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

were in town—me and Stefan, Karel and Poppy. We were just about old enough to be their parents, but we probably looked more like their grandparents. Those two had such a glow about them, and didn’t yet understand about mortgages and things like that. Karel said Poppy gave him music. She’d wake up humming, and he’d be off at once, setting what he’d heard into a composition. They had three years like that, then a very bad year—Poppy was so gravely ill—and we lost her.

My first point about Přem is that I don’t know anything about his mother. Karel would allow people to assume Přem is Poppy’s son, but he almost certainly isn’t. Of course, a downside of long-distance friendship is that it takes some time to become aware of a new factor in your friends’ life. I do, however, find it extraordinary that, after a decade of quarterly lunches without any mention of a new partner, fling, or any development falling between those two posts, Karel introduced me to Přem, who looked to be all of ten years old.

I asked the little boy how old he was, and he smiled at me and said, “Guess!”

Karel had been ill for about a month prior; he characterised it as a stomach complaint and told me his doctor found nothing wrong, and I believed him at the time, but I don’t anymore. I mean I believe Karel was laid low by what he called his stomach complaint, but I doubt he saw a doctor about it. He probably stayed at home all month, possibly feeling death draw near and shrinking away, and somewhere near the middle of all that Přem arrived. Dropped off by his mother, probably. I am volunteering this as a guess even though I don’t believe it. I’m not sure what I do believe concerning Přemysl.

I paid Karel an impromptu visit one evening. I didn’t tell him I was coming, I just took the train up to Newcastle and took a taxi to his house. That morning I had felt that something was the matter and that it might not be too late to fix it as long as I saw Karel that very day. Karel answered the door himself, looking better than I’d seen him in a while, and I felt as if I’d caught myself wishing bad things on him. I got a warm welcome and a cream tea from him, even though darkness was falling. We talked for hours. Přem was about seventeen by then. Karel was particularly pleased with how well he was doing at school, and was matter-of-fact about him continuing higher education close to home, so that he wouldn’t be out at night. I asked him if he didn’t think he was being too strict with Přem, and he began a circumspect answer, then his telephone rang upstairs. He excused himself; there was a call he’d been expecting all day. And almost as soon as he had gone, Přem was there. I don’t mean he had come in, I mean he was there. There was a lamp beside the chair I was sitting in; he switched it on and said, “Yes, Ms. Rashid, he is too strict. Thank you for being on my side.”

I may have simply gibbered for a moment; I just couldn’t get my bearings. He told me that, because I was on his side, he wanted to give me a present. I think that’s what he told me. Very strange, that night. When I think back to it, I think I must have … misunderstood somehow? “Misunderstood” doesn’t seem to be the right word, but he was saying nonthreatening things at normal pitch, yet everything he said scared the hell out of me. There had to be a misunderstanding somewhere. Anyway, he said he wanted to give me a present. And I thought, whatever this present is, I certainly mustn’t accept it. It was also beginning to be rather difficult to comprehend where exactly in the room he was. He switched on two more lamps and he seemed to be where they were and also by the bookcase and also, quite horribly, sitting at my feet with his elbows on my knees.

“A musician without an instrument,” Přem said. “A woman who will never marry … hmmm … I’ve got just the thing for you all the same. Don’t you want your present, Ms. Rashid?”

“No,” I gasped. “Go to bed.”

“But you’ll like it. The present. I can bring you someone. Anyone you want. Just think of someone and I’ll bring them.”

“Bring someone? From where?”

He switched on another lamp and said, “Anywhere …”

Karel got off the phone and came back, thank God. He gave Přem a hearty clap on the shoulder: “Bedtime, right?”

“Bedtime,” Přem agreed.

“I’ll just say goodnight to Zeinab, and then I’ll be with you.”

“Then you’ll be with me.”

I never visited Karel at home after dark again, even after he assured me that Přem was now “much better at night.” There are a couple of other stories about Přem from when he was ten or so; hearsay, so I’ll be brief with these. The first is that a pair of would-be kidnappers took Přem from the posh primary school Karel was sending him to, but returned him in the middle of the night. It’s the middle-of-the-night bit that made me think this actually could have happened; the kidnappers saw what he was and just took him home. There is this too: when Přem was asked for some description of the kidnappers, he said that one was a white man and the other was a white woman, that they were “not as old as my father,” and both of them made him sad. Why … had they harmed him somehow? “No,” he said, “they were fine at first, but then they started to look like this”—he drew two faces with upside-down smiles—“and after that they just kept crying and crying and crying … It was sad …”

The other bit of hearsay is