The Crane Wife(5)
Author: Patrick Ness

‘They only do that stuff in America, George. Can I Help You, Sir. You Look Fabulous In That, Sir. Can I Get You Some More Iced Tea, Sir.’

‘. . . so you’ve never been to America then.’

‘Television. Exactly the same thing.’

‘Please, just call St Ives, tell them we have an urgent correction. And while you’re at it, ask them where the Brookman Stag Do t-shirts are. The boys are leaving for Riga tonight and they should have been here by–’

‘Brookman?’

‘. . . Oh, what’s that look, Mehmet? I don’t like that look. Please tell me–’

‘The Brookman ones have already gone out. He came by when you were at lunch.’

‘Oh, no. No, no, no. I checked the order myself and all that had come in were–’

‘The light blue ones with the kittens on the front.’

‘Those were the O’Riley Hen Night! Why on earth would light blue kittens be for a stag do? They even said Hen Night–’

‘We don’t have hen nights in Turkey! How am I supposed to know the difference?’

‘You moved here when you were three!’

‘What’s the big deal? They’ll all be so drunk, who’s going to notice?’

‘I suspect ten soldiers from Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards might notice that a light blue cartoon kitten with a hand over its gen**als isn’t quite–’

‘Paw.’

‘What?’

‘If it was a kitten, it’d be a paw. And what’s it supposed to be doing, anyway? Pleasuring itself? Because how is that a theme for a hen night?’

‘. . .’

‘What?’

‘Call Brookman, Mehmet. He obviously hasn’t opened his box of t-shirts yet for whatever reason–’

‘Yeah, he did seem in a bit of a hurry. Not even enough time to look at them.’

‘. . . You’re smiling.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. You did it on purpose.’

‘I did not!’

‘Mehmet!’

‘You accuse me of everything! It’s racist!’

‘Call him. Now.’

‘I don’t see why I have to do all the crappy jobs around here. All you do is moon around in the back making your precious little cuttings. Like what’s that one even supposed to be?’

‘What one?’

‘The one you’ve been carrying this whole time. The one you just hid behind your back.’

‘This? This is nothing. This is–’

‘Looks like a goose.’

‘It’s not a goose. It’s a crane.’

‘A crane.’

‘A crane.’

‘. . . like the kind that builds buildings? ’Cause, George, I hate to break it to you–’

‘Go. Now. Now, now, now, now, now–’

‘I’m going. God. Slavery was abolished two hundred years ago, you know.’

‘Yes, I know, by William Wilberforce.’

‘And you wonder why no one asks you out. I really don’t think women get turned on by William Wilberforce references. Not that I’d know, I’ll admit–’

‘I have had no problems with girlfriends, Mehmet.’

‘You mean like the last one? The secret girlfriend no one ever saw who didn’t have a name? Did she live in Canada, George? Was she called Alberta?’

‘I don’t even begin to understand those sentences.’

‘Musical theatre reference. Like a foreign language to you. Which reminds me, I’ve got an audition–’

‘Yes, fine, whatever, just put it in the schedule and make the call. And don’t spend a half hour twittering before you do.’

‘Twittering. Was the world in colour yet when you were born, George? And gravity all the time?’

‘Do you honestly think you’re a quality enough employee for me not to fire you?’

‘Oh, here we go. “It’s my shop. I own it–”’

‘I do.’

‘Fine. I’ll leave you here alone with your goose.’

‘Crane.’

‘Well, I hope you’re gonna label it, because no one is ever going to think “crane” when they see that.’

‘It’s not for everyone. It’s . . .’

‘It’s what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, you’ve gone all bashful. You’re even blushing!’

‘No, stop, what? Nothing, no. I just. Saw a crane. Last night.’

‘. . . by “crane”, do you mean “prostitute”?’

‘No! Jesus Christ, if you must know, a crane landed in my garden.’

‘. . . And?’

‘And nothing, go make the calls!’

‘Fine, watch me walking.’

‘And quit sighing like that.’

‘Customer, Mr Duncan.’

‘What?’

‘I said, customer, George. Behind you.’

‘I didn’t hear the door–’

‘. . .’

‘. . .’

‘. . .’

‘Can I . . . ?’

‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Kumiko.’

People were always surprised to find out that George was American, or at least that he had started life that way. They told him he didn’t ‘seem’ American. When asked what exactly this entailed, they would look uncertain – not uncertain about what ‘seeming’ American might mean but uncertain about how badly they wanted to offend him.

These people, friends even, many of them highly educated, many who had visited America several times, were surprisingly difficult to budge from their assumption that, George aside (of course, of course), his 300 million compatriots were all of them passport-less, irony-hating Jesus-praisers who voted for apparently insane politicians, all the while complaining that their outrageously cheap petrol wasn’t nearly cheap enough. ‘America is,’ they would say, and so confidently, without fear of contradiction or rebuttal to anything that followed.

‘The New Yorker,’ he would reply. ‘Jazz. Meryl Streep.’

This usually just prompted them to try out their approximation of an American accent, all wheedling brightness and too much blinking. At least it had morphed over the years; for a full decade after he’d moved to England, people would dive ecstatically into J.R. Ewing’s worst twang. ‘I’m from Tacoma,’ he would say.

No one wanted to hear that people other than themselves might be complicated, that no one was ever just one thing, no history ever just one version. It was oddly hard for them to accept that, though American, he was neither from the Deep South or the East Coast, that his upbringing was in the Pacific Northwest, where the accents were mild and nearly Canadian, and even though his parents had ticked a stereotypical box by being regular church-attenders – which, all right, it was difficult to find American Protestants who weren’t – they’d been slightly laissez-faire about it, as if it were a duty, like vaccinations. His father had been a secret smoker, for example, even though the church was of an evangelical strain and frowned on such things. George also knew from a startling, never-to-be-discussed accidental sighting that his parents occasionally rented  p**n ography on VHS from the gas station down the road. ‘People are legion,’ he would insist, ‘even when it’s inconvenient to a worldview.’