As he talks, I feel for Hanna’s hand. I take it in my own. Gently I squeeze.
She runs her thumb across the back of my hand.
A few nights later, there is a party.
Michel chivvies us into the truck. It’s a two-seater, I’m riding in the flatbed. A motorcycle tyre makes a seat for me. It feels as though I’m sitting on a toilet. Hanna tucks me round with the fleecy throw she’s fetched from the sofa.
‘I’ll be warm enough.’
She tucks the blanket round me as though I were her dolly.
Michel hands me a can of beer then climbs behind the wheel. He takes the shingle road gently, then speeds off like a dog out of the gate as soon as he hits hardtop. The reclaimed land – old marsh, made into weedy fields – is flat and monotonous. It won’t admit its closeness to the sea at all – you have to search for clues. I glimpse the top of a red sail behind a hedge, and we shoot by the entrance with a sign, crudely done, for a water sports school. Hard as I look, I get no glimpse of water. We drive past an army artillery range – a long run of chainlink and nothing else to see. A grassy blank. I would like to drive this road some time. It weaves and rocks: an hypnotic rhythm, like something from a driving game. I remember my beer. I pull the ring and the can explodes. I lean forward, keeping the stuff off myself. The wind whips the foam welling out of the top of the can and trails it into the dark.
Michel drops a gear, and then another, and the truck tilts sharply. I brace myself. Brambles choke the narrow lane that leads, steep as a funicular, up through a tilted zone to the mainland proper, and the west.
The road bends back and forth, following the old shoreline. Solid land on one side of the road slides and slips away from the other in muddy, fertile gobs. This soft slippage suggests less the action of ancient tides than the recent melting of a candle.
We pass through old, landlocked harbour towns, one after another. Through the windows of old coaching inns I catch glimpses of red linoleum. The forecourts of the timber merchants are piled with shipping pallets. Teenage girls with bare legs are smoking together under the grey-orange lights of station car parks.
We pick up speed on a dual carriageway between hillsides cut up into cereal fields: enclosures as vast and arbitrary as strip-mines. Ragged hedges. Crows. By now I’m frozen to a popsicle, I’ve got my hands stuffed in my jacket and still I can barely feel my fingers. My head is a block of ice; even blinking is a struggle. Most of this is wind-chill. But something is happening to the weather, too. Gusts beat about the truck like starlings scrapping over a piece of bread. There’s a band of cloud moving in from the sea. It’s so low it looks more like a wall, and above it, catching the last of the light, are towers of brighter cloud, as smooth as porcelain – the prows of strange ships riding a dark tide into harbour.
Off the main road, Michel slows sharply for blind bends in the dusk, then brakes and turns. The truck rumbles and sways, finding its balance on an exhausted gravel driveway, all mud and hardcore and potholes. I lever myself up and round to lean on the roof of the cab. The drive is lined with trees. It curves steadily. On the left are fields, to the right a bank of rhododendrons – the truck’s headlights rummage through their gloss, leathery green.
The house comes into view. It’s a big, no-nonsense place, its white stucco luminous in the dusk. It’s a couple of hundred years old, from the look of it. It has not been long abandoned. There must be two, three hundred people gathered on the lawn, in vans parked up on the gravel turning circle, and in the house itself. The windows have no curtains, and you can see inside every room – they’re all lit up. The electricity is still connected, or it’s been jemmied on.
The garden is ornate and disorganised. Many shrubs are hidden under wet clothes and sheets of muddy canvas. Teepees make angular shadows under the trees. Cigarette ends tattoo the darkness. Fifty feet away, a pampas grass has been set on fire. It burns with a roiling, liquid flame. The air stinks of petrol. There’s a dip in the land behind the house. Behind it, trees make a dense black screen – a false horizon. There’s a sound system in the dip; its noise seems to be emanating from within the earth. Its industrial beats melt to form something ponderous and wet – a faltering heart.
In the middle of the lawn, a boy with a shaved head is pouring petrol onto a pile of furniture and floorboards scavenged from the house. There are upholstered chairs there. Leather trunks. Clothes. A child’s bed. The boy takes a swig of petrol from the can, flicks a lighter in front of his face and blows fire. A cheer goes up and the heap explodes. The boy falls back, rubbing his face. The bonfire catches in stages, a staggered spectacle, the turning on of civic illuminations. Somewhere deep in the pile, batteries pop. A pair of silk knickers rises on the expanding air and catches fire.
Hanna takes my arm and squeezes. I turn to her, thinking she must be enjoying this, but her expression is carefully blank. Coming here was Michel’s idea, not hers. Michel, grinning, waves his phone in the air, saluting us, and wanders off, snapping pictures as he goes. Then Hanna moves away and I am left alone, wondering why the hell they brought me here. What’s here for me? A bunch of kids on heat, demonstrating their lack of materialism by destroying someone else’s stuff. It is an unpleasant reminder that the human world falls apart, not through catastrophe, but from mounting internal failure. I wonder where the house’s owners are.
Partygoers gather round the flames, shouting. They seem determined to incite my paranoia. I step away from the noise, but my gaze is held by the shapes in the flames – turned wood and latticework – and metal-salt colours spilling from the curtains jumbled on top of the pyre. I’d lay money not one kid here has a clue how to turn wood, or make a chair, or knit a blanket for a child. They still live in a world of affordable plenty. Stuff, for them, is a utility, on tap. They rate this evening a misdemeanour, like flooding a public bathroom. Everything can be replaced. They believe this. Soon they will wake to discover that, blinded by fictitious capital, they have been torching what few riches were left.
The world ends, not with flood or plague or famine, but with a man torching his own house.
A boy tries to sell me a can of lager from a barrow parked under a tree. Rebellion against the market system can only be taken so far.
The kitchen has been left more or less intact. There has even been some attempt at catering. There are plates piled on every surface. By the sink there are plastic washbowls full of punch, black under the weak fluorescent light. It’s crowded, as kitchens always are. Near the door, surrounded by girls who crowd her round like acolytes, I see a woman in late middle age. She’s standing with her back to me. Her hair is grey and shaved so short I can see her skull.
‘Mind,’ comes a voice beside me.
I cannot move – neither do I want to.
‘Fucking
mind
.’ Someone opens a fridge door into my foot. I move aside, lose sight of the woman a second, and push through the crush only to find that she is gone.
I look around for something, anything, to drink. There’s a half-full bottle of vodka on the windowsill. I need something to steady myself. I need room to think. She looked like Mum. She looked
exactly
like Mum, the last time I saw her alive. It cannot be her – but what if it is? Her being here would solve all mysteries – all, barring the mystery of how she could possibly still be living.
In the hall the stairs are jammed with girls waiting miserably for their turn on the one working toilet. ‘I’m off to shit in the garden,’ says one, the fattest of them, barrelling me into the wall as she goes. ‘Mind,’ she says.
‘Mind yourself, you fat fuck.’
She hesitates and turns, squeezing her fists, the flesh squishing like dough, but the urgency in her bowels overcomes her annoyance with me. Someone on the stairs calls me a cunt. This, from people like this, I can live with. I take the stairs at speed. Hands and feet whip out of the way of my feet like fish darting for the shelter of rocks. ‘What’s your problem?’
My problem is I’ve lost my mum.
The upstairs rooms are empty. Not unoccupied. Empty. Everything has been dragged out of them, even the carpets.
‘Mum?’
I move from room to room.
‘Sara?’
It cannot possibly be her. The world cannot possibly knit itself over so well. There are no miracles. ‘Mum!’
I take a breath, or try to. I feel as though I have been kicked. Air rattles in, as eventually it must, clearing my head. The fit – what else would you call it? – it passes.
On the stairs, Hanna has joined the queue for the toilet. It’s much shorter now. ‘Everyone’s gone to piss in the garden.’
‘I’m surprised they don’t just use the rooms.’
‘Christ.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry, Conrad.’
‘What?’
‘This.’ She glances round her, wincing, as if afraid of what new thing she might see. ‘It’s horrible.’
The front door glass is bashed in. A hand reaches through and fiddles with the lock. The door opens and a boy enters, trailing a guitar. He wanders into a room and strikes up a folk song. Come the end times, we shall have no chairs, no beds, no blankets for our children. We shall have folk-singers, and we shall kill them with rocks and cook thin strips of their flesh over fires conjured from their smashed guitars.
Hanna and I stand shivering in the gust from the open door. (The weather is definitely turning.) Horrible, the paint-spattered carpet. Horrible, the inept graffiti on the walls, and the shattered light-shade over the door, and the fragments of coloured glass from the panel the boy has idly smashed. Yes, horrible. Yet these judgements don’t just spring up from nowhere. ‘The thing you have to bear in mind, Hanna, is that everything’s still more or less in favour of being sensitive and civilised. And this stuff can turn on a penny.’
Hanna’s not interested in my cleverness. Probably she gets enough of this sort of thing from Michel. ‘They’ve ruined it,’ she says, a brave bourgeois, standing up for value.
I go and swing the front door shut. Squares of coloured glass crunch beneath my feet. I pull a blue square free of its twisted leading. ‘Close your eyes.’
‘What?’
‘Close them.’ I stand beside her, and raise the jagged colour to her face. ‘Okay.’
Hanna stares through the glass at the blue-tinted hall, wide-eyed, a child. ‘Oh,’ she says. She smiles. Nothing is horrible any more. Everything is new.
This is a trick I have learned how to pull. This is my work. With tricks of mathematics and optics, we augment reality, smothering surfaces in warm, spicy notes of brand belonging.
I turn, distracted by a voice.
‘I lived free among free women.’
That woman even sounds like my mother. She’s back in the kitchen again. How the hell did she do that?
‘There were no inhibitions,’ says a boy, egging her on.
‘None, sonny, none.’ She is not my mother. She does suggest, with uncanny physical precision, what my mother might have become. She says, ‘We lived a life of perfect freedom together.’
The kitchen is less busy now. I go over to the sink, but the vodka has disappeared. I rinse out a cup and dip it into a washbowl. The punch is as thick as blood. There are slices of orange floating in it.
The boy says, ‘What was it like? How did it feel? Describe your freedom.’
‘Licky.’
‘You were licked?’
‘I lived among tongues. Among women’s unfettered tongues, singing, crying, tasting, supping. Tongues loosed in the mouth, free to probe and explore the soft mouthy interiors of the self, to sense and express.’
Hanna comes and stands beside me. She snaps open a can of lager. The woman like my mother says, ‘There developed among us an unexpected appetite for the anus. For the wrestle of probing muscle and sphinctered round, for the negotiation between these intimate forces.’
‘At all times of day and night.’ The boy has her rhythm now.
Hanna peers into my cup. ‘What the fuck is that? God.’ She takes a mouthful of beer and swills it round her mouth before swallowing. ‘Let’s get out of this shithole.’
She leads me back to the lawn. Someone is throwing books into the fire. I feel the need to comfort her. I put my arm through hers. ‘He probably thinks he’s being ironic.’
‘I can see why Michel wanted to come here,’ she says.
So can I. If he’s any sort of writer, he’ll be sat up in a tree somewhere with a view of it all, taking snaps, scribbling furious notes.
Hanna surveys the house, the grounds, the fires. She says, ‘You sink and you sink and you sink and one day you look in the mirror and there are creases around your eyes that weren’t there last year and you’ve done nothing, absolutely fuck-all that adds up to anything.’
‘Yes?’
Hanna makes a face. She is presenting herself to me, delivering the elevator pitch for ‘Hanna’. It’s not rehearsed, exactly – it’s not cynical – but she wants me to know she is more than just another counter-culture youth. She wants me to think well of her.
But it is painful, to have to listen to all her hackneyed dreams of secession – her plans to flee her self in other lands, on other shores, and in among the poorest of the Earth: sea gypsies and shrimp farmers, fishermen and cockle pickers. These are communities Hanna has read about and with whom she declares a powerful if abstract affinity. ‘I want to be among people who work with nature,’ she says, ‘who work with their hands.’
I remember the time Dad blew up about Mum joining the protest camp – how she’d be used, abused and very likely raped. A funny thing to say in front of your son. Now I understand his frustration. Listening to Hanna is like watching a car accident from the vantage of a hill. The distance giving you the view takes away any chance to intervene.
Dry land is portioned and parcelled and privatised beyond all saving – this is Hanna’s argument. And if this is the way she thinks, I can understand Michel’s deep appeal for her. She has fallen for his millennial poetic.
There’s no denying the intensity of Michel’s mythmaking. A glint of morning silver in the dusk. A spark of spring renewal in the dying king’s eye. Where it all goes wrong – wrong enough to matter – is his insistence that escape is a real possibility. Hanna dreams that come the Fall she will literally sail off into the sunset with Michel. She genuinely imagines they can live off the sea.