‘The speed of it,’ he said. ‘The hunger for it. It seems . . .’
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t really know how it seemed.
‘I am surprised as well,’ Kumiko said, rinsing off the shampoo with a measuring cup. She squeezed out the excess water, then sat him up and started combing out his wet locks, a pair of short, sharp scissors in her hand.
‘I suppose I’m just dazed,’ he said.
He felt a small hesitation in her hand, so small as to hardly even be there, before she gathered up a line of his hair and snipped its ends cleanly away.
‘Dazed in a good way or a bad way?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sure it’s either good or bad. It’s just . . . dazzling. There was nothing. Just this idle hobby of mine that meant nothing. And then there was you.’ He looked at her. She gently guided him back into a more suitable position for the haircut. ‘And all of this, too,’ he said. ‘And . . .’
‘And?’ She took another snip of his hair, moving with the confidence of a professional.
‘And nothing, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Just that this extraordinary thing has happened. Is happening.’
‘And that unnerves you?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘It unnerves me, too. I am not surprised at the hunger you mention. The world has always been hungry, though it often does not know what it hungers for. But the suddenness, yes. It is rather remarkable, isn’t it?’
She combed his hair again, ready for more snipping. This haircut had happened simply. He’d said he was going to visit his local barbers – a pair of Brazilian brothers, surprisingly young, outlandishly handsome, utterly gormless – and she’d said, ‘Let me.’
‘Where did you learn to do this again?’ he asked.
‘On my travels,’ she said. ‘Plus, it isn’t so far from what I do in my work, is it? They are complementary skills.’
‘I wouldn’t want to try cutting your hair.’
He could almost feel her smile, feel the warmth of it behind him in his little kitchen, as he sat in this chair, an old sheet wrapped around his neck, newspapers on the floor to catch the clippings. He closed his eyes. Yes, he could feel her. Feel her against him. Feel the brush of her breath against his neck as she leaned in close.
‘I love you,’ he whispered.
‘I know,’ she whispered back, but it didn’t feel like a rebuke. Her knowledge felt like delight, and he knew that this was enough.
But then there was an accompanying feeling that it wasn’t enough. Do you love me? he wanted to ask, and it shamed him. Even when she said the words to him – which she did, though not as often – he always had to stop himself from asking for confirmation.
He knew so very, very little about her. Still.
But it wasn’t as if he’d told her everything either. Rachel had gone unmentioned, for one, though that was more for his daughter, who he suspected, almost certainly correctly, would be crushed if she knew. There were also, of course, the whole host of bad habits kept secret in the early days of any relationship – the toenail ablutions in bed, the laissez-faire approach to whisker maintenance, that whole dabbing himself with a square of loo roll after peeing thing – but even compared to that, Kumiko had given him almost nothing. It was unreasonable, it was untrusting, it was–
He pushed it down, fought it away.
‘I once tried cutting Amanda’s hair,’ he said, ‘when she was little.’
He heard Kumiko chuckle. ‘And how did that go?’
‘Not bad, I thought.’
‘And yet still it was only once.’
‘Well, little girls, eh?’ He frowned, his chest slightly over-filled with love for his difficult daughter. ‘Though Amanda was never a very usual little girl. Funny, always funny, and Clare and I thought that meant she was doing all right.’
‘I like her,’ Kumiko said. ‘She makes very much sense to me.’
‘I still can’t believe you met like that.’
‘The only unnatural thing would be if there were no coincidences, George. I could have walked into any print shop, for example. But I walked into yours and look at the upheaval that has resulted.’
He turned to her. ‘So you feel the upheaval, too?’
She nodded, turning him back again. ‘I have not as much time as I would like to work on my own story.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, thinking once more of the thirty-two tiles, of what he had seen of them – the lady and the volcano, the world they were making – and of all the ones he had yet to see. She hadn’t even told him how the story ended yet. ‘Are you okay with that?’
‘For now,’ she said. ‘But you know this yourself. A story needs to be told. A story must be told. How else can we live in this world that makes no sense?’
‘How else can we live with the extraordinary?’ George murmured.
‘Yes,’ Kumiko said, seriously. ‘Exactly that. The extraordinary happens all the time. So much, we can’t take it. Life and happiness and heartache and love. If we couldn’t put it into a story–’
‘And explain it–’
‘No!’ she said, suddenly sharp. ‘Not explain. Stories do not explain. They seem to, but all they provide is a starting point. A story never ends at the end. There is always after. And even within itself, even by saying that this version is the right one, it suggests other versions, versions that exist in parallel. No, a story is not an explanation, it is a net, a net through which the truth flows. The net catches some of the truth, but not all, never all, only enough so that we can live with the extraordinary without it killing us.’ She sagged a little, as if exhausted by this speech. ‘As it surely, surely would.’
After a moment, George asked, ‘Has something extraordinary happened to you?’
‘To me,’ she said, ‘and to everyone. To you, too, George, I’m sure.’
‘Yes,’ he said, feeling the truth of it.
‘Tell me,’ she smiled, a smile so kind he felt as if he could live in it for the rest of his life.
He opened his mouth to tell her about the crane in his backyard, a story he’d been shy of up until now, especially given Amanda’s sceptical reaction to it, but maybe now was the moment to tell her of the strange bird whose life he may have saved, whose origin he could never know, whose appearance had marked the beginning of this impossible segment of his life, a segment his heart was in continual danger of breaking over in fear that it would end.