Don’t Bottle It

The market was heaving.

The fishmonger calling out what she had left. The trolleys. The radio on the spice stall. Two kids. A bloke haggling over the price of some garlic like his life depended on it.

Axel had the paella list in his head and wasn’t checking it, because he knew that list by heart.

In among all that noise he heard a voice singing, and something odd happened: he heard all of it. Not the way you hear a radio in the background. The way you hear somebody who’s talking to you.

He followed it.

He walked past a stall with the crates laid out by colour and made a note to come back.

She was at the far end, in the gap between the spice stall and the wall, standing, with a rucksack propped against the bricks.

In the forty seconds it took him to get there, eleven people walked past her and not one of them turned their head.

She was barefoot. The rucksack was a school one, grey from having once been some other colour, with the zip burst and tied shut with a shoelace. And next to her, sitting down, was a white cat with its head splodged brown and black, watching people’s feet go by.

Axel stopped three metres away and stayed there.

She saw him stop. She raised an eyebrow half a centimetre and kept singing, and it was a strange song: loose lines, no chorus, with really long silences in the middle that she didn’t fill with anything.

And then a dog barked, very close and very loud, and she stopped singing halfway through a word.

The cat stood up. Its tail puffed out and it froze, side on, not taking its eyes off him.

It was a big dog, straining at the lead with both front paws in the air. And on the other end of the lead there was a man pulling too, but backwards, and shouting louder than the dog.

“Bloody cat! Get out of it!”

The girl didn’t move. Neither did the cat.

“I said clear off,” said the man. “Dirty hippie. Get a job and stop bothering people.”

And Axel, who’d never had a fight with anyone in his life, stepped in between them.

“Oi, mate, don’t talk to her like that, she’s not done anything to you.”

“Get that flea-bitten cat out of here, it’s winding my dog up.”

Axel laughed before he could stop it. He didn’t hold it in and he didn’t try to.

“Why don’t you just keep walking, eh?”

The man opened his mouth and nothing came out. By then the dog had started sniffing a crate of tomatoes and the cat was doing laps round the girl’s legs.

Muttering, the man yanked the lead and walked on.

“Come on, Duque, sod these hippies,” he said, and yanked it again, and the market swallowed him up.

Axel stayed where he was, his hands held a bit away from his body, like someone who’s just put down something heavy. His heart was banging. Twenty-six years of keeping out of everything, and he’d just waded into the middle of a market for a barefoot girl and a cat. He had no idea where that had come from. Before she spoke he had time to think that none of that was him. And then, straight after, that maybe it was.

“Thanks.”

“No worries. Sad, isn’t it? All the miserable sods out there.”

“Well. Lucky you’re not one of them.”

And Axel stood there holding that for a second longer than an answer takes.

“I’m Eva.”

“Axel.”

They shook hands. The cat came over and sniffed his feet.

“Looks like he likes you.”

“Go figure.” And without thinking: “Here, you’re a really good singer.”

“Well, you’re the only one who’s paid me any attention all afternoon.”

“What’s it called?”

“Dunno. I don’t like giving my songs names.”

“So you were making it up?”

“It comes out and I sing it. Then I forget it.”

“That’s even better.”

She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no.

The cat had started batting at the laces on one of Axel’s shoes.

“Listen,” he went on. “I’m doing a dinner at mine tonight with a couple of mates. Come, if you want. We’ll play something after.”

Eva didn’t say anything. She looked at the cat, then at him.

“Only if I can bring Fay.”

“Course! Well… I’m not allowed pets in the flat. But it’s my last day round here, so I couldn’t care less. I’m off tomorrowwww!”

“Where are you going, then?”

That’s where he got stuck, because he’d gone a whole day without anyone asking him anything.

“North. Don’t know how far.”

“North of where?”

“North.”

“Oh. Going to find yourself, are you?”

“No.”

He didn’t say the other thing. He nearly did and he didn’t, and what stayed inside him was a slice of pizza on a kitchen floor.

“I’m going to find an adventure.”

“I like the sound of that.”

And she didn’t ask anything else.

Axel wrote the address down for her on a scrap of paper bag, with the time underneath and a “don’t bottle it” that came out without him thinking, and went off to get the squid.