Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best books to read for self improvement .txt) 📕

(just as respectfully as you wished we’d crash and burn), I’ve told you all this because seeing a train and getting yourself hyped up about some 1737 events you don’t really understand is not too far off from using your mouth as a gemstone safe.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and so on,

Ava Kapoor

“Which part of this is most likely to make R. Pandey grind their teeth to dust?” Xavier asked, waving his hand over the pages like a gleeful conjurer.

I rubbed my chin. “Well, Xavier, I’d say it’ll be the relentless misspelling of the surname. You?”

“I reckon it’ll be the overall tone … you know … the explainingness of it all. Let’s just live quiet lives, OK, shithead?” He kissed his fingers at the sheets of paper before slipping them back into the envelope. Then we rolled up our sleeves, more than half-convinced that the scavenged millions were hidden somewhere on the train. Maybe even in this very carriage …

We were just uncertain what currency it would be in. Maybe it was millions of won worth of emeralds?

“Never mind the format,” Xavier said. “There’ll be a lot of it, and that’s how we’ll know we’ve found it.”

We called out to Árpád and Chela, hoping elite search abilities were a characteristic that mongooses shared. Árpád Montague XXX doesn’t give up until he finds what he’s looking for. His approach is very in-depth, though, so you have to be resigned to the things around you never looking the same again after the search. It was probably just as well that a couple of seconds after Xavier called in the mongooses (and they failed to appear) Allegra Yu’s voice came through the tannoy speaker above our heads, proposing we meet her in the picture gallery car in five minutes.

8.

The picture gallery was just next door, and windowless. A low-hanging lightbulb simulated wintry sunshine; each of the canvases were bathed in white. There was one on each wall, and they were paired. The two blank, unframed canvases faced each other, and so did two scratchily pigmented paintings, both portraits. It looked as if the painter had tried to scrape away every other line he laid down. But this discordance was gentle; the colours pledged to settle at the touch of a hand. Xavier approached the head-and-shoulders portrait first; quite confrontationally, I thought. I could see what was making him nervous. The subject of the portrait looked as if he was somewhere in his early twenties, his clean-shaven cheeks heavy with puppy fat. He appeared to be leaning back and to the side, deliberately avoiding either the centre of the frame or the light in front of it. He also appeared to be looking at Xavier. There was merriment and malice in those unblinking sloe-black eyes. I tucked my hand into the back pocket of Xavier’s jeans, and we stood almost nose to nose with the portrait, trying to stare it down together. The man in the painting was dark haired, ruddy of skin, and bushy of eyebrow. Whichever way I tilted my head, Xavier was the only one of us I could catch him looking at. A lock of hair fell over his left eye, just like a lock of mine fell over my right eye. I’d sometimes tuck or blow the lock out of the way, but this guy would probably just have stared at you through it. The white shirt he wore was mostly unbuttoned, revealing that he either waxed his chest or hadn’t bothered to paint the hair in. I bet that was a constant—starting things you couldn’t finish, I thought. Then wondered about my confident use of the past tense, and my verdict that this was a self-portrait. One more thing: I’d seen him somewhere. One, two, three, the facts I knew.

“Was he giving you the eye like this when you were here yesterday?”

Xavier nodded. “The expression was a bit different, though. Probably just my mood.”

“Different how?”

Xavier didn’t answer.

I turned to face the portrait that was hanging on the opposite wall. It was of a father and son. Their resemblance was unmistakable, and the setting was presumably the father’s study; there were lots of books and box files, and a theremin dimly visible behind the desk. The father was seated with an arm thrown proudly around his son, who was standing and looking at him with a mixture of affection and reserve. The son was the subject of the self-portrait behind me, and in this portrait with his father he was younger still. About ten. They’d been much older when I saw them in the flesh, but I had seen them both. Five years ago.

Not together like this, smiling at each other—

Their faces loomed before me, stretched, contracted. In a whirl of black hair and blue tulle, Allegra was there, both hands beneath my elbow, propping me up and twisting me away from the canvas. If she hadn’t, I’d have staggered into it head-first.

Xavier’s back was to me, and he looked round. “Who are they?” he asked. His face showed … I’m not sure. Not worry, exactly. Sadness. Seriousness.

“That’s Přemysl Stojaspal,” Allegra said, pointing at the self-portrait and at the ten-year-old portrayed standing beside his father. “And that’s his father, Karel. Both painted by Přem. You seem to recognize them, Otto?”

“I’ll tell you, but tell me something first—”

“No, Otto.” Allegra was shaking her head. “I’m afraid not, mate. You don’t get on a train, put us behind schedule with a search for a jumper there’s no trace of, then get to set the pace of the questioning.”

“So you didn’t find anything. That was what I wanted to know.”

Just as it had been with the man in the fire. The one I’d rushed in to rescue. At least that was how it had seemed at the time: it felt like I had to get him out of there, I had to because nobody else could. I’d seen him in the window—a motionless figure.