The Crane Wife (28 page)

‘I can’t stand up,’ he said. ‘My feet–’

‘Oh,
Dad
,’ she said, pulling him into her sooty embrace as well.

George felt his last defences collapse as he was held by his daughter. ‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘She’s gone.’

‘I know,’ Amanda said, holding him tight. ‘I know.’

‘She’s gone.’

And he felt the truth of it like a bullet in his heart.

Amanda held her father tight against her as he wept, JP making spitting sounds to clear the soot from his mouth where he’d kissed her, and Rachel standing there watching it all.

‘Thank you,’ Amanda whispered to her over George’s sobbing head. Rachel gave her a questioning look. Amanda gestured to JP.

‘Oh,’ Rachel said, turning back to the fire and watching it burn. ‘No problem.’ And then as if to herself, ‘No problem at all.’

There was a crash and a sudden
whooshing
sound as the fire brigade finally,
finally
started to aim hoses at the fire from the street side, a fine mist of steam drifting into the back garden. The flames at the top of the house immediately disappeared under the water, replaced by thicker smoke.

‘We can’t get around any more,’ Amanda said, nodding to where the side of the house was now collapsing in burning slow motion onto the driveway. ‘We’ll have to wait back here until they put it out.’

‘
Un feu
,’ JP said again.

The
feu
had, by this point, been burning long enough to keep them all uncomfortably warm, so Amanda gently undraped the Wriggle blanket from around her son. ‘Why don’t we give this to
grand-père
for now?’

‘He’s
naked
,’ JP said, happily.

She put the blanket around George’s shoulders, covering him.

‘It’s all over,’ he said.

‘I know, Dad,’ Amanda said, rubbing his back. ‘I know.’

‘She’s gone.’

‘I know.’

He looked up at her, quizzically. ‘How do
you
know?’

But before she could answer, Rachel interrupted. ‘Amanda?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Could you tell work I won’t be in on Monday?’

‘Are you
kidding
me–?’

‘Just, please, Amanda. As a friend.’

Amanda coughed again, watching her. ‘Yeah, okay, I guess.’

‘In fact,’ Rachel said, turning back to the fire, ‘maybe you could tell them I’m not coming back at all.’ She hugged her arms to herself, and it took Amanda a minute to wonder how it was that Rachel looked so different.

Then she realised it was because she looked
free
.

N
o one needed her in a meeting for at least an hour, the corridor outside was momentarily clear, and she could probably get away with ‘accidentally’ locking her door for a few minutes, so what the hell? She hung the tile on the back wall of her new office, if only to see how it looked.

It looked . . . well, it looked
great
. How could it not? The mountain of words on the horizon, the bird of feathers in the night sky above, forever beyond each other’s reach though – painfully, beautifully – forever in each other’s sight. A picture of sadness, but also of peace and history. They could look upon love and be comforted.

At least, that’s how Amanda liked to read it.

In the end, though, there was no possible way of keeping the tile here. It was far too valuable, for one thing. The market for the few surviving, already-sold tiles had skyrocketed since Kumiko’s death, and even though Amanda’s added to that scant total by one, the only other person she wanted to know of its existence was George, who she’d finally shown it to at Kumiko’s wake. She’d been nervous, frightened even, that he’d react badly to her having kept it from him, but he’d said he understood completely, understood, too, her desire to keep it secret still.

It was something completely personal to the two of them, after all, a physical intersection where their lives crossed with Kumiko’s. And who else, who
better
to share it with than George?

None better
, she thought, looking at the tile for as long as she dared.
None better at all
.

She sighed and took it down, placing it carefully in the bag that Kumiko had given her and locking the whole thing in a drawer. She opened her office door again, sat down at her desk and looked out the window at her brand-new view.

It was only of a dirty canal, but it was a start.

Since the night of the fire all those weeks ago, Rachel had not only gone ahead and quit her job, but had vanished completely. Mei reported that Rachel’s flat was abandoned, save for a couple of fistfuls of Rachel’s clothes and a suitcase, with only the briefest calls to make her goodbyes to her putative best friend.

‘What did she say?’ Amanda had asked a very teary Mei over lunch.

‘I just don’t believe it.’

‘I know, but what did she
say
?’

Mei shrugged, sadly. ‘She said she had finally found clarity, and that she couldn’t believe how much of her life she’d wasted. She said she wanted to see what was beyond the horizon, and that more than anything, she wished the same for me.’

‘Well. That was nice.’

Mei’s face screwed up in anguish. ‘I know! Do you think she’s had a traumatic head injury?’

Mei hadn’t seemed very much surprised – or indeed to very much notice – that Felicity Hartford had gone straight to Amanda for promotion into Rachel’s position, something Amanda felt almost certain Rachel had orchestrated. Well, if that was the case, then maybe accepting it in a certain spirit was required.

‘I’m only doing this because you’re a woman, you realise,’ Felicity had said. ‘We can’t have fourteen male directors, apparently, despite the other candidates’ manifest superiority to what I’ll laughingly call your
abilities
–’

‘I want my own office,’ Amanda said.

Felicity looked as if Amanda had just stripped to her underpants. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Tom Shanahan has his own office. Eric Kirby has his own office. Billy Singh has his own–’

‘And there are a larger number of directors who do
not
, Amanda. There will be no special treatment just because you–’

‘You don’t hate women.’

At this, Felicity Hartwell had blinked. ‘My dear, what an
extraordinarily
odd thing to say.’

‘You hate
everyone
. Which is fine with me, I’m not too much of a fan of everyone either, but you take it out on women because it’s more fun, isn’t it? We fight differently. More interestingly.’

‘I’ll thank you to change this line of–’

‘So I’ll make a deal with you. You give me my own office and I won’t take you to a
very
uncomfortable tribunal where I’ll present my recording of everything you’ve said so far.’ She removed her phone from her pocket and showed Felicity that it was still recording every word. ‘And, in return, let me just ask you this.’

Felicity’s face hardened. ‘You don’t know who the fuck you’re dealing with, Missy–’

‘What do you think of the Animals In War Memorial on Park Lane?’

‘I could eat a nothing like you for
breakfast
–’

‘What do think of it?’ Amanda snapped, feeling the nerves in her stomach twang from the tension of this gambit.

But still appearing fairly calm. Which was nice.

Felicity sat back, exasperated. She made a disgusted
fine
sound. ‘I think it’s a ludicrous embarrassment,’ she said, ‘put up there by rich morons with–’

‘–more money than sense,’ Amanda finished. ‘It’s an abomination to equate a Golden Retriever with a soldier. Not that I have anything against Golden Retrievers, mind, but they’ve even got a fucking
pigeon
up there. And the whole Memorial is bigger than the one for all of
Australia
, so clearly we care more as a country about pigeons than we do Australians.’

‘Well,’ Felicity said, still astonished, ‘can you blame us?’ And then, seeing Amanda’s face, she gave a surprised smile. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’

Every woman around the office had been remarking lately how much easier – if not exactly
easy
– Felicity was to work with these days. And all it took was lunch once a week with Amanda. It had been an effort to evict a complaining Tom Shanahan from his office, but Felicity had done it and had even left an ANZAC card as a good-luck note on Amanda’s desk this morning. Scarily, Amanda was beginning to think they were becoming rather good friends.

‘I’d suggest a plant,’ her new assistant Jason said, stepping into the doorway. He was very, very cute in a tiresomely fascist sort of way that stirred not one single ember in Amanda’s fires. A feeling which seemed mutual; he wasn’t more than five years younger than her, but had clearly cast her into the sexual outer darkness anyway.

Who cared? The outer darkness had
way
more interesting people in it.

‘Plants are for the emotionally pliable,’ she said, looking down, as if returning to work she hadn’t actually started.

‘Noted,’ he said. ‘Papers for you.’

He put them on the far corner of her desk. And waited. She slowly looked back up in the tried-and-tested manner of a boss indicating an employee’s presence was unwelcome.

‘Mei Lo asked if she could schedule a meeting,’ he said.

‘. . . and?’

‘I said I didn’t believe you had any openings on your schedule, that I didn’t believe there’d be any openings all week, and that I didn’t believe you cared for meetings anyway.’ Jason grinned, his green eyes glinting. ‘She said she couldn’t believe it.’

Amanda had already been looking forward to finding ways to fire him within the month, but for now she just sat back in her chair and said, ‘Do you love anyone, Jason?’

He looked surprised for a moment before the smirk returned. ‘Careful there, Miss Duncan. You could have a sexual harassment suit on your hands.’

‘
Love
, Jason. Not sex. Which depressingly explains so very much about you. And I know you were being sarcastic, but it’s Mrs Laurent. I never officially changed it back.’

He looked impatient now. ‘Will that be all,
Mrs Laurent
?’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘Because it’s none of your damn business.’

She tapped her lower lip with a pen, an implement Felicity Hartford was trying to ban from the office, ostensibly because all work should have been entirely electronic by now, but really to see how irritated everyone would get. It had been Amanda’s idea. ‘You see, Jason,’ she said, ‘it’s okay to think people are idiots. Because on the whole, they really, really are. But not everyone. And that’s where the mistake is easy to make.’

‘Amanda–’

‘
Mrs Laurent
. You end up hating so many people that without even noticing, you start to hate
everyone
. Including yourself. But that’s the trick, you see? The trick that makes everything survivable. You’ve got to love somebody.’

‘Oh, please–’

‘It doesn’t have to be everybody, because that would make you an idiot, too. But it has to be someone.’

‘I really have to–’

‘I, for instance, love my son, my father, my mother, my stepfather, and my ex-husband. Which hurts a little, but there you go. I also loved my father’s fiancée, but she died, and that hurts, too. But that’s the risk of loving anyone.’ She leaned forward. ‘I also love my friends, who at this moment consist entirely of the scariest human resources woman in the history of scary human resources women, and Mei Lo. Now, she’s not much, I’ll give you that, but she’s mine. And if you
ever
talk that way about her again, I’ll pound your no-doubt-entirely-waxed little ass into the carpet so hard you’ll walk funny for the rest of your life.’

‘You can’t talk to me like–’

‘Just did.’ She smiled. ‘Get out. Go find someone to love.’

He left with an angry sneer. Maybe she wouldn’t fire him. It might be more fun to keep him around and make his life miserable.

Oh, God
, she thought.
I’m going to be a terrible boss
.

But she didn’t stop smiling.

She opened her drawer and took another look at the tile. It moved her, still, with the same fresh strength as the first time, when Kumiko had handed it to her in the park as a most impossible gift.

Kumiko
, she thought, and put her hand on her stomach.

Her still flat stomach. Her non-pregnant stomach.

Because of all the important things that could have been discussed,
that
had been the first thing Kumiko had said to her in the midst of the inferno.

The smoke, when Amanda entered George’s house, was a monster. It was like drowning, if the water you were drowning in was not just boiling hot, but also alive and aggressive and angry, water that wanted to murder you, water that was, in fact, smoke from a raging fire and like nothing but itself.

‘GEORGE!’ she had cried, but didn’t get much past the first G before the coughing took over. Two steps beyond the front door and she was choking, a third and a fourth and she was as good as blind. And now that she was inside the house, she didn’t know what to do. This was all ridiculously heroic, but she was scared out of her mind, not only for her father and Kumiko, but for JP, back there without her. She couldn’t leave him, but she couldn’t leave her father either, not to die like this, not to burn up in agony. The indecision was paralysing and was seconds away from being deadly.

And then the ceiling caved in.

A beam struck her on the head and knocked her to the ground. The world disappeared into blackness.

Some time later, a time which would forever be a hole in her life, she felt a hand take hers to get her to rise. It was gentle but firm, and there was no resisting it. She rose unsteadily, her head hurting, her body covered in soot and smoke but, remarkably, without burns, despite the fire raging around her.

She looked up into Kumiko’s eyes.

They were golden. And sad beyond the birth of the world itself.

Kumiko reached out and touched Amanda’s stomach. ‘You are not,’ she said. ‘I am sorry.’

‘I know,’ Amanda replied, surprised. ‘I took a test.’