Behind My Back

She went down to the shop for milk and bread.

A Tuesday morning, with the fine rain of every day, with the size thirty-sevens she put on to go down the street because it was muddy, which fitted her perfectly and which nobody had ever said where they had come from.

Trini was stacking boxes.

“Morning.”

“Morning, love.”

Eva took the milk out of the fridge and a loaf from the basket and put them on the counter.

Trini, working the till, without looking up, said:

“Oh, listen. Your sister rang.”

Eva didn’t move.

“What?”

“Your sister.” Trini tore off the receipt. “She rang the landline here on Saturday. Since she can’t get you on the mobile up there, she rang here.” She put the receipt in front of her. “Very nice, she is. We talked for a while. She says to see if you’ll come down some time to talk.”

Eva looked at the receipt. A receipt from a village shop, with the milk and the bread.

“How does she know I’m here?” she said.

Trini looked up. And in a second, in one single second, that sixty-year-old woman who had spent forty years behind a counter understood that she had just put her foot in it completely without knowing in what.

“Oh,” she said.

“How does she know I’m here, Trini?”

“Love, I…”

“Fine.”

She took the milk and the bread and left without paying. Trini came out to the door with the receipt in her hand and didn’t call after her.

She went up the street walking normally. That was what Axel saw first from the balcony: that she was coming up walking normally, with the bag, with the big boots, without hurrying.

“How was it?”

Eva came into the house without answering. She put the milk on the table. She put the bread beside it.

And she turned round.

“Have you been talking to my sister?”

Everything inside Axel dropped at once, like a lift letting go.

The worst was the half second. That half second in which he could have said “yes” and didn’t, because he was looking for where to start.

Eva saw it. She saw the half second perfectly.

“Ah,” she said. “Fine.”

“Eva, wait.”

“No, it’s done.”

“Let me explain.”

There Eva laughed. It was a very short laugh, with no humour in it at all, the sort that comes out on its own.

“Let me explain,” she repeated. “Fine.”

She leaned on the table with both hands.

“Explain.”

Axel explained. He did it worse with every sentence, and he knew it while he was doing it, and he couldn’t stop.

He told her it had been Hortensia. That Irene had rung her first. That he had only picked up the phone to find out what she wanted, nothing more. That he hadn’t said where they were. That the woman was destroyed, Eva, really destroyed, that he had heard her cry. That it had been a year and seven months. That maybe they were just misunderstanding each other. That he hadn’t decided anything, that he was only waiting for the moment to tell her.

And there Eva lifted her head.

“The moment?”

“Yes. I wanted to…”

“You were waiting for the moment to tell me something that is mine?”

Axel shut up.

“How long?” she said.

“Eva…”

“How long.”

Axel swallowed.

“Since before the robbery.”

Eva went still. She started doing the arithmetic and Axel saw her doing it, saw the places going across her face, one after another. The wash-house. The pine wood. The river. The tomatoes. The square with the funeral. Úrsula. The roof. His parents.

Her birthday.

“Four months,” she said.

“It isn’t…”

“Four bloody months.”

And she took the loaf of bread off the table and threw it at the wall. And it wasn’t about the loaf: it was because she needed to throw something and that was what there was.

“Four months!” And now she was shouting, and it wasn’t the flat voice from the verge, it was a voice Axel had never heard from her. “Four months talking to her behind my back! Telling her how I am! Telling her whether I eat, whether I sleep, whether I laugh!”

“I only…”

“You only nothing!” Her face went red. “You have been filing reports! You have set yourself up as go-between in my life without asking me!”

“Eva, all she wants is…”

“I DON’T CARE WHAT SHE WANTS!”

An enormous silence fell in the kitchen. Kika got under the table.

“I don’t care what she wants,” Eva repeated, lower, and that was worse. “I don’t care if she cries. I don’t care if it’s been a year or twenty. I don’t owe her that.”

“I didn’t say you owed her.”

“Yes you did.” Her voice broke and she swallowed it. “You said it every day you talked to her and didn’t tell me.”

They both stood there, in a kitchen, two metres apart.

“I thought that…”

“I know what you thought.” Eva wiped her face with the back of her hand, angrily, as though it were in the way. “You thought you could see it better than me. You thought I was too far inside and that somebody from outside was needed, calm, who could see it clearly. And you thought that if you told me I’d shut myself off, and that’s why it was better for you to prepare it and hand it to me when it was ready.”

“It isn’t…”

“It is that.”

She pushed the hair off her face.

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

“Eva.”

“You’ve broken my flute.”

Axel was left with the word in his mouth without knowing which one it was.

“You’ve broken my flute,” said Eva, “and bought me another one.”

And there her voice ran out.

She took twenty minutes, and she hadn’t needed anything like that long. She pulled her school rucksack out of the blue one, unfolded it, pulled the shoelace on the zip tight and put her things in: the plastic sheet, the five metres of rope, a change of clothes, the checked blanket, the toilet bag and a notebook she had bought at the shop.

And she left the blue one on the table, empty, next to the milk.

Axel was in the kitchen doorway and didn’t dare come in.

“Eva, it’ll be dark in two hours.”

“I don’t care.”

“You’ve nowhere to go.”

Eva stopped. She turned round very slowly.

“I have never had anywhere to go,” she said. “That isn’t news. That’s me.”

She slung on the rucksack. Off one shoulder. As always.

“The new thing was this,” she said, and pointed at the house with her chin, the kitchen, the new roof, the table. “This was new.”

And then, with the rucksack already on, she said one more thing.

“Lend me the phone.”

Axel gave it to her. It was the last thing he gave her.

She dialled from memory, stepped two paces away and talked for thirty seconds looking at the wall.

“Yes. The twenty-sixth.” A pause. “No, now. If you set off now you get here by eleven.”

She hung up and handed it back looking him in the eyes, which was the worst thing she could have done, because up to that moment she hadn’t looked at him once.

“I didn’t want to go,” she said.

And she said no more, and there was no need, because both halves of it were said: she didn’t want to go, and she was going.

She went down the stairs skipping the second and the fifth.

Axel went out onto the balcony. He saw her in the street, below, in the fine rain, putting her hood up. Fay came out after her and settled beside her. Kika stayed in the doorway, looking at one and then the other, and didn’t know what to do, and stayed.

“Eva!”

She didn’t turn round.

“Eva, for God’s sake!”

She went down the street and at the bend she was gone.

Axel stayed on the balcony until it got dark.

At eleven he heard the car. It came up the cobbled street in first gear, scraping its underside on the same stones as always, stopped down below for a long minute with the engine running, and went back down.

He didn’t look out.

Then he went into the kitchen and switched on the bulb.

The milk was on the table, unopened, and next to it the blue rucksack, empty, with the straps still stiff. The loaf of bread was on the floor, against the wall, broken in half.

And the bag of sugar was open on the table, and she never left anything open.

On the shelf of the hearth, at the other end, where he had moved it because of the leak, was the plate of sugar.

Full.