‘Not these. These are angry tears. Don’t laugh.’
‘Well, sweetheart, if it helps, I’m your friend.’
‘Oh, Dad. You know that doesn’t count.’
She wouldn’t let him see her working on the tiles.
‘I cannot, George,’ she’d say, looking unexpectedly bashful (and how he couldn’t not touch her when she blushed, how he couldn’t not run his fingers across the line of her cheekbone, down to her jaw, under her chin, at which point he couldn’t not kiss her, apologising at every step). ‘It is too private, I am sorry.’
‘Even for me?’ he asked.
‘Especially for you. You see me, clearly, with love–’
‘Kumiko–’
‘I know. You have not said the word, but it is there.’ He tensed, but her creamy brown eyes were warm and kind. ‘Your observation is exactly what I would want,’ she went on, ‘but it changes my work. It has to begin with just my own eyes. If you are there to see it, it is already shared, and if it is already shared, then I will not be able to give it to you or to anyone, do you see?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, yes, I do see, but that’s not what I was going to say.’
‘What were you going to say?’
‘That I do see you with love. That’s how I see you.’
‘I know,’ she said, but she said it in such a way that ‘I know’ became every type of love he ever wanted to hear.
‘Will you move in with me?’
And like every other time he’d asked that question, she just laughed.
On its own, her art was beautiful, but she wouldn’t stop insisting that it was static. The cuttings of the feathers woven together, assembled in eye-bending combinations to suggest not only a picture (the watermill, the dragon, the profile) but often the absences in those pictures, too, the shadows they left, black feathers woven with dark purple ones to make surprising representations of voids. Or sometimes, there was just empty space, with a single dash of down to emphasise its emptiness. The eye was constantly fooled by them, happening upon shape when blankness was expected, happening upon blankness when shape was expected. They tantalised, they tricked.
‘But they do not breathe, George.’
‘They do. I’m telling you, they do.’
‘You are kind. They do not.’
On repeated inspection, they revealed themselves to not always be exclusively feathers, either. She would sometimes sew a line of thread or a single mother-of-pearl button to suggest a horizon or a sun. In one, she included a flat curve of plastic which should have jarred against the softness of a feather’s spray, but somehow seemed a combination both apt and eternal.
They were good. They were very good.
But, she said, ‘They lack life.’
‘They’re gorgeous.’
‘They are gorgeously empty.’
‘They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’
‘They are like nothing empty you’ve ever seen before.’
He would argue with her like this, but then she would remind him of their first day, of that first ‘impertinence’, as she’d called it. Her dragon in that tile had remained the same, a dragon that George refused to agree lacked any life at all. He could see malevolence in the dragon’s eye, made green by what was maybe a bit of glass or garnet.
But now the dragon was threatening George’s crane. The same dragon made of feather flew over the crane made of words on paper. A combination of mediums that shouldn’t have worked. A combination of styles that shouldn’t have worked. George wasn’t even remotely afraid to acknowledge that it was even a combination of competencies (hers exquisitely agile, his barely managing a limp) that shouldn’t have worked.
But oh. But oh. But oh.
‘Holy shit,’ Mehmet had said.
Holy shit indeed, George had thought.
The dragon now had purpose. The crane now had context. The dragon now had a dangerous curiosity, it had potential. The crane now had threat, a serenity about to cease. Together, they had tension. Together, they were more than two incomplete halves, they were a third thing, mysterious and powerful and bigger than the small black square that imprisoned them. A frame had become a film, a sentence had become a story. The dragon and the crane invited you to step in, take part, be either or both, but they were very clear that you would do so at your peril.
And she had given it to him.
‘As a thank you,’ she had said, ‘if you wish it.’
‘No,’ George said. ‘It’s too much. Clearly too much.’
‘I’ll take it,’ Mehmet said.
‘It is finished,’ Kumiko said. ‘You finished it. It belongs to you as much as me.’
‘I . . .’ George started. ‘I . . .’
‘I’ll take it,’ Mehmet said again.
And then Kumiko had said, ‘Tell me, do you regularly make your cuttings?’
Which really started everything.
She didn’t ask him to cut anything specific, felt that that would somehow get in the way of inspiration. But George eagerly began to dedicate every spare moment to making cuttings – raiding the second-hand bookstore bins, buying proper ones if nothing was right, then sending Mehmet to the front of the shop to torture any customers who came in (‘But it says red here on the form.’).
He tried not to think, tried to loosen his concentration from its moorings, allow the blade to just make its marks, letting himself stay unsure of what the final assemblage would be until he put the last slice into place.
‘What is it?’ Mehmet asked of the first one he finished that he was even partway satisfied with.
‘What do you think it is?’ George replied, slightly baffled himself.
‘Some kind of hyena?’
‘I think it might be a lion.’
‘Oh, yeah. One of them stylised jobbies, like they have on England sport shirts.’
‘Jobbies?’
‘Everything old is new again, Captain.’
‘Call me Captain again and you’re fired.’
Mehmet frowned at the hyena/lion. ‘This isn’t some mysterious allure of the East thing you’ve got with this woman, is it? Because I’d find that, like, amazingly offensive.’
‘You’re from the East, Mehmet, and I find you neither mysterious nor alluring.’