‘. . .’
‘Oh, come on, George? No need to be shy? I saw you on the internet?’
‘It’s over. I thought we–’
‘No, it isn’t over? I’ve seen the ones you’ve got for sale? Right here in front of me on my computer screen? It’s not over at all, is it, George?’
‘I mean this is over. And you know it is. You wanted it to be. And for once, I agreed–’
‘But that was before you became famous?’
‘Hardly famous, look, I–’
‘And these prices, George? That’s being a bit of a tall poppy, isn’t it?’
‘Those aren’t our websites. Those aren’t our prices. We don’t even know how that all started. It’s just sort of exploded–’
‘“We don’t even know”? You and this Kumiko person? That’s her name, isn’t it? Kumiko?’
‘I’m going to hang up now, Rachel, and I don’t want you–’
‘A couple who works together? Isn’t that nice?’
‘You’ve really got to stop this upward inflection. It makes you sound like an imbecile.’
‘. . .’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean–’
‘Screw you, George. I’m just trying to be nice. I’m just trying to be friendly. I mean, you broke my heart–’
‘That’s not even a little bit true. Clandestine meetings. Sworn to secrecy. You never even seemed like you were having a good time.’
‘That’s really not fair? The secrecy was for both of us? I mean, I’ll happily tell Amanda all about us now, if that’s what you want–’
‘Is that meant to be some kind of threat?’
‘. . .’
‘I’m going to hang up now. I really am.’
‘Wait. Wait? I’m sorry? I know how harsh I can be. I do. But . . .’
‘But what?’
‘I can’t bear you being cruel, George. That’s the last thing you ever are.’
‘I’m sorry, I–’
‘Because that’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about. That you’re not cruel? Because cruelty is so common these days, you wouldn’t believe it. Every man I go out with, it’s like I’m in a competition with him. Who’s the meanest? Who’s the rudest? Like we’re competing from the first hello to prove how tough we are. And then the actual dates are like a, like a, like a, what are those things?’
‘A joust?’
‘Yes! Like a joust! And the only thing you’re allowed to do is show the other person how tough you are and how hard you are and how you’re laughing at their weaknesses. That’s what it is. You’re laughing at them. You’re laughing at how stupid they are? And you’re trying your goddamn hardest to make sure they’re never going to laugh at how stupid you are. And don’t even get me started on the sex?’
‘I would really hope not to–’
‘Because the sex is all about pretending that, no matter how great it is? No matter how much work and, like, skill they put into it? That it’s only okay? That you’ve had better? That it wasn’t, like, bad, but they shouldn’t feel too proud of themselves?’
‘Rachel, I don’t know what you want from–’
‘It’s awful, George. I hate it. And I’ve been with this guy, Wally?’
‘Wally?’
‘And every minute is like that! Every minute! Like we’re on Gladiators? It’s exhausting. I’m so tired of it. I’m so, so tired of it? And you weren’t like that.’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘George?’
‘I’m with Kumiko now.’
‘I know. I know? I mean, I do know? Your daughter won’t shut up about it? So I know? But I was just thinking. I was thinking how much I missed you.’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘I don’t know what to say to–’
‘You don’t have to say anything? I just–’
‘I’m with Kumiko–’
‘Miss someone who’s–’
‘And I really have–’
‘Someone who’s actually kind–’
‘Fallen in love with her.’
‘You were so nice to me, George. Hardly anyone is.’
‘Well, you weren’t exactly nice yourself.’
‘I know I wasn’t that nice to you–’
‘No, nice to yourself. You didn’t treat yourself well.’
‘You were the first person to ever suggest that could even be a possibility, George. And I’ve been dating this Wally, who’s really, really cute and all but–’
‘Rachel, I have to–’
‘But I just keep thinking, He’s not as nice as George.’
‘It was a fling, Rachel, and I think we both know what a mistake it was. I’m too old for you. I’m too boring for you. You said so yourself. I’m not even that good-looking–’
‘So what if all that’s true? Sometimes you need more than that.’
‘And this has nothing to do with me being with someone else? Nothing to do with me being in the news a little bit?’
‘You’re being mean again, George. And it doesn’t suit you?’
‘I’m genuinely going to go. I’m going to wish you well–’
‘See? Niceness.’
‘But I’m really going to go now.’
‘I’d like to see you.’
‘Rachel–’
‘Just for old time’s sake?’
‘No, I don’t think–’
‘I could show you a proper good time.’
‘. . .’
‘You know I can, George.’
‘I’m so sorry, Rachel.’
‘You will be if you don’t let me–’
‘I’m so sorry you’re this lonely.’
‘George–’
‘I wish happiness for you. I listen to you and I hear hurting and I hear cries of how much you want to–’
‘Wait just a second–’
‘–connect with someone, really connect.’
‘I do, though? I–’
‘And I’m sorry it can’t be me. But it can’t. It really can’t.’
‘George–’
‘And I wish you well–’
‘George–’
‘But I have to go now–’
‘I’m pregnant.’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘Except, of course, you’re not.’
‘George–’
‘Goodbye, Rachel, and I’m sorry.’
‘George, I just–’
8 of 32
The lady flies for a lifetime and more, landing when the growing earth calls to her, flying when it does not. Both are enjoyable, and enjoyment is, despite her tears, something she seems to have an aptitude for. She grants absolution wherever she lands, piercing hearts with her forgiveness, for of what do we ever ask forgiveness if not our offences against joy?
The world enters its adolescence, the land stitching itself together into a recognisable whole, though not without its pains and eruptions. She does not avoid the volcanoes when they spew, recognising in them the same anger as the water, of effort directed outward, into nothing.
‘Not long,’ she tells the volcanoes. ‘Not long before your reach will dig its long muscles into the earth, binding it tightly as a world. One arm clasping another clasping another, holding the burden of life on your collective shoulders. Not long.’
And the volcanoes believe her, calming their angry flows, directing them more usefully, dragging the world together.
9 of 32
All volcanoes, save one.
‘I do not believe you, my lady,’ says the volcano, his green eyes flashing in a malevolent merriment she finds puzzling. ‘The point of a volcano is anger,’ he says. ‘A calm volcano is merely a mountain, is it not? To calm a volcano is to kill it.’
Lava and heat and destruction flow from him in waves, the denizens of this young earth fleeing before his burning
laughter. She flies away in distaste, before circling around again to confirm her distaste. Then circling round again.
‘The purpose of a volcano is to die,’ she says. ‘Is this not what you strive for?’
‘The purpose of a volcano is to die, my lady,’ says the volcano, ‘but as angrily as possible.’
‘You do not seem angry,’ she says. ‘You smile. You jest. You speak from desire, from flirtation. I have seen it the world over.’
‘I speak from joy, my lady. Angry joy.’
‘Is such a thing possible?’
‘It is that which creates us all. It is that which fires the magma of the world. It is that which drives the volcano to sing.’
‘Is this what you call your destruction? A song?’
‘I do, my lady. And a song can never lie.’
‘Unlike you,’ she says and flies away.
The volcano casts a sail of lava after her retreating form. It does not reach her. It is not meant to. ‘You will return, my lady,’ he says. ‘You will return.’
10 of 32
She returns. She is older, wiser. The world is older, too, though surprisingly not that much wiser.
‘You still erupt,’ she says, flying a wide circle around the volcano.
‘And you still forgive,’ says the volcano, atop his chariot of horses, ‘where forgiveness is not warranted.’
‘You have become an agent of war,’ she says, keeping beyond his reach, for she has learned more about volcanoes in the passing time, learned as we all must to stay out of range of their exertions.
‘I am a general now,’ says the volcano. An army spreads out before him, swarming over the world, consuming forests and cities and deserts and plains.
‘You have not died like all the others and become a mountain.’
‘I have not, my lady. There was no future in it.’
He raises his whip, a long chain of glowing white heat, and lashes his great and terrible horses. They whinny in agony and trample farms and bridges and civilisations under their hooves, his innumerable, ravenous armies flowing like burning rivers in their wake.
She flies with him for a time, watching in silence as he grinds this corner of the world to ruin. She says nothing to him. He says nothing in return, save for the occasional glance in her direction. Those green eyes, tracing her path.
‘I will forgive you,’ she says, ‘should you ask.’
‘I will not ask, my lady,’ says the volcano.
‘And why not?’
‘I do not require anyone’s forgiveness, and neither do I recognise your authority to offer it.’
‘The authority to offer it is given by he who asks.’
He smiles at her, his eyes bright. ‘This does not contradict me, my lady.’
11 of 32
Guided by a feeling she declines to recognise, she swoops down low over the volcano’s advancing army. It has encountered another and, up close, it is impossible to tell which side is which. The battle is nothing more than a twisting, spattering pan of butchery, turned in on itself to boil and burn.
She sweeps back up and around, circling the volcano for a last time.
‘Before you leave, my lady,’ says the volcano. ‘I wonder if you will tell me your name.’ He smiles again, and reflected in his eyes the world is dying in fire and terror. ‘So that I may call it to you when you next see me.’
‘I will not see you again.’
‘As you wish, my lady,’ the volcano says, bowing his head at her. ‘Yet I will tell you mine.’ He opens his mouth and a roar of pain and mischief is hurled from it. The leaves on nearby trees curl up just to hear it, birds fall from the skies, black locusts spiral from cracks in the ground.
‘But you, my lady,’ says the volcano, ‘may call me–’
‘I shall not call you anything,’ she says, ready to fly away, but not leaving, not just yet. She says, for the second time, ‘I will not see you again.’
The volcano says, also for a second time, ‘As you wish, my lady.’
He raises his whip, but she is gone before it lands.
12 of 32
‘Father?’ she says, flying through the clouds. She knows he will not answer. He never has, not at any point as the world has grown older. She neither knows nor in fact believes that he might be out there listening to her, for a cloud shifts and gathers and rains itself out many times over the course of a single day let alone a world’s lifetimes, and even the daughter of a cloud cannot tell one from another.
They might be her father. They might just be clouds. They are not her father. They are clouds.
Yet still, ‘Father?’ she says.
She says nothing further, unsure of what her question might be. Her head is filled with the volcano, with arguments they have never had, defeats of him she has never achieved, the final sweet forgiveness she can offer as she grants him his last wish of a release he has not asked for.
She flies through the clouds, letting the drops of moisture cool her brow, wet her clothes in sweet relief, soothe the aching muscles of her flying.
All the while, her father watches her, whispering her name only when she has finally left the clouds and is too far away to hear it.
George began to dream strange things.
Kumiko still wouldn’t let him see her work, would still barely let him past the front door of the small flat where she lived – which didn’t matter so much as she was almost always at George’s now anyway – but he began to dream of locked doors and knowing she was beyond them, knowing also that the locks were only there at her request and his observance of that request. He could look any time he chose. But in his dreams, he stayed behind the door. In agony.
Or he dreamed of finding her in a secret white room with no locks, gathering feathers to herself in the shape of a woman, draping and trimming long white wings back into arms and fingers, disguising a beak behind her nose, putting pale brown contact lenses over her golden, golden eyes. When she saw him watching her, she wept for him, for all they were about to lose.
Or he dreamed of fire, rising up through the earth, spilling out in seams of lava, chasing him, with her running behind, but in the dream he could never be sure whether she was running from the fire, too, or if she was leading it to him, so that it could swarm down and consume him.
When he woke, he forgot every fact of the dreams, but a residue of unease remained.
And began to accumulate.
The first purchase he made with the tile money was a massive new printer for the shop.
‘Not a raise for me?’ Mehmet asked, arms huffily folded.
‘And a raise for you,’ George said, watching the delivery men move the printer into place.
‘How much?’
‘Pound an hour.’
‘That’s it?’
George turned to him. ‘Pound-fifty?’
Mehmet looked as if he was about to protest, but then his face broke into a disbelieving smile. ‘How have you made it this far in life, George? How do you not get eaten alive by the world out there?’
‘I do okay,’ George said, his eyes back on the printer.
It didn’t gleam; its parts were plastic and its rollers looked like what they were, cogs in an enormous piece of industrial machinery. But oh, it did gleam. In his heart’s eye, it gleamed. It was faster than George’s old printer, but that was just a technical point. Its colours were more vibrant. The sheens and complex texture combinations it could do were almost laughably luxuriant. Its programming could re-adjust itself in an instant, faster than an instant, could anticipate your coming instant and do what you wanted before you even asked.
It was everything George had ever wanted for his shop.
And it had paid for itself from the art that hung above it. Art that Kumiko mostly made but for which she insisted his part was vital, and for which she continued to give him half.
Which was turning out to be half of quite a lot. After they’d sold the second tile – of the closed hand beside the profile of the fac
e – to the woman brought in by the first buyer, they’d sold a third and a fourth within the week to friends of those first two buyers. Despite being obviously moneyed and occasionally intimidatingly cool, neither of the new buyers had seemed to want the tiles out of any sense of fashion – how could they, the tiles were far too new – but instead behaved with the same sort of desperate longing the first buyers had shown. One, a creative accounts exec who wore an expensive black tie over an expensive black shirt under an expensive black blazer, had said almost nothing beyond a whispered ‘Yes’ as he gazed on the newest tile, which showed Kumiko’s feathered horses plummeting down a hill towards a river of George’s words, before handing over a large wad of bills to the scandalised Mehmet.
Then someone, presumably one of the buyers, had tipped off a small but influential online arts journal, which had featured a brief interview with George – but not Kumiko, who had asked him to please be whatever sort of public face the tiles might need – as a ‘potential rising star’, and before the end of that week they’d not only had a number of enquiries to buy the at-that-point still-unfinished fifth tile, but also offers of initial meetings and even representation from different art dealers.
George had declined, mainly because Kumiko seemed reluctant to involve others, but by then it hardly mattered. Word was spreading, without George seemingly having to do anything to make it spread.
‘You’ve got buzz,’ Mehmet said, in an annoyed way, after they’d shipped off the fifth tile to a buyer in Scotland who hadn’t even seen it in person. ‘God knows why.’
‘If God does know,’ George said, ‘he’s not telling me.’
Kumiko, meanwhile, kept out of the way, letting George handle all the selling while she kept on working industriously, taking whatever cuttings George offered her and somehow turning them into breathtaking compositions that seemed to have always existed, merely waiting to coalesce and reveal their ancient, fully formed shape rather than just being newly made. She worked on further tiles to sell but also added George’s cuttings to her private stack of thirty-two that even he hadn’t seen all of. These were kept secret and off-sale, but for the others there was already a growing queue of people who snapped up the sixth and seventh tiles within hours of them being finished, paying increasingly preposterous prices.