Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best manga ereader .TXT) 📗

into his trousers. “That’s what I’m doing. But thank you for asking; please enjoy your journey.”

The girl’s delighted “Ha” sparked a haphazard wish for an older sister, someone at home who talked to and about him like this, mocking and affectionate in equal measure. She’d drive everyone completely mad with her cynically idealistic remarks as they grew up—friends, other family members, would be suitors, colleagues, everyone—and he, Xavier Shin, would be her most partisan associate. This sister of his would always be able to say, “Well, Xavier knows what I mean!” even if he didn’t. He listened as the other two arranged their board and discussed the order of play, the grandfatherly sounding father good humouredly fending off accusations of having plotted his own defeat in advance. Hearing them like each other aloud was almost as bad as the leg spasms. He drew such comfort from their company, from their existence, that he almost wished they’d leave. It had been better before they came. Before they’d swanned in, he had almost coaxed himself into thinking that this was what the train home was like for most people, and there was no good reason why things should be different for him. Most people feel themselves depart as they arrive at their station. We’d all like to keep the impressions we just gathered, keep the hope we had and the interest we took in our surroundings; we’d like to be like that all the time and every day, but by the time you get home, that’s all snuffed out. In you go, in you go, creature who dwells in the stationery box, in you go, clutching your withered posy …

Xavier had a hunch that these two were somehow exempt. How had they managed it? They played their board game, and against the backdrop of sound they made (muffled exclamations, drawn out “hmms,” pebbles knocking wood), Xavier heard the name of his station announced. He watched and listened as passengers boarded and disembarked. And as the train swept onward he also glimpsed the male Paris parent standing near the ticket barrier in animated conversation with a station guard, possibly being told a son wasn’t something you could ask about at the Lost Property counter. He emptied his lungs all the way out, then fully restocked. What did he do now that he’d missed his stop and his treacherous legs had very conveniently gone back to normal? Think, he had to think. There was every chance that his two carriage-mates would get off at the very next station, but he wished so much that they would stay awhile. Not for long. Just for, say, three more stops. Then he’d turn around and face the six weeks.

He dropped his feet onto the floor, raised his arms, rolled his neck around a few times to get the crick out of it, looked at the grandfatherly father and then at the girl. A stocky black man with a button nose and so many smile lines his entire mouth area looked crumpled. His daughter resembled him about the nose but had otherwise branched out on her own with a patron-saint-of-adventuresses look. Twinkly eyes, masses of frank forehead, and a halo of curls. They were playing Baduk. The girl’s hand hovered above the square she’d just chosen, and Xavier could see why she’d been cross in advance about her dad letting her win. She’d probably thought she was a Baduk genius, had never lost a game since birth … until she’d faced an opponent other than this man, who was mysteriously and embarrassingly bad at Baduk. Both father and daughter were older than he’d expected. The girl looked about sixteen, and the man about sixty. Xavier didn’t seem to look the way they’d thought he would either—he supposed he seemed younger. The surprise wasn’t unpleasant on either side, though the girl did raise her eyebrows and ask if Xavier was a runaway or what.

Which led him to consider what exactly he was. He came to some conclusions he couldn’t share. His mouth couldn’t say that he’d been given one shell to inhabit, only one—the obedient son of the Paris parents. And now that he’d passed the station where the male Paris parent was waiting for him, that shell was in pieces, and he’d fallen out, neither solid nor liquid, but a wisp of air, easily dispersed. Doubtless they’d already begun—phone calls, messages, arrangements: “Yes, same as last time.” The Paris parents had had other sons, boys from other branches of his family they’d taken guardianship of with promises to turn them into cultured and highly educated men. Disappointments one and all. So now, again, the things in the son’s room would be given away, his withdrawal from school records would be made in absentia, and anybody who’d ever had anything to do with him would be made aware that he’d been sent abroad. To a better school, or for treatment, because his health had taken a very serious downturn. Even if he went back to them now, one or the other of them would be on the way to Switzerland or somewhere, passport in hand, more than capable of looking him quite calmly in the face and saying, “This is very sad, and I do hope you find your own parents, but my son is very sick, my partner is with him right now, I’m just on my way to visit them.” He had deliberately missed his stop, and that was how he’d become a secret, to be walled up in darkness along with all the other matters the Paris parents couldn’t let anybody know about. Xavier was so frightened he was sure his heart would implode, but he smiled at the girl and her father. He was thinking: Even if this is it for me, I’ll be smiling as I go. I want the Paris parents to find out about it and wonder what that crazy little bastard was smiling about as he died … and as they