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

felt like someone stepped on me. Yes, stepped on me. Not to cause me pain—more a kind of acrobatic manoeuvre … to reach the ceiling … God, what am I saying to you, Ava. A heel pressed down on my chest, and I winked out of sight too.

It seems the firefighters burst in a couple of minutes after me—I got off very lightly in terms of physical issues. Everything else was a bit nightmarish for a while as the facts piled up … The entire building had been empty, not just the flat—the other two residents were out, and there were no witnesses regarding the arsonist. I really couldn’t understand that at all, given what I had so unambiguously seen in broad daylight. Karel went on record with a statement that he’d been there to collect his son’s post and hadn’t seen what had happened. He was quite clearly grappling with something terminal too, so I think any initial suspicion that he’d committed arson soon evaporated. As for me, there was a sense that I’d stayed in the fire, or that I might as well have. My friend Spera all but moved in with me for the next few weeks and looked after all three of us Montague boys. Palliative care for Árpád XXIX in the last few days of her long life, nutritious feed and frolics for her youthful successor, plus a similarly rigorous watch kept on me. Thank God for Spera, even though on her second day of residence she decided the very look in my eyes had changed … I now had “the eyes of a sleeping phoenix.” She kept snapping photos of me at inconvenient moments so she’d get what she called a candid expression. I put up with that and sought out cures for insomnia. Where were you and your theremin when I needed you, eh?

One of my mums’ friends suggested hypnosis and recommended a therapist she was convinced had cured her own insomnia. The clinic was on Harley Street, so my mums had this reverence for it: “Can’t go wrong with a Harley Street treatment …” They offered to pay for a few sessions with this hypnotherapist, so I booked an appointment and went along to the clinic with an open mind.

It was October 2014. The clocks had just gone backward, and I’d forgotten to inform my watch of this fact, my phone was dead … I’d missed my appointment by an hour … Oh, and the receptionist at the clinic was this naughty-looking, heavyset blonde with a deep voice that got me stiff and kept me there. He seemed about my age. A good sign, because, before him, age gaps exceeding seven years had been my personal recipe for heartache when partnering up with anybody. Something about the difference in life stages; that’s what I was told whilst getting dumped, anyway. Another good sign: after a couple of months of being too shaken up by the fire for Eros to bother knocking at my door, every not-so-innocent word that receptionist said filled me with yearning. His name was Jan, but he said I could call him Honza. On my way out I went through the “I might have got the wrong idea, or maybe you’re seeing someone, but here’s my phone number anyway” speech. I didn’t suggest friendship because I already knew that if I ever had another five minutes alone with him, I wasn’t going to be able to pretend that I saw him as a potential friend. I mean, maybe later, but first things first. He took the scrap of paper from me, picked up the phone on the desk in front of him, and dialled my number. We both listened to my voicemail greeting, and he said: “You’ll answer next time, right?”

I was never more conscientious about keeping my phone charged than I was during my seven months with Honza Svoboda. He didn’t seem in any way aware of his drool-generating effect on pretty much any sexually available human being who crossed his path. He may have taken up the occasional offer—we never spent the night together, so I wouldn’t know … He left the receptionist job and got a night job as a security guard. The most I usually got to do with him at night was walk him to work; we’d arrive at around ten p.m. at the latest, he’d change into uniform and send me home. This was usually after spending the day together, so I did sometimes wonder if and when Honza slept at all.

Honza was the one who instigated our monogamy discussion, and he was the first to say “I love you.” He was OK with me not being ready to say it back, but he got anxious about … I can’t remember his exact terminology—either being “enough” for me, or being “what I wanted.” He’d accuse me of looking elsewhere when I really wasn’t. I was his unemployed puppy who took everything he had to give me. Psychoactive substances, days-of-the-week underwear, mesmerism lessons. Yes, I’m a hypnotist because of Honza. I’d told him I needed something to do … not just for money, something that would put the fire and whatever had made me run into it very firmly in the past. He said, “Oh, if it’s a pastime you want, I have just the thing …” And he said it was easy to learn. Maybe it was for Honza. I may not be accredited, and he didn’t teach me to apply these methods therapeutically, but unless I’m dealing with the likes of my partner’s aunt, the stuff I learnt from Honza Svoboda works and has built me a substantial client base. I didn’t realise it while he was working on me (it probably wouldn’t have worked if I’d realised it) but this guy Honza did as much as Spera did—maybe more—in terms of putting me back on my feet, and in better stead than I’d been before. Everything in living memory that had