Free The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness Page B

‘They’re like looking at a piece of my soul.’
    She widened her eyes a bit.
    But she didn’t laugh at him.
    ‘You are very kind, George,’ she said. ‘But you are wrong. They are like looking at a piece of
my
soul.’ She sighed. ‘My as yet incomplete soul. They lack something. They are nearly there, but they . . . lack.’
    She looked into her cup of tea as if what she lacked might be there.
    She was impossible. Impossibly beautiful, impossibly talking to him, but also impossibly
present
, so much so that what else could she be but a dream? The soles of her feet must be hovering a centimetre above the ground. Her skin would turn out to be made of glass that would shatter if touched. Her hands, on closer inspection, would be translucent at the least, clear enough to read through.
    He reached forward impulsively and took her hand in his. She let him, and he examined it front and back. There was nothing unusual about it at all, of course, just a hand (but
her
hand,
hers
) and, embarrassed, he set it back down. She didn’t let him go, though. She examined his hand the same, looking at his rough skin, at the hair that gathered so unattractively across the backs of his fingers, at the nails chewed too short for too many decades to be little more than buried tombstones at his fingertips.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
    She gently let him go and reached into the small suitcase, placed down by her chair. She took out the small cutting of George’s crane, which she had asked if she could have at the shop. She held it in the palm of her hand.
    ‘I wonder if I might perform an impertinence,’ she said.
    The following day was a nightmare. Retrieving the kitten t-shirts from the Brookman party had proven surprisingly difficult as they’d taken an equally surprising liking to them.
    ‘What’s funnier than ten army officers wearing way-too-tight light blue t-shirts with a wanking kitten on the front?’ Brookman had said on the phone.
    George could think of any number of things. ‘It’s just that the O’Riley Hen Party were sort of
counting
on them. They’re personalised to each member’s–’
    ‘We know! We’ve already divvied up the names. The Best Man is
definitely
Boobs.’
    George had ended up having an in-town t-shirt printer do a rush job at his own exorbitant expense to reproduce another batch for the hen party and hoped to God they hadn’t found any sudden EasyJet bargains to Riga as well. Mehmet, meanwhile, was feigning stomach illness to try and leave early, which he regularly did on Friday afternoons, and George had also spent the entire day toiling over the almost literally incredible news that Kumiko had yet to acquire a mobile phone that worked in this country, so he had no way of calling or texting her, or obsessing over calling or texting her, or obsessing over
not
calling or texting her and had reached a point of near-implosion about having nothing but her word that he’d ever see her again.
    When, of course, in she walked.
    ‘My impertinence,’ she said, laying the suitcase on the front counter.
    She removed her feathered tile of the dragon: white, tightly woven strands of feather and stalk on the plain black background.
    And beside the dragon, she’d affixed his cutting of the crane.
    ‘Holy shit,’ Mehmet said, seriously, peering over George’s shoulder. ‘That’s amazing.’
    George said nothing, because if he spoke, he would weep.
    ‘It’s a picnic,’ Amanda said the next morning, handing JP over to George in a pile of biscuit-smelling flesh.
    ‘
Grand-père
!’ JP shouted.
    ‘Bit cold for a picnic, isn’t it?’ George asked, after he’d kissed JP and taken him inside. Amanda followed him in but didn’t sit down.
    He saw her glancing at the papers and clothes and books galore that made his sitting room not the most obviously child-friendly place in the world. It didn’t matter. JP adored George, and George adored his grandson. They could have been stuck in prison and made a