‘A tour guide,’ Mehmet practically spat.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘But what would you do without me, George?’
‘Probably much the same as now. Except with fewer interruptions.’
Mehmet swivelled back and forth on his stool, regarding George for a moment. ‘You really don’t see it, do you?’
‘Beg pardon?’
‘The way people are around you. The way they act.’
‘What on earth are you talking–’
‘They’re loyal to you, George. You inspire that. You’re best friends with your daughter. You’re best friends with your ex-wife–’
‘Hardly best–’
‘And Kumiko, who is beautiful and talented and mysterious enough to probably have any man in the whole wide world, chose you. Don’t you ever ask yourself why?’
George felt his skin flush, which might not have even been the fever. ‘It’s not because I’m loyal.’
‘It’s because you inspire loyalty. No one wants to let you down. Which, frankly, makes them all vaguely irritated with you most of the time – I know it does me – but they stick around because they want to be sure you’re all right.’ Mehmet shrugged. ‘You’re likeable. And if you like them, well, that means they’re really worth liking, doesn’t it?’
This was easily the nicest thing Mehmet had ever said to him, and in the midst of everything that was wrong at the moment George felt a sudden dizzying upsurge of love and kindness.
‘You’re fired, Mehmet.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not angry. I’m not even dissatisfied with your work. Well, not much. But if you stay here, you’re going to end up taking over this shop, and that would be the saddest thing that ever happened. You deserve better.’
‘George–’
‘I’ve got a ton of money in the bank from these goddamn tiles. I’ll give you a big redundancy. But you need to take the leap, Mehmet. You really do.’
Mehmet looked ready to argue, but then he stopped. ‘How big a redundancy?’
George laughed. It felt like a rare thing. ‘It’s been a pleasure, Mehmet.’
‘What, I have to leave now?’
‘No, of course not. You’ve got badges to finish.’
George went back to his cutting, his momentary lightness dissipating quickly. He glanced up at the first tile he and Kumiko had made together, still hanging on the wall above him. The dragon and the crane, danger and serenity, staring him down. That miracle of first creation. How had he done it then?
And how the hell was he supposed to do it now?
The day after the party, Kumiko had quietly set out every tile of the private story she was telling, one by one, along the bookshelves of his sitting room, putting them in front of his books so the story told itself around the room. The mandala of his soul holding the tiles of hers. He counted them. There were thirty-one.
‘There is one left to finish,’ she’d said.
‘The end of the story,’ he’d said. ‘Will it be a happy ending?
She smiled at him, and his heart soared. ‘Depends on what you mean by happy.’
George looked across the tiles. ‘It’s just that it all seems sort of precarious, doesn’t it? Like everyone’s happiness could be snatched away at any moment.’
She’d looked at him. ‘Do you think your happiness is going to be taken from you, George?’
‘Who doesn’t?’
She considered this as she regarded the penultimate tile. ‘One more to go,’ she said, ‘and then this story is finished.’
One more to go, he thought, looking down at his cutting again now, wondering what the little separate bits were supposed to add up to, wondering which direction he was meant to be heading with them. This assemblage would be for that final tile, but Kumiko had refused, as ever, to tell him what she wanted. Well, refused was probably a bit strong, she’d more eluded him when he asked her about it, but as the days went on he was growing more and more anxious. It felt increasingly like a test he was failing.
‘You’re an artist, George,’ she’d said. ‘This is what you must accept. And if you are an artist, then you will know the shape when it appears under your hand.’
‘But what are you cutting? So at least I’ll know–’
‘It is better if you don’t.’
And then George had found himself saying, ‘What else is new?’
They hadn’t exactly fought after that, but a chilly politeness had descended. It really seemed as if it should have been the moment they had a big blow-up, that they needed to have at least one fight that would either sunder them irreparably or – and George really did think this was more likely and not just because he hungered for it – bring them even closer together. But instead, she had (politely) insisted on going back to her own flat, saying it felt important for her to finish her work there before she took the final step of moving in completely.
He’d thought this meant just a day, but another, then another, then a few more had passed, until a full week was gone, with Kumiko still working, still demurring from making the final move to his house. It had also been a week of being battered by this fever, battered by failure after failure with his own work, and then one ugly, ugly evening, after he’d been unable to get hold of her all day long, there had dawned the single deadly thought that she didn’t really love him.
And that turned out to be too frightening to bear alone.
It only took a moment, a single, inexplicable moment, but he found himself taking out his phone and dialling a number which turned out to be Rachel’s.
‘George,’ she’d answered, as if she already knew what he wanted.
She’d come right over, despite the hour, and she’d seemed, not to put too fine a point on it, slightly unhinged.
But that hadn’t stopped him.
‘Is this for the big project?’ Mehmet said, appearing over his shoulder, making him jump.
‘Jesus, Mehmet, I nearly cut off my thumb,’ George said. Then he turned to look at him. ‘What big project?’
‘I’ve just heard rumours.’
‘What rumours? We’re just taking a little break, that’s all.’
‘It’s all over the right sort of digital places, George, where you wouldn’t even know how to look. Word doesn’t stop spreading just because you want it to.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Mehmet sighed, as if talking to a slow pupil. ‘The tiles were doing well already. Then you suddenly stopped making them–’
‘We didn’t stop, we’re just–’
‘Please. How do people react when they can’t have something? It turns them into babies. Gimme, gimme, gimme. If you wanted to lower demand, you should have put out a million tiles, not zero.’
George turned back to the cutting. ‘I have no control over any of that. There’s no big project. Not for them anyway.’
Mehmet shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. Just by talking about it, they might make it true. That’s kind of what art is, isn’t it?’
George sighed and rubbed his temples. He really did feel rough. Maybe it was time to think about giving up for the day. He’d been cutting from a mould-spattered copy of The Golden Bowl he’d found in a £1 bin outside a charity shop. It was a book, he suspected, which could possibly have been deeply metaphorical for his situation, if he or anyone he’d ever known had actually read it. As it was, all he knew of the plot was what he’d gleaned from the back cover. A gift of a bowl meant to represent love had a crack running through it. Or something. He’d torn off the cover, thrown it away, and started cutting, trying to figure out what Kumiko needed for the last tile.
But page after page after page and nothing had appeared. Without quite realising he was doing it, his first attempts were silhouettes of women, their faces, their bodies, clothed and unclothed, even the curve and nipple of a breast once, which seemed so viciously reductive he’d crumpled it immediately and gone to lunch, embarrassed and sorrowful. What was wrong
with him?
He’d tried animals after that. It was a crane that had first brought them together, after all, and if the word ‘final’ continued hovering in the air, then perhaps an animal might round things off nicely. But all his birds became penguins, all his penguins became otters. His tigers were sheep, his dragons moths, his horses barely more than geometric shapes with unconvincing legs.
‘Ah, screw it,’ he said now, throwing away what felt like the hundredth iteration. One more. One more try and then he’d give up. Maybe completely.
He tore out one final (that word again) page of dense, Jamesian prose and tried to read it to see if inspiration could be found.
She saw him in truth less easily beguiled, saw him wander in the closed dusky rooms from place to place or else for long periods recline on deep sofas and stare before him through the smoke of ceaseless cigarettes.
Yep, that seemed to fit pretty well with the little George thought he knew of Henry James. He was sure it must be brilliant, but it didn’t half read like an artistic representation of writing, rather than writing itself. A painting of a page. A cutting without cuts.
And then, because he was still George, he felt a flash of guilt at thinking so much like his daughter and being unkind to a long-dead writer who was revered by thousands, or at least hundreds, and whose golden bowl no doubt stood for something richly meaningful that could almost certainly illuminate the closed dusky rooms of his own–
He closed his eyes for a moment. Henry James was probably the last writer you should read if you were feverish. He took in a long breath, opened his eyes, and turned the page over. He slashed a line across it with his blade.
Why had he called Rachel? What could he possibly have been thinking?
He cut another line, making two sides of an open, rough triangle.
It was as if he’d wilfully decided to sacrifice everything just to spite Kumiko, a spite she would, he hoped, remain forever unaware of, so it did nothing but slice at his own heart, as spite only ever did.
He cut two more swift lines, removing a shape from the page and setting it to one side.
He hadn’t even been angry with her, not really. He’d just felt . . . lost. Alone. Unaccompanied even when she was right there with him.
He cut more lines from the same page, above where he’d removed the triangle. A cut here, a smaller shape from the page there.
And it was his fault alone. He had never really confronted Kumiko, had demanded nothing further from her than what she gave and therefore she had every right to think, to believe, to trust that George was happy with what he was given.
Cut. Tear. Cut more. Tear more.
And so he had – stupidly, insanely – gone to Rachel, who had given, and he had given in return, only to discover–
A final cut.
–that to be given everything was too much. That something was plenty. Or at least enough. That his world, the world of the sixty-five per cent man, was filled up to its brim by partial, and drowned by whole.
He wanted Kumiko. There was nothing else worth wanting, nothing else worth needing.
And oh please please please let her forgive him without knowing why. That’s all he wanted from her now, forgiveness.
Please forgive me–
‘That’s pretty cool,’ Mehmet said, still standing behind him, forgotten.
‘I swear to God, Mehmet,’ George barked, startled again. ‘I’m suddenly very happy to waive any notice period.’
‘No, but seriously,’ Mehmet said. ‘Nice.’
George looked down at what he’d made, arranged there on his work mat, the different shapes coalescing into a larger form. His eyes took a second to see it, but there it was, impossible now to miss.
He’d cut a volcano. An erupting volcano.
One covered in words, made from a book. A volcano that breathed fire and brimstone and ash and death. One that signalled the destruction of the world.
But also, as ever, the birth of another.
And there it was. This was it. He’d found it.
The final cutting.
The story could end.
He drove to her flat directly from the shop, the cutting pressed safely in a clear plastic folder. He was in no way nervous about what she’d say, because he knew the cutting was right. It was different from the volcanoes he’d made before – stolid, peaceful, lumpen things that he’d never seen her use – and very different from the ones she made herself. It was more than just the difference between feather and paper, this was a volcano that had burst unconscious from his fingers, a volcano of George, and Henry James’s bowl could go leakily hold some flowers, thank you very much, because a volcano right now was all the metaphor he needed, and not just because his fever was radiating off him like lava.
Evening was falling as he pulled up outside the building that held her flat, a flat he had only ever really stood at the doorstep of while picking her up. Which had never seemed all that weird till now, just another facet of Kumiko’s mystery, that she didn’t want him to see her workspace, didn’t want to feel him there even in memory, she said, or the work wouldn’t flow. He had believed it easily, even though she didn’t seem to have any problem coming to the shop, into his workspace.
He hadn’t called ahead, not that she answered her phone more than a third of the time anyway, but that was all right, maybe it was time for George to be a little surprising. In a good way. He parked and reached for the volcano, looking at it again. It felt so right, felt somehow so open, burning in his hand, a confession and an apology and so much a plea for how much he needed her that he felt she couldn’t help but see it and understand it and add it to the final tile, completing their story, bringing them together, forever. He turned with a rush of hope to open his car door.
And the world came to an end.
Rachel was coming out of the block of flats.
Rachel.
Who lived nowhere near here.
He watched her step from the front door out onto the pavement, illuminated by the lights of the foyer and the few streetlights ticking on. He watched her look through her handbag for her keys, her face unsmiling and oddly confused.
Then she glanced up, as if she’d heard something, and saw him.
The light caught her eyes again, flashing them green as she gave him the briefest of glances. Then she immediately pretended she hadn’t seen him, though there was no way that could possibly be true. She looked back into her handbag and continued the hunt for her keys while starting to move away.
But before she disappeared into the night he caught a last look of her face, and it was still strangely baffled, even disappointed.
George looked up the front of the block of flats to Kumiko’s window. His stomach was tumbling, falling through his body down some kind of alimentary bottomless pit. How had this happened? How had Rachel known where Kumiko lived, when she was so particular about giving out her address to even George? Had they met before? Had they known each other all along? And what had they said to each other?
It was over. It could only be over. And it was over by his hand, his selfishness, and his greed, yes, greed, not for the money that the artwork so surprisingly brought, but for Kumiko herself. He was greedy for her. He wanted more than she was giving, and though that greed was against all his best tendencies, all the things that made everyone like him, he still felt it. He hungered for her, and she wouldn’t feed him.
And now here was Rachel. In Kumiko’s block of flats, probably in her very flat. Where George himself had never properly been.
Somehow, as unreasonable and baseless and outrageous as it was, George started to grow angry. He gripped the steering wheel in two fists, a frown twisting his mouth, the fever feeling like it was blazing now, catching him in a furious shine. It seemed so unfair, everyone else conducting his life for him, yet again, like he was so placid it couldn’t possibly matter. Well, it did matter. It did, at last, bloody well matter.
He had to see her. This had to have some resolution
. One way or another, something had to end.
He grabbed the cutting and got out of his car, slamming the door so hard the whole vehicle rocked. He strode to the entrance, ignoring the call button as he held open the door for an exiting young mother and her two children. She looked at him suspiciously, until her eyes caught the cutting under his arm and she said, ‘Kumiko?’
He only answered a gruff ‘Yes’, before brushing past her.
He pressed the up button on the lift thirty-three times before the doors opened. He bounced angrily on his feet as the lift rose, and even now, he could feel the injustice of his anger. He was the one who betrayed Kumiko. She had done nothing.
In fact, that was her crime, wasn’t it? That she had done nothing.
But oh, the injustice of that, too, because of course she hadn’t done nothing. She had given him the whole world. Just not enough of herself in it.
The anger churned in him, ready to boil over, ready to erupt.
The lift doors opened and he stormed down the hallway, going straight to her door and pounding on it.
‘Kumiko!’ he shouted. ‘Kumiko!’
The door swung open under his fist.
He fell quiet as it slowly glided all the way open, gently tapping the opposite wall. It was silent in the flat. The lights were on, but there was no sound, no activity from inside.
‘Kumiko?’ he said.
In three steps, he was further inside her flat than he’d ever been, which was an absurd notion, one he couldn’t believe he’d put up with for so long. No wonder women didn’t take him seriously. No wonder his own daughter laughed at him and talked to him like–
He stopped, raising a slow fist to his forehead, as if to massage away a headache. Where was all this coming from? This rage, this lashing out. Who was he, at this moment?
What had happened to George?
‘Kumiko?’ he asked again, as if maybe she would have the answer.
He moved past a ruthlessly clean kitchen, almost to the point of never having been used, and then into a similarly clean sitting room, so devoid of personality it could have been a hotel.