‘Manners,’ it said.
‘Your eyes are green,’ George said. ‘When they should be gold.’
The crane looked at him full-on. Its eyes were indeed green, a burning, flaming, sulphurous green. ‘And what do you know of gold?’ it asked, its voice different, wrong.
‘Who are you?’ George demanded, angry, but fear rising in his chest.
‘A question that needs no asking,’ the crane said. Lava erupted from its eyes and poured down in great cataracts towards George.
Who ran. Or tried to. The rocky surface hurtled beneath him at great speed, rushing him away from the tidal waves of molten lava, though in actuality he couldn’t quite seem to move, to make any motion except a sort of lumpy gesture at running.
‘Okay, this feels like a dream,’ he said.
‘No,’ the volcano said, rising beneath him, putting a fiery fist around George’s neck and lifting him into the air. ‘You were right the first time.’
‘Please,’ George tried to say. ‘Please, stop.’
But the volcano wouldn’t listen, lifting him higher and higher, its face blocking out the stars with smoke and flame. ‘I will not stop,’ the volcano roared. ‘I will never stop!’
It reared back and threw George across the sky at impossible speed, rocketing past the melting world, past scalding clouds that used to be lakes and oceans, past the cries of the doomed in their burning cities. George flew fast as a comet, until he could see his target, see the white silkiness of it, see the great muscular motion of its wings furling and unfurling across the impossible expanse.
He hit it, piercing it.
And it destroyed him.
He woke. Not with a cry or a sudden sitting up in bed, heart pounding. Nothing so dramatic. He merely opened his eyes.
They were wet with tears.
‘Kumiko?’ he asked of the solitary darkness of his room, knowing she was at her own home tonight, knowing this was a night where he slept alone.
He asked it again anyway. ‘Kumiko?’
But there was no answer.
‘I want you,’ he said. ‘Oh, how I want you.’
And, being George, he was ashamed of his greed.
III.
Amanda brought it to work with her. Not every day, but often. Which wasn’t even remotely appropriate given the money certain people seemed increasingly willing to spend on them, but also because it was precious to her for deeper reasons, ones she couldn’t properly articulate to herself, much less be able to explain if anyone asked. Which was the risk of bringing it to work. If anyone saw it, they’d definitely ask.
So this morning, when she left the flat, she made the firm decision not to bring it. And then, like she had a number of times before, she changed her mind.
It was the usual black tile, like the one she’d seen in her father’s shop, and upon it had been placed segments of white feathers, cut and trimmed and woven to suggest a horizon and a sky, and in that sky, against a bed of shimmering down, a bird in flight. A white bird against a white sky, but definitely separate, definitely soaring but somehow, also, still. At rest.
Below the bird, one of her father’s cuttings from the pages of a book, which she (and, to be fair, often he) had always dismissed as ‘aimless natterings’, but here given new power, new context. These words – and words they were, bold ones, earthy ones, sometimes literally, a fungus here, an eggplant there and just down at the bottom, tucked away so you almost couldn’t see it, a plaintive little arse that moved her somehow, every time – these words made a mountain, as solid and present as the eternal earth, anchoring the tile in place, solidifying the stillness of the bird. There was peace here, with hints somehow that it was perhaps ragged, perhaps hard-earned, but peace nonetheless.
She hid it in the top drawer of her desk and, opening the drawer to look at it now, she felt the same as the first time she’d seen it, that she was atop a precipice and about to fall, that though it was dizzying and frightening, there was also a possible liberation in the falling.
Looking at it actually made her short of breath.
Because it also felt like–
Well, it was a stupid word, wasn’t it? Worse, a stupid notion, one that clearly hadn’t been intended, though kindness obviously had, but she could never say it out loud, never think on it too long even in the privacy of her own head.
Because it also felt like–
Well, goddammit, it felt like love. Like forgiveness, somehow, which maybe were the same thing sometimes.
At which point she always told herself that it was just a tile, for God’s sake. She really, really wasn’t the kind of person who was Moved By Art. (This was almost embarrassingly true. She had once managed the entire Louvre in an hour, a feat even Henri, through his horror, had been impressed by. ‘We’ve seen the Mona Lisa, we’ve seen the winged victory of Samothrace, and now I just want a crêpe.’ They’d then, for reasons she couldn’t quite remember, moved on to Belgium, where everything was so much crappier than France, not least that the crêpe vendors had been replaced by carts selling waffles. It was like wanting to buy air and being sold peat.) Here, though, now, in her little cubicle, she could see why word was spreading so quickly about the tiles, why the people who saw them reacted so strongly. She could barely stop herself from touching hers, from running her fingers over the top of it, from holding it close and–
‘What is that?’
And before she even looked up, she was cursing herself for being stupid enough to bring it anywhere on earth that Rachel might see.
The tile had been a present, unasked-for and unexpected. After getting over her initial shock on that unlikely morning on the park bench – that here was Kumiko, in a forlorn, barely green square lined with scraggly bushes and the requisite statue of a forgotten man on a forgotten horse – they’d begun to talk. And how they’d talked. Of their shared hatred for cyclists (‘All that self-righteousness,’ Kumiko had said, allowing a frown to make her face even prettier, ‘and then they act like it is your fault when they run the red light and nearly knock you down.’ ‘And they smell,’ Amanda had said. ‘Just because you change out of your gear at work doesn’t actually mean you’ve had a shower.’ ‘And the fold-up ones,’ Kumiko continued, to Amanda’s increasing delight and astonishment, ‘they put it in your way on a train and it seems as if you are supposed to treat it with the respect of an elderly relative.’ ‘I know!’); how they both, contrarily, felt weirdly protective of those charity people with the clipboards who had turned eye contact into such a risk on the High Street (‘They are only trying to do a job,’ Kumiko said. ‘And they’re all so young,’ Amanda said, ‘and all probably out-of-work actors.’ ‘It is certainly better than being forced to watch them act.’); and Amanda had even ventured her opinion on the Animals In War Memorial. Kumiko, remarkably, hadn’t heard of it, so Amanda explained it to her.