The Crane Wife(43)
Author: Patrick Ness

Which made no sense. Nor did the anger she felt when further meetings with Kumiko proved difficult to arrange. Nor did her growing jealousy of George for the time he got to spend with her. She knew all of it was irrational, but what good did rationale ever do in the face of need?

‘We’ve had to start saying no to people about the tiles,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘It was getting too much, so we just told everyone to leave us alone for a bit. Frankly, I’m happy for a breather. Everything’s been so fast.’

‘Yes,’ Amanda replied, surprising both of them with the heat in her voice. ‘That’s what the rest of us have been thinking. How fast it’s all been.’

She’d winced to herself about how petty she sounded. But didn’t quite apologise.

‘No need to sound quite so put out about it,’ George said. ‘I hope you don’t mean the marriage?’

‘Yes, George, the marriage is what I mean.’

‘But Kumiko is–’

‘Kumiko is marvellous. Kumiko is wonderful. She’s like no one I’ve ever met before.’

‘She is that–’

‘But it’s barely a couple of months,’ she heard herself saying, harshly, pointlessly. ‘How well do you really know her?’

He paused at that, and she thought she could hear his discomfort, even in the silence. ‘Well enough. I think.’

‘You think?’

At which he’d grown suddenly stern. ‘What I really think is that this isn’t your business, Amanda. For too long you’ve thought you had the right to just come into my life and tell old George what to do. Well, you can’t. I’m forty-eight. I’m your father. I’ve met a woman I love and I’m going to marry her and I don’t need your permission or your approval, all right?’

Almost by reflex, Amanda waited for him to say he was sorry, like he did every other time he’d snapped at her, possibly across her entire life.

Except, this time, he didn’t.

‘We barely knew Henri before you married him and you didn’t hear us complaining.’

‘Well, Mum complained a little–’

‘And we didn’t know about the divorce until he’d already moved back to France, so don’t talk to me about too fast.’

‘That was different. I was young. Young people do that stuff when they’re finding themselves.’

And then he said the meanest thing he would ever say to her, all the more painful for being one hundred per cent true.

‘The slash-and-burn way you go about it, Amanda, you’ll be looking for yourself the rest of your life.’

For that, he had immediately apologised, blaming some kind of vague, lingering man flu for his temper, but it was too late. It felt as if he had shot her with an arrow. Worse, an accurate one. They hadn’t spoken since. It wasn’t quite that dramatic, she’d speak to him again soon, she was sure, and she certainly wasn’t going to get in the way of JP seeing his rightfully adored grand-père.

No, what hurt was that she realised what she’d said to Kumiko at the party was right. Amanda yearned, even for the things she already had. And it was poison, not even sweet-tasting.

The insane dreams weren’t helping. Regular, with content so weird it almost felt like her personality was being disassembled. She always woke from them exhausted. It might only have been the fever, but lordy. She lay awake now, her bladder deciding to not so gently insist that, if she was awake, there were matters that could use tending, another similarity to her father she’d go to her grave without knowing. The clock read an obscene trio of numbers, 3.47. Work was in a few hours, and she needed to get some sleep. She sighed and got up, hoping to make it quick.

But thinking of work made her think of Rachel, and as she moved down the hallway she woke up some more whether she wanted to or not. Rachel had grown even stranger since the night of the party, buoyed up, it seemed, by an apparent happiness that bordered on the deranged.

‘He’s too hairless,’ Amanda had been saying to Mei just this morning, chatting about a reality TV star who’d cross-pollinated to another reality show set in a jungle. ‘It’s like looking at a really hunky ten-year-old, and who wants that?’

Both Mei and Amanda had physically recoiled at the explosion of Rachel’s laughter nearby. They’d been unaware she was even listening. ‘Maybe Michael Jackson?’ she’d said, leaning in with a slightly terrifying smile.

‘Um, that’s not funny?’ Mei said, anxiously. ‘He’s dead now? And I like him?’

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Rachel said, looking at Mei in astonishment. ‘Talking in questions really is annoying.’ She’d turned to Amanda. ‘By the way, Amanda, good work on Essex. I’ve been telling Felicity you’re out for my job.’

She’d laughed out loud again, and Amanda watched her go with her mouth open, for once feeling exactly as amazed as Mei.

Maybe Rachel really was having a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t that the cheerfulness was unwelcome but – Amanda didn’t know the word, sparkly would do – Rachel had an uncomfortably sparkly feel to her, like she was a grenade well past the point where she should have exploded. All you could do was keep a safe distance and hope for the best.

Amanda stumbled into her bathroom and sat down on her freezing toilet, gasping at the temperature. She put a hand on the radiator to try and get some heat flowing through her. The bathroom was, bizarrely, in the corner of the building. Instead of putting the sitting room here to give it a nice double-sided view, the architects had elected to use it for the one place in the flat where you regularly got na**d and expelled things.

She didn’t turn on the light, though the hopes of keeping a minimal level of consciousness were fading with both the train of her thoughts and the cold on her bottom. The gorgeous moonlight coming through the windows would have added several per cent to her flat’s resale value if it could have been seen romantically over the back of a settee. It was almost bright enough to read in here.

She finished peeing, dried herself, flushed and stood, pulling the elastic of her sleeping-alone knickers – which were getting far too much wear recently – up to her waist.

Then she stopped.

What the hell? she thought, and turned and vomited down the still-spiralling water.

Well, she was wide awake now.

‘Seriously,’ she whispered, genuinely startled. ‘What the hell?’