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‘Carrying on is what nature does,’ said Zach. ‘And that, I find, is about the only thing I have any faith in.’
But you mustn’t give up. You can’t wait for the world to be perfect before you start living in it.’
‘What are byōbu?’ ‘Screens. Folding screens.
She folded her arms, suddenly feeling like she used to at school: the stupid one who answered questions wrong. That was the reason why she didn’t do much talking. Talking was deceit, one of the games people played to keep themselves from looking the world in the eye.
body of a man she had shot in the head. ‘The sea’s inhospitality has grown on me,’ she said, ‘let’s put it that way. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not.’ Again Eoin raised an eyebrow. ‘You sound like a proper old salt. And you’re right, you know. The sea can be a mean old bitch, but she makes no bones about it. A shark is a shark, my old captain used to say.’
Hannah nodded. ‘It’s not the same in the woods. Even something like a wolf, it . . . it disguises what it really is. Makes you
think it’s beautiful. Even the trees starve each other of the light. I’ve always called myself a person who loves nature, but I suppose what I’ve thought of as nature has always been trees, mammals, flowers . . . so much life you can distract yourself from the death.’ Eoin was watching her with a curious expression, but Hannah was in full flow now and her fists were clenched. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that the sea might be the truer face of nature. It’s where everything came from, after all. The sea never hides what it can do to you, how deep it goes or how far. And every shell on the beach is a
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‘Everything you just said is true,’ he said, watching the waves coming in, ‘and when you know people who have drowned, or not come back to port after a storm, you feel it all the more cruelly. It took me a long time to learn to actually love the sea. Back when I was a boy, becoming a sailor seemed to me the only way out of the village where I grew up. But I was very seasick to begin with. I’m glad, now. My first captain would only apprentice those who had no sea legs. He said that all there was to learn about life could be learned by hanging your head overboard and throwing up into ocean
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Self-loathing was a difficult thing for those who had none of their own to understand. It had
its own seasons. It could trick you into thinking it had lifted, only to come cycling around again. You attacked yourself in the same ways you always had. You flung the same accusations. Perhaps you could no more rid yourself of self-loathing than you could rid the world of winter. What was certain was that, like winter, in its wake it left you bare.
The sheer magnitude of the planet, somewhere on the far side of which was Japan. Seb had helped her learn to cope with it, but a weight didn’t lighten just because you found the strength to carry it.
