The Crane Wife(19)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘Oh, Amanda–’

‘I know, you don’t need to tell me.’

‘Which girls?’

‘What?’

‘Which girls at the office?’

‘The same ones. Mei and Rachel.’

‘Rachel. The one who talks in questions.’

‘And Mei is the one whose boobs aren’t fake but look like they are. See? It’s things like that. I think them and then I just say them–’

‘What happened?’

‘The usual. I opened my big, fat, f**king mouth–’

‘I wish you wouldn’t–’

‘Not the time to be shaming me for my language, Dad.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I just, I don’t get it. How do people do it? How do people talk so easily to one another? How do they just, I don’t know, fall into it and relax and there’s repartee and banter and, whatever, ease, and I just sit there and I think, Okay, what are we talking about? And what should I say? And what shouldn’t I say? And how should I or shouldn’t I say it? And by the time I do f**king say something, we’re three topics on.’

‘You couldn’t introduce topics yourself?’

‘That gets me into more trouble. I mean, this all really started to go downhill at that godawful picnic when I said how much I hated that monstrosity on Mayfair–’

‘Which monstrosity?’

‘The Animals In War Memorial.’

‘That? You don’t like that?’

‘. . .’

‘Oh, sweetheart, I don’t even know why you’re crying now, but please–’

‘Because I don’t understand how people talk to each other, Dad. I try, but I just blunder on in and knock over the china and spit in the soup and break all these rules that no one will even tell me–’

‘Ah, that’s an English thing. They do like their unknowable rules.’

‘Yeah, but I am English. I am they.’

‘I don’t think you’re the only one who feels left out, is all I’m saying.’

‘But that’s just it. Feeling left out. It was supposed to stop when I grew up but . . .’

‘Smart people often feel left out, love.’

‘I’m not that smart. I mean, I’m smarter than Rachel. And probably Mei, too, though that’s a well of many mysteries. So, I don’t know, maybe. But what good is being smart when you speak words and no one hears the ones you mean?’

‘I’m sorry, darling. Maybe they weren’t good friends for you to begin with–’

‘Well, someone has to be! I’m nearly twenty-six and I can’t even point to a best friend. Do you know how freakish that is for a girl? Girls are all about best friends, even when you hate each other.’

‘Boys have best friends, too.’

‘Really not the point. For me, it’s been two and a half decades of false starts, of sitting outside the glass, wondering how you get in. How you stay in.’

‘Could be worse. Could be nearly five decades.’

‘You’ve never had a problem getting inside the glass, George.’

‘I’ve had a problem getting other people to stay in there with me, though. Same thing, different angle.’

‘Mum stayed.’

‘For a while.’

‘For a long while. She’s still your friend.’

‘A friend is different than a wife, Amanda.’

‘Yeah, I know. I know. I’m having . . . It’s just been tough at work. And at home. Henri calls and talks to JP and he’s polite to me. Friendly and polite and f**king courteous. And it tears three pieces out of my heart every single time . . .’

‘Okay, I’m going to stop telling you to stop crying. Maybe it’s a healing thing.’

‘Not these. These are angry tears. Don’t laugh.’

‘Well, sweetheart, if it helps, I’m your friend.’

‘Oh, Dad. You know that doesn’t count.’

She wouldn’t let him see her working on the tiles.

‘I cannot, George,’ she’d say, looking unexpectedly bashful (and how he couldn’t not touch her when she blushed, how he couldn’t not run his fingers across the line of her cheekbone, down to her jaw, under her chin, at which point he couldn’t not kiss her, apologising at every step). ‘It is too private, I am sorry.’

‘Even for me?’ he asked.

‘Especially for you. You see me, clearly, with love–’

‘Kumiko–’

‘I know. You have not said the word, but it is there.’ He tensed, but her creamy brown eyes were warm and kind. ‘Your observation is exactly what I would want,’ she went on, ‘but it changes my work. It has to begin with just my own eyes. If you are there to see it, it is already shared, and if it is already shared, then I will not be able to give it to you or to anyone, do you see?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, yes, I do see, but that’s not what I was going to say.’

‘What were you going to say?’

‘That I do see you with love. That’s how I see you.’

‘I know,’ she said, but she said it in such a way that ‘I know’ became every type of love he ever wanted to hear.

‘Will you move in with me?’

And like every other time he’d asked that question, she just laughed.

On its own, her art was beautiful, but she wouldn’t stop insisting that it was static. The cuttings of the feathers woven together, assembled in eye-bending combinations to suggest not only a picture (the watermill, the dragon, the profile) but often the absences in those pictures, too, the shadows they left, black feathers woven with dark purple ones to make surprising representations of voids. Or sometimes, there was just empty space, with a single dash of down to emphasise its emptiness. The eye was constantly fooled by them, happening upon shape when blankness was expected, happening upon blankness when shape was expected. They tantalised, they tricked.

‘But they do not breathe, George.’

‘They do. I’m telling you, they do.’

‘You are kind. They do not.’

On repeated inspection, they revealed themselves to not always be exclusively feathers, either. She would sometimes sew a line of thread or a single mother-of-pearl button to suggest a horizon or a sun. In one, she included a flat curve of plastic which should have jarred against the softness of a feather’s spray, but somehow seemed a combination both apt and eternal.