The Crane Wife(23)
Author: Patrick Ness

George swallowed. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see the tiles.’

She opened her mouth in a little square of delighted surprise. ‘Do you, George? And my immediate thought was to say no to you. But how wonderful. Of course I will show you.’

She untied the ribbon, and showed him the first one.

It was almost completely covered in feathers. They fanned out, looping in and out of one another in a spray of brilliant white. Within, a single feather, also white but of just different enough tone to stand out, was cut and woven into the shape of an infant.

‘These are not for sale,’ she murmured, hesitant just yet to show him the rest.

‘No,’ George said, in almost silent agreement.

‘But what might you add?’ she asked. ‘What does it lack?’

‘It lacks nothing,’ George said, his eye following every contour of the white, every slightly different contour of the infant.

‘You know that not to be true,’ she said. ‘And so I ask you to think on it.’

George studied the picture again, trying to detach from his conscious mind, trying to let the image float there, let other images attach themselves to it.

‘I’d add an absence,’ he said. ‘An absence made of words. There is loss here.’ He blinked, recovering himself. ‘I think.’

She nodded. ‘And will you cut the absence for me? Will you cut others, too, as you’ve been doing?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything.’

They turned back to the tiles. ‘What’s happening here?’ he asked. ‘You said it was a myth. What myth?’

She merely nodded again, and he thought she wasn’t going to answer.

But then she spoke, as if at the beginning of a story.

‘She is born in a breath of cloud,’ she said.

And continued speaking.

The following Monday, after a weekend spent with her, again lost in specifics but with generalities of serenity and comfort and a sweet yearning, George hung in his shop the third tile they’d made, the latest of the ones separate from her private thirty-two.

She had taken the closed fist he’d made, the one bled of power and vengeance, the one that seemed resigned and perhaps welcoming of its ultimate fate, and paired it with the feathered cuttings of the cheek and neck of the woman looking away from the artist. It was a more jarring conjunction than even the lion and the watermill. It had intimations of violence, fist against face, no matter how calm the fist, but this dissipated quickly. The fist became no longer a fist, but simply a closed hand, withdrawing, empty, from its final caress of the woman’s face. The caress may, in fact, have been of a memory, the closed hand reaching into the past to feel it again, but failing, as the past always fails those who grasp at it.

‘It’s just a picture,’ George kept saying to himself, as he tried to find a spot on the wall to display it. ‘It’s just a picture.’ Trying to somehow surprise it out of its power, reduce its impact on him, keep it from making his stomach tumble.

But he failed. And was happy that he did.

The door opened behind him. For one amazed moment, he thought it was Mehmet being unprecedentedly punctual, particularly after a weekend following whatever a ‘swing from Wicked’ audition might have entailed.

‘You’re early,’ he said, turning, the third tile in his hand.

But it wasn’t Mehmet. It was the man who had bought the second tile for such an extravagant sum. He wasn’t alone. A slightly plump but fiercely professional-looking woman was with him. Short blonde hair, expensive earrings and an open-collared shirt of a cut so simple and elegant it probably cost more than George’s refrigerator.

Her face, though. Her face was nearly desperate, her eyes blazing at George, slightly red at their edges, as if sometime this morning she had been crying.

‘Is this him?’ she asked.

‘This is him,’ the man said, a step behind her.

The woman looked down to the picture he was holding. ‘There are more,’ she said, relief flooding her voice.

‘Can I help you?’ George mustered himself to ask.

‘That picture,’ she said. ‘That picture you’re holding.’

‘What about it?’ George said, raising it slightly, ready to defend it.

And then the woman said a number that George could only ever really have described as extravagant.

After she finally, finally finished the last of the dreariest Essex queue counts in the history of dreary Essex queue counts, and after she’d picked up a cranky, under-slept JP from yet another Saturday with her father, who was weirdly distracted and mumbled something about getting back to his cuttings, and then having at last arrived home after going to two separate supermarkets to find the only kind of juice JP was drinking this week (mango, passion fruit and peach), there was a knock on Amanda’s front door.

She ignored it, as she usually did. Who knocked on the doors of flats these days? Salesmen, for the most part, explaining the sensual pleasures of double-glazing, or rosette-wearing fascists in summer hats seeking her vote in the next election or, once, in a Cockney variant so thick that even as an Englishwoman she had trouble following it, a man asking if she’d like to buy fresh fish from the back of a van. (‘Who would ever do that?’ she’d asked him.) It definitely wouldn’t be the building supervisor at least, not on a game day, and it was too late for the post, so when the knock came a second time she ignored it all over again.

‘Whatever happened to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, do you think?’ she asked JP, tucked behind 3D glasses in front of their decidedly non-3D telly. ‘You never see them much any more. It’s like they’ve passed into myth.’ She grabbed another handful of sticky toys to be tidied away. ‘Though probably not one of those myths with br**sts and bacchanals and swans having it off with maidens.’ She turned to her son, who had not answered, mostly because he was four years old and in front of the TV. ‘What do you suppose a Jehovah’s Witness myth might be like, poo-poo? I picture quite a lot of lighthouses.’

‘Hush, Mama,’ JP said. ‘Wriggle dance!’

Which meant the Wriggle dance was coming up agonisingly soon on the Wriggle video download, danced by the childlike dinosaur Wriggles in their Wriggle costumes on Wriggle Beach under Wriggle rainbows springing forth from Wriggle applications on Wriggle computer pads. The dance involved very little more than wriggling, but JP was a fierce devotee.