Michael Marshall Smith

Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence


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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 stolen, 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)