NOOR TEXTED that he was considering taking Aisha’s laptop away until the Füst case died down. She seemed to have spent the entire evening engaged in a long and rambling argument with her friends via six-way video call. She attacked Füst’s reputation, defended it, then attacked again, berated the friends who’d gone off him for their faithlessness, cursed the infinite stupidity of his unchanged fans and threatened to put on a Füst mask and beat them up to see how they liked it. She’d skipped dinner again and was running a temperature. When was I coming home?
Two firsts: being reluctant to leave Ched’s house and being reluctant to enter my own. I said I’d been at the gym. Ched does have a home gymnasium; he works out a lot, his body being his back-up plan in case he gets ugly again. But I don’t know why I lied.
—
AISHA WILL GET over this. But what of her tails and her plant-growing projects and the remarkably potent gin she was perfecting? “That gin was going to make us richer than an entire network of 1920s bootleggers,” I said, to see if that wouldn’t rouse her. She likes money. Now it seems she liked it because she could exchange it for Matyas Füst–related items. What worries Noor is that three of Aisha’s graven images fell off their pedestals at once: him, me, and Matyas Füst. The girls seemed to pity our weakness. Noor’s brusque talk of judicial process and media treatment. My awkward, awkward silence. Is it really bad that the girls have found us out, though? I never projected strength. Not on purpose, anyway.
“What are you really worrying about, Noor?”
He shuffled papers into his briefcase, rearranged his pens, straightened his tie. “It just . . . I think I’ve lost them. Just like that, overnight. Their mother says they’re fine with her . . .”
I loosened the knot of his tie a little, just a little. It still looked neat, so he couldn’t complain.
“Nah. I don’t even know them as well as you do and I can tell they’re just thinking.” A casual overview of all their main emotional attachments reveals that Noor and his ex have been better parents than they realize; while Day and Aisha appreciate strength, lack of it isn’t a deal breaker in the matter of whether they respect a person or not.
—
ALL WAS QUIET on the Matyas Füst front for a few months; I kept an eye on that situation (among others) and read that the reporters who managed to get a sound bite out of Füst all got the same one. He was completing his anger management therapy and was still preparing his apology. This sound bite was paired with another obtained from YouTube woman: Looking forward to it.
It was around that time Ched and I started talking again—not often, but enough. I’d be entering or leaving the House of Locks, the phone would ring, and it would be Ched. He described his current existence as a cycle of drills and chores, and was so tired he’d fall asleep mid-sentence. It was good to speak to him, not just because it was him but because he didn’t know the first thing about the incident that had rocked my household. When I gave him a brief outline he said: “Oh, you know the apology Füst’s preparing is going to be a song, right? And that song is going to become an anthem of repentance. It’s probably going to be called ‘Dress Made of Needles.’”
“Nice—I’ll go down to the betting shop tomorrow.”
There was something else I wanted to talk about while I had him on the line. When I answered his phone calls he needed half a second to adjust his greeting, and it sounded as if he was disappointed that I was the one who’d answered. Well, disappointed is too strong a word. It was more as if I wasn’t his first preference. Which was fine, except that I’m the only other person who has keys to his house. His mum’s been trying to get a set for years without success.
“So what’s going on? You met someone?”
“Not sure,” he said. “I . . . think so.”
“And this person has keys?”
After a lot more questioning he eventually confessed that he hadn’t given a set of keys to anybody else and had never actually met this woman in person, but was fairly sure that she had keys because she sometimes answered the phone when he called. When he said that I adjusted my position so that I was able to watch all the open doors and I said: “That’s wonderful, Ched. I’m really happy for you.”
“Don’t overreact,” he said. “She’s a nice voice at the moment, nothing more. Like one of the ones that sing. Except that she just talks.”
“Did you ask her how she got in?”
“Of course.”
“Well, what did she say?”
“She encouraged me to think of a better question.”
I glared at Boudicca; no wonder she’d been filling out lately. “Maybe she feeds your fish too.”
“Haha, maybe. But while we’re talking about this, could you do me a favor? I don’t think she wants to be seen, so if you let yourself in and happen to notice that she’s around just leave immediately, OK?”
“OK, Ched. No problem.”
Just another day in the lives of two boys from Bezin. Still, I checked every room in Ched’s wing of the house before I left. His alarm system’s in working order and none of his valuables have moved. For now.
—
CHED’S PHONE GIRLFRIEND earned me the first direct smile I’d got from Aisha in weeks. “You stupid boys,” she said, lovingly. A string of text messages appeared on her phone and her smile vanished as if it had never been.