The Normal Stories

Axel opened his eyes and for a moment didn’t know where he was.

All he could see was a sheet of white plastic over him and a bloody great rucksack next to him.

Oh, right. His tent.

He lay there a while, listening.

No cars, no motorbikes, no people. Outside the birds were whistling away, dead pleased about something.

“God knows what they’re on about,” he thought.

It was nice and warm inside the sleeping bag.

He remembered the little brownie in the red hat who’d caught him having a wee on the track.

Had that really happened?

Well, sometimes his head sent him weird visions. Once, on a night shift on reception at the hotel, he could’ve sworn a brownie just like that one had flicked tomato sauce onto the shirt of a customer who was kicking off.

Another time, playing board games with Bruno and Clara, he’d seen a brownie nick the most important piece off the board. He found it three days later in the cereal box.

That sort of thing.

So this was more of the same. A brownie asking for chocolate in the middle of the woods.

It was his head. It happened when he’d been awake for ages, and last night he’d been awake for twenty hours.

He came out of the tent and stretched. The woods in the daytime were a different thing: you could see where they ended, and it was a small, ordinary place, two chestnut trees and a load of ferns, and in there, at night, he’d been lying staring at the plastic roof like he was in the Amazon.

He packed up, put everything in the rucksack and went back to the track.

He walked for a good two hours. His head didn’t ask him for anything for two whole hours, and that hadn’t happened since he was little.

Bit by bit the path changed and up ahead a bit of civilisation started to show.

Not that he was missing it already, but it was about time for a coffee.

He still had a fair way to go. He walked faster.

Eva woke up at the same time with the sun beating down on her face.

She was under her plastic, tied between a wooden bench and a park railing, with her rucksack for a pillow. She’d got her head down at five in the morning and it had taken her four minutes to put up.

She was dry.

Fay was asleep, curled up in a ball on her belly.

“Oi, sleepyhead. Up you get, we need to eat.”

They got up and left the park.

She found a little shop just two streets up, with crates of fruit outside.

She told Fay to wait at the door and came out a few minutes later with a couple of bananas, a little box of dates, a bottle of water and a small tin of tuna.

She sat on the edge of the fountain in the village square and opened the tin for the cat.

Fay got stuck in without stopping.

She peeled a banana and looked around. The village was waking up. A woman crossed the square with a loaf under her arm and said good morning to the fountain, not to her. A man went by on a bike with a radio hanging off the handlebars. At the bar on the corner someone yanked the shutter up, the way you open something you open every single day.

Eva liked that. Sitting down somewhere new at opening time and seeing who opens it.

She finished the banana and took a date.

She started humming a tune while she nibbled it.

No words at first, quiet, just for her.

But the song grew all on its own. One of hers, with no name, the words coming as she went.

A little girl stopped dead in the middle of the square, holding her mum’s hand.

There weren’t exactly loads of people, but the ones walking by stopped to listen.

Eva had shut her eyes and her voice was just pouring out, crossing the square from one corner to the other.

A funny thing happened to her when she sang: she saw places. Places so clear they felt like memories, and they weren’t, because she’d never been there. Or so she thought.

And while she was singing them nothing weighed anything, which is the closest she’d ever come to being all right.

With her eyes shut she felt a shadow in front of her. Someone was looking at her from close up.

“You again?” said a cheerful voice.

She stopped singing. She opened her eyes.

Eva had spent half the night promising herself she’d ask around the village today for a lad with a big rucksack. And the lad with the big rucksack had turned up right in front of her all by himself.

“Me again,” she said, with a daft grin.

Fay lifted his head out of the nearly empty tin, looked at Axel for a second and went back to what he was doing.

Axel dropped his rucksack on the ground with a groan and sat down next to Eva on the edge of the fountain.

“Hungry?” she said, holding out the box of dates.

“Ooof… a bit, yeah.”

There, on the edge of the fountain in a village neither of them knew the name of, they started talking.

“So what happened yesterday, then?” Axel asked with half a date in his mouth.

“Well, yesterday I got invited to a dinner with board games and when I got there, nobody was in.”

It took Axel a second to catch on. She was telling him she’d gone. To his place. That she’d got there and he was gone.

“Wow, your mates sound shit,” he said, and wolfed down the other half of the date.

Eva laughed.

“Nah, seriously. I went to yours, but I got there suuuper late and you’d gone. One of your neighbours said you’d left, so I decided to come and find you.”

“Oh. So you came.”

And he sat there with a date in his hand, doing three sums at once and not getting an answer to any of them.

Eva was watching him. She had a long thing of her own to tell and didn’t know where you start, and on top of that it had dawned on her that the one with the rucksack had his too: nobody walks out of their flat at night carrying nine boxes of board games for the fun of it.

So she went first.

“Look… I’ll tell you whatever you want.” She took another bite of date. “But you have to go first. Why did you just go like that, overnight? You said something about an adventure, but an adventure’s going off somewhere for the weekend, not walking out of your house in the middle of the night with no idea when you’re coming back.”

Axel had a think.

“You want the truth? But I’m warning you, it’s a ridiculous story.”

“Go on. I know all the normal ones already.”

“I left because of a slice of pizza.”

Eva looked at him, waiting for the punchline. It didn’t come.

“I was at home, just a normal night. Having my tea at the kitchen table, with my phone propped up on the box. I took a bite that was way too big… and it got stuck here.” He pointed at his throat. “No air. Not in, not out. Nothing.”

Eva had stopped chewing.

“I got up, tried to cough, nothing. And I had this flash, this really clear thought: that I was completely on my own. That if I snuffed it right there, in my kitchen, I’d have lived a stupid life. School to uni and uni to work. Fake smiles every day and four boring holidays.”

“So what did you do?”

“Threw myself belly first against the edge of the worktop. Like an animal. And the bit of pizza shot out and landed on the floor, two metres away.”

He went quiet for a moment.

“Then I just sat there on the kitchen floor, staring at that lump of frozen pizza. Microwaved. Like everything else.” He wiped his mouth with his hand. “And from the floor, without getting up, I sent three messages. One to Bruno asking for a haircut. One to the landlord saying I wasn’t renewing. And an email to work. All three in four minutes, with my heart still going like the clappers.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it. The next afternoon I was sat in a barber’s chair with the cape on, listening to Bruno going on about his stuff, and I hadn’t told anyone. Not even him, and he had me right there for half an hour.” He opened his hands. “And here I am.”

Eva didn’t say anything. She passed him the bottle of water.

“The stupidest bit is I had everything sorted,” Axel went on, and took a drink. “Studied, got my degree, worked on reception at a hotel, had my tidy little flat, all my stuff where it’s supposed to be.”

“The whole package.”

“The package, yeah. And the package bored me stupid. Till I nearly died over a pizza and thought: hang on, is this it? All that for this?”

And he took a date from the box and ate it.

Eva had put her date back in the box and hadn’t picked it up again.

“I know what that feels like,” she said. “My lot had the package all set up for me before I was born.”

And she told him. Bit by bit, looking at the water in the fountain.

She told him about the piano. The lessons, the recitals. The right clothes, the right friends. A mum who only cared what other people would think, and a dad who’d stopped arguing with her about it so long ago that Eva couldn’t remember ever hearing him argue. An older sister who did everything right and never missed a chance to remind her.

“At home everything was decided. What you’d study, who you hung round with, even how you had to do your hair. Everything. Except one thing.”

“What?”

“Whether you were happy. Nobody cared about that.”

Axel thought about it.

“And there wasn’t anything? Something you liked, I mean. Even something stupid.”

Eva took a moment.

“One thing,” she said.

And she didn’t say what. And he didn’t ask, because with people you’ve just met you can tell straight away when there’s a door shut, and she’d shut that one just by saying it.

She was quiet for a moment, turning a date round in her fingers.

“My parents died in the car. A while back now.” She said it without her voice shaking. “Arguing, as usual. Well: her shouting and him driving and not saying a word, which was how my dad argued. Over something stupid, a motorway exit they’d missed because they read the satnav wrong. And me and my sister in the back, not saying a word. As usual.”

Axel didn’t say anything. He got it fast that there was nothing to say.

“The only thing they knew how to do together was argue. And they died doing it.” A laugh came out of her with nothing behind it. “Takes some doing, that.”

She flicked the date stone into the box.

“When they died I stayed with my sister. It was all right at first, until she started hating everything I did, wouldn’t leave me alone. So I decided to get out of that life… a bit like you.” She shrugged. “But look at me, I’ve ended up just as lost as before. At least I’m lost my own way, though. That’s something.”

Neither of them said anything for a bit, watching Fay, who’d licked the tin spotless and was doing his paws.

Axel stood up all of a sudden.

“You know what we need? A coffee. I’ve been gagging for one all morning.”

He swung the rucksack onto his shoulder. As he moved it, a handful of small, worn photos with a rubber band round them poked out of a side pocket. He shoved them back in.

“You carry photos around?” Eva asked.

“My old life. I’ll show you some time.”

“Come on, then, let’s get that coffee,” she said, standing up.

Fay set off first, tail straight up, like he knew exactly where they did the best coffee in the village.