He kissed Kumiko that night. For a moment, she was definitely the one being kissed, but then she did kiss him back.
His heart sang.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said to her some time later, after they lay together under sheets he hadn’t even bothered changing, never imagining for a moment that anything like this was going to happen. ‘Who are you?’
‘Kumiko,’ she said. ‘And who are you?’
‘I’ll be honest,’ George said. ‘I haven’t the foggiest idea.’
‘Then I will tell you.’ She turned to him, taking his hand as if bestowing a blessing. ‘You are kind, George. The sort of man who would forgive.’
‘Forgive what?’ he asked.
But she kissed him for an answer and the question was lost, lost, lost.
1 of 32
She is born a breath of cloud.
She sees neither her mother nor her father – her mother has died during the birth and not hung around; her father is the cloud itself, silent, weeping, consumed with grief – and so she stands alone, on legs unfamiliar.
‘Where have I come from?’ she asks.
There is no answer.
‘Where am I to go?’
There is no answer, even from the cloud, though he knows.
‘May I ask, at least, what I am called?’
After a hesitant moment, the cloud whispers into her ear. She nods her head and understands.
2 of 32
She takes flight.
3 of 32
The world below her is young, too young to have quite grown together. It exists in islands of floating earth, some connected by rope bridges or bamboo walkways, others reached across expanses of sky by rowing boats made of paper, others to which she can only fly.
She lands on an island that is mostly meadow, the grass bowing to her in the breeze. She pinches it between her fingertips and says, ‘Yes. Just so.’
In the meadow, there is a lake. She goes to it, following the sand along its shores, until she reaches the river that flows from it. She stands on tiptoes and sees that the river empties over the edge of the island and into space in an outrage of angry water.
Why does the water do so? she thinks.
4 of 32
There is a fisherman on the far shore. She calls to him. ‘Why does the water do so? Will it not spend itself completely and leave only empty earth?’
‘This lake is sourced from the tears of children who have lost their parents, my lady,’ the fisherman replies. ‘As you see.’
‘Ah,’ she says, looking down to see tears falling from her own golden eyes into the water, sending out ringlets across the lake’s surface.
‘It makes the fish tender,’ the fisherman says, reeling in a specimen with shiny golden scales. ‘Though they do taste of sorrow.’
‘I am hungry,’ she says. ‘I have yet to eat anything at all.’
‘Come over to the fire, my lady,’ the fisherman says. ‘I will feed you your fill of grief.’ He tosses the golden-scaled fish into his basket, its gills gasping fruitlessly in the air. ‘And perhaps after,’ he says, almost shyly, but only almost, ‘you will lie with me to show your gratitude.’
He smiles at her. It is full of ugly hope.
5 of 32
She bows her head in reply and flies to him, her fingers delicately skating across the surface of the lake, pulling two long watery arrowheads behind her. She lands next to the fisherman and places her hands on the sides of his head, kissing him gently on the lips.
It is a new sensation. Wetter than she expects.
‘You wish to trap me,’ she says to him. ‘Your thoughts are clear. You will take the spear you have lying next to your basket of fish, and if I do not agree to lie with you, you will use it to force me. You are perhaps not even a bad man, perhaps just one twisted by loneliness. I could not say. But what I do know is that you do not really ask for my body. You ask for my forgiveness.’
The man’s face has become a curl of sadness. He begins to weep. ‘Yes, my lady. I am sorry, my lady.’
‘I believe you,’ she says. ‘You have my forgiveness.’
6 of 32
Quickly, mercifully, she bites out both of the fisherman’s eyes and plunges two sharp fingers through his heart. He slumps to the muddy shore.
‘You have killed me, my lady,’ he says, regarding his body, squelching in the mud between them. ‘You have set me free.’
‘This I do gladly,’ she says.
‘I thank you, my lady,’ says the fisherman. ‘I thank you.’
A wind whirls around them, scattering the fisherman’s spirit, which thanks her until it can thank her no more.
7 of 32
She feeds on his basket of fish. They do taste of sorrow, which is bitter but not unpleasantly so. After she has sated her appetite, she takes the fish that remain and places them back in the water, holding them between her hands until they wriggle back into life and swim off. When this is finished, she rolls the body of the fisherman into the lake, too, bidding him farewell when he catches the current, making his final journey as the angry water hurls him out into the space between the islands.
She looks at her hands, turns them this way and that, as if in curiosity of what she has done with them. She washes them in the river and dries them on the material of her dress.
Then, once again, she takes flight.
II.
‘I want to ask her to move in with me.’
‘Yeah, and I meant to see if you could take JP on Saturday again? I’ve got queue counting to do in Romford, if you can believe it. On a Saturday. Some kind of sporting event, I don’t know–’
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yes. Hiring a cleaner. Blah blah blah. I’d have to drop him off criminally early, like before six, but he’ll easily sleep till eight, so really, it’s just–’
‘Did you hear the reason I’m hiring a cleaner?’
‘The reason? I don’t know. To have a clean house? What kind of question–?
‘I think I’m going to ask Kumiko to move in with me.’
‘. . .’
‘. . .’
‘Move in with you?’
‘Well. I want to.’
‘MOVE IN WITH YOU!?’
‘I know it’s a bit sudden.’
‘A BIT SUDDEN? You’ve known her for two weeks! If that! What are you, mayflies?’