Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. Michael Marshall Smith

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       Chapter 8

      Hannah picked at her food. It wasn’t that she didn’t like it. Everything she’d eaten in the hotel so far – dinner the previous night, breakfast this morning, and now lunch – had been good. Not as nice as when Dad had his game on but, on the other hand, not frozen pizza three nights in a row. She simply wasn’t hungry.

      She hadn’t slept well either. She’d been woken several times in the night by the mournful sound of wind. It would sweep past the windows and over the roof of the cabin with a long, low howl, and then tail away as if it’d forgotten or come to terms with whatever tragedy had provoked it in the first place. It would be quiet for a while – a long, pregnant silence – and then suddenly do its thing again, much louder and with more keening this time, as if it’d realized that actually everything was far worse than it had originally feared, and the world needed to know.

      It was cold, too. Granddad piled blankets and an extra counterpane over her when she went to bed, but in the dark hours it was freezing. Eventually, about six in the morning, she had wrapped herself in her dressing gown and a blanket and left her bedroom, padding out to the main room. She’d been surprised to find Granddad already there, fully dressed, staring out to sea, or at where the sea would be if it hadn’t still been dark.

      ‘You’re up early,’ she said.

      ‘Hmm?’

      Granddad took a moment to come back from whatever thoughts he’d been having, but then he said the hotel would be serving breakfast by now and why didn’t they go get a big plate of eggs to warm themselves up.

      He had been acting strange since, though. He seemed to lose focus every now and then, head held as if listening for something. After a moment of this he’d shake his head and be totally normal again.

      They’d started the day by heading down the wooden steps to the beach, turning left and walking. They walked for an hour and then turned and walked back. The sea was grey and choppy. The sand was grey, too, punctuated by large, dark boulders. There was no one else around.

      They talked of this and that. Looking back, Hannah couldn’t remember exactly what they had talked about. Just … stuff. Mom and Dad always wanted to know how school had been, when she was going to do her homework, if there was the slightest possibility, ever, that she might tidy up her room. With Granddad it was more like waves on the beach. Coming in, and going out, none of them mattering but all of them real. It struck her as a shame that it was hard to remember this kind of talking after it was over.

      ‘What are we going to do this afternoon?’ she asked.

      ‘Walk the other way. You have to. Or the beach gets unbalanced.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘Oh yes. Like a seesaw. All the sand slides to one end. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Or yours.’

      Hannah raised a disbelieving eyebrow. Granddad just sat there looking innocent.

      The only other person in the restaurant was a young waitress who spent her time looking as though she was in training for a competition to see who in the world could look the most bored, and had a real chance of placing in the medals.

      ‘Don’t you get lonely here?’

      ‘I don’t get lonely anywhere.’

      ‘But how, if there are no people?’

      ‘Loneliness isn’t to do with other people.’

      ‘But don’t you want someone to talk to, sometimes?’

      Granddad raised his hand in another vain attempt to attract the attention of the waitress. ‘The problem, dear, is my age. When you’re as old as me, if people see you in a corner with a book they think: Poor old fellow, he must be lonely – I’ll go cheer him up. And so they come and talk at you, whether you want them to or not, and they always speak too loudly, and treat you as though you’re incapable of understanding the smallest things, or as if you’re simple in the head.’

      ‘Really?’

      The hand movement not having worked, Granddad coughed, extremely loudly. The waitress looked the other way.

      ‘Almost always,’ he went on. ‘They believe that because older people move slowly, their minds must creep too. They forget that the way you get to be old is by living a long time, which means you’ve seen a lot of things. When you get to my age—’

      ‘What is your age, Granddad?’

      Hannah knew she shouldn’t interrupt a grown-up but couldn’t resist such a perfect opening. Granddad’s age was a hotly debated topic. Nobody knew what it was, at least not for sure. They knew his birthday – 20 November – but not the year he’d been born. Hannah’s dad and Aunt Zo had spent their childhoods believing that their father was born in 1936, which is what their mother had told them. But one Christmas when Hannah’s mom mentioned this in passing – and when Granddad had enjoyed a few glasses of wine over lunch – he’d laughed very hard and said no, no, that wasn’t when he’d been born at all. Concerted attempts to pin him down subsequently had been deftly avoided. Hannah’s mom had more than once suggested this was because Granddad was losing his marbles, and couldn’t actually remember. Hannah, on the other hand, believed he was just having fun.

      ‘So very, very ooooooold,’ he said with a wicked grin. ‘Now – we need our bill. Please throw your spoon at the waitress. Aim for her head.’

      The beach was wilder on the right. A river came СКАЧАТЬ