“What voucher?” I asked the camera.
Aisha held up a finger, rummaged in her schoolbag and held up a voucher I’d given her on her last birthday, the last of a booklet of six. There in my own handwriting were the words: This voucher entitles you to one completely fair and wrath-free hearing.
“Ahhhhhh,” I said, banging my chest, trying to open up some space in there. “OK, OK, I’m ready.”
“I used your emergency debit card,” Aisha said. “You know Dad always wants to know why I’m like this and all I can say is I’m sorry I am. But I think—no, I’m sure, I’m sure, that if I just look him in the eye . . . I know it’s a lot of money. I didn’t really think the bid would go through. I didn’t know you had that much on there! But please understand. I will pay you back. I’m going to get a job, and I’m going to make some stuff and sell a lot of it.”
“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK.” My heartbeat was returning to normal. Aisha had been operating on the principle that I wouldn’t want to be that guy who embarrasses himself by withdrawing a ten-thousand-pound donation he made to an enormously deserving cause. But I am that guy, so it’s fine for me to do that.
—
NOOR’S EX-WIFE came over for coffee and spoke of seeking psychiatric assistance for Aisha, particularly in the light of Day’s discovery that Aisha had made a purchase from her laptop: a liter of almost pure sulfuric acid—96 percent. The three of us sat silently with our coffee cups, picturing Aisha and Füst alone in some garland-bedecked bower, Füst singing his heart out, maybe even singing his latest hit, “Dress Made of Needles” . . . then as the last notes of the song died out, Aisha uncapped the bottle of acid hidden beneath her dress and let fly. For about a week Noor couldn’t look at Aisha without shouting: “What are you?”
All we’d hear from Aisha was the bitter laugh, and I tried to soothe her by saying, “He’s been forgiven, Aish. Everyone else has forgiven him,” but I stopped that because there was a look that replaced her laughter, and that look haunted me.
It was Ched’s opinion that it might have been all right if the apology had been something that Aisha could consider real, but now this thing wouldn’t end unless she was able to take or witness vengeance upon Matyas Füst. Tyche agreed, but with a slight modification: Aisha would be able to move on if Matyas Füst was able to deliver a sincere apology for what he’d done. “At least . . . that’s how it would be for me,” Tyche added, twirling her wedding ring around her finger. “I mean, the galling thing about ‘Dress Made of Needles’ is that as a piece of music it’s fine, but as an apology it takes the piss. But you know what, at least we got a meaningful song out of it, at least he wrote this good song because of her . . .”
The constellation on Tyche’s wrist was definitely a tattoo that day and her breeziness was macabre. I thought for a long time, or what felt like a long time, anyway, before I asked her if there was anything she could do for Aisha.
“Let me talk to her,” Tyche said.
I wasn’t allowed to listen to their conversation, but I know that it concerned the invocation of a goddess and Tyche was very well prepared for it, arrived at our house wearing an elegant black suit and carrying a portfolio full of images and diagrams that she and Aisha pored over at length.
“Just FYI, we decided on Hecate,” Tyche said on her way out.
“Yeah? Who she?”
“Oh, nobody you need to worry about . . .”
“Come on, let me have the basics.”
“Well . . . she keeps an eye on big journeys from the interior to the exterior, or vice versa. She’s there for the step that takes you from one state to another. She’s someone you see at crossroads, for instance. Well, you sort of see her but don’t register what you’ve seen until it’s too late to go back. She holds three keys . . . some say they’re keys to the underworld, others that they’re access to the past, present, and future. And—ah, you’re zoning out on me . . .”
Tyche struck and held a warlike pose in the doorway.
“Picture the image of me fixed in this doorway, and also in every other doorway you pass, sometimes three-dimensional and sometimes vaporous, whatever I feel like being at the moment you try to get past me,” she said. “Imagine not being able to stop me from coming in, imagine not being able to cast me out because I own all thresholds. As an additional bonus, imagine me with three faces. That’s who we’re sending to have a little chat with Matyas Füst.”
“Oh! Why didn’t you just lead with that instead of the benevolent stuff? But listen, hang on, Tyche, is that not a bit much—”
She was already gone.
—
SUMMER HAS COME BACK around, and with only a week until Ched returns from military service, I write this from a bench beside Ched’s water fountain at the House of Locks. The woman with the voice he likes came in while I was feeding Boudicca, so I left.
Anyway, events of recent months, presented without comment, for who am I to comment after all?