The Speaker

The cat had finished his tin of tuna and was washing his paws.

Eva had been sitting on the same step for three hours and change, her back against the wall of a locked doorway and the scrap of paper bag in her hand, folded and unfolded so many times that you could barely read the address any more.

They’d be playing by now. Four people round a table, the flat smelling of food.

When Fay had finished washing, he climbed into Eva’s lap. She let him settle and went on unfolding the piece of paper, though she already knew the address by heart.

She looked at the street lamp opposite, which had been on for a while now, and that made her mind up.

“Come on, Fay.”

“Better late than never,” she told herself.

She got up off the step and set off for the address Axel had given her.

Meanwhile, out on the dirt track, Axel had been walking for quite a while, following the circle of light from his head torch. It showed him about three metres of path and not much else.

The first twenty minutes were good. The next twenty were the same twenty again.

After an hour and a half he started thinking about everything he’d left behind. The flat, the job, the games outside the hairdresser’s. It no longer seemed such a good idea.

He stopped with his head torch pointing at a branch.

What was he doing out here? Had he really chucked everything in to go wandering down a dirt track in the middle of the night?

He sat on the ground and switched off his torch. In the dark, a branch cracking or a bird flapping its wings began to sound rather less pleasant than it had ten minutes earlier.

He wanted to turn round and go back to his kitchen, which would still smell of paella, and to his own bed.

What if tomorrow he woke up just as fed up, only in a wet tent? He hugged the rucksack to his chest. The familiar emptiness was still there, in the pit of his stomach. Neither the fresh air nor the walk had shifted it.

A couple of drops landed on his forehead and, before he had time to complain, it started raining properly.

He stood up. He got the waterproof out of the rucksack, the one he’d bought in January, and wrapped himself up in it completely: shoulders to knees, rucksack inside.

“Adventure, my arse,” he told himself. “That’s enough.”

He pulled the hood tight and started walking back the way he’d come.

He didn’t even bother switching the head torch on: in the distance, a long way off, he could see the lights of his city.

He hadn’t gone eight steps when something yelled at his back.

He froze.

It was music. Inside his rucksack, the speaker had started belting out one of those songs people dance to at weddings. The only guests were him and the trees, and he hadn’t even switched the bloody thing on.

Or he’d knocked it by accident getting the waterproof out, which was the first thing he thought. Except that was nearly a minute ago and the button was on the other side.

With the rain hammering down and a full-blown party going on in his rucksack, Axel started laughing. He tried to stay pissed off, but with that song playing there was no chance.

He turned round again and switched the head torch on. The rain ran off the plastic and he didn’t care.

He walked on without knowing where he was going, soaked through, with the speaker playing inside his rucksack. He’d left home so things would happen to him, and fair enough, he was now lugging a disco through the woods.