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

if the wheels had tucked themselves over the rail tracks. See its mane, see its claws …

All I said was: “Bling a ling a ling. A tad conspicuous for a tea-smuggling train, isn’t it?”

A passerby wearing a high-visibility jacket and a yellow hard hat asked if we were off anywhere nice. I said, “No idea, mate,” but Xavier draped an arm around me and informed her that we were off on our non-honeymoon honeymoon. An answer that made this life event of ours a destination in and of itself at the same time as downplaying the fact that we really didn’t know if we were going anywhere nice. The wording on our ticket was the vaguest conceivable. Árpád may have been unhappy about that, but we non-honeymoon honeymooners didn’t much care.

We strolled the platform more or less in step for a while, Xavier and I, and we indulged in a bit of sentimental murmuring. I barely recall what it was we said to each other—I’m sure it was classic “is this real life”–type commentary—it was the sound of his voice and the sweet sting of his glance that hurt me in ways only he could kiss better. You run the romantic gauntlet for decades without knowing who exactly it is you’re giving and taking such a battering in order to reach. You run the gauntlet without knowing whether the person whose favour you seek will even be there once you somehow put that path strewn with sensory confetti and emotional gore behind you. And then, by some stroke of fortune, the gauntlet concludes, the person does exist after all, and you become that perpetually astonished lover from so many of the songs you used to find endlessly disingenuous.

It was really happening. We really had found each other, and we really were going away together—not for the first time, but for the first time travelling under a shared surname. This was to take place aboard a train called The Lucky Day. The train was there, and we were there, and so we kept saying things like “This is it,” and “Here we go,” as if trying to place verbal reins on the momentum of it all.

Each carriage door was sealed with a symbol. A dagger, a bumblebee, a spinning wheel, a harp. Our ticket placed us in Clock Carriage, so we began looking for a clock shape cast in the same dull brass as the others—a tulip, a telescope, a die that had rolled the number two …

We couldn’t pass up the prospect of an onboard gambling den. The dice seal was pressed, but the door only opened at the third or fourth try; the first attempt was mine, Xavier went next, then Árpád, then me again. The two dots on the face of the dice weren’t just adornment—you had to dip your fingers into them and really press. We all bundled into the carriage to have a look, taking our luggage with us so that we could roll it through other carriages as we looked for ours. And we hunched over, heads lowered and shoulders bowed—at least Xavier and I did—once it became fully apparent what an upside-down sort of place we’d entered. All the seats and tables were scattered across the ceiling among the luggage racks, looking very much as if they’d settled there after the train had undertaken a particularly vigorous loop-the-loop. The silence had a thin skin. We heard the rattle and chatter of the station, and a woolly murmur that may have been sleep talk from the train’s engine. A normalising mesh of sound. We weren’t in the correct carriage, but we weren’t disturbing anything. And we in turn would not be disturbed … as long as we moved on. If you stuck out your tongue it would dance there, right at the tip: the fizz of conditionality. But Xavier seemed less fazed by this carriage than by something he saw in the next one. I followed his gaze but only saw a row of closed compartments.

Árpád trekked up the wall, did a tabletop dash across the ceiling, subjected us to a somewhat professorial gaze, as if to say, “And that’s how exploring is done, kids,” then slid to the ground and ambled back out onto the open air. I made to follow him but changed course when I saw Xavier headed for the door that led to the next compartment.

“Árpád went the other way,” I said, slipping in between Xavier and the door handle.

“I know, but—”

“You know, but you’re already trying to ditch us before we’ve even left the station?”

“Otto, it’s a train, not the Yorkshire moors. We don’t have to huddle together like hikers lost in the mists.”

Our faces were very close together, but we didn’t kiss. We’d moved, apparently of our own accord, into the exact spot where the weight of that crowded ceiling felt least balanced. Long-backed chairs hovered above our skulls, our wheeled luggage skittered across the bare floor, and I didn’t know about Xavier, but I didn’t dare break our pose. For that was how our bodies were arranged in relation to each other: lovers on the brink of a steamy clinch. I was the coy one, my left hand gripping the sun-warmed windowsill. Xavier’s right hand was pressed to the door behind me, his wrist tickling the top of my ear. I could very easily have turned my head and touched my lips to his wrist, but I could see there was no competing with the view over my shoulder. I’d already lost him to the dim net of doors that ran through the centre of the train.

“You can’t imagine how I longed for this day,” I said. “And it’s finally here. The day I officially become less fanciable than a door.”

“Hmmm?” Looking down, he moved his hands over me. Slowly, so that I gasped. He said: “I like that sound. Not a sound that doors tend to make.” But then he added: “I think I saw her, Otto.”

“Her?”

I