The Crane Wife(60)
Author: Patrick Ness

At least, that’s how Amanda liked to read it.

In the end, though, there was no possible way of keeping the tile here. It was far too valuable, for one thing. The market for the few surviving, already-sold tiles had skyrocketed since Kumiko’s death, and even though Amanda’s added to that scant total by one, the only other person she wanted to know of its existence was George, who she’d finally shown it to at Kumiko’s wake. She’d been nervous, frightened even, that he’d react badly to her having kept it from him, but he’d said he understood completely, understood, too, her desire to keep it secret still.

It was something completely personal to the two of them, after all, a physical intersection where their lives crossed with Kumiko’s. And who else, who better to share it with than George?

None better, she thought, looking at the tile for as long as she dared. None better at all.

She sighed and took it down, placing it carefully in the bag that Kumiko had given her and locking the whole thing in a drawer. She opened her office door again, sat down at her desk and looked out the window at her brand-new view.

It was only of a dirty canal, but it was a start.

Since the night of the fire all those weeks ago, Rachel had not only gone ahead and quit her job, but had vanished completely. Mei reported that Rachel’s flat was abandoned, save for a couple of fistfuls of Rachel’s clothes and a suitcase, with only the briefest calls to make her goodbyes to her putative best friend.

‘What did she say?’ Amanda had asked a very teary Mei over lunch.

‘I just don’t believe it.’

‘I know, but what did she say?’

Mei shrugged, sadly. ‘She said she had finally found clarity, and that she couldn’t believe how much of her life she’d wasted. She said she wanted to see what was beyond the horizon, and that more than anything, she wished the same for me.’

‘Well. That was nice.’

Mei’s face screwed up in anguish. ‘I know! Do you think she’s had a traumatic head injury?’

Mei hadn’t seemed very much surprised – or indeed to very much notice – that Felicity Hartford had gone straight to Amanda for promotion into Rachel’s position, something Amanda felt almost certain Rachel had orchestrated. Well, if that was the case, then maybe accepting it in a certain spirit was required.

‘I’m only doing this because you’re a woman, you realise,’ Felicity had said. ‘We can’t have fourteen male directors, apparently, despite the other candidates’ manifest superiority to what I’ll laughingly call your abilities–’

‘I want my own office,’ Amanda said.

Felicity looked as if Amanda had just stripped to her underpants. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Tom Shanahan has his own office. Eric Kirby has his own office. Billy Singh has his own–’

‘And there are a larger number of directors who do not, Amanda. There will be no special treatment just because you–’

‘You don’t hate women.’

At this, Felicity Hartwell had blinked. ‘My dear, what an extraordinarily odd thing to say.’

‘You hate everyone. Which is fine with me, I’m not too much of a fan of everyone either, but you take it out on women because it’s more fun, isn’t it? We fight differently. More interestingly.’

‘I’ll thank you to change this line of–’

‘So I’ll make a deal with you. You give me my own office and I won’t take you to a very uncomfortable tribunal where I’ll present my recording of everything you’ve said so far.’ She removed her phone from her pocket and showed Felicity that it was still recording every word. ‘And, in return, let me just ask you this.’

Felicity’s face hardened. ‘You don’t know who the f**k you’re dealing with, Missy–’

‘What do you think of the Animals In War Memorial on Park Lane?’

‘I could eat a nothing like you for breakfast–’

‘What do think of it?’ Amanda snapped, feeling the nerves in her stomach twang from the tension of this gambit.

But still appearing fairly calm. Which was nice.

Felicity sat back, exasperated. She made a disgusted fine sound. ‘I think it’s a ludicrous embarrassment,’ she said, ‘put up there by rich morons with–’

‘–more money than sense,’ Amanda finished. ‘It’s an abomination to equate a Golden Retriever with a soldier. Not that I have anything against Golden Retrievers, mind, but they’ve even got a f**king pigeon up there. And the whole Memorial is bigger than the one for all of Australia, so clearly we care more as a country about pigeons than we do Australians.’

‘Well,’ Felicity said, still astonished, ‘can you blame us?’ And then, seeing Amanda’s face, she gave a surprised smile. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’

Every woman around the office had been remarking lately how much easier – if not exactly easy – Felicity was to work with these days. And all it took was lunch once a week with Amanda. It had been an effort to evict a complaining Tom Shanahan from his office, but Felicity had done it and had even left an ANZAC card as a good-luck note on Amanda’s desk this morning. Scarily, Amanda was beginning to think they were becoming rather good friends.

‘I’d suggest a plant,’ her new assistant Jason said, stepping into the doorway. He was very, very cute in a tiresomely fascist sort of way that stirred not one single ember in Amanda’s fires. A feeling which seemed mutual; he wasn’t more than five years younger than her, but had clearly cast her into the sexual outer darkness anyway.

Who cared? The outer darkness had way more interesting people in it.

‘Plants are for the emotionally pliable,’ she said, looking down, as if returning to work she hadn’t actually started.

‘Noted,’ he said. ‘Papers for you.’

He put them on the far corner of her desk. And waited. She slowly looked back up in the tried-and-tested manner of a boss indicating an employee’s presence was unwelcome.

‘Mei Lo asked if she could schedule a meeting,’ he said.

‘. . . and?’

‘I said I didn’t believe you had any openings on your schedule, that I didn’t believe there’d be any openings all week, and that I didn’t believe you cared for meetings anyway.’ Jason grinned, his green eyes glinting. ‘She said she couldn’t believe it.’