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

“Xavier?”

We were interrupted by a princess in her late twenties. I’ll amend that slightly: an haute urban princess with a side ponytail, her blue tulle ballgown slashed at the hip and pulled on over silk leggings. A tiny emerald shone from the piercing in her left nostril, but her feet crowned the entire look: she wore an astonishingly white pair of Converse. Trainers only ever stay as clean as the conscience of their wearer.

She climbed up into our carriage from the track and stood in front of us with folded arms.

“Allegra Yu,” she said. “What happened, exactly?” She—or perhaps Ava—had drawn a heart-shaped beauty spot onto the highest point of each of her cheekbones, amplifying the seamless asymmetries of her face so that she wore several expressions at once. She had a Peckham accent, which made me think she might actually hear me out. Peckhamites are deep. You’ll get hurt if you try to waste their time, but otherwise they are available for soul-to-soul communication, giving compassionate audience to all manner of monologues delivered in languages they don’t speak. What am I basing these claims on? I’ll just flash my son-of-a-Peckhamite credentials here.

Allegra listened to what I had to say without asking anything, though at a couple of points she did make some intensely questioning eye contact with me and also with Xavier. After I’d fallen silent, she took the dip net from me. I must have been waving it again as I spoke. I was quite willing to relinquish the net but found that my fingers had other ideas; Allegra had to peel them away from the handle. I was not behaving like a reliable witness.

“Anything to add?” she asked Xavier.

He looked her in the eyes. “No. That’s what happened.”

“You saw it all?”

“Yeah.”

“OK,” she said. “Well, we’re looking. I’ll let you know if we find … anything.”

“If?” I said. “What do you mean, ‘if’?”

“Good question,” she said, and considerably disconcerted me by putting a hand into the pocket of her ballgown, pulling out a lollipop, jamming it into the left corner of her mouth, and continuing without answering my “good question”: “Stay inside the train, please. I’ll need to see you both a bit later.”

“Can’t wait,” I said. “But for now … can I have a lollipop too?”

She switched her lollipop from the left to the right side, said it was her last one, and rejoined the crew milling around the exterior. She took the dip net with her.

Árpád and Chela believed me. The one skipped up onto my knee and waited until I lowered my head for grooming, brushing my fringe back and forth as he checked for nits. The other came and put her paw in my hand for a second.

“Xavier,” I said, “this is Chela, our future daughter-in-law.”

In Korean, Xavier asked Chela to take care of him in times to come. She listened impassively, and when he went to pat her on the head, she ducked—because of the pressure I’d just put on her with my introduction, Xavier said. Then the two mongooses bounded out of the carriage door and along the track.

7.

I don’t know how this makes us sound—I don’t know how any of it makes us sound—but the next thing on our agenda was breakfast. An unknown man had jumped out of the train right in front of my eyes, but when Xavier asked if I was hungry, I said I could do with some French toast.

Xavier was chef for the morning; we’d flipped a coin. We walked into the pantry car, and eggshells crunched beneath our feet. The yolks and whites ran down the window in viscous stripes. A loaf of brioche sat in a pot on the hob, submerged in milk and sprinkled with violet leaves. The butter dish was in the sink. The stub of butter left in there had been thoroughly licked; tongue marks aside, you could tell from its foamy veneer of spit. There was maple syrup all over the place; it had been rubbed and drizzled over every drawer and cupboard handle, mixed with butter for additional slip. This was bespoke vandalism, a project completed by somebody who’d known we’d want French toast in the morning and gone out of their way to incorporate every ingredient we’d need. Mind you, all the ingredients had been gifts from our host in the first place. A case of Ava giveth and Ava taketh away?

I started cleaning up, but Xavier stopped me. “Even if they don’t find any trace of your jumping man, Allegra should at least see this.”

“Well, anyone inclined to believe that there was no jumping man would think I did this too.”

“Well, they’d be wrong. I don’t know about anything else, but you’d never waste food.”

“True.”

Our hands were sticky, so we washed them in the shower car. But then he found syrup on my collarbone, and I found some in his navel, and we just kept finding more and more, so getting truly clean took ages. Particularly when you factor in the way shower acoustics can augment your lover’s breathing, adding a stroke to every one of your strokes, sending the sound of him tingling along your skin as you feel him come. Getting fully dressed again was a struggle too. Eventually he picked up his clothes and walked out of the shower car, laughing and telling me he’d dress outside the door.

I pulled my jeans on, then patted the pocket. Xavier’s phone was in there. He’d taken my pre-shower clothing and left me his. There was still no cellular signal, but quickly, before he realised his mistake, I keyed in his passcode, opened up his message inbox, and read the top two messages—the ones that had come in while we’d been talking to Do Yeon-ssi when we first boarded the train. Those were the only two I had eyes for. The first one, which had come in just before he’d asked how Yuri and Do