A Hundred and Seventy-Nine

It rained for three days straight.

On the third day they got into the tent at seven in the evening, and nothing would have got them out again. All three lay beneath the lantern, with Kika stretched across the entrance like a stopper, perfuming the whole place with her lovely wet-dog smell.

“I’m bored,” said Hortensia.

“Go to sleep.”

“It’s seven o’clock, love.” Silence. “Show me something.”

“Like what?”

“Anything. I’ve spent three days staring at the same bit of plastic.”

Axel rummaged in the side pocket of his rucksack and brought out his bundle of photographs, held together with an elastic band. They were small proper prints, still showing the holes from the drawing pins he’d used to put them on his wall.

“Ooh.” Hortensia sat up. “Give them here, give them here.”

“There’s a hundred and seventy-nine.”

“You counted them?”

“I counted them when I took them off the wall.”

“A hundred and seventy-nine exactly?” said Eva.

“Exactly.”

“You’re not right in the head, lad.”

“I know.”

The first one was him at sixteen, at a gig, with a criminal fringe.

“Is that a fringe?”

“Ten years ago everyone had one of those, Hortensia.”

“Well, then everyone had it in for you, son.”

The second was a goat on the roof of a car.

“And this?”

“A goat.”

“I can see it’s a goat. What’s it doing on your wall?”

“We were camping and the daft thing climbed up on some bloke’s car. And the bloke came out in his pants.”

“So why isn’t the bloke in the photo?”

“Because he was terrifying.”

Hortensia passed the photo to Eva, crying with laughter, and out came the rest. An enormous paella he’d made, “not great, but one for the history books”. Bruno with the scissors in his mouth. His dad under a car. Clara asleep on a sofa with her mouth open. A dog that wasn’t Kika but looked a bit like her.

“And this one?”

A woman from behind, crouching in a small shop, putting someone’s foot into a shoe.

“My mum. She’s got a shoe shop. She looks at people’s feet before their faces. She’ll be walking down the street and she’ll go ‘that one’s a forty-one and she’s wearing a forty’. And she’s right. Which is the worst bit.”

“And this?”

“Bruno again. With long hair.”

“Bruno had long hair?”

“Down to here. He says that’s why he became a barber. So it wouldn’t happen to anyone else.”

Hortensia flicked through them slowly with her thumb. By the twentieth, Axel realised she wasn’t just looking at the faces any more. She was studying the background of each one.

“Here,” she said. “There’s no places in these.”

“What?”

“There’s no scenery, sweetheart. There’s faces. A kitchen, a table, a bench. And the one with a mountain behind it is because there was somebody in front.” She handed him back the stack. “I’ve got two shoeboxes full of photos, and half of them have got the house in. The house from the front, the house from the back, the house with snow on. And there’s nobody in the house.”

They were at it for an hour. Hortensia laughed at nearly all of them, and the ones she didn’t laugh at, she asked about.

“And girlfriends?” she said at one point.

“There aren’t any in there.”

He said it fast, without looking up, and moved on to the next one.

Eva looked at him for a moment. Axel moved to the next photo before she could ask about the missing ones.

Among the photographs from Norway, after a harbour and a plate of salmon, came one of two nineteen-year-olds sitting on a bench. They were wearing matching hats and laughing at something that had just happened.

Axel looked at it for half a second and moved on.

“Ooh, hang on, that one…”

“That’s Oslo.”

He hurried on to the next one, of a crooked lamp post, and launched into a story that went on far too long for a photo of a lamp post.

Eva didn’t say a word. But she saw his hand: Axel had put the one with the hats at the back of the stack, under all the others, and while he was talking about the lamp post he was turning it over with his thumb, again and again.

Hortensia fell asleep two minutes after the photos were put away, and started snoring almost as well as Eva.

“Here,” said Eva, very quietly.

“What?”

“Why do you carry them?”

Axel looked at the lantern.

“Because you forget things. Honestly. I didn’t remember the goat thing, and it was on my wall, and I saw it every day coming out of the bathroom. And I didn’t see it. But if you take the photo away, it goes. And it’s like it never happened.”

Eva took a while to answer.

“I haven’t got any.”

And she turned over.

Axel opened his mouth to ask her if she wanted one, and it seemed so massively stupid that he shut it again.

Lying on the green plastic with the rain beating on the tent and the photographs put away again, he felt the emptiness return to the pit of his stomach. The same one he’d felt in the kitchen. The one that came every night.

He tried to blame the three days they’d spent cooped up in the rain, but that explanation didn’t last him even four minutes.

He’d left a flat, a job and a city after the thing with the pizza. Now he was sleeping on the ground in the middle of nowhere, with a woman snoring inches away and a dog in the doorway. What else was he supposed to change?

He’d turned his life upside down and could still feel every bit of it, as though the bastard had walked all the way with him.