There Were Eight

The tiny sound of a clothes peg falling woke Axel at four in the morning. His neck was killing him and he had a bit of hay in his ear. The owner of the hayloft had called down from a window telling them to come in, without bothering to come downstairs: the door was open and they weren’t to dream of smoking. She’d shut the window before they could answer.

The hayloft had a little window onto the back street, at first-floor level. Every window and every balcony had lines with washing on, because Sunday had been a glorious day.

He peered through the little window and counted eight. Eight creatures hanging quite happily from the washing lines, on a system of ropes criss-crossing the street from balcony to balcony. They were rearranging the entire neighbourhood’s laundry.

They’d unpeg a shirt, send it flying along the rope to the balcony opposite, and there another one would peg it out on that house’s line. Pegs and all. At four in the morning clothes were going back and forth over the street like in a factory.

He recognised Gorgorito in a second, because he was the one doing the least work and the most shouting. He was on a balcony with his hands on his hips, running the show.

“Put that one on the blue! ON THE BLUE!”

“PUT IT WHERE?” shouted a voice Axel knew.

“ON THE BLUE, DEAFO!”

“COURSE THERE’S LENTILS!”

Gorgorito covered his face with both hands.

Manazas dropped a pair of trousers into the street. He spent a whole minute looking down with his great big hands on his head, like someone watching their gran’s best plate hit the floor.

The other five he’d never seen in his life. They were getting on with it, very serious, like a removals crew.

Kika was asleep in the hay, legs in the air. Eva, two metres away, was snoring. Neither of them noticed a thing.

Axel spent twenty minutes with his nose at the little window. When he turned towards Eva, he nearly woke her. All he had to do was touch her shoulder and ask her to look. He crouched beside her, listening to her snore, until she stirred and he drew his hand back. What the hell was he going to say if she couldn’t see anything? He lay down again with his jacket folded under his neck, and it took him a good while to fall asleep.

By the time they went down to fill the bottles at half past nine, it had turned into a circus. Seven people stood in the street, all looking up and talking at once.

“That one’s mine!”

“Oh, give over, that’s my husband’s!”

“I know it, I sewed the cuff on myself!”

From a balcony, a woman in a flowered dressing gown waved somebody else’s shirt, two clothes pegs still in her mouth.

“I’ve got your socks here!”

And three doorways down, another one in curlers:

“They’ll be yours!”

“They’re yours, the elastic’s gone!”

In the middle of the street, a man in a vest with an unlit cigarette in his mouth studied the balconies with the gravity of someone about to solve a murder.

“It was the kids.”

“What kids? There aren’t any kids here.”

“The twins.”

“The twins are four!”

“They’re little devils!”

“They can’t reach the line even standing on a chair!”

“They’re little devils!” he said again, happily.

The twins were on the corner swearing on their mum’s life that it wasn’t them. Since there were two of them, they were four years old and they were both talking at once, nobody paid the slightest attention.

It was a woman in an apron who solved it.

“Puri’s nephew. He came up on Sunday for firewood with the ladder and stayed the night.”

The man in the vest took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it like a piece of evidence.

“Puri’s nephew is fifteen.”

“Well, exactly.”

Puri’s nephew was on the corner with the twins and a bag of sunflower seeds. He swore blind it wasn’t him, with a face not even his own mother would have believed.

Everyone accepted it straight away. By then they were already laughing, and Puri’s nephew was just what they needed to keep going a bit longer. At ten there were fourteen of them in the street, laughing their heads off. They’d been in Peñazul for fifteen hours, a village with pavements so narrow the houses almost touched, and until that morning Axel hadn’t seen two neighbours speak to each other.

Eva turned to him with the bottle full.

“It wasn’t Puri’s nephew.”

“No?”

“No.”

Eva kept looking at the balconies. Axel waited for her to say more, but she just screwed the cap back on.

He had a whole sentence on the tip of his tongue too. “There were eight of them. I counted. And I know three of them by name.” He swallowed it with the water.

“Anyway,” said Eva, swinging her rucksack on, “I got up to worse than that when I was twelve.”

The woman from the hayloft was on her balcony with her arms folded, watching the circus.

“Oi! Did you sleep all right?”

“Like royalty, thanks.”

“Well, when you’re back this way you let me know, I’ll put sheets on for you. And tell the woman on the second floor I’ve got her socks, I picked them up off the ground before someone trod on them.”

And she shut the window before anyone could answer.

It had been a good two weeks since the wallet on the threshing floor. At twelve, in Villanueva del Olmo, the car was waiting for them outside the only bar, one wheel up on the pavement and him leaning on the bonnet.

Axel had sent him the location the night before, from the hayloft, because a “where are you lot, Concierge?” had come in and he didn’t know how not to answer.

“Four hours,” said the lad with the car.

This time he didn’t need to say it again. His white T-shirt had a crease from top to bottom, and it was the first crease Axel had ever seen on him.

“Four hours for a sandwich, mate?”

“For a good sandwich.”

They found the café closed, with a piece of cardboard on the shutter saying CLOSED MONDAYS. The lad with the car read it twice, in case Monday might change its mind between readings.

They ate on the edge of the fountain what they had with them: half a loaf, three tomatoes and a tin of sardines. He hadn’t brought anything. He ate half of everything, talking about a beach bar in Cantomar where the sardines were better.

After a while he turned to Eva.

“Here. That thing with my mate.”

Eva looked up.

“He wants to hear you live. Says the phone’s no good, you lose stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“The second part, where the fountain drowns your voice out. He even put headphones on.” He took Axel’s last bit of bread. “He says it needs a proper recording. And nobody’s to cut those silences out.”

Eva didn’t say anything. But she didn’t finish her tomato.

At two he set off back. Four hours back, with his half of the loaf inside him.

“Let me know where you’re stopping!”

And off he went, scraping the bottom on the kerb.

That afternoon, as they climbed a steep stretch with the sun coming from the side, Eva stopped.

“Here.”

“What?”

“Can I borrow your phone?”

Axel handed it over without thinking, because it was a phone, and kept walking. Twenty metres on he realised she wasn’t coming.

When he turned, she was on the verge with her back to him, the phone at one ear and a finger blocking the other. He waited four minutes. When Eva came back she returned his phone, put a little folded square of paper in her inside pocket and walked on ahead, without telling him who she’d called.

Axel followed without asking. It took him three kilometres to admit why he preferred to keep quiet: if he asked questions, she could ask them too.