled hadn’t wanted her to leave and insinuated itself into her voice as a way of forcing her to take it along. He could understand the feeling.

She laughed at him, but nicely. ‘I do not like talking of myself so much. Let it be enough that I have lived and changed and been changed. Just like everyone else.’

‘I can’t ever imagine you’d need changing.’

She pushed some roast beef around her plate without eating it. ‘I believe you mean what you say, George.’

‘That was too much. I’m sorry.’

‘And I believe that, too.’

She’d had a relationship, perhaps even a marriage, that had ended at some point, though it didn’t seem amicably so, like his had with Clare. She didn’t want to talk about that either. ‘The past is always filled with both joy and pain, which are private and perhaps not first date conversation.’

He’d been so pleased she’d called it a ‘first date’ that he missed several of her next sentences.

‘But you, now, George,’ she said. ‘You are not from here, are you?’

‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘I’m–’

‘American.’ She leant back in her chair. ‘So you perhaps do not quite belong either, do you?’

She said she’d taken up the cuttings on her travels. Paints and brushes were too hard and too expensive to truck around from place to place, so she’d first started using local fabrics – batiks or weaves or whatever was to hand – and had moved, more or less by chance, to feathers, after coming across a market stall in Paramaribo or Vientiane or Quito or Shangri-La perhaps, that sold every colour of feather you could imagine and beyond, some concoctions so unlikely they hardly seemed to have come from an animal at all.

‘And looking back on it,’ she said, ‘what an impossible market stall to find. Feathers are difficult to source, and expensive. Yet here they were, pinned to the walls of a poor market seller in melting heat. I was bewitched. I bought as much as my arms could carry, and when I went back the next day, the stall was gone.’

She took a sip of mint tea, an odd thing to have with roast beef, but she’d declined all offers of the red wine George was desperately trying not to drink too quickly.

‘Your pictures are . . .’ George started, and faltered.

‘And again, the sentence you cannot finish.’

‘No, I was going to say, they’re . . .’ Still the word failed him. ‘They’re . . .’ Her face was smiling, a little shy at an incoming critique of her work, but beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful and kind and somehow looking right back at George that to hell with it, in he went, ‘They’re like looking at a piece of my soul.’

She widened her eyes a bit.

But she didn’t laugh at him.

‘You are very kind, George,’ she said. ‘But you are wrong. They are like looking at a piece of my soul.’ She sighed. ‘My as yet incomplete soul. They lack something. They are nearly there, but they . . . lack.’

She looked into her cup of tea as if what she lacked might be there.

She was impossible. Impossibly beautiful, impossibly talking to him, but also impossibly present, so much so that what else could she be but a dream? The soles of her feet must be hovering a centimetre above the ground. Her skin would turn out to be made of glass that would shatter if touched. Her hands, on closer inspection, would be translucent at the least, clear enough to read through.

He reached forward impulsively and took her hand in his. She let him, and he examined it front and back. There was nothing unusual about it at all, of course, just a hand (but her hand, hers) and, embarrassed, he set it back down. She didn’t let him go, though. She examined his hand the same, looking at his rough skin, at the hair that gathered so unattractively across the backs of his fingers, at the nails chewed too short for too many decades to be little more than buried tombstones at his fingertips.