That’s Lovely

That morning Eva got up in a mood.

At twelve Axel said that the top path might take longer, but you’d see more.

“Well spotted.”

She said it without turning round and without raising her voice. Axel stood there with his mouth half open.

“Okay.”

Two hundred metres.

“Sorry,” said Eva.

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not, though.” She yanked her rucksack straight. “I’m just not up to it today, mate.”

Hortensia was two steps ahead and didn’t turn round either.

“Oh, you’ve got your period.”

Eva stopped dead.

“Well, honestly.”

“What?”

“You don’t just say it like that.”

“And how do you say it?” Hortensia kept walking. “Love, I had periods for more years than you’ve been alive. You tell me and I understand, which is more than this one’s going to do.”

Axel put both hands up without anyone having asked him anything.

A laugh got out of Eva’s nose, the kind that comes out right when you’re making up your mind to be angry and there’s no going back.

“You’re so…”

“So what?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, then.”

Mid-afternoon, on a bridge, another one turned up.

They’d stopped to look at the river when Axel looked down and found something sitting on the wall, a hand’s width from his elbow. He was shorter than Gorgorito and a lot rounder, with a woolly hat covering half his face and enormous ears sticking out from underneath it.

“Afternoon,” said Axel.

He was getting used to it. And that scared him more than the shock.

The creature turned round.

“EH?”

“I said afternoon.”

“AH! AFTERNOON! LOVELY DAY, ISN’T IT!”

It was drizzling.

“Who are you?”

“TWO? TWO WHAT?”

“Who. Are. You.”

“LITO!” He thumped his chest twice. “LITO, ALWAYS HAVE BEEN!”

“Okay, Lito. I’m Axel.”

“COURSE THERE’S LENTILS!”

“You what?”

“AT MY AUNTIE’S! THERE ALWAYS ARE!”

He cracked up, slapping his knees, delighted with a conversation they weren’t having.

Axel was desperate to show him to someone.

Not Eva. Eva had said “a rat, or something”, and he didn’t dare push her.

Bruno.

He’d told Bruno one games night, at three in the morning, with the box open on the table and the big piece nowhere to be found. And Bruno had gone quiet and then said:

“Right. And do they eat?”

He was the only person in his whole life who never asked him for proof.

But Bruno was cutting hair a long way from there. So he showed Hortensia. Because Hortensia was the most normal person he’d ever met, the kind who buys three jars of sauce just in case. If Hortensia saw it, it wasn’t just him any more.

Lito was coming along with them in the ditch, hopping, singing something dreadful. Fay was following two metres behind with his tail in a question mark, trying to decide if it was edible.

At a junction, in the drizzle, Axel couldn’t take it any more.

“Hortensia.”

“Yes, love.”

“Look there.” He pointed at a stone a metre and a half away, where Lito was sitting scratching an ear. “There. Right there.”

Hortensia looked.

She really looked. She shaded her eyes with her hand and spent two long seconds looking at the stone. And Axel only had to see her face to know what was coming.

Eva, a few steps behind, wasn’t looking at the stone. She was looking at Axel.

“Oh,” said Hortensia.

She smiled. A lovely smile. Not a drop of mockery in it. The one you give a little kid who shows you a drawing you can’t make head nor tail of.

“That’s lovely, love.”

Axel lowered his arm.

“Yeah.”

“No, really, I think it’s wonderful.” She put her hand on his shoulder as she went past. “I had an aunt who used to talk to her dead husband every night, and she was the cleverest one in the family.”

She kept walking. As she went past the stone she took a little sidestep, like going round a puddle that isn’t there, and didn’t look.

It stung worse than a belly laugh would have.

He walked two kilometres with that. And one by one they all came back to him, the ones who’d said it before in other words. His boss at the hotel, who asked him one day, very kindly, whether he was sleeping all right. A teacher who sent a note home about the drawings in his exercise book.

And her.

“You just overthink everything,” she used to tell him. In a soft voice. Three years. One Sunday she was there and the next she wasn’t, and in between there were some very polite messages. A week later he was already explaining to a mate that it was for the best, for both of them. He explained it so many times he nearly believed it.

“THAT ONE’S MINE!” yelled Lito, diving at a butterfly.

It wasn’t.

They had lunch on a threshing floor, sitting on bales of straw. Eva sat down next to Axel, bit into her bread and was quiet for a while.

“What did she say to you?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Hortensia. At the junction.”

“That it was lovely.”

Eva nodded slowly, chewing. She didn’t ask him what had been at the junction. She didn’t tell him she saw them too, or that she didn’t. She just sat there, shoulder to shoulder, and when he got up she passed him the bottle without him asking.

Lito said goodbye on a bend, for no reason.

“I’M OFF!”

“RIGHT!” shouted Axel.

“WRITE WHAT?”

“RIGHT, I SAID!”

“WELL, TA-RA THEN!”

And he went into a hole in a dry-stone wall.

That night, knocking in the tent pegs, Axel saw Eva looking at the sky. A half-moon lying on its side on top of a hill.

“What are you looking at?”

“The count.”

“What count?”

“Mine.” She pointed up with her chin, not taking her hand out of her pocket. “I haven’t got a phone.”

And she went into the tent.

It clicked on the last peg, thinking back to the morning.

And he went red all on his own, in the dark, with the mallet in his hand.