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 past 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.