‘Ah,’ Kumiko said when she saw the cutting. ‘A lion. Yes.’
And took it away.
He still knew very little about her as yet, what she did with her free time, who her family was, even what she did for money.
‘I live, George,’ she would say, an expression of pained perplexity glancing across her brow. ‘What does anyone do? They live, they survive, they take themselves and their history and they carry on.’
Well, that’s what characters in books do, he would think but not say, but the rest of us need to buy bread and beer once in a while.
She hinted, occasionally, that she lived off savings, but how much money could whatever kind of international aid worker she’d been have stashed away? Unless, of course, it was from before or was family money or–
‘I worry you,’ she said one night in bed, in George’s bed, in George’s house – he still hadn’t been to hers (‘Too small,’ she’d said, frowning at herself. ‘Smaller than anyone would ever believe.’) – in what may have been the third week of their dating. It was a strange time. He’d look back and know they’d spent hours together but would only have clear memories of a few passing moments: her lips parting to eat a polite bite of aubergine, her laughter at the bread-hungry geese who disappointedly followed them around a park, the bemused way she took his hand when he looked uneasy at being surrounded by teenagers in a queue at the cinema (to see a film which vanished like vapours in his memory).
She was almost a half-remembered dream, yet not.
Because here she was, in his bed, mirroring his caresses of her, running a finger from his temple to his chin and saying, ‘I worry you.’
‘I know so little about you,’ he said. ‘I want to know more.’
‘You know everything important.’
‘You say that, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘For example, your name.’
‘You know my name, George,’ she said, amused.
‘Yes, but is Kumiko Japanese?’
‘I believe so.’
‘Are you Japanese?’
She looked at him teasingly. ‘In the sense that my name is, yes, I suppose I am.’
‘Is that an offensive question? I don’t mean it to be–’
‘George,’ she said, sitting up a bit more, looking down at him on the pillow, her finger continuing down through the greying hairs on his chest.
‘Things were not easy for me, before,’ she said, and it was as if the night itself stopped to listen to her. ‘There were hard days, George. Days that I loved, of course, days that I lived to the end of every minute, but more often they were hard. And I do not wish to live in them again.’ She stopped, her finger poking playfully at his belly button, her voice anything but that same playful. ‘There is more of me to know, of course there is.’ She glanced up at him, and he could have sworn her eyes were somehow reflecting golden moonlight that was actually coming from behind her. ‘But we have time, George. We have all the time we can steal. And so, can it wait? Can I be revealed to you slowly?’
‘Kumiko–’
‘I feel safe with you, George. You are safety and softness and kindness and respite.’
George, who had been uneasy with how this conversation was going already, suddenly felt twice as dismayed. ‘Softness?’
‘Softness is strength,’ she said. ‘Stronger than you know.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it isn’t. People say that because it sounds nice, but it’s not really true.’
‘George . . .’
He sighed. He wanted to hold her now, wanted his arms around her, his too rough hands skimming gently over the skin of her back, her thighs, even her feet and hands. He wanted to completely surround her somehow, be a cave for her, be in fact the very respite she had called him, the very respite he resisted being called.
‘My ex-wife,’ George said, regretting introducing her into the bedroom but pressing ahead. ‘She always told me I was too nice, too friendly. Too soft. She didn’t mean it in a bad way, not at all. In fact, she’s still a friend.’ He paused. ‘But she left me. Every woman eventually has. I’ve never done the breaking up with a single woman I’ve ever dated.’ He ran his hand up the side of Kumiko’s arm. ‘People want niceness in their friends, but that’s a different kind of love.’
‘Niceness, George,’ she said, ‘is everything in the world that I want.’
And though George heard the words right now silently added to the end of that sentence, he genuinely had no idea if it was because she’d intended them or if they were supplied by his own fearful heart.
He framed the dragon and crane, took his time considering how. A simple flat frame couldn’t even come close to properly doing the job, the depth of the tile’s physical construction preventing it from merely being pressed under glass. Besides, basic frames were for brilliantly toothed children and their Golden Retrievers, not something as challenging, as alive, as this.
After trying and failing at a number of approaches – unglassed, mounted on matte or gloss, set flat to be viewed from above – he finally placed it inside a shallow glass case so that there was empty air around it, a hint of diorama. The case itself had a tarnished gold edge around the corners, like the picture inside might have been in there for hundreds of years and might crumble to dust upon opening. It seemed like a relic from some alternate timeline, an artefact accidentally tumbled through from some other place.
But then, where to put it?
He hung it at home, but for some reason that didn’t seem right. Above his mantelpiece it looked indefinably wrong, a foreign visitor smiling politely and wondering when on earth this dinner party was going to end. The walls of the rest of his rooms were too crowded with books to give it enough space to breathe, so he tried hanging it above his bed. One startlingly incoherent sex dream later (landslides and grasslands and armies running over his very skin), he took it right back down.
So finally, that only left the shop, where at least he would be able to see it every day and where it looked strangely comfortable, watching over him, not at all out of place, somehow, among the best examples of his shop’s work. And this was where he’d met her, of course. So maybe this tile, a crossroads of their two differing arts, just looked most natural hung in the same crossroads where their lives had intersected.