Michael Smith - Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

‘But …’ He stopped. He didn’t seem to know what he wanted to say next.

‘You’re sad,’ she said.

He laughed, surprised. ‘Well, yeah. You are too, I know. It’s, uh, it’s a strange time.’

‘I’m sad,’ she agreed. ‘But not like you are.’

‘What … do you mean?’

‘You’re badly sad.’

He stared at her, nodding, and she was intensely scared to see that his eyes were full. She had never, ever seen her dad cry. She didn’t want to see it now. She knew life sucked but if it turned out it was bad enough to make her father cry , it was far worse than she realized. That would be beyond mundane.

‘Did I say something wrong?’

‘No. You said something smart.’ He sniffed briskly, and stopped looking like he was going to cry. ‘I need some time,’ he said. ‘Firstly … well, all this.’ He raised his hands, referring to the house, and what was in it, and what was not in it any more. ‘Plus … work. I’m getting behind. One or the other thing, I could handle. Both at once, not so much. It seems.’

Hannah understood that her father typed for a living, for people who lived down in Los Angeles, helping them make stories. She knew this was a hard job sometimes, partly because – so she had gathered, from overhearing conversations between him and Mom – almost all of the people her dad worked for were assholes and idiots, with the creative acumen of mosquitoes and the moral sensibilities of wolverines. He said things like this very quietly, though, as if concerned they might be able to hear him from over three hundred miles away.

‘OK, look,’ he said. ‘Here’s the thing. I wondered if you’d like to go stay with Granddad for a while.’

Hannah wanted to say ‘yes’ immediately, but dimly understood that she should not. ‘Granddad?’

Her father was watching her carefully. ‘Yes.’

‘Why not Aunt Zo?’

‘Zo-zo’s busy.’ He sighed. ‘Got an exhibition coming up, or a performance, or some … thing. Plus you’ve seen her apartment. She has to stand up when she goes to sleep.’

This was an old family joke and Hannah smiled as always, or tried to. It felt different now. In the past there would never have been any question of her staying with Aunt Zo. Now it had evidently been considered, and rejected. That made Hannah feel rejected too. ‘And I was thinking … of you going for more than a couple of days.’

‘How long?’

‘A week. Maybe two.’

Two whole weeks ? ‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘But … what about school?’

‘I talked to Teacher Jen. She said it would be OK.’

Hannah looked hard at her father, and knew he was not telling the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway. He would have talked to her teacher, yes. You couldn’t just yank a kid out of school without clearing it with mission control.

But it struck her now that, though he had not shaved, he’d been wearing smart chinos and a shirt when he dropped her at school that morning – the first time in ages he hadn’t been wearing the raggedy jeans he used to only wear at the weekend. She didn’t think you could bail your kid out of school for two weeks just by saying ‘I’m having a hard time.’ So probably he’d said it was something to do with working for the wolverines instead, which is why he’d been wearing business clothes. Things to do with work were always incredibly important for grown-ups. They were respected without question. Far more, it sometimes seemed, than things to do with children.

‘Have you asked Granddad?’

‘Yes. I spoke to him last night. Well, emailed. There’s no phone signal there.’

‘Where is he now? Where on earth?’

Her father smiled, and this time it looked genuine. It made Hannah realize what a long time it had been since she’d seen that kind of smile on his face.

‘Washington State,’ he said, as if this meant the far side of the moon. ‘God knows why. But where he’s staying sounds pretty cool. I think you’ll like it. And he says he’s really looking forward to seeing you.’

From the moment Dad first mentioned the idea, Hannah had wanted to go. She loved her dad’s dad, and the prospect of getting out of Santa Cruz for a while, doing something – anything – other than plodding through her mundane existence, felt desperately attractive. She’d held back from leaping at it because she knew she shouldn’t seem as if she wanted to get away from her father. That also meant she had to say what she said next. ‘But I’ll miss you.’

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized how true they were. How badly true.

Her dad’s lips clamped together, the way they sometimes did when he was mad. His eyes didn’t look mad, though. Not at all.

‘I’ll miss you too,’ he said. ‘But we can Skype, and email, and it’s not so long. And when you get back, things will be better here. I promise.’

‘OK,’ Hannah said. ‘Can I watch some Netflix now?’

‘Sure,’ he said, wrong-footed.

‘Yay.’

She jumped up and ran to the den and switched on the big TV. As she was waiting for her show to load she glanced back into the living room and saw that her father was still sitting on the edge of the sofa, shoulders bowed and head lowered. She could not see his face or eyes.

His shoulders seemed to shake, for a moment, and then shake again. Presumably he was laughing at something.

The driver pulled over to the side of Ali Baba Avenue and turned to look at the guy in the back of his cab.

‘You sure this is where you want to be?’

The old man had been silent throughout the long journey into Dade County from South Beach, successfully resisting Domingo’s attempts to involve him in conversation. Domingo was good at conversation, too. His game was tight. He didn’t mind listening either, a much rarer gift, and so he could usually get customers to chat with him, and he did this out of a simple desire to tell people things and to hear stuff about where they’d come from and where they were going, not just because it meant a bigger tip, though that was always welcome.

This customer, though … he wasn’t buying it. Anything Domingo said, he’d said nothing back, remaining relentlessly and noisily silent. He was currently looking out of the window at the twilight, his big, pale hands resting on the knees of his suit. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This looks perfect.’

Domingo laughed briefly. ‘Right. You want to get mugged or score some dope that’s gonna put you straight in ER, that may be true. This could be Heaven on earth right here.’

The passenger held out a few bank notes to signal their business was concluded. Domingo was not to be so easily dismissed, however.

‘The hell you want to come to Opa Locka for, anyway? Some dumbass website say there’s authentic down-home cooking? They lied, brother. The only specialty they got around here is rat boiled in meth. You want food, I can take you places, good places, back where the locals don’t eat each other.’

The old man opened his door. Domingo tried one last time. ‘Look. At least take my card, OK? How the hell else you going to get back? Don’t you be flagging down no cab here, even if you see one, which you won’t. For real. They’ll take you round the corner and rob your ass. If you’re lucky.’

The man got out and walked off down a street that looked as though it had recently withstood a minor hurricane and hadn’t been remotely picturesque before that. Domingo thought about going after him, but this was, bottom line, not a neighbourhood where he wanted to linger any longer than necessary.

So he drove away.

The old man spent an hour strolling the streets as the light faded. He saw low storage buildings of indeterminate purpose, fortified with barbed wire. He passed squat one-storey dwellings interspersed with clumps of stunted palm trees, houses set apart from each other not for the luxury of space but as though the inhabitants didn’t trust their neighbours enough to live in closer proximity. There were no sidewalks, so he walked down the middle of the streets, which were pitted and patched and ragged at the edges and sprouting grass in many places: the kind of broken roads you’d expect to see down the dusty end of country towns that had been dying for decades. It was stiflingly humid.