What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(16)

She pulled a T-shirt on and looked at the camera for a little while before she started talking. You could tell from her eyes that she was out of her head on something and probably couldn’t have told you her own name if you’d asked her. Her English was far below fluency, but since she was in her happy place she didn’t bother struggling with pronunciation, just said what she had to say and left us to figure it out. She wanted us to know that “the entertainer” Matyas Füst had picked her up on a street corner a few hours after he’d played a sold-out concert in Greenwich. She’d spent the rest of the night with him and he hadn’t proved very entertaining at all. Tell us a bit more about yourself, the person holding the camera said—a woman, I think, trying to sound gentle, but her voice was thick with anger. The woman on camera obediently stated that she was often on street corners trying to get money, and that she didn’t often get lucky: The men she signaled to could usually tell just by looking at the backs of her hands that she’d gone too far into whatever she was doing. But Matyas Füst didn’t care about that: He’d had a fight with his controlling bitch of a girlfriend and it had taken all he had not to hit the girlfriend. Taking your fists to a prima ballerina with an adoring host of family and friends would be a very messy and expensive blunder. So he went looking for someone nobody cared about. And he found . . . me . . . the woman on-screen said, and giggled. Noor pressed pause again and left the room, went upstairs, and knocked on Aisha’s bedroom door. “Come and eat,” he said, and Aisha and Day said they’d come in a minute.

—

HOURS LATER they still hadn’t come downstairs. We’d watched the rest of the clip by then. The whole thing was only three minutes and thirty seconds long, but we kept trying to watch it through Aisha’s and Day’s eyes, this woman telling us that after they’d had sex Füst had insulted her so that she slapped him, and once he’d received the slap he’d smiled (her fingers plucked at the corners of her mouth until we could see just how he’d smiled), told her she’d “started it,” and proceeded to beat her until she couldn’t stand up. She’d hit back, she said, even from her place at his feet she’d hit back, but every time he hit harder. Then he stood over her in all his wealth and fame and arrogance and shrugged when she said she wasn’t going to keep quiet about this. Matyas Füst had shrugged and asked her if she thought anybody was going to give a shit that someone like her had got hurt. A nameless junkie with seriously crazy English. Look at you, he said. And look at me. He threw a handful of money at her and told her it was better for her to keep her mouth shut and spend that, or save it for a rainy day. Then he went back to his girlfriend. They must have made up, because she’d seen photos of them having a romantic dinner in a restaurant, and hints had been dropped about their wedding plans. I look him on Google. The woman on-camera seemed proud of her diligence. Then she asked us her question about Matyas Füst: Did anybody care that he’d hurt her, someone like her? She was just wondering. She laughed and gave us a perky little wave at the end. Thank you. Nice day to you.

Aisha came in cradling her laptop in her arms. Day followed, hands helplessly rising and falling. “It’s not just the clip, it’s the comments,” she said, when she saw us.

Ah yes, the comments.

Noor couldn’t make himself look, so Aisha and I read some of them aloud. There was a lot of LOL cool allegations junkie, maybe it was all a dream? and LMAO people will say anything to ruin a good man’s reputation stay strong Matyas!

If only that was the worst of it. Aisha’s haggard face as she read: Oh boohoo. What’s this one complaining about? He paid her, didn’t he? She hit him, didn’t she? Admitted all this herself. Does she think you can hit someone and just walk away? I read: She should count herself lucky: men probably treat broken down old whores worse than that in her country. And she got to bang Matyas! Matyas Füst can beat me up any time baby LOL

Then the apologists came out to play: Even if this is true is it the full story? We know that Matyas wouldn’t just lash out like that so we need to be asking what she did . . .

Day showed us a screenshot she’d saved. She’d posted a comment of her own: Guys are you being serious? I’m appalled and really scared by this and all the reactions I’m seeing . . . this isn’t the world I want to live in. She’d received so many replies telling her to kill herself that she’d decided to delete her account.

“I still don’t think it’s true,” Aisha said. “He couldn’t have done something like this.” When Noor put on his solicitor voice to point out that the video had been up for half a day, had a view count of half a million, and would have had Matyas Füst’s team of lawyers swinging left and right if the content hadn’t had any basis in fact, Aisha said through gritted teeth: “But he hasn’t said anything at all.”

“He’ll probably make a statement in the morning,” Noor said. We were failing as the men in Day and Aisha’s life. We weren’t doing what we were supposed to do. This came through very clearly in the way that Day and Aisha were looking at us, or more not looking at us, really.

—

THE MORNING brought no statement from Füst, and Noor sounded relieved (and ashamed of his relief) when he said: “Looks like she hasn’t got any proof and he’s going to ignore or deny it.” In the afternoon there were reports of an eyewitness to the beating coming forward, and about an hour after that Füst’s legal team announced that he’d voluntarily made himself available to the police for questioning.