It’s Eva

“Morning. Can I have my ladder back?”

Úrsula was at the door in her overalls. Eight in the morning, on the sixth day.

“The ladder?”

“The aluminium one, lad. I need it.”

“Oh. Yeah, course. It’s upstairs, I’ll bring it down.”

Úrsula didn’t move from the step.

“She’s at mine.”

“What?”

“Eva.” She shoved her hands in her overall pockets. “She’s at my house. She came back on Friday.”

Axel stood there with his hand on the door frame.

“At your house?”

“Three hundred metres from here. In the green house.”

“Úrsula, I’ve spent five days looking in ditches.”

“I know. I’ve seen you. She told me not to say anything. So I didn’t say anything.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s on my sofa. Eating, sleeping and not talking. Like a scalded cat.”

“Look, lad, I don’t get involved.” And she got involved immediately. “But I’ve had a twenty-four-year-old kid in my living room for four days and last night she told me what you did. I’m going to tell you two things and then you give me my ladder back.”

Axel waited.

“The first is you’ve cocked it up. You know that already, it’s written all over your face.”

“Yeah.”

“The second is that you cocked it up the day you didn’t tell her. Not the day you rang.” She took a hand out of her pocket. “Keeping quiet’s one thing. Sending her reports every week is another.”

Axel didn’t answer. He had nothing to answer with.

“Right, then. The ladder.”

“And why are you telling me now?”

“Because now she’s told me to tell you.”

She turned to go. Halfway down the hill she stopped, without turning round, and lifted her chin at the roof.

“And you’re going up there today. You’ve gone five days without touching a slate and the order on the door hasn’t moved.”

The whole village knew.

Trini knew. Sabino knew. The lad with the frying pans knew. The woman in the corner house, who in two months hadn’t so much as said good morning to him, knew.

Twenty-six people, and not one of them had said a word to him in four days. Trini had rung up his bread that very morning, one twenty, without looking up.

He went up on the roof at nine. He took slate up till five without coming down for lunch, one eye on the rope and the other on the bend in the street.

At five she came round the bend.

She was coming with her rucksack hanging off one shoulder and Fay out in front, tail straight up. Kika heard her before anyone, ran down the street to get her and completely lost her head, howling, going round in circles.

“Get off, you pest. Get off.” And she crouched down to hug her anyway.

Axel came down the ladder with the bucket still in his hand and didn’t know what to do with the bucket.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Can I come in?”

“It’s your house.”

“No, it’s not my house.” She said it without any bitterness, like a fact. “Can I come in?”

“Yeah.”

They sat in the kitchen, one on each side of the table.

“Eva, I…”

“Wait.”

“It’s just I want to tell you that…”

“I said wait.”

He shut up.

Eva put both hands on the table and looked at them.

“We’re doing this the other way round. I talk first. And you don’t fix anything for me. Not one sentence, Axel. If you start explaining why you did it, I’m getting up and going.”

“Okay.”

She was quiet for a minute.

“I went to the trial,” she said. “Three hours. It went well. They told me to come back in October and I said no. I came back on a bus and a tractor.”

Four sentences, without looking up from the table.

“Then four days at Úrsula’s. I’ve painted a whole room for her and we haven’t talked about this once, because that woman doesn’t ask. And on Saturday, painting a skirting board, I caught myself waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For you to come up and get me.”

Axel took a breath.

“Shut up.”

He shut it.

“For you to come up and talk me round.” She laughed through her nose, with nothing funny in it. “Like my whole fucking life. Waiting for someone to make it easy for me.”

“Hortensia told me once that anyone who makes you feel you owe them something doesn’t love you. They want to boss you about.” She looked him in the face. “And you did that to me, Axel.”

Axel looked down.

“And in two years I hadn’t said my surname in a single village. In this one I did. In front of a gas bottle, to sign for an envelope.”

She took the envelope from the insurance company out of her rucksack. Open.

She smoothed it out on the table. The home insurance policy for the flat. With her finger she showed him a box.

Occupants: 2.

“Two years without me,” she said. “And it says two.”

Axel had known since June. He didn’t say that either.

“And my sister hasn’t been in front of me a single day. Not one. I’m the one carrying her. Everywhere. Like the rucksack.” She laughed. A bit, this time. “Some freedom.”

Axel kept quiet. It took everything he had.

“So I’m going to do something,” said Eva. “And I’m going to do it myself. Give me your phone.”

Axel gave it to her. The same one she’d used, six days earlier, to ring someone else.

“Give me the number.”

“Eva…”

“The number, Axel.”

“Are you sure?”

Eva already had her thumb over the screen.

“No. But it’s mine.”

Axel read out nine digits. She typed them in one by one, without getting a single one wrong.

Then she took the tartan blanket off the bench, threw it round her shoulders and went out onto the balcony, which was the only place in the house with a bar of signal.

She pulled the door to. The door didn’t shut. It hadn’t shut since July, because Axel had the frame half-done.

It stayed open four fingers’ width.

Through the four fingers you could see her from behind, with the phone in her hand, not putting it to her ear. And you could hear the ringing, tiny, coming out of her hand. One. Two. Three.

On the fourth she put it to her ear.

And through those four fingers Axel heard the first thing she’d said to her sister in nearly two years. Two words.

“It’s Eva.”

Then a very long silence. Then Eva saying “I know” three times in a row, in three different voices.

And Axel moved away.

He went to the other end of the kitchen and sat down on the bench, with his back to the door, hands on his knees. He didn’t pick up the broom. He didn’t start washing up. He didn’t go down for water to have something to do.

Fay went out onto the balcony through the four fingers and sat on Eva’s feet. Kika stayed with Axel and rested her head on his knee.

Twenty minutes.

When Eva came in her eyes were red and her face was calm. She put the phone on the table, on top of the policy.

“She’s coming.”

“When?”

“Saturday week.” She sat down. “She says Hortensia’s bringing her. Don’t ask me how, but Hortensia’s bringing her.”

“Okay.”

“And if she comes and I make a mess of it, I’m the one making a mess of it.”

“Okay.”

She sat looking at the table.

“Now you can talk,” she said.

And Axel, who’d spent six days with a three-page speech in his head, said three words.

“I was wrong.”

Eva nodded.

“Okay.” She got up and picked up the bucket. “Go on, up you go.”