The Crane Wife (3 page)

‘Don’t you worry. You’ve got my personal guarantee.’

‘You hear that? George Duncan’s personal guarantee.’

‘Which means exactly what?’

‘It’ll be here tomorrow, Paddy, I promise you. If I have to drive to St Ives–’

‘Your printer’s in
St Ives
?’

‘If I have to drive to St Ives and pick it up myself.’

‘That’s a twelve-hour round trip.’

‘You’ve done it? I’ve found the A30 not too bad if you–’

‘Just . . . By tomorrow, please. Spelled properly.’

‘You have my word.’

‘. . .’

‘. . .’

‘. .  . Well,
he
was a grouchy one.’

‘Stop winding up the customers, Mehmet. There’s a recession on.’

‘Ah, see, another good point.
With the recession on, Patty, does the misspelling of one’s name really amount to so very, very much
–’

‘What do I keep saying? Customer service. It’s not something I’ve just made up to punish you.’

‘They only do that stuff in America, George. Can I Help You, Sir. You Look Fabulous In That, Sir. Can I Get You Some More Iced Tea, Sir.’

‘. . . so you’ve never
been
to America then.’

‘Television. Exactly the same thing.’

‘Please, just call St Ives, tell them we have an urgent correction. And while you’re at it, ask them where the Brookman Stag Do t-shirts are. The boys are leaving for Riga tonight and they should have been here by–’

‘Brookman?’

‘. . . Oh, what’s that look, Mehmet? I don’t like that look. Please tell me–’

‘The Brookman ones have already gone out. He came by when you were at lunch.’

‘Oh, no. No, no, no. I checked the order myself and all that had come in were–’

‘The light blue ones with the kittens on the front.’

‘Those were the O’Riley Hen Night! Why on earth would light blue kittens be for a stag do? They even
said
Hen Night
–’

‘We don’t have hen nights in Turkey! How am I supposed to know the difference?’

‘You moved here when you were
three
!’

‘What’s the big deal? They’ll all be so drunk, who’s going to notice?’

‘I suspect ten soldiers from Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards might notice that a light blue cartoon kitten with a hand over its genitals isn’t quite–’

‘Paw.’

‘What?’

‘If it was a kitten, it’d be a paw. And what’s it supposed to be doing, anyway? Pleasuring itself? Because how is that a theme for a hen night?’

‘. . .’

‘What?’

‘Call Brookman, Mehmet. He obviously hasn’t opened his box of t-shirts yet for whatever reason–’

‘Yeah, he did seem in a bit of a hurry. Not even enough time to look at them.’

‘. . . You’re smiling.’

‘I’m not.’

‘You are. You did it on purpose.’

‘I did not!’

‘Mehmet!’

‘You accuse me of everything! It’s racist!’

‘Call him. Now.’

‘I don’t see why I have to do all the crappy jobs around here. All you do is moon around in the back making your precious little
cuttings
. Like what’s that one even supposed to be?’

‘What one?’

‘The one you’ve been carrying this whole time. The one you just hid behind your back.’

‘This? This is nothing. This is–’

‘Looks like a goose.’

‘It’s not a goose. It’s a crane.’

‘A crane.’

‘A crane.’

‘. . . like the kind that builds buildings? ’Cause, George, I hate to break it to you–’

‘Go. Now. Now, now, now, now, now–’

‘I’m
going
.
God
. Slavery was abolished two hundred years ago, you know.’

‘Yes, I know, by William Wilberforce.’

‘And you wonder why no one asks you out. I really don’t think women get turned on by William Wilberforce references. Not that I’d
know
, I’ll admit–’

‘I have had no problems with girlfriends, Mehmet.’

‘You mean like the last one? The secret girlfriend no one ever saw who didn’t have a name? Did she live in Canada, George? Was she called Alberta?’

‘I don’t even begin to understand those sentences.’

‘Musical theatre reference. Like a foreign language to you. Which reminds me, I’ve got an audition–’

‘Yes, fine, whatever, just put it in the schedule and
make the call
. And don’t spend a half hour twittering before you do.’

‘
Twittering
. Was the world in colour yet when you were born, George? And gravity all the time?’

‘Do you honestly think you’re a quality enough employee for me not to fire you?’

‘Oh, here we go. “It’s
my
shop.
I
own it–”’

‘I
do
.’

‘Fine. I’ll leave you here alone with your goose.’

‘Crane.’

‘Well, I hope you’re gonna label it, because no one is ever going to think “crane” when they see that.’

‘It’s not for everyone. It’s . . .’

‘It’s what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, you’ve gone all bashful. You’re even
blushing
!’

‘No, stop, what? Nothing, no. I just. Saw a crane. Last night.’

‘. . . by “crane”, do you mean “prostitute”?’

‘No! Jesus Christ, if you must know, a crane landed in my garden.’

‘. . . And?’

‘And nothing, go make the calls!’

‘Fine, watch me walking.’

‘And quit sighing like that.’

‘Customer, Mr Duncan.’

‘What?’

‘I said,
customer
, George. Behind you.’

‘I didn’t hear the door–’

‘. . .’

‘. . .’

‘. . .’

‘Can I . . . ?’

‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Kumiko.’

P
eople were always surprised to find out that George was American, or at least that he had started life that way. They told him he didn’t ‘seem’ American. When asked what exactly this entailed, they would look uncertain – not uncertain about what ‘seeming’ American might mean but uncertain about how badly they wanted to offend him.

These people, friends even, many of them highly educated, many who had visited America several times, were surprisingly difficult to budge from their assumption that, George aside (of course, of course), his 300 million compatriots were all of them passport-less, irony-hating Jesus-praisers who voted for apparently insane politicians, all the while complaining that their outrageously cheap petrol wasn’t nearly cheap enough. ‘America is,’ they would say, and so confidently, without fear of contradiction or rebuttal to anything that followed.

‘
The New Yorker
,’ he would reply. ‘Jazz. Meryl
Streep
.’

This usually just prompted them to try out their approximation of an American accent, all wheedling brightness and too much blinking. At least it had morphed over the years; for a full decade after he’d moved to England, people would dive ecstatically into J.R. Ewing’s worst twang. ‘I’m from Tacoma,’ he would say.

No one wanted to hear that people other than themselves might be complicated, that no one was ever just one thing, no history ever just one version. It was oddly hard for them to accept that, though American, he was neither from the Deep South or the East Coast, that his upbringing was in the Pacific Northwest, where the accents were mild and nearly Canadian, and even though his parents had ticked a stereotypical box by being regular church-attenders – which, all right, it
was
difficult to find American Protestants who weren’t – they’d been slightly
laissez-faire
about it, as if it were a duty, like vaccinations. His father had been a secret smoker, for example, even though the church was of an evangelical strain and frowned on such things. George also knew from a startling, never-to-be-discussed accidental sighting that his parents occasionally rented pornography on VHS from the gas station down the road. ‘People are legion,’ he would insist, ‘even when it’s inconvenient to a worldview.’

Take his one anomalous school year. Even
that
wasn’t a simple story, as if there were any such things. He had sailed through kindergarten (though who doesn’t sail through kindergarten? he thought. Wasn’t it basically just showing up and not choking on things?) and performed above his level through first and second grades – indeed, occasionally being sent up to fourth grade reading groups just to keep the boredom from setting in. The teachers loved him, loved his big blue eyes, loved a compliance that bordered on the slavish, loved a complexion that looked like he was about to grow a beard, aged six.

‘Sensitive’, they called him in Parent/Teacher Conferences. ‘Dreamy, but in a good way.’ ‘Always with his hand in the air.’ ‘Such a special, tender little guy.’

‘Not special at all,’ said Miss Jones, in the first Parent/Teacher Conference of third grade, a scant two weeks after he’d started. ‘And far too much of a smarty-pants. No one likes a know-it-all. Not the other students and certainly not
me
.’

George’s parents had sat there in polite astonishment, his mother clutching her handbag as if it were a dachshund about to leap down and soil the carpet. His mother and father exchanged a look, his mother’s face especially retreating into that shocked expression she always got when unexpectedly confronted by life. Which essentially was every time she left the house.

George knew all this because 1) they were the kind of parents who would go to every Parent/Teacher Conference (he thought it might be the ‘only child’ thing; they didn’t want to miss even a moment, lest they irreparably screw something up) and 2) they’d been unable to get a sitter that night, despite the vast squadron of teenage girls usually on offer at the church, so he quietly drew with coloured pencils at a spare desk while his mother and father crouched, comically low, in the plastic children’s seats before Miss Jones’s desk.

But Miss Jones was only getting warmed up. ‘I just cannot tell you how tired I am,’ she said, lifting her eyes to Heaven as if praying for an answer to her tiredness, ‘of
every
single parent coming in here and telling me how their little Timmy or Stephanie or
Frederico
’ – she said the name so scornfully even George knew she was talking about Freddie Gomez, the only other boy who’d gone up to higher-grade reading groups with him and who smelled eye-wateringly of soap – ‘is special and talented and God’s gift to third grade knowledge.’

His father cleared his throat. ‘We’re not the ones saying it, though,’ he said. ‘The
school
–’

‘Oh, the
school
, is it?’ Miss Jones leaned forward, coming nearly all the way across her desk. ‘Let me tell you something,
Mister
Duncan,’ she said. ‘These boys and girls are six and seven and eight years old. What do they know about anything except how to tie their shoes and not wet themselves when the bell goes? And not that all of them are so great at
that
, I can tell you.’

‘Well, what does that have to do with the price of milk?’ his mother said, in a tense, strangled tone that made George’s ears prick. She was a nervous lady, his mother. She’d clearly been thrown off balance by Miss Jones’s forthrightness, her volume, her – let’s face it – blackness, and already he could see that things weren’t going to go well. He went back to colouring every quadrant of Snoopy the same shade of green.

It was just this moment when Miss Jones made her mistake. ‘Now, you listen to me, Mrs Duncan,’ she said, and she stuck out her finger and shook it in George’s mother’s face. ‘Just because your boy doesn’t eat paste doesn’t mean he’s gifted.’

George’s mother’s eyes never left the end of the dark brown finger wagging so close to her nose, following it as it bobbed up and down in righteous instruction, invading George’s mother’s space in a way that even George found obscurely upsetting, and just as George’s father said, ‘Now, you listen here,’ in his authoritative, construction foreman voice-of-doom, George’s mother leaned forward and bit the end of Miss Jones’s finger, snapping it hard between her teeth and hanging on for a surprising second or two before all the screaming started.

Now this story, when George told it, always made him nervous in that it gave slightly the wrong impression of his mother. Biting an obnoxious teacher’s finger – though not drawing blood and not quite so painfully that Miss Jones couldn’t be talked out of an assault charge by a principal who acted for all the world as if this wasn’t the first biting-of-Miss-Jones incident to come across his desk – could easily be read as a heroic action. His mother was the star of this story, and why shouldn’t she be? As family anecdotes went, it was a corker, retold with gales of laughter and at frequent request.

‘And I thought,’ his mother would say, blushing with horror and delight that every eye in the room was on her, ‘someone’s gonna bite that finger one of these days. So why not today?’

But George knew, really knew in his heart, that the biting wasn’t the act of someone mastering a situation and bringing it to a close with the perfect outrageous resolution. His mother had
actually
bitten Miss Jones because of a certain detachment from reality, a certain panicky falling-away from things. She was anxious to the point of brittle, like a champagne flute – when, age nineteen, George finally saw his first champagne flute – that needed wrapping and packing away. His father performed this function, taking care of every emergency, handling every possible crisis. His love of his wife – and George was quite certain that he loved her – took the form of ongoing protection that perhaps, in the end, did her more harm than good.

When Miss Jones waggled the finger, George was pretty sure his mother hadn’t felt insulted, she’d felt
attacked
, as if the world was tipping beneath her, and she’d bitten Miss Jones not as an act of triumphant assertion, but because she was trying to
hold on
. By her literal teeth. Life was unravelling under the threat of a single, terrible finger, looming as large as a coming apocalypse from which there would be no mercy, no forgiveness, just everlasting despair. Who wouldn’t lash out in the face of such a terrible affront?

That his mother had gotten it accidentally exactly right, well, that seemed to be just one of those things, and a part of him was pleased for her that, for once, she had. But the story that was told and the story
underneath
that story were different things, and perhaps irreconcilable.