The Flute

The rest of the message was underneath.

Apparently the young officer, the one with the little notebook, told her they’d seen Eva, she was fine and she wasn’t on her own. Where, no, he’d promised the girl. Who with, yes: a lady called Hortensia Rebollo, he saw it on the ID card. And that’s how she found me. Through my husband’s death notice, would you believe. She’s a lawyer, she told me. I don’t know if that helps or makes it worse.

She says she just wants to know she’s all right. I haven’t told her anything. Paco says tell the girl and be done with it. Paco says a lot of things. What should I do?

Axel read it three times in the dark, with the screen turned right down. On the third he thought of a red-faced lad writing out a surname in very careful handwriting, while Eva asked him where it was all going to end up.

A metre and a half away, Eva was snoring.

He typed “Don’t tell her anything”, deleted it, and ended up sending “Let me think about it”.

In the morning Eva saw him looking at his phone.

“Who was that last night?”

“Hortensia.”

“What did she want?”

“Her plait keeps going wrong.”

That was true. She’d said so two messages earlier.

That afternoon, as they climbed a steep stretch, Eva kept shifting her rucksack about. She slung it over one shoulder, then both, with the straps so long the bag was practically down by her arse, then went back to carrying it sideways.

“Is it digging in?”

“No.”

“You’re carrying it all wrong, though.”

“I’m carrying it how I’m carrying it.”

“Look, if you shorten these straps, the rucksack sits against your back and stops pulling you backwards. It only takes a second.”

“There’s no need.”

“Eva, you’re carrying it like a handbag, for God’s sake.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Sorry,” she said, more quietly. “I don’t want it. I carry it because she gave it to me, with mine inside. But I don’t want it.”

She sat down on a rock at the side. Axel, on another one.

“When I was fifteen I made myself a flute,” said Eva, looking at her feet.

“What do you mean, you made yourself a flute?”

“Out of a bamboo cane from a neighbour’s garden. I watched a video. The holes have to go in exactly the right places and I had no idea, so I worked my way through fifteen canes before I got a sound out of one.”

“Fifteen? What about the neighbour?”

“The neighbour had a lot of bamboo and not much eyesight.”

Axel couldn’t help laughing, and neither could she, just a little.

“I did the holes with a kebab skewer heated in the flame, in the kitchen, when nobody was in. I burned my fingers eight times.” She held her fingers up, like you could still see it. “Number fifteen played. Sounded like a tin whistle, mind. But it played.”

“And what happened?”

“One day me and my sister had a row. About something stupid, I don’t even remember. And she picked the cane up off my bed and snapped it over her knee. ‘In this house we do what I say, end of.’”

Axel’s jaw clenched.

“That’s normal, isn’t it?” said Eva. “A row between sisters, something gets broken. It’s the other thing I didn’t see coming. A week later she gave me a flute. A transverse one, a real one, with a case and a little cloth. Cost a fortune. And she gave it to me at Sunday lunch, in front of my parents, my aunt and uncle and my gran.”

She picked a little stone up off the ground.

“And everyone going: ‘What a lovely sister you’ve got.’ ‘After what it cost her.’ And my gran took my face in her hands and said ‘sweetheart, how lucky you are’. And I had to say thank you. In front of everyone. And I said it really well, mind. That’s what I’m good at.”

She threw the little stone.

“And from that day on, the one who’d broken a flute was me, for not playing hers. She had the receipt and I had a snapped cane in the bin.”

She stood up.

“I never played it. Not one note. It’ll be at hers, in the hall cupboard, with the case shut.”

She slung the blue rucksack over the same shoulder again, its strap just as loose as before.

“That’s why.”

And she carried on up.

It was five minutes before Axel got up off the rock.

They didn’t bring it up again all day. That night they laughed at a cow that stood staring at them while they ate, because you didn’t need Hortensia for that. And Eva fell asleep straight away.

Inside his sleeping bag, with his hand over the phone screen, Axel clung to the fact that the flute business had happened eight years ago. People could change, couldn’t they? And if Irene had been looking for her for over a year, she must care at least a little. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that he could sort it out by sitting them down to talk.

He could wake her and tell her that her sister had called Hortensia. For a few seconds he nearly did, until he found an excuse that suited him beautifully: she was sleeping so well, how cruel to upset her at this particular moment.

He could make the first call himself. Hear Irene out without taking sides. There was no need to make everything so complicated.

He typed:

Give me her number. I’ll talk to her. Just to find out what she wants. Eva doesn’t need to know anything about it.

He reread the part about Eva not needing to know three times, then pressed send.