bespoke camel coat whose unadjusted hems pooled around his feet, silk pyjamas and flip-flops.
“I’m sorry”, Theo had mumbled.
A slight shrug. “Stuff happens. What’ll you do now?”
Theo couldn’t stop his face cracking into a jagged grin. “That,” he’d said, “is a very good question.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll fix everything.” And, for a fraction of a second, he’d believed it. Except nobody could fix it for the man who’d just turned an entire Alp into a cloud of fine dust, currently grounding all air traffic from Istanbul to Reykjavik. “It may take a little time, but I’ll see to it, don’t you worry.”
Then the taxi had taken him away, and now Pieter was dead. The world’s shortest giant was gone for ever, and that – well, the things that had happened to Theo Bernstein since he left Leiden had been annoying, verging on tiresome, but Pieter’s death was bad.
He looked down at the letter;
– left you the sum of five thousand US dollars and the contents of his safe deposit box.
Theo never remembered his dreams, even the ones with cucumbers; so, when he woke up on the train to Leiden with a crick in his neck and a mouth that tasted slightly worse then the guts trolley smelt, he was amazed to find that there were scenes and images in his head. It was like finding a stranger in his bath.
The dream, however, was no big deal; in fact, it had been so dull he could remember yawning, stretching, vainly fighting the unbearable heaviness of his eyelids, and waking up. He’d been in the audience at one of those conferences he’d always found an excuse for not going to. Pieter van Goyen was up on the stage, back turned, writing equations on a huge blackboard. The maths didn’t work, but Pieter didn’t seem aware of it; he carried on chalking and scribbling until he reached the end, whereupon he scrawled x = 7 and triple underlined it with a great flourish, and everybody started to applaud. But x didn’t = 7; a ten-year-old could’ve pointed out the flaws in the algebra. Still, the audience were on their feet, a full-blown standing ovation, and Theo realised he was the only one still sitting down. He shifted uncomfortably, and then he was sitting in the same seat in the same auditorium, next to the same thin woman with glasses and the same tall, bald man, and Pieter was up on the stage writing out more equations, but it was a year later. The equations didn’t work this time, either; but everybody seemed so engrossed in the proceedings that he didn’t dare say anything. Instead, he covered his face with his hand, and that was when his eyelids started to droop, and the clacking of Pieter’s chalk blurred into a raindrops-on-roof soothing lullaby, and he’d yawned and stretched, and –
Woken up on the train, feeling as though he’d been lynched twice by an apprentice hangman. His left foot had gone to sleep, and so had his right hand. He blinked and licked his lips, and noticed that the seat next to him, which had been empty for the last four hours, was now occupied. Furthermore, his right hand (the invisible one) had gone numb because it was wedged between the armrest and the thigh of the new occupant, a pretty girl in her early twenties.
Oh, he thought.
It wasn’t easy to think with his head full of sleep, but he had a stab at it. Apologising and explaining – no, probably not. Gently easing his hand away could well cause more problems than it solved. He’d almost decided on standing up as quickly and as sharply as he could and walking very fast to the next compartment, until he realised that he couldn’t do that, not with a left foot he couldn’t feel any sensation in. That just left staying perfectly still and pretending he was still asleep; an unsatisfying plan, but the best he could think of under the circumstances. Unfortunately, before he could close his eyes and do the deep, regular breathing, the girl looked up from her book and smiled at him.
“Hi,” she said.
It’s like this, he rehearsed. My right arm’s invisible, because of an industrial accident, and you got in after I fell asleep, and my right hand – no, not really. “Hi,” he sort of gurgled.
“You were fast asleep,” she said. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.”
“What? Oh, no, not at all.” He tried to sit up a bit straighter, but his