she couldn't find. She was searching for it when she noticed that her answer machine was blinking. She punched it to play as she continued her search.
Hadiyyah's voice came to her, tense and low, sounding as if she was trying to keep someone else from hearing her. "I got gated, Barbara," she said. "This's the first chance I had to ring you 'cause I'm not meant even to use the phone. Dad said I'm gated 'till further notice' an' I don't think it's fair at all."
"Damn," Barbara muttered, studying the grey box from which her little friend's voice came.
"Dad said it's owing to my arguing with him. I di'n't really want to give back the Buddy Holly CD, see. Then when he said I had to, I said could I just leave it for you with a note. And he said no, I had to do it in person. And I said I di'n't think that was fair. And he said I was to do what he told me and since I 'clearly di'n't want to do it' he'd make sure it was done properly, which's why he came with me. And then I said he was mean, mean, mean and I hated him. And he..." A silence as if she were listening to something nearby. She hurried on. "I'm not meant to argue with him ever is what he said and he gated me. So I can't use the phone and I can't watch telly and I can't do anything but go to school and come home and it's not fair." She began to cry. "Gotta go. 'Bye," she managed to say with a hiccup. Then the message was over.
Barbara sighed. She had not expected this of Taymullah Azhar. He had broken rules himself: leaving an arranged marriage and two small children to take up with an English girl with whom he'd fallen in love. He'd been ousted from his family as a result, forever a pariah to his own kin. Of all the people on earth, he was the last person she would have anticipated being so inflexible and unforgiving.
She was going to have to have a talk with him. Punishments, she thought, should match their crimes. But she knew she would have to come up with an approach that didn't seem like actually talking to him, by which of course she really meant giving him a piece of her mind. No, she was going to have to dress it in the guise of a natural part of a conversation, which meant she was going to have to develop a subject of conversation that would allow the topics of Hadiyyah, lying, being gated, and unreasonable parents to arise naturally. At the moment, though, the very thought of all that verbal manoeuvring made Barbara's head feel like a balloon too full of air. She made a mental note to seek out a reasonable excuse to talk to Azhar, and she uncapped her Stella Artois.
There was a good chance, she thought, that she would need to consume two bottles of lager tonight.
FU MADE THE necessary preparations. These did not take long because He had laid the groundwork well. Once the chosen boy had proved himself worthy, He had watched him until He knew all his routines and movements. So when the time was right, He was able to make a quick choice of the environs in which He would finally act. He chose the gym.
He felt confident. He'd found a place where He'd been able to park without difficulty each time he'd been in the vicinity. It was in a street where on one side a stained brick wall formed the boundary of a school-yard and on the other a cricket ground lay in darkness. The street wasn't particularly close to the gym, but Fu didn't expect that to present much trouble because, more important than anything else, the place He parked was on the route the boy would have to take to get to his home.
When he emerged from the gym, Fu was waiting although He made it seem as though their meeting were a coincidence.
"Hey," Fu said, all pleased surprise. "Is that...What're you doing here?"
The boy was three steps ahead of Him, shoulders hunched, as they always were, head hanging down. When he turned, Fu waited for recognition to dawn. It did quickly enough to satisfy.
The boy looked left and right, but it didn't seem so much because he wanted to escape what was coming, as to see