The Flute

The rest of the message was underneath.

Apparently the young officer, the one with the little notebook, told her they’d seen her and she was fine and she wasn’t on her own. Where, no, he’d promised the girl. Who with, yes: a lady called Hortensia Rebollo, he saw it on the ID card. And that’s how she found me. Through my husband’s death notice, would you believe. She’s a lawyer, she told me. I don’t know if that helps or makes it worse.

She says she just wants to know she’s all right. I haven’t told her anything. Paco says tell the girl and be done with it. Paco says a lot of things. What should I do?

Axel read it three times in the dark, with the screen turned right down. On the third he thought of a red-faced lad writing out a surname in very careful handwriting, while Eva asked him where it was all going to end up.

A metre and a half away, Eva was snoring.

He typed: Don’t tell her anything.

He deleted it.

He typed: Let me think about it.

And pressed send.

In the morning Eva saw him looking at his phone.

“Who was that last night?”

“Hortensia.”

“What did she want?”

“Her plait keeps going wrong.”

That was true. She’d said so two messages earlier.

That afternoon, going up a long rise, Eva shifted her rucksack for the fourth time in an hour. First hanging off one shoulder. Then both, with the straps let out really long, practically down by her bum. Then one shoulder again.

“Is it digging in?”

“No.”

“You’re carrying it all wrong, though.”

“I’m carrying it how I’m carrying it.”

“Look, if you tighten this bit at the top, the weight goes onto your shoulders. It takes a second.”

“There’s no need.”

“Eva, you’re carrying it like a handbag, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Sorry,” she said, more quietly. “I don’t want it. I carry it because she gave it to me, with mine inside. But I don’t want it.”

She sat down on a rock at the side. Axel, on another one.

“When I was fifteen I made myself a flute,” said Eva, looking at her feet.

“What do you mean, you made yourself a flute?”

“Out of a bamboo cane from a neighbour’s garden. I watched a video. The holes have to go in an exact spot and I had no idea, so I made fifteen canes before one of them played.”

“Fifteen? What about the neighbour?”

“The neighbour had a lot of bamboo and not much eyesight.”

A laugh got away from Axel, and from her too, a little bit.

“I did the holes with a kebab skewer heated in the flame, in the kitchen, when nobody was in. I burned my fingers eight times.” She held her fingers up, like you could still see it. “Number fifteen played. Sounded like a tin whistle, mind. But it played.”

“And what happened?”

“One day me and my sister had a row. About something stupid, I don’t even remember. And she picked the cane up off my bed and snapped it over her knee. ‘In this house we do what I say, end of.’”

Axel’s jaw clenched.

“That’s normal, isn’t it?” said Eva. “A row between sisters, something gets broken. It’s the other thing I didn’t see coming. A week later she gave me a flute. A transverse one, a real one, with a case and a little cloth. Cost a fortune. And she gave it to me at Sunday lunch, in front of my parents, my aunt and uncle and my gran.”

She picked a little stone up off the ground.

“And everyone going: ‘What a lovely sister you’ve got.’ ‘After what it cost her.’ And my gran took my face in her hands and said ‘sweetheart, how lucky you are’. And I had to say thank you. In front of everyone. And I said it really well, mind. That’s what I’m good at.”

She threw the little stone.

“And from that day on, the one who’d broken a flute was me, for not playing hers. She had the receipt and I had a snapped cane in the bin.”

She stood up.

“I never played it. Not one note. It’ll be at hers, in the hall cupboard, with the case shut.”

She swung the blue rucksack onto her shoulder. One shoulder. Again.

“That’s why.”

And she carried on up.

It was five minutes before Axel got up off the rock.

They didn’t bring it up again all day. That night they laughed at a cow that stood staring at them while they ate, because you didn’t need Hortensia for that. And Eva fell asleep straight away.

Axel got his phone out inside his sleeping bag.

And he thought this. That the flute thing had happened eight years ago. That people change. That she’d been looking for her for more than a year, and however you look at it, that means she cares. That maybe they just weren’t understanding each other, and that was all.

There was a moment, one, when he nearly did the right thing.

He could wake her up. He could tell her “your sister has rung Hortensia”. Five words. And then whatever was going to happen would happen, but in front of him and not behind his back.

He had it for five seconds.

On the fifth he thought she was asleep and that waking someone up for that was cruel. And it was true. That’s why it worked so well.

And from there it was one step to the other thing. That this could be sorted if someone from outside, someone calm, someone who had nothing to do with it, sat in the middle and talked to both of them.

Someone like him.

He typed:

Give me her number. I’ll talk to her. Just to find out what she wants. Eva doesn’t need to know anything about it.

He read the last sentence three times.

And pressed send.