Something Sweet

“You’re the ones in Hortensia’s house.”

They’d been in the village twenty-two hours.

“Yes.”

“I know.”

The shop stood beside the fountain and doubled as a café, tobacconist’s and collection point for everybody’s parcels. The sign said TRINI’S GROCERIES. Trini was about sixty, wore her glasses on a cord and looked at you in a way that made explaining why you’d come seem quite unnecessary. She probably already knew.

She planted two coffees on the counter without waiting for them to ask, and while they chose what to buy, she kept adding things of her own accord.

“Not candles, you’re sleeping on dry bracken up there and you’ll burn yourselves alive. Take head torches, I’ve got two.”

“Okay.”

“And a broom. You won’t get anywhere without a broom.”

“Okay.”

“And gloves, love, the brambles up there are bloody vicious.”

Eva took gloves.

“And I already know about the order on the door, so don’t go telling me.” She put some tomatoes in a bag without looking at them. “The whole village knows. And the lot with the bricked-up houses knew first.”

“Who owns those bricked-up houses?”

“Some people from outside. They’ve spent two years buying dead folks’ houses off the nephews. They pay little and smile a lot.” She did a sum on a bit of brown paper. “The one they haven’t got is Hortensia’s, the one with the bread oven. And the water.”

“What water?”

“From the spring up top, it comes down through her vegetable patch. Without that they’ve got no spa, son. They’ve got a bathtub.” She folded the paper. “Every now and then one of them comes up with a folder to measure the house.”

“Measure it for what?”

“So they know what’ll fit.”

While she was totting up the bill, Axel seized the chance to bring up the other matter. He’d been rehearsing it since the fountain, but still managed to sound as though he was asking something idiotic.

“Excuse me. One thing. In the house… we get the feeling there’s something.”

Trini kept tapping away at the till.

“Rats?”

“No.”

“Pine marten?”

“Pine marten as well, I think. But no.”

He ran out of ways to say it without saying it, and thought it best to shut up.

Trini waited two seconds. Then she looked back down at the receipt.

“Well, put out something sweet for them and that’s that.”

Axel was left with his wallet open in his hand.

“Sorry?”

“Put something sweet out for them. A bit of sugar on a plate, or honey.” She tore off the receipt. “And don’t sweep towards the bottom of the stairs, they don’t like that.”

“Sorry, don’t sweep towards where?”

“Towards the stairs.” She looked at him like he was a foreigner. “Sweep the other way.”

“And what if I sweep that way?”

Trini, for the first and only time in the whole conversation, lifted her head and looked him in the eye.

“Well, don’t sweep that way.”

And went back to the till.

“Twelve forty.”

Outside, they both sat on the rim of the fountain. Axel still looked as though he’d left something behind in the shop.

“You all right?”

“That gave me the willies, that did.” He looked at the ground. “I’ve had this my whole life. And that woman tells me to sweep the other way like she’s telling me where the bins are.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And she didn’t even look up, Eva. Didn’t even look up.”

“Once she did,” said Eva. “To tell you not to sweep that way.”

And she got up to fill the bottles.

Over the next four days he met the same matter-of-fact attitude three times. When Axel asked a man carrying firewood about a wall in the hayloft, he advised him not to touch that part, “because one of them sleeps there”.

A woman saw him going up with the wheelbarrow and told him that if he was going to move the rubble heap, he should say so out loud first.

“Say so to who?”

“You just say so, love. Costs nothing.”

In the shop, a bloke of about thirty paused over his coffee to tell Trini that his frying pan had fallen off its hook again, for the third time.

“Well, hang something else on it,” said Trini.

“Yeah.”

On the fourth day Axel went back down to the shop and asked Trini a different way.

“Trini. People round here, when a house has been shut up a long time, what do they say’s inside?”

Trini was stacking tins and didn’t stop.

“Damp.”

“Apart from damp.”

“Rats.”

“Apart from rats.”

That’s when she turned round, with a tin of tomatoes in each hand, and looked at him over her glasses.

“Son. Did you come here to do up a house or to ask questions?”

“To do up a house.”

“Then do it up.”

And she carried on with the tins.

That night, lying on the ferns in the stable with the head torch hanging from a nail, Axel tried to explain to Eva the muddle in his head.

“It’s worse,” he said.

“What is?”

“This. In the city I used to see things and nobody else saw them, so I was the problem. Bad, but clear.” He propped himself up on one elbow. “Here everybody talks about them and nobody sees them. They say it the way my gran used to kiss the bread when she dropped it, before she threw it away.”

He dropped back down.

“So what, then? What I’m seeing here is a saying?”

Eva took a while to answer.

“And which would you rather?”

“Sorry?”

“That it’s true or that it’s a saying.”

Axel opened his mouth and nothing came out.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there you go.”

“And which would you rather?”

Eva lay looking at the ceiling.

“I’d put the sugar out either way.”

“That’s not an answer, girl.”

“Then I’m not answering.”

And she fell asleep. Sometimes Axel loved it when she did that and sometimes he wanted to throw a boot at her.

The next day he waited until Eva had gone down for water, then left a plate with two spoonfuls of sugar on the mantelpiece. He felt ridiculous until he turned round and found Fay watching from the doorway, as calm as a civil servant who’d seen this particular procedure a thousand times. Then he felt ridiculous in front of somebody.

“Don’t you say anything.”

Fay yawned.

The sugar stayed on the plate all afternoon and all night. The next morning not a grain remained, but a line of ants was climbing the wall from a crack.

Axel watched the ants for a while before filling the plate again.