The Market

The market, at seven in the evening on a Wednesday, is a place with a lot of noise in it. The fishwife calling out what she has left. The trolleys. The radio on the spice stall. Two kids. A man arguing over the price of some garlic as though something depended on it.

Axel had the paella list in his head and wasn’t looking at it, because that list he knew.

In among all that noise he heard a voice singing, and something odd happened to him: he heard the whole of it. Not the way you hear a radio in the background. The way you hear somebody who is talking to you.

He followed it.

He went past a stall with the crates set out by colour and made a note to come back.

She was at the far end, in the gap between the spice stall and the wall, standing, with a rucksack propped against the brickwork.

In the forty seconds it took him to get there, eleven people walked past her and not one of them turned their head.

She was barefoot. The rucksack was a school one, grey from having once been some other colour, with the zip burst and tied shut with a shoelace. And beside her, sitting, was a white cat with its head splashed brown and black, watching people’s feet go by.

Axel stopped three metres off and stayed there.

She saw him stop. She raised an eyebrow half a centimetre and carried on singing, and it was an odd song: loose lines, no chorus, with very long silences in the middle that she didn’t fill with anything.

And then a dog barked, very close and very loud, and she stopped singing halfway through a word.

The cat stood up. Its tail puffed to three times the size and it went still, side on, not taking its eyes off him.

It was a big dog, pulling at the lead with both front paws in the air. And on the other end of the lead there was a man pulling too, but backwards, and shouting louder than the dog.

“Bloody stupid cat! Get out of here!”

The girl didn’t move. Nor did the cat.

“I said get out of here,” said the man. “Dirty hippie. Get a job and stop bothering people.”

And Axel, who has never had a fight with anybody in his life, put himself in the middle.

“Oi, mate, don’t talk to the girl like that, she hasn’t done anything to you.”

“Get that flea-bitten cat out of here, it’s bothering my dog.”

The laugh got away from Axel. He didn’t hold it in and he didn’t try to.

“Why don’t you just carry on your way and leave it?”

The man opened his mouth and said nothing. By then the dog had started sniffing a crate of tomatoes and the cat was doing circles round the girl’s legs.

Grumbling, the man tugged the lead and walked on.

“Come on, Duque, sod these hippies,” he said before carrying on his way and disappearing into the crowd.

“Thanks.”

“No bother. Sad, isn’t it? The amount of bitter people there are about.”

“Well. Then you’re lucky not to be one.”

And Axel sat with that on him for a second longer than an answer lasts.

“I’m Eva.”

“Axel.”

They shook hands. The cat came over and smelled his feet.

“Looks like he likes you.”

“There you go.” And without thinking: “Here, you sing really well.”

“Well, you’re the only one who’s paid me any mind all afternoon.”

“What’s it called?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like giving my songs names.”

“So you were making it up as you went?”

“It comes out and I sing it. Then I forget it.”

“That’s even better.”

She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no.

The cat had started batting at the laces of one of Axel’s shoes.

“Listen,” the lad added. “Tonight I’m doing a dinner at my place with a couple of friends, you can come if you like. We’re going to play board games after dinner as well.”

Eva stayed silent. She looked at the cat, then at him.

“Only if I can bring Fay.”

“Course! Well… they don’t let me have animals in the flat. But it’s my last day, so I couldn’t care less.”

“And where are you off to?”

There he got stuck, because he had gone a whole day without anybody asking him anything.

“North. I don’t know how far.”

“North of where?”

“North.”

“Ah. And are you off to find yourself?”

“No.”

He didn’t say the other thing. He was on the point of it and he didn’t say it, and what stayed inside him was a slice of pizza on a kitchen floor.

“I’m off to find an adventure.”

“I like that plan.”

And she didn’t ask any more. Not then and not afterwards.

Axel wrote the address down for her on a bit of paper bag, with the time underneath and a “don’t chicken out” that came out without him thinking, and went off for the squid.