‘It’s . . .’ George said.
‘Holy . . .’ Mehmet said.
‘That’s . . .’ the man in the suit said.
And then he named an even more extravagant sum.
‘
Goodness
,’ Kumiko said, as if seeing the man for the first time. She glanced at George, astonished. ‘Is he offering to buy it?’
The man didn’t wait for George to answer and increased his extravagant sum by another extravagant amount.
Kumiko giggled, actually giggled, looking at George as if they’d somehow stepped into the middle of an unexpected comedy sketch. ‘What on earth shall we do?’ she said.
George felt unwilling, almost savagely so, to let the lion and the watermill out of his sight, even after this single glimpse of the way it lived there on the tile.
The man doubled his second extravagant sum.
‘Sold!’ Mehmet cried.
‘George?’ Kumiko asked again. ‘The money would be useful to me. For supplies.’
George tried to speak, but it came out in a croak. He tried again. ‘Anything,’ he stumbled. ‘Anything you say.’
Kumiko watched him for a moment. ‘I will not hold you to that,’ she said. Then she turned to the man. ‘All right. A deal.’
As George, in a daze, wrapped the lion and the watermill in tissue paper the man in the suit began to cry, unembarrassed. ‘Thank you,’ he kept saying, as Mehmet ordered up a dummy invoice the man could charge his credit card against. ‘Just, thank you.’
‘
How
much?’ Amanda said, the next time she dropped JP off at his house.
‘I know,’ George said. He hoisted JP up to eye level, bouncing him in his arms. ‘You thought your
grand-père
was crazy, huh? Cutting up books like that?’
‘
Désolé
,’ JP said.
‘No, seriously, Dad,
how
much?’
‘She gave me half. I said no. I
insisted
no, but she said we’d made it together, that it was nothing without my contribution – though that’s patently a lie, Amanda, my contribution is tiny, a tenth, a thousandth of hers.’
‘But she still gave you half.’
‘Said it would turn the art into a lie if I didn’t accept it.’
‘When the hell am I going to meet this woman?’ Amanda demanded.
George was confused for a moment, but then he realised that Kumiko and Amanda still hadn’t actually met. Somehow it had always worked out that they were never there at the same time. Strange. Though, to be honest, when he was with Kumiko, George tended to forget about the existence of anyone else on the planet, forget momentarily they might be important at all. He felt a flush of shame and improvised a lie.
‘Soon,’ he said. ‘She suggested a cocktail party.’
‘A
cocktail
party? Where? 1961?’
‘Cock-tail,’ JP said, making shooting noises with his finger.
‘She can be a bit old-fashioned,’ George said. ‘It’s just an idea.’
‘Well, I do want to meet her. This mystery woman who’s just earned you a month’s salary in a day.’
‘I had a little part in it. I did make the lion.’
‘Whatever you say, George.’
Kumiko had a second set of tiles she was reluctant to show him. There were thirty-two of them, she said, and they sat quietly in the corner of her suitcase in five separate stacks tied together with white ribbon, a single sheet of tissue paper between each to keep them from rubbing together.
‘It is a larger project of mine,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to show me,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said, a small smile playing on her lips. ‘Which is why I perhaps will.’
She finally did late on a Saturday in the print shop. George had returned JP to Amanda after her second weekend in a row counting traffic queues in Romford or Horsham or whatever town with a great-aunt-sounding name it was, and George had come in to relieve Mehmet, who hated working alone and swore he had a Saturday afternoon call-back for ‘swing in
Wicked
’, which George assumed was a lie but let him off anyway.
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.
A
fter 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.)