‘When the hell am I going to meet this woman?’ Amanda demanded.
George was confused for a moment, but then he realised that Kumiko and Amanda still hadn’t actually met. Somehow it had always worked out that they were never there at the same time. Strange. Though, to be honest, when he was with Kumiko, George tended to forget about the existence of anyone else on the planet, forget momentarily they might be important at all. He felt a flush of shame and improvised a lie.
‘Soon,’ he said. ‘She suggested a cocktail party.’
‘A cocktail party? Where? 1961?’
‘Cock-tail,’ JP said, making shooting noises with his finger.
‘She can be a bit old-fashioned,’ George said. ‘It’s just an idea.’
‘Well, I do want to meet her. This mystery woman who’s just earned you a month’s salary in a day.’
‘I had a little part in it. I did make the lion.’
‘Whatever you say, George.’
Kumiko had a second set of tiles she was reluctant to show him. There were thirty-two of them, she said, and they sat quietly in the corner of her suitcase in five separate stacks tied together with white ribbon, a single sheet of tissue paper between each to keep them from rubbing together.
‘It is a larger project of mine,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to show me,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said, a small smile playing on her lips. ‘Which is why I perhaps will.’
She finally did late on a Saturday in the print shop. George had returned JP to Amanda after her second weekend in a row counting traffic queues in Romford or Horsham or whatever town with a great-aunt-sounding name it was, and George had come in to relieve Mehmet, who hated working alone and swore he had a Saturday afternoon call-back for ‘swing in Wicked’, which George assumed was a lie but let him off anyway.
He hadn’t seen Kumiko for the previous two nights. Their get-togethers were unpredictable. She now had a phone number she never seemed to answer, and often she would just show up in George’s shop, wondering if he’d like to join her for company that evening.
He always said yes.
Today, she waited until nearly the end of opening hours to make her way inside. Still with the suitcase, still with the white coat draped over one arm, no matter how much colder this winter seemed to be getting.
‘My daughter would very much like to meet you,’ he said to her as she opened the case.
‘The feeling is mutual,’ Kumiko said. ‘Perhaps if we have that party you were speaking of.’
‘Yes,’ George said. ‘Okay, yes, then definitely, let’s–’
‘It is a kind of story,’ she said, interrupting, but so delicately it was almost as if she’d done so by accident, as if he had asked her about the pile of unseen tiles seconds ago rather than many nights before. She reached into the suitcase and, instead of showing him the new picture she’d made of his latest donated cutting (a closed fist, but one drained of potential violence, one clearly clasping its last beloved thing), she picked up a packet of tiles tied with ribbon.
‘A sort of myth,’ she said, setting the packet down but not yet unwrapping it. ‘A story I was told as a girl, but one that has grown in the telling over the years.’
Yet still she didn’t move to untie the ribbon.
‘You don’t have to,’ George said.
‘I know.’
‘I’m willing to wait. I told you I was willing to wait for anything.’
She looked at him seriously now. ‘You hand me too much power, George. It is not a burden, but it might become one, and I do not wish that.’ She touched his arm. ‘I know you do it out of your abundant kindness, but there may come a day when both you and I would wish that I treat you less carefully. And that must remain a possibility, George. If there is never a chance of hardness or pain, then softness has no meaning.’
George swallowed. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see the tiles.’
She opened her mouth in a little square of delighted surprise. ‘Do you, George? And my immediate thought was to say no to you. But how wonderful. Of course I will show you.’
She untied the ribbon, and showed him the first one.
It was almost completely covered in feathers. They fanned out, looping in and out of one another in a spray of brilliant white. Within, a single feather, also white but of just different enough tone to stand out, was cut and woven into the shape of an infant.
‘These are not for sale,’ she murmured, hesitant just yet to show him the rest.
‘No,’ George said, in almost silent agreement.
‘But what might you add?’ she asked. ‘What does it lack?’
‘It lacks nothing,’ George said, his eye following every contour of the white, every slightly different contour of the infant.
‘You know that not to be true,’ she said. ‘And so I ask you to think on it.’
George studied the picture again, trying to detach from his conscious mind, trying to let the image float there, let other images attach themselves to it.
‘I’d add an absence,’ he said. ‘An absence made of words. There is loss here.’ He blinked, recovering himself. ‘I think.’
She nodded. ‘And will you cut the absence for me? Will you cut others, too, as you’ve been doing?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Anything.’
They turned back to the tiles. ‘What’s happening here?’ he asked. ‘You said it was a myth. What myth?’
She merely nodded again, and he thought she wasn’t going to answer.
But then she spoke, as if at the beginning of a story.
‘She is born in a breath of cloud,’ she said.
And continued speaking.
The following Monday, after a weekend spent with her, again lost in specifics but with generalities of serenity and comfort and a sweet yearning, George hung in his shop the third tile they’d made, the latest of the ones separate from her private thirty-two.
She had taken the closed fist he’d made, the one bled of power and vengeance, the one that seemed resigned and perhaps welcoming of its ultimate fate, and paired it with the feathered cuttings of the cheek and neck of the woman looking away from the artist. It was a more jarring conjunction than even the lion and the watermill. It had intimations of violence, fist against face, no matter how calm the fist, but this dissipated quickly. The fist became no longer a fist, but simply a closed hand, withdrawing, empty, from its final caress of the woman’s face. The caress may, in fact, have been of a memory, the closed hand reaching into the past to feel it again, but failing, as the past always fails those who grasp at it.