The Crane Wife (26 page)

It was only JP that made any of this seem real. The tangibility of him was undreamable, his smell of milk and sweat and biscuits, that heartbreaking cowlick up the back of his head, and – she frowned in a little flash of shame – that stain of cranberry juice on his upper lip that she really should have washed off before bed.

She set her eyes back on the road and took a corner as swiftly as she dared. No, if he was here, then she was here. But nothing
else
about this made any sense at all. Rachel (
Rachel!
) calling at this hour of the morning, screaming her head off in terror and alarm and – this was the part so difficult to process, the part that would take so very much unpacking at some unspecified date in the future – doing it
at George’s house
.

It didn’t compute. Not in any way. Why would Rachel be parked outside George’s house?

Why would Rachel be the one who saw the fire?

Even Rachel hadn’t seemed to know. She’d said it outright. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here,’ she’d shouted, ‘but you have to come!’

There’d been something in her urgency that had struck Amanda as utterly true, beyond all manipulation, beyond whatever crazy bullshit Rachel was entirely capable of pulling. Rachel’s terror had reached right through the phone and sunk into Amanda’s guts like a frozen stone.

So here she was, driving as fast as she could get away with.

‘Come on,’ she said, cutting across a surprisingly late night taxi. The driver gave her two fingers, which she absentmindedly returned.

Her father didn’t live all that far from her, three miles at most – though in this city that usually meant thirty minutes anyway – but she sailed through the nearly nonexistent traffic, cresting the small hill that took her down to her father’s house.

Where she saw the pillar of smoke.

‘Oh, shit,’ she whispered.

It stretched impossibly high in the air, straight up, too, on a clear, windless, freezing night, like an arm reaching up to heaven.

‘No,’ she whispered as she took the last few turnings. ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no.’

She pulled around the last corner, expecting to see–

Not this.

There was nothing in the street. No fire engines, no neighbours out in nightgowns and slippers watching the blaze.

No sign of her father or Kumiko.

Just Rachel, frantic, beside her own car, as George’s house blazed in front of her.

Amanda screeched to a stop in the middle of the road.

‘
Maman
?’ she heard from the back seat.

She turned to him. ‘You must listen to Mama, JP. Are you listening?’

His eyes were locked solidly out the window, hypnotised by the fire.

‘JP!’

He looked back at her, frightened.

‘Sweetie, you do not get out of that seat. Do you hear Mama? Whatever you do, you do not get out of that seat!’

‘
Un feu
,’ he said, eyes wide.

‘Yes, and Mama has to get out of the car for a minute, but I’ll be right back. I’ll be
right back
, do you hear me?’

He nodded and gripped his blanket around him. Hating herself for leaving him there, hating
Rachel
with irrational zeal – and perhaps a little bit rational, too – for being the person who brought her to this place, Amanda leapt out of the car.

‘
WHERE’S THE FUCKING FIRE BRIGADE
?’ she screamed.

‘I called them,’ Rachel said, looking stunned. ‘They’re on their way.’

‘I don’t hear any sirens! Why am I here first?’

‘I’m sorry, I panicked, I called you and then it took me a minute to–’

But Amanda had stopped listening. Flames were leaping out of the sitting-room window, and it looked as if they might even have reached the stairs. There was so much smoke, though. So unbelievably much.

‘GEORGE!’ she screamed at the top of her lungs. ‘KUMIKO!’

‘They’re still in there,’ Rachel said behind her.

Amanda turned on her. ‘How do you know? And what the fuck are you doing here?’

‘I don’t know!’ Rachel shouted back. ‘I don’t even remember how I got here. I was just here, and there was a fire and . . .’ She trailed off, her face so scared, that Amanda turned back to the house without pushing her further.

At last she heard faint sirens, but in the distance, too far, arriving too late.

Something was wrong here. Something
more
wrong than just the fire, which grew even as she watched it. Lights were starting to come on in nearby houses, but she had a weird feeling they’d only been woken by her shouting and
then
noticed the fire.

She looked back at Rachel, whose expression was almost that of a madwoman. She went to speak to her, to demand what she knew, but then a loud exploding sound came from the house. They couldn’t see exactly where it came from, but it boomed across the night nevertheless.

The house blazed even more, almost disappearing behind smoke and fire. If Rachel was right – and Amanda knew somehow she
had
to be – then her father was in there.

George. And Kumiko.

And the fire brigade, their sirens still far in the distance, were going to be too late to save them.

She grabbed the front of Rachel’s blouse with a fist so tight Rachel cried out. ‘
You listen to me
,’ Amanda hissed, their noses actually touching. ‘JP is in my car and you are going to watch him
right now
, and I swear on my life, Rachel, that if anything,
anything
happens to him, I will put a knife through your heart.’

‘I believe you,’ Rachel said.

Amanda let her go, ran to her car and stuck her head in. ‘Everything’s going to be all right, sweetie. This lady’s going to watch you for a minute. I’m going to get
grand-père
.’

‘Mama–’

‘Everything’s going to be all right,’ she said again.

She leant over the seat, squeezed him ferociously for a brief second, then turned and ran into her father’s burning house.

B
y the time they realised how very bad it was, first smelling the smoke, then seeing it push under the door with alarming force, they were already trapped.

They’d tried to run for it anyway – George still naked, Kumiko in the barest of nightslips – but they only managed two or three stairs before the smoke beat them back.

‘I cannot,’ Kumiko had said behind him, coughing out the words with an alarming wetness.

It wasn’t just that the smoke was unbreathable, it felt like a living thing, a cloud of snakes trying to reach down your throat to not just choke you, but poison you, burn you with darkness. George understood in the worst possible instant what news stories meant when they said people died of smoke inhalation. One or two breaths of this and your lungs no longer worked, one or two more and you lost consciousness forever.

Through flashes of it, he could see flames already coating the bottom of the stairs, so there might not have been a route for them even if they could have made it down.

They retreated to the bedroom, shutting the door behind them for all the good that it did. George felt dangerously light-headed, from the smoke and from how quickly cataclysm had overtaken them.

‘We will have to go out the window,’ Kumiko said, almost calm, but he could see the beads of sweat pouring down her forehead. The temperature in the bedroom had risen with alarming speed.

‘Yes,’ George agreed, following her to it. She opened it and looked out. They were directly over the kitchen and could see smoke pouring out from the ground-floor windows below.

‘It is far,’ she said, ‘and onto concrete.’

‘I’ll go first,’ George said. ‘I’ll try and break your fall.’

‘Chivalrous,’ she said, ‘but there is no time.’

She put a foot on the windowsill to lift herself up.

An explosion rocked the house, it sounded like from somewhere in the kitchen. Kumiko lost her grip and fell back into George’s arms. They tumbled to the floor.

‘Gas main,’ he said.

‘George!’ Kumiko called out in alarm, looking behind him. The bedroom floor was starting to
sag
, as if it was melting into the room below, something that turned out to be almost unfeasibly frightening, because George only realised how much he counted on floors to stay flat when they suddenly stopped doing so.

‘We must move!’ Kumiko said over the roar. ‘Now!’

But before they could even rise there was a sound like an angry yawn and the far end of the bedroom completely gave way. One of the bookcases George kept there (mostly non-fiction) vanished immediately into the fire below. The bed started to slide, too, down the still-tilting floor.

Kumiko grabbed the windowsill, now the only thing to hold on to as the floor continued to slide away from them. The bed juddered to a halt for a moment, caught on something, and flames streaked up the mattress. George caught a quick, hellish glimpse of the sitting room below, consumed by fire, before smoke started pouring into the bedroom like a tidal wave.

‘Try to pull yourself up!’ he shouted. He was lying below her as the floor continued its tilt. It could only be a matter of seconds before everything went. He pushed her up towards the window, and she made it easily, one foot on the sill, her arms on the window’s sides, ready to jump. She turned back to him, fear across her face.

‘I’m right behind you!’ he coughed, trying to rise.

But with another judder the bed fell through, taking most of the floor with it. George fell, too, catching his upper arms on the sudden ledge remaining below the window. His legs swung down into the burning lower level of his house, and he screamed in pain as flames seized his bare feet.

‘
George
!’ Kumiko yelled.

‘
Go
!’ he shouted back to her. ‘Jump!
Please
!’

His mouth filled with smoke at every syllable, even the taste of it knocking his senses off-kilter. He tried to curl his legs away from the burning below him, could feel the soles of his feet blistering, the smoke, the pain, the fear, all of it filling his eyes with tears.

He looked back up to Kumiko.

Who wasn’t there.

Thank God
, he thought, grateful she’d jumped, grateful she’d at least got away.
Thank God
.

He felt himself succumbing to the smoke – so fast, so
fast
– his thoughts slurring and slowing, the world shimmering away.

Distantly aware of being caught.

I
n his dream, he flies.

The smoke curls around him under the swoop of two great wings. He thinks at first that the wings are his own, but they are not. He is being carried, held, he is not sure how, but the grip is firm around him.

Firm but tender.

The wings swoop again, slow but with a strength so sure he has no fear, even though a fire big enough to consume the world is burning below him. They pass through a wall of smoke, and the air is suddenly cooler, fresher, easier to breathe.

He is flying through open air now, arcing up and out like the path of an arrow.

He weighs nothing. His burdens fall away like the world below him. He glances up but he cannot see exactly what it is that carries him.

But even in his dream, he knows.

A long neck, graced with a crown of scarlet and a pair of golden eyes, turns back to look at him, just once, the eyes filled with tears of their own.

Tears of sadness, he thinks. Tears of depthless sorrow.

And he grows suddenly frightened.

The arc continues its downward momentum. The ground approaches again. He touches the grass first with his feet, its coolness a sudden balm on skin that he now remembers is burnt and roiling with pain.

As he is laid gently down, he gives out a long slow moan.

He calls, he cries.

He keens.

Until long white feathers wipe away his tears, brush across his forehead and temples, and enfold him in soft, soft whiteness.

He longs for his dream to end.

He longs for it never to end.

It ends.

‘G
eorge?’

He blinked open his eyes, starting to shiver almost immediately. He was naked against the frost-covered grass of his back garden.

‘
George
,’ the voice said again.

He looked up. Kumiko. He was lying in her arms, as she knelt behind him in the grass. Though still only in her nightslip, she seemed oblivious to the cold.

‘How did we . . . ?’ he asked, immediately coughing and having to spit out an alarming black tar.

When he looked back at her again, her eyes were golden.

And brimming with tears.

George felt a catch in his throat that wasn’t smoke. ‘I know you,’ he said, and it wasn’t a question.

She nodded slowly. ‘You do.’

He touched her cheek, smudged as it was with soot. ‘Why are you sad then?’ He ran his thumb down to her chin. ‘Why are you always so sad?’

There was a crashing sound, and they both looked back to the house. The flames fully engulfed the roof now, eating his home with a terrifying ferocity.

‘The tiles,’ he coughed out, quietly. ‘We’ll have to write new ones.’

But Kumiko said nothing, and he moved his hand to brush away the tears that flowed down her cheeks–

(–like the feathers that had brushed his own–)

–and said, ‘Kumiko?’

‘You must forgive me, George,’ she said, sadly.

‘For what?
I’m
the one who needs forgiveness.
I’m
the one who–’

‘
Everyone
needs forgiveness, my love. And for more years than I can count, I have had no one to offer it to me.’ Her golden eyes blazed, though maybe it was just a reflection of the flames from the house. ‘Until I found
you
, George,’ she continued. ‘You are the one who can. You are the one who must.’

‘I don’t understand,’ George said, still in her arms, still lying across her lap.

‘Please, George. Please. And then I shall go.’

He sat up, alarmed. ‘Go? No, you can’t go. I’ve just
found
you.’