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.