A New Beginning

One Tuesday in March, at twenty past eleven at night, Axel was sitting on his kitchen floor.

Two metres away from him, also on the floor, there was a half-eaten slice of pizza.

The rest was on the table.

The speaker was still connected. From the floor you could hear perfectly well how a twelve-second video ended and another one started by itself, and how somebody did something absolutely hilarious.

Axel did not move for four minutes.

The pit of his stomach hurt. His heart was in his ears and both hands were open on top of his thighs, the way you hold them when you have just been running.

It smelled of pizza. Of boxed pizza, with the warm cardboard underneath, which is a smell that fills a small flat in two minutes and doesn’t leave in two days. From the floor it smelled a great deal more.

One thing kept going round in his head, always the same one, always in the same four words.

What a stupid life.

It wasn’t that it had occurred to him there. It was that there, there was no way of not hearing it.

And it wasn’t the first time. It was the one from every night.

It came when he turned the light off, with the phone already face down on the bedside table: the whole day went past him at once, he looked at it, and there was nothing there. A correct day. Eight hours at a front desk, a gym he hadn’t gone to, two episodes of something, dinner. Nothing bad. Nothing. And he fell asleep with that on him, two fingers below the breastbone, and in the morning it was gone and he didn’t remember it.

He had been doing that for four years.

What was different about the Tuesday was that he was sitting on the floor and it wasn’t going away.

After four minutes he reached out, took the phone off the table and unlocked it, and that is something he has never been able to explain to anybody.

He wrote three messages.

To Bruno, his barber:

Mate, sorry about the hour. I need a haircut. Tomorrow if you can.

To the landlord:

Good evening. I’m not renewing. I’m out of the flat on the 1st and you keep the deposit for the trouble.

And to work:

Hello. I am resigning with immediate effect. Sorry about the notice. Thank you for everything.

All three in four minutes. Then he locked the phone, left it face down on the tiles next to the slice of pizza, and stayed there a while longer, listening to one video end and another one start.

Bruno answered two minutes later: tomorrow at quarter past six, handsome.

He did not call anybody. He did not tell anybody: not that night, not the next day at the barber’s, not at the market, not at the dinner.

And nobody ever came to know that all of it had started on a kitchen floor, with a half-eaten slice of pizza two metres away and the rest of it on the table.

The next day he woke up at twenty past seven without an alarm.

He drank a glass of water standing up in the kitchen, looking at the spot on the floor where the slice had been, and started with the top cupboard.

He did it fast, because there was nothing to decide. The crockery and the pans into a box for the neighbour on the second floor, who has two kids and three plates. He put aside on the worktop the paella pan, the board, the knife and just enough to lay the table that night, and the rest went into the box. The clothes he wasn’t taking, into two bin bags, for the parish clothing bank on the corner. The telly for the girl on the fourth floor, who came up for it with her boyfriend at eleven, and the boyfriend shook his hand and said “cheers, mate”, and neither of them asked anything.

Nobody asked anything all morning. Not once.

The mattress was staying, it belonged to the flat. The table, the flat’s. The ceiling light, the flat’s.

And at twelve, with the flat empty and his knees filthy, he did a sum that took him hardly any time at all. Of everything that had been inside those four walls for four years, less than a quarter was his. The rest came with the rent.

Then he opened the hall cupboard, which was where the good stuff was.

A hundred-and-twenty-euro tent, bought in January after two weeks of reading forums, never taken out of its bag. A three-season sleeping bag. A stove. A steel water bottle. A head torch with two sets of batteries. A pair of folding poles. A first-aid kit still sealed.

All of it broken in inside his head and none of it broken in.

And that, he thought right there, on his knees, with the head torch in his hand, was not the cupboard of a man who doesn’t fancy anything. It was the cupboard of a man who fancies everything and has never once gone.

He loaded it into the rucksack following a handwritten list with three columns: what I’m taking, what I’m not, and why. And in the why column there wasn’t a single blank. He was good at that. He had been good at that his whole life.

He peeled the photos off the wall next to the bed, one by one, a hundred and seventy-nine of them, and put them into a paper envelope with an elastic band round it.

At half past one he sat down on the kitchen floor again, with his back against the wall, in front of the only thing he hadn’t worked out where to put: a mountain of coloured boxes. Nine board games.

The list of people he could leave them to came to him on its own.

He had three hundred and something contacts in his phone. He had a group of sixteen called THE USUAL LOT. He had four games on the go with people in three countries whose faces he had never seen and who he talked to every week.

For nine cardboard boxes the list was two people, and at that hour the two of them were cutting hair four streets away.

And he wasn’t going to tell them.

He had decided that the night before and he wouldn’t have been able to explain why. If he told them there was a conversation, and in the conversation there was “and for how long?”, and he didn’t have that answer and he wasn’t about to invent one to set anybody’s mind at rest.

With his parents he took longer. He opened his mother’s thread and typed “mum, I’m going up north for a few days”. He looked at it and deleted it letter by letter. He typed “mum, I’ll call you tomorrow” and deleted that too.

What he actually did was ring them on the third day, sitting on a bench on the way out of a village, with one bar of signal and the sun in his face. He told them he was walking north and that he didn’t know how far. His father said “right” and then went quiet for a good long while, which in his father is a kind of hug. Then his mother came on and asked him what boots he was wearing.

And about the pizza he said nothing. Not that day and not any other.

At six he put his shoes on and went to the bathroom before leaving, and there, standing in front of the toilet, it struck him again how well thought out everything is. The porcelain. The pipes. The water that carries off what is yours and what belongs to half a city and gives it back clean to a river. He liked knowing there was a system. He liked it a great deal, knowing that everything was under control.

He looked in the mirror before leaving. The bloke in the mirror looked like a happy, easy-going sort, and he was. What the bloke in the mirror did not show was the inside, something that had been burning in there for years and that morning no longer fitted.

He went out into the street with fifteen minutes to spare, because he is not one of those people who turn up late.

The salon had the whole street wall in glass, so from outside you could see everything: Bruno sweeping up the last customer’s hair and Clara putting the dye bottles on the shelf into colour order, which for some reason always ended up jumbled, some of them even standing upside down.

Four metres by six, two chairs, a basin and the shelf. Bruno panelled the walls in wood himself one August, with boards off a pallet, and you can tell in two places. And seven pots hung from the ceiling, which Axel counted every time he walked in because every time there was one more.

He went in and the two of them turned round.

“Axel, mate! I was waiting for you.”

“Well, here I am.” And to her: “Hello, Clara.”

“Sit down and let’s crack on.”

He sat down.

Bruno threw the cape over him, gave the chair two turns of the crank to raise it and started at the nape, and Axel sat looking at the mirror, which is the only thing there is to look at in a barber’s.

Clara finished with the bottles and went off to cash up. And it was then, looking at the mirror, behind his own face, that Axel saw one of them move.

It was one of the dyes on the top shelf, a dark violet one, and it was wobbling slowly, as though someone had pushed it with a finger. Axel narrowed his eyes. By the time he got a proper look at it, it was still, and so were the ones beside it, and there was nobody on that side of the salon.

He let it go. A lot of traffic goes down that street and a shelf vibrates.

Bruno shaped it without hurrying, talking about his own things, and Axel answered just enough. His hair came out fresh and with movement, exactly the way he liked it.

And when Bruno was shaking out the cape, the violet bottle moved again. This time Axel was looking right at it.

Right beside the bottles, walking along the shelf with all the calm in the world, there was a little mouse.

Bruno carried on with what he was doing. Clara had her back to them, at the till. The little mouse reached the end of the shelf, stopped and lifted its head, and Axel could swear it looked at him and not at the wall.

Then it was gone.

He said nothing. He kept it to himself, the same way he had kept the pizza to himself, except that this one made him laugh.

“Cheers, mate. It’s perfect,” he told him, getting up out of the chair.

“You’re welcome, handsome.” Bruno shook out the cape two more times than he needed to. “And don’t take three months to come back, all right? Last time you walked in here looking like a shrub.”

Clara came back from the till and leaned on the back of the other chair.

“Listen, what are you up to on Saturday? There’s a plant market on in the park and I don’t want to go on my own.”

Axel stood there a second with his wallet open in his hand.

“I’ll let you know.”

“That’s a no,” said Bruno, without looking up from the broom.

“That’s a maybe,” said Clara.

“Listen, what about tonight?” said Axel, paying his friend for the cut. “I’ll make a paella and we’ll play something.”

“Yes!” shouted Clara. “We’re in.”

“Bring something to drink, then, and I’ll pop by the market.”

“Sound, mate! We’ll be there!”

And Axel left the salon with a perfect haircut and without having said a word.