‘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.
‘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 day of it.
‘Not for Rachel and Mei,’ Amanda said.
‘Rachel?’ George asked.
‘You remember,’ she said. ‘The girl from work who came to my birthday a few months back. Mei, too. Both pretty, both vaguely evil-seeming. Rachel more so.’
‘Yes,’ George said, bouncing a giggling JP up and down in his arms. ‘I think I remember them.’
‘We sit in the sun. We look at boys. We drink wine.’
‘Sounds nice.’
‘They hate me. And I think I hate them.’
‘I met someone,’ he said, so quickly it must have been obvious he’d been holding it in. ‘She’s called Kumiko.’
Amanda’s face froze for a minute. ‘All right.’
‘Came into the shop. We’ve gone out the last two nights. And again tonight.’
‘Three nights in a row? Are you teenagers?’
‘I know, I know, it’s a lot all at once, but . . .’ He set JP down on the sofa, burying him in dusty, old cushions so that he’d have to escape, a game JP loved.
‘But?’ Amanda asked.
‘Nothing,’ George shrugged. ‘Nothing. I’m just saying I met a nice lady.’
‘All right,’ Amanda said again, carefully. ‘I’ll pick him up before four.’
‘Good, because–’
‘Because you’ve got a date, gotcha.’
But George wasn’t embarrassed, felt too full of sunshine to even be bashful. ‘And wait,’ he said, ‘just wait until I show you the dragon and the crane.’