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; that 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.’