Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence Read online

  How could anyone, even her grandfather, whom Hannah was perfectly prepared to believe capable of special things, make parts too small to be seen with a magnifying glass, and then place those parts in perfect relation to each other, so that a hundred thousand points of contact ticked along in harmony, so closely and perfectly aligned that they didn’t make a sound?

  ‘How is this even possible?’ she asked. ‘They go on forever, don’t they? Smaller and smaller?’

  ‘Don’t look too closely,’ her grandfather said, moving his hands to obscure the workings from her eyes.

  She had a glimpse then, in her mind, of what really happened inside this machine. That there came a point at which the parts were so incomprehensibly tiny that they were separate and yet joined at the same time – discrete, independent components fused into a solid mass, like a million people in a city, like the souls of everyone on the planet. She couldn’t articulate this, but she did know that it didn’t make sense.

  That it wasn’t, in fact, possible.

  She noticed something sticking out of the wall of the interior. It was a pin, in a tarnished gold colour, with a dark red jewel at the end. A red that looked like old blood. It spoke to her. She slowly reached her hand out towards it.

  ‘Don’t touch that,’ Granddad said sharply. ‘You of all people. Leave it be.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The last resort,’ he said.

  He stepped out of the machine and began to pack it back into its case, using a long and complex series of adjustments to cause the parts to fold back upon each other, somehow getting smaller with each pivot and swivel, until, ten minutes later, it fitted back into the old suitcase again. It was like being able to stuff a car into a shoebox. He put the first of the panels back in position and started screwing it in place.

  Meanwhile the Devil – for some reason, after glimpsing the interior of this machine, Hannah felt more willing to think of him in that way – had gone to stand in the corner of the room. The big mushroom climbed down off the sofa and went to him. They started a quiet conversation that Hannah couldn’t hear.

  Granddad finished the first plate, and put the other one in place. Hannah watched. ‘You made this?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But how?’

  ‘It took a very long time.’

  ‘But if you made this for him, and it was so hard, how come he didn’t give you anything for it?’

  Her grandfather looked uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You did. In the story. He said he wasn’t going to pay.’

  ‘That’s different to saying he didn’t give me anything.’

  ‘Well, then, what?’

  Granddad sighed, but spoke quickly, as if he’d decided it was better to just get on with it. ‘The meeting in my workshop took place in 1779.’

  Hannah frowned. ‘So?’

  Her grandfather tightened the last screw. He put his tools back in the old leather bag they’d come out of.

  ‘You really can’t do the math?’ This wasn’t her grandfather speaking, but the other man. He’d finished his conversation with the mushroom and was now standing over them, as if impatient to get moving. ‘That was nearly two hundred and fifty years ago.’

  Hannah stared at him. ‘What?’

  The man in the suit ignored her, and turned to Granddad. ‘How soon can you be ready to leave?’

  Chapter 14

  Some hours before, in a hotel lounge five thousand miles away, Hannah’s mother had spent a while sitting by herself. An hour previously she’d finished an early supper with a man with whom she was now close, a man who lived here in London, the man of whom she’d been thinking during that long-ago lunch in the restaurant in Los Gatos.

  The guy, in short, for whom she’d bailed on everything that had previously been her life.

  They’d gone to a place around the corner from her hotel, a discreet little Italian restaurant where, nearly a year before, their knees had first brushed during a meeting to set up the work Kristen was now here to conduct. It had been ‘their place’. It still was. They didn’t have to go there any more, of course. They could go anywhere, and did frequent other restaurants and bars, yet more often than not they gravitated back to the Bella Mare … though she’d now eaten everything on their menu at least once and if the truth be told it was all pretty average.

  It hadn’t used to taste that way.

  Putting down her credit card at the end of every other meal – instead of paying in cash so it wouldn’t pop up looking suspicious on the monthly statement – had stopped feeling interesting too. Even kissing him goodnight in the hotel’s underground parking lot, one of the rituals of their short time sort-of-together, hadn’t made her feel much at all.

  Her date had gone home early – he had a breakfast meeting the next morning (life quickly turns practical even after cataclysmic events of self-definition) – and Kristen decided to bring her iPad down to the hotel bar to clear the backlog of personal emails. That hadn’t happened, however. There were several in her in-box, weeks old, that remained unanswered. Old friends, a few former colleagues back in the States. Her cousin, most of all.

  Kristen was hiding from these emails and their enquiries and accusations, just as she was effectively still hiding each time she suggested they go to the Bella Mare instead of somewhere new. And hiding here by the fireplace in this hotel bar, and even in the hotel itself.

  Hiding from the feelings of guilt that laced her every waking hour. Having an affair is like running into the back of your spouse’s car. It doesn’t matter how slowly or erratically they were driving, you’re the one getting a ticket – plus you may suddenly find it turns out you’re responsible for every single ding or scrape in the relationship before that, going back years. Added to this were feelings of guilt relating to the not-great recent conversation with her daughter, which she was finding difficult to think about, and pushing away again for now.

  But there was something more.

  The first disquieting hints, perhaps, that while the man who’d spent most of dinner talking about work might have been a sharp enough needle to help unpick the seams of her previous story, he might not be the one to help her start making something worth replacing it with. That he might have been an effect rather than a cause. Kristen was scarred and battle-weary after months spent blowing through interior walls of ‘if not now, then when?’ She wasn’t sure she had the resolve or strength to now tackle ‘so – if not this, then what?’

  At least, not tonight.

  The waitress floated up and asked if she needed anything, disturbing this train of thought before it had time to get properly started, to Kristen’s relief.

  She ordered a hot chocolate – it was cold in London tonight, very cold – and tried once again to answer the email from her cousin Jill.

  Instead she ended up thinking about a painting, one that hung on the wall of a house she hadn’t seen in a while. The house that used to be her home, in Santa Cruz.

  The painting, a passable watercolour of Big Sur by a Carmel artist, had only been three hundred dollars (framed) when Steve bought it a year and a half before. Not an insignificant amount, but hardly worth the strident muttering it had occasioned from Kristen. Steve very seldom bought things for himself. He’d effectively asked permission, too (or at least given her a heads-up of his intentions, leaving space for opposing counsel to speak their mind), and she hadn’t said no.

  So why the damning with faint praise and who-cares-where-it-hangs? Why the failure to engage?

  Then, a few weeks after the picture came into their house, she’d been relaxing with a glass of wine in the yard while Steve put Hannah to bed. As she sat looking vaguely at the back of the house where they’d lived for seven years, the answer came to her as if dropped out of the sky.

  For a long time Big Sur had been their dream place. They visited it every year, a long weekend or two at least. They’d taken Hannah on her first hike in its mountains, watched her play in i
ts streams and on its windy beaches as infant, toddler and child. It had become part of their daughter’s world and imagination as well as their own.

  An aspiration they’d spoken of so often it had become bedrock was that when (not if) Steve finally wrote a hit series and money flooded in, they’d buy a cottage perched on the vertiginous wooded slopes overlooking the vastness of the Pacific. Renovate it while honouring its funky authenticity. Construct a crazy little tor of local stone, like Robinson Jeffers had, in which Steve would write further hit TV series. Build fires and relax around them on cushions in the soft-wind evenings, wrapped in artisan hand-woven blankets, sipping fine local wines and thinking wise and beautiful thoughts. Except …

  Kristen didn’t care about Big Sur any more.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want the cottage. The notion neither excited nor bored her. It didn’t raise a blip on her radar, and that was what was strange. It was like walking up to a gate in a forest, one you’ve looked at longingly many times, believing that one day you’ll open it and walk through and undertake a promised journey along the path on the other side; but then one afternoon discovering the view had been a painting all along, and nothing lay beyond. That there was no path, no adventure to be had along that road.

  It was like discovering this, and not caring. Not feeling any loss. Just shrugging and turning away.

  Kristen saw her husband trotting down the staircase inside the house, his head visible at intervals through the small, circular windows that ran down it. He went into the kitchen and poured a glass of wine that was local, but not fine (they were on another economy drive). He’d hang out there a while, she knew, catching up on email, then come out to join her.

  She watched his face, so well known, as it bent over his laptop on the counter, his sequence of mannerisms. She’d known this man a long time, and been married to him for fifteen years, and yet she realized the prospect of him joining her caused no blip on her radar either; and this probably meant it was not only Big Sur that had lost the keys to her heart. She was the only person who had a set.

  And so not only did she have to hold on to them very tightly, but there might come a day when she had to get in her car, and drive.

  That day came. She drove away from home. A long way.

  But then she stalled.

  When the woman spoke, she startled Kristen.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your machine,’ she said. ‘It’s going to fall.’

  Kristen saw she was right. Her iPad was in danger of slipping off her lap. She moved it to safety, and smiled up at the woman, who despite appearing well into her seventies was rocking a head of long grey hair. This was a look you often saw back home, though never here in London. It made her feel homesick.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Miles away.’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said in a less friendly way. ‘You are.’

  With that she walked out of the bar. A few moments later Kristen saw her leave the hotel and walk away down the dark street in the rain.

  As she lay in bed later, alone and cold in the dark and finding sleep slow in coming, Kristen wondered what the old woman meant.

  Miles away.

  She rolled over, saw her phone on the nightstand, doing its duty, waiting patiently to wake her at 6.15 a.m. as usual so she could run for an hour in the hotel gym. It would still only be late afternoon in California. She found herself wondering if she should call Steve. Check he was OK.

  It was a strange thought, and she dismissed it.

  He’d be fine.

  PART 2

  We like to think we live in daylight,

  but half the world is always dark.

  — Ursula Le Guin

  Even good and evil dream of each other

  from the depths of their loneliness.

  — Jean Baudrillard

  Cool Memories III

  Chapter 15

  They left just before the dawn.

  Granddad had to take everything out of the trunk of his car to make room for the machine, and then almost everything out of the back seats to make room for Hannah and Vaneclaw. Hannah helped. The imp also assisted for a short period, but after breaking several things was told to go stand some distance away. The Devil spent the time standing on the path by the bluff, staring out to sea. Granddad explained he would be listening to the dark turnings of the stars. Hannah privately suspected he was just being lazy, or evil.

  They piled all the stuff from the car in the main room of the cabin and Hannah tried not to think about the fact that the size of the pile made it extremely unlikely it could ever have fitted in the car in the first place. Granddad was the Engineer, evidently. He was good at wedging things into very small spaces. That was all.

  When it was finally done, Granddad locked up the cabin and they set off. This time he did not take the scenic route but drove to the airport as quickly as possible. After a while he pushed a CD into the player, and as Hannah sat tiredly watching out of the window and listening to the music she realized that yes, it really did sound like the sky and trees talking together, saying wise and kind things – and that sometimes not having to use words might make it easier to say what you needed to say.

  She was even more tired when they eventually landed at the other end, but tired in that wide-eyed, brittle way that feels like you’re completely not tired and will never be tired again but on the other hand if someone is rude to you you are likely to bash them over the head with a brick until they are completely flat.

  She was surprised to be there at all. She’d realized as they walked into Sea-Tac Airport that, if they really were going to another country, she’d need her passport. She mentioned this to Granddad but he said not to worry. Sure enough, when they approached security it hadn’t seemed to be a problem. The Devil showed the man at the gate something that he pulled out of his wallet. It didn’t look to Hannah like any passport she’d ever seen. It was too small, and a strange colour. The man glanced at it, blinked slowly, then waved them through as if checking passports was the most unimportant thing in the world. He seemed to recover his dedication soon, however, because when she glanced back as they waited to go through the X-ray machine, Hannah saw the man giving somebody else’s passport an oppressively thorough going-over.

  Granddad had to go through the X-ray machine three times because he kept setting it off on account of very small tools or tiny bits of machinery he’d forgotten about, hidden in the pockets of his jacket and trousers. The man in charge of the machine started getting more and more suspicious, and began to look like he might not even let Granddad pass, but the Devil stared at him, and the man turned pale, as if something in his insides was troubling him. Soon afterwards he waved them all through. Hannah was glad to finally get to the other side but disturbed at the look she had seen the Devil give. It seemed likely that bad things would come of it.

  She was right. The man who’d been in charge of the X-ray machine died of stomach cancer four months later.

  They walked to the departure gate and waited until they were let through. They sat in a row on the plane together, the Devil stuffing the imp into one of the overheard lockers. The locker kept flopping open throughout the duration of the flight, to the increasing irritation of nearby passengers, but otherwise the journey was uneventful. Though very, very, very endless.

  It wasn’t the first time Hannah had been on a long-haul flight. She’d been to Hawaii twice before, and Paris, France, when she was younger. This flight seemed surreally long, however, as though time itself had stopped to take a break, re-evaluated its life, realized it was tired of always rushing forwards, and decided to remain still forever instead.

  Granddad and the Devil spent the time in conversation, often in a language Hannah didn’t understand. German, presumably. It got to the point at which she wished the mushroom in the locker were sitting next to her, so at least she’d have someone to talk to. But then the locker flopped open again, causing someone’s handbag to fall out and land on the tray of a passe
nger trying to eat their meal, splashing it all over them, and she realized the imp was better off where he was.

  Eventually the plane landed and they got off and trudged through an airport that was dark and cold and made of concrete. They went through a different type of security. Again, the Devil went first, and once more nobody seemed interested in Hannah or her lack of passport. Their party only had one small bag with them and so they walked straight across the concourse and out on to the street.

  Hannah gasped out loud. She’d been cold in her life before, but this was … this was something else. The streets had ice on them and the wind felt like a knife.

  ‘Good God,’ Granddad said, shivering too. The Devil gave him a dirty look, but Granddad shrugged. ‘It’s just an expression.’

  All the buildings looked as though they had been designed to make you feel small and sad. It was working, too. The few people battling their way along the road, wrapped up in thick coats and wearing big, furry hats, looked as if they would rather, given complete freedom of choice, be dead. It was so cold that it made you feel miserable and empty and afraid. Vaneclaw rapidly turned a distressing shade of purple, his teeth chattering so loudly that it made Hannah’s jaws ache.

  Granddad and the Devil went to the kerb to hail a cab, leaving Hannah and the mushroom shivering together.

  ‘Why are we even in Siberia?’ she asked.

  ‘Search me,’ it said.

  They spent the night in a nearby hotel made of concrete. It was, by local standards, slightly not-ugly. It didn’t look like it wanted you to feel bad, more as if whoever had designed the hotel simply didn’t like buildings very much, and was encouraging you to feel the same.