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, but George sat there for a long while, looking at the cuttings.
A lily. Clearly, a lily. From a book called In the Beauty of the Lilies.
He gave an irritated laugh at his own obviousness, precisely the shallowness of vision that had always prevented him from becoming a proper artist, he felt, and he reached to brush it all into the rubbish bin.
But he stopped. It really was a rather good lily.
And so it began. He started haunting the £1 bins of second-hand bookstores, taking only the most damaged, unloved and unlovable books. He never exactly tried to make themed cuttings – hoping to avoid a repeat of the unsubtle lily – but sometimes a line would strike his fancy from the pages of a sixty-year-old, half-mouldy Agatha Christie, and he’d cut the shapes of a paragraphed hand dangling a multi-claused cigarette. Or a lettered horizon with three haiku-looking moons from the pages of a sci-fi novel he’d never heard of. Or a solitary figure carrying a small child, marked only by a single ‘1’ from the ‘Part 1’ of a history of the siege of Leningrad.
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