The Crane Wife (25 page)

‘What, my lady?’ the volcano says, his voice low and heavy.

‘Try.’

‘Try what?’

‘Try to harm me.’

He is unsettled, confused. But she is taunting him and begins to fly annoyingly close to his face. ‘My lady!’ he says, cross, and half-heartedly throws a blanket of lava her way.

She cries out in pain. She turns to him, the burn growing on her arm, the skin rippling and peeling in an ugly wound.

‘My lady!’ he says, shocked.

But she flies out of his reach.

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‘Where is your hatred now, my husband?’ she asks. ‘Where is your torment? You can harm me.’ She cocks her head. ‘So what will you do?’

She turns her back and flies away, not too fast, not in fear, just away. Away from him.

He trembles as what she has done sinks into him. The terrible, terrible thing she has achieved, far worse than any forgiveness could ever be.

He grows angry. And angrier still.

She is disappearing into the distance, a speck of light against a night of black.

‘I shall pursue you, my lady,’ he says. ‘I shall never cease pursuing you. I shall follow you until the end of time and–’

But she is not listening.

And he is not pursuing.

His heart aches. Aches with love. Aches with hatred. Aches with the bullet of her lodged inside.

His rage grows.

‘My lady,’ he says, angrily. ‘My lady.’

He storms over the landscape, destroying everything in his path, but there is no satisfaction in it, nothing to be gained from the small peoples running from him, the cities sinking beneath his blows, the vast forests burning under his breath. He turns back to the horizon. She is still a disappearing spot upon it, one star among the firmament.

‘My lady,’ he says again.

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He reaches down into the forest and rips up the tallest tree from its roots. He crushes it in his fist until it is straight and light. He reaches into the metals of the cities, into the factories he knows so well, and fashions an arrowhead from melted weapons of death. He fletches the arrow with feathers, extincting an entire species of the most beautiful bird he can find. He pulls out a bowstring from the tenderest sinews of the world, ignoring the cries of his child. He makes the bow from his own lava, allowing it to cool only into elasticity.

In the instant and eternity it has taken him to make his weapon, she has not disappeared from the horizon. She is still there, forever, like the bullet in his heart.

‘This is not over, my lady,’ he says, lining up his sight.

He lets fly the arrow.

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It strikes her.

‘Oh, my love!’ she cries out, in pain and terrible, inevitable surprise. ‘What have you done?’

And she falls, falls, falls to earth.

T
he fire began like this (1).

In the top half of the final tile, a volcano made of words erupted its fury, blasting verbs and adjectives and gerunds out into the world to consume everything they touched. In the bottom half, somewhat counterintuitively, a woman made of feathers fell from the sky. She had a single cut word – covered in down to obscure its exact letters – pierced through her heart. She fell with sorrow and resignation, but her position was such that she might also have completed her fall, thrown to earth by the angry arms of the volcano.

Kumiko set the tile on the bookshelves with the others. She had lit the room with candles in every corner, the tiles flickering in the warmth of the flames, like miniature suns in a temple for an ancient goddess.

‘It seems a strange ending,’ George said. ‘The volcano destroying itself in anger, the woman beyond his grasp.’

‘A happy release for both, maybe,’ Kumiko said. ‘But also perhaps a sad one, too, yes. And after all, not even an ending. All stories begin before they start and never, ever finish.’

‘What happens to them next?’

In answer, she only took him by the arm and led him out of the sitting room, up the stairs, and into what was now their bed. Her intention didn’t seem exclusively carnal, but she did press herself to him after they undressed, holding him to her, stroking his hair. He looked up into her eyes, lit by moonlight.

They reflected back to him, golden.

‘Do I know who you are?’ he asked.

To which she only said, ‘Kiss me.’

And so he did.

Down in the sitting room, the candles still burned in their wax cylinders, flickering and dancing. One candle, though, had a flaw. Its flame licked and burned unevenly, and soon the wall of the candle melted away, molten wax spilling over the side, pooling across George’s old coffee table. Even this was only a small danger, but the collapse unbalanced the candle just enough for it to tip, lowering its flame closer to the tabletop.

Later, after a physical intimacy so close and gentle and perfect it made George dare to think for a fleeting moment that happiness might be possible after all, he sat up in bed. Kumiko sleepily asked where he was going. ‘To blow out those candles,’ he replied.

But it was already too late.

The fire began like this (2).

After Kumiko placed the last tile and George blew out the candles she’d lit, they’d retired to bed. They made love slowly, almost sadly, but with a tenderness so light George felt as if they’d finally made it through some unnameably strange and mysterious ordeal, safely reaching the other side. He looked up into her eyes, lit by moonlight.

They reflected back to him, golden.

‘Do I know who you are?’ he asked.

To which she only said, ‘Kiss me.’

And so he did.

Later, they slept, and still sleeping, George rose.

He padded down the stairs with the stumbling certainty of the sleepwalker. In his darkened sitting room, he moved towards the first tile of the story (
‘She is born in a breath of cloud
. . .’) and took it down from the bookshelf. He tossed it carelessly on the coffee table. He did the same with the second tile, dropping it on the first. He repeated this action, unseeing, through every tile, one after the other, until he reached the last, set out this very evening. He placed it on top of the others, the pile now in great disarray, the feathers and his paper cuttings tearing and ripping under the slipshod weight.

Still in the dark, he reached for the box of matches with which they had lit the candles. He struck one, and though his pupils recoiled at the sudden blaze of light, he didn’t wince or blink or look away.

He held the flame to the edge of one of the tiles near the bottom of the pile. It was at first reluctant to catch, the tiles being made of a particularly heavy matte bonding, but catch it eventually did, a dark blue flame oozing over it, grabbing inexorable hold of the first batch of page cuttings, then brightening, expanding, a hungry tongue sprouting two more, which each sprouted two more in turn.

George dropped the match and turned back towards the stairs, slowly climbing them as the fire grew and spread and flexed its muscles.

He would remember none of this and not believe it if he had, having zero history of somnambulism. Nevertheless, he climbed back under the covers, placed his head on the pillow, Kumiko snuggling in behind him, and he closed his eyes again, as if they had never been properly open.

The fire began like this (3).

In the darkened sitting room, while George and Kumiko slept upstairs, the tiles looked at one another across the bookshelves. They told a story of a lady and a volcano who were both more and less than what they were called. Their story was told in feathers and paper, but it was the feathers alone that now seemed to waft and shift as if in a breeze–

A feather detached itself from one of the tiles, flitting in the air, jumping and dashing in a fretful spiral–

Where it was joined by a second, a bit of feather from a different tile, swirling around the first–

And then a third and a fourth, then a flurry, then a
wave
of feathers, pouring from the shelves, twisting in spirals and helixes, coalescing then bursting apart, grabbing at each other like fists at the end of living ropes. They started to concentrate themselves in the centre of the room, and there seemed to be a kind of charge running through them, with flashes here and there, as if small electrical storms raged inside the cloud of feathers–

A spasm surged through the cloud, every bit of feather rushing towards a middle point–

Where, for the briefest of seconds, the feathers came together to make a great white bird, its wings outstretched, its neck unfurling high into the air, its head curled back in what might be ecstasy, might be terror, might be fury or sorrow–

And then it blasted apart, uncountable feathers and sparks flung across the room as it exploded–

The sparks caught cloth and books and wood and curtains as they landed in a hundred different spots, igniting them–

The fire began like this (4).

The volcano opened its green eyes and looked out across the vastness of the sitting room, a universe unto itself.

The horizon of this universe told a story.

The volcano stepped from the final tile to read it, his eyes showing first astonishment, then grief, as he read the tale along the skyline. He wept tears of fire to see the lady again, to see how things had gone.

But as he read, he also began to grow angry.

‘This is not how it happened,’ he said. ‘There is more than what is told here.’

The volcano’s anger began to make him grow, as anger inevitably did to a volcano. The valleys and glaciers along his flanks trembled and broke apart, re-forming as he grew larger and larger, taller and taller, his anger firing the furnace that burned within him.

‘You have misrepresented me!’ he shouted. ‘You have denied the truth!’

He grew so large he filled the world of the sitting room, nations fleeing from him, cities crumbling under his earthquakes, forests and landscapes disappearing through crevasses big enough to swallow an ocean.

‘This will not stand!’ he shouted, raising clenched and furious fists. ‘This will not stand!’

He erupted, sending ash and fire in an unstoppable cataclysm that burned the universe entire.

The fire began like this (5).

The house was silent, asleep. Nothing stirred, even in George and Kumiko’s bedroom, where they slept against one another, the blankets twisted around them like foothills after an earthquake.

Down below, in a still moment, the front door of George’s house slowly opened, followed by silent footsteps inside. The door closed, just as quietly.

Rachel made her way into the sitting room, holding the key that George had forgotten he’d once given her in the palm of her hand. She stood, squinting in the darkness, trying to read the tiles.

She hadn’t been feeling particularly well lately. Whole swathes of time seemed to vanish from her day without her being able to account for them, and when she
was
fully aware of what was going on, the rushes of feeling that buffeted her were both exhausting and perplexing. She had always known who she was, it had been her greatest weapon, and then, one day, after ending it with George, she had woken up and
not
known. That had proved increasingly difficult to handle, increasingly difficult to live with, and there seemed no relief from it, as if she’d suddenly been given a burden to carry, one that slowed her down while the rest of life rushed away from her, leaving her behind.

Perhaps, she wondered, as she brushed her fingers against the barely visible tiles, she was going crazy.

What on earth, for example, had possessed her to go and see Kumiko? She couldn’t even remember how she knew where Kumiko lived, though it can only have been something Kumiko must have mentioned at that party. But when she arrived, she and Kumiko hadn’t even argued. Rachel had calmly – really quite astoundingly calmly – told Kumiko that she’d slept with George, that he’d called her over and insisted on it, and that she had done so immediately and willingly without a thought to Kumiko’s feelings.

Kumiko had taken it all without visible anger, except perhaps for a slight impatience, as if she’d been expecting the news all along and it was tardy in arriving.

And then Kumiko had opened her mouth to speak, and the next thing Rachel remembered, she was downstairs, looking for her keys in her handbag. Which was
really
annoying, because she would have loved to have heard what Kumiko had to say about it, even if she couldn’t remember for the life of her why she’d gone over to Kumiko’s in the first place.

Then she had glanced up and seen George sitting in his car.

And oh, the shame that followed. The unbearable
shame
. It had been so painful, she’d had to sit in her car for nearly twenty minutes before the crying ebbed enough to let her drive.

Which also made no sense. She’d never much bothered with shame before. And why so
much
, especially if George was the one who–

No. No, it was crazy.

It was, in fact, further proof that she was
going
crazy.

As evidence, here she was in George’s sitting room, an action that made perfect sense and also none whatsoever, and frankly she’d had just about enough of that feeling lately. She’d also had enough of the endless
dreams
she’d been having –
ridiculous
dreams, of being made love to by whole countries, of flying through impossible landscapes, of being shot by
arrows
, for Christ’s sake – and what it really boiled down to, she supposed, was that she was exhausted by it all. She had nothing more to give, and even she knew she’d had very little to give in the first place.

So here she was, in George’s house, and an anger was rising in her. Anger at all that had happened. Anger at all that had stopped feeling familiar and liveable. Anger, too, because she couldn’t even properly account for how she’d arrived here tonight. Or why.

Her eyes flashed green. On an impulse, she picked up the matches she’d seen lying on a side table.

She lit one.

The fire began like that. Or that. Or that. Or that. Or that.

And it burned.

A
manda glanced in her rearview mirror. JP was still asleep in his car seat, having not even really woken as she picked him up out of bed, jammies, blanket and all.