The Crane Wife(21)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘Kumiko–’

‘I feel safe with you, George. You are safety and softness and kindness and respite.’

George, who had been uneasy with how this conversation was going already, suddenly felt twice as dismayed. ‘Softness?’

‘Softness is strength,’ she said. ‘Stronger than you know.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it isn’t. People say that because it sounds nice, but it’s not really true.’

‘George . . .’

He sighed. He wanted to hold her now, wanted his arms around her, his too rough hands skimming gently over the skin of her back, her thighs, even her feet and hands. He wanted to completely surround her somehow, be a cave for her, be in fact the very respite she had called him, the very respite he resisted being called.

‘My ex-wife,’ George said, regretting introducing her into the bedroom but pressing ahead. ‘She always told me I was too nice, too friendly. Too soft. She didn’t mean it in a bad way, not at all. In fact, she’s still a friend.’ He paused. ‘But she left me. Every woman eventually has. I’ve never done the breaking up with a single woman I’ve ever dated.’ He ran his hand up the side of Kumiko’s arm. ‘People want niceness in their friends, but that’s a different kind of love.’

‘Niceness, George,’ she said, ‘is everything in the world that I want.’

And though George heard the words right now silently added to the end of that sentence, he genuinely had no idea if it was because she’d intended them or if they were supplied by his own fearful heart.

He framed the dragon and crane, took his time considering how. A simple flat frame couldn’t even come close to properly doing the job, the depth of the tile’s physical construction preventing it from merely being pressed under glass. Besides, basic frames were for brilliantly toothed children and their Golden Retrievers, not something as challenging, as alive, as this.

After trying and failing at a number of approaches – unglassed, mounted on matte or gloss, set flat to be viewed from above – he finally placed it inside a shallow glass case so that there was empty air around it, a hint of diorama. The case itself had a tarnished gold edge around the corners, like the picture inside might have been in there for hundreds of years and might crumble to dust upon opening. It seemed like a relic from some alternate timeline, an artefact accidentally tumbled through from some other place.

But then, where to put it?

He hung it at home, but for some reason that didn’t seem right. Above his mantelpiece it looked indefinably wrong, a foreign visitor smiling politely and wondering when on earth this dinner party was going to end. The walls of the rest of his rooms were too crowded with books to give it enough space to breathe, so he tried hanging it above his bed. One startlingly incoherent sex dream later (landslides and grasslands and armies running over his very skin), he took it right back down.

So finally, that only left the shop, where at least he would be able to see it every day and where it looked strangely comfortable, watching over him, not at all out of place, somehow, among the best examples of his shop’s work. And this was where he’d met her, of course. So maybe this tile, a crossroads of their two differing arts, just looked most natural hung in the same crossroads where their lives had intersected.

He hung it above his desk, on the back wall, distant from the front counter, slightly too far to be seen clearly, he thought.

But.

‘What on earth is that?’ the man in the suit said, picking up some freshly printed training folders because, he’d said, his secretary was sick. George looked up from his desk, from the small cutting he was making that seemed to be a still life of fruit (or possibly a spaniel) taking shape in front of him.

‘Don’t ask me,’ Mehmet said, still resentful the tile hadn’t been given to him. ‘I don’t think we’d call that art in Turkey.’

‘Then the Turks would be very foolish indeed,’ said the man in the suit, a kind of stunned dazzle in his voice. ‘Is it yours?’ he asked, looking at George keenly, as if on the verge of confirming something he’d always wanted to know. And he meant Is it yours? both ways, George realised. Had George made it? But also, George was curious to hear, did George own it?

‘The crane is mine,’ George said. ‘The dragon is . . .’ He paused for a moment, Kumiko’s name precious on his tongue. ‘Someone else’s.’

‘It’s extraordinary,’ the man said, simply, without undue emphasis, his eyes never moving from it.

‘Thank you.’

‘How much is it?’

George blinked, surprised. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘How much are you offering?’ Mehmet said, crossing his arms.

‘It’s not for sale,’ George said.

‘But if it was?’ both Mehmet and the man said at exactly the same time.

‘It’s not. The end.’

‘Everyone has a price,’ the man said, looking slightly annoyed now, having been denied something he wanted, the injustice that outraged the modern world above all others.

‘That’s about the most hostile thing I’ve heard all day,’ George said.

The man’s posture shifted. ‘I’m sorry. I genuinely am. It’s just that it’s so . . .’

George waited to hear what the man would say. Mehmet seemed to be waiting, too.

‘. . . right,’ the man finally said.

George was astonished to see the man’s eyes now swimming behind incipient tears.

‘Are you sure?’ said the man.

‘I’m sure,’ George said, but respectfully.

‘I’d pay good money,’ the man said. ‘More than you think.’

And then he named a figure so extravagant that Mehmet actually gasped.

‘It’s not for sale,’ George said.

Mehmet turned on him. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘You know,’ said the man, ‘I do actually understand. I wouldn’t part with it either.’ His hand idly patted the pile of training folders on the counter, a motion that contained so much disappointment, so much recognition that he’d bumped up against one of life’s worst limits, George found himself standing. To do what, he didn’t know. To offer the man comfort? To apologise? To simply recognise the importance of the moment?

He would never find out, because the shop door opened and Kumiko came in, smiling up at George in greeting.

‘I hope you do not mind,’ she said, setting her suitcase on the counter beside the man’s folders, seemingly oblivious to his presence. She took out another black tile, hiding its contents from George for the moment. ‘I have taken your lion,’ she said. ‘And I have used it.’