The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness Read Free Book Online

were Rachel and Mei. They were three of nine women in a company of seventy-four, which
had
to be illegal. It wasn’t that transport was such a non-woman sort of industry necessarily (though it was a little), it’s that this particular company – Umbrello Flattery and Unwin – had a Head of Personnel (Felicity Hartford, unquestionably woman number one out of nine) who hated other women. She’d informed Amanda at her interview that Amanda was ‘at best’ the eighth most qualified applicant (of eight), but that even the elderly Umbrello Senior had begun to wonder why his newly-retired secretary had been replaced by a fashionable young man with what looked like a ‘shaft of metal, Mrs Hartford’ pierced through the skin under the back of his shirt collar. Before Mrs Hartford was ‘bored into her grave by yet another lawsuit’, Amanda would have to do.
    Amanda worked in Rachel and Mei’s unit – Mrs Hartford liking to keep the women in as few groups as possible, which made it easier to fire the worst one should she wake up in the morning with the inclination to do so – and they’d taken her under their wing as a fellow young divorcee. They invited Amanda out to lunch her first day, and in those forty-five minutes Amanda had learned not only that Rachel had put the naked pictures she’d found of her ex-husband’s mistress on the memorial website of said mistress’s late mother and that Mei struggled with thrush, but also that Rachel had survived – and possibly started – a house fire in college that had killed two of her roommates and that Mei had three separate, eye-watering anecdotes about circumcised men. ‘Were they brothers?’ Amanda had laughed, a deep, gravelly, dirty laugh she might have said was her best feature, had anyone ever asked.
    No one had laughed back. It had been a long eight months.
    ‘Can you get the picnic basket?’ Rachel asked, as she pulled her Mini into a space.
    ‘Sure,’ Amanda said. She always got the picnic basket.
    Mei got out of the passenger side, face concentrating hard on her phone. She was tracking her infant daughter on GPS during a visitation weekend with the baby’s father. ‘That’s unbelievable,’ said Mei, who didn’t believe anything. ‘He’s taken her to
Nando’s
.’
    ‘What the fuck is in here?’ Amanda asked, gracelessly dragging the unreasonably heavy basket out of the Mini. She felt like a rhinoceros backing out of a display cabinet.
    ‘You know, you’re twenty-five?’ Rachel said. ‘Which is younger than us, okay, I get that, but still too old to talk like you’re on
Skins
?’
    ‘Sorry,’ Amanda grunted, as she finally got the picnic basket out of the car. Where it promptly plummeted to the ground. A puddle of wine bubbled out the basket’s bottom like a particularly expensive spring.
    Rachel sighed. ‘That was like our only bottle of red?’
    ‘Sorry,’ Amanda said again.
    Rachel said nothing, just let an awkward moment of silence pass while she waited for Mei to notice Amanda standing in the puddle of Pinot.
    ‘Ooooooh,’ Mei whispered, finally seeing. ‘I don’t believe it.’
    Amanda always
started
well with friends. In primary and secondary school, in college, at the different jobs she’d had since graduating, plus of course the gang of friends that had hung around Henri. They all liked her when they first met her. Really, they
did.
    Things that might have been threatening in a man – her slight tallness, her slightly broad shoulders, her deep, commanding voice – were conversely disarming in a woman. Men would look at her and think ‘woman’ but also somehow ‘rugby’ and find themselves buying her a pint while asking her whether she thought that hot Dutch girl reading Economics would give them the time of day. Gay men rather liked her, which had its benefits but was also a bit like being spayed, while women seemed to cherish her at first as someone around whom they could
finally
be themselves, speak their minds, not