3.

You should know that the train ride was a gift from one Shin Do Yeon. Her nephew had offered to share his surname with me, and I’d managed to accept with sedate joy, like a person who was in a normal amount of love. I might even have managed to ask if he was sure this was what he wanted. Not at all like the real me, who’d been putting my first name and his surname together over and over and over on various pieces of scrap paper ever since I’d met him. Three years of practice signatures.

He frowned at the deed poll document when it came through. “Should we have done it the other way around, so I’d have been Francis Xavier Montague?” he asked. There was no point answering until he’d thought about it all over again, so I just waited. After a long moment he looked up from the paper and said my new name with a satisfied nod. “Otto Shin . . .”

He brushed the back of his hand against my cheek. Heady stuff, that overlapping of live patterns, the subtle chequering of his hand. Rough and smooth, flexible knuckles and leathered skin. His is the hand of a sea swimmer; in water it becomes a broad bladed oar. That same hand is a hardy aid to him as a once-a-week football goalie more enthusiastic than he is adept, and it’s the fine-fingered hand the needle glitters from as it sews all the buttons back onto our shirts. This is only the preface to the prologue of the dossier on Xavier Shin’s hands. For the rest, see Puccini’s “O dolci mani.”

Do Yeon-ssi cleared her throat. “Hi, lovebirds,” she said. “Yes, it’s me again. Your aunt. I’m here too, remember? Why not take these train tickets and call it a honeymoon? It would’ve made me very happy if you’d done things properly and actually got married instead of this deed poll business. But there’s no need to suddenly start caring about my happiness now when you never did before . . .”

Celebratory travel aside, there were also Árpád’s needs to consider. Do Yeon-ssi wanted to make a special point of reminding us that Árpád XXX was getting on for six years old, and that it was very important for mongooses to travel before they reach middle age: “Otherwise they get narrow-minded.”

This discussion took place in Do Yeon-ssi’s study, where Árpád’s favourite sandbox was located. We took a look at him and at the various bits of carefully polished treasure he was in the process of hiding. Back when it’d just been me and Árpád in my studio flat, he hadn’t had many high-value items to look after. A bronze-coloured bottle top here and there, perhaps. But ever since Árpád XXX had become part of the Shin household, there were solid gold bracelets, diamond stud earrings, and jade rings. Árpád was clearly delighted with his hoard. I also saw signs of self-consciousness, which were fairly understandable, given that we’d all stopped talking and were now staring at him.

Árpád Montague XXX: well worth staring at. Notable features include his coat of platinum fur and the exceptionally well-sculpted length of his paws and feet—the grace of those alone might convince you Nijinsky’s been reincarnated in mongoose form. Some snootiness of manner might be justified, and yet you could search the universe and fail to find a friendlier creature, or a fellow more willing to hear both sides of a story and disperse the benefit of the doubt in both directions if needed. During my more rational hours of the day—eleven in the morning, for instance, or three o’clock in the afternoon—I realise what I sound like when I talk about Árpád. I do realise it, and I know no one should listen to a word I say about him. The trouble is, I see all sorts of stories in that mongoose. He’s a friend of two hundred years and more. By which I mean that he is his very own self and also every fit of laughter his predecessors have induced in mine, every ounce of liability, bewilderment, solace, simple certainty . . . Árpád XXX, the pick of Árpád XXIX’s litter. And who was Árpád XXIX? Not only the most sardonic bosom friend of my teens and early twenties, but my mum’s favourite of Árpád XXVIII’s offspring. The twenty-eighth of our Árpáds would close his eyes and quiver ardently upon hearing certain lines of Ulysses. Tennyson’s biggest fan.

Or was he?

Lieselotte (my mum) pointed out that Árpád XXVIII may well have been trolling Martha (also my mum). Martha’s the Montague descendant, and she’s also one of those literature professors with a “postmodernism or goodbye” stance. She finds Victorian literature cloying at best, so all you have to do is recite a few lines of mid- to late-nineteenth-century poetry before her body language indicates she isn’t coping. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world for Árpád XXVIII to pick up on that.

I could write a book about the Árpáds, but I’ll keep it to a couple of paragraphs. Árpád the First appeared one night in my great-grandfather’s nursery when he was a very small boy in Kuching, Borneo. I’m sure almost no one deludes themselves that all their ancestors were decent. Pick a vein, any vein: mud mixed with lightning flows through, an unruly fusion of bad blood and good. It’s not easy to imagine what would make someone hate a little boy—or, more probably, the parents of that little boy—enough to place not one but two vipers in his cot. There we were, harmless government administrators, on perfectly good terms with everybody, and all of a sudden some wrong’un came after our only son doesn’t quite ring true to me. Many surmises could be made, and have been made, but when it came right down to it, you had this switchback fanged couple bearing down on a youngster too stunned to even make a sound. Two against one isn’t fair. But really it was even simpler than that. The mongoose is the enemy of the serpent. Árpád the First wasn’t interested in saving anyone’s life. Leaping into that writhing mass and slashing away until it fell still; that’s what she was interested in. End of. Or not quite. A third-floor nursery can’t really be described as a natural habitat for a mongoose. I almost want to say that someone must have brought her there, but having lived with Árpáds all my life, I know that Árpád the First could just have easily been out looking for trouble and found her own way into that nursery. Basically it’s like that song . . . if we don’t know by now, we will never, ever, ever, ever know.

Even as a toddler that forebear of mine was the solid type. The mongoose had bolted, but someone had been reading the child potted biographies of wise warriors. One name had got stuck in his head, and he knew it must belong to the mongoose: he waited until he could be heard over the nursery maid’s hysterical screams, then he murmured, “Árpád,” over and over, with his pudgy little arms outstretched. And once Árpád the First had made herself presentable, she came to see him.

Do Yeon-ssi hadn’t heard this legend. There was never the right time or the right sort of atmosphere in which to bring it up. When people ask about Árpád XXX, or about his mother, it’s always been simpler just to say, “Yeah, domestic mongooses are the new cats and dogs—it’ll catch on, you’ll see.” But Do Yeon-ssi’s lecture on mongoose psychology was far from brief, and I longed to lecture my lecturer, really set the scene for her, give her some idea of . . . I don’t know, the intertwining of two fates or something. That was all Montague stuff, though, and I’m a Shin now. I held my peace. Xavier knows all about the Árpáds, but he stayed quiet too. That was no surprise. I’ve never heard him talk back to his aunt. She’s been the parental authority in his life for decades, and he’s learned that contradicting her sets up the first link in a chain of counter-contradictions that drags you to the underworld.

Better to immediately cooperate with Do Yeon-ssi . . . that’s what Xavier calls her: Miss Do Yeon. Her more old-fashioned friends are shocked that he puts things on a first-name basis like this, but what can Do Yeon-ssi do? She devoutly watched over this brat for so many years, and this is how he repays her . . . by depriving her of the honorifics that are due her. But she’s not going to cry over it, that’s just the way it goes, she didn’t do it for the honorifics anyway . . .

That’s how Do Yeon-ssi spins it, with full awareness that Xavier calls her “Miss” in tribute to her heart-shaped petal of a face. Her ink-black hair is streaked with strands of white, and it mostly looks after itself, running semi-divine riot around her shoulders and down her back, making you think of aureoles and oceans. And then there’s the look in her eyes. The look of Eve in Eden . . . some amalgam of devotion and brutality that’s only really satisfied by encounters with the interior and therefore eviscerates everything in sight. It’s fitting for an optical lens magnate to be embodied the way she is, each eye a magnifying glass. I should’ve known better than to go along with her request to be placed under hypnosis. She asked if I could make it so she’d fall asleep whenever she wanted to. “Deep sleep . . . the kind that gets you really well rested, OK?” She did need more sleep of that kind. After one of her more acute bouts of insomnia, she looks so tired nobody realises she’s rich. Those bleary eyes with dark circles around them somehow make everything she’s wearing and holding look stolen.

“Yeah, no prob,” I said. I was cocky. After all, that was how I made my living at the time. That and boosting diet willpower, deleting fear of public speaking, and some stuff with a few other phobias. My artist friend Spera loves to have a go at me for not putting my “powers” to more profound uses. According to Spera, Emily Dickinson would be disappointed in me. She quotes from Dickinson’s letters: Cherish Power—dear—remember that stands in the Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than either of them. This utterance brought forth the most thoughtful and mature response I could conceive of: sepulchral silence as I dropped a cashew nut down the front of Spera’s top. Let others do their bit towards revolutionising human consciousness: I’ve learned to treat an attention span as a pulse with a regularity observable right down to the millisecond. I make a few test runs, track a few signals, and then I weary my hypnotee into a light stupor with the most minuscule of small talk. With Do Yeon-ssi I picked the issue of daylight savings, listing times I’d been late for appointments because of it, or had been too early, decided to come back later, and then missed the appointment altogether. I also provided meticulous descriptions of the weather on each of the occasions I described, and invited her to share similar experiences. When she declined to do so, I invented daylight savings mix-ups for her, resoundingly minor scenarios I vowed she’d told me about herself. I was loving the way Do Yeon-ssi’s face changed as she observed my commitment to the strangely dreary lies I was telling. Her expression had been a mixture of confusion, wonder, and distaste, and it began to congeal into abject dismay. And she kept interjecting to ask when the hypnotism would begin. Ostensibly Do Yeon-ssi was free to tell me to get lost, but she didn’t because of the position I occupied. I knew that keeping her captive in that particular way wasn’t real power, but it felt close enough. This woman who might not have had the time of day for me under any other circumstances had promised her nephew I’d be just as precious to her as he was. Ha! Xavier would never have talked at her like that, on and on, bulldozing every attempt to change the subject to something that didn’t feel like the gory murder of her brain cells. On and on and on, lying in wait at the end of her attention span, stopwatch and tiny scissors in hand, ah, here’s my chance, the boredom has become physically unbearable, and then—a gormless chuckle here, a little pressure of the hand there, and had it all gone the way it was supposed to, it would soon have been done; I’d have trimmed the edge off Do Yeon-ssi’s sense of time so that she circled and circled the same instant, unable to conceive of any other until the next was presented to her. The energy of such a trance is elemental. At least, that’s what I was taught, that the subject is struggling with all their might to break through into the next moment, or to recall the preceding one. And break through they inevitably will, unless— Well, that would depend on the hypnotist’s own strength of mind. Us bog-standard Svengalis have about twenty seconds, thirty seconds max, to work with. So we work fast, and our brushstrokes are crude. Into the eerie calm of Do Yeon-ssi’s boredom I intended to embed a line of gibberish, a sound pattern she could repeat until it smoothed out into a silken slide that tumbled into a sea of self-undoing. I’ve overheard Do Yeon-ssi talking to her pillow. All about qualms and grudges and topics to consult Google about in the morning. She recites misremembered poetry stanzas and foreign language phrases she’d never been able to use in ordinary conversation, and then she scolds the pillow for only pretending to understand.

Drifting far from the reach of these day thoughts and night thoughts, Do Yeon-ssi would bag herself a thousand and one nights’ worth of sleep over the course of a few hours, I’d prove I was more than just a purveyor of parlour tricks, and Xavier would no longer feel the need to keep track of Do Yeon-ssi’s ever-increasing sleeping pill dosage by counting the capsules. And there we’d be: three happy bunnies hopping along together.

Like I said, that was the plan. But I couldn’t get a fix on Do Yeon-ssi’s attention span at all. I felt her lose interest in our discussion. That happened fairly quickly. But—and here’s the horror story—she lost interest without losing focus, continuing to respond to my inanities as if something was actually at stake. It’s like this: At a marionette show you find four types of engaged audience—four different philosophies of enjoying the performance. There are those whose attention is reserved solely for the actions of the marionette: that’s Árpád XXX, wishing to believe that the figure is alive in one way or another. Then there are the ones who can’t and won’t stop looking at the puppet master (or seeking signs of the puppet master, if that person is hidden): that’s how Xavier is. There are those who watch the faces of their fellow audience members: my preference, obviously, since I’m the one here talking about the other types. And there are those who follow the strings and the strings alone. Do Yeon-ssi is a string watcher. She may not much care about the order of the strings—if they tangle, they tangle. Still, they express something to her, something about the nature of the illusion before her. That’s enough of a reason for her to pursue the strings to their vanishing point.

No, Xavier doesn’t quarrel with Do Yeon-ssi, and neither do I. I tuned out as she spoke of Árpád’s best interests. I let my thoughts drift across the shabby scholastic heaven that was our aunt’s study. Parchment dust, tarnished gilt, faded brocade. Probably hell for an asthmatic, actually. I stuck to unassuming gestures, pouring tea for the three of us and stuffing down the sandwiches and fondant fancies she selected and placed on the edge of my plate. To be fair to Do Yeon-ssi, she made sure I got the most appealing ones every time, occasionally slapping Xavier’s hand away when he hindered her objective. She praised Árpád XXX to the skies, yet in the same breath asked us to acknowledge that the dark side of an exceptional mongoose is bound to be exceptionally dark. There was grim talk of overnight deterioration, there were documented cases . . . Do Yeon-ssi read to us from the mid-1960s account of a Bombay mongoose whose latter years were punctuated with inexplicable frenzies . . . this mongoose would completely lose it, for no reason at all, and the only thing that restored her to her right mind was copious Pepsi consumption. I tried not to let it show, but I was a bit shaken by the case of the Bombay mongoose. Not even Coke . . . Pepsi. The preferred beverage of souls damaged beyond repair. I found myself nodding in agreement as Do Yeon-ssi made her closing statements: We three must take a trip, Xavier, Árpád, and me. As soon as possible. We’d thank her for it later.

Her first idea had been to buy the train for us. Its backstory struck her as romantic. She showed us an impossibly glossy historical overview one of her secretaries had prepared: centuries ago, when English tea lovers had faced a 119 percent tax on the price of their favourite drink, this train had been a logistical link in a chain forged by tea and emerald smugglers. But these days the train had a permanent resident who wouldn’t be parted from her charming home at any price. All Do Yeon-ssi could find out about her was that her name was Ava Kapoor, that the train had belonged to this Ava Kapoor’s family from the beginning, and that she was some sort of recluse. Though apparently not the sort who was averse to lovebirds. She seemed young, in spirit, if not in physiology. And she seemed kind. At least that’s what I decided after looking at the letter she’d written in response to Do Yeon-ssi’s near-harassment. The gist of Ms. Kapoor’s reply (puffy little crescent moons drawn above her lowercase I’s and J’s and all) was that Xavier, Árpád, and I were quite welcome to journey along one of her favourite scenic routes with her, and that she’d drop us off at any train station we wanted, within reason. She wrote of her regret that it might not be possible to meet in person and hoped we wouldn’t take that as a snub.

The Lakes and Mountains Route, that’s what it said on our ticket, along with our names, the name of the train, and the name of our carriage. That was it. Just imprecise enough to stir my interest: I’d never been on a train that had named carriages instead of numbered ones. Would Ms. Kapoor be driving the train herself so that we four were the only ones on board? I wondered about the route too. Which lakes and mountains? And where? Switzerland? Italy? France? Just how far away could five days of track and tunnel take us?

Xavier said I’d do better to wonder why his nearly eighty-year-old aunt was so keen to get rid of us. The genuine motive was as different from those she’d stated as night is from day—he was very definite about that. Do Yeon-ssi didn’t give us a chance to do much pondering either: by the time we thought about digging our suitcases out of our storage room closet, a team of professional packers had already filled the cases with all the essentials, had zipped our gear into diaphanous packing cubes, even. There was Tupperware dotted with minuscule perforations and filled with earthworms, beetles, and just enough air to keep them alive for Árpád’s delectation. It felt like Do Yeon-ssi was taking care of everything in advance so she could forget all about us. Right up until then I’d thought she’d found us pleasant and helpful companions, what with all our fetching and carrying and solicitous enquiries. As I thought about it again, Do Yeon-ssi had lived alone on purpose for a long time before Xavier started having nightmares about her slipping in the bath and not being able to call anyone for help. When I tried to see things her way, the credible version went like this: frequent visits from Xavier would’ve been nice, but sharing her living space with the most attentive nephew ever (and now his partner, and his partner’s mongoose) was, perhaps, a bit much. I suppose carers can all too easily become captors, and with the best intentions in the world, we’d become just that.

The train tickets were Do Yeon-ssi’s way of asking for a few days off: that’s how I put it to Xavier. He admitted that she did deserve at least that much, though he extracted additional promises from her: Yes, she’d take her vitamins every morning without fail. Yes, she’d limit herself to one soju milkshake per day. Yes, she’d immediately ask the nearest bystander for aid with items that would require an inadvisable degree of stooping or stretching to reach by herself. And yes, she’d phone if there was anything, absolutely anything, even very slightly wrong, in which case she could expect us back on her doorstep as soon as we could manage it.

---

Later, in that pitch-dark train carriage, the very notion of the three of us rushing to Do Yeon-ssi’s rescue made me laugh. I mean, locating a light switch was beyond our combined capability, so never mind about achieving anything else.

“OK, there are literally only two sides this thing can be on,” I said, after what felt like at least a decade of bumping heads, sharp pokes from fingers and claws, and frankly quite sinister face-licking accompanied by heavy breathing. Darkness seemed to give Árpád (at least I prayed it was Árpád) license to engage in behaviour he wouldn’t have in the light. “That’s the window, and that side is where we came in. So I’ll take this side, and you and Árpád take the other side. Don’t rush, and go really small scale . . . Just pat the wall inch by inch . . . No, why have you turned off your flashlight?”

My phone was dead as usual, and Xavier claimed he needed to save the flashlight battery himself. We sought and found a photo of Ava Kapoor so Xavier could confirm that she was who he’d seen, then we settled on the most practical way of finding out what was going on with her: we’d phone her. Xavier texted away, trying to get a phone number for Ava Kapoor from Do Yeon-ssi, and then from Do Yeon-ssi’s secretary. Neither replied. I tucked my chin over his shoulder and basked in the glow from his phone screen as he also texted our local stationmaster and made sure she held on to my suitcase until we got back.

“How do you even have her phone number? What . . . the two of you have a whole conversation thread? How far back does this go?”

“Sheila likes train jokes. It’s Boughton, Otto. Everyone has everyone else’s phone number.”

“I don’t!”

“Well, you’ve got that mouthy South London attitude on you, haven’t you . . . and remember what a hard time you had falling asleep without the sound of sirens? I have to say, for a while I really wondered if Kent life could ever be for you . . .”

Xavier gave Do Yeon-ssi one more minute to text him back, then he called her on speakerphone. The phone rang for ages before we heard her voicemail greeting. Xavier hung up and rang again. When Do Yeon-ssi answered, she was slurring a bit. Piecing together some of the terminology in noisy background circulation, it soon became clear that she was having a gin rummy party with extra gin. It had been maybe five years since her last gin rummy party, attended by a significant proportion of Europe’s hard men and women. So many unsettling things had happened post-festivities (not necessarily the grand cleanup, but the visitors who came over the weeks that followed, complete strangers who kissed Do Yeon-ssi’s hands or left the tiniest and stripiest kittens imaginable at her feet and thanked her for “saving their lives”) that she’d decided it was probably best not to associate with her gin rummy crowd anymore. But she missed them, I suppose. We had played whist with her whenever we could find a suitable fourth player, but that’s a very tame setup if you prefer to play cards for real estate, works of art, or cancellation of others’ debt. So out went the whist-playing nephews and in rushed the revellers.

“Anyway, listen, your friend’s here with us, so I’m sure you’ll get a full report later,” said Do Yeon-ssi.

“Which friend?” I asked, and Xavier asked, “One of mine, or one of Otto’s?” As if his friends are more virtuous.

We heard Do Yeon-ssi asking if she could finally tell us, then she announced: “It’s Yuri!”

“Oh . . . Yuri . . . ,” we said, exchanging blank looks.

“I have to say, it’s nice having him around. Just . . . easy, you know? Not your usual style at all. I thought you went for angsty types.”

Any response Yuri might have been making was swallowed up by what sounded like a full string orchestra playing “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love.”

I started to tell Do Yeon-ssi I didn’t know any Yuri, but a message flashed up on the screen, and Xavier took the phone from me before I had time to read it. All I saw was that it wasn’t from a saved contact: the full phone number was displayed. Xavier read the message, then asked: “Er, how did you guys meet?”

Something (or an inebriated someone) crashed to the floor very close to Do Yeon-ssi, there was a hubbub around her, and she said: “What? What? I can’t hear you.”

“I was asking how you and Yuri met,” Xavier said.

“Almost got bathed in hot gumbo from a soup tureen . . . and now you’re asking how I met your friend? What do you think is going on? A toy boy and sugar mummy dating service introduced us, something like that? Just keep on thinking that way if you want to . . .”

Xavier glanced at me for confirmation, then said: “It’s just that we don’t know—”

Another text message arrived. He looked at it and finished, “. . . what we’d do without Yuri.”

Clearly he now had some idea who Yuri was. Yet he frowned when Do Yeon-ssi told us the party had been Yuri’s idea. To help her unwind. And when it was revealed that she’d asked this very same Yuri about honeymoon ideas and he’d put her in touch with Ava Kapoor, Xavier was livid. “Yeah, he’s a nonstop lifestyle guy, Yuri,” I said into the phone. “That’s what we love about him. Could you put him on for a sec?”

Surprise, surprise: Yuri had been right at her elbow just a second ago, but somebody had whisked him away. What could Do Yeon-ssi say, Yuri was popular. She’d tell him to give us a call: “And don’t forget to thank him for the train idea. Right, I’ve got to go. What did you want again? Ah yes, a phone number. I’ll text it to you in—”

Xavier’s phone signal flatlined. I left the compartment to check the corridor window: we were going through a tunnel. Once we were out the other side, he followed me into the corridor, switching his handset off and then on again.

“Still no signal?”

“Hang on . . . nope. Lucky for Yuri.”

“Our dear, dear friend Yuri. Working tirelessly day and night to guarantee that everyone’s relaxed and having fun.”

He tapped the corner of his phone against his teeth, thinking. “That’s the thing: it could be genuinely benevolent meddling. Maybe we do owe him a thank-you. But there’s something fucked up about having to await outcomes before deciding whether to be nasty or nice.”

We’d taken the southeastern-bound train from our station hundreds of times and had thought it’d be the same old route at least until we reached Ashford. Yet here we were puttering along between two heavily weathered stone circles. They were nothing close to Stonehenge height—these circles rose from a field of mud-matted grass that stood almost as tall as they did—in fact they were the height of, well, your average gravestone. No, they were gravestones. As we passed we saw that these rings were set concentrically and that they ran deep. “Did you know that we lived this close to something like this?” I asked Xavier. He shook his head, checked his phone screen one more time—still no messages and no signal—then pointed towards the back of the train. “Right, I’ll look for Ava that way. See you back here in a bit?”

That meant I was the one who’d approach the driver’s carriage. I called out to Árpád, but he’d curled up in the corner of his window seat and had apparently gone to sleep. I put an ear to his snout. Definitely just sleeping. As I straightened up, a patch of the darkness behind me got darker. The sensation was similar to the one you get when someone’s staring at you, someone close by but out of your line of sight. I turned around and started to say something, thinking Xavier had come back in. But it was just me and the sleeping mongoose. Xavier had already moved on to the next carriage: I heard him shouting, “Ms. Kapoor? Ms. Kapoor?”

I’d left the compartment door ajar, and now it was closed. I didn’t have any specific ideas about this, but I was unhappy with the order in which I’d noticed the changes. The door closes and it gets darker, fine, but it gets darker and then the door closes? No thanks. Thumbs down to whatever mentality I’d boarded this train with, and another thumbs down to this door-and-darkness thing occurring almost as soon as Xavier left me. See—even the term I used . . . left me. Never mind that he had gone to see if somebody needed help—I’d 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 whether or not a cubicle was occupied but were spared particularities. I headed for the only cubicle that held a living form and said: “I’d like to talk to Ms. Kapoor quickly.”

“Oh, you would?” the occupant asked, somehow sounding neither hostile nor curious, but quite French. Think Catherine Deneuve circa 1968, her mild amusement as she confronts and dismisses the mysteries of desire with questions like How could you think even for a second that I was interested in you? Judging by the shade of skin visible through the glass, it was a black Deneuve I’d just encountered. Black or dark South Asian.

“Yes, I would. You’re definitely not Ms. Kapoor?”

The form shifted; she was dabbing her forehead with a towel. “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘definitely’ not, because things always take some kind of crazy turn when you say ‘definitely.’ But I’m moderately sure I’m somebody else.”

“That person being . . . ?”

“Just another pawn of fate, sweating all my cares away for now. And wondering what’s keeping you from doing the same.”

I pulled the rest of my clothes off and took a seat in the cubicle behind hers, explaining that it seemed Ms. Kapoor might need help. At the end of a long interval—so long I thought I was going to have to repeat myself—Cubicle Lady asked: “Did she say so herself?” A genuine enquiry this time.

“In a way. We think— I think— We’re not . . .” I gave up and asked: “Do you think she’s OK?”

“Ms. Kapoor is busy,” said Cubicle Lady. “Don’t bother her.”

She told me that I’d want a shower after this, and I’d have to do that in my own carriage. None of which really served as an answer. I took another tack, talking quickly because that information about the showers made it sound as if she was about to leave: “Who else is on board at the moment?”

“What do you mean?”

“You, me, Xavier, Ms. Kapoor, and—?”

Ah . . . A sigh in the near distance, trembling at first, then clear and sure: Ah . . .

I jumped to my feet, slipped in my own sweat, banged my head against the cubicle wall, and dropped onto the bench. The sigh lengthened, soared, and swooped, turning to song. I felt my face scrunching up. Not just from the pain from having almost brained myself . . . I was trying to discern what it was I could hear, and the ratio of thrill to fright. Music that makes you shiver in the midst of a sauna . . . what, how, what? The wailer was further away than I’d thought—they’d only felt close at first because it had started up so suddenly and was so distinct from any of the other train sounds. It was further away and . . . not a person. This couldn’t even be a recording of a person. Not a wind instrument, not a string instrument. A person after all? It was very, very like a human voice, airily blurring notes with the skill of an operatic coloratura, but the tone was thinner than any oxygen-dependent organism could accomplish without asphyxiating.

“There are just five of us,” said Cubicle Lady, paying no attention whatsoever to the sigh-singing. “You, me, Ms. Kapoor, Xavier, and Allegra—she operates the train, though I take over sometimes. A maintenance team will board at the next station, but they’ll only be with us for two stops. That’s later on this evening. Then tomorrow we’ll have the bazaar . . .”

“About this, er, singing,” I began to ask.

“I think I know why you asked if there’s anybody else,” she said.

“Are you not hearing that? That—music?”

The pitch and volume of the singing had increased, the melody doubled (divided? both?) so that I could hardly hear her: “It’s an old freight train,” she was saying. “No matter what Ms. Kapoor does with it, no matter how she refurbishes and re-refurbishes the interior, it doesn’t feel new.”

“Oh, well, for whatever it’s worth, I like what she’s done with it,” I said. “But what—”

The song itself was a sweet, soft, cracked little ditty. Milk and cake, a fond caress before the pillow was pressed over your face. Silk caressing your cheek as you were drained of breath . . . you could fight, but you didn’t want to.

Cubicle Lady raised her voice: “If you want to help, try not to talk to Ms. Kapoor. Just keep on being a happy twosome and go home with some photos and some good memories.”

That did it; the honeymoon advice. One hand to the back of my aching head, I left my own cubicle, put on a dressing gown, and warned: “I’m gonna join you in there.”

She pulled her cubicle curtain aside and said, “No need.”

The first few things I noticed: She was right about not being Ava Kapoor, she was black, and she looked about the same age as me. Maybe a few years younger, though no more than five, I thought. Her gaze held none of the indifference I’d heard in her voice; the look she gave me was frank and friendly. Her hair had been swept into three different sections and then bundled together so that they ran in a mohawk-like ridge from the base of her temples to the base of her neck. She’d hastily knotted a towel around the upper half of her body when she heard my threat, and her shyness in that respect puzzled me a bit, given that I could very clearly see that she was sitting with her long legs far apart. The distance looked gymnastic—just short of the splits. A floor length (and mostly transparent) waterproof blanket covered those legs, and beneath them was what appeared to be a wooden box.

“Hello.”

“Hi.”

“Just steaming my parts,” she said. “Mugwort keeps them happy.”

I folded my arms, unfolded them, folded them again, then gestured in the direction of the singing. “That, next door. Is that . . . Ms. Kapoor?”

The sound stopped the split second I put a name to it. I couldn’t help smiling at that.

“It was,” Cubicle Lady said, spreading her legs even further. “Hopefully she’s finished for the day.”

She looked at me. “What’s that face about? Ah, you’re moved or something.”

“You . . . aren’t?”

“I hate that racket,” she said, with a vehemence that shrank her eyes and puckered her face. But then she caught herself and sent an impish smile my way: “You never exaggerate? Well, good for you.”

Realising that I had encountered somebody who had no intention of telling me anything other than practicalities and the planned schedule for our comfort and enjoyment, I began walking backward, all apologies for bothering her and eagerness for the cold shower I was about to have. When she gave a satisfied nod and dropped the curtain. I walked around the back of her cubicle, found a pair of towelling slippers, and put them on, my head throbbing so horribly I momentarily mistook arms for legs and hands for feet. The singing started up again as I stealth-padded towards the door that led to A. Kapoor.