Concierge

Without Hortensia, they could walk past a cow without anyone having a thing to say about it. Axel found himself talking too much to fill the gap: he told Eva things about the hotel and ended up sharing a theory of his about churches.

“They put them right up at the top because everybody goes along the bottom. Only the ones who really believe it climb up. It’s a filter. Priests back then were dead clever, you know. Way cleverer than…”

He realised he was trying to be Hortensia and fell silent. They walked for an hour without a word, and that was quite all right too.

Hortensia’s things were in his trouser pocket: the key, cold against his thigh, and the two papers folded inside the scrap of flour bag.

The first night, while Eva snored, he took the papers out and examined them with his head torch turned right down. Even that tiny light made the developer’s brochure shine. He counted on his fingers the months until the stamped deadline: May, June, July, August and September. They fitted on one hand.

It seemed like loads of time. He put the papers away again with the key, and he didn’t use that pocket for anything else.

On the second night, once Eva had gone into the tent, Gorgorito turned up sitting on the rucksack.

“Where’s the old girl?”

“She stayed with a baker.”

“You sold her?”

“She stayed, I said.”

“For how much?”

“For nothing.”

“Then you got ripped off.” He scratched his belly. “Chocolate?”

“Haven’t got any.”

“What a rubbish trip.”

And he went.

On the third day Axel’s phone buzzed in his pocket. A message from nine digits with no name.

Where are you lot, Concierge?

Axel replied with the name of the village they were heading for. He couldn’t think of any reason not to.

At eleven in the morning, on a back road where nobody ever went, they heard a car. Low, grey, scraping the tarmac at every pothole. It pulled up alongside them and the window came down.

“Concierge!”

He rested his elbow out of the window, sporting sunglasses that probably cost more than the tent.

“I was passing. Well, an hour from here.” He laughed to himself. “I’m from this province, down that way. Hop in, go on, I’ll have you in the village in ten minutes.”

Eva had sat down on the crash barrier with Fay in her lap. She didn’t look at the car. Kika lay down in the shade of the door, because shade is shade.

Axel crouched at the window and heard himself say no.

“What do you mean, no?”

“We’re walking.”

“Yeah, but it’s fourteen kilometres.”

“That’s the point.”

The lad in the car looked at the two of them, waiting for the joke. It didn’t come.

“You’re a pair of dickheads,” he said, delighted.

He parked on the verge with his hazards on and got Axel to come and stretch his legs. They walked a kilometre and a bit, and the bloke from the car barely paused for breath.

“A mate of mine’s got a twelve-metre sailing boat and he gets seasick in the shower. In the shower, man.”

They turned back when the car’s owner began wondering whether people nicked things round there.

Before he left he stopped in front of Eva, who was still on the crash barrier scratching the cat behind the ear.

“That thing the other night. I’ve been thinking about it. Nobody does that off the cuff like that.”

“Okay.”

“Not okay. Okay’s what people say when they’re not going to do anything.”

And he went.

They walked the fourteen kilometres. They stopped for three hours at a river, because nobody walks in the three o’clock sun, and got there at half seven, knackered, with a new blister each. Quintanilla del Polvo, which comes out as something like Dustville, was hideous and had nothing in it. Not even dust.

That night Axel didn’t get the thing in the pit of his stomach.

He put it down to being tired.

The next day brought the sort of heat you remember, and they hadn’t showered for four days. They could still argue that they didn’t smell bad, but the blend of smoke, sun cream and rucksack was developing quite a personality.

At a petrol station Axel came out of the shop with two eight-litre bottles of water, one in each hand, and the face of someone who’d had an idea.

“Not a chance,” said Eva.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“It’s written all over you.”

If you leave the bottles in the sun all morning, by three in the afternoon the water’s hot. And eight litres is eight litres.

He tied the containers to either side of his rucksack to balance the weight. Three steps later he had to adjust the straps. He’d bought himself a shower. Now he had to be the plumbing.

He had four hours of walking ahead of him with sixteen kilos of water on his back, on top of everything he was already carrying.

“Give me one,” said Eva after an hour.

“No.”

“Give me one.”

“No.”

In the second hour she stopped in the middle of the road, untied one without asking and kept walking with the bottle hanging off her shoulder like a handbag. They didn’t mention it again.

At three they found a flat patch behind some hazel trees, away from the road, with a large flat rock. The water in the containers had warmed up as though it had just come out of a bath tap.

“Ooh,” said Eva, pouring a little water into her hand.

“Eh? Eh?”

“Okay. Fine. It was a good idea,” she said, very fast, looking away. “Now go over there somewhere.”

Axel went over there somewhere. Fifty metres, behind the hazels. From there you couldn’t see anything and you could hear everything.

Axel heard a little trickle of water, then a muffled yelp, and after a pause another trickle. Eva’s voice came from behind the hazels, positively bristling with indignation:

“THIS ISN’T A SHOWER!”

“It’s hot water!”

“IT’S A GLASS OF HOT WATER, AXEL!”

“You’ve got to ration it!”

“THIS ISN’T RATIONING!”

Two minutes later, in a different voice, almost to herself:

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“I’ve had sand down my neck for four days.”

On the other side of the hazels, Axel poured water down his back and felt like the cleverest bloke in the world, even if the comments coming from across the bushes weren’t entirely in agreement.

They had bread and tomato on the rock, with wet hair.

“Here,” said Eva, looking at her hands. “You paid for the bottles.”

Axel was going to say “don’t worry about it”, which was what he always said. Something else came out.

“Four sixty.”

Eva looked up.

“What?”

“They cost four sixty. Both of them. If you want to write it down.”

Eva went very still. Then she took out of her pocket a little notebook she’d bought at the tobacconist’s in Peñalumbre, licked her finger, found the last page and wrote.

“What are you putting?”

“Four sixty.”

“Don’t actually write it down.”

“It’s written.”

The row was about the route.

The fifth day, five in the afternoon, thirty degrees and a hill. Axel had had his phone in his hand for half an hour.

“This way we save six kilometres.”

“There’s no path that way.”

“There is. Look, there’s the line.”

“That line’s twenty years old.”

“It’s a map, Eva.”

“It’s a map made by somebody who’s never been here.”

And she kept going along the road.

“It’s six kilometres, kiddo!”

“Then off you go, kiddo!”

And off he went. He went down the path on his own, very dignified. Kika went with Eva, which he took as a betrayal, pure and simple.

For four hundred metres the path proved him right. Then it narrowed, filled with waist-high brambles and ended at a new wire fence with a private hunting sign. Axel stood there looking, as if a gap might appear if he kept at it long enough.

It took him fifty minutes to get back, with his arms covered in scratches.

Eva was waiting in the shade of the crash barrier with the cat and the dog. She’d been sitting there for fifty minutes, though she could perfectly well have gone on without him.

She didn’t say “told you”. She passed him the bottle.

“Six kilometres,” he said.

“And a fence.”

“Brand new, mind. Just put up. They put that one up this morning, specially for me.”

Eva kicked a stone, so she wouldn’t laugh.

As he drank, Axel looked at the entrance to the path. The grass stood so stiffly that he could make out every single footprint he’d left on his way in.

“Not a soul goes down there,” he said. “Look at the grass. And the stuff on the verge, flattened in patches. The map doesn’t tell you that.”

Eva gave him a sideways look.

“Ooh, look at Mr Clever.”

And they carried on along the road, which was longer and got there.