Nine Digits

On the sixth day, at eight in the morning, Úrsula appeared at the door with her blue overalls on.

“Morning.”

“Morning.”

“Are you giving me back my ladder?”

Axel blinked.

“The ladder?”

“The aluminium one. I need it.”

“Ah. Yes, of course.” He stepped aside. “It’s upstairs. I’ll bring it down.”

Úrsula didn’t move off the step.

“She’s at my house,” she said.

“What?”

“Eva.” She put her hands in the pockets of her overalls. “She’s been at my house since Tuesday.”

Axel stayed with his hand on the door frame.

“Since Tuesday?”

“Since Tuesday afternoon.”

“And you didn’t…”

“No.”

The two of them stood there looking at each other.

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

“I know. I’ve seen you.” She shifted her hands in her pockets. “She told me not to say anything. So I don’t say anything.”

“But I thought she’d left the village.”

“That’s what she wanted you to think.”

Axel leaned against the frame.

“Is she all right?”

“She’s on my sofa. She eats, she sleeps and she doesn’t talk.” Úrsula lifted one shoulder. “Like a scalded cat.”

“Úrsula…”

“Look, lad, I don’t get involved.”

“Right.”

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

Axel waited.

“The first is that you’ve messed up. But you already know that, it’s written on your face.”

“Yes.”

“And the second is that you messed up the day you didn’t tell her. Not the day you rang.” She took one hand out of her pocket and jerked her thumb upwards, towards the village. “People round here keep quiet about a lot of things, you know? An awful lot. I’ve spent thirty years keeping quiet about things, and there are two houses on this street where I know things I have never said and am never going to say. But keeping quiet is one thing and saying you were talking to your mother is another.”

“I know that.”

“Well then.” She put her hand back in her pocket. “The ladder.”

Axel ran his hands over his face.

“And why are you telling me now?”

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

The whole village knew.

Axel understood that in the following three seconds and it took him a while longer to understand it fully. Trini knew. Sabino knew. The lad with the frying pans knew. The woman on the third floor, who hadn’t so much as said good morning to him in two months, knew.

Twenty-six neighbours and not a single one had said a word to him in five days.

Not out of bad faith. The opposite. Because it wasn’t theirs.

Eva arrived at five in the afternoon. She came up the street with the rucksack hanging off one shoulder and Fay behind her, and Kika ran down to meet her and completely lost her head, spinning round and howling and crashing into everybody’s legs.

She stopped on the step. Axel came out to the door and didn’t know what to do with his hands.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

Silence.

“Can I come in?”

“It’s your house.”

“No, it isn’t my house.” She said it without resentment, as a fact. “Can I come in?”

“Yes.”

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

And Axel launched into it.

“Eva, I…”

“Wait.”

“It’s just that 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 going to do it the other way round,” she said. “I talk first. And you don’t fix anything for me.”

“All right.”

“Don’t fix anything for me, Axel. Not one sentence. If you start explaining why you did it, I get up and go.”

“All right.”

She was quiet for almost a minute.

“I’ve been two days away and three at Úrsula’s,” she said.

The first two she did the session. Three hours of studio, and it went well, and she came back on a bus and on a tractor. She told that in four sentences, without lifting her eyes from the table, and she never told it again.

“I’ve painted her a whole room and we haven’t talked about this once, because that woman is one of the ones who don’t ask. And on Thursday I realised something.”

“What?”

“That I was waiting for you to come.”

Axel drew breath.

“Be quiet.”

He closed it.

“I was sitting there, painting a skirting board, waiting for somebody to come and find me and talk me round.” She laughed through her nose, with no humour. “Like my whole bloody life. Waiting for somebody to make it easy for me.”

She pushed her hair back.

“And then I remembered something Hortensia said to me on a doorstep.”

“What?”

“That I don’t owe anybody anything.” She was silent a moment. “And that anyone who makes me feel I do doesn’t love me. They want to run me.”

She looked Axel straight in the face.

“And I spent the whole afternoon turning that over. Because you did it to me. You really did it to me and I’m not going to take that away from you.”

“I know.”

“Don’t talk.”

“Sorry.”

Eva took a breath.

“But I’ve spent a year and seven months saying my sister controls my life,” she said. “And I’ve spent a year and seven months unable to go into a village without looking behind me. Without saying my surname. Without giving a phone number. Without signing up to anything where they ask you for ID.”

Her voice went a bit strange and she carried on the same.

“And that isn’t her controlling me. That’s me carrying her about.” She dropped her eyes to the table. “I left my house so that nobody would tell me what to do. And ever since then I’ve been organising my entire life around a person who hasn’t been in front of me for a single day.”

She laughed, and this time a little for real.

“Some freedom.”

Axel said nothing. It cost him everything he had, but he said nothing.

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

“Lend me the phone.”

Axel gave it to her. It was the same one as always, the one she had asked him for three times in four months to call somebody else, and none of the three times had she said who.

“Give me the number.”

Axel didn’t move.

“Eva…”

“The number, Axel.”

“Are you sure?”

Eva looked at him with a face Axel had never seen on her and never forgot.

“No,” she said. “But it’s mine.”

Axel read out nine digits. Eva typed them in. She kept her finger over the screen for a long while.

And then she pressed it.

And she didn’t put it to her ear. She stood in the middle of the kitchen with the phone in her hand and the ringing tone going, one, two, three, looking at the table.

On the fourth she put it to her ear, took the checked blanket off the bench and put it round her shoulders and went out onto the balcony.

She pulled the door and the door didn’t shut. It hadn’t shut since July, because the frame was one of Axel’s half-finished jobs.

It stayed open four fingers’ width.

Through those four fingers Axel heard the first thing that woman had said to her sister in a year and seven months, and it was two words.

“It’s Eva.”

It seemed to him, hearing it, that it was the only time he had heard her say it without anybody asking.

Then a very long silence. And then Eva saying “right” three times over, in three different voices.

And there Axel did the only thing he could think of that was any use, which was to get out of the way.

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

He spent twenty minutes sitting on a bench, listening to a voice he couldn’t make out, without going to fix anything.

It was the hardest thing he had done in that house.

When she came in her eyes were red and her face was calm. She put the phone on the table.

“She’s coming in two weeks,” she said.

“All right.”

“And if she comes and I make a mess of it, I make a mess of it.”

“All right.”

Eva sat down and looked at the table for a moment.

“Now you can talk,” she said.

And Axel, who had spent six days preparing an enormous speech, with its parts and its explanations and its way of being understood, sat down opposite and said the only thing that was any use.

“I was wrong.”

Eva nodded.

“All right.”