The Crane Wife(31)
Author: Patrick Ness

George had declined, mainly because Kumiko seemed reluctant to involve others, but by then it hardly mattered. Word was spreading, without George seemingly having to do anything to make it spread.

‘You’ve got buzz,’ Mehmet said, in an annoyed way, after they’d shipped off the fifth tile to a buyer in Scotland who hadn’t even seen it in person. ‘God knows why.’

‘If God does know,’ George said, ‘he’s not telling me.’

Kumiko, meanwhile, kept out of the way, letting George handle all the selling while she kept on working industriously, taking whatever cuttings George offered her and somehow turning them into breathtaking compositions that seemed to have always existed, merely waiting to coalesce and reveal their ancient, fully formed shape rather than just being newly made. She worked on further tiles to sell but also added George’s cuttings to her private stack of thirty-two that even he hadn’t seen all of. These were kept secret and off-sale, but for the others there was already a growing queue of people who snapped up the sixth and seventh tiles within hours of them being finished, paying increasingly preposterous prices.

Preposterous enough, for example, for a substantial down payment on this top-of-the-line, affordable-only-by-proper-publishing-folks printer.

It was gorgeous. It was his. It barely seemed real.

‘It seems somehow . . .’ He turned to Mehmet. ‘Am I missing something here? How did this happen?’

‘I don’t know, George,’ Mehmet said. ‘I’m not sure anybody does.’

‘Don’t you find it strange?’ he said as Kumiko lathered up his hair.

‘Lean back,’ she said, to keep his head over the sink.

‘The speed of it,’ he said. ‘The hunger for it. It seems . . .’

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t really know how it seemed.

‘I am surprised as well,’ Kumiko said, rinsing off the shampoo with a measuring cup. She squeezed out the excess water, then sat him up and started combing out his wet locks, a pair of short, sharp scissors in her hand.

‘I suppose I’m just dazed,’ he said.

He felt a small hesitation in her hand, so small as to hardly even be there, before she gathered up a line of his hair and snipped its ends cleanly away.

‘Dazed in a good way or a bad way?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure it’s either good or bad. It’s just . . . dazzling. There was nothing. Just this idle hobby of mine that meant nothing. And then there was you.’ He looked at her. She gently guided him back into a more suitable position for the haircut. ‘And all of this, too,’ he said. ‘And . . .’

‘And?’ She took another snip of his hair, moving with the confidence of a professional.

‘And nothing, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Just that this extraordinary thing has happened. Is happening.’

‘And that unnerves you?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘It unnerves me, too. I am not surprised at the hunger you mention. The world has always been hungry, though it often does not know what it hungers for. But the suddenness, yes. It is rather remarkable, isn’t it?’

She combed his hair again, ready for more snipping. This haircut had happened simply. He’d said he was going to visit his local barbers – a pair of Brazilian brothers, surprisingly young, outlandishly handsome, utterly gormless – and she’d said, ‘Let me.’

‘Where did you learn to do this again?’ he asked.

‘On my travels,’ she said. ‘Plus, it isn’t so far from what I do in my work, is it? They are complementary skills.’

‘I wouldn’t want to try cutting your hair.’

He could almost feel her smile, feel the warmth of it behind him in his little kitchen, as he sat in this chair, an old sheet wrapped around his neck, newspapers on the floor to catch the clippings. He closed his eyes. Yes, he could feel her. Feel her against him. Feel the brush of her breath against his neck as she leaned in close.

‘I love you,’ he whispered.

‘I know,’ she whispered back, but it didn’t feel like a rebuke. Her knowledge felt like delight, and he knew that this was enough.

But then there was an accompanying feeling that it wasn’t enough. Do you love me? he wanted to ask, and it shamed him. Even when she said the words to him – which she did, though not as often – he always had to stop himself from asking for confirmation.

He knew so very, very little about her. Still.

But it wasn’t as if he’d told her everything either. Rachel had gone unmentioned, for one, though that was more for his daughter, who he suspected, almost certainly correctly, would be crushed if she knew. There were also, of course, the whole host of bad habits kept secret in the early days of any relationship – the toenail ablutions in bed, the laissez-faire approach to whisker maintenance, that whole dabbing himself with a square of loo roll after peeing thing – but even compared to that, Kumiko had given him almost nothing. It was unreasonable, it was untrusting, it was–

He pushed it down, fought it away.

‘I once tried cutting Amanda’s hair,’ he said, ‘when she was little.’

He heard Kumiko chuckle. ‘And how did that go?’

‘Not bad, I thought.’

‘And yet still it was only once.’

‘Well, little girls, eh?’ He frowned, his chest slightly over-filled with love for his difficult daughter. ‘Though Amanda was never a very usual little girl. Funny, always funny, and Clare and I thought that meant she was doing all right.’

‘I like her,’ Kumiko said. ‘She makes very much sense to me.’

‘I still can’t believe you met like that.’

‘The only unnatural thing would be if there were no coincidences, George. I could have walked into any print shop, for example. But I walked into yours and look at the upheaval that has resulted.’

He turned to her. ‘So you feel the upheaval, too?’

She nodded, turning him back again. ‘I have not as much time as I would like to work on my own story.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, thinking once more of the thirty-two tiles, of what he had seen of them – the lady and the volcano, the world they were making – and of all the ones he had yet to see. She hadn’t even told him how the story ended yet. ‘Are you okay with that?’

‘For now,’ she said. ‘But you know this yourself. A story needs to be told. A story must be told. How else can we live in this world that makes no sense?’