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

‘money and power’ and you heard ‘men and women.’ Which words correlate with which in that fevered brain of yours? I wonder. No, the move I think Zeinab and Allegra are making in these accounts is the move titled Art Is Made by Other People. Or maybe even Art Is Made of Other People. We’ve got a teacher who, perhaps unconsciously, expresses and transmits a nonnegotiable criterion for art … that it speaks to posterity. It has to be born of isolation, then … at a distance from contemporary concerns. For this reason, and several others—yes, some of which are related to historical access, the teacher has neither the ability or the permission to make the kind of art she respects. Her impressionable students glean these views from her, and some of them are wounded in the same spot as Zeinab is. Allegra, for example. But others—for instance, Karel—feel no constraint at all. He had the resources to ascend to Olympus, but ultimately he couldn’t hack it.”

“Right under A’s and Z’s noses, he opts out of isolation and dialogue with posterity and opts into a bit of an inscrutable domestic situation, fair to middling film scores, and a prose piece he doesn’t even finish …”

“Unforgivable,” Xavier said. “And the figure of the son becomes a problem for them. A personal one.”

I was listening, but glanced sideways while thinking about what he was saying. We were passing a billboard; had in fact been running alongside the advert it displayed for about thirty minutes, and every now and again we’d been hazarding guesses as to what was being advertised. Xavier allowed himself another sideways glance too. The advert (about four metres high and miles and miles and miles wide) was in its entirety, an inexorably repeated LOL in an italicised typeset. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL … Oh, and punctuation appeared in the middle of each O, so that some represented smiling faces while others frowned, screamed, appeared to be verklempt or caught in the throes of anhedonia. We allowed the billboard to LOL at us for a while.

Xavier was the first to rouse himself.

“Otto. What was I saying?”

“Art Is Made of Other People …”

The train slowed, then stopped altogether. We’d pulled into a redbrick stabling yard. We watched as the merchants boarded, along with swathes of bazaar paraphernalia—baskets, banners, hampers trailing sequined scarves, rolled-up rugs. Allegra and a couple of members of the maintenance team were in conductor mode, checking passports and ticking off names as each new passenger walked up the train steps. After a few minutes, Laura joined them.

“Quick question, guys—” Ava said from the corridor. We both screamed. She’d braided her front hair into a lustrous little tail that wagged when she moved her head—I could picture Allegra tying the lilac ribbon at the end and issuing a decree that this was to be worn until nightfall. It was the same as with the black hearts drawn onto Allegra’s cheekbones: even if these were little attentions each had paid to herself, they somehow seemed to have been undertaken on each other’s behalf. Ava wagged her braid of front hair and held an envelope and was not in any way a fearsome apparition. We just hadn’t been expecting her; she’d crept down the carriage so quietly, under cover of the bazaar commotion. She repeated herself once we’d calmed down. “Quick question. Do the names”—she glanced at two lines of black text scrawled across her left palm—“the names ‘Honza Svoboda’ and ‘Raúl Mateus’ ring a bell at all?”

In silence, we handed her our written accounts, along with the other four.

“Thanks,” Ava said, sliding it all back into the folder and then stuffing the folder up under her jumper. “I was just in the postal-sorting carriage, you see …” She handed me the envelope and, beckoning Xavier, leaned on my shoulder as we inspected it. Ava’s name was written across the front, and where a postage mark would have been, the words Agency for Introducing a Sense of Proportion into Novel Writing were stamped in blotchy red ink.

There were three sheets of paper inside the envelope. Letters; all three in more or less identical handwriting. I took them out one by one and read them aloud.

The first:

Dear Ava,

You’d better not listen to them. They’re a bad influence.

Yours sincerely,

Honza Svoboda

The second:

Dear Ava,

You’d better stop talking to them. You’re a bad influence.

Yours sincerely,

Raúl Mateus

The third was unsigned.

Nothing to add. Except—Ciiiiiiiiiiaoooooooo bambini!

*

Something inside me curled and curdled, and Xavier murmured that we were probably going to go out of our minds before Ava did.

I tried to return the letters, but she wouldn’t take them.

“Oh no … you keep them, please. I—Hang on.” She raised a hand, frowning. “They’re coming. Three … two … one …”

The connecting doors on either end of the carriage rolled open. Allegra came upon us from the direction of the library, and Laura from the direction of the pantry. Not smiling, exactly, but the mood they brought with them was lighthearted and low-key. A little too uniformly so.

“Ready to do some shopping?” Laura asked, shaking a pair of imaginary pom-poms.

“Chop chop, Ava,” Allegra said. “All this is for you. Maybe you can find a nice present for Dr. Zachariah. Who will be with us tomorrow. Remember?” Laura and Allegra cast cheery glances at each other, then at us, then at their most important passenger, blithely ignoring the document-shaped bulge that lay across her bosom.

I got to my feet and checked for my wallet, unsure what was in the air or why this had been brought here to us in Clock Carriage, but ready to leave them to it. I was still holding the communication from the so-called Agency for Introducing a Sense of Proportion into Novel Writing, and after a few more moments’ deliberation, I pushed the envelope and its contents out of the nearest window. “The, er, bazaar, does accept credit cards, right?” Xavier asked.

“Ah yes, Dr. Zachariah! What do you think I should buy for the doctor who’s been such