Peaces, Helen Oyeyemi [best life changing books TXT] 📗

“You … aren’t?”

“I hate that racket,” she said, with a vehemence that shrank her eyes and puckered her face. But then she caught herself and sent an impish smile my way: “You never exaggerate? Well, good for you.”

Realising that I had encountered somebody who had no intention of telling me anything other than practicalities and the planned schedule for our comfort and enjoyment, I began walking backward, all apologies for bothering her and eagerness for the cold shower I was about to have. When she gave a satisfied nod and dropped the curtain. I walked around the back of her cubicle, found a pair of towelling slippers, and put them on, my head throbbing so horribly I momentarily mistook arms for legs and hands for feet. The singing started up again as I stealth-padded towards the door that led to A. Kapoor.

4.

From a short distance the voice had made me shiver in the heat, but up close it only glimmered faintly, like a hook crafted from ice and sunk into the heart. A wound that healed another wound—the pain in my skull swirled away so quickly it left me light-headed. For the second or third time I wondered what Xavier was seeing and hearing right now. What could he possibly have found in the carriages behind ours? Surely it was all happening here.

I was standing in a combined kitchen, dining room, and lounge. This carriage wasn’t open plan like the previous ones. It was neat and functional and sensible and felt like a different train altogether. A cheerily coloured one in which every item within reach performed its function and refused to do a single second of overtime. You couldn’t ask the chairs to be anything more than a seating option: they were higher up and cleaner than the floor, but that was the offer in its entirety. Beyond the lounge area there were three compartments: one for Cubicle Lady; one for the train driver, Allegra; and Ava Kapoor was in the last one. Her compartment door was closed, so I saw her through the glass—my second seated lady of the day. This one was about the same age as the first but had much better posture. Her glossy black hair bluntly concluded at a point just below her ears, and she was sat on a high stool with some sheet music and what looked like a radio on a stand before her. A radio in combat with the ether, extending antenna-like spears front and sideways. She held her body almost completely still as she leaned towards this walnut-coloured music box; only her hands moved, her wrists gently flexing as she wove air through her fingers. To top it all off, Árpád was splayed across the pillow on the bed behind her, putting his tail to use as a metronome. No, not Árpád—a smaller mongoose, with darker fur, narrower eyes, and rounder ears. The music ebbed and swelled when Ava made a fist, and her lips parted in a smile.

I knocked at the compartment door—harder than I intended to. She looked at me, looked back at her sheet music, and twirled a fraction of a bar of melody around her index finger, then realised what she’d just seen. The theremin lost its celestial tone and squawked like a hoarse parrot as she floundered, then switched it off. The mongoose that wasn’t Árpád slid off the bed, skipped across the stream of cables coursing between the theremin and its power source, and circled me, administering a sniff test.

“You,” said Ava Kapoor. “What are you doing here?”

“What do people usually say to you after they’ve heard you play that thing?” I asked. “Do they tell you they’re ready to die in your arms?”

She began a smile—a really wonderful one—then, as if remembering that she wasn’t supposed to do things like that, she erased it. “What is it? I mean, what d’you want?”

Her vocal tone was warm, and her words very clearly enunciated—think BBC Geordie. She looked behind me. So did the mongoose. I didn’t turn, but felt similarly apprehensive. Cubicle Lady wasn’t going to stay in the cubicle forever.

“I thought I’d come to see if you’re OK. But now I’m seeking permission to die in your arms,” I said.

She beckoned me, saying: “Come, then, and see what you get for going around bothering people with your quips.” The door between us was still closed, and her fugitive smile broke cover.

“Serious question,” I said. “You wrote a word and showed it to Xavier. What did it say?”

“Oh, that … it said HELLO. I just knew he was gonna spot me, and I wanted to avoid, well, a meeting like this one. So I tried to get ‘hello’ out of the way. Is it my turn to ask a serious question now?”

“Ask away.”

“Is it true that you once ran into a burning house?”

So Do Yeon-ssi had told her about that. Not such a surprise. Whenever Xavier’s aunt introduces me to anyone I have to jump in really quickly and take over before this story comes out. I hardly ever feel like talking about it. But Ava gave me the big-brown-eyes treatment until I explained that it wasn’t a whole house, it was just a flat. A distinction she immediately dismissed. For some reason I needed to reduce her impression of my folly. I think about all the time I had to spend hospitalised because of what I did. I think about the damp shadow that spread over me for weeks. Not just damp but thirsty too, that shadow, greedily sucking away at my tear ducts and oesophagus so that I dreaded opening my eyes and retched up half the air I managed to draw in. I think how close to total respiratory failure that fire brought me, how close to brain death. It was folly, all right. And now she was asking why I’d gone in.

“Ms. Shin didn’t tell you?”

“She did, but