by Simon Ings
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.
She’s not ignorant. She’s spent time on the ocean. She knows what she’s doing. ‘Most sailing clubs are friendly, they can usually tell you which skippers are planning long trips. It’s not so hard to find a berth, if you’re willing to work.’ But this is the problem. All Hanna’s practicality, her experience, her determination, even her intelligence, are only making her more stupid. Stupidity isn’t a lack of knowledge, or a lack of intelligence. Stupidity isn’t a lack at all. Stupidity is a force. It’s an energy. It has hold of her now and it is not going to let her go.
Michel is by the bonfire, stomping up and down in his heavy boots. I have never seen him dance before. He isn’t very good. He smiles at us, creasing his eyes against the smoke from his roll-up. Hanna leans in to speak to him. He shrugs, smiles, carries on stomping. He’s still clutching his phone. Is he still taking photographs? It would be like him. I’m surprised at people’s easiness with it. Even with things as they are, the police still turn over in their sleep now and again to seize some online prey.
Hanna takes my hand and leads me back up the slope, past the house. We are leaving him here. Hanna is driving me home.
The weather front I saw building earlier this evening hits land. Hanna’s faster than Michel behind the wheel and she punches us into the open mouth of the storm. The rain is so heavy it takes all the power out of our headlights. Hanna finds the switch for the fogs but the rain simply reflects the light, make visibility even worse. I wish to God she would slow down.
Lightless, winding, the road leads through uncertain country into the shelter of tall hedges. Rain shivers off the sides of barns and silos. A magnesium yard light throws the shadow of a tractor across the lane. On a sharp bend, our own headlights are repeated in tiny shards off the eyes of cattle pressed together in a barn.
Suddenly there are leaves hanging motionless in the air before us, glittering in the headlights, fluttering in space as though suspended on thin wires. It’s not a big tree. As trees go. We skid, swerve, the truck slipping into place, nose to tail across the narrow road, as neatly as a wedge fits a crevice. In the split-second before impact I catch a glimpse of Hanna, hands still at the wheel. My heart swells to see her sitting there, so calm. I wish there was time for me to hold her.
We hit the tree side-on. The noise is immense, complex, horrible. Something punches a hole through my side window, passes behind my head, and stabs the cabin ceiling. In the time it takes me to inhale – I’m still half-convinced that my brains must be spattered across the roof of the cabin – the cabin light comes on. The branch that nearly killed me is knotted and grey and lichenous. A spider, a tiny red body cushioned on long hair-like limbs, climbs from the branch onto the light housing, as the light fades and dies. Everything turns silver suddenly. I imagine another car, swooping towards us, and glance in panic at the side mirror. It’s still intact, and hanging there like a picture expertly framed, the moon shines through a rent in the clouds.
Hanna’s airbag, deflating, leaves her with her head cushioned in the laminated shards of her side window.
‘Hanna?’
Her eyes come open.
‘Hanna?’
She takes a breath. She blinks. She looks at me. She says nothing. Glass falls like rain from her lap as she opens her door and climbs down from the truck.
‘Hanna.’ Slowly, testing for damage, I clamber across the cab to the open door and let myself down to the ground. The ground isn’t solid at all – I’m balancing on branches, on crushed twigs and leaves. I put my hand out to steady myself and the wing-mirror gives under my hand and I barely keep my feet.
The rain has stopped but the gale is at its fiercest now. It tore the tree out by the root, and the tree brought down a low wall as it fell. Clumps of brickwork are scattered in puzzle pieces all over the road. I step from the shelter of the cab. You would think these high verges would shelter us from the wind; instead they channel it. Tree and truck together make a complex voicebox through which the wind passes, moaning and whistling, struggling to speak. The wind is so strong I can barely stand up in it. It’s stripping the tree. Something, a nut, a fir cone, damn near takes out my eye. I open my mouth to shout, and the next second I’m spitting out leaves. ‘Hanna!’
She’s leaning against the tailgate, braced against the wind. As I watch, her energy fails her; she slips down off the panel and lands in the road.
I offer her my hand.
She looks up at me and dares a smile. She yells, ‘Does this happen to you a lot?’
The road’s on a sharp incline, which makes moving the tree much easier. It is quite small. You would think it would take more mass to shove a branch practically through the roof of our cabin. Hanna, still shaken, accepts my offer to drive the truck for a while. There’s some comical business, trying to work out how to reset the engine after its bag-deploying stall. I ease the truck pas
t the tree, and foliage crackles beneath our tyres. The truck’s sides sing as they scrape against its branches.
‘Gun it,’ says Hanna. ‘We have to get home.’
I’m more worried about the rubble from the wall than I am about the tree, but we get past without a blow-out. It’s cold in the cab now, the glass in both side windows put out, but the rain has stopped for now and our windscreen, cracked through and crazed in its lower left quarter, is still somehow holding together. No way am I letting us go over twenty with the windscreen like this.
The coast road is awash with refuse spilt in the gale. The wind’s first violence is past, but it’s still strong enough to be sending cereal cartons bounding along the gutters. A tea bag catches in our wipers, and is snatched away. Through town after town, our passage is lit by the flashing indicator lights of parked cars. Their alarms, triggered by the gale, howl and hoot as we go by.
‘How does it feel to drive?’ Hanna’s worried about the truck. She can’t understand why we are going so slowly. She does not know, as I know, intimately, what flying glass can do to a person’s face.
‘It’s fine.’ I keep the needle stuck at twenty, the engine whining away in second gear. In places, even the litter is overtaking us. A signboard for a local paper goes skidding under our wheels. Plastic bags flock in the branches of overhanging trees. We have only one headlight now.
Half-way down the vertiginous lane to the levels I brake to a halt and together we wrestle with a buckled wheel arch to stop it rubbing against the nearside front tyre. Now, of course, it starts to rain again.
I am gripped by a sudden desperation to be behind a door and contained within walls. I let the needle go to thirty, trying all the while not to think what will happen if the windscreen gives way.
The levels offer no obstacle to the wind; it gathers walls of rain about itself, becoming visible, and dances circles round us as we drive. Sudden gusts break up the rocking rhythm of the road, and Hanna flinches every time rain comes into the cabin. My hands are frozen and wet on the wheel.
The gale is at its fiercest when we reach the shingle, but here there is almost nothing for the wind to toy with. No litter, no foliage to toss about. Not even sand. I can hear the sea over the sound of the engine but I cannot see it; it lies beyond the shingle bank, where the automatic lighthouse blinks but does not turn. The snap of its easy illumination nags at the eye in a way the wheeling light of the old lighthouse never would.
Outside the house, the boat is rocking on its trestles. A tarpaulin has come loose. It snaps and writhes, a fantastic pennant, over the roof of the bungalow.
‘Christ.’
Hanna leads me to the door, undoes it, shoves and shoves. Behind us, the boat creaks and strains, eager to fall. ‘Hanna?’ I’m offering help, but what comes out of my mouth is a lamb’s bleat against this roaring wind. ‘Hanna!’
‘There.’
The electricity is out. Holding hands like bashful school-children, we stand in the dark of Hanna and Michel’s bedroom looking out at the storm. Beyond rain beading the window pane, there is nothing to see. There are no street lights. The house itself might be sunk in a deep hole, or sealed inside a gigantic tin, were it not that it bends and flexes with every shift of the wind. The house is adapted to storms. In the changing pressure it contracts and swells like a lung, popping and squeaking.
We are in the bedroom because the boat may at any moment come crashing into the living room. Outside, pebbles grind together under the beating of irregular waves. I wonder how high the water is now. I wonder how high the tide comes, relative to the land. Were the currents to shift, the prevailing winds to change, how quickly would the sea eat through this place?
Lightning flashes, bringing the answer to life with a dreadful clarity. I can see the sea! This has to be a trick of the light. The sea is swelling into view, out beyond the shingle. It vanishes for a second. Then lightning strikes a second time – a tree, thinly rooted in the surreal greener-than-green ocean.
Another flash. (The world is reduced to a series of stills.) A grey container ship shows up starkly against the radium green ocean, the ceramic-white sky. Its prow, as straight as a piece of creased paper, cuts the black water, raising a wound webbed with foam. At the back of the ship, the helm and living quarters rise as a stack of grey boxes. A red painted line runs round them like a strip of packing tape. What’s a ship this big doing so close to the shore? Is it being steered towards the shelter of land, or are the waves dashing her helplessly towards these banks? Another flash, and the ship is poised halfway down the sickening descent of a coast-facing swell. Its right propeller is lifted into the air and a line of water, thick as shaving foam, clings like a hand to the grey circle made by its spinning blades. In the electric flash, the ship appears reduced, tiny, as simple and smooth as a plastic construction model.
It vanishes. I turn to Hanna. I cannot see her, but I wait, and she is looking at me, straight at me, in the next lightning flash, her lips slightly parted, as though she would speak, but in the darkness no sound comes, and there is no more lightning. We stand there in the dark waiting for light, and there is no light at all anymore. I have to do something about those parted lips, I have to, and she meets me, her lips meet mine, while all around us the house breathes its heavy sigh.
It happens easily, the way water spills and finds its level. A steady and fluid descent. Clothes. Bodies. Her flesh is tight and hard and efficient. She pulls me onto her and into her as though clambering into a piece of gym apparatus. I pin her arms to the bed, less from passion than from the simple desire to catch my breath. Her hips arc against me, gently now, pulling me against her pubic bone. Her desire is heartbreakingly pure. She will not let my tongue inside her mouth. ‘Little kisses,’ she whispers. ‘Little kisses,’ all the while stretching her legs, lifting them, stretching herself wide for me. The smell of Michel on the sheets only steepens the rate of my fall into her. The thought of him where I am now, his wet in with hers, makes me climax so fast I have no time to withdraw. I come deep inside her. She gasps.
‘Hanna—’
‘It’s okay. Doesn’t matter.’
I don’t even go soft.
After a time, she fetches me out with her hand. ‘Do me like a boy.’
‘Hanna.’
‘Go on,’ she says, pulling herself wider, hands under her knees. ‘I want to be filled.’
We are sitting at opposite ends of the sofa, eating breakfast. Anyway, toast.
Half way through the night I panicked and left the bed Hanna shares with Michel and came to sleep out here. There wasn’t any need, as it turns out. Michel isn’t back yet. I wish to God I’d stayed in bed, pressed up to Hanna. Her small brown hands. Her breath. Perhaps we would have done it again. Again, that magic word. Imagine it happening all over again.
It’s not going to happen now. Everything has acquired a predictable awkwardness. Words are setting over our intimacy like a scab over a wound.
Hanna asks, ‘Where will you go? When you get back.’
‘I’ll see if I can find a flat near where I used to live.’ I tell Hanna about the old factory, its interlinked brick courtyards, its dogs and its motor scooters, its life, its noise.
‘It sounds fun,’ Hanna says, as unconvinced as I am.
When I go back I will go straight to work. I will pick up where I left off, if the company will let me. I will earn money and pay rent, and life will acquire whatever new shape it will.
I think right now I would actually feel easier with Michel here. ‘When’s Mick back?’
‘Oh—’ Hanna’s dismissive gesture is somehow more undermining of her relationship with Michel than anything we did together. What we did probably doesn’t count for much, after all. People do things. If they only get the chance. Again. God, I would give my right arm for again. She is the most beautiful thing I have taken to bed in my life.
‘Tell me about Mandy.’
Another unavoidable topic. She knows Mandy was my girlfriend; t
hat I lived with her, and I have left her now, and feel guilty for it. She does not know the full circumstances. I have so far spared her – spared myself – the details.
‘The thing is, falling in love is about falling in love with a world.’
New to the city, and ever more out of touch with my father as he pursued his own strange course, I fell hook, line and sinker for Mandy’s world. And though my love for Mandy has long since evaporated, I still love Mandy’s kitchen. I’m still deeply infatuated with her pillows, and her shoes. I love her scarves and her seven different kinds of toothpaste. ‘There was a flavour for each day of the week. And she had these little porcelain bottles of essential oils gathering dust on her bathroom shelf.’
‘I don’t know why you came here,’ Hanna says. There is a chill in her voice. I have revealed too much of myself. The inner shallows.
She is thinking about last night, and wondering how much of what I did with her was directed at her; how much at the boat, the shack, the shingle, the lighthouses. ‘We fall in love with a world.’ How stupid.
Too late now to tell her it was all for her. Too late to convince her that she is something new, unlooked for and extraordinary. Too late to tell her that she has changed my game.
‘You asked me here.’ Words build their own defences around me, unasked. ‘Mick asked me.’
‘That’s not what I meant. Don’t be angry.’
I take a breath. ‘Michel wanted to show you off to me – is my guess.’
‘You think he’s that egotistic?’
‘You. The boat. The book. The life. Not in a bad way. He wants me to know that he’s happy.’
‘He does?’
‘He knows that his happiness matters to me.’
‘Right.’
‘We’ve known each other forever. Did he not tell you that?’ Indeed, the amount of damage I could do right now, with a few salient memories, is dizzying. ‘Do me like a boy,’ indeed. Not that I will say anything. If history teaches us one lesson, it is that all breakages must be paid for.