Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Read online

  Hannah felt like a Watcher.

  Like something unknown, standing outside normal life, apart from it; right here, and yet far away. As if she lived in a secret country, hidden behind where everyone else lived, or as if some Big Bad Wolf – star of a fairy tale that had unnerved her as a young child, partly because it had been told to her by Aunt Zo, who really wasn’t keen on wolves – had blown her whole house down, changing the world forever, stranding her in a place where her thoughts and fears were invisible to people who were always looking the other way.

  ‘Can we go back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Granddad was smiling, but he looked serious, too. ‘You can never go back, only forward. I read that in a book once.’

  ‘Is it true?’

  He shrugged. ‘In a way. Time will slip sideways every now and then, but once something’s happened it can’t be un- happened. You have to make the best of how the world is afterwards. Lots of people make themselves crazy, or at least deeply unhappy, because they don’t realize that.’

  ‘Are Mom and Dad going to get back together?’

  The question came out of the blue and in a rush. Granddad was silent for so long afterwards that she started to think he hadn’t heard, or that she hadn’t said it out loud after all.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually. ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Don’t you hope so?’

  ‘I hope they do what’s right for them,’ he said carefully. ‘But I don’t know what that is. I don’t think they do either, at the moment.’

  Hannah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘What’s right is for them to be together! We’re a family. They have to be my mom and dad.’

  ‘They are, Hannah. They always will be. Even if they stay apart.’

  ‘That’s not enough.’

  ‘It may have to be, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No.’ She glared up at him. In that moment he didn’t look like her granddad, someone whose face was so well known that it disappeared, allowing her to look inside. Now it seemed alien, a mask of lines and wrinkles holding a pair of sharp, knowing eyes – old man’s eyes, the eyes of someone who’d witnessed so many things that it made him see the world differently.

  Made him see it wrongly.

  Unable to say any of this, she ran away.

  He caught up with her, of course. Not by running – the idea of Granddad running would have been comical, had she been in the right mood. He caught up with her by walking, steadily, slowly, consistently. She ran out of steam. He did not. She lost her fury. He’d had none. That’s how you win, in the end.

  When they got back to the cabin she said she wanted to wander around the hotel grounds, by herself. Granddad agreed but warned her to be careful of the edge of the bluff, and he’d see her in the lodge in an hour.

  She set off at a misleading angle – to make it look as though she was really going off to explore – but as soon as she was out of sight of the cabin she changed course towards the lodge. Once inside she got out her iPod Touch, found a private corner, and tried to Skype her dad.

  There was no reply. In a way, she thought this was a good thing. He had Skype on his phone and both his computers, the big one in his study and his precious laptop. If he couldn’t hear any of them it must mean he’d gone for a walk, done something other than the staring-at-a-screen routine he’d been in every day and night since Mom left, and which even Hannah knew could not be positive – especially as the staring sessions seldom seemed to be accompanied by the sound of typing. Good for him.

  So she called her mom instead. Mom picked up on the eighth ring, as if she’d been a long way from the phone.

  ‘It’s late, honey,’ was the first thing she said.

  Hannah hadn’t thought to check the time. It was after four o’clock. She did the math. That made it gone midnight where her mom was. ‘Sorry,’ she said, though she thought maybe her mom could have said something else first.

  ‘Didn’t Dad warn you what time it would be?’

  Hannah hesitated. Mom evidently didn’t know where she was. ‘I didn’t tell him I was going to try calling.’

  ‘That’s OK. How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. Though it’s very cold.’

  ‘So why are you there?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If it’s so cold in London, why are you there? Why don’t you come back home?’

  ‘It’s … it’s not that simple.’

  ‘So explain it to me.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s work, and … I have to be here.’

  ‘I hate you,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Oh, honey, I know this is hard for you. Hard and … very confusing. But you … you don’t mean that.’

  Her mom sounded upset. Hannah wanted to take the words back, but couldn’t – not without having somewhere else to put them. The words were real things, and their story was real, and she realized that she’d needed to say them to someone. She wasn’t sure if it should have been her mom, or dad, or even Granddad, for not being able to promise her everything would be OK. But somebody needed to hear, to hear right now and to understand, that everything was not OK. There was only one word for that. Hannah had never hated anyone or anything before in her life, but right now the word was there in the centre of her head. She couldn’t see past it.

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I hate you.’

  ‘Honey, I really want to talk to you some more, but can you pass me over to Dad for a second?’

  Hannah ended the call. She went to the part of the lounge where there were big windows, and sat looking out over the ocean. She watched as the light started to fade and the grey of the sea slowly rose to meet the grey of the sky, until eventually they joined.

  Granddad arrived. They ate, they talked, though not much. They walked back to the cabin along the bluff. Her grandfather stayed in the chair in her room after Hannah had climbed into bed. For a long time they were silent together in the darkness.

  ‘I know you want them to get back together,’ he said. ‘Of course you do. And that might be what happens. I certainly hope so. I love them both. But for the time being, trust that they both love you, and so do I. For tonight, that may have to be enough. And that’s no small thing, either.’

  She could see he wasn’t lying. ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘What you feel now is serious, but try not to take it too seriously. Sleep, as deeply as you can. Dream long. Tomorrow things may feel different.’

  ‘’K.’

  She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep until her grandfather quietly got up and left.

  Then she did fall asleep.

  Granddad walked to the kitchen. He made a pot of coffee and took a mug of it into the living room. He sat in the big chair, facing out into darkness.

  He settled to wait.

  Chapter 9

  Meanwhile, back in Miami, Nash and his remaining (non-exploded) associates – Eduardo, Jesse and Chex – were breaking into a second-hand store close to the warehouse where they’d encountered the freaky old man in the suit.

  Most criminals avoid committing crimes on home turf, on the grounds that stealing from people with whom you might later come into contact tends to be a bad policy. People don’t like being stolen from. It makes them angry and upset. In places like Opa Locka, where the stolen-from have a tendency to briskly take matters into their own hands, this can lead to violent confrontations, broken bones and general sadness.

  Nash didn’t care about this, despite the fact the store they were robbing belonged to a man called Mr Files, who even the dumbest locals knew was a dude on whose wrong side you most certainly didn’t want to be. Mr Files knew everyone thought of him this way, however, and would therefore be able to guess that the only person likely to go ahead and rob him anyway would be Nash, whom Mr Files accepted was even scarier than he was. The situation was further complicated by the fact that half the goods in the store were in fact stole
n, and Mr Files had acquired most of these from Nash himself. The items were, therefore, now being stolen a second time, and it was far from inconceivable that (after a suitable delay) Nash might resell them back to Mr Files; that some of these pieces of tech might spend the rest of their existence circulating back and forth between them like pieces of flotsam bobbing on a dead sea.

  This is why you have to be quite smart to be a successful criminal. Keeping track of the interlocking illegalities and hierarchies can be hard, and if you get it wrong you don’t just get a bad appraisal and the chance to buck up your ideas, but instead wind up floating in the bay, often in more than one piece. Men (and women) who were neither smart nor scary enough to work this system with confidence – men like Eduardo, Jesse and Chex – tended to find a leader and do what they were told.

  Though robbing Mr Files’s store made them nervous, they were glad to be doing something. In the couple of days since the encounter with the man in the black suit, morale among the group had not been high. The following night the three men had turned up to Nash’s house to find their boss sitting on the tilting porch, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, staring into the middle distance. He had not, as per his usual custom, got decisively to his feet, bounced down the steps, and led them into an evening of lucratively criminal behaviour.

  He’d just sat there, alone, reaching after a while for another beer and another cigarette, saying nothing. After nearly an hour of watching this, the three men left.

  A common trait amongst persons of a criminal nature is a lack of foresight. This is why so many of them end up in jail. It also means that rather than putting money aside for a rainy day, they live within narrow margins. Eduardo, Jesse and Chex were therefore soon in a position where they had no money.

  And so they turned up at Nash’s house again the next night, because though they could have scraped together a little cash through muggings or small-scale robberies of their own, working for Nash produced a much higher return – plus there was the fact he was well known for exacting hideous revenge on anybody who messed with his people, and this made them feel a lot safer.

  So though it was in none of their natures, they elected to be patient for once, and wait.

  Tonight, Nash had come down off the porch. There hadn’t been quite the usual spring in his step, but his guys supposed they could understand why. For six months he’d been trying to raise their game. Lift them from being mere thieves, drug dealers and criminals. Trying to make their actions pay off towards a larger goal – that of being truly evil. For a while on that evening in the abandoned warehouse it looked as though it had worked. But then the old guy in the suit had blown Pete to pieces, and left. Leaving Nash looking wrong-footed, rejected, and … a little dumb.

  They knew this was intolerable, the very worst thing – especially in front of people who looked up to you. Leaders who’ve been made to feel dumb often feel the need to re- establish dominance through acts of flamboyant violence, and sometimes it’s the people nearest them who wind up taking the brunt. Tonight, thankfully, Nash didn’t seem like he was feeling dumb.

  ‘So what’s the plan, boss?’ Jesse asked.

  ‘Business as usual,’ Nash said. And that was that.

  Once they were inside Mr Files’s store they fanned out. All had been in the building before, either to steal things or to buy. They knew what they were looking for. Not televisions, though twenty hung along the side wall. Nobody steals televisions any more, they’ve become too big and heavy. Game consoles were better. Smaller, lighter, easier to sell – even pro junkies need a game to nod out in front of. Laptops worked too.

  And – especially and most of all – phones.

  Eduardo went to the back and started putting the slimmest and newest-looking laptops into his bag. Jesse did the same with the consoles, picking through the available brands with a practised eye. Chex and Nash went to the other side, where the phones were. The interior of the store was dimly lit through the sturdy metal grille in front of the window, by the flickering neon sign outside and an occasional slow swish of passing car headlamps. Nobody was worried about people glimpsing shapes within the store and alerting the cops. The police knew better than to get involved in the complex criminal ecosystem, unless unusually high rates of fatality were involved.

  Chex stood in front of the display with the Samsungs and LGs. He ignored the cheap, contractless handsets that people called ‘burners’, only ever of interest to drug dealers and those of no fixed abode, and started taking down smartphones and stowing them in his shoulder bag.

  Nash walked further to the primo items, the iPhones. There were a lot, certainly more than when they’d last robbed the place. This could mean Mr Files had found an additional source of stolen goods, and that was something Nash needed to look into. A man in his position could not tolerate new thieves in his area, not least because if Mr Files stopped relying upon Nash then the balance of power could change. Nash knew he’d be able to resolve the situation, and the fact that spirited violence would be involved only made the prospect more appealing. Since the embarrassing evening in the warehouse he’d found himself increasingly drawn to the idea of hurting people, especially people who’d done him wrong. This, in fact, was what he’d been thinking about while sitting on the porch for hour after hour. Hurting. Causing harm. Breaking things and people so very badly that there would never be any chance of putting them together again. And then breaking them some more.

  ‘What’s that?’ Chex had stopped plucking phones from the shelves and was standing with his head cocked.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘I heard something.’

  ‘No you didn’t. Keep working.’

  Chex didn’t, however. Nash was self-aware enough to know these people worked for him mainly because they were afraid of him, and therefore when one of them didn’t do what he said, there was generally a good reason for it.

  So he became still too, iPhone in hand, and listened. At first nothing. But then, yes – a faint crackling sound. Not even quite a crackling. Quieter. More like a hiss. And then louder than that, more keening.

  The other guys were talking quietly to each other as they gathered up stuff and didn’t seem to have heard anything. No sign of anyone at the door in the back, through which they’d entered. Nash peered at the televisions hanging on the wall. There was something different about them. The screens were dark, but not the flat dark of an LCD or plasma when no power’s going through. A faint swirling motion was visible within the muddy grey. On old-fashioned TVs a dead channel was bright and noisy and sparkling. Now it looked like electricity had been applied to all the televisions, but no signal.

  Finally the guys at the back noticed. ‘What’s up?’

  Nash held up his hand for silence. He’d already realized a possible explanation was all the TVs were on the same circuit, and had been turned on. Maybe from the back room.

  Which meant someone was in here.

  He was reaching for the gun lodged in the back of his jeans when he noticed something else, however. The screen of the iPhone he was holding was doing the same thing. Instead of a black, shiny surface, it too was a swirling dark grey. And there was no way someone in back could have turned that on.

  He glanced at Chex, saw he was staring down at the phone in his hand too. ‘Hell’s going on?’

  Nash looked back at the phone. The variation in tones became more marked. He felt like he couldn’t look away. The darker greys got darker, the lighter a little more light. It was as if there was something there, some pattern just outside reach – like one of those black-and-white pictures you stare at until they resolve into a Dalmatian or something. But moving.

  Was it a face?

  Was there someone in there, inside the phone?

  Someone or something or maybe even a bunch of someones or somethings. If so, Nash believed they were there to talk to him – that this phenomenon was meant for him alone. He was wrong about this: something similar was happening in many place
s across the country, in front of similar men and women. The only difference was that Nash was able to perceive it clearly. It was not meant specifically for him, but it spoke to him far more strongly than anybody else. His soul was tuned to receive.

  And so he was the only one who saw a digital compass slowly swimming up out of the swirling dots on the screen, its needle spinning so fast that it was a blur.

  He was dimly aware of Chex staring down at the phone in his own hand, and the others gazing up at the televisions on the wall. But this wasn’t for them.

  Then he heard it, or felt it. The message. What sounded like a distant howl, something wild and feral heard from the other side of a mountain in the night, resolved into a number of voices, speaking as one. Two words. A verb and a direction. He blinked, and felt the message settle deep inside.

  The compass stopped spinning.

  It pointed in one clear direction.

  Then suddenly the screen was blank again, and the crackling sound was gone.

  When they were back outside Jesse noticed that whatever had just happened, it had put purpose back in Nash’s step. Their leader lit a cigarette and stood smoking in silence for a while. Then he nodded at the bags full of stolen goods each had hanging from their shoulders.