by Patrick Ness
For a strange passing instant, she seemed to blur. George could think of no other word for it. He would look back on this moment, press at it, see if he could sense something more there that he could name, because it really did feel like it was here that the important thing happened. He didn’t know, would never know, what it was, but this momentary blur of her, when she was somehow there and not there, seemed indelibly the moment where the story ended. It was a moment that should have lasted for an eternity, at least.
But it passed almost immediately. The blurring ceased as quickly as it had begun, though there was something different about her when she knelt down to him now, something less defined, like all boundaries had fallen from her.
‘What just happened?’ he asked. ‘Something–’
‘She is safe, George,’ Kumiko said. ‘Amanda is safe.’
‘What? How can you know that? How can you–?’
But she was already raising her hand to the skin of her chest again, and once more she drew a line with her fingernail. The skin opened, the fissure parting to reveal–
‘Kumiko, no,’ George whispered. ‘What have you done?’
She put her hands on his cheeks, the tears from her golden eyes streaming. ‘You saved me once, George. And by loving me, you have done so again.’
She brought his lips to hers, and they kissed. It tasted to George of champagne and flight and flowers and the world being born and of the very first moment he laid eyes on her and she’d told him her name and it all burned bright as the raging sun, so bright he had to close his eyes.
When he opened them, she was gone.
‘Why are you crying, grand-père?’ JP asked, a moment and a lifetime later. Then he whispered fiercely, ‘And why are you naked?’
‘She’s gone,’ George couldn’t stop himself from saying.
‘Who?’
George wiped his eyes. ‘The lady who was just here. She had to go.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And your grand-père is very, very sad about that.’
JP blinked. ‘What lady?’
‘Okay, this is weird,’ Rachel said, sitting up on the grass, looking like she was trying to figure out where the hell she was. She saw the fire and looked astonished, then saw George and JP and looked even more astonished.
‘Are you all right?’ George asked.
Rachel seemed to take this question very seriously, even putting a hand to her chest as if to check her heart was still beating. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I think I really am.’ She got to her feet, swaying a little, but upright. ‘I think I really am all right.’ She laughed. And laughed again.
‘MAMAN!’ JP suddenly shouted, leaping from George and dashing towards a figure staggering, impossibly, out the back door of the burning kitchen.
(Out the locked back door of the burning kitchen, George had a second to think.)
Amanda.
Her face and clothes were black with smoke, the whites of her desperate eyes comically bright under the thick layer of soot. She was coughing into her fist but coming away seemingly unharmed from the wall of flame behind her. ‘JP!’ she cried and came running to meet him halfway across the lawn, picking him up in a fearsome hug. She staggered over to George. ‘Dad!’
‘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.
V.
No 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.
&
nbsp; ‘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.’
The fire and smoke roared, but seemed to do so slowly now, in a way that allowed them this pocket within the maelstrom.
‘You thought it would give you a connection,’ Kumiko said.
‘I did,’ Amanda said, simply, sadly. ‘I really did.’
‘You already have connections. So many.’
‘Not so many.’
‘But enough.’
Kumiko turned to the body on the floor. Amanda looked with her, knowing who it was, who it must be, but feeling for a moment that it was maybe not so important. The fire still raged but was receding somehow, blurring into a slow smear.
Kumiko reached a finger over to Amanda’s chest and drew a line down the jumper she’d thrown on. The fabric parted, as did Amanda’s skin and tissue beneath it. Her heart was exposed to the light.
It was no longer beating.
