Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence. Michael Marshall Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ seriously. It is home to a well-regarded branch of the University of California and also to a famous boardwalk, where you can go on fairground rides and scare yourself witless should you be so inclined. The boardwalk features a house of horrors and a carousel and shooting galleries and the fifth-oldest rollercoaster in America (the famed Giant Dipper, which Hannah had ridden only once, with her grandfather: both emerged shaken from the experience, and he later described the contraption as ‘potentially evil’) and places to buy corn dogs and garlic fries and Dippin’ Dots. It is a matter of lasting chagrin to the childfolk of Santa Cruz that they’re not allowed to go to the boardwalk every single day.

      Though outsiders have been visiting for many years to walk on the beaches or surf or eat seafood, the town – as Hannah’s mother sometimes observed – is rather like an island. Behind it stand the sturdy Santa Cruz Mountains, covered in redwoods and pines, cradling the town and providing a barrier between it and Silicon Valley and San Jose. Once these mountains were home to wolves and bears but the humans got rid of them to make the place tidier, and for the convenience of those who wish to hike. South lies the sweeping bay, where not much happens except for the cultivation of artichokes and garlic and other unappealing grown-up foodstuffs, until you get to Monterey, and then Carmel, and finally the craggy wilderness of Big Sur. On the northern side of town there’s mainly emptiness along seventy miles of beautiful coast until you reach San Francisco, or ‘the city’, as everyone calls it in these parts. Santa Cruz could therefore seem somewhat cut off from the rest of California (and indeed the world), but luckily almost everyone who lives there is content with this arrangement. So Hannah’s mother sometimes said, without much of a smile.

      Hannah hadn’t heard her mother say much recently, however. Before Hannah became embroiled in the story I’m about to tell, she was already a participant in several others, starring in The Tale of Being an Eleven-Year-Old Girl, The Story of Having Annoyingly Straight Brown Hair, The Chronicles of My Friend Ellie Being Mean to Me for No Reason, and The Saga of It Being Completely Unfair that I’m Not Allowed to Have a Kitten. One story had come to dominate her life recently, however, looming so large and changing so many things in such enormous ways that it drowned out all the rest.

      It’s an old and sad and confusing tale, called Mom and Dad Don’t Live Together Any More.

      Hannah knew the exact moment when this story began, the point at which some malign spirit had furrowed its brow and wondered ‘What if?’ and started messing around with her life.

      It was a Saturday, and they were in Los Gatos. Hannah’s mom liked Los Gatos. It’s neat and tidy and has stores they didn’t have in Santa Cruz. Hannah’s dad was never as keen to make the half-hour journey over the mountains (the most doom-laden highway in the world, according to him, attractive but luridly prone to accident, and it’s hard to be completely sanguine about the fact it actually crosses the San Andreas Fault) but between the Apple Store and a coffee shop and the nice square outside their favourite restaurant he seemed able to pass the morning pleasantly enough while Hannah and her mother shopped.

      Lunch afterwards was always fun. The restaurant they visited was bright and airy and the waiters were friendly and wore smart uniforms and before you got your food they brought baskets of miniature breads and pastries which Hannah’s parents would try to stop her eating. Meanwhile they’d talk and sip wine and Hannah’s mom would show her dad some of the things she’d bought (though never, Hannah noticed, absolutely everything).

      All of Hannah’s memories of Los Gatos were good, therefore, until the time six months before, when she happened to glance up while nibbling a tiny muffin and saw her mother looking out of the window. Mom’s face was blank and sad.

      Surprised – lunches in Los Gatos were always cheerful, sometimes so cheerful recently that they might even have seemed a little shrill – Hannah looked at her father.

      He was watching her mom. The expression on his face was not blank, though it was also sad.

      ‘Dad?’

      He blinked as if waking from a dream, and gave her a hard time for starting another pastry, though she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Meanwhile her mother kept staring out of the window as though watching something a long way away, as if wondering if she were to jump up from the table right now and run out of the door as fast as she could, she might be able to catch up with it before it disappeared from sight.

      Food arrived, and everybody ate, and then they drove home. They didn’t go to Los Gatos again after that. As far as Hannah was concerned, that lunch was when it all started to go wrong.

      Because two months later Hannah’s mom moved out.

      A lot of things stayed the same. Hannah attended school, did homework, went to French class on Tuesday afternoons (which was extra, because Mom thought she ought to be able to understand it, even though the nearest place anybody spoke French was probably France). Dad had always done the grocery shopping and cooked the evening meal – as Hannah’s mom travelled a lot for work, all over America and Europe, and had always seemed baffled and infuriated by the oven – so that was business as usual.

      There’s a difference between ‘Mom being away until the weekend’, however, and ‘Mom is away … indefinitely.’ The kitchen table goes all big. The dishwasher sounds too loud.

      Her grandfather came to stay with them for a week – or, at least, his meandering path through the world brought him into Santa Cruz – which was nice. He did the kind of thing he usually did, like making odd little sculptures out of random objects he found on his walks, and dozing off in an armchair (or spending periods ‘resting his eyes’). He cooked dinner one night though it wasn’t entirely clear what it was, and tried to help Hannah with her science homework, but after ten minutes of frowning at the questions simply said that they were ‘wrong’.

      Hannah also saw her Aunt Zo, who came down a few times to keep her company. Zoë was twenty-eight. She lived in the city and was an artist-or-something. She had alarmingly spiky dyed-blond hair and several tattoos and wore black most of the time and was her dad’s much younger sister, though it seemed to Hannah that Zo and her dad always looked at each other with cautious bemusement, as if they weren’t sure they belonged to the same species, never mind family. Hannah didn’t know what an ‘artist-or-something’ even was. She’d intuited it might not be an entirely complimentary term because it was how her mother described Zoë, and Hannah’s mom and Zo had not always appeared to get on super-well. It had to be different to an ‘artist’, certainly, because extensive tests had demonstrated that Aunt Zo couldn’t draw at all.

      She was friendly, though, and fun, and had gone to a lot of trouble to explain that the fact Hannah’s parents didn’t live together right now didn’t mean either of them loved her any less. Sometimes people lived together forever, and sometimes they did not. That was between them, and the reasons could be impossible for anybody else to understand. Sometimes it was because of something big or weird and unfixable. Sometimes it was merely something ‘mundane’.

      Hannah hadn’t understood what this word meant. Aunt Zo waved her hands vaguely, and said, ‘Well, you know. Mundane.’

      Later Hannah looked it up on the internet. The internet said that the word came from the Latin mundus, meaning ‘world’, and thus referred to things ‘of the earthly world, rather than a heavenly or spiritual one’. That made zero sense until she realized this was only a second thing it could mean, and that usually people used it to mean ‘dull, lacking interest or excitement’.

      Hannah nodded at this. She didn’t see how Mom and Dad not living together could be without interest, but she was beginning to feel her life in general most certainly could.

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