What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

  “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?

  The day after Tyche and Aisha had their meeting, a black-bordered notice appeared in one of the national newspapers:

  R.I.P. MATYAS FÜST,

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY MATYAS FÜST AND GOOD LUCK.

  YOUR REBIRTH WILL BE A DIFFICULT ONE.

  Naturally a lot of questions were asked, since Matyas Füst was alive and, at that time, well. It proved impossible to discover who was responsible for the notice.

  The day after the notice appeared Matyas Füst phoned into a five p.m. radio show that was popular with commuters all over the country and announced that he’d like to apologize for his apology, which had come more from his head than his heart. He also asked that his fans cease their verbal abuse of the victim of his attack, since she had “been through a lot” and hadn’t asked for a penny in compensation beyond their original transaction. The hosts of the radio show had to ask him to repeat his declarations of remorse several times because his weeping made them unintelligible.

  About a week after that, Füst interrupted his performance on the live taping of a variety show to state that he was being “hounded” and that he feared for his life, that “they” pricked him with needles and slammed his hands in doors. When members of the audience pointed out that he was uninjured he appeared confused and said that it had only happened “inside where no one could see.” Before the broadcast was halted he also managed to say that he believed that in attacking the woman he’d met on the street he’d been following a bad example set by his father, who had frequently beaten his mother in front of him. His parents issued a joint denial that basically boiled down to: We have no idea why he’s saying these things but it’s making us sad. Füst’s fiancée moved out of his house again with talk of plans to “focus on her career” . . . that was funny, and rather sweet . . . if there was ever anybody born focused on her career it was this prima ballerina, but her statement suggested she thought it didn’t show. As for her ex-fiancé, a few close members of his family moved into his home, “to look after him.” The close family members were unable to prevent him from phoning into radio shows and appearing on breakfast TV to apologize for his previous apologies and make further apologies. He ended his most recent TV appearance with the reflection that quality was probably better than quantity and that he’d take his time to find a genuine expression of his thoughts. He’d been told that the key to a real apology was the identification of one’s real mistake. He hoped to be able to do that soon.

  Health-care professionals were reported to have joined the close family members surrounding Füst at his home, but he escaped them all and was reported missing for six months.

  Füst was found to have been sleeping rough all winter—a very hard winter, so much surprise was expressed that he’d lived through it. He gave one interview, to a reputable chronicle of paranormal phenomena. I think he intended for the interview to dispel the rumors of his insanity but it had the opposite effect. Especially when he spoke about “them.” “They” demanded that he apologize and then called his apologies glib. He said that “they” were three women and yet “they” were one, and that one of them took his pain away so that the others could return it to him and so it went on. He said he should have died during the winter but it pleased “them” to keep him alive in or
der for him to learn what he could say or do to keep them off. If there was anybody who knew how to convince this woman that he was sorry, Matyas Füst begged to know that secret at any price.

  Aisha may have abandoned tails for good, but allheal plants are flowering in her window box, she’s working on reducing the aphrodisiac effect of an otherwise very convenient headache cure, and she’s looking forward to Matyas Füst’s forthcoming book, An Outcast’s Apology. She reckons Füst is getting closer to identifying his mistake, and says he should keep trying.

  is your blood as red as this?

  I.

  (NO)

  YOU ALWAYS SAID, Myrna Semyonova, that we weren’t right for each other. And it always made my heart sink when you said that, but my answer was always: You’re wrong. I’ll show you. I’ll show you. I’ve got something that other lovers would give a great deal to possess: a perfect memory of the very first time I saw you. I was fifteen, and my handsome, laconic eighteen-year-old brother burned brightest among my heroes. I followed him everywhere—well, he sometimes managed to escape me, but most of the time he didn’t make too much of an effort. That’s Arjun’s gift; never trying too hard, always doing just enough. Somehow he knew how to be with people, when to make eye contact and when to gaze thoughtfully into the distance, how to prove that you’re paying attention to what you’re being told. It was Jyoti’s breaking up with him that improved his people skills. For three years Jyoti had been warning him and warning him about his tendency not to listen to her, or to anyone. Don’t you ever think that one day you might miss something really important, Arjun, she’d say. Something that someone can only say one time? He tried to focus. Well, he claimed that he was trying, but he still tuned out. If Jyoti was talking, then he’d gaze adoringly at her but not hear a word, and with everyone else he’d just fall silent and then insert a generic comment into the space left for him to speak in. God knows where his mind used to go.

  One day Jyoti met up with him at the café down the road for a make-or-break conversation. She had a favor to ask him, she said, and if he didn’t at least consider doing it then there was no point in their being together. Jyoti, you have my full attention, he said immediately. Tell me—I’m listening. Fifteen minutes later, she checked her watch, kissed him on the cheek, and left the café beaming. She was late to meet a friend, but he’d agreed to do her the big favor she’d asked for. Only he had no idea what the favor was supposed to be. She’d lost him about four words in.

  He asked a woman sitting nearby if she’d overheard the conversation, and if she could by any chance tell him what had been asked of him, but the woman was elderly and said: “Sorry love, I’m a bit hard of hearing nowadays.”

  A couple on the other side of him categorically denied having heard anything, even after he told them the future of his relationship depended on it—this was England after all, where minding one’s own business is a form of civil religion. So all he could do was wait for Jyoti’s furious I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU phone call, and vow to win her love again one day, when he’d become a better man. I was learning a lot from Arjun. And I had lots more to learn. In those days when anyone spoke to me I became a flustered echo, scrambling up the words they’d said to me and then returning them as fast as I could. Blame it on growing pains, or on the ghost I shared my bedroom with.

  —

  MYRNA, BEFORE YOU I could only really talk to my brother and the ghost. There was something disorganized about the way she spoke that rubbed off on me. Plus she (the ghost) had warned me that the minute I grew up I wouldn’t be able to see her anymore. “How will I know when I’ve grown up?” When I started using words I didn’t really know the meaning of, she said. I said I did that already, and she said yes but I worried about it and grown-ups didn’t. (Of course I’m paraphrasing her; when I think back on her syntax it’s like hearing a song played backward.) So then there’s this trepidation that you’re going to suddenly find yourself having a conversation that turns you into a grown-up, a conversation that stops you being able to see things and people that are actually there. My brother knew about the ghost, but described her as an alarmist, said I needed to get out more and invited me to his friend Tim’s nineteenth birthday party. The party where I met you, Myrna.

  “You can be my date tonight if you like,” Arjun said.

  “Won’t people think it’s creepy?” I asked.

  “Nah . . . if anything females are into males who are nice to their verbally challenged little sisters,” he said. “Gives the impression of having a caring side and stuff like that.”

  “What a relief! I’d hate to come between you and the females.”

  “Don’t even worry about that, Radha. That’s never going to happen.” (And so on.)

  I know what it is to have a brother that people like talking to, so I brought a book just in case the evening took Arjun away from me. But he stuck with me, introduced me to the birthday boy, called upon his friends to observe the way I calmly matched him beer for beer, generally behaved in a way that made me feel as if I was something more than a stammering fly on the wall. Then a boy approached us—well, Arjun, really—a nondescript sort of boy, I’m surprised to say, since his hair was green. He had a look of rehearsal on his face, he was silently practicing sentences he’d prepared, and Arjun said to me quietly: “Wonder what this one’s after.”

  The boy, Joe, was Tim’s cousin.

  “Joe who goes to the puppet school?” Arjun asked.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Seen, seen,” Arjun said. “What you saying?”

  “Girls like you, don’t they?” Joe asked.

  Arjun lowered his eyelids and shrugged; if I’d been wearing sleeves I’d have laughed into one of them. Joe had a twenty-pound note, which he was willing to hand over to my brother right now if Arjun would go over to a certain girl, dance with her, talk to her, and appear to enjoy her company for a couple of hours. Once I realized what he was asking, I thought: Even Arjun will be lost for words this time. But my brother must’ve had similar requests before (can teenage boys really be so inhuman?) because he asked: “Is she really that butters? I haven’t seen any girl I’d rate below a seven tonight. A good night, I was thinking.”

  The boy had the good grace to blush. “No, she’s not that ugly. Just . . . not my type.”

  “Why did you even bring her then, if she’s not your type?” Arjun asked.

  “It was a dare,” Joe said, miserably. “I don’t usually do things like this—you can ask Tim—just believe me when I say I didn’t have much of a choice. I didn’t think she’d say yes. But she did.”

  “Mate . . . don’t pay people to hang out with her.”

  “I don’t know what else to do. She’s got to have a good time. She’s my headmaster’s daughter. I don’t think she’d get me expelled or anything—maybe she won’t even say anything to him. But she’s his daughter.”

  “Better safe than sorry,” my brother agreed. Myrna, by that point I was already looking around to see if I could spot you (what level of unattractiveness forces people to pay cash so as to be able to avoid having to look at it or speak to it?) and when Joe said that he’d been trying to talk to you but you just sat there reading your book, I searched all the harder.

  “What kind of person brings a book to a party,” Arjun said expressionlessly, without looking at me, but he gave a little nod that I interpreted as a suggestion that I seek this girl out.

  “What’s her name?” I asked. Joe told me. I found you half buried in a beanbag, pretending to read that dense textbook that takes all the fun out of puppeteering, the one your father swears by—Brambani’s War Between the Fingers and the Thumb. Curse stuffy old Brambani. Maybe his lessons are easier to digest when filtered through stubbornly unshed tears. You had a string of fairy lights wrapped around your neck. I sort of understood how that would be comforting, the lights around your neck. Sometimes I dream I’m falling, and it’s no
t so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I’m sick of it, but then a noose stops me short and I think, well, at least I’m not falling anymore. Clearly I hadn’t arrived in your life a moment too soon. You looked at me, and this is how I saw you, when first I saw you: I saw your eyes like flint arrows, and your chin set against the world, and I saw the curve of your lips, which is so beautiful that it’s almost illusory—your eyes freeze a person, but then the flickering flame of your mouth beckons.

  Thank God Joe was so uncharacteristically panicky and stupid that evening. I discovered that I could talk to you in natural, complete sentences. It was simple: If I talked to you, perhaps you would kiss me. And I had to have a kiss from you: To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me . . .

  —

  AS FOR WHAT you saw of me—I think you saw a kid in a gray dress gawping at you like you were the meaning of life. You immediately began talking to me as if I were a child at your knee. You told me about how stories come to our aid in times of need. You’d recently been on a flight from Prague, you told me, and the plane had gone through a terrifyingly long tunnel of turbulence up there in the clouds. “Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,” you said. “She was just reading her book—maybe a little bit faster than usual, but otherwise untroubled. I said to her: ‘Have you noticed that we might be about to crash?’ And she said: ‘Yes I did notice that actually, which makes it even more important for me to know how this ends.’”

  I got you to dance, and I got you to show me a few of the exercises you did for hand flexibility, and I got you to talk about your school and its classrooms full of students obsessed with attaining mastery of puppets. I liked the sound of it. Your eyes narrowed intently as you spoke of your final year there: The best two students were permitted to choose two new students and help them through their first year. It was in your mind to play a part in another puppeteer’s future, that much was clear. You believed in the work that puppet play can do—you’d seen it with your own eyes. Before your father began teaching, back in the days when he performed, you had seen a rod puppet of his go down on its knees before a girl who sat a little aside from his audience of schoolchildren. This girl had been looking on with her hair hanging over her face, only partly hiding a cruel-looking scar; her eyes shone with hatred. Not necessarily hatred of your father or of puppets or the other children, but a hatred of make-believe, which did not heal, but was only useful to the people who didn’t need it. Man and long-bearded puppet left the stage, walked over to the girl, and knelt—the puppet’s kneeling was of course guided by your father’s hand, and every eye in the audience was on your father’s face, but his uncertain expression convinced everyone that the puppet had suddenly expressed a will of its own. “Princess, I am Merlin, your Merlin,” the puppet man said to the girl. “At your service forever.”