by Patrick Ness
They were good. They were very good.
But, she said, ‘They lack life.’
‘They’re gorgeous.’
‘They are gorgeously empty.’
‘They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’
‘They are like nothing empty you’ve ever seen before.’
He would argue with her like this, but then she would remind him of their first day, of that first ‘impertinence’, as she’d called it. Her dragon in that tile had remained the same, a dragon that George refused to agree lacked any life at all. He could see malevolence in the dragon’s eye, made green by what was maybe a bit of glass or garnet.
But now the dragon was threatening George’s crane. The same dragon made of feather flew over the crane made of words on paper. A combination of mediums that shouldn’t have worked. A combination of styles that shouldn’t have worked. George wasn’t even remotely afraid to acknowledge that it was even a combination of competencies (hers exquisitely agile, his barely managing a limp) that shouldn’t have worked.
But oh. But oh. But oh.
‘Holy shit,’ Mehmet had said.
Holy shit indeed, George had thought.
The dragon now had purpose. The crane now had context. The dragon now had a dangerous curiosity, it had potential. The crane now had threat, a serenity about to cease. Together, they had tension. Together, they were more than two incomplete halves, they were a third thing, mysterious and powerful and bigger than the small black square that imprisoned them. A frame had become a film, a sentence had become a story. The dragon and the crane invited you to step in, take part, be either or both, but they were very clear that you would do so at your peril.
And she had given it to him.
‘As a thank you,’ she had said, ‘if you wish it.’
‘No,’ George said. ‘It’s too much. Clearly too much.’
‘I’ll take it,’ Mehmet said.
‘It is finished,’ Kumiko said. ‘You finished it. It belongs to you as much as me.’
‘I . . .’ George started. ‘I . . .’
‘I’ll take it,’ Mehmet said again.
And then Kumiko had said, ‘Tell me, do you regularly make your cuttings?’
Which really started everything.
She didn’t ask him to cut anything specific, felt that that would somehow get in the way of inspiration. But George eagerly began to dedicate every spare moment to making cuttings – raiding the second-hand bookstore bins, buying proper ones if nothing was right, then sending Mehmet to the front of the shop to torture any customers who came in (‘But it says red here on the form.’).
He tried not to think, tried to loosen his concentration from its moorings, allow the blade to just make its marks, letting himself stay unsure of what the final assemblage would be until he put the last slice into place.
‘What is it?’ Mehmet asked of the first one he finished that he was even partway satisfied with.
‘What do you think it is?’ George replied, slightly baffled himself.
‘Some kind of hyena?’
‘I think it might be a lion.’
‘Oh, yeah. One of them stylised jobbies, like they have on England sport shirts.’
‘Jobbies?’
‘Everything old is new again, Captain.’
‘Call me Captain again and you’re fired.’
Mehmet frowned at the hyena/lion. ‘This isn’t some mysterious allure of the East thing you’ve got with this woman, is it? Because I’d find that, like, amazingly offensive.’
‘You’re from the East, Mehmet, and I find you neither mysterious nor alluring.’
‘Ah,’ Kumiko said when she saw the cutting. ‘A lion. Yes.’
And took it away.
He still knew very little about her as yet, what she did with her free time, who her family was, even what she did for money.
‘I live, George,’ she would say, an expression of pained perplexity glancing across her brow. ‘What does anyone do? They live, they survive, they take themselves and their history and they carry on.’
Well, that’s what characters in books do, he would think but not say, but the rest of us need to buy bread and beer once in a while.
She hinted, occasionally, that she lived off savings, but how much money could whatever kind of international aid worker she’d been have stashed away? Unless, of course, it was from before or was family money or–
‘I worry you,’ she said one night in bed, in George’s bed, in George’s house – he still hadn’t been to hers (‘Too small,’ she’d said, frowning at herself. ‘Smaller than anyone would ever believe.’) – in what may have been the third week of their dating. It was a strange time. He’d look back and know they’d spent hours together but would only have clear memories of a few passing moments: her lips parting to eat a polite bite of aubergine, her laughter at the bread-hungry geese who disappointedly followed them around a park, the bemused way she took his hand when he looked uneasy at being surrounded by teenagers in a queue at the cinema (to see a film which vanished like vapours in his memory).
She was almost a half-remembered dream, yet not.
Because here she was, in his bed, mirroring his caresses of her, running a finger from his temple to his chin and saying, ‘I worry you.’
‘I know so little about you,’ he said. ‘I want to know more.’
‘You know everything important.’
‘You say that, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘For example, your name.’
‘You know my name, George,’ she said, amused.
‘Yes, but is Kumiko Japanese?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Are you Japanese?’
She looked at him teasingly. ‘In the sense that my name is, yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Is that an offensive question? I don’t mean it to be–’
‘George,’ she said, sitting up a bit more, looking down at him on the pillow, her finger continuing down through the greying hairs on his chest.
‘Things were not easy for me, before,’ she said, and it was as if the night itself stopped to listen to her. ‘There were hard days, George. Days that I loved, of course, days that I lived to the end of every minute, but more often they were hard. And I do not wish to live in them again.’ She stopped, her finger poking playfully at his belly button, her voice anything but that same playful. ‘There is more of me to know, of course there is.’ She glanced up at him, and he could have sworn her eyes were somehow reflecting golden moonlight that was actually coming from behind her. ‘But we have time, George. We have all the time we can steal. And so, can it wait? Can I be revealed to you slowly?’
‘Kumiko–’
‘I feel safe with you, George. You are safety and softness and kindness and respite.’
George, who had been uneasy with how this conversation was going already, suddenly felt twice as dismayed. ‘Softness?’
‘Softness is strength,’ she said. ‘Stronger than you know.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it isn’t. People say that because it sounds nice, but it’s not really true.’
‘George . . .’
He sighed. He wanted to hold her now, wanted his arms around her, his too rough hands skimming gently over the skin of her back, her thighs, even her feet and hands. He wanted to completely surround her somehow, be a cave for her, be in fact the very respite she had called him, the very respite he resisted being called.
‘My ex-wife,’ George said, regretting introducing her into the bedroom but pressing ahead. ‘She always told me I was too nice, too friendly. Too soft. She didn’t mean it in a bad way, not at all. In fact, she’s still a friend.’ He paused. ‘But she left me. Every woman eventually has. I’ve never done the breaking up with a single woman I’ve ever dated.’ He ran his hand up the side of Kumiko’s arm. ‘People want niceness in their friends, but that’s a different kind of love.’
‘Niceness, George,’ she said, ‘is everything in t
he world that I want.’
And though George heard the words right now silently added to the end of that sentence, he genuinely had no idea if it was because she’d intended them or if they were supplied by his own fearful heart.
He framed the dragon and crane, took his time considering how. A simple flat frame couldn’t even come close to properly doing the job, the depth of the tile’s physical construction preventing it from merely being pressed under glass. Besides, basic frames were for brilliantly toothed children and their Golden Retrievers, not something as challenging, as alive, as this.
After trying and failing at a number of approaches – unglassed, mounted on matte or gloss, set flat to be viewed from above – he finally placed it inside a shallow glass case so that there was empty air around it, a hint of diorama. The case itself had a tarnished gold edge around the corners, like the picture inside might have been in there for hundreds of years and might crumble to dust upon opening. It seemed like a relic from some alternate timeline, an artefact accidentally tumbled through from some other place.
But then, where to put it?
He hung it at home, but for some reason that didn’t seem right. Above his mantelpiece it looked indefinably wrong, a foreign visitor smiling politely and wondering when on earth this dinner party was going to end. The walls of the rest of his rooms were too crowded with books to give it enough space to breathe, so he tried hanging it above his bed. One startlingly incoherent sex dream later (landslides and grasslands and armies running over his very skin), he took it right back down.
So finally, that only left the shop, where at least he would be able to see it every day and where it looked strangely comfortable, watching over him, not at all out of place, somehow, among the best examples of his shop’s work. And this was where he’d met her, of course. So maybe this tile, a crossroads of their two differing arts, just looked most natural hung in the same crossroads where their lives had intersected.
He hung it above his desk, on the back wall, distant from the front counter, slightly too far to be seen clearly, he thought.
But.
‘What on earth is that?’ the man in the suit said, picking up some freshly printed training folders because, he’d said, his secretary was sick. George looked up from his desk, from the small cutting he was making that seemed to be a still life of fruit (or possibly a spaniel) taking shape in front of him.
‘Don’t ask me,’ Mehmet said, still resentful the tile hadn’t been given to him. ‘I don’t think we’d call that art in Turkey.’
‘Then the Turks would be very foolish indeed,’ said the man in the suit, a kind of stunned dazzle in his voice. ‘Is it yours?’ he asked, looking at George keenly, as if on the verge of confirming something he’d always wanted to know. And he meant Is it yours? both ways, George realised. Had George made it? But also, George was curious to hear, did George own it?
‘The crane is mine,’ George said. ‘The dragon is . . .’ He paused for a moment, Kumiko’s name precious on his tongue. ‘Someone else’s.’
‘It’s extraordinary,’ the man said, simply, without undue emphasis, his eyes never moving from it.
‘Thank you.’
‘How much is it?’
George blinked, surprised. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘How much are you offering?’ Mehmet said, crossing his arms.
‘It’s not for sale,’ George said.
‘But if it was?’ both Mehmet and the man said at exactly the same time.
‘It’s not. The end.’
‘Everyone has a price,’ the man said, looking slightly annoyed now, having been denied something he wanted, the injustice that outraged the modern world above all others.
‘That’s about the most hostile thing I’ve heard all day,’ George said.
The man’s posture shifted. ‘I’m sorry. I genuinely am. It’s just that it’s so . . .’
George waited to hear what the man would say. Mehmet seemed to be waiting, too.
‘. . . right,’ the man finally said.
George was astonished to see the man’s eyes now swimming behind incipient tears.
‘Are you sure?’ said the man.
‘I’m sure,’ George said, but respectfully.
‘I’d pay good money,’ the man said. ‘More than you think.’
And then he named a figure so extravagant that Mehmet actually gasped.
‘It’s not for sale,’ George said.
Mehmet turned on him. ‘Are you crazy?’
‘You know,’ said the man, ‘I do actually understand. I wouldn’t part with it either.’ His hand idly patted the pile of training folders on the counter, a motion that contained so much disappointment, so much recognition that he’d bumped up against one of life’s worst limits, George found himself standing. To do what, he didn’t know. To offer the man comfort? To apologise? To simply recognise the importance of the moment?
He would never find out, because the shop door opened and Kumiko came in, smiling up at George in greeting.
‘I hope you do not mind,’ she said, setting her suitcase on the counter beside the man’s folders, seemingly oblivious to his presence. She took out another black tile, hiding its contents from George for the moment. ‘I have taken your lion,’ she said. ‘And I have used it.’
She flipped the tile over with a silently delighted ta-da.
The lion now prowled the watermill. A conjunction even more jarring than the dragon and the crane, but one that somehow, against all possibilities, worked just as well. The trueness of the watermill, which carried history in every glistening feather filament, was now imbued with a warning. Lions alone welcome here, it seemed to say. Lions made only of words. But perhaps this lion, this one here, who had clearly prowled the watermill for so long that it and the watermill were one home, one history, perhaps it might make an exception for you, the viewer. It might still eat you, but then again, it might not. Like the dragon and the crane, the risk would be yours. Would you take it?
‘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 contributio
n 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.
