The Crane Wife(26)
Author: Patrick Ness

JP coughed, and the bird glanced up at the noise. A bright golden eye, crazy like the eyes of all birds, caught hers briefly and held it for one second, two, before returning to its hunt.

Amanda felt briefly like she’d been judged. But then, she felt that most days.

‘Is Papa coming to feed the ducks with us?’ JP asked.

‘No, baby, Papa had to go back to France.’

‘Claudine,’ JP said, proud of his knowledge.

‘Indeed,’ Amanda said. ‘Claudine.’

JP looked back at the goose he’d been feeding. It had nibbled up the last of the bread and was poking its long neck at them in a request that managed to seem both embarrassed and assertive. JP just stood there, hands on his hips, foam Superman muscles bulging. ‘A goose,’ he said. ‘I am not a goose.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Sometimes I am a duck, Mama,’ he explained, ‘but I am not ever a goose. Not even once.’

‘Why do you suppose that is?’

‘If I was a goose, I would know my name. But when I am a goose, I don’t know my name, so I’m not a goose. I’m a duck.’

‘You’re a JP.’

‘I am a Jean-Pierre.’

‘That, too.’

He stuck his sticky hand in hers (how? How was it sticky? All he’d been handling was bread. Did little boys just ooze sticky resin, like snails?). Amanda glanced again at the stork/possibly crane thing, watching it until it disappeared behind the branches of an overhanging tree, still scanning the water for food.

‘Surely the fish are hibernating this time of year?’ she asked, then rolled her eyes at how stupid it sounded. She was becoming increasingly worried she was turning into one of those single mothers you saw on trains, speaking in a loud, clear voice to their child, as if pleading for somebody, anybody to please join in and give her something else to talk about besides goddamn wriggling.

‘What’s hyperflating?’ JP asked.

‘Hibernating. Means sleeping off the winter.’

‘Oh, I do that. I get into bed and I sleep the whole winter. And sometimes, Mama? Sometimes, I am winter. Je suis l’hiver.’

‘Oui, little dude. Mais oui.’

By the time she’d got JP to bed that night, she found she was so tired she couldn’t be bothered to even make lunch for the next day. She was supposed to have time off in lieu for all these idiotic Saturdays out in soul-sapping middle-of-Essex nowhere, but Head of Personnel Felicity Hartford had made it clear that ‘time off in lieu’ was like the gold standard: worth the world, as long as no one ever asked to spend it.

She called George that evening instead, and they talked about Kumiko – who Amanda still hadn’t met; it had got to the point where it seemed George was purposely keeping her secret – and about the astonishing amount of money he and Kumiko were suddenly being offered for the art they made together, a development Amanda instinctively mistrusted, like telling everyone you’d won the lottery before doing the final verification of your numbers.

‘You remember that bird you said you saved?’ she asked. ‘What was it? A stork?’

‘A crane,’ he said. ‘At least I’m pretty sure it was a crane.’

‘Did that really happen? Or did you just dream it?’

He sighed, and to her surprise, there was a real annoyance in it. She pressed on quickly. ‘Only I think I may have seen it today. At the park with JP. Tall white thing, hunting for fish.’

‘Really? That park near your flat?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Gosh, wouldn’t that be something? Gosh. It wasn’t a dream, no, but it sure felt that way. Gosh.’

She talked to her mother next, mostly about her father. ‘Well, almost none of that makes sense, dear,’ her mother said about Kumiko and the art and the money and the crane. ‘Are you sure?’

‘He seems happy.’

‘He always seems happy. Doesn’t mean he is.’

‘Don’t tell me you still worry about him, Mum.’

‘To meet George once is to worry about him forever.’

Just before she lay down in bed to pretend to read, Amanda picked up her mobile again and clicked ‘Recents’. Henri was third down, after her father and her mother. She hadn’t spoken to anyone else the entire weekend. She thought of calling Henri to see if he’d made it home safely, but that, of course, was impossible, for so many reasons. And what would she say? What would he say?

She put the phone back down and turned off the light.

She slept. And dreamt of volcanoes.

Work on Monday morning involved an analysis of the data she’d collected at the weekends – numbers of cars, how long each had waited on average, possible alternate traffic signalling or routing or directional changes that might help. She never tried to explain this part of her job to others, not after seeing how their faces stretched back in terror that she might keep talking about it.

But, well, people were dumb, and she found the job interesting. The sorting out of traffic may not have been all that dynamic, but the solving of a problem could be. And these were problems she could solve, was even developing a certain flair for solving, even possibly so well she may have been shifting Felicity Hartford from anonymous loathing of her into reluctantly approving awareness.

Though Rachel – who was, after all, her immediate superior – was starting to prove a real obstacle.

‘Have you finished the analysis yet?’ Rachel asked, standing at the end of Amanda’s desk reading a report, as if Amanda’s work was too boring for eye contact.

‘It’s 9.42,’ Amanda said. ‘I’ve only been here forty-five minutes.’

‘Thirty-one minutes?’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t think your tardiness hasn’t been noticed?’

‘I worked all day Saturday.’

‘Queue counts should only take the morning? I hardly think that’s all day?’

It had been like this since the picnic. Nothing obvious had changed, no big gestures or declaration of eternal enmity, just the slow withdrawal of lunch invites, an increased brusqueness to work requests, a general chilling of atmosphere. Refusing to look at her was new, though. They must have entered a new phase, Amanda thought. All righty then.

‘How’s it going with Jake Gyllenhaal’s brother?’ she asked, turning back to her screen. Out of the corner of her eye, she at least saw Rachel look up.

‘Who?’

‘The boy from the park,’ Amanda said, faux-innocently. ‘The one who threw olive oil all over you.’