‘That’s important to remember. But in the specific case of the place to which we’re going, we very nearly are.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry. “Yes” is what I meant to say.’
The road wound up and over the hills. At the top you could see the ocean for a few minutes through the trees, and then the road headed down again on the other side.
At the end of it stood a hotel, an old-looking two-storey lodge made of wood, but Granddad turned towards a crop of cabins dotted along a pathway that meandered along the low bluff above the beach. He parked in front of the last of these.
‘Welcome to Kalaloch.’
The cabin was made of wood and painted white and grey, though not recently. It was clean but had a musty smell, like old sea breezes retired into stillness. There were two bedrooms, a bathroom with a tub so tiny Hannah thought she might have difficulty stretching her legs out in it, and a living room with two chairs and a couch but no TV. At all. Not even a small one. She checked several times, baffled by this overturning of the natural order.
The outside wall of the living room was taken up with a pair of sliding glass doors, with a view out over the path to the ocean. When he’d put her suitcase on the bed of her room, Granddad opened the doors and led her out on to the path, past a couple of battered plastic chairs evidently designed for enjoying the view from the minuscule deck, assuming you’d brought a thick sweater or two.
The beach was twenty feet below the edge of the bluff, a wide stretch of grey sand reaching out towards an even greyer sea. A few pieces of driftwood, large and very white, were strewn across it. There was no one down there, no footprints even. It looked like the end of the world. The ocean seemed as though it went on forever and then a bit more.
A gull sailed by, high overhead, and disappeared.
Even with Granddad only feet away, Hannah felt very alone. Her hand folded around the iPod in her jeans pocket. ‘Is there Wi-Fi here?’
‘Not in the cabin. There is in the lodge, though, when we go over there to eat dinner.’
Hannah nodded.
‘You want to Skype your dad?’
She shrugged. He looked out at the ocean for a moment, then put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, ‘but it’s been a long drive, and I’m rather hungry already.’
She smiled at him. He always heard.
Meanwhile, about a thousand miles away, a man was sitting at a table in a diner called Frankie’s Food Fiasco, situated at the edge of a small town in North Dakota. The man was called Ron – though a lot of people had another name for him.
The restaurant had got its name because it was owned by a guy called Frankie: sometimes that’s the way it is. Frankie was a capable cook, and his diner was regarded as pretty much the only place you’d voluntarily eat in town. Less well known was that Frankie had never wanted to own a diner. He’d wanted to be a movie star. For a while it looked like it might happen, too, after he scored a lead supporting role in a TV series about a maverick chiropodist turned surfing detective, called Undertoe, which by odd coincidence was the first show Hannah’s dad worked on. It was also the only one that had got a second season, and thus constituted his biggest and, kind of, only success. Frankie had played the star’s dour buddy, prone to mutter the word ‘Fiasco!’ whenever things went wrong – which became a moderately popular running gag in society at large for about five minutes.
Once the show got cancelled and he’d realized the world of entertainment appeared not merely willing, but keen, to get along without him, Frankie had enough smarts to head back to his home town, where he used his savings to buy a failing restaurant, largely because he had no idea of what else to do. Through trial and error – and a degree of bloody-mindedness – he’d rewritten himself as a cook, and now if you wanted to eat out in Shendig, North Dakota, Frankie’s Food Fiasco was where you’d go.
Frankie could have been content with this state of affairs, but he was not. He wished he was still an actor, and in the intervening years had developed a churning resentment of the people who frequented his diner. What did they know about the life he should have had? Nothing. Zip. Nada. They just wanted their burgers and wings and fries and beer. They sat and stuffed their greedy faces not caring that the food they were shovelling down had been prepared by a man who, were this a fair and just world, should be lounging on the deck of a beach house in Malibu, stupefied with money and success.
In revenge for this, every night Frankie would, at random, screw up a single dish. He’d put in way too much salt, or a big dollop of hot sauce, or mix untoward ingredients in such a way that the result tasted quite unlike anything you’d generally regard as food. Though it was never explicitly discussed, some of the restaurant’s customers realized the danger, incorrectly assuming it was a recurrent accident. You couldn’t say anything should you be unlucky enough to be served the booby-trapped dish because Frankie was prone to banning people if they got uppity, and you didn’t want that to happen as the only other place to eat in Shendig (apart from Molly’s Café, which was dependably disgusting) was the Burger King downtown. If you received Frankie’s nightly food bomb you forced down as much as you could and politely told the waitress you were full, declining the opportunity to have the remainder boxed – knowing that statistically you were unlikely to get the booby prize again for a while.
Unless, that is, you were Ron.
Ron ate at Frankie’s at least once a week. It was just down the hill from his apartment and he enjoyed the low ceilings, the wood panelling, the fact that the music was never too loud. He also liked the food, though it seemed like his entrée tasted really weird about one time in three. Ron hadn’t heard the rumour about the food bombs. He just shrugged and put it down to fate.
Ron put a lot of things down to fate. He had to. Like the fact that the booth he was sitting in tonight – and he couldn’t move, because the place was packed: people liked to come in when it was busy, as it lowered the probability of receiving a dish that tasted like it had been cobbled together from things that had died out on the highway and then spent a few days simmering in snot – happened to be right under a spot in the exposed piping hooked to the ceiling that had developed a leak, and was intermittently allowing droplets of very cold water to fall on to his head. He’d tried moving to the other side of the booth, but it happened there, too. Except the drops were boiling hot.
Tonight his ribs tasted great, but he was barely aware of them. He was concerned instead with two other matters, the first being that he’d totalled his car that afternoon. It had snowed heavily a couple of days before and while most people had managed to avoid the very obvious icy patch at the end of the road, Ron had not. As he’d recently lost his job at the picture framer’s after dropping (and damaging, cataclysmically and beyond hope of repair) what had turned out to be a rather valuable painting, Ron wasn’t in a position to get his car fixed. Without one, it was going to be hard to find a new job.
The second thing on his mind was his girlfriend, Rionda. Or rather, he realized gloomily, his ex-girlfriend. She worked at the Burger King and was the nicest person he had ever met. She’d seemed to like him too, but their association had been plagued by disappointing events, including him setting fire to her favourite dress when lighting a candle that was supposed to be romantic, and accidentally backing his car over her foot.
She’d put up with most of this reasonably well, but the last weekend had seen a new low point. Invited for the first time to meet Rionda’s parents, Ron became entangled in a series of calamities during a visit to their bathroom that he still didn’t understand, but which had ultimately led to a need for the services of not one, but two teams of emergency plumbers, working in shifts, an estimated refurbishment bill of six to ten thousand dollars, and an odour which experts were now saying would probably never go away.