The Normal Stories

Axel opened his eyes and took a moment to recognise the white fabric above him and the enormous rucksack beside him. Oh, right. The tent. He’d forgotten he slept here now.

He lay there a while, listening.

No cars, no motorbikes, no people. Outside the birds were whistling away, dead pleased about something.

“God knows what they’re on about,” he thought.

It was nice and warm inside the sleeping bag.

He remembered the little brownie in the red hat who’d caught him having a wee on the track.

Had that really happened?

Well, sometimes his head sent him weird visions. Once, on a night shift on reception at the hotel, he could’ve sworn a brownie just like that one had flicked tomato sauce onto the shirt of a customer who was kicking off.

Another time, playing board games with Bruno and Clara, he’d seen a brownie nick the most important piece off the board. He found it three days later in the cereal box.

The chocolate business could have been another of those tricks his mind played when he’d gone too long without sleep. He’d been awake for twenty hours the night before, so it had plenty of reason.

He came out of the tent and stretched. The woods in the daytime were a different thing: you could see where they ended, and it was a small, ordinary place, two chestnut trees and a load of ferns, and in there, at night, he’d been lying staring at the plastic roof like he was in the Amazon.

He packed up, put everything in the rucksack and went back to the track.

He walked for two hours in a good mood, with nothing nagging at him, and that hadn’t happened since he was little.

Further along the path, the rooftops of a village came into view.

Not that he was missing the city already, but it was about time for a coffee.

He still had a fair way to go. He walked faster.

Eva woke up at the same time with the sun beating down on her face.

She was under her plastic, tied between a wooden bench and a park railing, with her rucksack for a pillow. She’d got her head down at five in the morning and it had taken her four minutes to put up.

She was dry.

Fay was asleep, curled up in a ball on her belly.

“Oi, sleepyhead. Up you get, we need to eat.”

They got up and left the park.

She found a little shop just two streets up, with crates of fruit outside.

She told Fay to wait at the door and came out a few minutes later with a couple of bananas, a little box of dates, a bottle of water and a small tin of tuna.

She sat on the edge of the fountain in the village square and opened the tin for the cat.

Fay got stuck in without stopping.

As she ate the banana, Eva watched the village waking up. A woman passed with bread under her arm and called good morning towards the fountain without looking at her. A man cycled past with a radio hanging from his handlebars, and at the corner café someone hauled the shutter up in one go. She liked arriving in places at that hour and seeing who got going first.

When she’d finished the banana, she took a date and hummed between little bites. At first she sang quietly without words, until one of her own songs began to take shape, the lyrics made up as she went along.

A little girl stopped dead in the middle of the square, holding her mum’s hand.

There weren’t exactly loads of people, but the ones walking by stopped to listen.

Eva had shut her eyes and her voice was just pouring out, crossing the square from one corner to the other.

As she sang, places took shape in her mind: a kitchen with the window open, a muddy path, a patch of shade beneath a tree where she could lie down and sleep. Sometimes she got so caught up in them that she forgot to open her eyes.

While she sang, none of it weighed on her. It was the closest she’d ever come to feeling all right.

With her eyes shut she felt a shadow in front of her. Someone was looking at her from close up.

“You again?” said a cheerful voice.

She stopped singing. She opened her eyes.

Eva had spent half the night promising herself she’d ask around the village today for a lad with a big rucksack. And the lad with the big rucksack had turned up right in front of her all by himself.

“Me again,” she said, with a daft grin.

Fay lifted his head out of the nearly empty tin, looked at Axel for a second and went back to what he was doing.

Axel dropped his rucksack on the ground with a groan and sat down next to Eva on the edge of the fountain.

“Hungry?” she said, holding out the box of dates.

“Ooof… a bit, yeah.”

He took one and bit into it. Ever since the pizza, he’d been chewing with enormous care, though he hadn’t noticed it yet.

“So what happened yesterday, then?” Axel asked with half a date in his mouth.

“Well, yesterday I got invited to a dinner with board games and when I got there, nobody was in.”

It took Axel a second to realise that Eva had been to his flat and that, by the time she arrived, he’d already left.

“Wow, your mates sound shit,” he said, and wolfed down the other half of the date.

Eva laughed.

“Nah, seriously. I went to yours, but I got there suuuper late and you’d gone. One of your neighbours said you’d left, so I decided to come and find you.”

“Oh. So you came.”

He held the stone between his fingers, trying to work out what time she’d arrived and where the hell they’d missed each other.

Eva watched him. She had a long story of her own and no idea where to start. And it had dawned on her that the lad with the rucksack must have one too: nobody leaves their flat in the middle of the night lugging board games just for fun.

So she broke the silence.

“Look… I’ll tell you whatever you want.” She took another bite of date. “But you have to go first. Why did you just go like that, overnight? You said something about an adventure, but an adventure’s going off somewhere for the weekend, not walking out of your house in the middle of the night with no idea when you’re coming back.”

Axel had a think.

“You want the truth? But I’m warning you, it’s a ridiculous story.”

“Go on. I know all the normal ones already.”

“I left because of a slice of pizza.”

Eva looked at him, waiting for the punchline. It didn’t come.

“I was at home, just a normal night. Having my tea at the kitchen table, with my phone propped up on the box. I took a bite that was way too big… and it got stuck here.” He pointed at his throat. “No air. Not in, not out. Nothing.”

Eva had stopped chewing.

“I got up, tried to cough, nothing. And I had this flash, this really clear thought: that I was completely on my own. That if I snuffed it right there, in my kitchen, I’d have lived a stupid life. School to uni and uni to work. Fake smiles every day and four boring holidays.”

“So what did you do?”

“Threw myself belly first against the edge of the worktop. Like an animal. And the bit of pizza shot out and landed on the floor, two metres away.”

He went quiet for a moment.

“Then I sat on the kitchen floor staring at that bit of frozen pizza. Microwaved, too.” He wiped his mouth with his hand. “I got up, picked my phone off the table and sent three messages. To Bruno for a haircut, to the landlord to say I wasn’t renewing, and to Don Ernesto to quit my job. Four minutes, with my heart still hammering.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it. The next afternoon I was sat in a barber’s chair with the cape on, listening to Bruno going on about his stuff, and I hadn’t told anyone. Not even him, and he had me right there for half an hour.” He opened his hands. “And here I am.”

Eva didn’t say anything. She passed him the bottle of water.

“The stupidest bit is I had everything sorted,” Axel went on, and took a drink. “Studied, got my degree, worked on reception at a hotel, had my tidy little flat, all my stuff where it’s supposed to be.”

“The whole package.”

“The package, yeah. And the package bored me stupid. Till I nearly died over a pizza and thought: hang on, is this it? All that for this?”

And he took a date from the box and ate it.

Eva had put her date back in the box and hadn’t picked it up again.

“I know what that feels like,” she said. “My lot had the package all set up for me before I was born.”

And she told him. Bit by bit, looking at the water in the fountain.

She told him about the piano. The lessons, the recitals. The right clothes, the right friends. A mum who only cared what other people would think, and a dad who’d stopped arguing with her about it so long ago that Eva couldn’t remember ever hearing him argue. An older sister who did everything right and never missed a chance to remind her.

“At home everything was decided. What you’d study, who you hung round with, even how you had to do your hair. Everything. Except one thing.”

“What?”

“Whether you were happy. Nobody cared about that.”

Axel thought about it.

“And there wasn’t anything? Something you liked, I mean. Even something stupid.”

Eva took a moment.

“One thing,” she said.

Eva added nothing more, and Axel swallowed the question he’d been about to ask.

She was quiet for a moment, turning a date round in her fingers.

“My parents died in the car. A while back now.” She said it without her voice shaking. “Arguing, as usual. Well: her shouting and him driving and not saying a word, which was how my dad argued. Over something stupid, a motorway exit they’d missed because they read the satnav wrong. And me and my sister in the back, not saying a word. As usual.”

Axel said nothing.

“The only thing they knew how to do together was argue. And they died doing it.” A laugh came out of her with nothing behind it. “Takes some doing, that.”

She flicked the date stone into the box.

“When they died I stayed with my sister. It was all right at first, until she started hating everything I did, wouldn’t leave me alone. So I decided to get out of that life… a bit like you.” She shrugged. “But look at me, I’ve ended up just as lost as before. At least I’m lost my own way, though. That’s something.”

Neither of them said anything for a bit, watching Fay, who’d licked the tin spotless and was doing his paws.

Axel stood up all of a sudden.

“You know what we need? A coffee. I’ve been gagging for one all morning.”

He swung the rucksack onto his shoulder. As he moved it, a handful of small, worn photos with a rubber band round them poked out of a side pocket. He shoved them back in.

“You carry photos around?” Eva asked.

“My old life. I’ll show you some time.”

“Come on, then, let’s get that coffee,” she said, standing up.

Fay set off first, tail straight up, like he knew exactly where they did the best coffee in the village.