The Other Conversation

The call was on a Tuesday, at four in the afternoon, leaning against the wall of a wash-house while Eva was in the village shop.

He had seven minutes.

It rang four times and he was on the point of hanging up, hugely relieved, when they picked up.

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice. Ordinary. A bit tired.

“Hello. Er… Irene?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Axel. I’m…” He choked on it. “I’m travelling with your sister.”

Silence at the other end. A very long silence.

“Sorry,” she said, and he heard her move, close a door. “Sorry, it’s that… Yes. Hortensia told me you might.”

“Yes.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s all right.”

“Really all right?”

“Really all right.” Axel looked over towards the shop. “She eats, she sleeps, she laughs. She’s all right.”

And then the woman burst into tears on the phone, and Axel stayed there, with the phone at his ear, looking at an empty wash-house, not knowing what to do with his hands.

They were on for twenty minutes.

Irene was thirty, a lawyer, and lived in the same flat the two of them had grown up in, and she told him that without his asking, the way you tell things when you have spent a long time not being able to tell them.

“In the same flat,” she said, and laughed with no humour at all. “And I know how that looks.”

“It doesn’t look like anything.”

“It looks like I’m an idiot.” A tap was heard turning on and off. “But if I sell it, where do I leave her the key? I keep her room exactly the same, all right. Exactly. I haven’t touched anything. And every January I ring the insurance woman and tell her two people live in that house, even though it’s only me, because saying one gives me a something.”

“Mm.”

“Which is being out of my mind, isn’t it?”

“I’ve spent three months walking towards a village I saw written on a flour bag.”

She laughed, and this time there was humour in it.

“Right. So we’re both the same, then.” She took a breath. “I looked for her a lot. At the start like a madwoman. I reported it, I went to the police station I don’t know how many times, I rang people from school I hadn’t seen in years, I made a fake account to see if she turned up in somebody’s photo. And I learned by heart the clothes she took with her, all right. I looked at people in the street. A year and a bit looking for a girl in a grey T-shirt.”

“Mm.”

“And then one day I stopped. Because they told me she was an adult and that if she didn’t want to turn up she wasn’t going to turn up.” She blew her nose. “And it’s been the worst year of my life.”

Axel didn’t open his mouth.

“What are you? Her boyfriend?”

“No. A friend.”

“Right.” Pause. “Sorry. It’s that I don’t know anything.”

There, without meaning to, the first one slipped out.

“It’s that she’s always kept to herself.”

Axel didn’t move.

“Sorry?”

“No, nothing. That she’s always been like that. Very…” She hunted for the word. “Very much one for leaving. Even as a little girl. She’d shut herself in her room and not come out. And I’d knock on the door and tell her dinner was on the table, and she wouldn’t answer, and an hour later she’d come down and eat on her own standing up in the kitchen.” The noise of a glass. “I love her very much, all right. Enormously. She’s the only thing I’ve got left.”

And then, more quietly:

“It’s that I haven’t had anybody to ask how you do this either. I had a degree half started and plans I can’t even remember what they were. And suddenly I had to sign papers and do the shopping and know when the gas has to be paid. And a fifteen-year-old sister who wouldn’t speak to me.” Pause. “And I don’t know how to be a sister, Axel. I learned to be the other thing. And you don’t unlearn that, however hard you try, and I have tried.”

Axel looked twice towards the shop.

And there she said the other one.

“Listen,” said Irene. “Do you think she’d want to talk to me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course.”

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

“Yes, yes.” She swallowed. “It’s that all I want is for her to be all right. For her to come home for a while, to rest, to eat something hot. And then we’ll organise things.”

Axel noted the number in his phone and spent a second with that last word going round in his ear.

He didn’t take it up.

“All right.”

“And I’m not going to tell her what to do, all right. Let that be clear.”

“Yes.”

“But she can’t be like this, come on. Out there. With nothing.”

“Will you tell her I called?”

There Axel heard himself say:

“Leave it to me. I’ll work out how to do it.”

And as he hung up, with his thumb already on the button, he twigged something: that Irene hadn’t once asked what he was like. She had asked whether Eva ate, whether she slept, whether she laughed, whether she was all right, really all right. Four times. And of him, a bloke who had picked up from a roadside and had spent three months sleeping next to her sister, she hadn’t even asked the surname.

It didn’t strike him as wrong. That woman had spent a year and four months thinking about nothing else, and you could tell that even in what she didn’t ask.

He hung up and stayed leaning against the wash-house with the phone in his hand.

He wrote to Hortensia.

I’ve spoken to her.

She answered two minutes later.

And?

It isn’t what she says. She’s destroyed.

Dots. A long spell of dots.

Be careful, son.

I will. Bit by bit.

Bit by bit but let her find out, all right.

Axel read that message twice. He wrote of course and didn’t send it. He wrote when the moment comes and did send it. He put the phone away.

The worst wasn’t the lie afterwards. The worst was how easy it turned out to be, and that twenty paces later he was already thinking about something else.

Eva came out of the shop with a bag and a loaf under her arm.

“They didn’t have milk.”

“Never mind.”

“Who were you talking to?”

There was a gap. A tiny gap, the size of two sentences, in which Axel had them whole and finished and ready to come out: “To your sister. Hortensia gave me her number.”

He had them. He heard them inside. He even felt the breath to say them.

“My mother.”

“Ah.” Eva gave him the loaf to carry. “Is she all right?”

“Yes.”

“Say hello from me.”

She set off walking. Axel stood half a second looking at her back, with the loaf in his hand, and then he went after her.

That night, while Eva slept, he started working out what he was going to say and when. He told himself the key was the moment. He told himself that if he came out with it now, in the middle of a road, with nothing around, she would shut the door and there would be no way back. He told himself it was better to wait until they were somewhere, calm, settled, with things in their place. He told himself he knew Eva.

And he went to sleep fairly untroubled, which is the worst part of all.