The Crane Wife(17)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She gently let him go and reached into the small suitcase, placed down by her chair. She took out the small cutting of George’s crane, which she had asked if she could have at the shop. She held it in the palm of her hand.

‘I wonder if I might perform an impertinence,’ she said.

The following day was a nightmare. Retrieving the kitten t-shirts from the Brookman party had proven surprisingly difficult as they’d taken an equally surprising liking to them.

‘What’s funnier than ten army officers wearing way-too-tight light blue t-shirts with a wanking kitten on the front?’ Brookman had said on the phone.

George could think of any number of things. ‘It’s just that the O’Riley Hen Party were sort of counting on them. They’re personalised to each member’s–’

‘We know! We’ve already divvied up the names. The Best Man is definitely Boobs.’

George had ended up having an in-town t-shirt printer do a rush job at his own exorbitant expense to reproduce another batch for the hen party and hoped to God they hadn’t found any sudden EasyJet bargains to Riga as well. Mehmet, meanwhile, was feigning stomach illness to try and leave early, which he regularly did on Friday afternoons, and George had also spent the entire day toiling over the almost literally incredible news that Kumiko had yet to acquire a mobile phone that worked in this country, so he had no way of calling or texting her, or obsessing over calling or texting her, or obsessing over not calling or texting her and had reached a point of near-implosion about having nothing but her word that he’d ever see her again.

When, of course, in she walked.

‘My impertinence,’ she said, laying the suitcase on the front counter.

She removed her feathered tile of the dragon: white, tightly woven strands of feather and stalk on the plain black background.

And beside the dragon, she’d affixed his cutting of the crane.

‘Holy shit,’ Mehmet said, seriously, peering over George’s shoulder. ‘That’s amazing.’

George said nothing, because if he spoke, he would weep.

‘It’s a picnic,’ Amanda said the next morning, handing JP over to George in a pile of biscuit-smelling flesh.

‘Grand-père!’ JP shouted.

‘Bit cold for a picnic, isn’t it?’ George asked, after he’d kissed JP and taken him inside. Amanda followed him in but didn’t sit down.

He saw her glancing at the papers and clothes and books galore that made his sitting room not the most obviously child-friendly place in the world. It didn’t matter. JP adored George, and George adored his grandson. They could have been stuck in prison and made a day of it.

‘Not for Rachel and Mei,’ Amanda said.

‘Rachel?’ George asked.

‘You remember,’ she said. ‘The girl from work who came to my birthday a few months back. Mei, too. Both pretty, both vaguely evil-seeming. Rachel more so.’

‘Yes,’ George said, bouncing a giggling JP up and down in his arms. ‘I think I remember them.’

‘We sit in the sun. We look at boys. We drink wine.’

‘Sounds nice.’

‘They hate me. And I think I hate them.’

‘I met someone,’ he said, so quickly it must have been obvious he’d been holding it in. ‘She’s called Kumiko.’

Amanda’s face froze for a minute. ‘All right.’

‘Came into the shop. We’ve gone out the last two nights. And again tonight.’

‘Three nights in a row? Are you teenagers?’

‘I know, I know, it’s a lot all at once, but . . .’ He set JP down on the sofa, burying him in dusty, old cushions so that he’d have to escape, a game JP loved.

‘But?’ Amanda asked.

‘Nothing,’ George shrugged. ‘Nothing. I’m just saying I met a nice lady.’

‘All right,’ Amanda said again, carefully. ‘I’ll pick him up before four.’

‘Good, because–’

‘Because you’ve got a date, gotcha.’

But George wasn’t embarrassed, felt too full of sunshine to even be bashful. ‘And wait,’ he said, ‘just wait until I show you the dragon and the crane.’

He kissed Kumiko that night. For a moment, she was definitely the one being kissed, but then she did kiss him back.

His heart sang.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he said to her some time later, after they lay together under sheets he hadn’t even bothered changing, never imagining for a moment that anything like this was going to happen. ‘Who are you?’

‘Kumiko,’ she said. ‘And who are you?’

‘I’ll be honest,’ George said. ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea.’

‘Then I will tell you.’ She turned to him, taking his hand as if bestowing a blessing. ‘You are kind, George. The sort of man who would forgive.’

‘Forgive what?’ he asked.

But she kissed him for an answer and the question was lost, lost, lost.

1 of 32

She is born a breath of cloud.

She sees neither her mother nor her father – her mother has died during the birth and not hung around; her father is the cloud itself, silent, weeping, consumed with grief – and so she stands alone, on legs unfamiliar.

‘Where have I come from?’ she asks.

There is no answer.

‘Where am I to go?’

There is no answer, even from the cloud, though he knows.

‘May I ask, at least, what I am called?’

After a hesitant moment, the cloud whispers into her ear. She nods her head and understands.

2 of 32

She takes flight.

3 of 32

The world below her is young, too young to have quite grown together. It exists in islands of floating earth, some connected by rope bridges or bamboo walkways, others reached across expanses of sky by rowing boats made of paper, others to which she can only fly.

She lands on an island that is mostly meadow, the grass bowing to her in the breeze. She pinches it between her fingertips and says, ‘Yes. Just so.’

In the meadow, there is a lake. She goes to it, following the sand along its shores, until she reaches the river that flows from it. She stands on tiptoes and sees that the river empties over the edge of the island and into space in an outrage of angry water.

Why does the water do so? she thinks.

4 of 32

There is a fisherman on the far shore. She calls to him. ‘Why does the water do so? Will it not spend itself completely and leave only empty earth?’