That’s Lovely
Axel showed someone and got told that it was lovely
That morning Eva got up in a mood.
At twelve Axel said that the top path might take longer, but you’d see more.
“Well spotted.”
She said it without turning round and without raising her voice. Axel stood there with his mouth half open.
“Okay.”
It took Eva about two hundred metres to speak again.
“Sorry,” said Eva.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not, though.” She yanked her rucksack straight. “I’m just not up to it today, mate.”
Hortensia was two steps ahead and didn’t turn round either.
“Oh, you’ve got your period.”
Eva stopped dead.
“Well, honestly.”
“What?”
“You don’t just say it like that.”
“And how do you say it?” Hortensia kept walking. “Love, I had periods for more years than you’ve been alive. You tell me and I understand, which is more than this one’s going to do.”
Axel put both hands up without anyone having asked him anything.
Eva tried to hold back her laughter, but it escaped through her nose and ruined her bad mood.
“You’re so…”
“So what?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, then.”
In the middle of the afternoon they stopped on a bridge to look at the river. When Axel glanced down, another of those creatures was sitting a hand’s breadth from his elbow, shorter and considerably rounder than Gorgorito, with a cap covering half his face and enormous ears sticking out at the sides.
“Afternoon,” said Axel.
He was getting used to finding them about the place, and that worried him more than the shock of seeing them.
The creature turned round.
“EH?”
“I said afternoon.”
“AH! AFTERNOON!” he bellowed, as though they were thirty metres apart. “LOVELY DAY, ISN’T IT!”
It was drizzling.
“Who are you?”
“TWO? TWO WHAT?”
“Who. Are. You.”
“LITO!” He thumped his chest twice. “LITO, ALWAYS HAVE BEEN!”
“Okay, Lito. I’m Axel.”
“COURSE THERE’S LENTILS!”
“You what?”
“AT MY AUNTIE’S! THERE ALWAYS ARE!”
Lito was laughing his head off, slapping his knees, delighted with a conversation nobody else was having.
Axel desperately wanted to show him to someone. He didn’t dare press Eva after her “a rat, or something”, but he remembered the night he’d told Bruno, at three in the morning, while they looked for a missing game piece. His friend had gone quiet for a while, then asked:
“Right. And do they eat?”
He was the only person in his whole life who never asked him for proof.
But Bruno was cutting hair a long way from there. So he showed Hortensia. Because Hortensia was the most normal person he’d ever met, the kind who buys three jars of sauce just in case. If Hortensia saw it, it wasn’t just him any more.
Lito was coming along with them in the ditch, hopping, singing something dreadful. Fay was following two metres behind with his tail in a question mark, trying to decide if it was edible.
At a junction, in the drizzle, Axel couldn’t take it any more.
“Hortensia.”
“Yes, love.”
“Look there.” He pointed at a stone a metre and a half away, where Lito was sitting scratching an ear. “There. Right there.”
Hortensia shaded her eyes with her hand and looked at the stone for a couple of seconds. As soon as Axel saw her face, he began to regret calling her over.
Eva, a few steps behind, wasn’t looking at the stone. She was looking at Axel.
“Oh,” said Hortensia.
She gave him a wonderfully kind smile, without a trace of mockery. The sort you give a child who shows you a drawing when you haven’t the faintest idea what the hell they’ve drawn.
“That’s lovely, love.”
Axel lowered his arm.
“Yeah.”
“No, really, I think it’s wonderful.” She put her hand on his shoulder as she went past. “I had an aunt who used to talk to her dead husband every night, and she was the cleverest one in the family.”
She kept walking. As she went past the stone she took a little sidestep, like going round a puddle that isn’t there, and didn’t look.
That kindness hurt more than laughter would have. For two kilometres he thought about his boss asking whether he was sleeping well, the teacher who’d sent a note home about the drawings in his exercise book, and his ex saying in that gentle voice, “You just overthink everything.” They’d spent three years together. One Sunday she was there and the next she wasn’t, with a few very civil messages in between. Axel spent the following week explaining to a mate that it had been best for both of them, hoping that if he said it often enough he’d believe it.
“THAT ONE’S MINE!” yelled Lito, diving at a butterfly.
It wasn’t.
They stopped to eat on a threshing floor, sitting on bales of straw. Eva sat down next to Axel, bit into her bread and was quiet for a while.
“What did she say to you?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Hortensia. At the junction.”
“That it was lovely.”
Eva nodded slowly, chewing. She didn’t ask him what had been at the junction. She didn’t tell him she saw them too, or that she didn’t. She just sat there, shoulder to shoulder, and when he got up she passed him the bottle without him asking.
Lito said goodbye on a bend, for no reason.
“I’M OFF!”
“RIGHT!” shouted Axel.
“WRITE WHAT?”
“RIGHT, I SAID!”
“WELL, TA-RA THEN!”
And he went into a hole in a dry-stone wall.
That night, while Axel knocked in the tent pegs, Eva watched the half-moon lying on its side above a hill.
“What are you looking at?”
“Checking the calendar.”
“What calendar?”
“Mine.” She pointed up with her chin, not taking her hand out of her pocket. “I haven’t got a phone.”
And she went into the tent.
He got it as he hammered in the last peg. He remembered what had happened that morning and went red all by himself, in the dark, with the mallet in his hand.