Ñoño

The storm caught them out in the open and it was a proper one.

First everything went yellow. Then a wind came that tore the map out of their hands. And then the water started coming down like someone was chucking it out of a bucket.

“Run!” shouted Axel.

“You run, you’re the one with the house on your back!”

They ran two hundred metres along a track that was turning into a river, with Kika howling from nerves and Fay stuffed down Eva’s hoodie, which was somewhere Fay had never been and had no wish to be.

They made it to the pelota court in Hermisende. An enormous wall, a tin roof covering half of it and a goal spray-painted on. They got in underneath, dripping, and the tin sounded like the end of the world.

“Good grief,” said Hortensia, wringing out her hair with both hands.

Kika shook herself off right next to her.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

And after that nobody could stop laughing. Eva let the cat go, and he shot off into a corner to lick his dignity back into shape, and she stood there with her T-shirt stuck to her and her hair dripping, laughing too.

When they calmed down it was still pouring. Six in the evening and as dark as nine. Eva leaned against the wall, stretched her legs out and started humming, almost to herself, watching the water run off the edge of the tin.

After a while she shut her eyes, still singing.

Axel looked down.

And saw him.

Right up against Eva’s ankle, two fingers off, not touching her. Small, soaked through, with a scarf wound three times round his neck and still trailing on the ground. Red nose. Sitting the way you sit next to a heater.

He was crying.

Not snivelling. Crying with his shoulders, with his whole body, without making a sound.

“Hey,” said Axel, really quietly, so as not to interrupt Eva. “What’s up, little man?”

The creature lifted his face and sniffed.

“Have you hurt yourself?”

He shook his head.

“Is it the rain?”

Another no. And he raised his eyes, up towards Eva’s face.

“Is it her?”

The creature nodded, really hard, twice. And started crying again.

Axel looked at her. Eva was just the same. Leaning against the wall, humming something with no words, her hair stuck to her face and her bare feet on the concrete.

“But she’s fine.”

The creature made a noise that was half hiccup and half word, and covered his face with his scarf.

“What’s your name?”

“Ñoño,” he said, in a voice like a wet dishcloth.

“Well, it suits a big softie like you.”

“I know.”

“Who are you talking to?” said Hortensia from the other side.

“Nobody.”

“Oh. Well, don’t let them get wet, it comes through here.”

They were there two and a half hours. And they didn’t get bored.

Hortensia’s phone buzzed in her cardigan pocket. She took it out, looked at the screen for a second, put it face down on her knee and gave it a little pat, the way you’d tell something to sit still.

“Someone selling something,” she said. Nobody had asked.

And she started telling them about a cousin of hers who married the same man twice.

“Twice, mind. They got divorced back when getting divorced was a scandal, nine years later they bumped into each other at a funeral and eleven months after that they were back in the same church, with the same priest, who didn’t remember them.” She flicked a drop off her arm. “And at the second wedding she looked far lovelier.”

Kika went out into the rain four times and all four times she came back and shook herself off over everybody. The fourth time Hortensia got up with her cardigan dripping.

“You shake yourself on me one more time and I’ll make a rug out of you! A hall runner, you demon wolf!”

Kika wagged her tail, delighted.

Then the three of them went quiet.

And Axel sat looking at Eva, who on a hard shoulder had said “don’t you lot ring her” without her voice shaking.

And the one in the scarf looked up at her from down by her ankle and cried what she wouldn’t.

When Axel looked again, there was nobody there. Just a puddle that had crept in under the tin and, next to Eva’s foot, a little wet mark the size of a button.

Water. Obviously water. Everything in there was wet.

It cleared up at nine. They came out with the sky black on one side and clear on the other, and the air smelled of wet earth.

They had dinner in the pelota court, with the stove roaring.

At one point, while Hortensia was going on about something at a market, Axel took Hortensia’s tartan blanket and put it round Eva’s shoulders, without saying anything.

Hortensia saw. She put her hand over her mouth so nobody would see her smile, and it did her no good at all.

“I’m not cold,” said Eva.

“I know.”

She didn’t take it off all night.

At three in the morning Hortensia’s phone buzzed again inside her cardigan. The screen lit up the tin roof of the court for a second. Then nothing. Face down, and a little pat.

That night Hortensia didn’t snore.