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

is, yeah? It may not seem like it, but I do worry about Do Yeon-ssi.”

“Oh, please … you should be more worried about what’ll happen to Yuri if my aunt finds out he’s with her under false pretences. But I do have some idea who he is, yeah.”

“Any idea why he’s put himself on a fast track to adoptive nephewhood?”

He looked at me quickly, then looked away. “It’s his pattern, I guess. It’s like he tries to get the best out of you, and if it doesn’t work, he just … goes.”

“He’s an ex?”

“Why do you ask that whenever I mention a friend you haven’t heard about? You do realise that hardly any of my friends are exes?”

“I do. But back to Yuri … is he an ex?”

“If he is who I think he is, then yeah,” Xavier muttered. Each syllable begrudged.

“The most recent one?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe he wants to get back together,” I said, as calmly as I could.

He said something under his breath, then, much more audibly: “You don’t seem to have an ex like that, Otto. An ex who makes you feel like shit.”

“No, I don’t have an ex like that. But there are always the ones who try, so I think I know what you’re talking about.”

Xavier grimaced. “It wasn’t … He didn’t—I’m talking about a dynamic where someone’s only ever quietly, steadily good to you, you keep fucking up, and they accept it. Never cross or negative …”

I must have looked skeptical, because he repeated: “Never. He never showed it, but there’s no way I didn’t hurt him with my shitty behaviour. And don’t say I probably didn’t fuck up as much as I think I did. You weren’t there.”

“I wasn’t. But I’m here now, and the shitty-boyfriend routine doesn’t sound like you. If that was really your style, it would’ve come out by now. Can you give me an example?”

“Maybe some other time,” he said. He stared out of the window and started eating his feelings; a stack of crispy fish skins disappeared in one bite. Then he coughed and flung an arm out, almost dropping his phone: “Lake! A lake—”

We’d ground to a halt in what looked like a junkyard or a fairground—possibly one in the process of conversion into the other, but both projects had been halted, so the track was surrounded by what seemed like miles of rusting machinery, dust-matted pieces of apparatus and hulking shapes swaddled in oilcloth. But immediately beyond that first layer, just like looking through the pillars of a grey-brown gate, the bright, crisp colours of the lake basin curved around to meet the eye. It was quite a violent blue, that lake. A colour that ripped the horizon. Some lakes are calm, and some are tense. This one was a thunderous mass at war with the sky, David shaking a watery fist at Goliath and roaring, I’ll drown you!

We jumped down from the carriage and walked lakeward but were only a few yards from the train when Allegra walked into view, wearing a hard hat and muttering into a walkie-talkie that muttered back at her. She raised a hand when she saw us, made gestures instructing us to reboard the train, then turned and paced the other way without even checking to see if she was being obeyed. She didn’t need to. We weighed up the numbers … maintenance team under Allegra’s command versus us. We went back.

“Are we … prisoners?” I asked Xavier.

“Probably not,” he said, trying to take a picture of the lake from the carriage doorway. He couldn’t get the angle right and gave up. “Though if we are, I’m sure Allegra will let us know.”

A series of message alerts flashed across his phone screen. “Signal!”

He called Do Yeon-ssi without even looking at the messages. She answered on the second ring, and he put her on speakerphone. “I was just thinking about my nephews … where are you? How’s Árpád? Did you get hold of Ava? Are you having a nice time?”

She broke off between questions to sing along, with word-perfect recall, to the “Macarena.”

“Everything’s great,” Xavier said. “What about Yuri? He’s behaving himself, right?”

“We’re getting on. He’s really … unmaterialistic, you know? I thought he’d come to fill his pockets with everybody else’s money … Nothing wrong with that, as long as you play fair, of course. But he’s playing for charity donations.”

“Oh? Which charities?” I asked.

(Xavier scowled at me and whispered “What do you care which charities …?”)

“Ask him yourself,” Do Yeon-ssi said. “You didn’t call him?”

“We haven’t had signal!”

“Do you know, last night Yuri made a bet with me that you wouldn’t call him. He said something about feeling a bit left out ever since you two had become a couple.”

Xavier said nothing, I said nothing. I needed to think about it a bit more, the claim Saint Yuri had on the person I loved. Some mutation of guilt that I couldn’t get my non-Catholic head around at all.

Do Yeon-ssi got brusque with us. “This is the first time I’ve ever had to tell you to treat your friends properly. Call him now, OK?”

“Will do. Wish we were there doing the ‘Macarena’ with you,” I told her.

“No you don’t. And anyway, I’ve got Yuri.”

We hung up.

“Silly me for wanting to go back early,” Xavier said. “She’s got Yuri now, and things have never been better.”

He remembered his text and e-mail alerts and thumbed through them.

“Any from Yuri?”

“Nah.”

“You’re not gonna call?”

“You’re as bad as Do Yeon-ssi.” He knocked on the door of the next carriage and waited a couple of seconds before leading me into a carriage that was wall-to-wall wooden trays, each tray stuffed to overflow with letters and labelled with the names of villages and boroughs within cities. The desk in here was a long, narrow writing desk, not a dance floor. There were plenty of drawers and built-in stationery receptacles, and a little row of language dictionaries. Latin, Italian, modern Greek, and so on. Three chairs were drawn up around