The Crane Wife (17 page)

And as time passed, she never actually got around to mentioning the tile to either of her parents. From the things he said, it didn’t seem as if Kumiko had told George about it either. Nor did JP ever bring it up to him, and while she certainly wasn’t going to ask her wee little son to lie, somehow, without her even trying, it was never an issue. It became a secret they’d all wordlessly agreed to keep.

So she just kept looking at it.

In those same weeks, even before she caught the glimpse of the tile, Rachel had grown strangely friendlier.

‘You want to join us for lunch?’ she’d asked one day, Mei in tow.

Mei was astonished. ‘Really?’

‘Really?’ Amanda echoed.

‘Girls in the office?’ Rachel said. ‘Need to support each other? Not let stupid stuff get in the way?’

‘
Really
?’ Mei said again.

‘Yes, really,’ Rachel snapped. ‘We’re all grown-ups here?’

‘Thanks,’ Amanda said, ‘but I’ve got plans.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Rachel said, and off they went.

But that hadn’t been the end of it.

‘Thought we might go to the cinema tomorrow?’ Rachel said, appearing on a Friday morning. ‘Make fun of Anne Hathaway’s accent? Then knock back a few cocktails?’

Amanda had watched her, suspiciously. ‘Is that an invitation?’

Rachel’s face made an angry, scoffing shape but quickly recovered. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘how many times do I need to say I’m sorry?’

Amanda opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. ‘Once?’

‘So? The cinema?’

‘I’ve got JP–’

‘No worries.’ And off she went again.

It was weird, and in a way worse than when they were just friends who hated each other. Rachel was as unreasonably demanding as ever about getting work in, but the invitations kept coming, until finally she’d relented and gone for lunch at the latest gourmet burger chain.

‘Do you think this is actually Emmental?’ Amanda asked, lifting up the bun.

‘I can’t
believe
they put cheese that fancy on a burger,’ Mei said.

‘
Fancy
?’ Rachel sneered. ‘Who says “fancy”?’

Mei looked slightly confused. ‘
I
just did?’

‘How’s it going with Wally?’ Amanda asked, taking a bite of the burger.

‘Wally is like a huge prick?’ Rachel said, cutting her own veggie burger in two.

‘
Is
a huge prick,’ Amanda said, ‘or
has
?’

Rachel slammed down her knife and fork, startling everyone, even nearby tables. ‘You know what?’ she nearly shouted. ‘I’m a good person!’

A quiet fell over their section of the restaurant. Mei looked at Amanda, then back at Rachel. ‘Well,’ Mei said, ‘I mean, you’re
okay
–’

‘Who says you’re not a good person?’ Amanda asked, actually interested, though not so interested that she failed to take another bite of burger.

‘I know I’m difficult? All right? But I think you have to be? To be a woman in business? And to make it in life and not be a, be a, be a–’

‘Chump?’ Mei suggested, sipping from her pistachio milkshake.

‘Yes, not be a chump! I thought that was the whole point?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Amanda asked.

Rachel sighed heavily, and there suddenly seemed to be actual tears in her eyes. ‘Don’t you just get tired of having to hate everybody?’

‘I
don’t
hate everybody,’ Amanda said.

‘Yes, you do!’ Rachel said. ‘You complain about everybody and everything! Like, all the time?’

‘Well . . .’ Amanda sat back. ‘Not
everybody
.’

‘Who do you like? Tell me.’

Rachel’s insistence was so nakedly hungry, Amanda answered almost as if to defend herself. ‘I love my son so much I sometimes miss him even when he’s sitting right there.’

‘Oh, me, too,’ Mei sympathised. ‘My daughter–’

‘Child,’ Rachel said, curtly. ‘Doesn’t count.’

‘I love my dad.’

‘George,’ Rachel nodded.

‘I loved Henri.’

‘Did you?’ Mei asked, eyes wide.

Amanda looked down at her burger, suddenly a little less hungry, remembering that night he’d stopped by, the night he hadn’t mentioned again on any of his subsequent calls to JP. ‘Yeah.’ She looked back up at them. ‘Yes, more than I can say.’

‘So you’re lucky then,’ Rachel said. ‘At least you’ve
had
somebody. I’m just so tired of hating everyone and myself and the two of you–’

‘Hey!’ Mei said.

‘Oh, please,’ Rachel pffted. ‘I don’t even know why I’m here. Do you? I don’t even know why I’m trying to–’

She stopped, her face scrunching up in some really, really unattractive crying. She stood suddenly, so quickly the chair behind her fell over. She took one look at it and fled the restaurant. Yes, Amanda thought,
fled
was the right word.

‘Wow,’ Mei said, turning back to Amanda. ‘Do you think you should go after her?’

‘Not me,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You.’

Mei acknowledged this was probably true, grabbed her bag and left without saying goodbye. Or paying for anyone’s share of the bill.

Amanda stayed, pondering the conversation and finishing her burger. And what the hell, a few bites of Mei’s, too.

Back at work, Rachel pretended the outburst had never happened, which wasn’t a surprise, but she still kept up the almost-friendliness campaign, which
was
. And should also have been a warning, should have given Amanda greater pause before even thinking about risking the tile at work, because here, inevitably, was the moment that probably almost had to happen: Rachel standing there, her eyes laser-like on the now-hastily-being-shut drawer.

‘That was–’ Rachel started to say.

‘None of your goddamn business, is what it was,’ Amanda said sharply.

‘I’ve never seen one in person?’

Amanda stared her down. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Amanda–’

‘Can I
help
you with something, Rachel?’

And then, once more, there was a strange moment. Rachel’s eyes seemed to flicker and she hesitated. Then she looked down, crestfallen, at the papers in her hand and started walking away.
Who are you,
Amanda thought,
and what have you done with Rachel?

But as she watched Rachel’s unfeasibly shapely bottom shuffle off in defeat, Amanda found herself feeling an emotion so unassociated with her that it took her a minute to identify it properly. It was pity. Worse, it was
recognition
. She looked at Rachel and suddenly saw a fellow-traveller across that baffling, hostile landscape she knew all too well, the one whose entire set of rules seemed to exist for you to never properly learn and therefore be forever excluded, no matter how much you pretended it didn’t matter.

For Rachel, it might have even been worse, because she
had
known the rules for a long time, had thrived on them, and had maybe now – if her equally unprecedented lunch outburst was anything to go by – found them empty. What happened to a person then? If she was trying this badly to be friends with Amanda, of all people, and doing it this incredibly incompetently, then what did that mean? Amanda realised she knew. As much as she still didn’t actually
like
Rachel – because that seemed several bridges and an ocean too far – she glimpsed a harrowing sliver of understanding about her.

Rachel was lonely. And where Amanda had known that feeling her whole life, Rachel seemed to have just woken up to the possibility she’d been lonely all along.

‘Rach?’ she found herself saying.

Rachel turned back, her green eyes watery, but ready to be defiant. ‘What?’

Amanda’s hand hovered over her desk drawer before deciding that no, she couldn’t do that. No matter how much pity she had for Rachel, it wasn’t enough to share
this
, not yet, probably not ever, not something this private, this
hers
.

So she found herself inexplicably doing the next best thing, regretting it even as the sentence fell clumsily from her lips. ‘My father’s having a party to introduce people to Kumiko. There’ll probably be artwork there.’ She swallowed, as if to stop herself, but somehow the words kept being spoken. ‘Do you want to come along?’

Rachel’s smile of acceptance was any number of things. It was grateful, it was unnervingly bright, but mostly, Amanda’s heart quailed to see, it was triumphant.

13 of 32

‘You have changed,’ the lady says.

‘I have,’ says the volcano. ‘And I have not.’

She flies in her usual cautious circle around the open skies above his factories. ‘You are a man of peace.’

‘I am not currently a man of war, my lady. It is not the same.’

‘Yet you create, you build, you add to the world.’

‘It is what volcanoes do. Until we are tamed into mountains.’

‘You tease me.’

‘And you taunt me, my lady.’

She lands, placing her feet on the peaked roof of a factory. The billowing black smoke it produces does not sully her clothing or her skin. It flows around her, leaving her untouched.

‘Taunt you?’ she asks. ‘How is this true?’

‘My thoughts are filled with you,’ he says. ‘You enter my dreams, yet you stay out of arm’s reach.’

‘You enter my dreams,’ she says, crisply, ‘and you do not.’

The volcano smiles, and she sees, again, the malevolent merriment behind his blazing eyes. ‘My lady dreams of me?’ he says.

She takes off in flight again.

14 of 32

‘Wait, my lady!’ he calls after her. ‘A gift!’

She soars around behind him, over the vast countrysides of factories and mines that have replaced the nations he once warred upon. ‘What gift would I accept from you?’ she asks. ‘You are a volcano. You destroy.’

‘And create.’

‘And destroy again.’

‘And create again, my lady. You know this to be true.’

‘What is your gift?’

‘Alight once more, so that I may give it to you.’

‘You are dangerous to me.’

‘You are just as dangerous to me, my lady. If I harm you, you will turn me into a mountain. It is a risk to us both. Either we both live, or we are both destroyed. And I wish to live.’

She considers this. After a moment, she lands.

‘What is your gift?’ she asks.

‘An unexpected truth, my lady.’

Across the length of a continent, he holds out his hand for her to step onto.

A fraction of a second more quickly than she would have liked, she does so.

15 of 32

The volcano erupts, causing the world to crack in two. Factories, towns, cities, nations fall into chasms in the earth. The skies fill with ash and fire. Rivers of lava make the seas boil. All is darkness and flame and destruction.

‘But you, my lady,’ he says, as she stands on the palm of his hand, ‘are unharmed. I cannot, do you see?’

He brings up a wave of lava to fall on her, but it parts as it does, leaving her untouched. He waves his hand to spin a torrent of fire around her, but again, it does not touch her skin. He brings a burning fist down to smash her in his palm, but it stops before harming a feather on her head.

‘I wish to destroy you, my lady,’ he says, ‘so that I may create you again. But I cannot, despite what we both have believed.’ He holds her up high, over the ruined world, up to his green, green eyes. ‘Do you see what this means?’

‘I do,’ she says. ‘And my answer is yes, I will marry you.’

On the palm of the volcano’s hand, grass begins to grow under her feet.

16 of 32

They set about recreating the world. They call it their child, a joke that neither is particularly comfortable with, especially when the speaking of it makes it true. He raises lava to build new plains. She brings in seasons to wear them down, plant them, fill them with green.

Their regular couplings are violent yet unsatisfying. His hands wish to burn her, blast her to steam, and hers wish to turn him to stone, sending sheets of rock crashing to earth. But they cannot harm one another. He must constantly, viciously boil, she must constantly, violently forgive, but the fruits of their efforts are as naught.

Yet it works. For a time.

17 of 32

Neither ceases to be what they were before.

She suspects he is behind the wars that blight the face of their child, and when he returns from absences his horses sweat fire and blood, as if they had run to the end of time and back.

He suspects, in turn, that her absences are spent bestowing her forgiveness on others, and when she returns from periods away there is a contentment to her, a glassy-eyed satisfaction she is slow to stir from.

He has thought himself too big, too all-powerful for jealousy. She has thought herself too free, too quietly sure of her place in the world for jealousy to even occur to her.

They are both wrong.

18 of 32

She begins to follow him on his trips across their child, keeping distant and out of sight, but watching him raise armies that swarm across the land, watching him build factories that belch black smoke into the sky, watching him create a kind of link amongst all the creatures living there so that, by their own choice, they allow themselves to be more easily controlled.

He, meanwhile, hides in hot springs and geysers, travels via ash falls and earthquakes, dances across tectonic plate stresses and the slidings of continents to follow her, watching her deal with the people of their child, watch them try to take from her, watch her forgive them with her touch, releasing them from their burdens in an exchange more intimate than any of their own closenesses could ever be.

Their child senses their disquiet, as any child would. It frets and turns and soils itself under their increasingly neglectful eye. Occasionally, it shames them into submitting to its needs, and they repay it in caresses, in seasons of peace and fair weather, in nights of endless moonlight and days of crisp sun.

But it is never long before their eyes return to one another, and when that happens the world knows to cower and take itself early to bed.

‘A
re we ready?’ George asked.

‘Would it matter if we were not?’ Kumiko replied, reaching up to straighten his tie, which needed no straightening and made the gesture almost ironic, a mockery of an infinite number of black-and-white TV housewives straightening an infinite number of black-and-white neckties on an infinite number of patiently loving black-and-white advertising executive husbands.