The Speaker

The cat had finished his tin of tuna and was on the paws.

Eva had been sitting on the same step for three hours and a bit, her back against the wall of a shut doorway and the bit of paper bag in her hand, folded and unfolded so many times that the address no longer read properly.

At that hour they would be playing. Four people round a table, with the flat smelling of food.

The cat finished with the paws and climbed onto her lap, which is what a cat does once it has had its dinner.

She let him climb up and didn’t move.

She knew the address by heart and she kept unfolding the paper.

She looked at the street lamp across the way, which had been on for a while now, and that decided her.

“Come on, Fay.”

“Better late than never,” she told herself.

She got up off the step and set off towards the address Axel had given her.

He had been walking a good while by then, looking at the bit of path the headlamp kept opening in front of him, which was a three-metre circle with earth in it.

The first twenty minutes were good. The next twenty were the same twenty again.

And at an hour and a half he started doing a sum he didn’t want to do, the sum of everything he had given away that morning.

He stopped.

The head torch stayed fixed on a branch.

What was he doing out here? Had he really left everything to head off at night down a dirt track?

He sat on the ground. Turned the flashlight off.

The darkness came down on him whole.

The forest sounds, which had felt nice a moment ago, were now just that, noises. A branch snapping. The wings of a bird you couldn’t see.

He wanted to turn back. To undo his steps and go back to the smell of paella. Back to the light of his apartment and his room, the walls covered in photos.

What if that wasn’t leaving a city but leaving himself? He asked himself the question and didn’t know how to answer it, and that, to a bloke who kept a three-column list with the why column filled in all the way down, sat worse than the cold.

Then a drop landed on his forehead. Then another. And ten seconds later it was properly raining.

He got up. He took the waterproof out of the rucksack, the one he had bought in January, and wrapped himself right up: from the shoulders to the knees, with the rucksack inside.

“What adventure, what adventure,” he told himself. “That’s enough.”

He tightened the hood and started retracing his steps.

He didn’t even bother turning on the head torch: at the far end, a long way off, he could see the lights of his city.

He hadn’t taken eight steps when something screamed at his back.

He froze.

It wasn’t a scream. It was music. Cheerful music, the kind you dance to at a wedding, full blast, coming out of nowhere in the middle of a dirt track at twelve at night.

It was the speaker. Inside the rucksack, under the waterproof.

He hadn’t switched it on.

Or he had knocked it by accident getting the waterproof out, which was the first thing he thought. Except that was nearly a minute ago and the button is on the other side.

With the rain hammering down and the speaker playing something cheerful in the middle of nowhere, Axel laughed on his own. Not because it was funny. Because it was impossible to carry on thinking what he was thinking with that song on.

He turned round again and switched the headlamp on. The drops ran off the plastic and he didn’t care.

He didn’t know where he was going. But he wasn’t going in silence any more.

And he kept walking, at night, in the rain, in the middle of nowhere, with a speaker playing inside his rucksack. It was ridiculous. It was exactly what he had left home to find.