Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

Then

Imagine, if you will, a watchmaker’s workshop.

In fact, please imagine one whether you wish to or not. That’s where something’s about to happen, something that won’t seem important right away but will turn out to be – and if you’re not prepared to listen to what I’m saying then this whole thing simply isn’t going to work.

So.

Imagine that thing I just said.

If it helps, the workshop is on the street level of an old and crumbling building, in a town some distance from here. With the exception of the workbench it is cluttered and dusty. The watchmaker is advanced in years and does not care about the state of the place, except for the area in which he works.

It is a late afternoon in autumn, and growing dark. Quite cold, too. It is quiet. The workshop is dimly lit by candles, and the watchmaker – you can picture him in the gloom, bent over his bench, if you wish – is wearing several layers of clothing to keep warm. He is repairing a piece he made several decades ago, the prized possession of a local nobleman. It will take him perhaps half an hour, he estimates, after which he’ll lock up his workshop and walk through the narrow streets to his house, where since the death of his wife he lives alone but for an elderly and bad-tempered cat. On the way he will stop off to purchase a few provisions, primarily a bag of peppermints, of which he is extremely fond. The watchmaker. Not the cat.

The timepiece he is working on is intricate, and very advanced for its time, though the watchmaker knows that were he to embark upon crafting something like it now he’d do things quite differently. He has learned a great deal since he made it. He doesn’t make anything new any more, however. He hasn’t in a long while. The story of his life has already been told. He is merely waiting for its final line.

Nonetheless, his eyes remain sharp and his fingers nimble, and in fact it only takes ten minutes before the watch is working perfectly once more. He reassembles it, and polishes the outside with his sleeve. Finished. Done.

He stands with the piece in his hands. He is aware, through his profound understanding of its workings, of the intricate mechanisms involved in its measuring of time, the hidden movements. He feels these as a subtle, almost imperceptible vibration, like the murmur of a tiny animal cupped in his hand, stirring in its sleep.

And he is aware of something else.

Not one thing, in fact, but a multitude – a cloud filling his mind like notes from a church organ, soaring up towards heaven. He is aware of children, and a grandchild. They cannot be his, because he has none: his marriage, though long and comfortable, was without issue. Aware, too, of the people who had come before him, his parents and grandparents and ancestors, aware not merely of the idea of them but their reality, their complexity – as though he has only ever been the soloist in the music of his life, supported upon the harmonies of others.

He’s aware also that though the candles in the workshop illuminate small areas, there are patches of darkness too, and parts that are neither one thing nor the other. That his entire life has been this way, not forever pulled between two poles but borne instead along far more complex currents, of which ticks and tocks are merely the extremes.

How did he come to be standing here on this cold afternoon? he wonders. What innumerable events led to this?

And why?

He shakes his head, frowning. This is not the kind of thought that usually occupies his mind. He is not normally prey, either, to a feeling of dread – though that is what is creeping up on him now. Something bad is about to happen.

Something wicked this way comes.

He hears footsteps in the street outside. He half turns, but cannot see who is approaching. The windows are grimy. He has not cleaned them in many years. Nobody needs to see inside. His venerable name on the sign is advertisement enough, and as he has gradually withdrawn from the world so he has come to value the privacy the windows’ opaqueness confers.

But now suddenly he wishes he could see who’s coming. And he wonders whether his life is over after all.

He waits, turning back to the bench, busying his hands.

And the door opens.

No, no, no. Sorry. Stop imagining things.

I’ve got this completely wrong. I’ve tried to tell the story from the beginning.

That’s always a mistake. I’ve learned my lesson since, and have even come to wonder if this is what I was dimly starting to comprehend on that cold, long-ago afternoon. Life is not like a watch or clock, something that can be constructed and then wound for the first time, set in motion.

There is no beginning. We are always in the middle.

OK, look. I’m going to start again.

PART 1

A story is a spirit being, not a repertoire,

allegory or form of psychology.

Martin Shaw

Snowy Tower

Chapter 1

So. This is a story, as I’ve said. And stories are skittish, like cats. You need to approach calmly and respectfully or they’ll run away and you’ll never see them again. People have been spinning tales for as long as we’ve been on this planet, perhaps even longer. There are stories that are so ancient, in fact, that they come from a time before words – tales conjured in gestures and grunts, movement of the eyes; stories that live in the rustling of leaves and lapping of waves, and whose ghosts hide in the tales we tell each other now.

Be good, and be careful.

Beware of that cave; that forest; that man.

Some day the sun will go dark, and then we will hide.

But all stories – and I’m talking about proper ones here, not stories about sassy teens becoming ninja spies or needy middle-agers overturning their lives in a fit of First World pique and finding true love running a funky little bookshop in Barcelona – need us to survive. Humans are the clouds from which stories rain, but we are also shards of glass that channel their light, focusing them so sharply that they burn.

Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too – reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it.

That’s what happened to Hannah Green. She got caught up in a story.

And this is what it is.

Hannah lives in a place called Santa Cruz, on the coast of Northern California. It has a nice downtown with organic grocery stores and a Safeway and coffee shops and movie theatres and a library and all the things you need if you want other towns to take you 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.

The next time she saw Zo was when her aunt came to babysit overnight because Hannah’s dad had to fly down to a meeting in Los Angeles. Hannah dropped the word into conversation, and was pleased to see her aunt smile to herself. Emboldened, Hannah tentatively asked whether maybe, next time, rather than Zo coming to Santa Cruz, Hannah could come up to the city instead. She did not say, but felt, they could be girls together there, and have new and unusual fun that would not be dull or lack excitement. Zo said yes, maybe, and how about they made some more popcorn and watched a movie.

Hannah was old and smart enough to understand that whatever ‘mundane’ might mean, ‘maybe’ generally meant ‘no’.

Otherwise, life dragged on like a really long television show that was impossible to turn off. She went to school and ate and slept. Mom sent her an email every couple of days, and they spoke on Skype once a week. The emails were short, and usually about the weather in London, England, where she was working. The phone conversations were better, though it sometimes felt as though the actress playing her mother had changed.

Hannah realized it wasn’t likely that, even when (or if) her mom did come back, she was going to come and live with Hannah and her dad. Straight away, anyway. Missing her mother was tough, but bearable. Hannah put thoughts of her in a box in her head and closed it up (not too tightly, just enough to stop it popping open all the time and making her cry) and told herself that she was welcome to look inside however often she liked. In her imagination the box was ornate and intricate and golden, like something out of a storybook.

Missing her dad was worse, because he was right there.

He hadn’t gone away, but he had. Virtually everything about him with the exception of his appearance (though he often looked tired, and didn’t smile with his eyes) had changed. He hugged her at bedtime. He hugged her at the school gate. When something needed to be said, one of them said it, and the other listened. But sometimes when Hannah came into a room without him realizing, she would look at him for a while and it was as though there was nobody there.

Otherwise, nothing much changed.

School.

Homework.

Food.

Bed.

School.

Homework.

Food.

Bed …

… like waves lapping on a deserted shore. Life was flat and grey and quiet, all the more so because every other adult with whom she came into contact – teachers at school, her friends’ moms and dads, even the instructor at gym, who’d always been snarky with literally everyone – treated her differently now. They were polite and accommodating and they always smiled and seemed to look at her more directly than before. They were so very nice to her, in fact, that the world no longer had edge or bite. It lost all shape and colour and momentum, and any sense of light or shade. It was like living in a cloud.

Late one autumnal afternoon, as she sat watching through the window as a squirrel played in the tree outside, looking so in charge of its life, having so much fun, Hannah realized that her own life had become ‘mundane’.

Horribly, unfeasibly mundane.

So I suppose that’s where we’ll begin.

Don’t worry, things will start to happen. This hasn’t been the actual story yet. It’s background, a few moments spent sifting through the tales already in progress in order to pick a moment in time and say: ‘So now let’s see what happened next.’

And we will.

But before we get any further into Hannah’s story, we need to go and meet someone else.

Chapter 2

Because, meanwhile, an old man was dozing on the terrace of the Palace Hotel, on Miami’s South Beach.

The hotel stands amidst a half-mile of art deco jewels restored to their former glory in the 1980s, and – like many of the others – was determinedly now running back to seed, as though that was the state in which it felt most comfortable. The old man had a local newspaper on his lap but he had not read it. To one side, on the table supporting the umbrella protecting him from the sun, was a glass of ice tea that had long ago come up to ambient temperature. A large bug was swimming in it, a leisurely freestyle. The waiter working the terrace had approached the table several times to see if the gaunt old buzzard wanted his glass refreshed. Each time he’d discovered the man’s eyes were closed. His position had not changed in quite a while.

Nonetheless the waiter decided to try one more time. In half an hour his shift would be over. In most ways that was awesome. The afternoon had been hellishly humid and the waiter was looking forward to returning to his ratty apartment, taking a shower, sitting out on his balcony and smoking pot for a couple of hours before hitting the town in the hope of finding some margarita-addled divorcée or, failing that, simply getting wasted. Business on the terrace had not been brisk, however. He was below quota on tips (and behind on his rent), and that was why he decided – now it was approaching five – it was worth one final attempt to upsell the old dude in the crumpled suit into a big glass of wine or, better still, an overpriced cocktail.

He went and stood over him.

The old man’s head was tilted forwards in sleep, showcasing a pale forehead dotted with liver spots, a sizable beak of a nose, and combed-back hair that, though pure white, remained in decent supply. Large, mottled hands rested on knees that appeared bony even through the black linen of his suit. Who wore black in Florida, for God’s sake?

The waiter coughed. There was no response.

He coughed again, more loudly.

Consciousness returned slowly.

It felt as though it was coming from a great distance, and that was because this was not a normal awakening. It wasn’t merely a matter of rising from sleep. On this day, the old man woke from a far deeper slumber.

He opened his eyes and for a moment he had no idea where he was. It was hot. It was bright, though the quality of the light suggested it must be towards the end of the afternoon. He could see the glint of some ocean or other, past the stone terrace on which he sat.

And there was a young man, wearing a white apron, standing in front of him and smiling the kind of smile that always had financial outlay attached to it.

‘Refreshed, sir?’

The old man stared confusedly at him for a moment, and then sat up straight. He peered around the terrace and saw young couples at other tables, and a few older people wearing hats and looking out at the ocean as if waiting for it to do something. Hotels on either side. Palm trees.

He turned back to the waiter. ‘Where am I?’

The waiter sighed. The old fart had seemed fine when he ordered his ice tea earlier. Evidently a day in the sun had fried what was left of his wits.

‘Wondered if I could interest you in a cold glass of Chardonnay, sir? We have an intriguing selection. Though perhaps a crisp Sauvignon Blanc would be more to your taste? Or a Martini, a Bellini, or a Sobotini? That’s the signature creation of our in-house executive mixologist, Ralph Sobo, and features a trio of—’

‘Did I ask you to recite the entire drinks menu?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So?’

The waiter smiled tightly. ‘You are on the terrace of the Palace Hotel,’ he said, offensively slowly. ‘South Beach. Miami. The United States of America.’ He leaned forwards and added, loudly enough for people nearby to turn and smile to themselves, ‘Planet Earth.’

The man frowned. ‘How long have I been here?’

‘In this spot? The entire afternoon. The hotel? I have no clue. I’m sure reception can assist you with that information, along with your name, if that’s also slipped your mind. Now – can I help you with a beverage, or not?’

The man shook his head. ‘Just my bill.’

The waiter walked off, bouncing his tray against his knee, vowing that he would use everything within his power to make sure that the wrinkly old fool received his bill only after a very significant delay.

This waiter had only been working at the Palace for a couple of days, and didn’t yet know many other members of staff. Otherwise he might have heard, in passing, whispers about this particular old man. Rumours that in the three months he’d been resident in a suite on the thirteenth floor, it had proved impossible to place guests in the accommodation on either side. The hotel’s sophisticated computer system appeared to have developed an intermittent glitch that meant those rooms showed up as occupied, even when they were not. Any attempt to override or ignore this resulted in double- or even treble-booking, with the inevitable fallout of enraged guests, and so for the time being reception had stopped trying to allot the rooms. They had also temporarily halted attempts to get to the bottom of the means of payment the old man had presented. His credit card, though unimpeachable in status and hue, proved impossible to retain reliably in the system. As a result – and to the hotel manager’s increasing disquiet – no charge had yet been levied against it. The technical department claimed this would be fixed very soon. The manager hoped this was true, though it was not the first or even third time he’d been given this assurance.

The waiter didn’t know any of this, however. So he went over to the register and surreptitiously tore up the old man’s bill, before hanging up his apron and leaving the terrace, whistling a tune to himself.

It’d only take the senile old bastard ten or fifteen minutes to get a new bill from the next waiter, but any inconvenience was better than none.

The man sitting under the umbrella didn’t wait that long, however. He laid ten dollars on the table, securing it under his glass. He stood. For a few moments he didn’t move any farther, apparently becalmed, his face blank.

Then suddenly he smiled.

It was not a simple smile, one of pleasure or joy. It was complicated, rueful. If you’d been watching, you might have thought he’d remembered something, a matter that was not urgent but which he felt foolish for having neglected.

He took a last look at the ocean and then turned and walked towards the doors to the hotel lobby, moving with a good deal more grace and speed than you might have expected.

An hour later, after a shower and in the middle of his second joint, the waiter from the Palace Hotel was relaxing on his balcony when it suddenly collapsed, dropping him forty feet into the chaos of his downstairs neighbour’s scrap of yard, where he died, reasonably quickly, as a result of a sheared metal strut which punctured his ribcage and heart.

This was not a coincidence.

Chapter 3

It was seven in the evening, and Hannah was waiting.

Waiting.

Waiting.

She’d been waiting since breakfast, during which her father had been even more distant and insubstantial than usual; and waiting since he’d dropped her at school, saying goodbye with a hug and a kiss but an odd look in his eyes. He had forgotten to shave that morning, she noticed. He’d forgotten the day before, too. She hadn’t waited during the math homework they’d endured after pick-up, as she knew she had to pay attention. Her dad had more than once described helping her with math as his punishment for all the evil things he didn’t remember doing in a previous life, or lives, and while she doubted this was true she understood his patience was not limitless, especially now.

She then waited while he cooked dinner, her favourite, a creamy pasta dish with bacon and peas that he’d invented for her when she was small and the very smell of which made her feel safe and warm even when she knew that the world had changed. In fact, as she sat in the corner of the kitchen