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

been abandoned! I wasn’t sure when and how I’d started thinking like that; I’d have loved to find a way to blame it on the train, but couldn’t.

The only thing to do was tackle it all head on. I put a hand to the tinted glass door, pushed, and it didn’t open. It didn’t open because, I am embarrassed to say, I hadn’t actually pushed the door—I’d only thought I had. What-if thoughts had seized me by the wrist and showed me what I expected to happen. I used my other hand and burst out into the corridor, calling out, “Ms. Kapoor,” and rapping on the tinted glass of every door on the way to the driver’s cabin. I was almost, not quite, running. To make up for lost time. Now that Xavier and I had decided to be gallant, I was feeling competitive about it.

I caught certain personal glimpses of Ava Kapoor as I moved through the next three carriages—these were three of the carriages we hadn’t been able to see from the outside. They were arranged to her liking, so the objects and atmosphere spoke of her. The library car was first. Had my phone been in the land of the living I’d have been taking pictures like mad. Since it wasn’t, I was more than content to move very slowly and gawp. At the framed photographs of reading rooms in nine libraries across the globe (I recognised two but thought Xavier would probably recognise all of them), at the cubist bookshelves that rippled along the walls like stacked seashells, at the double bed–sized fainting couch upholstered in brocade the colour of Darjeeling tea in the fourth minute of brewing. Cushions in the same shade of copper were scattered across the floor, and books had been left on top of a few of them, bookmarked with pages seemingly torn from other books. If the fainting couch was tea, the mahogany desk was whisky—a great, dark pool of it, with Emeralite lamps for stepping-stones. No visible footprints here, and no Ms. Kapoor, but I had more than half a notion that this tabletop had doubled as her dance floor. Now it was inviting me to dance too. I promised the table I’d be back just after midnight. Me, you, my earphones, and a top secret tabletop party playlist …

Next came the greenhouse car, where I walked under a green-veined glass roof and alongside a leaf fountain that turned out on closer inspection to be a particularly rowdy lettuce bed. There seemed to have been some sort of accident (or an experiment) with flower seeds: Lettuce battled clusters of violets for space. Summer garlands of tomatoes, peppers, and fat little cucumbers hung from trellised vines, along with a clawed gardening glove or three. I looked out the windows—while there was no sign of the lakes and mountains we’d been promised yet, we were definitely nowhere near Ashford. Just then the train slowed down considerably, as if conceding to give me a clue as to where we were. A few metres away from the track was a pile of earth, or blossoming rock—its peak standing high above the ground, but not quite high enough for it to qualify as a hill. Whatever it was, it was caged in extra spiky barbed wire that seemed to stretch for miles around and above it. The only way this mound could’ve escaped would have been by drawing itself deeper into the ground until it disappeared from the surface altogether. Though I suppose that would only have served to make its imprisonment more private. Look—I had this heap of earth in front of me, a heap that gave every appearance of having been punished for a wilful act … I had to process that somehow. I couldn’t tell if we were still in England or not. There weren’t any signs. After another second the mound’s peak began to bulge in a way that might have alarmed me if I’d been closer. Some sort of accelerated plant growth? A scalding  hot mud eruption? As it was, knowing that I only had a few more blinks of the eye to monitor the situation, I switched windows for a better view. It had just been the angle. What I’d seen was a climber arriving at the top of the mound. “What?! What did you do?” I asked. Never mind that my query couldn’t be heard or answered—I still had to ask. “What the fuck went wrong in your life that you’ve ended up where you are?”

The figure stood and threw their head back, seeming to examine the barbed-wire lid that closed them in. Then they limped around the peak and vanished from sight. Stems rustled as I moved to the next window, pulling three baby tomatoes off the nearest vine as I squinted at the mound. The tomatoes were good, only a little sour, so I took three more. The figure on the hill returned to view. Now they were directly facing the train and waving with both hands. I waved back; I couldn’t distinguish a single detail of this person’s appearance, and don’t think they really saw me either. We waved until we were no longer visible to each other in any way. Then I stepped into the next carriage and a barrage of steam that soaked through my clothes and momentarily blinded me besides.

A female-sounding someone insisted I take my shoes off and put them in a basket to my left, so I did. While I was in the middle of that a dressing gown fell on my head and the same someone said I might as well get naked too. It was a sauna we were in, after all. I’d already unbuttoned my shirt before it caught up with me; I was stripping on demand.

“Ms. Kapoor?”

“No.”

The carriage was tiled in blue and white and partitioned into gelatinous-looking cubicles with curtain flaps instead of doors. The cubicle walls had a frosted-glass effect so you could see