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

Xavier told them he was on a trip with his mother. And if you want to make a list of things that are scary, put words at the top. Because just as the girl and her father had begun to gently dismantle Xavier’s assertion—his mother had been gone for quite a while, hadn’t she, where were her things, and so on—a woman who could very easily pass as Xavier’s mother stepped into the compartment and sat down with them. Age, check; face just as Korean as his was, check; soft drink brought back from the restaurant car for her patiently waiting son, check. Two drinks, actually. One for him and one for the girl, whose name he still didn’t know.

“Oof, such a queue …,” the woman said. Her soft, raspy accent was familiar to him—it was from Burgundy, just like his favourite French teacher, who always sounded as if he was talking through a mouthful of sugar cubes. But the accent was the only thing Xavier recognised. Everything else about the woman was like a warning not to lie, never, ever to lie unless you wanted what you said to come true. She was wearing an SNCF uniform, navy and red, but she whirled her loose hair up into a bun, pulled a gauzy white shawl out of a leather tote, and draped it around her shoulders as she took her seat beside the girl Xavier had imagined was his sibling. The newcomer proceeded to slap a can of Ricqlès down in front of each of the two youngest passengers, who now found themselves facing each other with identical wide-eyed stares, as if perhaps this being who’d gone from SNCF employee to archetype of chic maternity in two seconds flat could still be banished if only they didn’t make eye contact with her. They sought out the emergency cord instead. Xavier couldn’t see it, so he had to assume the girl had her eyes fixed on it. It was high up and to the right of his head, far from the window. Quite a scramble, even if you could count on not being tackled before you got there.

“Draw the curtains and drink up, kids,” the woman said, gesturing with something pearl grey that seemed to fold over and under the lines of her hand—a gauntlet? Xavier glanced at it: it was an exceedingly ladylike pistol. The girl’s father, who had actually been looking at the woman, had caught this development in real time. No wonder he’d kept his reaction minimal. The girl arranged the curtains from her side, and Xavier mirrored her actions. Xavier opened his can of minty fizz, and so did the girl. Now looking anywhere but at each other, they drank up, somehow managing not to choke. The woman turned the pistol on the girl’s father, who rubbed his face hard and in slow motion, trying to wake himself up. At the count of ten …

“You’re going to shoot me? Why?”

The man looked at the woman as he asked this, and the question was posed in English. The woman took a pair of handcuffs from her tote and threw them over to Xavier, who caught them reflexively, though he fumbled with the keys she threw half a second later. “Cuff his ankles,” she instructed in French, then tapped her gun against the tabletop. “Quickly. Now.”

Kneeling on the carriage floor, flinching in expectation of kicks to the face administered either by the man or his daughter, Xavier mumbled apologies as he snapped the cuffs around silk-clad ankles. He rose, slid the keys across the table to this newly materialised mother of his, and she jangled them in the man’s direction and addressed him in French: “No running off, sir. We’re about to play Go.”

Still in English, the man said, “The police will pass by soon. They’ll see this. Is that OK with you?”

The woman looked down at the Baduk board and then swept the grid clean with one hand, sending stones shooting in every direction. The man put his hand on Xavier’s arm, asking in English: “Young man, do you understand me?”

Xavier nodded.

“But she doesn’t, right?”

Xavier looked across the table at the woman who so urgently wanted to play Go that she was prepared to play it under these conditions, with an ankle-cuffed opponent and a pistol in one hand. She had liquid labyrinths for eyes, and the more the man spoke English to her and to Xavier, the more likely it began to seem that she was going to shoot them all. It was very, very difficult to tell if this was language-barrier frustration or a more general irritability. Xavier avoided taking linguistic sides by shrugging.

“Can you tell her,” the man said. “Can you tell her that even though she would rather talk in French, I can’t right now. I was never fluent in the first place, and right now—it’s all gone. I’m pissing myself here. Because of my daughter … just ask her to let my daughter go first. Fuck. The girl never wanted to take this trip anyway. Who cares about that bar in Montmartre where the pianist has his newspaper set up in front of him in place of a music score and all the regulars know to leave the street door open so the breeze can turn the pages for him; you’d better just care about that sort of thing on your own, that’s what my daughter says. Let’s send Laura away first; then we can talk any way she wants.”

Xavier could have squeaked, And what about me? But saved his breath. The girl didn’t say anything either, though it was clear that if she was going to pick a battle, it would be the one against any heroics her dad tried to pull.

“He seems upset,” the woman said to Xavier. “What did he just say?”

The boy hesitated. He wasn’t so sure that she didn’t already understand. But he