For Nobody

Axel got home with the grocery bag, left it in the kitchen and caught himself in passing in the hallway mirror. Bruno had given him a perfect haircut.

It was the last night he was going to sleep there and it didn’t make him sad at all, and that struck him as the strangest fact of the whole day.

The first thing he did, before getting down to cooking, was switch on the speaker and put music on. Then he went into the bedroom to check one more time something he had already checked twice.

There was nothing left in the room but the rucksack, green and stuffed to the last pocket, and the nine coloured boxes stacked up by the door.

Everything inside it had a purpose, and some things even had more than one, like the spork, which worked for cereal and for meat and which he had weighed on the kitchen scales.

The boxes were the one thing he hadn’t sorted out that morning. Bruno and Clara were his usual playing mates, so the idea was this: one last game, and then, seeing them out at the door, put the boxes in their arms and explain nothing. That way they’d go on being used instead of collecting dust on a stranger’s shelf.

He turned the light off and went back to the kitchen. He got out the board, the knife and started on the vegetables, chopping out of time with the music, which is how everybody chops.

He had already done the green peppers and was reaching out for a red one when the red pepper started rolling along the worktop.

That was… weird.

The pepper kept rolling until it fell into the sink.

He stood still for three seconds with the knife in his hand.

The laws of nature are always the same. If a thing moves it is because something moved it, and there was nobody there but him, so he must have caught it with his elbow. It had happened to him before. With onions it happened constantly.

He fished it out of the sink, chopped it, and put the pan on the heat with oil. While it warmed up he chopped two cloves of garlic.

He was finishing up, tossing the garlic and the chopped peppers into the pan, when the music paused and a little chime sounded.

A phone notification. Someone had texted him.

“Hey Axel, we’re not coming tonight in the end, we’re dead on our feet and we’re going to watch a film. Next week for sure, bro!”

He read it twice. Then he put the phone face down next to the speaker, threw in the garlic and carried on.

Bruno and Clara never let him down. In four years, not once.

And that was the night.

He stood there looking at the pan with the garlic jumping. Four years of games at that table with those nine boxes, and the last night they were trading it for a film on the sofa without knowing it was the last. It wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know. That was the worst of it: that they didn’t know because he hadn’t told them, and that it still hurt as if they did.

And something else came to him, uglier, something he had been avoiding looking at for a while: that if he had told them, maybe they wouldn’t have come either. That people are dead at nine o’clock on a Wednesday night. That he had been too, for four years, and nobody had come looking for him.

There was still Eva, who had said around nine. It was ten past nine, and the speaker was still playing in a kitchen with two places laid too many.

He chopped the courgettes. He chopped the chicken. He cleaned the squid, which took him a while. He put in the rice and the stock and put the lid on, and he stood seventeen minutes in front of the pan watching it cook, without sitting down once.

At twenty past ten the paella was superb and it was for four.

He served himself twice. And on the third he got up for the plate, stood looking at it, and put it back on the draining board.

And there, standing in the kitchen, with three people’s dinner on the table, it came to him: why wait until tomorrow?

He didn’t have to think about it. There was nothing holding him there until the next morning, and that sentence, said like that, in his head, with the flat empty, was not the cheerful sentence it sounded like.

“Fuck it all,” he said, out loud, in an empty kitchen.

He said it with anger, which was a thing that never came out of him, and it sounded so strange in his own mouth that he almost laughed.

He washed the pan, covered what was left and put it in the fridge for nobody. He picked up the rucksack.

“Then let’s go,” he said to himself. He also picked up the nine boxes, which weighed more than the rucksack, and carried them stacked against his chest with his chin on top.

The night was crisp, but it wasn’t cold.

The rucksack weighed on his back, but not too much.

Perfect.

He walked the same route he had walked that afternoon, towards the salon. He left the boxes at the foot of the glass door, under the wooden sign that said “Closed”, and on top of them he put a folded page from the shopping notebook, with four lines written standing up on the pavement.

Bruno, Clara: I’m off to walk north for a while. I don’t know how long. The games are yours, because if I leave them in the flat the landlord keeps them and nobody plays a single one. Sorry about the way I’m doing this. It isn’t about you. Axel.

And he carried on down the avenue.

He turned left, followed a few more avenues, crossed a bridge, and over there the vibe changed. No more houses, no more paved roads. The ground was dirt, and instead of buildings and streetlights there were trees and darkness.

He’d left the city… and for some reason, even the air smelled different.

It smelled of wet earth, and on his street it didn’t smell of anything.