Pops

The phone rang at quarter past eight in the evening, in the middle of a bridge, and on the screen it said Pops.

Axel stopped dead.

“Oh, blimey.”

“What’s wrong?”

“My father.”

He watched it ring three more times, with the face of somebody who hasn’t called in a while and no longer knows whether the one calling is the one who has remembered or the one who is worried. He picked up.

“Dad?”

“There he is!” The voice came out so loud that Eva could hear it perfectly from a metre and a half away. “He’s alive after all!”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Queta! He’s alive!”

There was a noise in the background and then his mother’s voice, further off, shouting something that sounded like “well tell him to call now and then!”

“Your mother says call now and then.”

“I heard her perfectly.”

“Well, yes, she does shout a lot.”

And they both burst out laughing at exactly the same time, in exactly the same way, with the same hiccup at the end, and something came into Eva’s chest. She sat down on the parapet of the bridge and started pretending to look at the river.

You could hear everything.

“And where are you?”

“Well…” Axel looked around. “On a bridge.”

“Right. And where’s the bridge?”

“Up. Towards the mountains.”

“Ah, bloody hell. But weren’t you going to the wave business?”

“I’m still going north, Dad. It’s just that I’m going through the middle.”

“Ah.”

He didn’t ask why. That was what struck Eva, that the man said “ah” and moved on to something else, as though a son changing course were an item on the weather forecast.

“Listen, I’ve bought a machine.”

“What machine?”

“A thicknesser. Second hand, off a bloke who closed his workshop.” You could tell from his voice he’d spent two weeks waiting to tell somebody. “It’s forty years old and it runs like the first day. It’s cast iron, all right, one of the old ones, weighs two hundred and twenty kilos and it took four of us to get it in, me, the neighbour, his son and a trolley. I’ve changed the blades, they were eaten away, and I’ve made it a new table out of marine ply because the factory one was warped. And you should see the finish it leaves on a board. You run your hand over it and you feel nothing. Nothing at all.”

“And where have you put it?”

“Well, where the table was.”

“And the table?”

“The table’s outside.”

“Dad.”

“It’s covered.”

“It’s going to rain.”

“It’s covered, man.” Pause. “Well, your mother covered it.”

Axel was laughing with a hand on his forehead.

“Listen, one thing,” said his father, changing his tone, lowering his voice a little, like somebody about to ask something important. “Chestnut wood, have you seen it worked?”

“No.”

“It’s soft but it’s noble. It takes water like nothing else. The roofs up that way are all chestnut, did you know that?”

“No.”

“Well then.” A short silence. “In case you’re interested.”

And there Eva, from the parapet, turned her head slightly, because that had not been a conversation about wood.

“And you, do you eat?” said his father, suddenly.

“I eat.”

“Do you eat well or do you eat tins?”

“I cook almost always.”

Silence at the other end.

“You?”

“Me.”

“You cook?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Queta.” You could hear the phone being taken away from his mouth. “QUETA! He says he cooks!”

His mother could be heard saying something that couldn’t be made out, and then the voice came back, closer.

“Your mother says she’ll believe it when she sees it. Hang on, she’s coming on.”

There was the noise of a phone changing hands and then Queta’s voice, much closer than necessary.

“Axel?”

“Hello, Mum.”

“What boots have you got on?”

Axel took a moment to react.

“Sorry?”

“The boots. Have you got the brown ones or the ones you bought yourself on the internet?”

“The brown ones.”

“Ah.” A silence of approval. “Well. Those at least have a proper shape.”

“They’re fine, Mum.”

“Does your little toe stick out sideways when you go downhill?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No it doesn’t, Mum.”

“Because if it does, they’re too short and you’ll arrive limping. And you don’t arrive limping from the foot, all right, you arrive limping from the knee, and that doesn’t get fixed.” She could be heard turning away and saying something to her husband, and she came back. “And never take them off all at once at the end of the day, because it swells. First you sit a while with them on and then you take them off. A woman who spent forty years standing up in a market taught me that.”

“All right.”

“Well, son. I’ll put you back on to your father, he’s here jumping up and down.”

Eva, on the parapet, covered her mouth with her hand.

They talked for twenty minutes. They talked about the neighbour who had bought himself a motorbike at seventy-three. They talked about an aunt of his who was bad with her kidney. They talked about whether the stove was the same one, and Axel said it was and his father said “of course it’s the same one”, with a pride that wouldn’t fit in the phone.

At the end, when he was already saying goodbye, his father said:

“Listen.”

“Yes?”

“We’re very glad, all right.”

“About what?”

“About this.” He cleared his throat. “About you having gone.”

Axel went quiet.

“Enough of being shut in there,” said his father. “Right, off you go. You’re using up your credit.”

“There’s no credit, Dad. There isn’t credit any more.”

“Well, all the same. A kiss, son.”

And he hung up.

Axel put the phone away and stood leaning on the bridge, looking at the water, with a silly smile that wouldn’t go.

“He’s mad,” he said. “He’s put two hundred and twenty kilos of iron in the workshop and taken the table out into the yard.”

Eva went on looking at the river.

Axel turned round. She was sitting on the parapet with her knees up.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Eva.”

She took a while to answer.

“That you’ve got luck you don’t deserve,” she said.

She didn’t say it with any anger. She said it the way somebody notes that the weather is fine.

Axel opened his mouth to say something and out came exactly what he shouldn’t have said.

“Well, it isn’t exactly…”

“No.” Eva turned round. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That thing where you play it down so I don’t feel bad.” She looked back at the river. “Your father rang you to tell you about a machine. For no reason at all. Just to tell you. And your mother came on the phone to ask what boots you’re wearing, which is a thing nobody cares about, and she cares.”

She got up and brushed off her trousers.

“That is bloody marvellous, Axel. And it’s right that it’s bloody marvellous.”

She picked the rucksack up off the ground and slung it on.

“Come on, it’s getting dark.”

They walked the last stretch with the light going. And Axel, who had spent twenty-six years picking up the phone when it said Pops without thinking absolutely anything, spent the whole way thinking about it.

And two hours later, already inside his sleeping bag, he twigged the chestnut thing.

His father hadn’t asked him where he was, or for how long, or what he was planning to do. He had talked to him about the wood they use for the roofs up there.

Which was his way of asking all the rest.