Michael Smith - Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

‘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 down out of the hills, approaching at a jagged angle as though woozy after a long fight. The river widened markedly as it met the beach, became pebble-bottomed and choked with branches and trees, stripped of their bark, white and 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.