The Crane Wife (7 page)

‘Whatever you say,’ Rachel said, taking a sip of her coffee.

‘Maybe you’re thinking of your
step
father,’ Mei said, obviously worried they were being too unkind.

‘My stepfather is also American,’ Amanda frowned. ‘My mother clearly has a type.’ This wasn’t true either. Hank was American, yes, but he was big, strapping and black. He couldn’t have been more different from George if George had been a woman. ‘My mother is British, but my father is definitely American.’

Rachel just raised her eyebrows and carried on looking at Mr Three O’Clock.

‘Ask his new girlfriend, if you don’t believe me,’ Amanda said, but quietly, because she’d given up.

‘New girlfriend?’ Rachel asked, surprisingly sharply.

‘He’s dating?’ Mei said, mouth open. ‘At his age?’

‘He’s forty-eight,’ Amanda said. ‘Hardly even out of range for either of you.’

‘Eew?’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t be gross?’ She flicked another olive out of her pasta. ‘So what’s she like then? Your new stepmother-to-be?’

Amanda wondered that herself. George had been even more unfocused this week than usual. He’d first called her with a story she couldn’t quite follow about a bird landing in his back garden and then flying away, a story she’d eventually convinced him must have been a dream, before suddenly announcing this morning that he’d been seeing a new woman who’d wandered into his shop. He’d sounded so open and vulnerable that the worry about what would inevitably happen – this was George, after all – made her a little bit sick.

‘Hardly a new stepmum,’ Amanda said. ‘It’s only been a few dates, and I haven’t even met her. All I know is she’s called Kumiko and–’

‘Kumiko?’ Rachel said. ‘What kind of name is that?’

‘Japanese,’ Mei said, eyes laser-like. ‘Very common name.’

‘I’m not sure about that, but from what he says, she seems really nice.’

‘If she puts up with your allegedly American father, she must be?’ Rachel said, draining the last of her wine.

‘What’s
that
supposed to mean?’ Amanda asked, but only got to ‘What’s
that–’
when the football thumped her in the back of the head so hard she practically went face down into the picnic basket.

‘Sorry,’ said Mr Three O’Clock, leaning in dynamically to retrieve the ball.

‘What the
fuck
?’ Amanda said, hand on the back of her head, but she stopped when she saw Rachel laughing in her most attractive way, boobs pushed up like an offering.

‘Don’t worry about it?’ Rachel said. ‘She deserved it for telling porky pies?’

Mr Three O’Clock laughed and brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. ‘Is this picnic ladies-only or can any riffraff join?’

‘Riffraff would be an improvement?’ Rachel said. ‘Have some calamari? It’s Marks & Spencer’s?’

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said, sitting down roughly next to Amanda, knocking her Diet Coke into the grass. He didn’t apologise. Rachel was already dishing up a napkin of calamari for him.

Amanda was still holding the back of her head. ‘Olive oil?’ she asked, her voice flat.

‘
Love
some,’ he said, not even looking her in the face.

She carefully grabbed the bottle of oil and handed it to him, looking as innocent as she could manage. ‘Make sure you shake it first.’

He did.

‘I don’t
believe
it,’ Mei said.

T
o take his blade and cut into the pages of a book felt like such a taboo, such a transgression against everything he held dear, George still half-expected them to bleed every time he did it.

He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He’d never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no emails from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. The edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark – fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper – moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut.

And how they looked on the walls! Lined up according to whatever whim. George’s whim was simple – by author, chronological within name – but over the years he’d also done it by size, subject matter, types of binding. All of them there on his shelves, too many, not enough, their stories raging within regardless of a reader: Dorothea Brooke forever making her confounding choice of husband, the rain of flowers forever marking Jose Arcadio Buendia’s funeral, Hal Incandenza forever playing Eschaton on the tennis courts of Enfield.

He had seen a story once about sand mandalas made by Tibetan Buddhist monks.
Unbelievably
gorgeous creations, sometimes just a metre across, sometimes big as a room. Different colours of sand, painstakingly blown in symmetrical patterns by monks using straw-like tubes, building layer upon layer, over the course of weeks, until it was finished. At which point, in keeping with Buddhist feelings about materialism, the mandala was destroyed, but George tended to ignore that part.

What was interesting to him was that the mandala was meant to be – unless he’d vastly misunderstood, which was also possible – a reflection of the internal state of the monk. The monk’s inner being, hopefully a peaceful one, laid out in beautiful, fragile form. The soul as a painting.

The books on George’s walls were his sand mandala. When they were all in their place, when he could run his hands over their spines, taking one off the shelf to read or re-read, they were the most serene reflection of his internal state. Or if perhaps not quite his internal state, then at least the internal state he would like to have had. Which was maybe all it was for the monks, too, come to think of it.

And so when he made his very first incision into the pages of a book, when he cut into an old paperback he’d found lying near the rubbish bins behind the shop, it felt like a blundering step into his mandala. A blasphemy. A desecration of the divine. Or, perhaps, a releasing of it.

Either way, it felt . . .
interesting.

He’d never considered himself an artist, certainly didn’t consider himself one
now
, but he’d always been a half-decent drawer of things. He could sketch a face with some skill – less so the hands, but who besides John Singer Sargent could ever do hands? – and he’d even, for a period in college, made nude charcoal rubbings of Clare, lounging over a pillow or failing to hold steady the feathered headdress she’d found God knew where. These were usually precursors to sex, of course, though none the worse for that, and perhaps an emblem of their eventual marriage, as she misunderstood the sort of person he essentially was.

‘That’s really not half-bad,’ Clare would say, looking over the sketchpad as she pulled his shirt out of his trousers. And what followed was always relaxed and amused and full of the right sort of joy.

He hadn’t stopped sketching and drawing when they married, even when he started the business and she began moving up the civil service solicitor ladder – she’d be a judge some day, they were both sure of it – but he’d never really
progressed
in the way Clare kept (nicely, encouragingly, full of hope) thinking he would. He remained a sketcher, and the nude charcoals grew fewer and farther between, the headdresses never found again, the languorous afternoons turning slowly, prematurely, into middle-aged naps.

Clare’s new husband, Hank, managed an enormous hotel for an American conglomerate. George had no idea if he drew.

After the divorce, George still sketched, sometimes nothing more than doodling while on the phone, sometimes taking sheets of the posher paper out of stock at the shop and trying his hand at a tree through sunlight or a rainy park bench or a heroically ugly pair of shoes Mehmet had once left behind after a failed audition for
The Lion King.
Nothing more than that, though. Nothing past lines of pencil, sometimes ink, never charcoal these days.

Until he found the book. He could easily have missed it. It had fallen behind the bins, and he only spotted it when he was gathering up the remains of a thrown-out lunch a lucky pigeon had dragged over half the alley. The book was a John Updike he’d never read (he’d never read any John Updike) called
In the Beauty of the Lilies.
He had taken it inside, in all its damaged state, and flipped through the ruined pages. Many of the edges were stuck together after having survived rainfall, but there was maybe half a workable book inside.

He was struck by an impulse to draw something on a page. The book’s life was over, it was effectively unreadable, but still, drawing on it seemed both tantalisingly vandalous but maybe also – and this felt increasingly right – a way to lay it to rest, give it a decent burial, like sewing pennies in its eyes. But as he lowered his pencil onto one of the emptier pages, he stopped.

A cutting blade would be better.

Not thinking too hard on the why of this, he dug into his desk and found the blade he used for trimming and splicing when a job needed actual physical assemblage – far rarer these days in the age of computer design, which he did
not
resist, as it was faster and left him free time to doodle and dawdle and dream. He turned back to the book on his worktable.

It was a Saturday morning. He needed to open the shop any moment now, but instead, he placed the blade on the page. He let out a little gasp as he cut, half-expecting the book to gasp as well. It didn’t, but he still paused after that first cut, looking at what he had done.

And then he did it again.

He cut and cut, small strips, larger ones, curved ones, angled ones, some tearing,
many
tearing, actually, until he got used to the paper’s particular give. More were just not quite the right shape, so he kept cutting, deep into the words of John Updike (he read snippets when he rested, the paragraphs with their astonishing numbers of semi-colons and not especially much happening).

At some point, he’d opened the shop and left the customers to Mehmet’s mercy while he focused with surprising force on the cuttings, the hours melting together in a way they rarely did. He was unsure what shapes he was really making, but by late afternoon, when Mehmet was getting itchy feet to go home and get ready for a Saturday evening out, he assembled the most smoothly cut shapes on a square of black paper, cajoling them together in the shape he’d begun seeing in his mind’s eye. He didn’t stack them or allow them to reach out into three-dimensions, just laid them flat on the page, not even always touching, urging them towards the shape that felt right, the scattered words and parts of words looking back at him, as if through small, curved windows onto the world built inside the book.

‘Lily,’ Mehmet said, brushing past him to get his coat.

‘What?’ George said, blinking in surprise, having almost forgotten where he was.

‘Looks like a lily,’ Mehmet said slowly, as if talking to a coma patient. ‘My mother’s favourite flower. Which tells you a whole lot about her, if you ask me. Fragrant and likely to stain.’

Mehmet shrugged on his coat and left, but George sat there for a long while, looking at the cuttings.

A lily. Clearly, a lily. From a book called
In the Beauty of the Lilies.

He gave an irritated laugh at his own obviousness, precisely the shallowness of vision that had always prevented him from becoming a proper artist, he felt, and he reached to brush it all into the rubbish bin.

But he stopped. It really was a rather
good
lily.

And so it began. He started haunting the £1 bins of second-hand bookstores, taking only the most damaged, unloved and unlovable books. He never exactly
tried
to make themed cuttings – hoping to avoid a repeat of the unsubtle lily – but sometimes a line would strike his fancy from the pages of a sixty-year-old, half-mouldy Agatha Christie, and he’d cut the shapes of a paragraphed hand dangling a multi-claused cigarette. Or a lettered horizon with three haiku-looking moons from the pages of a sci-fi novel he’d never heard of. Or a solitary figure carrying a small child, marked only by a single ‘1’ from the ‘Part 1’ of a history of the siege of Leningrad.

He only ever showed the final outcomes to Amanda – Mehmet saw all of them, since he worked at the shop, but that was a different thing than ‘showing’ – and she was courteous about them, which was disheartening, yes, but still he kept on. Experimenting with glues to find the best way to secure them against a background, testing them under glass or not, in frames or not, bordered, unbordered, small or large. He would sometimes try to make a silhouette from a single cutting, managing once a near-perfect rose (from, as an homage to his lily, a falling-apart copy of Iris Murdoch’s
An Accidental Rose
), but more often getting results akin to the very goose-like crane that Mehmet had accidentally seen.

He had no ambition about them, would never have even considered they were good enough for public view, but they passed the time. They let his hands work, often detached slightly from his mind, and always headed towards something, a mystery only revealed, sometimes even to him, at the moment of assembling the pieces on a flat background. He finished them in various ways and kept them in a corner of the storeroom that Mehmet, graciously, never rummaged through.

They were a bit of fun, sometimes a bit more than that, but usually nothing much, he’d be the first to say, although he would also insist that they were
his
nothing much.

Until the day Kumiko had arrived. And changed everything.

She was carrying a suitcase, a small one, such as you’d see – his mind went to the image so quickly it distracted him – on the arm of a forties film heroine at a train station: the case barely more than a small box, clearly empty so the actress wouldn’t be distressed, and hanging from a white-gloved hand that showed no dirt. Yet also clearly a suitcase and not a briefcase or handbag.