“Hello.”
“Hi.”
“Just steaming my parts,” she said. “Mugwort keeps them happy.”
I folded my arms, unfolded them, folded them again, then gestured in the direction of the singing. “That, next door. Is that … Ms. Kapoor?”
The sound stopped the split second I put a name to it. I couldn’t help smiling at that.
“It was,” Cubicle Lady said, spreading her legs even further. “Hopefully she’s finished for the day.”
She looked at me. “What’s that face about? Ah, you’re moved or something.”
“You … aren’t?”
“I hate that racket,” she said, with a vehemence that shrank her eyes and puckered her face. But then she caught herself and sent an impish smile my way: “You never exaggerate? Well, good for you.”
Realising that I had encountered somebody who had no intention of telling me anything other than practicalities and the planned schedule for our comfort and enjoyment, I began walking backward, all apologies for bothering her and eagerness for the cold shower I was about to have. When she gave a satisfied nod and dropped the curtain. I walked around the back of her cubicle, found a pair of towelling slippers, and put them on, my head throbbing so horribly I momentarily mistook arms for legs and hands for feet. The singing started up again as I stealth-padded towards the door that led to A. Kapoor.
4.
From a short distance the voice had made me shiver in the heat, but up close it only glimmered faintly, like a hook crafted from ice and sunk into the heart. A wound that healed another wound—the pain in my skull swirled away so quickly it left me light-headed. For the second or third time I wondered what Xavier was seeing and hearing right now. What could he possibly have found in the carriages behind ours? Surely it was all happening here.
I was standing in a combined kitchen, dining room, and lounge. This carriage wasn’t open plan like the previous ones. It was neat and functional and sensible and felt like a different train altogether. A cheerily coloured one in which every item within reach performed its function and refused to do a single second of overtime. You couldn’t ask the chairs to be anything more than a seating option: they were higher up and cleaner than the floor, but that was the offer in its entirety. Beyond the lounge area there were three compartments: one for Cubicle Lady; one for the train driver, Allegra; and Ava Kapoor was in the last one. Her compartment door was closed, so I saw her through the glass—my second seated lady of the day. This one was about the same age as the first but had much better posture. Her glossy black hair bluntly concluded at a point just below her ears, and she was sat on a high stool with some sheet music and what looked like a radio on a stand before her. A radio in combat with the ether, extending antenna-like spears front and sideways. She held her body almost completely still as she leaned towards this walnut-coloured music box; only her hands moved, her wrists gently flexing as she wove air through her fingers. To top it all off, Árpád was splayed across the pillow on the bed behind her, putting his tail to use as a metronome. No, not Árpád—a smaller mongoose, with darker fur, narrower eyes, and rounder ears. The music ebbed and swelled when Ava made a fist, and her lips parted in a smile.
I knocked at the compartment door—harder than I intended to. She looked at me, looked back at her sheet music, and twirled a fraction of a bar of melody around her index finger, then realised what she’d just seen. The theremin lost its celestial tone and squawked like a hoarse parrot as she floundered, then switched it off. The mongoose that wasn’t Árpád slid off the bed, skipped across the stream of cables coursing between the theremin and its power source, and circled me, administering a sniff test.
“You,” said Ava Kapoor. “What are you doing here?”
“What do people usually say to you after they’ve heard you play that thing?” I asked. “Do they tell you they’re ready to die in your arms?”
She began a smile—a really wonderful one—then, as if remembering that she wasn’t supposed to do things like that, she erased it. “What is it? I mean, what d’you want?”
Her vocal tone was warm, and her words very clearly enunciated—think BBC Geordie. She looked behind me. So did the mongoose. I didn’t turn, but felt similarly apprehensive. Cubicle Lady wasn’t going to stay in the cubicle forever.
“I thought I’d come to see if you’re OK. But now I’m seeking permission to die in your arms,” I said.
She beckoned me, saying: “Come, then, and see what you get for going around bothering people with your quips.” The door between us was still closed, and her fugitive smile broke cover.
“Serious question,” I said. “You wrote a word and showed it to Xavier. What did it say?”
“Oh, that … it said HELLO. I just knew he was gonna spot me, and I wanted to avoid, well, a meeting like this one. So I tried to get ‘hello’ out of the way. Is it my turn to ask a serious question now?”
“Ask away.”
“Is it true that you once ran into a burning house?”
So Do Yeon-ssi had told her about that. Not such a surprise. Whenever Xavier’s aunt introduces me to anyone I have to jump in really quickly and take over before this story comes out. I hardly ever feel like talking about it. But Ava gave me the big-brown-eyes treatment until I explained that it wasn’t a whole house, it was just a flat. A distinction she immediately dismissed. For some reason I needed to reduce her impression of my folly. I think about all the time I had to spend hospitalised because of what I did. I think about the damp shadow that spread over me for weeks. Not just damp but thirsty too, that shadow, greedily sucking away at my tear ducts and oesophagus so that I dreaded opening my eyes and retched up half the air I managed to draw in. I think how close to total respiratory failure that fire brought me, how close to brain death. It was folly, all right. And now she was asking why I’d gone in.
“Ms. Shin didn’t tell you?”
“She did, but I was hoping you’d speak for yourself.”
The mongoose was standing on his hind legs now, eyeing me with even more alertness than Ava was. I gave him a nod. “What’s his name?”
“That’s Chela. A female. Answer my question.”
“I thought there was someone in there. Well. I saw someone. They didn’t come out, so I thought … obviously the fire brigade was on its way, but …”
“You went in and there was no one there.”
“I’m told it was a kind of neural blip. The seeing-someone bit, not the acting on it.”
“Really? Wouldn’t you say that acting on the first blip constitutes a second blip? You know you should have waited for people who’d know what to do. So why didn’t you?”
As she asked this, her face took on a glassy, anticipatory look. Hungry for some sort of bleak confession, it seemed. I did what I always do when wary; I played the wag, telling her I’d asked myself what Árpád would do and had acted accordingly.
“Árpád? The mongoose you’re travelling with. You’re saying you’ve made him your moral compass?” Disappointed, she turned away, then turned back. “I’m sorry. I mean, he’s probably just as dependable as anybody else, if not more. It’s just that my own neural blip has been ongoing for years. I suppose I was looking for encouragement.”
“I can do encouragement,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“I’m a member of the Empty Room Club too,” she said. “That song I was playing … did you really like it? Funny—most don’t. Anyway, it was written by a friend of mine. He was a composer. Mostly film scores, but not this song. He …”
Ava opened the compartment door, took two quick steps towards me, eyes alight, then held up her hands. It looked as if she was making a note to herself, that she should stop. But she had come closer.
I offered her my arm and asked: “Did he write the song for you?”
She took my arm, and we went on a promenade the length of the carriage and back. The train coursed onto a triple track, then dawdled for a few seconds … long enough for two ot
her trains to join us. One on either side. The blinds of the train carriage to the left were drawn closed, but through the windows on our right we could see into a carriage where a nurse in a spotless white uniform leaned over a table, fastidiously cooling a steaming bowl of soup with a folding fan. He stirred the bowl with a thermometer every few seconds, and his billy goat beard wagged with satisfaction each time he checked the temperature. We nodded at him when he looked in our direction, and he nodded back, then closed the window blinds of his carriage too.
“No, the song’s called ‘For Přemysl at Night,’” Ava said. “Five nights a week for four years, beginning when I was twenty-one … I’d go to this tall, thin house in Jesmond Vale, Newcastle—if you saw it, you’d think it was made of enormous marble toothpicks …”
“And all the rooms were empty?”
“Ha. Not a bad guess. Actually my friend lived there. Well, we started off as employer and employee. He paid me to visit. My friend Karel … he was this gangly fifty-something-year-old with a deeply sulky resting expression; no matter what you said to him, for the first second or two he’d look at you like he was getting told off for something he hadn’t even done. But when he smiled it made quite a difference. I’d be like, “Oh my god, you’re somewhat appealing, aren’t you?!” And he’d go, “I don’t know, Ava … am I?” I’d get to his house at about a quarter to midnight, and he’d take me to a huge, dark bedroom on the top floor. The floor above his own bedroom. We’d go there, and.”
There was no outer change—our arms remained lightly linked, she spoke evenly, her gaze didn’t waver—but her pulse had segued into a death-metal drum solo.
“Ava—it’s OK. Whatever it is, you can say it.”
“It’s just that we’re getting on and everything, you and me. And now you’re gonna think I’m off my head.”
“So what if I do? You already think I’m off mine, don’t you?”
“Yeah, a bit,” she admitted.
“Was he really your friend, this guy? I mean—he didn’t do anything unfriendly? Or did he?”
“Who, Karel? No. Allegra worked for him too, and she liked him, otherwise I wouldn’t even have gone there in the first place. You’re not gonna hate someone your girlfriend likes, right?”
“Well …”
“You’ve just thought of a trillion exceptions, but that assumption’s never failed us yet. Karel would take me to that bedroom, and he’d switch on a nightlight, and he’d give me music he’d composed. One of the songs was the one you heard, ‘For Přemysl at Night.’ Then he’d go off to sleep in his own room downstairs.”
“Leaving you to play to an empty room?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Though it did have this sort of lived-in feel to it. Ultra untidy, loads of expensive gear just tossed aside and left in bad condition. The bed looked like it had been properly slept in—the bed linen made all kinds of weird shapes—but it was only blankets and things. I’m afraid of the dark too, so …”
“This Karel guy must have been offering you more money than you could refuse.”
“He really was. Not that that’s saying much. I—we—really needed ready cash. My dad was sick. I really hated leaving him at night; always had it in the back of my mind that this might be our last one … Sorry, this isn’t what you signed up for. You came for your honeymoon, and here I am blabbing away at you.”
“Oh, but we’re the Empty Room Club. We have an understanding. I’m hoping your dad got better.”
She squeezed my arm. “Thanks for saying so, but he didn’t. And he had a lot to say about my night work before he went. He said I shouldn’t have taken the job … it was an insult not just to my talent but to any musician’s. ‘Why doesn’t this Karel just put a CD on if music helps him sleep,’ he’d say. He scoffed when I tried to tell him it was about having another person there. But I’m glad Karel didn’t go down the CD route. A good while later, once we’d become friends, I found out that he’d lost his wife to the same type of cancer my dad was dying of. He had been through some similar things with her. The remissions, the beautiful remissions, then that fucking awful final march. We met a decade after Karel’s wife had died … He was teetotal, ate healthily, went running every morning, had this schedule that mixed glitzy galas, commercial work, and pet projects, and every now and then he’d suddenly flinch just a tiny bit, for no external reason, and you’d realise he was completely wrecked.”
“Flinch?” I said.
“Yeah. He caught himself very, very quickly, but not before I’d seen him huddle up like an arm had been raised against him. Not just any arm—an arm as heavy as a thirty-foot canon, so all he could do was try to come to terms with getting squashed like a raisin. For the first year I didn’t think to ask Karel anything about himself, though. All I cared about was funding various end-of-life things for Dad. There were trips we needed to take, and people he needed to see. I had to make it all as painless as possible for him. Dad never asked me for anything; it’s just that I had to do that for him. He kept making new friends as we went along … said I couldn’t expect him to stop enjoying people. He was the greatest exasperation—whew, sorry, one second, please.”
She turned her head away, raised her sleeve to her face, looked at me again. “Sorrows of a daddy’s girl. He died … and I went on playing to the empty room for another three years. Five nights a week, mostly weeknights, overall.”
“Jumping at shadows the whole time?”
“It was hard to do at first, let me tell you. Karel would only let me have the nightlight while I was playing, but as soon as he left I’d switch all the lights on and search the room before I started. He’d thump on his bedroom ceiling with a broom handle so I’d get a move on. Anyway … after that first night, I was still scared of the dark everywhere except in that empty room, where I played my theremin from midnight to five a.m. And I don’t know why.”
I scratched my head.
“There’s more,” she said. “Even though, as I told you, it was an empty room, some of the compositions I played got a better reception than others.”
“How could you tell?”
I’d kept my tone neutral, but she raised her chin; her pulse was going again. “I don’t know, Otto. That’s just how it was. I played some Martinu˚, some Schillinger, a bit of Fuleihan, some Zappa, and two of Allegra’s compositions. He seemed to quite like Allegra’s offerings, but it was the song Karel wrote for him that really helped him get some rest.”
“Him?”
“Přem. Remember, the song’s called ‘For Přemysl at Night.’ Karel told me I should only ever play it for his son.”
“But …” Suddenly I thought better of asking.
“Are they dead now, Karel and Přem? Is that what you wanted to ask? Karel is, but I don’t know about Přem.”
She stopped walking and asked: “Do you?”
“Do I what? Know about Přem?!” I genuinely didn’t see how she’d arrived at this question (how and what could I know about this Přemysl of hers?), yet somehow I ended up sounding like a bad liar.
Her eyebrows shot up. I must have smiled first; hers seemed like a reply.
“It’s been a peculiar few years. For me, at least, Otto. But it’s almost over … well, depending on what the doctor says. Oh, hello, Laura.”
Cubicle Lady had materialised to my right, fully dressed and exasperated.
“What did I ask you not to do, Mr. Shin?”
“Talk to Ms. Kapoor.”
“And what are you doing right at this moment?”
Ava shrugged and gave me a tiny wave, so I said: “Leaving, Laura … I’m leaving.”
I invited Chela the mongoose along, telling her there was someone she might like to meet. Staring, Laura said: “Sorry, but there’s a rule about talking to Chela as well.”
Bloody hell. Fine. I went back the way I came without another word.
5.
Xárpád was waiting in our compartment. Xárpád and the continued absence of light.
“You found her?” Xavier asked. He sounded just a little fuzzy; he seemed to have been sitting in there for a while, just staring straight ahead of him.
I took his hand and threaded his fingers through mine. “Yup. It was HELLO, not HELP.”
“That’s a relief. I’ll have to tell her so myself.”
“Ah, about that. She does like having us on board and everything, but … just in case you see her around … we’re not actually allowed to talk to her.”
“What? Why?”
“Er …”
“You didn’t find out why.”
“It’s for health reasons, I reckon. She mentioned a doctor. And seems a bit transfixed by loss. People she knew and loved who are gone.”
“Mourning?”
“I don’t know if I’d describe it that way. She seems more … expectant? Anyway, it’s the sort of the thing that takes time, and four days from now we’ll be gone. Shouldn’t be too difficult to respect her wishes. Just wait ’til you see the library, and taste train-grown tomatoes,” I told him. “We can pick violets for our salad too. Maybe even marry Árpád off while we’re at it …”
“Marry him off to who? Ava Kapoor?!”
“No … you’ll see. Well, I hope you will.”
He slapped his knee. “I’ll prepare my share of the bride price accordingly. Also, I see your library and tomatoes and raise you a portrait gallery and a postal-sorting carriage …”
Peaces Page 4