20.

She stayed near the door for a few seconds, holding on to the button that held it open, and all four of us wriggled towards her, ducking blows from Yuri’s pirate sword, which he was using like a cricket bat, swinging away at our heads.

“Ava, look . . .”

“Ava, you’ve got to—”

“Ms. Kapoor, you must see this, you must see what he’s doing—”

“Ava—”

What must that have been like for her? We probably looked and sounded like a pandemonium of parrots that had been cooped up for weeks. Our squawking contortions. Our bloodied drool.

At that point, even though she’d been so cold, bathing and reading books while Yuri bullied us, we still believed Ava was going to vanquish Yuri or take up our cause in some other way. So we wriggled on, preparing to lie at her feet until she relented. But Árpád and Chela held us at bay, and Ava made straight for her sleeping compartment, steering the widest possible berth around each one of us. Yuri lowered his sword and gave her a thumbs-up as she went. “Loving this new no-nonsense attitude,” he said to her. “Ava Kapoor, Ava Kapoor, the most rational girl in town!”

She hesitated before stepping into her cabin. “You’re not getting up?” she said to us. Xavier and I got death glares, but she was less sure she understood what was going on with Laura and Allegra. Her gaze trembled over and around their wounds.

Xavier raised his bound hands. “OK, but if you could just—”

“No, you’ve put on your little show, and you spoilt the bazaar, and you’ve made it clear what I’ll have to tell Dr. Zachariah tomorrow—”

(“What are you going to say to Dr. Zachariah?!” we all said, more or less at once. Yuri included.)

“. . . so get up, everyone, and let’s get going again. And as for you two Shins! You’re a disgrace. I’ve seen the state of dormitory carriage, and I expect those beds to be stripped by the time we drop you off. I mean it. You’ve had a whole two carriages for your private use and it wasn’t enough . . .”

“Oh, those two always want more, Ava,” Yuri said, nodding sagely. He walked over to the lounge area and took a seat. Árpád and Chela kept monitoring him, sizing up their chances of jumping him, but he never let go of the pirate sword.

Xavier looked at me and mouthed, What? I mirrored him, and Allegra rested her bruised forehead on her steepled hands while Laura made one more formal plea for Ava to look over her shoulder—just over there, at the chair that was now facing Ava’s sleeping compartment. Laura began to describe the details for Ava. The wetsuit, the full-faced diving mask, the pirate sword. She trailed off as she listened to her own description. But she’d briefly sparked Ava’s interest: “You’re seeing all that over there?”

She flicked a brief glance at Yuri. I mean, directly at Yuri. We all saw it. Disconcerted, he waved at her. Had eye contact been made, though? That was less certain. Ava turned back to us. “Come on, guys. I’m sorry if I worried you earlier. And this—it’s almost flattering that you’d go to this much effort . . . but . . . it’d be lovely if you’d just get up and we could put this behind us.”

Allegra, head still pressed to her fingertips, said faintly: “Ava. Beb. I don’t know how to describe this situation to you in a way that isn’t going to piss you off, but if you untie just one set of hands . . . doesn’t matter which . . . we’ll all be free very soon, and—and then we’ll be on our way to the doctor . . . within the . . .”

Ava was already at her side, an arm around her as she rummaged through floor-level drawers for a knife suited to rope cutting. We could see a number of questions occurring to her as she sawed away, but for the time being she contented herself with one.

“Allegra, who did this?”

Yuri leapt to his feet, excited. “Přem! Tell her it was Přem. Say: He sends his regards, and then burst into tears. Go on. I’ll give you a tenner.”

Ava touched her forehead to Allegra’s. “Allegra.”

“Allegra,” Yuri said. “Pssst, Allegra. Twenty pounds cash in hand if you tell her she’s the one who did this.”

Then he asked me if I’d lend him twenty pounds. Ava spun around when I told him to fuck off.

“It was someone named Yuri,” Allegra said, taking the knife. She tried and failed to cut through her ankle ties.

“Yuri?” Ava looked to the rest of us for confirmation.

“Yuri,” Laura declared, hands patiently outheld for her turn with the knife. “Yes, it was him.” Xavier said the same, and so did I. Yuri, it was Yuri.

Most galling of all, he was right about using the name Přem. When we swore to this new name, “Yuri,” it must have sounded as if we were trying to populate the train with various baleful spirits. But I really don’t know. I keep trying to allow for the doubts Ava must have had, but I still think that in her place I would have listened to us and believed us, just believed us. I would’ve done that first and then got the details in due course.

Though as Laura later pointed out, even if Ava had believed us, what could she have done about it? She still couldn’t see the fucker. And she’d already written that trying to behave as if he was visible to her hadn’t worked at all.

Once all four of us were unbound, Laura hobbled over to the kitchen table for her walkie-talkie. After minutes of white noise, she asked Ava: “But where are they, the maintenance team?”

“They said something about going for a walk along the coast. Understandably, they didn’t like you kicking them off the train without telling them why.”

“OK, but. The entire maintenance team?”

“It’s a close-knit crew, Laura.”

First aid kits were fetched out of a cupboard, tea was drunk, and strategies were signalled with our eyes. From the lounge area, Yuri surveyed us with—well, the diving mask obscured his expression. But he gave a grunt of contentment. Plus, wetsuits reveal all: he had a hard-on.

Ava watched us too. She watched as we gingerly rotated our ankles and jiggled our fingers. She was no longer annoyed with us—in fact I think it’s not an understatement to say that she looked miserable.

The two mongooses followed Ava into her sleeping compartment. Allegra showed every sign of wanting to go with them . . . to the extent that she began to crawl in that direction on her hands and knees. But Xavier whispered to her that she should just wait for the maintenance team. And then Ava, not in bed after all, began to play “For Přemysl at Night.”

She played it differently; this time the notes were granular and we heard them as hordes. A furore in the soil that buried us alive. Still, we sank with our arms wrapped around each other. Allegra, Laura, Xavier, and me. The less Ava liked us as a “we,” the tighter our hold. After a couple of moments, Allegra said: “Ow.” There were several issues her “ow” could have been addressing, but her main one was that Laura’s walkie-talkie was digging into her back.

Ava stopped playing.

“What’s that? What are you whispering among yourselves?” she called out.

“Nothing, Ava. Sorry.”

A scratchy silence followed, and for a few minutes it seemed as if Ava was going to leave that silence exactly as it was. She put on a sleeping mask. I saw this reflected in the carriage window across from her cabin, and it struck me as ominous. I’m not sure I’m going to be able to articulate reasons . . .

Partly it was Ava’s expression. The grim line her mouth was set in as she pulled the silk down over her closed eyelids. Partly it was Yuri’s reaction from his ringside seat, the way he rubbed his hands together. After about a minute just sitting quietly with her hands on her thighs, Ava elevated her arms and played from memory, beginning all over again.

A jumble of inner and outer matters followed: The clack of the exterior door as maintenance team members tried to access the carriage from the platform. Ava concluding her performance and walking blindfolded through our midst as we struggled upright, too timid to satisfy our craving to catch at her clothing. With the exception of Laura, we murmured, “Beautiful . . . Ava, that was really beautiful . . .” I remember wondering, mid-grovel, why we were being like this, but from this point in time I think we already knew what had just happened and were hoping against hope that it could be remedied.

The maintenance team redoubled their knocking efforts, but Ava stopped halfway to the exterior door and turned in our direction. “Guys?” she said. Her hands went to the sleeping mask, then she scowled. “What now? They ran off while I was playing?”

“Ms. Kapoor,” Laura said, in a very loud and very firm voice. “We were here listening, Ms. Kapoor. I assure you I would have run away if I had the strength.”

“Rude,” Ava said. “So fucking rude.”

We relaxed. Until she called out to us again. “Guys? Seriously? I’m giving you three seconds to answer me. I don’t feel like playing hide-and-seek right now. Three . . .”

Yuri sniggered. “Ah, so this is how it happens,” he said, getting up and walking over to Ava. He turned so he was facing us, just as Ava was.

“Two,” Ava said.

We bellowed in unison, at the top of our lungs:

“AVAAAAAAAAA . . .”

“MS. KAAAAAPOOOOOOOOR . . .”

Allegra Yu didn’t join us. She looked out of the window, in a trance, as if we were already on our way home.

“One.”

Ava lifted the sleep mask, and Yuri said: “Ciao, bambini. You’re all screwed.” That was the last we saw or heard of him. A very literal “missed his departure whilst blinking” situation.

We shouted and waved (somewhat feebly) as Ava walked backward, checking her sleeping compartment. Two sleeping mongooses in there, but that was all. She checked Laura’s compartment, and Allegra’s, even moving the pillows around on the beds. Several times her eyes met ours directly, but no, no sign of recognition, nothing.

“For fuck’s sake, Ava . . .”

“AVA, PLEAAAAASE. Please!”

“Four years we’ve lived together, Ms. Kapoor. Four years.”

“I’d have heard it if they’d left . . . I’d have heard it, wouldn’t I?” she said, flopping down on the ground next to Allegra.

Silently, Allegra turned to her. They almost bumped noses. Silently, Allegra took in Ava’s face, her gaze falling like a wave of honey. A leave-taking look. Ava kissed her; then, as the pounding at the platform door grew frantic, she jumped up to let the maintenance team in.

Allegra stood up too: “Wh—Ava? You can—?”

Ava gave her the smile. The really very wonderful smile. “I can what?”

She could, and she did. She’d unseen us. But not Allegra.

Why didn’t I (or Laura, or Xavier) force bodily contact? Why didn’t one of us tap Ava on the shoulder, for instance, or stand in her path and insist that she take notice of us? We didn’t dare to. As for why we didn’t dare . . . you wouldn’t have either! Suppose your finger passed through the shoulder you’d presumed to tap, straight through, as if that shoulder were a mere hologram? Or suppose some overwhelmingly anti-magnetic sensation prevented your finger from descending onto the target shoulder? Let’s just suppose and suppose and suppose, and never find out for ourselves what life turns into after that decisive a failure to connect . . .

When The Lucky Day got going again, it blasted along the nighttime rails like a getaway train.

All the breakup advice I’ve read advocates drawing boundaries of your own. At some point you have to become as unavailable to your rejecter as they are to you. So here are my red lines:

No thinking of the infirmary car that was in the very last carriage, beyond the bazaar carriage. I’m discarding the memory of lying in there that very night with Xavier and Laura and Allegra, lying there two by two, drinking in the ether of that antiseptic haven and trying not to think about what’s going to happen to us now that we’d been unseen. Let’s forget the way Allegra offered all three of us a shoulder to cry on but we were too bitter to take her up on it. I won’t say which one of us told her, “This isn’t something you have to worry about, Allegra. Yet.” There’s no use revisiting Allegra’s semi-elated expression as she agreed with us regarding the “yet” bit; I won’t wonder whether she considered that uncertainty a perk.

Nor do I want to talk about how Ava came into the Stojaspal inheritance the very next day. Conjecture’s almost too tempting. If I gave in, my guess would be that the question of Karel Stojaspal’s son wasn’t even raised. I’d wager that the sanity trap lay in Ava’s own raising of the question. Since she didn’t, everything quietly continued as she perceived it. That is, as if this Přem person had never been.

And I certainly don’t want to bitch about Árpád Montague XXX and the slightly apologetic yet maximally dedicated way he pretended to unsee us. He only did it because Chela did. I’m enclosing the last time I saw Árpád in a square of fat red lines . . .

It was in the infirmary carriage. Ava had just visited Allegra with a care package: chicken soup, a pair of fresh white trainers, etc. We, the soupless and white trainer–less, had glared and glowered throughout this visit, to very little effect aside from dispelling surplus feeling. You always imagine that the things said about you behind your back will have some intensity to them, but Ava spoke so airily of our departure that it was highly unsatisfactory to hear ourselves talked about. The mongooses were in attendance; apparently respects must be paid to Ava’s favourite . . . and Árpád gave me a single backward glance as they were leaving the carriage. One look before running to catch up with Chela Kapoor. Whipped. Whipped! Atrociously so.