The Package

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

All he could see was a sheet of white plastic covering him and a great big rucksack beside him.

Oh, right. His tent.

He lay there for a while, listening.

No cars, no motorbikes, no people. Out there the birds were whistling carefree little tunes.

“Wonder what they’re going on about,” he thought.

Inside the sleeping bag it was nice and warm.

He remembered the little Brownie in the red cap who’d caught him peeing along the path.

Had that really happened?

Anyway, sometimes his head sent him strange visions. Once, working the night shift at the hotel reception, he could’ve sworn a Brownie just like that one had thrown tomato sauce onto the shirt of some complaining customer.

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

Seriously weird stuff.

So, probably the same thing. A Brownie asking for chocolate in the middle of the woods.

Obviously they were just delusions, the kind that showed up when he’d been awake for too many hours.

He came out of the tent and stretched. The wood by day was another thing: you could see where it ended, and it was a small, ordinary place with two chestnut trees and a lot of ferns, and there at night he had lain looking at the plastic ceiling as if he were in the Amazon.

He packed up, put everything in the rucksack and got back on the path.

He walked two good hours. His head didn’t ask him for anything in two hours, and that hadn’t happened to him since he was small.

Little by little the path changed and away at the far end a bit of civilisation started to show.

Not that he missed it already, this soon, but it really was about time for a nice little coffee.

He still had a good while to go. He picked up the pace.

Meanwhile, Eva was waking up with the sun hitting her in the face.

She was under her plastic sheet, tied between a wooden bench and a park railing, with the rucksack for a pillow. She had gone to bed at five in the morning and it had taken her four minutes to rig.

She was dry.

Fay was asleep, curled into a ball on her belly.

“Hey, sleepyhead. Up you get, time to eat.”

They got up and left the park.

She found a little shop barely two streets up, with crates of fruit out front.

She told Fay to wait by 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 set to eating without stopping.

She peeled a banana and looked around. The village was waking up.

An old woman was crossing the square with a bag full of bread.

Going the other way was a man on a bike.

She took a bite of the banana.

A car went by on the main street, a young guy inside.

Eva liked to watch. Every village she came to had its own spark. Its people, its streets, its shops, its rhythm.

She finished the banana and picked up a date.

She started humming a tune as she nibbled at it.

At first wordless, soft, just for herself.

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

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

It wasn’t that there were many people, but the ones passing by stopped to listen.

Eva had closed her eyes and her voice poured out unchecked, crossing the square from corner to corner.

It was a strange feeling, because the images coming into her mind were so vivid she could’ve sworn they were memories.

But she knew that wasn’t the case. Maybe they were only dreams.

And while she was singing them nothing weighed on her, which is the closest she has ever been to being all right.

With her eyes shut she felt a shadow in front of her. Somebody 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 that today she’d ask around the village for a kid with a big rucksack. And the kid with the big rucksack had planted himself right in front of her, all on his own.

“Me again,” she said, with a goofy smile.

Fay lifted his head from the nearly empty tin, looked at Axel for a second, and went back to his business.

The kid dropped his rucksack on the ground with a groan of relief and sat down next to Eva, on the edge of the fountain.

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

“Oof… quite a bit.”

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

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

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

It took Axel a second to catch it. She was telling him that she had gone. To his flat. That she got there and he wasn’t there any more.

“Blimey, what rubbish friends you’ve got,” he said, and polished off the other half of the date.

Eva laughed.

“Nah, seriously. I went to your place, man, but I got there suuper late and you were already gone. A neighbor of yours told me you’d left, so I decided to come find you.”

“Ah. So you did come.”

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 one long thing to tell and didn’t know where you start, and besides she had worked out that the one with the rucksack had his too: nobody leaves their flat at night loaded with nine boxes of board games for fun.

So she pushed first.

“Look… I’ll tell you whatever you want.” She bit into another date. “But you have to go first. Why did you leave like that, from one day to the next? You told me something about an adventure, but an adventure is going off for the weekend to explore wherever, not leaving home in the middle of the night with no idea when you’re coming back.”

Axel sat thinking.

“You want the truth? Just know it’s a ridiculous story.”

“Tell me. I already know all the normal ones.”

“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 some ordinary night. Having dinner at the kitchen table, with my phone propped on the box. I took too big a bite… and it got stuck right here.” He pointed to his throat. “No air getting in. Not out, not in. Nothing.”

Eva had stopped chewing.

“I stood up, tried to cough, nothing came out. And I got this flash in my head, one very clear thought: that I was completely alone. That if I died right there, in my kitchen, I’d have lived a stupid life. From school to college and from college to work. Fake smiles every day and a handful of boring trips.”

“And what did you do?”

“I threw myself belly first at the edge of the worktop. Like an animal. And the piece flew out and ended up 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. Out of the microwave. 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 him for a haircut. One to the landlord telling him I wasn’t renewing. And an email to work. All three in four minutes, with my heart still going like mad.”

“And that’s it?”

“And that’s it. The next afternoon I was sitting in a barber’s chair with the cape on, listening to Bruno talk about his stuff, and I hadn’t told a soul. Not even him, and he had me in front of him for half an hour.” He lifted one shoulder. “And here I am.”

Eva said nothing. She passed him the bottle of water.

“The most absurd part is that I had it all figured out,” Axel went on, and took a drink. “I studied, got my degree, worked as a hotel receptionist, had my tidy little apartment, everything in its place.”

“The whole package.”

“The package, exactly. And the package bored me to death, it didn’t make me happy. Until I nearly croaked over a pizza and thought: hey, is this it? All this fuss for this?”

And he took a date out of the box and ate it.

He ate it slowly. A great deal more slowly than a date requires, turning it over with his tongue and breaking it with the teeth on one side and then the other, looking at the water of the fountain.

He didn’t notice. He had been not noticing for three days.

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

“I know exactly how that feels,” she said. “They had my package put together before I was born.”

And she told him. Little by little, looking at the water in the fountain.

She told him about the piano. The lessons, the recitals. The right clothes, the right friends. Parents who only cared what other people would think. An older sister who did everything perfectly and never missed a chance to remind her of it.

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

“Which?”

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

Axel sat thinking.

“And there was nothing? I mean something you liked yourself. Even if it was daft.”

Eva took a moment.

“One thing,” she said.

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

She was quiet for a moment, turning a date over between her fingers.

“My parents killed themselves in the car. A while back now.” She said it without her voice shaking. “Arguing, like always. Up front yelling at each other over something stupid, a highway exit they’d missed because they misread the GPS. And my sister and me in the back, quiet. Like always.”

Axel said nothing. He quickly understood there was nothing to say.

“The only thing they knew how to do together was argue. And they died doing it.” A joyless little laugh escaped her. “You’ve got to hand it to them.”

She tossed the date pit into the little box.

“When they died I was left with my sister. At first we were okay, until she started hating everything I did, wouldn’t let me live in peace. So I decided to escape that life… a bit like you.” She shrugged. “But look, I’ve ended up just as lost as before. Though at least lost my own way. Which is something.”

The two of them fell quiet, watching Fay, who had left the tin gleaming and was licking his little paws.

Axel stood up suddenly.

“You know what we need? A nice little coffee. I’ve been after one all morning.”

He slung the rucksack over his shoulder. As he moved it, a handful of small, worn photos held together with a rubber band peeked out of a side pocket. He shoved them back in with a swipe of his hand.

“You carry photos?” Eva asked.

“My old life. I’ll show you sometime.”

“Well come on then, let’s go get that coffee,” she said, getting to her feet.

Fay set off first, tail straight up, as if he knew perfectly well where the best coffee in the village was made.