The Crane Wife(49)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘What rumours? We’re just taking a little break, that’s all.’

‘It’s all over the right sort of digital places, George, where you wouldn’t even know how to look. Word doesn’t stop spreading just because you want it to.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Mehmet sighed, as if talking to a slow pupil. ‘The tiles were doing well already. Then you suddenly stopped making them–’

‘We didn’t stop, we’re just–’

‘Please. How do people react when they can’t have something? It turns them into babies. Gimme, gimme, gimme. If you wanted to lower demand, you should have put out a million tiles, not zero.’

George turned back to the cutting. ‘I have no control over any of that. There’s no big project. Not for them anyway.’

Mehmet shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. Just by talking about it, they might make it true. That’s kind of what art is, isn’t it?’

George sighed and rubbed his temples. He really did feel rough. Maybe it was time to think about giving up for the day. He’d been cutting from a mould-spattered copy of The Golden Bowl he’d found in a £1 bin outside a charity shop. It was a book, he suspected, which could possibly have been deeply metaphorical for his situation, if he or anyone he’d ever known had actually read it. As it was, all he knew of the plot was what he’d gleaned from the back cover. A gift of a bowl meant to represent love had a crack running through it. Or something. He’d torn off the cover, thrown it away, and started cutting, trying to figure out what Kumiko needed for the last tile.

But page after page after page and nothing had appeared. Without quite realising he was doing it, his first attempts were silhouettes of women, their faces, their bodies, clothed and unclothed, even the curve and nipple of a breast once, which seemed so viciously reductive he’d crumpled it immediately and gone to lunch, embarrassed and sorrowful. What was wrong with him?

He’d tried animals after that. It was a crane that had first brought them together, after all, and if the word ‘final’ continued hovering in the air, then perhaps an animal might round things off nicely. But all his birds became penguins, all his penguins became otters. His tigers were sheep, his dragons moths, his horses barely more than geometric shapes with unconvincing legs.

‘Ah, screw it,’ he said now, throwing away what felt like the hundredth iteration. One more. One more try and then he’d give up. Maybe completely.

He tore out one final (that word again) page of dense, Jamesian prose and tried to read it to see if inspiration could be found.

She saw him in truth less easily beguiled, saw him wander in the closed dusky rooms from place to place or else for long periods recline on deep sofas and stare before him through the smoke of ceaseless cigarettes.

Yep, that seemed to fit pretty well with the little George thought he knew of Henry James. He was sure it must be brilliant, but it didn’t half read like an artistic representation of writing, rather than writing itself. A painting of a page. A cutting without cuts.

And then, because he was still George, he felt a flash of guilt at thinking so much like his daughter and being unkind to a long-dead writer who was revered by thousands, or at least hundreds, and whose golden bowl no doubt stood for something richly meaningful that could almost certainly illuminate the closed dusky rooms of his own–

He closed his eyes for a moment. Henry James was probably the last writer you should read if you were feverish. He took in a long breath, opened his eyes, and turned the page over. He slashed a line across it with his blade.

Why had he called Rachel? What could he possibly have been thinking?

He cut another line, making two sides of an open, rough triangle.

It was as if he’d wilfully decided to sacrifice everything just to spite Kumiko, a spite she would, he hoped, remain forever unaware of, so it did nothing but slice at his own heart, as spite only ever did.

He cut two more swift lines, removing a shape from the page and setting it to one side.

He hadn’t even been angry with her, not really. He’d just felt . . . lost. Alone. Unaccompanied even when she was right there with him.

He cut more lines from the same page, above where he’d removed the triangle. A cut here, a smaller shape from the page there.

And it was his fault alone. He had never really confronted Kumiko, had demanded nothing further from her than what she gave and therefore she had every right to think, to believe, to trust that George was happy with what he was given.

Cut. Tear. Cut more. Tear more.

And so he had – stupidly, insanely – gone to Rachel, who had given, and he had given in return, only to discover–

A final cut.

–that to be given everything was too much. That something was plenty. Or at least enough. That his world, the world of the sixty-five per cent man, was filled up to its brim by partial, and drowned by whole.

He wanted Kumiko. There was nothing else worth wanting, nothing else worth needing.

And oh please please please let her forgive him without knowing why. That’s all he wanted from her now, forgiveness.

Please forgive me–

‘That’s pretty cool,’ Mehmet said, still standing behind him, forgotten.

‘I swear to God, Mehmet,’ George barked, startled again. ‘I’m suddenly very happy to waive any notice period.’

‘No, but seriously,’ Mehmet said. ‘Nice.’

George looked down at what he’d made, arranged there on his work mat, the different shapes coalescing into a larger form. His eyes took a second to see it, but there it was, impossible now to miss.

He’d cut a volcano. An erupting volcano.

One covered in words, made from a book. A volcano that breathed fire and brimstone and ash and death. One that signalled the destruction of the world.

But also, as ever, the birth of another.

And there it was. This was it. He’d found it.

The final cutting.

The story could end.

He drove to her flat directly from the shop, the cutting pressed safely in a clear plastic folder. He was in no way nervous about what she’d say, because he knew the cutting was right. It was different from the volcanoes he’d made before – stolid, peaceful, lumpen things that he’d never seen her use – and very different from the ones she made herself. It was more than just the difference between feather and paper, this was a volcano that had burst unconscious from his fingers, a volcano of George, and Henry James’s bowl could go leakily hold some flowers, thank you very much, because a volcano right now was all the metaphor he needed, and not just because his fever was radiating off him like lava.