The Crane Wife(22)
Author: Patrick Ness

She flipped the tile over with a silently delighted ta-da.

The lion now prowled the watermill. A conjunction even more jarring than the dragon and the crane, but one that somehow, against all possibilities, worked just as well. The trueness of the watermill, which carried history in every glistening feather filament, was now imbued with a warning. Lions alone welcome here, it seemed to say. Lions made only of words. But perhaps this lion, this one here, who had clearly prowled the watermill for so long that it and the watermill were one home, one history, perhaps it might make an exception for you, the viewer. It might still eat you, but then again, it might not. Like the dragon and the crane, the risk would be yours. Would you take it?

‘It’s . . .’ George said.

‘Holy . . .’ Mehmet said.

‘That’s . . .’ the man in the suit said.

And then he named an even more extravagant sum.

‘Goodness,’ Kumiko said, as if seeing the man for the first time. She glanced at George, astonished. ‘Is he offering to buy it?’

The man didn’t wait for George to answer and increased his extravagant sum by another extravagant amount.

Kumiko giggled, actually giggled, looking at George as if they’d somehow stepped into the middle of an unexpected comedy sketch. ‘What on earth shall we do?’ she said.

George felt unwilling, almost savagely so, to let the lion and the watermill out of his sight, even after this single glimpse of the way it lived there on the tile.

The man doubled his second extravagant sum.

‘Sold!’ Mehmet cried.

‘George?’ Kumiko asked again. ‘The money would be useful to me. For supplies.’

George tried to speak, but it came out in a croak. He tried again. ‘Anything,’ he stumbled. ‘Anything you say.’

Kumiko watched him for a moment. ‘I will not hold you to that,’ she said. Then she turned to the man. ‘All right. A deal.’

As George, in a daze, wrapped the lion and the watermill in tissue paper the man in the suit began to cry, unembarrassed. ‘Thank you,’ he kept saying, as Mehmet ordered up a dummy invoice the man could charge his credit card against. ‘Just, thank you.’

‘How much?’ Amanda said, the next time she dropped JP off at his house.

‘I know,’ George said. He hoisted JP up to eye level, bouncing him in his arms. ‘You thought your grand-père was crazy, huh? Cutting up books like that?’

‘Désolé,’ JP said.

‘No, seriously, Dad, how much?’

‘She gave me half. I said no. I insisted no, but she said we’d made it together, that it was nothing without my contribution – though that’s patently a lie, Amanda, my contribution is tiny, a tenth, a thousandth of hers.’

‘But she still gave you half.’

‘Said it would turn the art into a lie if I didn’t accept it.’

‘When the hell am I going to meet this woman?’ Amanda demanded.

George was confused for a moment, but then he realised that Kumiko and Amanda still hadn’t actually met. Somehow it had always worked out that they were never there at the same time. Strange. Though, to be honest, when he was with Kumiko, George tended to forget about the existence of anyone else on the planet, forget momentarily they might be important at all. He felt a flush of shame and improvised a lie.

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘She suggested a cocktail party.’

‘A cocktail party? Where? 1961?’

‘Cock-tail,’ JP said, making shooting noises with his finger.

‘She can be a bit old-fashioned,’ George said. ‘It’s just an idea.’

‘Well, I do want to meet her. This mystery woman who’s just earned you a month’s salary in a day.’

‘I had a little part in it. I did make the lion.’

‘Whatever you say, George.’

Kumiko had a second set of tiles she was reluctant to show him. There were thirty-two of them, she said, and they sat quietly in the corner of her suitcase in five separate stacks tied together with white ribbon, a single sheet of tissue paper between each to keep them from rubbing together.

‘It is a larger project of mine,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to show me,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said, a small smile playing on her lips. ‘Which is why I perhaps will.’

She finally did late on a Saturday in the print shop. George had returned JP to Amanda after her second weekend in a row counting traffic queues in Romford or Horsham or whatever town with a great-aunt-sounding name it was, and George had come in to relieve Mehmet, who hated working alone and swore he had a Saturday afternoon call-back for ‘swing in Wicked’, which George assumed was a lie but let him off anyway.

He hadn’t seen Kumiko for the previous two nights. Their get-togethers were unpredictable. She now had a phone number she never seemed to answer, and often she would just show up in George’s shop, wondering if he’d like to join her for company that evening.

He always said yes.

Today, she waited until nearly the end of opening hours to make her way inside. Still with the suitcase, still with the white coat draped over one arm, no matter how much colder this winter seemed to be getting.

‘My daughter would very much like to meet you,’ he said to her as she opened the case.

‘The feeling is mutual,’ Kumiko said. ‘Perhaps if we have that party you were speaking of.’

‘Yes,’ George said. ‘Okay, yes, then definitely, let’s–’

‘It is a kind of story,’ she said, interrupting, but so delicately it was almost as if she’d done so by accident, as if he had asked her about the pile of unseen tiles seconds ago rather than many nights before. She reached into the suitcase and, instead of showing him the new picture she’d made of his latest donated cutting (a closed fist, but one drained of potential violence, one clearly clasping its last beloved thing), she picked up a packet of tiles tied with ribbon.

‘A sort of myth,’ she said, setting the packet down but not yet unwrapping it. ‘A story I was told as a girl, but one that has grown in the telling over the years.’

Yet still she didn’t move to untie the ribbon.

‘You don’t have to,’ George said.

‘I know.’

‘I’m willing to wait. I told you I was willing to wait for anything.’

She looked at him seriously now. ‘You hand me too much power, George. It is not a burden, but it might become one, and I do not wish that.’ She touched his arm. ‘I know you do it out of your abundant kindness, but there may come a day when both you and I would wish that I treat you less carefully. And that must remain a possibility, George. If there is never a chance of hardness or pain, then softness has no meaning.’