Hortensia

There he was on the café step, where Fay had been sitting.

Axel went outside to wait and found him sat there with his little legs dangling.

“You were…”

“Gorgorito.” He folded his little arms, looking mortally offended. “I’m Gorgorito, mate. You’ve got the memory of a goldfish. Got any chocolate left?”

“You ate it all.”

“Pfff. Tightwad.” He jerked his head towards the inside of the café, where the woman was still blowing her nose. “And what about her? You just going to leave her there?”

“And what do you want me to do about it, mate?”

“Get her to come.”

“Come where?”

“Wherever you’re going, sunshine. What’s the difference?”

“But that woman’s just slagged her off.”

“That’s why she’s short a purse.” He looked over at the counter and scratched an ear. “And you’re welcome, by the way. Nobody says thank you round here. And tell her to get those shoes off, you can’t live in shoes like that.”

“What do you know about her shoes?”

“I’ve seen them.”

He went over to Fay, who was on the pavement licking a paw, and jumped up onto his back.

“Giddy up!”

Fay carried on with his paw.

“I said giddy up!”

Fay finished his paw, had a good long stretch and, when he felt like it, trotted off down the street with the brownie clinging to two fistfuls of fur and shouting at him to slow down.

Two seconds later they were gone.

The woman came out of the café with red eyes and her bag clutched to her chest. Eva followed, having used a napkin to pick up everything she’d dropped, false teeth included.

“What are you looking at?” said the woman. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Nothing.”

“Where’s Fay?” said Eva.

“He went off down there.”

Eva looked down the street for a second.

“He’ll be back. He’s a law unto himself.”

“Just round the corner” turned out to mean twenty minutes uphill, towards the big houses and high fences. The woman led the way without getting out of breath, talking as though someone had finally taken the cork out.

“I was a right little tearaway as a girl, you know. Don’t you go thinking otherwise.”

“Were you?”

“A tearaway. We’d go down to the river the minute school was out. Three kilometres on foot. And there was a pool under a bridge with a waterfall coming down from above, freezing, and the game was to stand under it and see who could last longest. I’d come out with blue lips.”

She laughed to herself.

“And on Tuesdays, which was baking day, my mother would leave a little plate of something sweet on the bakehouse windowsill, and in the morning it was gone. I’d ask who’d taken it and my mother would say: ‘the ones upstairs’. And if I kept on, that they had a mouth on them, that they wouldn’t sugar the pill even if they saw you crying, that they were always up for a laugh, and that if they needled you it was to wake you up. And that was the end of it.” She lifted one shoulder. “Village stuff.”

“So what happened?” said Eva.

“I married a banker.”

She said it with her voice dropped, like at a wake.

“A very serious man. Had to have everything. Never laughed, you know. Never. And little by little you stop feeling like laughing yourself. Like a roof that won’t stop leaking.” She shook her head. “What a bloody stupid life.”

At the top of the hill they reached the house.

The house had iron gates, a video doorbell and a lawn so perfect you felt guilty at the thought of walking on it. Not a flower, not a raised blind, not a sound from inside. With everything they’d put into the place, it looked as though someone had forgotten to live there.

“Well, this is it.” She got her keys out. “In you come, there’s more than enough of everything here.”

“Here,” said Axel, already crossing the lawn. “Can I use your loo? I need to do a little something.”

Eva didn’t wait half a second.

“Number one or number two?”

Axel doubled up laughing in the middle of the garden.

The woman let out a great belly laugh and stood there laughing with the key in her hand, quite unable to get it into the lock.

“Go on, give it some welly!” she told Axel, pointing him to the door.

Eva’s smile stopped halfway. Just for a second. Then it came back, all of it.

Axel’s entire flat would have fitted into the bathroom, with its towels folded in thirds and soap that smelled of an expensive hotel. He washed his hands and held them under the tap for a good while, until the water began to burn.

When he came out, Eva was standing in the hall with her hands behind her back, not touching anything.

The woman appeared in the corridor carrying a small blue canvas rucksack. Its straps were still stiff from never having been used.

“Here you are, love.”

“I’ve already got one.”

“That’s not a rucksack, sweetheart. That’s a bag with straps on.” She pointed at the zip tied with the shoelace. “One of these days it’ll split at the bottom and you’ll be picking your things up out of a ditch.”

“It hasn’t split in a year and a half.”

“Well, exactly. It’s due.”

She put it in her hands and turned round.

Eva stood there holding the blue rucksack between two fingers, well away from her body, as if it were hot.

“And hang on, I’ll bring you some shoes. I’ve got loads. They’re a forty, but with two pairs of socks…”

“No.”

It came out more sharply than she’d intended, and she hurried to add:

“Thanks. But no.”

The woman looked at the bare feet on that shiny floor and didn’t push it.

The three of them had lunch in a kitchen where everything was on show and nothing got used.

“The plates were my mother-in-law’s,” said the woman, dishing up. “The whole set. I’ve spent half my life eating off a dead woman’s china.”

Eva spent twenty minutes in the shower and came out with her hair dripping, without saying a word. Then they went out into the garden, into the sunshine, onto the fake grass.

“Here,” said Axel. “The house isn’t going anywhere, is it? Why don’t you come with us?”

The woman stopped with her key halfway into her handbag.

“Sorry?”

“Come with us. We’re not going anywhere in particular. But we’re going.”

“That’s how I left,” said Eva, quietly, looking at her feet. “With nothing. Best thing I’ve ever done.”

“But… at my age. Where to? With what?”

“With what you’re stood up in,” said Axel. “Like when you went down to the river.”

It went quiet.

The woman looked at Axel. Then she looked down at her shoes. Patent leather, a little heel, the kind you don’t walk on the grass in.

“Give me five minutes.”

“Take your time, there’s no rush.”

“I said give me five minutes!”

She bounded up the steps with such vigour that Axel began to wonder who’d be waiting for whom along the way.

She took forty. She came out in trainers, with a rucksack that matched Eva’s, her hair shoved up any old how and a twenty-year-old’s face tucked inside her own. Something heavy in her cardigan pocket went clink when she walked, and the corner of a brown envelope was poking out of the top. She didn’t say what it was.

She closed the gate and held on to the iron for a moment before letting go.

“Right, that’s that. Oh, and look at this, silly me.”

She took out a leather purse.

“I’d lost it and I’d been in a right state all morning. And do you know where it was? In the fridge! Between the cheese and the butter. I’m losing my marbles, my loves.”

Axel and Eva looked at each other and managed not to laugh. Only just, but they managed.

“By the way,” Axel said as they headed downhill. “We’ve done all this talking and I don’t even know your name.”

“Hortensia Rebollo.” She pulled a face. “Hortensia like the hydrangea and Rebollo like the oak. My father used to say I came out of a garden centre.”

She looked down the street, towards where she’d never been.

“Well, then? Which way to this adventure?”

She set off before anyone could answer, the new rucksack bouncing on her back.

Fay came round a corner without a brownie on his back, looking as innocent as you like, and took the lead.