Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

  *

  Later, in that pitch-dark train carriage, the very notion of the three of us rushing to Do Yeon-ssi’s rescue made me laugh. I mean, locating a light switch was beyond our combined capability, so never mind about achieving anything else.

  “OK, there are literally only two sides this thing can be on,” I said, after what felt like at least a decade of bumping heads, sharp pokes from fingers and claws, and frankly quite sinister face-licking accompanied by heavy breathing. Darkness seemed to give Árpád (at least I prayed it was Árpád) license to engage in behaviour he wouldn’t have in the light. “That’s the window, and that side is where we came in. So I’ll take this side, and you and Árpád take the other side. Don’t rush, and go really small scale … Just pat the wall inch by inch … No, why have you turned off your flashlight?”

  My phone was dead as usual, and Xavier claimed he needed to save the flashlight battery himself. We sought and found a photo of Ava Kapoor so Xavier could confirm that she was who he’d seen, then we settled on the most practical way of finding out what was going on with her: we’d phone her. Xavier texted away, trying to get a phone number for Ava Kapoor from Do Yeon-ssi, and then from Do Yeon-ssi’s secretary. Neither replied. I tucked my chin over his shoulder and basked in the glow from his phone screen as he also texted our local stationmaster and made sure she held on to my suitcase until we got back.

  “How do you even have her phone number? What … the two of you have a whole conversation thread? How far back does this go?”

  “Sheila likes train jokes. It’s Boughton, Otto. Everyone has everyone else’s phone number.”

  “I don’t!”

  “Well, you’ve got that mouthy South London attitude on you, haven’t you … and remember what a hard time you had falling asleep without the sound of sirens? I have to say, for a while I really wondered if Kent life could ever be for you …”

  Xavier gave Do Yeon-ssi one more minute to text him back, then he called her on speakerphone. The phone rang for ages before we heard her voicemail greeting. Xavier hung up and rang again. When Do Yeon-ssi answered, she was slurring a bit. Piecing together some of the terminology in noisy background circulation, it soon became clear that she was having a gin rummy party with extra gin. It had been maybe five years since her last gin rummy party, attended by a significant proportion of Europe’s hard men and women. So many unsettling things had happened post-festivities (not necessarily the grand cleanup, but the visitors who came over the weeks that followed, complete strangers who kissed Do Yeon-ssi’s hands or left the tiniest and stripiest kittens imaginable at her feet and thanked her for “saving their lives”) that she’d decided it was probably best not to associate with her gin rummy crowd anymore. But she missed them, I suppose. We had played whist with her whenever we could find a suitable fourth player, but that’s a very tame setup if you prefer to play cards for real estate, works of art, or cancellation of others’ debt. So out went the whist-playing nephews and in rushed the revellers.

  “Anyway, listen, your friend’s here with us, so I’m sure you’ll get a full report later,” said Do Yeon-ssi.

  “Which friend?” I asked, and Xavier asked, “One of mine, or one of Otto’s?” As if his friends are more virtuous.

  We heard Do Yeon-ssi asking if she could finally tell us, then she announced: “It’s Yuri!”

  “Oh … Yuri …,” we said, exchanging blank looks.

  “I have to say, it’s nice having him around. Just … easy, you know? Not your usual style at all. I thought you went for angsty types.”

  Any response Yuri might have been making was swallowed up by what sounded like a full string orchestra playing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”

  I started to tell Do Yeon-ssi I didn’t know any Yuri, but a message flashed up on the screen, and Xavier took the phone from me before I had time to read it. All I saw was that it wasn’t from a saved contact: the full phone number was displayed. Xavier read the message, then asked: “Er, how did you guys meet?”

  Something (or an inebriated someone) crashed to the floor very close to Do Yeon-ssi, there was a hubbub around her, and she said: “What? What? I can’t hear you.”

  “I was asking how you and Yuri met,” Xavier said.

  “Almost got bathed in hot gumbo from a soup tureen … and now you’re asking how I met your friend? What do you think is going on? A toy boy and sugar mummy dating service introduced us, something like that? Just keep on thinking that way if you want to …”

  Xavier glanced at me for confirmation, then said: “It’s just that we don’t know—”

  Another text message arrived. He looked at it and finished, “… what we’d do without Yuri.”

  Clearly he now had some idea who Yuri was. Yet he frowned when Do Yeon-ssi told us the party had been Yuri’s idea. To help her unwind. And when it was revealed that she’d asked this very same Yuri about honeymoon ideas and he’d put her in touch with Ava Kapoor, Xavier was livid. “Yeah, he’s a nonstop lifestyle guy, Yuri,” I said into the phone. “That’s what we love about him. Could you put him on for a sec?”

  Surprise, surprise: Yuri had been right at her elbow just a second ago, but somebody had whisked him away. What could Do Yeon-ssi say, Yuri was popular. She’d tell him to give us a call: “And don’t forget to thank him for the train idea. Right, I’ve got to go. What did you want again? Ah yes, a phone number. I’ll text it to you in—”

  Xavier’s phone signal flatlined. I left the compartment to check the corridor window: we were going through a tunnel. Once we were out the other side, he followed me into the corridor, switching his handset off and then on again.

  “Still no signal?”

  “Hang on … nope. Lucky for Yuri.”

  “Our dear, dear friend Yuri. Working tirelessly day and night to guarantee that everyone’s relaxed and having fun.”

  He tapped the corner of his phone against his teeth, thinking. “That’s the thing: it could be genuinely benevolent meddling. Maybe we do owe him a thank-you. But there’s something fucked up about having to await outcomes before deciding whether to be nasty or nice.”

  We’d taken the southeastern-bound train from our station hundreds of times and had thought it’d be the same old route at least until we reached Ashford. Yet here we were puttering along between two heavily weathered stone circles. They were nothing close to Stonehenge height—these circles rose from a field of mud-matted grass that stood almost as tall as they did—in fact they were the height of, well, your average gravestone. No, they were gravestones. As we passed we saw that these rings were set concentrically and that they ran deep. “Did you know that we lived this close to something like this?” I asked Xavier. He shook his head, checked his phone screen one more time—still no messages and no signal—then pointed towards the back of the train. “Right, I’ll look for Ava that way. See you back here in a bit?”

  That meant I was the one who’d approach the driver’s carriage. I called out to Árpád, but he’d curled up in the corner of his window seat and had apparently gone to sleep. I put an ear to his snout. Definitely just sleeping. As I straightened up, a patch of the darkness behind me got darker. The sensation was similar to the one you get when someone’s staring at you, someone close by but out of your line of sight. I turned around and started to say something, thinking Xavier had come back in. But it was just me and the sleeping mongoose. Xavier had already moved on to the next carriage: I heard him shouting, “Ms. Kapoor? Ms. Kapoor?”

  I’d left the compartment door ajar, and now it was closed. I didn’t have any specific ideas about this, but I was unhappy with the order in which I’d noticed the changes. The door closes and it gets darker, fine, but it gets darker and then the door closes? No thanks. Thumbs down to whatever mentality I’d boarded this train with, and another thumbs down to this door-and-darkness thing occurring almost as soon as Xavier left me. See—even the term I used … left me. Never mind that he had gone to see if somebody needed help—I�
��d been abandoned! I wasn’t sure when and how I’d started thinking like that; I’d have loved to find a way to blame it on the train, but couldn’t.

  The only thing to do was tackle it all head on. I put a hand to the tinted glass door, pushed, and it didn’t open. It didn’t open because, I am embarrassed to say, I hadn’t actually pushed the door—I’d only thought I had. What-if thoughts had seized me by the wrist and showed me what I expected to happen. I used my other hand and burst out into the corridor, calling out, “Ms. Kapoor,” and rapping on the tinted glass of every door on the way to the driver’s cabin. I was almost, not quite, running. To make up for lost time. Now that Xavier and I had decided to be gallant, I was feeling competitive about it.

  I caught certain personal glimpses of Ava Kapoor as I moved through the next three carriages—these were three of the carriages we hadn’t been able to see from the outside. They were arranged to her liking, so the objects and atmosphere spoke of her. The library car was first. Had my phone been in the land of the living I’d have been taking pictures like mad. Since it wasn’t, I was more than content to move very slowly and gawp. At the framed photographs of reading rooms in nine libraries across the globe (I recognised two but thought Xavier would probably recognise all of them), at the cubist bookshelves that rippled along the walls like stacked seashells, at the double bed–sized fainting couch upholstered in brocade the colour of Darjeeling tea in the fourth minute of brewing. Cushions in the same shade of copper were scattered across the floor, and books had been left on top of a few of them, bookmarked with pages seemingly torn from other books. If the fainting couch was tea, the mahogany desk was whisky—a great, dark pool of it, with Emeralite lamps for stepping-stones. No visible footprints here, and no Ms. Kapoor, but I had more than half a notion that this tabletop had doubled as her dance floor. Now it was inviting me to dance too. I promised the table I’d be back just after midnight. Me, you, my earphones, and a top secret tabletop party playlist …

  Next came the greenhouse car, where I walked under a green-veined glass roof and alongside a leaf fountain that turned out on closer inspection to be a particularly rowdy lettuce bed. There seemed to have been some sort of accident (or an experiment) with flower seeds: Lettuce battled clusters of violets for space. Summer garlands of tomatoes, peppers, and fat little cucumbers hung from trellised vines, along with a clawed gardening glove or three. I looked out the windows—while there was no sign of the lakes and mountains we’d been promised yet, we were definitely nowhere near Ashford. Just then the train slowed down considerably, as if conceding to give me a clue as to where we were. A few metres away from the track was a pile of earth, or blossoming rock—its peak standing high above the ground, but not quite high enough for it to qualify as a hill. Whatever it was, it was caged in extra spiky barbed wire that seemed to stretch for miles around and above it. The only way this mound could’ve escaped would have been by drawing itself deeper into the ground until it disappeared from the surface altogether. Though I suppose that would only have served to make its imprisonment more private. Look—I had this heap of earth in front of me, a heap that gave every appearance of having been punished for a wilful act … I had to process that somehow. I couldn’t tell if we were still in England or not. There weren’t any signs. After another second the mound’s peak began to bulge in a way that might have alarmed me if I’d been closer. Some sort of accelerated plant growth? A scalding hot mud eruption? As it was, knowing that I only had a few more blinks of the eye to monitor the situation, I switched windows for a better view. It had just been the angle. What I’d seen was a climber arriving at the top of the mound. “What?! What did you do?” I asked. Never mind that my query couldn’t be heard or answered—I still had to ask. “What the fuck went wrong in your life that you’ve ended up where you are?”

  The figure stood and threw their head back, seeming to examine the barbed-wire lid that closed them in. Then they limped around the peak and vanished from sight. Stems rustled as I moved to the next window, pulling three baby tomatoes off the nearest vine as I squinted at the mound. The tomatoes were good, only a little sour, so I took three more. The figure on the hill returned to view. Now they were directly facing the train and waving with both hands. I waved back; I couldn’t distinguish a single detail of this person’s appearance, and don’t think they really saw me either. We waved until we were no longer visible to each other in any way. Then I stepped into the next carriage and a barrage of steam that soaked through my clothes and momentarily blinded me besides.

  A female-sounding someone insisted I take my shoes off and put them in a basket to my left, so I did. While I was in the middle of that a dressing gown fell on my head and the same someone said I might as well get naked too. It was a sauna we were in, after all. I’d already unbuttoned my shirt before it caught up with me; I was stripping on demand.

  “Ms. Kapoor?”

  “No.”

  The carriage was tiled in blue and white and partitioned into gelatinous-looking cubicles with curtain flaps instead of doors. The cubicle walls had a frosted-glass effect so you could see whether or not a cubicle was occupied but were spared particularities. I headed for the only cubicle that held a living form and said: “I’d like to talk to Ms. Kapoor quickly.”

  “Oh, you would?” the occupant asked, somehow sounding neither hostile nor curious, but quite French. Think Catherine Deneuve circa 1968, her mild amusement as she confronts and dismisses the mysteries of desire with questions like How could you think even for a second that I was interested in you? Judging by the shade of skin visible through the glass, it was a black Deneuve I’d just encountered. Black or dark South Asian.

  “Yes, I would. You’re definitely not Ms. Kapoor?”

  The form shifted; she was dabbing her forehead with a towel. “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘definitely’ not, because things always take some kind of crazy turn when you say ‘definitely.’ But I’m moderately sure I’m somebody else.”

  “That person being …?”

  “Just another pawn of fate, sweating all my cares away for now. And wondering what’s keeping you from doing the same.”

  I pulled the rest of my clothes off and took a seat in the cubicle behind hers, explaining that it seemed Ms. Kapoor might need help. At the end of a long interval—so long I thought I was going to have to repeat myself—Cubicle Lady asked: “Did she say so herself?” A genuine enquiry this time.

  “In a way. We think—I think—We’re not …” I gave up and asked: “Do you think she’s OK?”

  “Ms. Kapoor is busy,” said Cubicle Lady. “Don’t bother her.”

  She told me that I’d want a shower after this, and I’d have to do that in my own carriage. None of which really served as an answer. I took another tack, talking quickly because that information about the showers made it sound as if she was about to leave: “Who else is on board at the moment?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You, me, Xavier, Ms. Kapoor, and—?”

  Ah … A sigh in the near distance, trembling at first, then clear and sure: Ah …

  I jumped to my feet, slipped in my own sweat, banged my head against the cubicle wall, and dropped onto the bench. The sigh lengthened, soared, and swooped, turning to song. I felt my face scrunching up. Not just from the pain from having almost brained myself … I was trying to discern what it was I could hear, and the ratio of thrill to fright. Music that makes you shiver in the midst of a sauna … what, how, what? The wailer was further away than I’d thought—they’d only felt close at first because it had started up so suddenly and was so distinct from any of the other train sounds. It was further away and … not a person. This couldn’t even be a recording of a person. Not a wind instrument, not a string instrument. A person after all? It was very, very like a human voice, airily blurring notes with the skill of an operatic coloratura, but the tone was thinner than any oxygen-dependent organism could accomplish without asphyxiating.

  “There are just five of us,”
said Cubicle Lady, paying no attention whatsoever to the sigh-singing. “You, me, Ms. Kapoor, Xavier, and Allegra—she operates the train, though I take over sometimes. A maintenance team will board at the next station, but they’ll only be with us for two stops. That’s later on this evening. Then tomorrow we’ll have the bazaar …”

  “About this, er, singing,” I began to ask.

  “I think I know why you asked if there’s anybody else,” she said.

  “Are you not hearing that? That—music?”

  The pitch and volume of the singing had increased, the melody doubled (divided? both?) so that I could hardly hear her: “It’s an old freight train,” she was saying. “No matter what Ms. Kapoor does with it, no matter how she refurbishes and re-refurbishes the interior, it doesn’t feel new.”

  “Oh, well, for whatever it’s worth, I like what she’s done with it,” I said. “But what—”

  The song itself was a sweet, soft, cracked little ditty. Milk and cake, a fond caress before the pillow was pressed over your face. Silk caressing your cheek as you were drained of breath … you could fight, but you didn’t want to.

  Cubicle Lady raised her voice: “If you want to help, try not to talk to Ms. Kapoor. Just keep on being a happy twosome and go home with some photos and some good memories.”

  That did it; the honeymoon advice. One hand to the back of my aching head, I left my own cubicle, put on a dressing gown, and warned: “I’m gonna join you in there.”

  She pulled her cubicle curtain aside and said, “No need.”

  The first few things I noticed: She was right about not being Ava Kapoor, she was black, and she looked about the same age as me. Maybe a few years younger, though no more than five, I thought. Her gaze held none of the indifference I’d heard in her voice; the look she gave me was frank and friendly. Her hair had been swept into three different sections and then bundled together so that they ran in a mohawk-like ridge from the base of her temples to the base of her neck. She’d hastily knotted a towel around the upper half of her body when she heard my threat, and her shyness in that respect puzzled me a bit, given that I could very clearly see that she was sitting with her long legs far apart. The distance looked gymnastic—just short of the splits. A floor length (and mostly transparent) waterproof blanket covered those legs, and beneath them was what appeared to be a wooden box.