Michael Smith - Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

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.

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) Nash might resell them back to Mr Files; that some of these pieces of tech might spend the rest of their existence circulating back and forth between them like pieces of flotsam bobbing on a dead sea.

This is why you have to be quite smart to be a successful criminal. Keeping track of the interlocking illegalities and hierarchies can be hard, and if you get it wrong you don’t just get a bad appraisal and the chance to buck up your ideas, but instead wind up floating in the bay, often in more than one piece. Men (and women) who were neither smart nor scary enough to work this system with confidence – men like Eduardo, Jesse and Chex – tended to find a leader and do what they were told.

Though robbing Mr Files’s store made them nervous, they were glad to be doing something. In the couple of days since the encounter with the man in the black suit, morale among the group had not been high. The following night the three men had turned up to Nash’s house to find their boss sitting on the tilting porch, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, staring into the middle distance. He had not, as per his usual custom, got decisively to his feet, bounced down the steps, and led them into an evening of lucratively criminal behaviour.

He’d just sat there, alone, reaching after a while for another beer and another cigarette, saying nothing. After nearly an hour of watching this, the three men left.

A common trait amongst persons of a criminal nature is a lack of foresight. This is why so many of them end up in jail. It also means that rather than putting money aside for a rainy day, they live within narrow margins. Eduardo, Jesse and Chex were therefore soon in a position where they had no money.

And so they turned up at Nash’s house again the next night, because though they could have scraped together a little cash through muggings or small-scale robberies of their own, working for Nash produced a much higher return – plus there was the fact he was well known for exacting hideous revenge on anybody who messed with his people, and this made them feel a lot safer.

So though it was in none of their natures, they elected to be patient for once, and wait.