She cut him off, almost gently. ‘I have finished a new tile.’
He was taken aback. ‘Well, but. But that’s wonder–’
‘It is here.’ She went to one of his bookcases and fetched it out from where it was hidden behind a row of books. ‘I had it ready for the party, but there seemed no moment.’
She handed it to him.
‘It’s from the story,’ George whispered, the tears gathering again with full force as he looked down on her clipped and gathered feathers, his clipped and gathered words. ‘Kumiko, it’s . . .’
But he could only look.
The lady and the volcano circled one another warily, both now made of a combination of feathers and words, as their world cowered beneath them. And the tenderness as they watched one another, the anger, the heartache about to erupt, were almost too much for George. He was going to have to lie down in a moment and deal with this strange fever, but for now he just looked and looked, staring at the elegant, bird-like curves of the lady, at the blazing green stones Kumiko had given the volcano for eyes.
‘The story,’ he asked. ‘Is this the end?’
‘Not yet,’ Kumiko whispered, her voice like a breath of cloud. ‘But soon.’
Amanda dreamed she was an entire army eating the earth. Her hands were twisting streams of soldier ants and soldier men, destroying but also dissolving, then re-forming as fingers to grab, fists to pound, her body stretching from horizon to horizon, flattening everything in her path, approaching a city, yes, approaching it and raising a mighty tidal wave of a hand to sweep it all away–
But hesitating now, holding herself back from the final destruction–
And learning in an instant the fatality of this hesitation, because already she is dissipating, already she is falling to pieces, atom by painful atom–
She woke, not with a start, but with a simple opening of her eyes (never knowing this was an exact mirror of how her father woke from nightmares). She reached across the bed to place a hand on the bare skin of Henri’s back, an action that always re-anchored her after a troubling dream, bringing her back to earth, settling her again for sleep.
But Henri wasn’t there, of course. Not for years.
She breathed out slowly across night-dried lips and tried not to let wakefulness take hold. She shifted in the bed and sensed the wetness of night sweats on her sheets. She’d been fighting off a low fever for at least a week, culminating in a lovely new cold sore that now, as she yawned, cracked painfully at the corner of her mouth, like the punishment of an irritable god.
Even in her grogginess, it felt like a punishment she deserved. The days since the party had been fractious and stormy, not least in her own head. She found herself thinking of Kumiko almost constantly, wondering what she was doing that moment, wondering if she was with George, wondering especially when she herself might see her again. It was ludicrous. On one level, it felt like nothing so much as a crush, a surprising one as Amanda had never been attracted to other women – she kept mentally pressing those buttons to see if she had any feelings that way, but so far nada, which was both confusing and slightly disappointing – but the longing didn’t seem physical. Or no, that wasn’t right, it did seem physical but not that kind of physical. It was almost like the foods she had craved when she was pregnant with JP, her body telling her with unstoppable force that she had to eat peanuts and pineapple or die. Yes, that seemed to be it, Kumiko was a vital element that Amanda needed to keep on living.
Which made no sense. Nor did the anger she felt when further meetings with Kumiko proved difficult to arrange. Nor did her growing jealousy of George for the time he got to spend with her. She knew all of it was irrational, but what good did rationale ever do in the face of need?
‘We’ve had to start saying no to people about the tiles,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘It was getting too much, so we just told everyone to leave us alone for a bit. Frankly, I’m happy for a breather. Everything’s been so fast.’
‘Yes,’ Amanda replied, surprising both of them with the heat in her voice. ‘That’s what the rest of us have been thinking. How fast it’s all been.’
She’d winced to herself about how petty she sounded. But didn’t quite apologise.
‘No need to sound quite so put out about it,’ George said. ‘I hope you don’t mean the marriage?’
‘Yes, George, the marriage is what I mean.’
‘But Kumiko is–’
‘Kumiko is marvellous. Kumiko is wonderful. She’s like no one I’ve ever met before.’
‘She is that–’
‘But it’s barely a couple of months,’ she heard herself saying, harshly, pointlessly. ‘How well do you really know her?’
He paused at that, and she thought she could hear his discomfort, even in the silence. ‘Well enough. I think.’
‘You think?’
At which he’d grown suddenly stern. ‘What I really think is that this isn’t your business, Amanda. For too long you’ve thought you had the right to just come into my life and tell old George what to do. Well, you can’t. I’m forty-eight. I’m your father. I’ve met a woman I love and I’m going to marry her and I don’t need your permission or your approval, all right?’
Almost by reflex, Amanda waited for him to say he was sorry, like he did every other time he’d snapped at her, possibly across her entire life.
Except, this time, he didn’t.
‘We barely knew Henri before you married him and you didn’t hear us complaining.’
‘Well, Mum complained a little–’
‘And we didn’t know about the divorce until he’d already moved back to France, so don’t talk to me about too fast.’
‘That was different. I was young. Young people do that stuff when they’re finding themselves.’
And then he said the meanest thing he would ever say to her, all the more painful for being one hundred per cent true.
‘The slash-and-burn way you go about it, Amanda, you’ll be looking for yourself the rest of your life.’
For that, he had immediately apologised, blaming some kind of vague, lingering man flu for his temper, but it was too late. It felt as if he had shot her with an arrow. Worse, an accurate one. They hadn’t spoken since. It wasn’t quite that dramatic, she’d speak to him again soon, she was sure, and she certainly wasn’t going to get in the way of JP seeing his rightfully adored grand-père.
No, what hurt was that she realised what she’d said to Kumiko at the party was right. Amanda yearned, even for the things she already had. And it was poison, not even sweet-tasting.
The insane dreams weren’t helping. Regular, with content so weird it almost felt like her personality was being disassembled. She always woke from them exhausted. It might only have been the fever, but lordy. She lay awake now, her bladder deciding to not so gently insist that, if she was awake, there were matters that could use tending, another similarity to her father she’d go to her grave without knowing. The clock read an obscene trio of numbers, 3.47. Work was in a few hours, and she needed to get some sleep. She sighed and got up, hoping to make it quick.
But thinking of work made her think of Rachel, and as she moved down the hallway she woke up some more whether she wanted to or not. Rachel had grown even stranger since the night of the party, buoyed up, it seemed, by an apparent happiness that bordered on the deranged.
‘He’s too hairless,’ Amanda had been saying to Mei just this morning, chatting about a reality TV star who’d cross-pollinated to another reality show set in a jungle. ‘It’s like looking at a really hunky ten-year-old, and who wants that?’
Both Mei and Amanda had physically recoiled at the explosion of Rachel’s laughter nearby. They’d been unaware she was even listening. ‘Maybe Michael Jackson?’ she’d said, leaning in with a slightly terrifying smile.
‘Um, that’s not funny?’ Mei said, anxiously. ‘He’s dead now? And I like him?’
‘Sweet Jesus,’ Rachel said, looking at Mei in astonishment. ‘
Talking in questions really is annoying.’ She’d turned to Amanda. ‘By the way, Amanda, good work on Essex. I’ve been telling Felicity you’re out for my job.’
She’d laughed out loud again, and Amanda watched her go with her mouth open, for once feeling exactly as amazed as Mei.
Maybe Rachel really was having a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t that the cheerfulness was unwelcome but – Amanda didn’t know the word, sparkly would do – Rachel had an uncomfortably sparkly feel to her, like she was a grenade well past the point where she should have exploded. All you could do was keep a safe distance and hope for the best.
Amanda stumbled into her bathroom and sat down on her freezing toilet, gasping at the temperature. She put a hand on the radiator to try and get some heat flowing through her. The bathroom was, bizarrely, in the corner of the building. Instead of putting the sitting room here to give it a nice double-sided view, the architects had elected to use it for the one place in the flat where you regularly got naked and expelled things.
She didn’t turn on the light, though the hopes of keeping a minimal level of consciousness were fading with both the train of her thoughts and the cold on her bottom. The gorgeous moonlight coming through the windows would have added several per cent to her flat’s resale value if it could have been seen romantically over the back of a settee. It was almost bright enough to read in here.
She finished peeing, dried herself, flushed and stood, pulling the elastic of her sleeping-alone knickers – which were getting far too much wear recently – up to her waist.
Then she stopped.
What the hell? she thought, and turned and vomited down the still-spiralling water.
Well, she was wide awake now.
‘Seriously,’ she whispered, genuinely startled. ‘What the hell?’
She knelt there for a chilly second, waiting to see if there was more to come. She hadn’t drunk anything this evening or eaten anything dodgy. She still felt slightly feverish, true, but there’d not been any nausea over the week and–
She stopped.
Then she forced herself to complete the thought.
And she’d used a condom with Henri.
(Hadn’t she?)
Yes.
(Yes?)
She sat back. Yes, of course she had, there’s no way they’d risk a thing like that, it was automatic. Wasn’t it?
When was her last period? It had always been an irregular guest, but surely she’d–
‘Okay, now you’re just freaking yourself out,’ she whispered into the moonlit darkness. She couldn’t quite remember her cycle this late at night and they had used a condom. Of course they had. This was just a tummy thing. That was all.
She waited to see if she needed to vomit again, but didn’t and got up. The violent opening of her mouth had made her cold sore ache, so after she swished some mouthwash to get rid of the taste, she reached for the anti-viral cream.
That’s when the sound came, so unexpected and so quickly over it was like being doused with ice water.
She froze.
There was only silence now, and she wondered if she’d imagined it. And then got annoyed with herself because who ever imagined a sound? It was one of those idiotic things people said in movies when they were about to be killed by a bear-trap-carrying torturer.
No, she had heard something, something loud, outside the building.
But what?
An animal’s call? She looked out the window framing the beautiful moon, a window that unfortunately overlooked a less beautiful car park and too-busy street beyond. She was on the fourth floor, and even with the silence of a city at 3.47 in the morning, it seemed quite a distance over which to hear a fox, which it hadn’t really sounded like anyway. Foxes were like silent film stars about to be ruined by the advent of sound, beautiful but with the most affronting croak.
She put her face close enough to the glass to catch the steam of her breath. There was nothing out there, just the usual grazing cars in the car park, lit by a single yellowish streetlight. Nothing stirred in the road beyond either, not even the hourly nightbus that took her three months to learn to sleep through. She leaned over the bath to look out the other window, which really only showed another corner of the same car park and the roof of a building that had held a series of fleeting, dodgy-sounding businesses.
Nothing. All she could hear was her own breathing and the ticking of the radiator.
What could it have been? It had felt oddly sorrowful, like a cry of mourning or heartbreak. Or perhaps a cry for a lover who would never answer–
‘Oh, please,’ she said to herself, shivering. ‘It was a fox. Not an operetta.’
Nothing continued to happen, so she gave up and left the bathroom, pausing only when she felt her stomach rumble again, queasily poking at her like a separate person down there–
No! Not like a separate person. Not anything remotely like that whatsoever. Just queasiness. That’s it, that’s all, queasiness. Aside from the whole having-sex-with-his-ex-wife-while-his-girlfriend-was-tending-to-her-mother thing, which, granted, wasn’t exactly a plus for him, Henri was a responsible and considerate man. He wouldn’t have dreamt of risking something like that. Besides, she’d seen him put it on.
Had she?
‘Oh, shit,’ she whispered.
She tried to picture it happening, tried to see him doing it that night on her sofa, and yes, there he was in her mind’s eye, his hand rolling it down over himself as she unhooked her bra. But the whole episode had been so quick, so unhinged, that had she really seen it or had he just been stroking himself in the way that men seemed such prisoners to when they had their erections out in the open? And where would he have got a condom anyway? She didn’t have any in the flat and why would he be carrying one if he’d been with Claudine for the past couple of years–
‘Stop it,’ she said to herself firmly. ‘Just stop.’
Annoyingly, she couldn’t even call him to clear things up because they’d been quarrelling as well. Over JP, naturally. Henri wanted him to come to Montpellier for two whole weeks so he could be ‘properly introduced to France’.
‘No way,’ Amanda had said.
‘You cannot just say no way, Amanda,’ he said. ‘That cannot be how this conversation begins.’
‘He’s four. He gets homesick if we’re gone for a long afternoon. When he’s older–’
‘When he’s older, I will already be a stranger. I am a stranger now–’
‘No, you’re not. I can’t get him to shut up about you– ’
‘You see, you are trying to shut him up about me!’
‘Henri,’ she’d growled in frustration. ‘He is too young for a two-week trip–’
‘One week, then.’
‘He’s too young for a one–’
‘This is about me. You must admit this at least, Amanda. You are angry with me over what happened–’
Then she said, somewhat ironically given the current circumstance, ‘Oh, God, why are men so endlessly stupid about sex?’
They’d then spent a few minutes swearing at each other in French before hanging up with the issue of JP’s visit completely decided on her part and ‘still to be discussed’ on his.
She stopped by JP’s room now and looked in on her son. Still far too small for his new big-kid bed, he was sprawled as much as he could across a Wriggle duvet and even then he barely occupied more than a tiny corner of it. She went in and re-covered him.
‘Ce sont mes sandales,’ he mumbled, without opening his eyes. ‘Ne pas les prendre.’
‘I won’t, booboo,’ she said, kissing him on his sweaty little forehead, avoiding her cold sore. ‘I promise.’
He nestled back into his Wriggle pillow and was soon deep asleep once more. He was so beautiful there in the moonlight, Amanda found herself near tears again.
‘For God’s sake,’ she whispered.
At least being pregnant would explain all this weird emotional stuff lately. The jealousy of her father ove
r Kumiko. The inexplicable yet tremendously upsetting feeling that somehow Kumiko was being taken away from her. It might even explain the intoxicating memory of Kumiko feeding her the rice pudding, the feel of Kumiko’s fingertips in her mouth, a connection utterly unexpected, utterly – as far as Amanda was concerned – taboo and surprising, but a connection that pulled at her very guts, so much so she occasionally put her own fingertips in her mouth to replicate it.
It was childish, maddening, but George marrying Kumiko felt like she had somehow missed the best chance of her life. Everything after would be diminishment. She still guarded the devastatingly beautiful tile Kumiko had given her (because devastating was right, wasn’t it? She looked at it and was devastated) with a fierceness that bordered on desperation. She kept it in a sock drawer now, hidden away and never taken to work again, and she didn’t speak of its existence to anyone, not even George.
If she was honest with herself, which was difficult because the truth was so markedly uncomfortable, she admitted she was probably guarding all these things – the tile, the fingertips, her jealousy – against the thin, flickering hope that one day Kumiko might share all her unknowable secrets with Amanda. And perhaps that meant one day Amanda might be able to share hers, to finally show someone the flaw underneath the carapace of her personality, to maybe, possibly, even discover it wasn’t a flaw after all . . .
Which was all impossible now because of course George would be the person Kumiko confided in now that they were marrying. No matter how dear her and Kumiko’s friendship might grow, Amanda would never be the one with whom Kumiko discussed all those impossible things. And that made her sad enough to well up, again. None of it made any logical sense, and oh God, if pregnancy was the explanation–
‘Mama?’ JP asked from his bed. ‘Are you crying?’
‘No, no, sweetheart,’ she said, wiping her eyes quickly. ‘It’s only the moonlight. It’s so beautiful, don’t you see?’
‘I am sometimes the moon. When I sleep, I am.’
‘I know,’ she said, brushing away a lock of his hair. ‘That’s why you’re always so hungry in the morning.’