Read Online The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness - Free Book Online Page A

hope) thinking he would. He remained a sketcher, and the nude charcoals grew fewer and farther between, the headdresses never found again, the languorous afternoons turning slowly, prematurely, into middle-aged naps.
    Clare’s new husband, Hank, managed an enormous hotel for an American conglomerate. George had no idea if he drew.
    After the divorce, George still sketched, sometimes nothing more than doodling while on the phone, sometimes taking sheets of the posher paper out of stock at the shop and trying his hand at a tree through sunlight or a rainy park bench or a heroically ugly pair of shoes Mehmet had once left behind after a failed audition for
The Lion King.
Nothing more than that, though. Nothing past lines of pencil, sometimes ink, never charcoal these days.
    Until he found the book. He could easily have missed it. It had fallen behind the bins, and he only spotted it when he was gathering up the remains of a thrown-out lunch a lucky pigeon had dragged over half the alley. The book was a John Updike he’d never read (he’d never read any John Updike) called
In the Beauty of the Lilies.
He had taken it inside, in all its damaged state, and flipped through the ruined pages. Many of the edges were stuck together after having survived rainfall, but there was maybe half a workable book inside.
    He was struck by an impulse to draw something on a page. The book’s life was over, it was effectively unreadable, but still, drawing on it seemed both tantalisingly vandalous but maybe also – and this felt increasingly right – a way to lay it to rest, give it a decent burial, like sewing pennies in its eyes. But as he lowered his pencil onto one of the emptier pages, he stopped.
    A cutting blade would be better.
    Not thinking too hard on the why of this, he dug into his desk and found the blade he used for trimming and splicing when a job needed actual physical assemblage – far rarer these days in the age of computer design, which he did
not
resist, as it was faster and left him free time to doodle and dawdle and dream. He turned back to the book on his worktable.
    It was a Saturday morning. He needed to open the shop any moment now, but instead, he placed the blade on the page. He let out a little gasp as he cut, half-expecting the book to gasp as well. It didn’t, but he still paused after that first cut, looking at what he had done.
    And then he did it again.
    He cut and cut, small strips, larger ones, curved ones, angled ones, some tearing,
many
tearing, actually, until he got used to the paper’s particular give. More were just not quite the right shape, so he kept cutting, deep into the words of John Updike (he read snippets when he rested, the paragraphs with their astonishing numbers of semi-colons and not especially much happening).
    At some point, he’d opened the shop and left the customers to Mehmet’s mercy while he focused with surprising force on the cuttings, the hours melting together in a way they rarely did. He was unsure what shapes he was really making, but by late afternoon, when Mehmet was getting itchy feet to go home and get ready for a Saturday evening out, he assembled the most smoothly cut shapes on a square of black paper, cajoling them together in the shape he’d begun seeing in his mind’s eye. He didn’t stack them or allow them to reach out into three-dimensions, just laid them flat on the page, not even always touching, urging them towards the shape that felt right, the scattered words and parts of words looking back at him, as if through small, curved windows onto the world built inside the book.
    ‘Lily,’ Mehmet said, brushing past him to get his coat.
    ‘What?’ George said, blinking in surprise, having almost forgotten where he was.
    ‘Looks like a lily,’ Mehmet said slowly, as if talking to a coma patient. ‘My mother’s favourite flower. Which tells you a whole lot about her, if you ask me. Fragrant and likely to stain.’
    Mehmet shrugged on his coat and left,