He hadn’t seen Kumiko for the previous two nights. Their get-togethers were unpredictable. She now had a phone number she never seemed to answer, and often she would just show up in George’s shop, wondering if he’d like to join her for company that evening.
He always said yes.
Today, she waited until nearly the end of opening hours to make her way inside. Still with the suitcase, still with the white coat draped over one arm, no matter how much colder this winter seemed to be getting.
‘My daughter would very much like to meet you,’ he said to her as she opened the case.
‘The feeling is mutual,’ Kumiko said. ‘Perhaps if we have that party you were speaking of.’
‘Yes,’ George said. ‘Okay, yes, then definitely, let’s–’
‘It is a kind of story,’ she said, interrupting, but so delicately it was almost as if she’d done so by accident, as if he had asked her about the pile of unseen tiles seconds ago rather than many nights before. She reached into the suitcase and, instead of showing him the new picture she’d made of his latest donated cutting (a closed fist, but one drained of potential violence, one clearly clasping its last beloved thing), she picked up a packet of tiles tied with ribbon.
‘A sort of myth,’ she said, setting the packet down but not yet unwrapping it. ‘A story I was told as a girl, but one that has grown in the telling over the years.’
Yet still she didn’t move to untie the ribbon.
‘You don’t have to,’ George said.
‘I know.’
‘I’m willing to wait. I told you I was willing to wait for anything.’
She looked at him seriously now. ‘You hand me too much power, George. It is not a burden, but it might become one, and I do not wish that.’ She touched his arm. ‘I know you do it out of your abundant kindness, but there may come a day when both you and I would wish that I treat you less carefully. And that must remain a possibility, George. If there is never a chance of hardness or pain, then softness has no meaning.’
George swallowed. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see the tiles.’
She opened her mouth in a little square of delighted surprise. ‘Do you, George? And my immediate thought was to say no to you. But how wonderful. Of course I will show you.’
She untied the ribbon, and showed him the first one.
It was almost completely covered in feathers. They fanned out, looping in and out of one another in a spray of brilliant white. Within, a single feather, also white but of just different enough tone to stand out, was cut and woven into the shape of an infant.
‘These are not for sale,’ she murmured, hesitant just yet to show him the rest.
‘No,’ George said, in almost silent agreement.
‘But what might you add?’ she asked. ‘What does it lack?’
‘It lacks nothing,’ George said, his eye following every contour of the white, every slightly different contour of the infant.
‘You know that not to be true,’ she said. ‘And so I ask you to think on it.’
George studied the picture again, trying to detach from his conscious mind, trying to let the image float there, let other images attach themselves to it.
‘I’d add an absence,’ he said. ‘An absence made of words. There is loss here.’ He blinked, recovering himself. ‘I think.’
She nodded. ‘And will you cut the absence for me? Will you cut others, too, as you’ve been doing?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything.’
They turned back to the tiles. ‘What’s happening here?’ he asked. ‘You said it was a myth. What myth?’
She merely nodded again, and he thought she wasn’t going to answer.
But then she spoke, as if at the beginning of a story.
‘She is born in a breath of cloud,’ she said.
And continued speaking.
The following Monday, after a weekend spent with her, again lost in specifics but with generalities of serenity and comfort and a sweet yearning, George hung in his shop the third tile they’d made, the latest of the ones separate from her private thirty-two.
She had taken the closed fist he’d made, the one bled of power and vengeance, the one that seemed resigned and perhaps welcoming of its ultimate fate, and paired it with the feathered cuttings of the cheek and neck of the woman looking away from the artist. It was a more jarring conjunction than even the lion and the watermill. It had intimations of violence, fist against face, no matter how calm the fist, but this dissipated quickly. The fist became no longer a fist, but simply a closed hand, withdrawing, empty, from its final caress of the woman’s face. The caress may, in fact, have been of a memory, the closed hand reaching into the past to feel it again, but failing, as the past always fails those who grasp at it.
‘It’s just a picture,’ George kept saying to himself, as he tried to find a spot on the wall to display it. ‘It’s just a picture.’ Trying to somehow surprise it out of its power, reduce its impact on him, keep it from making his stomach tumble.
But he failed. And was happy that he did.
The door opened behind him. For one amazed moment, he thought it was Mehmet being unprecedentedly punctual, particularly after a weekend following whatever a ‘swing from Wicked’ audition might have entailed.
‘You’re early,’ he said, turning, the third tile in his hand.
But it wasn’t Mehmet. It was the man who had bought the second tile for such an extravagant sum. He wasn’t alone. A slightly plump but fiercely professional-looking woman was with him. Short blonde hair, expensive earrings and an open-collared shirt of a cut so simple and elegant it probably cost more than George’s refrigerator.
Her face, though. Her face was nearly desperate, her eyes blazing at George, slightly red at their edges, as if sometime this morning she had been crying.
‘Is this him?’ she asked.
‘This is him,’ the man said, a step behind her.
The woman looked down to the picture he was holding. ‘There are more,’ she said, relief flooding her voice.
‘Can I help you?’ George mustered himself to ask.
‘That picture,’ she said. ‘That picture you’re holding.’
‘What about it?’ George said, raising it slightly, ready to defend it.
And then the woman said a number that George could only ever really have described as extravagant.
After she finally, finally finished the last of the dreariest Essex queue counts in the history of dreary Essex queue counts, and after she’d picked up a cranky, under-slept JP from yet another Saturday with her father, who was weirdly distracted and mumbled something about getting back to his cuttings, and then having at last arrived home after going to two separate supermarkets to find the only kind of juice JP was drinking this week (mango, passion fruit and peach), there was a knock on Amanda’s front door.
She ignored it, as she usually did. Who knocked on the doors of flats these days? Salesmen, for the most part, explaining the sensual pleasures of double-glazing, or rosette-wearing fascists in summer hats seeking her vote in the next election or, once, in a Cockney variant so thick that even as an Englishwoman she had trouble following it, a man asking if she’d like to buy fresh fish from the back of a van. (‘Who would ever do that?’ she’d asked him.) It definitely wouldn’t be the building supervisor at least, not on a game day, and it was too late for the post, so when the knock came a second time she ignored it all over again.
‘Whatever happened to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, do you think?’ she asked JP, tucked behind 3D glasses in front of their decidedly non-3D telly. ‘You never see them much any more. It’s like they’ve passed into myth.’ She grabbed another handful of sticky toys to be tidied away. ‘Though probably not one of those myths with breasts and bacchanals and swans having it off with maidens.’ She turned to her son, who had not answered, mostly because he was four years old and in front of the TV. ‘What do you suppose a Jehovah’s Witness myth might be like, poo-poo? I picture quite a
lot of lighthouses.’
‘Hush, Mama,’ JP said. ‘Wriggle dance!’
Which meant the Wriggle dance was coming up agonisingly soon on the Wriggle video download, danced by the childlike dinosaur Wriggles in their Wriggle costumes on Wriggle Beach under Wriggle rainbows springing forth from Wriggle applications on Wriggle computer pads. The dance involved very little more than wriggling, but JP was a fierce devotee.
The knock came a third time, along with a muffled call. She paused, a sticky action figure in one hand, a sticky fire truck in another. She debated whether to risk it, but that fish salesman had also been calling things as he knocked (‘Fresh fish!’ she assumed, but would it really matter?). She waited, but whoever it was didn’t try a third time. She dumped the toys into the toy box and, with a sigh, decided the room was clean enough and all she really wanted was to get her beautiful boy off to bed after his weekly call with Henri and watch crappy Saturday evening telly by herself with a cup of tea and some sarcastic tweeting to her sixteen followers.
‘Wriggle dance!’ JP shouted, leaping to his feet and commencing to wriggle vigorously.
Amanda’s mobile rang. She stepped into the kitchen to rinse the sticky off her hands before taking it out of her pocket.
The display read, to her mild surprise, Henri.
‘You’re early,’ she answered. ‘He’s–’
‘You are home,’ Henri said, his accent, as ever, a surprising combination of spiky and warm. ‘I can hear the television. Why do you not answer your door?’
‘It was unexpected,’ he shrugged over a cup of tea. ‘I am back on the Eurostar tomorrow evening, and we only come because Claudine’s mother got trapped in her hotel room.’
Amanda paused in her own tea-sipping. ‘Trapped?’
Henri made a dismissive Gallic wave. ‘For most people, this is surprising. For Claudine’s mother . . .’ He shrugged again, a burden he was willing to put up with.
(JP had been beside himself at Henri’s appearance. ‘Papa! Papa! Je suis tortillant! Tortiller avec moi!’ And indeed, Henri had been up for a bit of paternal wriggling. It had taken ages to get JP down to bed after that, but Henri had asked to do it himself, even giving him a bath and reading him a story – Le Petit Prince, of course – before JP finally drifted off. Amanda had even tried not to feel irritated at how pleased with himself Henri looked after completing the tasks she did daily to no audience whatsoever.)
‘So where’s Claudine now?’ she asked.
‘On her way back to France,’ Henri said, and Amanda thought there was nothing more French in the world than a Frenchman saying France. ‘Her mother is using my ticket. I could not get another until tomorrow.’
‘It took both of you to save her mother?’
Henri rolled his eyes as if asking for mercy from the gods. ‘You will have to believe yourself very lucky not to have met her. Your mother, so different, so English, so nice. I very much love Claudine’ – he was looking away so he didn’t see Amanda’s small flinch – ‘she is like the oboe playing Bach, but her maman . . .’
He took another sip of his tea. ‘Thank you for allowing this intrusion.’ His voice was without cynicism or hidden meaning. He really was grateful. ‘I really am grateful,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, in a small voice.
There was a short, careful silence. ‘May I ask how are you?’ he said.
‘You may.’
He smiled back at her, in a way that made her stomach sink down to her toes. She loved him, she loved him, she loved him, she hated the French motherfucker, mostly for how much she loved him, but oh she loved loved loved him still, the handsome bastard. ‘So, how are you?’ he asked again.
She opened her mouth to say ‘I’m fine’, but what came out instead was ‘I can’t seem to stop crying lately’.
And to her surprise, it was true. She’d never considered herself much of a crier, but lately, oh, just lately. Crying when she talked with her father, crying at the slightest bit of TV sentiment, crying when a lift door closed before she reached it. It was infuriating, which weirdly only made her cry more.
‘Are you depressed?’ Henri asked, not unkindly.
‘Only if that means being angry all the time.’
‘I think the word for that is Amanda-esque.’ He raised his eyebrows in a way that only the French ever bothered with, but it was still friendly. This detente was still fairly new. Henri visited often enough to be sure JP kept his physical presence fresh in his memory, but it had, for the first couple of years, been like the exchange of nuclear secrets between hostile agents, with her, if she was honest, by far the more hostile. Over time, though, it had become too tiring to stay so constantly mad at him. She had thawed from strained to curt, from curt to polite, from polite to this almost friendliness, one which, in a way, was almost harder to take, because if she could be this calm with him, then that probably meant the spark had completely gone, hadn’t it? All that furious passion had at least been passion. The thought made her frown, and Henri mistook her expression.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, setting down his cup of tea. ‘I do not wish to offer you reason to shout at me.’
‘Is that all you think I did? Shout at you?’
‘There was quite a lot of shouting.’
‘There was quite a lot to be shouting at.’
He grinned. ‘And we are nearly there again. But please, I did not come for an argument. I came to see my son, and I would very happily do so in peace, if we can agree?’
Amanda said nothing, just swished the last bit of cold tea across the bottom of her cup as she looked at him. He was annoyingly tanned, his salt-and-pepper hair cropped very short to downplay a receding hairline. It only made him look sexier, though, as did the slightly French cut of his t-shirt and the slightly French wisp of chest hair over its collar.
‘This bothers me, the crying,’ he said, leaning towards her on the settee. ‘It cannot be good for you. It cannot be good for Jean-Pierre if his mother is sad.’
She thought for a moment. ‘I really don’t think they’re entirely sad tears. They’re more angry.’
‘These are not very different shadings.’
He was still there, leaning close enough to smell, an achingly familiar scent that was partly the honey soap she knew he was partial to, partly the cigarette he’d no doubt had on the walk here from the Tube, and partly just Henri, the individual smell that anyone had, made alluring or off-putting only because of the person who wore it.
Alluring. Or off-putting. Or alluring.
Goddamn him.
She reached up and ran a hand across his cheek. The stubble softly scraped her fingertips.
‘Amanda,’ Henri said.
He didn’t back away as she neared him, didn’t back away as she unquestionably entered his personal space, didn’t back away as her lips touched his.
But then he backed away. ‘That would be a bad idea.’
‘Claudine is under twenty-five miles of water,’ Amanda said, still close, though not quite sure what she was doing, feeling tears just seconds away, trying to make sure they didn’t arrive. ‘And think how well we already know each other. We could skip all the stuff neither of us like.’
He took her hand and kissed it. ‘We should not.’
‘But you’re thinking about it.’
He smiled and gestured to his lap, where an impressive area of strained fabric made his physical interest plain. ‘But we should not,’ he said. ‘We cannot.’
She waited another second to see if he would yield (and yield was the right word, she was asking him to yield to her, not just to see if he would, but because her need was clearly so much greater, so much greater at that moment that it felt as if she was falling off a cliff and desperately wanted him not to save her from falling, but to fall with her, and if they survived, well, then, afterwards there could be more fucking cups of fucking tea) and then she sat back on the settee, trying to smile casually, as if it was just a passing fancy, no big
deal, some mature adult fun they could have had, but nothing to regret, nothing to worry about.
She had to bite her bottom lip to keep from crying. Again.
‘I love you, Amanda,’ Henri said, ‘and I know, despite what you might shout, that you love me as well. But I love Claudine now and she is able to love me in a way that doesn’t cost her as much as it costs you.’
‘It was nothing,’ Amanda said, annoyed at the thickness in her voice, trying to turn it into a false brightness, knowing neither of them believed her. ‘Passing fancy on a Saturday evening.’ She sniffled and looked away from him as she took a sip from her empty teacup. ‘Just a bit of fun.’
He watched her for a moment. She knew he was fighting between trying to look noble about everything – he’d always had a pompous streak – but also truly trying to delicately, kindly, not embarrass her, if it was at all possible. It wasn’t, and she just had to wait until he realised that.
‘I should go,’ he finally said, standing, but he didn’t move away from her when he stood. Their proximity was suddenly very close, him standing, her sitting, both of them aware again of the still-present strain against his trousers.
They breathed for a moment.
‘Merde,’ Henri whispered, and pulled his shirt off over his head.
Later, when it was over, and he sat on the edge of the settee wearing nothing but a cigarette and his now inside-out underpants, he gestured towards JP’s room. ‘I miss him,’ he said. ‘Every day, I miss him.’
‘I know,’ was all Amanda could manage.
She didn’t cry after he left, didn’t feel angry or sad or anything at all, just watched brightly coloured people suffer brightly coloured hysteria all across the Saturday night telly. When it was finally time to turn all of that off and go to bed, that’s when she cried.
Sunday passed in a grind of chores: a week’s worth of dishes (she was ashamed to admit), slightly more than a week’s worth of laundry (she was even more ashamed to admit, JP was on a third rotation of a certain pair of dungarees), plus a break to feed the ducks at a nearby pond, which JP refused to do wearing anything but his Superman costume, complete with fake muscles.