The train doors shut while I was rescuing my dumplings. The bottom of the takeaway bag had given way, and I caught the carton against my stomach with both hands, which meant I had no hand left to appeal to the driver. Through the glass, a seated woman watched me balance two tubs of sauce on top.
She gave me a thumbs-up. Then she was gone.
"Good catch," said someone behind me.
Three punks occupied the bench beneath the station clock. The one who'd spoken had black hair, a dark visor pushed up on her head, and boots that extended well into the path of commuters. Her pink-haired friend moved a pair of enormous headphones off her ears. The third, blue-haired under a knitted beanie, a mask over her nose and mouth, took her backpack off the bench.
I sat before anyone could change their mind.
"Is that the family box?" the pink-haired one asked.
"It was cheaper than two singles."
"How many people?"
"Just me. But over time."
She leaned forward to look. The carton held twelve dumplings, a small mountain of noodles, and two spring rolls sweating through their paper sleeves. It had been a poor day, and I had intended to improve quite a lot of it at once.
The blue-haired one lowered her mask. "You need another bag. I've got one."
She unpacked a cable, a paperback swollen with bookmarks, and a clean shopping bag from her backpack. While I transferred the carton, the woman in the visor reached toward a spring roll and stopped with her fingers a courteous inch away.
"Cabbage?"
"I hope so."
"Would you swap one for a peach?"
She produced a bruised peach from the deep pocket of her coat. We examined it together.
"You can just have the spring roll," I said. "There's enough."
The peach went into my hand anyway, warm from her pocket. Her friend took four folded napkins from a headphone case. Blue Hair had a spare fork, still in its wrapper. Within a minute the carton lay open between us, on the lid balanced across two knees, and the next train was something we would consider when it came.
Pink Hair wanted the mushroom dumplings. I wanted the crispest ones. Visor wanted everyone to try dipping a spring roll in both sauces at once, but she had used hers up demonstrating the wrong proportions. Blue Hair divided the second roll with the edge of a fork and gave her a piece.
"Smaller bites this time."
"You make experimentation sound so shabby."
"It's on your coat."
She looked down and found a length of cabbage hanging from a patch on her lapel. I laughed with a dumpling in my mouth. Pink Hair immediately passed me a napkin without taking her eyes off the cabbage.
Visor removed the cabbage and, in revenge, brought up my catch at the train doors. There are people who let you recover from that sort of thing, and people who begin telling you what it looked like. These were the second kind. By the time the next train arrived, I was defending the quality of my catch, using a spring-roll sleeve to represent the train.
"That's your one," said Blue Hair.
"There'll be another."
Visor lifted her boots so the departing passengers could get past. I continued my demonstration.
They were going to hear a band in a cellar two stops east. Pink Hair had bought the tickets, and neither of her friends had listened to the album she'd sent them. This came out because I asked whether the drummer was any good.
"Fantastic," said Visor.
"There isn't a drummer," Pink Hair said.
"Then I'm excited to hear what they've done with the vacancy."
Pink Hair looked at Blue Hair, who was occupied with a particularly long noodle.
"You too?"
"I started it."
"Which track?"
"The first one."
"That's eleven seconds of someone opening a door."
"I thought my phone was broken."
Pink Hair put her fork down. "I've told you about this band all week."
"I remember," said Visor. "You were very happy."
"I wanted you to hear it."
That quietened us. A train came in on the opposite side of the island platform, filling the station with brake dust and warm air. Pink Hair watched people get off. I picked a mushroom dumpling out of the box and put it on her napkin.
"Can I?" I asked, pointing to her headphones.
She handed them over. Visor leaned across me, demanding an ear, and we ended up with our heads pressed together inside the band, listening through one cushion each.
The song began with someone singing very softly over a plucked string. Then another voice entered, and another. There was no drum. The pulse came from breaths, shoes against boards, a bow catching roughly on its return. I stopped smiling for Pink Hair's benefit and listened.
When the chorus began, Visor drew away. "Oh," she said.
Pink Hair took the headphones back and watched her.
"Play that bit again," Visor said.
We listened in pairs. Blue Hair held her side away from her ear at first, then let it settle. Pink Hair sang along under her breath, badly enough that I finally understood why the recording had so many singers. She needed every one of them.
The third train we let go contained a man from my office. I crouched behind Visor's shoulder until he had passed. There was nothing wrong with what I was doing, but I didn't want to spend tomorrow explaining why I'd been hiding from him.
Blue Hair poured tea from a flask into its lid. As I reached across for the headphones again, she went still, two fingers pressed beside her nose. Her eyes tracked something above my elbow. Then she shifted the tea to the far end of the bench.
"What?" I asked.
"You might knock it over when you turn."
I made an exaggerated show of keeping my elbows tucked in. She drank. Moments later Visor began doing the part of the song that sounded like a cupboard collapsing, I swung around to see her, and my elbow swept the empty patch of bench.
Blue Hair held up the flask lid.
"You've eaten with her before," I said.
"Quite a lot."
It was not until much later that I remembered she had been looking above my elbow, where it had yet to be.
The peach was excellent under the bruise. I cut it with the little wooden knife from the takeaway and caught the juice in an empty sauce tub. We had reached the stage of a meal at which people went on eating because the food was there and because stopping would mean deciding where to go. The station clock advanced. Pink Hair wrote the band name on my phone, then texted herself from it so she could send me a recording that wasn't on the official album.
A young man in white temple clothes approached the bench. He looked from one woman to the next, smiled in a startled way, and lifted his phone.
"Please don't," Blue Hair said.
He lowered it at once, but there had already been a click.
"Sorry. It's just, I thought you were—"
"We're eating," said Pink Hair.
He bowed, retreating into the people waiting for the westbound service. Visor watched him type with both thumbs.
"Well," she said. "That'll get around."
I assumed they were in a band themselves. It explained the clothes, their obscure taste, and the fact that all three could sit for an hour on a station bench without once appearing to wonder whether they ought to be doing something useful.
"Does that happen often?"
"Being recognized?" Pink Hair asked. "Sometimes. Having a nice lunch, less often."
"It's six o'clock."
"We started late."
Visor nudged the last dumpling toward me. "You paid."
Blue Hair had been looking at it. I cut it in half, although I made a mess of the job and most of the filling ended up on her side. She quietly exchanged the halves.
The westbound train arrived eight minutes later. A woman in a long red coat stepped out carrying a phone and a bouquet of white lilies. Behind her came a broad man in a gold suit, ducking his head beneath the door although he could have cleared it easily.
People on the platform made room. A passenger touched two fingers to his wedding ring and bowed to the woman. She paused when he asked for a blessing. I saw her take his hand, breathe across the ring, and draw a red spark out of her own breath. It circled his finger once before sinking into the metal.
I had seen her face carved above marriage shrines. The carvings left out the impatient crease between her eyebrows.
The man in gold was easier to recognize. His face appeared on the posters for the autumn revels, whose opening he proclaimed each year from the steps of his temple. He caught a little silver cup tossed by a delighted worshipper, drank from it, and returned it across the crowd. When he laughed, the echo kept laughing after him in three different voices.
I wiped my hands on my trousers and stood up.
"Clotho," said the goddess, looking at the visor. Her eyes moved to the headphones. "Lachesis." Then to the beanie. "Atropos."
The three women looked up from my takeaway. The Fates. My mother still kept their little altar beside her bed, and paid for readings by people these three had authorized to look ahead. In the portraits they had considerably less hair dye.
I sat down again.
"You haven't answered an invitation in forty-three years," the goddess said.
Clotho lowered her visor over her eyes. "Was it forty-three?"
"I counted."
The god in gold put a hand on the bench back and leaned over my shoulder. He smelled of oranges and hot stage lights.
"And yet here you are. All three of you. With—" He waited.
I gave him my name. He repeated it, getting the middle sound wrong, and Lachesis corrected him.
The goddess looked directly at me. For a moment I understood the young man with his phone. I wanted some evidence of this to carry home.
"What have you asked them?" she said.
"Whether the band had a drummer."
She waited for the rest.
"It doesn't."
The god's hand tightened on the bench as he began to laugh. His echo set off a second burst farther down the platform. Atropos stacked the empty tubs inside the carton and packed it into the shopping bag.
"It's a concert," Lachesis said. "We have tickets."
"You attend concerts?" The goddess's voice had dropped.
"We attend yours," said Lachesis. "At the temple. Quite often."
"You could have told me you were there."
Lachesis looked down at her headphones. "You'd have made a fuss."
The goddess looked at the lilies in her hand. Someone had tied their stems with a red ribbon, and one bloom had been crushed against her sleeve. Whatever I'd expected gods to quarrel about, it hadn't been this.
"I have offered you a place at my table every spring," she said.
Clotho pushed her visor up again. "With a list of questions under every plate."
"Last spring there was one question."
"It had parts," Atropos said.
The god straightened. "I said you were trying too hard."
"You sent a choir to their house."
"It was a very small choir."
Lachesis checked her phone. The music was to start at half past, but getting up now would mean walking out on two gods in the middle of a complaint. I had stayed at parties considerably worse than our lunch for the same reason, because the host was standing between me and my coat.
"Have they looked at your future?" the goddess asked me.
Atropos answered before I could. "About three seconds of it. For the tea."
"Only that?"
"I don't spend a meal doing it."
The god perched on the arm of the bench beside me. "Then there must be something about you."
He said it warmly. I found myself straightening my shoulders.
Clotho saw. She took off the visor to clean it and hid most of her smile behind her sleeve.
The goddess asked about my family. The god asked what I did at night. I answered the second question first and made my evenings sound quite crowded.
"Friends round for dinner, that sort of thing. You should have seen us at my cousin's wedding."
He invited himself to our next dinner. It had been eleven months since the wedding, and we'd been promising to get together again ever since.
"I'll have to check with people," I said.
"Of course."
Lachesis leaned forward to catch Atropos's eye. Across the tracks, the eastbound display counted down toward the train they needed. The goddess turned her body, gently but completely excluding that small conference.
"You were saying about your mother?"
I could have remained there for hours. They would have let me. Behind the goddess, Lachesis was winding her headphone cable around fingers that had gone white at the tips.
"We're going to miss it," she said.
The god waved toward the opposite track. "There's your train coming. We'll hear the rest on board."
"You want to come to the concert?" Lachesis asked.
"If our new friend is coming."
The prospect delighted me for perhaps two seconds. Then I imagined that little cellar with two gods in its front row and Lachesis unable to listen because everyone was watching her listen.
"I was going west," I said. "There's one in four minutes. You could come with me."
Both gods turned. Clotho lowered the hand holding her visor.
"I'll tell you everything we talked about," I went on. "You can have me to yourselves."
"Well!" said the god. "An exclusive account."
It hadn't sounded so bad while I was thinking it. The goddess was studying me now, and I had to keep my face arranged as if our lunch contained anything she wanted to know. Atropos stood, lifted the carton out of her shopping bag, and took our rubbish to the bin beside the stairs.
Clotho rose too. "We should see you aboard."
She picked up the empty bag and offered me her other hand. Her palm was sticky with peach juice. When I leaned close she said, "Is this on purpose?"
"I think so."
"Good. They ask a lot of questions."
She gave my hand a squeeze and left me holding the empty shopping bag.
We let the eastbound service leave without us. Atropos returned from the bin and spoke quietly to Lachesis; they looked toward the staircase, which led to the street. The cellar was two stops away, but walkable. I had come past it before lunch. I could have told the gods where it was, if anyone had asked.
Instead I took them along the westbound side to the far end of the platform. Atropos waited beside the bench with Lachesis. Clotho accompanied us, entertaining the god with an account of the spring-roll demonstration. He wanted the proportions. She gave him several alternatives and recommended against all of them.
When the train came, the last carriage had six empty seats together. I stepped inside and moved past the pole to the window. The god followed, then the goddess. Her coat caught on the corner of a seat; Clotho, still on the platform, leaned through the doorway to free it.
"Come in," the goddess said.
"I promised to send you off properly."
Clotho stepped back and waved. Farther along the platform, Atropos lifted her hand, saw me watching through the window, and took Lachesis toward the stairs. Lachesis turned once. I held up the shopping bag to her, remembered it was Atropos's rather than hers, and held it up anyway.
The warning sounded. The goddess rose, but the door was already closing in front of her. Clotho had both palms against the glass. She looked so pleased with me that I began smiling back before I remembered who was in the carriage.
We moved.
For several seconds the goddess watched the empty platform run past. Then she turned around.
"You arranged that."
The god looked from her to me. His grin diminished.
"They wanted to hear the band," I said.
"And you offered to tell us everything."
"I can. There's quite a lot about dumplings."
She remained standing. The lilies trembled in her hand, and I could see the effort she was making not to crush the stems. I had been rude to someone who'd brought flowers, and the fact that she was a goddess made that less comfortable in several directions.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I did mean to get you away from them. I hadn't thought much beyond that."
"Clearly."
The god's laugh started and stopped at her look. He tugged down his waistcoat. Outside the window, signal lights flicked past one by one.
"Forty-three years," she said, sitting at last. "I would have taken an answer."
"I can't answer for them."
"I know that."
We traveled a considerable distance in silence. A boy farther down the carriage removed one earbud and recognized the god. Before he could speak, the god put a finger to his lips. The boy kept his phone in his pocket.
At the next stop, the goddess got up. I thought she was leaving. Instead she moved to the seat opposite me, laid the flowers across her knees, and waited until the doors had closed.
"This band of theirs," she said. "The one with no drummer. What do they sound like?"
I couldn't have described them. I told her instead what I had heard on the bench: that Lachesis had talked about them all week, that her friends hadn't listened to the album she'd sent them, and that she had wanted them to hear it. Then I told her about the headphones, and she asked which song. I had to bring it up on my phone. For a minute she listened through its small speaker, her head inclined and the god leaning sideways to hear.
"The second voice," she said. "That boy sang in my temple."
"Is he good?"
"He was very young. He wanted everything loud."
We listened to the chorus. Her thumb beat once against a lily stem.
"He's learned something."
The god wanted to hear the opening again. He could make a whole train hear it from his throat, he said, and demonstrated four soft notes, each carrying a different voice. The goddess told him to let the boy finish. He did.
By the fourth stop, I had explained my employment, my missed train, and the special offer at the takeaway. The god had admitted that his own choir had stood outside the Fates' house for nine hours, which struck me as rather worse than the goddess's invitations.
"They could have opened a window," he said.
"What were you singing?" she asked.
He named a hymn. She closed her eyes.
"The long one?"
"It has a splendid final verse."
"Did you reach it?" I asked.
He considered. "No."
My phone vibrated. Lachesis had sent a photograph: three heads packed into the corner of a dim room, Clotho's visor reflecting a strip of stage light. Atropos had her mask down and a drink halfway to her mouth. Behind them someone was tuning a many-stringed instrument. The message said, Made it. Keep the bag till next time.
I turned the screen so the gods could see. The goddess looked for a long moment before returning to the lilies.
"Don't tell them I asked about the song," she said.
I nodded and put the phone away.
We were pulling into my stop. I had left home that morning with the intention of coming back early, eating alone, and finding something to watch. I could still go home and find something to watch. My apartment was three streets away. The empty shopping bag lay across my knees.
The doors opened. The god moved his legs to let me pass.
"Is this you?"
"Yes."
Across from me the goddess was easing the crushed lily out of the bouquet. She freed it without snapping the stem, then looked up.
"You were going to tell us about this wedding," she said. "Eleven months ago, wasn't it?"
I stayed in my seat.
"I hadn't told you it was eleven months ago."
"I'm the one who married them."
The god stretched his legs out again as the doors began to close. "Oh, now you must tell us."