The Crane Wife (6 page)

Amanda ploughed on, oblivious. ‘None of it’s real, even in terms of the story. In order for the plot to work at all, everyone has to act like a complete moron, and then they get to the end and not only is there no magic, the wizard is just some show-off loser who’s tricked everyone into following him, and before they can try his ass before the International Courts of Justice, he escapes in a balloon. He’s practically Miloševi
[ć]
.’

She stopped briefly, because she could see the whites around every part of Karen’s eyes, but she hoped it was from the dodgy tablets they’d bought from the overweight boy by the toilets, who’d said they were Ecstasy he’d found in his older brother’s old bedroom, so they could have been up to twenty years expired and were probably, in the end, Panadol.

‘You’re joking, right?’ Karen said.

‘And then she goes back home,’ Amanda sailed right on, thinking, somehow, that this was encouragement, ‘and we’re supposed to be
happy
that she’s returned to her old, small, black-and-white horizons? That dreams are all well and good, but don’t forget that you’re actually trapped on the farm forever? Same reason I hate the Chronicles of fucking Narnia. Oh, God, and don’t get me started on
him
.’ The Cowardly Lion minced onscreen. ‘The stuff of nightmares.’

Karen looked incredulous. Or rather,
more
incredulous. ‘The Cowardly Lion?’

‘Oh, come on.
Look
at him and tell me you don’t see every paedophile you’d warn your daughter away from. I always think he’s about to whip it out and lay down on top of Dorothy.’ She put on a frankly hideous version of the Cowardly Lion’s voice. ‘
Come on, little Dorothy, sit on your Uncle Lion’s lap and he’ll show you
why
he’s king of the jungle, uh-huh, uh-huh.
And then he pushes her to the ground and pulls her panties right on down to those ruby–’

Amanda stopped because the look on Karen’s face was, at last, unmistakeable. Panadol never made anyone look that way.

‘Well, don’t
cry
about it,’ Amanda said, but it was too late.

Karen, it turned out, had been ‘fiddled with’ – Karen’s own horrible, multiply-repeated phrase – by her grandfather from ages five to fourteen. It only stopped when he’d died. Not only that, when she’d told her parents, they’d thrown her briefly out of the house, allowing her back to do A-levels only when she’d completely recanted.

‘You don’t know,’ she’d sobbed into Amanda’s arms in the long, long hours that followed. ‘You just don’t know.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Amanda said, awkwardly patting Karen’s head. ‘No, I don’t.’

It might have brought them closer together. It probably
should
have, but instead, Karen started bringing friends over with whom she’d abruptly stop talking whenever Amanda entered the room. And that, once more, was that.

The baffling thing was that she had no idea
why.
Her childhood had been perfectly normal, from what she could tell. She was still close to both George and Clare, despite the divorce, and there’d never been any undue worry about money or security. It just felt like she’d been born with a small flaw, right at the centre of herself, a flaw somehow too shameful to be shown to anyone else, so she’d spent her life building a carapace around it to keep it hidden. Inevitably, the carapace
became
her true self, a fact she could never quite see, a fact that might have offered relief. Because all
she
knew was the truth deep inside of her, the little something wrong no one else could ever, ever know. And if that wasn’t the real her, then what was? At her core, she was broken, and life was just one long attempt to distract people from noticing.

‘Are you having a good time, sweetheart?’ her father would ask in his every-other-day call.

‘Yes, Dad,
Jesus
,’ she would say to keep from crying.

‘Because everyone says your college years are your best years, but I have to confess, I found them sort of awkward and . . . Well, awkward actually about covers it.’

‘You find everything awkward, George,’ she’d said, bending at the waist to stop the sob rising in her throat.

He’d laughed. ‘I suppose so.’ Which was so upsetting somehow – his kindness, the pointlessness of it – that when he’d asked, ‘Are you sure you don’t need any more money?’, she’d had to hang up on him.

Rachel and Mei sat down, taking up five-sixths of the picnic blanket between them. It wasn’t quite warm enough for a picnic, really, but Rachel liked these sorts of gruelling challenges, wanting to see, Amanda thought, how much she could get her friends to put up with. If you complained, you lost.

‘So who’s looking after JP?’ Rachel asked, not taking off her coat.

‘My dad,’ Amanda said, looking through the basket and failing to find anything she liked to eat. She settled on a plastic tub of salad. ‘Is there dressing?’

Another pause, then another quiet, shared laugh between Mei and Rachel. Amanda ignored it and found, at least, a small, very expensive-looking bottle of olive oil. She poured it sparingly over the greens and the other greens and the various other greens besides those. She screwed the cap on too vigorously and felt it snap under her fingers. It now spun fruitlessly and refused to stay on. She carefully put it back into the picnic basket, setting the cap on it in a way that at least made it
look
closed, checking to be sure that neither Rachel nor Mei had seen.

‘My dad would never babysit,’ Rachel said, pouring a mug of coffee from an outrageously sleek thermos. ‘Never changed a nappy in his life? Didn’t bother learning our names until we were five?’

‘Oh, please,’ Mei said, surprising both Amanda and, it seemed, herself, before quickly re-shaping her face into one of cheerful acquiescence. Amanda didn’t dare hope for solidarity here; it was probably just how much Rachel liked to play up the Australian-ness of her father until he was practically roping cattle with his teeth while surfing and drinking a beer.
Does he have that weird Australian pug nose?
Amanda had never asked.
Or the omnipresent layer of Australian male baby-fat?
she’d never queried.
Or a ponytail out of an inbred ’70s jug-band?
she’d never wondered aloud. She checked herself internally. She was being grossly unfair. But wasn’t grossly unfair sometimes
thrilling
?

‘Dad’s great with JP,’ she said. ‘He’s very kind, is my father. Gentle.’

‘Mmm,’ Rachel didn’t quite say, looking across the field they’d chosen to some youths also taking advantage of the weather to kick around a football. ‘Jake Gyllenhaal’s younger brother, three o’clock.’

Mei blinked. ‘You know, I never know what you mean by that. You say “three o’clock” like it’s a direction.’

‘It
is
a direction?’ Rachel said, pointing. ‘Twelve, one, two,
three
o’clock? Not that difficult?’

They turned and looked at Mr Three O’Clock who, Amanda would never admit out loud, was indeed handsome, if a bit too young even for her, though possibly not for the six-years-older Rachel. His hair was as thick and luscious as a milkshake, and there was no way he didn’t know it. Even at this distance, he gave off self-regard like the Queen gave off forbearance.

‘He looks like he cries when he comes,’ Amanda said, not realising she’d said it out loud until she heard Mei snort with laughter. She turned, but Mei was already retreating again under Rachel’s glare. Mei quickly picked up her phone to keep tracking her daughter. ‘Still in Nando’s,’ she said.

‘Well, at least Marco takes an interest?’ Rachel said. ‘At least he’s not off with some hot new girlfriend in another country? Forgetting every bit of his duty?’

Amanda’s fork stopped halfway between the last bite of the salad and her mouth, momentarily so stung that swift tears filled her eyes. Blunt willpower alone kept them from spreading down her cheeks.

Because it wasn’t like that. Well, it
was
, but it also wasn’t. Henri
was
back in France and living with Claudine now but Amanda had basically forced him to go, booting him out of her and JP’s life with a force and constancy that had surprised even her. He called JP every week, though, even if JP’s four-year-old phone skills were barely rudimentary. Henri said he just wanted his son to hear real French, wanted him to hear his name (Jean-Pierre) pronounced properly, wanted him to hear the lullabies his own grandmother had sung to him.

If Amanda’s heart hadn’t ripped freshly in two every time she heard Henri’s voice, it might have even been sweet.

They’d met her last year at university, seeing each other first in a shared tutorial, then overlapping at the same parties. He was stocky, and manly to the point of bullheaded. His hair was going saltily grey even at twenty, and out of every girl in the tutorial,
she
was the one he sat by, seeing – he eventually told her – a kind of kindred intensity, like she’d not only be able to kill an enemy, but eat him, too.

For her part, she got so giddy every time he was in the same room that she began to live in a state of almost permanent fury. She’d refused to even tell her parents about him for months, lest there be any hint of laughter at her falling so hard, though they would of course have been the last people to do so.

She took most of it out on Henri. ‘You’ve got
fire
,’ he said, and though it sounded ludicrous even in a French accent, they’d each been so turned on it hardly mattered. It was like a hurricane courting a scorpion. Objects thrown, unbelievable sex, months lived in a kind of constant, shivering fever. It had all felt so young! It had all felt so French! She’d been swept away, but in hindsight only in the sense that a landslide brings down a highway: unstoppable catastrophe, followed by rubble. They’d even argued at their wedding. During the ceremony.

One month into their marriage, she discovered she was three months pregnant and immediately began finding even more fault with him. He didn’t separate the knives into steak versus regular. He piled his fag ends in the potted camellia she’d hung out on their new balcony in a flat he never finished renovating like he promised. And then, one night, during still-rather-amazing seven-months-pregnant make-up sex, he had looked so angry that she’d spontaneously slapped him across the face, hard enough for her wedding ring to cut his cheek, an action that shocked her so deeply she’d stayed at her father’s that night, frightened of what she was capable of doing next.

Henri left the next day. ‘It is not the slap,’ he said, maddeningly calm. ‘A Frenchman can take a slap, Lord knows. It is how your face looked when you did it.’ He took her arm with a gentleness that told her it was over more brutally than any fight ever could have. ‘You fight your hatred for yourself, anyone can see, and you do your best, taking it out on people who you think will be strong enough to handle it. I understand this. I am the same. It is hard but it is bearable if your love for me is bigger than your hate. But it has tipped somewhere along the way, and there is no recovery from that, I do not think. For either of us.’

The pain of this made her anger blaze anew, and she’d swept him away in a torrent of vengeful promises that he’d never see his son, that if he didn’t disappear, she’d tell a judge
he
slapped
her
– and what English judge wasn’t prepared to believe that about a Frenchman? – so he’d better leave the country altogether or she’d have him arrested.

He finally believed her. And left.

Yet when their son was born, she named him after Henri’s beloved late uncle, like they’d once discussed. She’d immediately shortened it to JP, but still. Even now, she spoke French to him as much as English to make sure he stayed fluent and could talk freely to his father.

Henri had been the love of her life, and she’d never be able to forgive him for it. Or herself, it seemed.

In the meantime, he called, and the sound of his voice made her sad enough to turn up the telly while he spoke, haltingly, to JP, who answered everything into the receiver with a very cautious, ‘
Oui
?’

‘Look,’ Amanda said, shoving her fork back into the salad container and swallowing the tears. ‘I’m sorry for what I said about the Animals In War thing. I’m sorry for swearing. I’m sorry for fucking
everything
, all right? There’s no need to dole out more punishment.’

Mei’s eyes seemed to genuinely fill with surprised concern, but Rachel stormed in first. ‘It’s not the Memorial?’ she said. ‘It’s more like your overall
vehemence
?’

Amanda, who’d expected – foolishly, it now seemed – to be greeted with fast assurances that she had nothing to apologise for, got irritated all over again. ‘My grandpa Joe lost a leg in Vietnam,’ she said. ‘And then got spat on by peaceniks when he came back in his wheelchair. So forgive me if I think a monument to a
carrier pigeon
is in bad taste.’

‘
Whoa
,’ Mei whispered. ‘Your grandfather fought in Vietnam?’

‘That can’t possibly be true,’ Rachel said, her voice growing harder.

Amanda froze. It wasn’t actually true. Grandpa Joe had never been drafted and had died on a worksite when a digger accidentally severed an artery in his thigh. She could just feel the bad karma piling up for pretending otherwise even for a moment. But needs must.

‘Did he kill any Vietnamese?’ Mei asked, suddenly serious in the way she always was when anyone within hearing distance might have been disrespecting any Asian of any kind.

Rachel tutted scornfully. ‘British soldiers didn’t actually
fight
in Vietnam? Australians bloody well did, though. My father–’

‘My grandfather was
American
,’ Amanda said, because that part was true.

Mei looked at Rachel. ‘Was he?’

‘On your mum’s side?’ Rachel said, looking perplexed, in a way that was perplexing to Amanda.

‘No, my dad,’ she said. ‘My dad’s American.’

‘No, he isn’t,’ Rachel laughed. ‘Your dad’s British? I’ve met him? Like more than once? You’re such a little liar, Amanda. It isn’t clever? And it isn’t funny?’

‘Excuse me,’ Amanda said. ‘I think I know the nationality of my own father.’