‘That’s really not half-bad,’ Clare would say, looking over the sketchpad as she pulled his shirt out of his trousers. And what followed was always relaxed and amused and full of the right sort of joy.
He hadn’t stopped sketching and drawing when they married, even when he started the business and she began moving up the civil service solicitor ladder – she’d be a judge some day, they were both sure of it – but he’d never really progressed in the way Clare kept (nicely, encouragingly, full of hope) thinking he would. He remained a sketcher, and the nude charcoals grew fewer and farther between, the headdresses never found again, the languorous afternoons turning slowly, prematurely, into middle-aged naps.
Clare’s new husband, Hank, managed an enormous hotel for an American conglomerate. George had no idea if he drew.
After the divorce, George still sketched, sometimes nothing more than doodling while on the phone, sometimes taking sheets of the posher paper out of stock at the shop and trying his hand at a tree through sunlight or a rainy park bench or a heroically ugly pair of shoes Mehmet had once left behind after a failed audition for The Lion King. Nothing more than that, though. Nothing past lines of pencil, sometimes ink, never charcoal these days.
Until he found the book. He could easily have missed it. It had fallen behind the bins, and he only spotted it when he was gathering up the remains of a thrown-out lunch a lucky pigeon had dragged over half the alley. The book was a John Updike he’d never read (he’d never read any John Updike) called In the Beauty of the Lilies. He had taken it inside, in all its damaged state, and flipped through the ruined pages. Many of the edges were stuck together after having survived rainfall, but there was maybe half a workable book inside.
He was struck by an impulse to draw something on a page. The book’s life was over, it was effectively unreadable, but still, drawing on it seemed both tantalisingly vandalous but maybe also – and this felt increasingly right – a way to lay it to rest, give it a decent burial, like sewing pennies in its eyes. But as he lowered his pencil onto one of the emptier pages, he stopped.
A cutting blade would be better.
Not thinking too hard on the why of this, he dug into his desk and found the blade he used for trimming and splicing when a job needed actual physical assemblage – far rarer these days in the age of computer design, which he did not resist, as it was faster and left him free time to doodle and dawdle and dream. He turned back to the book on his worktable.
It was a Saturday morning. He needed to open the shop any moment now, but instead, he placed the blade on the page. He let out a little gasp as he cut, half-expecting the book to gasp as well. It didn’t, but he still paused after that first cut, looking at what he had done.
And then he did it again.
He cut and cut, small strips, larger ones, curved ones, angled ones, some tearing, many tearing, actually, until he got used to the paper’s particular give. More were just not quite the right shape, so he kept cutting, deep into the words of John Updike (he read snippets when he rested, the paragraphs with their astonishing numbers of semi-colons and not especially much happening).
At some point, he’d opened the shop and left the customers to Mehmet’s mercy while he focused with surprising force on the cuttings, the hours melting together in a way they rarely did. He was unsure what shapes he was really making, but by late afternoon, when Mehmet was getting itchy feet to go home and get ready for a Saturday evening out, he assembled the most smoothly cut shapes on a square of black paper, cajoling them together in the shape he’d begun seeing in his mind’s eye. He didn’t stack them or allow them to reach out into three-dimensions, just laid them flat on the page, not even always touching, urging them towards the shape that felt right, the scattered words and parts of words looking back at him, as if through small, curved windows onto the world built inside the book.
‘Lily,’ Mehmet said, brushing past him to get his coat.
‘What?’ George said, blinking in surprise, having almost forgotten where he was.
‘Looks like a lily,’ Mehmet said slowly, as if talking to a coma patient. ‘My mother’s favourite flower. Which tells you a whole lot about her, if you ask me. Fragrant and likely to stain.’
Mehmet shrugged on his coat and left, but George sat there for a long while, looking at the cuttings.
A lily. Clearly, a lily. From a book called In the Beauty of the Lilies.
He gave an irritated laugh at his own obviousness, precisely the shallowness of vision that had always prevented him from becoming a proper artist, he felt, and he reached to brush it all into the rubbish bin.
But he stopped. It really was a rather good lily.
And so it began. He started haunting the £1 bins of second-hand bookstores, taking only the most damaged, unloved and unlovable books. He never exactly tried to make themed cuttings – hoping to avoid a repeat of the unsubtle lily – but sometimes a line would strike his fancy from the pages of a sixty-year-old, half-mouldy Agatha Christie, and he’d cut the shapes of a paragraphed hand dangling a multi-claused cigarette. Or a lettered horizon with three haiku-looking moons from the pages of a sci-fi novel he’d never heard of. Or a solitary figure carrying a small child, marked only by a single ‘1’ from the ‘Part 1’ of a history of the siege of Leningrad.
He only ever showed the final outcomes to Amanda – Mehmet saw all of them, since he worked at the shop, but that was a different thing than ‘showing’ – and she was courteous about them, which was disheartening, yes, but still he kept on. Experimenting with glues to find the best way to secure them against a background, testing them under glass or not, in frames or not, bordered, unbordered, small or large. He would sometimes try to make a silhouette from a single cutting, managing once a near-perfect rose (from, as an homage to his lily, a falling-apart copy of Iris Murdoch’s An Accidental Rose), but more often getting results akin to the very goose-like crane that Mehmet had accidentally seen.
He had no ambition about them, would never have even considered they were good enough for public view, but they passed the time. They let his hands work, often detached slightly from his mind, and always headed towards something, a mystery only revealed, sometimes even to him, at the moment of assembling the pieces on a flat background. He finished them in various ways and kept them in a corner of the storeroom that Mehmet, graciously, never rummaged through.
They were a bit of fun, sometimes a bit more than that, but usually nothing much, he’d be the first to say, although he would also insist that they were his nothing much.
Until the day Kumiko had arrived. And changed everything.
She was carrying a suitcase, a small one, such as you’d see – his mind went to the image so quickly it distracted him – on the arm of a forties film heroine at a train station: the case barely more than a small box, clearly empty so the actress wouldn’t be distressed, and hanging from a white-gloved hand that showed no dirt. Yet also clearly a suitcase and not a briefcase or handbag.
She was smaller than average without actually being small, long dark hair cascading down to her shoulders, pale brown eyes watching him, unblinkingly. He couldn’t have put a finger on her nationality just then if you’d asked him. She wore a simple white dress, the same colour as the coat draped over her non-suitcase carrying arm, also like a train-bound forties heroine. Finally, she wore a small red hat perched on the top of her head, an anachronism that somehow fit with all the rest.
Her age was as difficult to fix as her origins. She looked younger than him, possibly thirty-five? But as he stared at her, his speech momentarily having left him, something about her stance, something about the exact simplicity of her dress, about the steady eyes still watching him, seemed suddenly from a figure out of time: a lady of vast estates and influence during an ancient Scottish war, a dauphine dispatched to marry in the wilds of South America, the patient handmaiden to a particularly difficult goddess . . .
He blinked, and she was a woman again. A woman in a simple white dress.
With a hat that looked both ninety years out of date and a harbinger of the latest thing.
‘Can I . . . ?’ he finally managed to say.
‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Kumiko.’
No one in the twenty-one year history of the print shop had opened an order this way. George said, ‘I’m George.’
‘George,’ she said. ‘Yes. George.’
‘Is there something we can help you with?’ George said, very, very much not wanting her to leave.
‘I was wondering, please,’ she said, lifting her small case up to the counter, ‘if you could possibly offer advice on how best to print facsimiles of these.’
On closer inspection, the suitcase looked both as if it was made out of paper and as if it was the most expensive piece of luggage George had ever seen. She opened it, undoing small leather straps, and pulled out a stack of large card tiles, each roughly A5-sized and each one black, similar to some of the ones George used for his own book-cut creations.
She set five of them down, one by one, in front of George.
They were pictures, evidently her own work from the way she regarded them, that odd artist’s combination of shy and bold, so expectant of a reaction, good or bad. On one level, they were nothing more than pictures of beautiful things placed against the background of a card. But on further viewing, on a deeper look . . .
Good Lord.
One was a watermill, but nothing nearly so twee as ‘watermill’ suggested. A watermill that seemed to be almost turning from the brook that ran through it, a watermill that existed not in fancy but somewhere specific in the world, a real watermill, a true watermill, near which the great and terrible tragedies of life might have recently happened. And yet also merely a watermill, too, and pretty with it.
There was a dragon in the next one, partially Chinese in style but with the wings of European myth, caught in mid-flight, its eye staring back at the viewer in malevolent mischief. Like the watermill, it was on the border of kitsch, of the sort of tourist tat you could buy for next to nothing from a street vendor. But it didn’t cross that border. This dragon was the one those fake dragons dreamed of being, the meaty, heavy, living, breathing animal behind the myth. This dragon might bite you. This dragon might eat you.
The others were the same, so near easy vulgarity, yet so clearly not. A phoenix rising from the bud of a flower. A stampede of horses cascading down a hill. The cheek and neck of a woman looking away from the artist.
They should have looked cheap. They should have looked tacky and home-made. They should have looked like the worst kind of car boot sale rubbish, the work of a plump, hopeless woman with no other options than an early death by drink.
But these. These were breathtaking.
And what tumbled George’s heart, what made his stomach feel as if he’d swallowed a fluttering balloon, was that they weren’t drawings or carvings or paintings or watercolours.
They were cuttings. Each was made with what looked like slices of an impossible array of feathers.
‘These are . . .’ George said, unable to think of exactly what to say, so he simply said it again. ‘These are . . .’
‘They are not quite there yet, I know,’ Kumiko said. ‘They lack something. But they are mine.’
She seemed to hesitate in the face of George’s intense consideration of the pictures. He looked at them as if he were a kidnap victim and they were his long-sought ransom. He felt as if he was losing his balance, as if vertigo had given his ears a thump, and he raised his hands to steady himself on the counter.
‘Oh!’ Kumiko said, and he saw her smiling down at his left hand.
There was his own cutting, utterly dismal, painfully amateur in comparison, still gripped in the hand that had tried to hide it from Mehmet. He moved to hide it again, but her eyes were already on it, and they weren’t scornful, weren’t mocking.
They were delighted.
‘You’ve made a crane,’ she said.
She was from ‘all over’, she said when he asked her over dinner that night, and had been a sort of teacher. Overseas. In developing countries.
‘It sounds noble,’ she said. ‘I do not want it to sound like that. Like some great woman offering her services to poor, adoring unfortunates. Not at all. It was not like that. It was like . . .’
She trailed off, looking into the dark wood panelling that overpowered the ceilings and the walls. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, George had taken her to a self-consciously old-fashioned ‘English’ restaurant, such as men in morning suits might have eaten at anywhere from 1780 to 1965. A small sign above the door read ‘Est 1997’. He’d been surprised she’d accepted his invitation, surprised she’d been free at no notice whatsoever, but she said she was new to this place and not, at the moment, overflowing with friends.
She’d used that word. Overflowing.
‘The teaching,’ she said, furrowing her brow, ‘the interaction, I should say, was like a hello and a goodbye, all at once, every day. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Not even a little,’ George said. She spoke in an accent he couldn’t place. French? French/Russian? Spanish/Maltese? South African/Nepalese/Canadian? But also English, and possibly Japanese like her name but also neither or any, as if every place she may have travelled hadn’t wanted her to leave and insinuated itself into her voice as a way of forcing her to take it along. He could understand the feeling.
She laughed at him, but nicely. ‘I do not like talking of myself so much. Let it be enough that I have lived and changed and been changed. Just like everyone else.’
‘I can’t ever imagine you’d need changing.’
She pushed some roast beef around her plate without eating it. ‘I believe you mean what you say, George.’
‘That was too much. I’m sorry.’
‘And I believe that, too.’
She’d had a relationship, perhaps even a marriage, that had ended at some point, though it didn’t seem amicably so, like his had with Clare. She didn’t want to talk about that either. ‘The past is always filled with both joy and pain, which are private and perhaps not first date conversation.’
He’d been so pleased she’d called it a ‘first date’ that he missed several of her next sentences.
‘But you, now, George,’ she said. ‘You are not from here, are you?’
‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘I’m–’
‘American.’ She leant back in her chair. ‘So you perhaps do not quite belong either, do you?’
She said she’d taken up the cuttings on her travels. Paints and brushes were too hard and too expensive to truck around from place to place, so she’d first started using local fabrics – batiks or weaves or whatever was to hand – and had moved, more or less by chance, to feathers, after coming across a market stall in Paramaribo or Vientiane or Quito or Shangri-La perhaps, that sold every colour of feather you could imagine and beyond, some concoctions so unlikely they hardly seemed to have come from an animal at all.
‘And looking back on it,’ she said, ‘what an impossible market stall to find. Feathers are difficult to source, and expensive. Yet here they were, pinned to the walls of a poor market seller in melting heat. I was bewitched. I bought as much as my arms could carry, and when I went back the next day, the stall was gone.’
She took a sip of mint tea, an odd thing to have with roast beef, but she’d declined all offers of the red wine George was desperately trying not to drink too quickly.
‘Your pictures are . . .’ George started, and faltered.
‘And again, the sentence you cannot finish.’
‘No, I was going to say, they’re . . .’ Still the word failed him. ‘They’re . . .’ Her face was smiling, a little shy at an incoming critique of her work, but beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful and kind and somehow looking right back at George that to hell with it, in he went, ‘They’re like looking at a piece of my soul.’
She widened her eyes a bit.
But she didn’t laugh at him.
&
nbsp; ‘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.’