Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. Michael Marshall Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ dead, washed down out of the mountains. Granddad sat to one side while Hannah explored the river mouth, but even for an only child used to being solitary, she needed someone her own age to make that kind of thing truly fun.

      They walked further and found a stretch where the beach near the waterline was busy with sand dollars. These weren’t just the shells, like the ones that – once in a blue moon – you might find fragments of on the beach in Santa Cruz. They were living creatures, as Hannah found with a start when she tried to pick one out of the sand (delighted to have found a whole one for once) and saw it burrowing away from her.

      She found its being alive faintly disturbing, as though it was a pebble that had tried to scuttle off.

      They walked on, and on. There was nothing along here except wilderness, and thus no particular reason to stop. Neither of them had said anything for half an hour.

      Eventually Hannah tired, and ground to a halt.

      There was no one else on the beach. She was starting to feel like a piece of driftwood, washed up on this shore and left there forever. Like that, or …

      Her father had once told her about something called the Watchers, a story set in the mountains of Big Sur. It was said that once in a very great while, at twilight, people caught a glimpse of figures – usually alone, but occasionally in pairs – standing in the deepest woods, or on a peak some distance away. Dark figures with no faces, not tall, cloaked in long black coats with hoods, or enveloped in shadows. They never did anything, or said anything, and when you looked back they were gone. Her father said people had been claiming to see the Watchers for a hundred years, and that the Native Americans had tales that sounded like they might be about the same thing, from even longer ago. Hannah had assumed her father might be making all this up – he did that kind of thing from time to time, testing ideas for whatever he was working on for the bastards and flea-brains down in Los Angeles – but then one afternoon her teacher had mentioned the Watchers too, and said that they were in a poem by some slightly famous poet who’d lived in Carmel, and John Steinbeck had put them in a short story, too, and John Steinbeck knew absolutely everything about sardines, so maybe he knew about that too.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ