A Hundred and Seventy-Nine

It rained for three days straight.

On the third they got into the tent at seven in the evening and didn’t come out again. The three of them lying down, the torch hanging from the roof and Kika curled up in the doorway, a furry cork that smelled of wet dog.

“I’m bored,” said Hortensia.

“Go to sleep.”

“It’s seven o’clock, love.” Silence. “Show me something.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. I’ve spent three days staring at the same bit of plastic.”

Axel put his hand in the side pocket of his rucksack and took out the stack. Small photos, the printed kind, held together with a rubber band. Worn at the edges, with the little drawing-pin hole at the top.

“Ooh.” Hortensia sat up. “Give them here, give them here.”

“There’s a hundred and seventy-nine.”

“You counted them?”

“I counted them when I took them off the wall.”

“A hundred and seventy-nine exactly?” said Eva.

“Exactly.”

“You’re not right in the head, lad.”

“I know.”

The first one was him at sixteen, at a gig, with a criminal fringe.

“Is that a fringe?”

“Ten years ago everyone had one of those, Hortensia.”

“Well, then everyone had it in for you, son.”

The second was a goat on the roof of a car.

“And this?”

“A goat.”

“I can see it’s a goat. What’s it doing on your wall?”

“We were camping and the daft thing climbed up on some bloke’s car. And the bloke came out in his pants.”

“So why isn’t the bloke in the photo?”

“Because he was terrifying.”

Hortensia passed the photo to Eva, crying with laughter, and out came the rest. An enormous paella he’d made, “average but historic”. Bruno with the scissors in his mouth. His dad under a car. Clara asleep on a sofa with her mouth open. A dog that wasn’t Kika but looked a bit like her.

“And this one?”

A woman from behind, crouching in a small shop, putting someone’s foot into a shoe.

“My mum. She’s got a shoe shop. She looks at people’s feet before their faces. She’ll be walking down the street and she’ll go ‘that one’s a forty-one and she’s wearing a forty’. And she’s right. Which is the worst bit.”

“And this?”

“Bruno again. With long hair.”

“Bruno had long hair?”

“Down to here. He says that’s why he became a barber. So it wouldn’t happen to anyone else.”

Hortensia went through them with her thumb, slowly. And by the twentieth Axel saw she wasn’t looking at them the way you look at a nice photo. She was looking at them like evidence.

“Here,” she said. “There’s no places in these.”

“What?”

“There’s no scenery, sweetheart. There’s faces. A kitchen, a table, a bench. And the one with a mountain behind it is because there was somebody in front.” She handed him back the stack. “I’ve got two shoeboxes full of photos, and half of them have got the house in. The house from the front, the house from the back, the house with snow on. And there’s nobody in the house.”

They were at it for an hour. Hortensia laughed at nearly all of them, and the ones she didn’t laugh at, she asked about.

“And girlfriends?” she said at one point.

“There aren’t any in there.”

He said it fast, without looking up, and moved on to the next one.

Eva held his eye a second too long. And Axel watched her do the sum: how many photos you take with someone, and how many you have to take down so there’s none left.

Then one came up, in the pile from Norway, between a harbour and a plate of salmon. Two nineteen-year-old lads on a bench, in matching hats, laughing at something that had just happened.

Axel looked at it for half a second and moved on.

“Ooh, hang on, that one…”

“That’s Oslo.”

And he pulled out the next one, a wonky lamp post, and started telling the story of the lamp post in great detail. In more detail than the lamp post had.

Eva didn’t say a word. But she saw his hand: Axel had put the one with the hats at the back of the stack, under all the others, and while he was talking about the lamp post he was turning it over with his thumb, again and again.

Hortensia fell asleep four minutes after the photos were put away, and started snoring almost as well as Eva.

“Here,” said Eva, very quietly.

“What?”

“Why do you carry them?”

Axel looked at the torch.

“Because you forget things. Honestly. I didn’t remember the goat thing, and it was on my wall, and I saw it every day coming out of the bathroom. And I didn’t see it. But if you take the photo away, it goes. And it’s like it never happened.”

Eva took a while to answer.

“I haven’t got any.”

And she turned over.

Axel opened his mouth to ask her if she wanted one, and it seemed so massively stupid that he shut it again.

And there, lying on a sheet of green plastic, with the rain hitting the roof and a hundred and seventy-nine photos back in the side pocket, it came back.

The kitchen one. The every-night one. In the pit of his stomach, right where it always sat.

He thought it was the rain. Three days stuck in there, it would get to anyone. That explanation lasted him four minutes.

Because four minutes later the other thing hit him. That he’d let go of a flat, a job and a city from his kitchen floor. That he was sleeping on the ground, in the middle of nowhere, with a woman snoring a hand’s width away and a dog in the doorway.

The biggest thing you can do.

And it was still there. All of it.

It hadn’t lost a thing along the way.