Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

  I wanted to be like that, and as I say, I should’ve been able to. But lasting six months with anyone was a miracle. Or so I’d thought, until Xavier. We’d worked out our key factor: absolute trust. That’s what Lieselotte and Martha have. I don’t think they’d have secretly looked at each other’s messages, though. Round and round I went, bursting the last few soap bubbles clustered along the outside of the shower stall as I tried to come up with a way to ask about this. To ask so Xavier would hear that I wanted to help him deal with whatever effect this “Yuri” was having on him. If he even wanted or needed help with that. Ugh. I looked in the mirror; my eyes were getting more bloodshot by the second. I closed them and pressed my knuckles down over my eyelids, trying to visualise that face one more time. The face of the man with the dip net. I saw something like a flame; a sizzling wave that melted matter. My lungs creaked, turning to cork again. My mouth filled with smoke; I coughed, still trying to look. He was there, I could find him, I just had to hold my breath a little longer, just—

  My chin hit the basin and then the floor. I curled up, coughing and coughing. Xavier knocked on the door.

  “Otto? You all right?”

  I knew I had to open my eyes if I wanted to breathe. And I did want to breathe. Didn’t I? Xavier knocked again. Breathe, breathe. My eyes opened. “Yeah, I’ll be out in a sec. I’ve got your phone.”

  When I stood up again my eyes looked even worse; redder than red. There was hardly any white left around the pupil. Xavier had left his sunglasses on the ledge above the sink, so I put those on too.

  Out in the corridor, I gave his phone back to him, he checked the screen, then said he wanted me to see the postal-sorting car. He had the tub of salted egg fish skin from the pantry tucked in under his other arm. We ate as we went along, slowing so that Xavier could stop in a doorway with his arm stuck out, seeking a signal: “Just wondering if our friend Yuri happens to know what’s going on …”

  Bringing Yuri up first … that was something.

  “You do know who this Yuri 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, Italia
n, modern Greek, and so on. Three chairs were drawn up around it, and each letter writer had carved their name around the edge of the table closest to their chair. Allegra. Laura. Ava. Ava had mentioned she was having a peculiar few years. Years lived out on this train with two people who wouldn’t let her talk to anybody but wrote letters alongside her? That sign must have said HELP and not HELLO after all; I’d been an idiot to take her word for it.

  Beneath the first window of the carriage, the wall wedged inward and held two baskets with an engraved slot above each one. The OUT basket held a handful of envelopes, and the IN basket contained one envelope, addressed to the train itself, The Lucky Day.

  “All these letters …” I looked over at the wooden trays. “They’re to the train?”

  Xavier opened one of the drawers, labelled “Chaouen,” and took out an envelope. Dear Lucky Day, he read aloud, converting French into English as he read,

  Everything is fucked, I don’t even know where to start with how fucked everything is. I saw you waiting here at the station, the Lucky Day, my lucky day, and I almost came in at your door so you could take me away. But I have to stay and see this through. That’s what’s best for everyone. Even though it isn’t me you’ve come for today, train, you can carry this along with you.

  Thanks.

  PS—Don’t write back. I’ve heard you do that sometimes, but you can’t try that with me. I know trains can’t write. Nor read, for that matter.

  I opened a drawer labelled “Croydon” and read,

  To Whom It May Concern, I am flabbergasted to see you flaunting the fruit of ill-gotten gains. Those of your generation may see the Lucky Day as a “cool hangout,” but I will forever be reminded of the Sichuan Affair that made paupers of tens of families and disgraced hundreds more, all so Hardeep and Shilpa Kapoor could walk away with their scavenged millions. Hope you crash and burn, and I don’t mean that metaphorically.

  R. Pandey.

  “… Does Ava basically have to stay onboard so she can’t be tracked to a fixed address?”

  “I wonder,” Xavier said. “Quite a few of the letters reference this Sichuan Affair. There’s a subset that feels robbed every time they see this train. And their versions of the Affair are quite different. When you said we aren’t allowed to talk to Ava, I wondered if it was to protect her from employees of these lovely pen pals of hers. But if you think about it, the letters are just hot air. To post them you have to walk straight up to the train and push them through the slot. You could just as easily say all this to her face or give her a slap or whatever else is on your mind. That could backfire, though, and they just want a risk-free way of making her feel bad, so they sneak up to the train and post letters like this, presumably when there’s no one else around. So yeah, there are those letters, but most of the ones I saw made me laugh or go ‘awww’ or ‘OK, that’s very niche’ …”

  I knew what he meant, having rifled through a few more drawers at random while he told me about them. “This one, for example, commending her choice of transport and trashing air, road, and sea transport. The sea is particularly lethal; perhaps it’s angry with mankind for wriggling out of the water all those aeons ago and choosing land. Now it’s all sharks and naval mines in there …”

  “Still thinking about the Sichuan Affair,” Xavier said, picking up the envelopes in the OUT box and fanning them out across the desktop “What was the name of that ‘fruit of ill-gotten gains’ letter writer again?”

  I went back to the Croydon tray: “R. Pandey.”

  He flicked the corner of one envelope and dropped the other four back into the OUT box and reached for a letter opener.

  “Want to see Ms. Kapoor’s reply?”

  The sunglasses had slipped down the bridge of my nose; I pushed them back up. “It somehow feels like we’re in trouble anyway, so why not …”

  Ava got stressed out when people maligned her train. She’d pressed down so hard with her pen that the paper had torn in places.

  Hi R. Pandy!

  Well, this is nice, my fortieth letter from you. I think it’s forty, but I’ve lost count, which you can’t blame me for, given that you use aliases. Sorry it’s taken so long to write back. Were those paint bombs little love letters from you too? Here I am, you’ve smoked me out at last.

  Yes, Hardeep and Shilpa Kapoor were monstrosities, weren’t they! Number one morality tale for me and my cousins growing up. They’re every error we could possibly make conveniently packaged up in two bodies. Do you know how they died? One stumbled into the path of a horse-drawn carriage, and the other—you’ll like this, R. Pande—the other choked on emeralds. They left two sons behind. The eldest was fathered by Hardeep, and the younger son was a Caucasian-Indian mix. You can think Hardeep’s stumble was deliberate if you want, but I think he was so plastered he had no idea he was out in the middle of a main road. For months he’d been drinking the costliest imported liquor round the clock. A perpetual celebration; he’d had the privilege of being well and truly blackmailed. Not that the blackmailer would have seen what he did as anything special. It was a routine sequence, sweeping a smuggler’s wife off her feet, threatening said smuggler with public circulation of wifey’s love letters, and, even more pathetically, sealing the deal by promising to disappear from her life if furnished with all the vital names, dates, and places crucial to the smuggling routes. You don’t have to put in much effort to blackmail weaklings who don’t feel like they can live without their even weaker wives. You can lead the weakling around the teahouses he frequents and use him like a pair of spectacles you look through to see the hidden design laid out on every low table, the meaning of the distance or proximity between the celadon teacup and the white one. The variations usually took years to learn, but blackmail gave Hardeep formidable teaching ability; his blackmailer boasted that it only took him about a month to absorb all the teacup arrangement codes necessary for tracking sea shipments without moving from his spot in the shade under the bamboo trees.

  If you ask me, R. Pandi, his associates were stupid to have let him host a quarter of the bankroll. He was a notably fragile link in that smuggling chain from the beginning. We haven’t found that he had a reputation for financial greed … it seems he had that much going for him. But he was too impulsive and had no discipline at all. That’s what the people who knew him well said about him. Lucky for him, then, that the only activity he liked more than drinking was successfully falsifying document after document, undaunted by intricacy or time frame. The Sichuan tea handlers couldn’t find anything to dislike about Hardeep and Shilpa as a couple—that was another factor in their favour. They get mentioned in a few letters as a local golden couple, and that must have been the first impression they gave as an attractive, well-mannered pair come over from Assam to talk tea in fluent Mandarin. That was the only reason he rose up the ranks the way he did, and after the East India Company crushed the cooperation among their competitors, Hardeep had nothing to do but buy liquor. Yes, as you said, he got to keep the money. He got to flee to Newcastle and live in lavish anonymity. And the wife he’d done it all for stayed where the money was. Run after the East India Company agent? Not Shilpa Kapoor. Let the letters she’d written to him be read aloud to her night after night; she could listen to it all stone-cold sober. This would usually happen at around one in the morning, with Hardeep putting on a simpering voice to impersonate her. “Ha ha,” she said, and “I don’t care,” and “Well, I’m going to be happy anyway.” She applauded her own turns of phrase. It was too late to do anything else. For about a decade Shilpa and Hardeep were serious about putting the money to good use. We have a lot of the documentation for funds and scholarships; they looked at and approved plans for schools and orphanages. It looks like the scammers of every age find a way to make our money do the most damage where we want and need it to do the most good—so in the age of private philanthropy, falling prey to scammers meant sponsoring altruistic fronts for some hair-raising shit.

  The atonement funding paper
trail dwindled to nothing after about a decade, as if Hardeep and Shilpa ultimately conceded that they simply didn’t have an eye for an honest endeavour. And why would they, if that “birds of a feather flock together” saying holds true? Shilpa already had some emeralds, but those were love gifts, so she bought herself some more; they were best suited to her colouring. She didn’t wear them; they were last-ditch emeralds. The sort her type of woman would put on before being led to the guillotine and displayed before a baying crowd. Shilpa dwelt on her new emeralds and dwelt in them. She inspected their inclusions through a jeweller’s eyeglass. She was worried that they’d been switched for fakes when she wasn’t looking. When she wasn’t worrying about that she worried that someone would come and take her emeralds from her outright. Someone might even kill her for them. And she didn’t necessarily think they’d be wrong to, so she wouldn’t even be able to come back as a protesting ghost. So Shilpa took to hiding her emeralds in her mouth. This was noticed, especially when she spoke. Hardeep was so drunk all the time he just thought her teeth had turned green and went on forcing her to relive the litany of passionate declarations she’d never made to him. Of course, once you start hiding emeralds in your mouth, you’re done for. It’s no great leap from there to sleeping with your emeralds in your mouth, which is how Shilpa Kapoor choked one night. She’d hidden away for the night in a wardrobe full of fur coats. Nobody heard her choking, or so they say, and she wasn’t found until morning. None of this made too much of a dent in those scavenged millions you mentioned. Not the emeralds, not the liquor, not the attempts at philanthropy, not anything else they bought. But that doesn’t actually matter, R. Pandee, because we don’t know where those two hid the rest of those millions. If you want full updates on the search, though, I’m sure my mother or one of my aunts or uncles could fill you in. You’ve written to someone whose family hasn’t moved house for centuries in case the treasure is somewhere in the house. We’re not a small family, so we branched out down the street and then down the neighbouring street, and so on. Charles Dickens heard about us and tried to find out more whilst in the region, but he backed down after a bunch of brown-skinned and muscle-bound Tyneside lads visited him at his hotel and advised him to write a sequel to Oliver Twist instead.