The Crane Wife(20)
Author: Patrick Ness

They were good. They were very good.

But, she said, ‘They lack life.’

‘They’re gorgeous.’

‘They are gorgeously empty.’

‘They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’

‘They are like nothing empty you’ve ever seen before.’

He would argue with her like this, but then she would remind him of their first day, of that first ‘impertinence’, as she’d called it. Her dragon in that tile had remained the same, a dragon that George refused to agree lacked any life at all. He could see malevolence in the dragon’s eye, made green by what was maybe a bit of glass or garnet.

But now the dragon was threatening George’s crane. The same dragon made of feather flew over the crane made of words on paper. A combination of mediums that shouldn’t have worked. A combination of styles that shouldn’t have worked. George wasn’t even remotely afraid to acknowledge that it was even a combination of competencies (hers exquisitely agile, his barely managing a limp) that shouldn’t have worked.

But oh. But oh. But oh.

‘Holy shit,’ Mehmet had said.

Holy shit indeed, George had thought.

The dragon now had purpose. The crane now had context. The dragon now had a dangerous curiosity, it had potential. The crane now had threat, a serenity about to cease. Together, they had tension. Together, they were more than two incomplete halves, they were a third thing, mysterious and powerful and bigger than the small black square that imprisoned them. A frame had become a film, a sentence had become a story. The dragon and the crane invited you to step in, take part, be either or both, but they were very clear that you would do so at your peril.

And she had given it to him.

‘As a thank you,’ she had said, ‘if you wish it.’

‘No,’ George said. ‘It’s too much. Clearly too much.’

‘I’ll take it,’ Mehmet said.

‘It is finished,’ Kumiko said. ‘You finished it. It belongs to you as much as me.’

‘I . . .’ George started. ‘I . . .’

‘I’ll take it,’ Mehmet said again.

And then Kumiko had said, ‘Tell me, do you regularly make your cuttings?’

Which really started everything.

She didn’t ask him to cut anything specific, felt that that would somehow get in the way of inspiration. But George eagerly began to dedicate every spare moment to making cuttings – raiding the second-hand bookstore bins, buying proper ones if nothing was right, then sending Mehmet to the front of the shop to torture any customers who came in (‘But it says red here on the form.’).

He tried not to think, tried to loosen his concentration from its moorings, allow the blade to just make its marks, letting himself stay unsure of what the final assemblage would be until he put the last slice into place.

‘What is it?’ Mehmet asked of the first one he finished that he was even partway satisfied with.

‘What do you think it is?’ George replied, slightly baffled himself.

‘Some kind of hyena?’

‘I think it might be a lion.’

‘Oh, yeah. One of them stylised jobbies, like they have on England sport shirts.’

‘Jobbies?’

‘Everything old is new again, Captain.’

‘Call me Captain again and you’re fired.’

Mehmet frowned at the hyena/lion. ‘This isn’t some mysterious allure of the East thing you’ve got with this woman, is it? Because I’d find that, like, amazingly offensive.’

‘You’re from the East, Mehmet, and I find you neither mysterious nor alluring.’

‘Ah,’ Kumiko said when she saw the cutting. ‘A lion. Yes.’

And took it away.

He still knew very little about her as yet, what she did with her free time, who her family was, even what she did for money.

‘I live, George,’ she would say, an expression of pained perplexity glancing across her brow. ‘What does anyone do? They live, they survive, they take themselves and their history and they carry on.’

Well, that’s what characters in books do, he would think but not say, but the rest of us need to buy bread and beer once in a while.

She hinted, occasionally, that she lived off savings, but how much money could whatever kind of international aid worker she’d been have stashed away? Unless, of course, it was from before or was family money or–

‘I worry you,’ she said one night in bed, in George’s bed, in George’s house – he still hadn’t been to hers (‘Too small,’ she’d said, frowning at herself. ‘Smaller than anyone would ever believe.’) – in what may have been the third week of their dating. It was a strange time. He’d look back and know they’d spent hours together but would only have clear memories of a few passing moments: her lips parting to eat a polite bite of aubergine, her laughter at the bread-hungry geese who disappointedly followed them around a park, the bemused way she took his hand when he looked uneasy at being surrounded by teenagers in a queue at the cinema (to see a film which vanished like vapours in his memory).

She was almost a half-remembered dream, yet not.

Because here she was, in his bed, mirroring his caresses of her, running a finger from his temple to his chin and saying, ‘I worry you.’

‘I know so little about you,’ he said. ‘I want to know more.’

‘You know everything important.’

‘You say that, but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘For example, your name.’

‘You know my name, George,’ she said, amused.

‘Yes, but is Kumiko Japanese?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Are you Japanese?’

She looked at him teasingly. ‘In the sense that my name is, yes, I suppose I am.’

‘Is that an offensive question? I don’t mean it to be–’

‘George,’ she said, sitting up a bit more, looking down at him on the pillow, her finger continuing down through the greying hairs on his chest.

‘Things were not easy for me, before,’ she said, and it was as if the night itself stopped to listen to her. ‘There were hard days, George. Days that I loved, of course, days that I lived to the end of every minute, but more often they were hard. And I do not wish to live in them again.’ She stopped, her finger poking playfully at his belly button, her voice anything but that same playful. ‘There is more of me to know, of course there is.’ She glanced up at him, and he could have sworn her eyes were somehow reflecting golden moonlight that was actually coming from behind her. ‘But we have time, George. We have all the time we can steal. And so, can it wait? Can I be revealed to you slowly?’