What Came Before He Shot Her

Mom

—Better authentic mammon than a bogus god.

Louis MacNeice

Autumn Journal

Joel Campbell, eleven years old at the time, began his descent towards murder with a bus ride. It was a newish bus, a single decker. It was numbered 70, on the London route that trundles along Du Cane Road in East Acton.

There is not much notable on the northern section of this particular route, of which Du Cane Road is but a brief part. The southern section is pleasant enough, cruising near the V & A and past the stately white edifices of Queen’s Gate in South Kensington. But the northern part has a list of destinations that reads like a where’s where of places in London not to frequent: the Swift Wash Laundry on North Pole Road, H. J. Bent Funeral Directors (cremations or burials) on Old Oak Common Lane, the dismal congeries of shops at the turbulent intersec-tion where Western Avenue becomes Western Way as cars and lorries tear towards the centre of town, and looming over all of this like something designed by Dickens: Wormwood Scrubs. Not Wormwood Scrubs the tract of land circumscribed by railway lines, but Wormwood Scrubs the prison, part fortress and part asylum in appearance, place of unremitting grim reality in fact.

On this particular January day, though, Joel Campbell took note of none of these features of the journey upon which he was embarking.

He was in the company of three other individuals, and he was cautiously anticipating a positive change in his life. Prior to this moment, East Acton and a small terrace house in Henchman Street had represented his circumstances: a grubby sitting room and grubbier kitchen below, three bedrooms above, and a patchy green at the front, round which the terrace of little homes horseshoed like a collection of war widows along three sides of a grave. It was a place that might have been pleasant fifty years ago, but successive generations of inhabitants had each put their mark upon it, and the current generation’s mark was given largely to rubbish on doorsteps, broken toys discarded on the single path that followed the U of the terrace, plastic snowmen and rotund Santas and reindeer toppling over upon the jutting roofs of bay windows from November till May, and a sinkhole of a mud puddle in the middle of the green that stood there eight months of the year, breeding insects like someone’s entomology project. Joel was glad to be leaving the place, even if leaving meant a long plane ride and a new life on an island very different from the only island he’d so far known.

“Ja-
mai
-ca.” His gran didn’t so much say as intone the word. Glory Campbell drew out the
mai
till it sounded the way a warm breeze felt, welcome and soft, with promise gilding its breath. “What you t’ink

’bout
dat
, you t’ree kids? Ja-
mai
-ca.”

“You t’ree kids” were the Campbell children, victims of a tragedy played out on Old Oak Common Lane on a Saturday afternoon. They were progeny of Glory’s elder son, dead like her second son although under entirely different circumstances. Joel, Ness, and Toby, they were called. Or “poor lit’l t’ings,” as Glory had taken to referring to them once her man George Gilbert had received his deportation papers and she’d seen which way the wind of George’s life was likely to blow.

This use of language on Glory’s part was something new. In the time the Campbell children had been living with her—which was more than four years and counting this time around and looking to be a permanent arrangement—she’d been a stickler for correct pronunciation. She herself had been taught the queen’s English long ago at her Catholic girls’ school in Kingston, and while it hadn’t served her as well as she’d hoped when she’d immigrated to England, she could still trot it out when a shop assistant needed sorting, and she intended her grandkids to be able to do some sorting as well, should they ever have the need.

But all that altered with the advent of George’s deportation papers.

When the buff envelope had been opened and its contents perused, digested, and understood, and when all the legal manoeuvring had been engaged in to prolong if not to thwart the inevitable, Glory had shed over forty years of God-save-the-current-monarch in an instant. If her George was heading for Ja-
mai
-ca, so was she. And the queen’s English wasn’t necessary there. Indeed, it could be an impediment.

So the linguistic tone, melody, and syntax morphed from Glory’s rather charmingly antique version of Received Pronunciation to the pleasant honey of Caribbean English. She was going native, her neighbours called it.

George Gilbert had left London first, escorted to Heathrow by immigration officials keeping the current prime minister’s promise to do something about the problem of visitors overstaying their visas. They came for him in a private car and glanced at their watches while he bade Glory a farewell thoroughly lubricated by Red Stripe, which he’d begun to drink in anticipation of the return to his roots. They said,

“Come along, Mr. Gilbert,” and took him by the arms. One of them reached into his pocket as if in search of handcuffs should George not cooperate.

But George was happy to go along with them. Things hadn’t really been the same at Glory’s since the grandkids had dropped on them like three human meteors from a galaxy he’d never quite understood.

“Look damn
odd
, Glor,” he’d say when he thought they weren’t listening. “Least, the boys do. S’pose the girl’s all right.”

“You hush up ’bout them,” was Glory’s reply. Her own children’s blood was thoroughly mixed—although less so than the blood of her grandkids—and she wasn’t about to have anyone comment on what was as obvious as burnt toast on snow. For mixed blood was not the disgrace it had been in centuries past. It no longer made anyone anathema.

But George blew out his lips. He sucked on his teeth. From the corners of his eyes, he watched the young Campbells. “They not fitting good into Jamaica,” he pointed out.

This assessment didn’t deter Glory. At least that was how it seemed to her grandchildren in the days leading up to their exodus from East Acton. Glory sold the furniture. She boxed up the kitchen. She sorted through clothes. She packed the suitcases, and when there were not enough to include everything that her granddaughter, Ness, wished to take to Jamaica, she folded those garments into her shopping trolley and declared that they’d pick up a suitcase on the way.

They made a ragtag parade weaving over to Du Cane Road. Glory led the way in a navy winter coat that hung to her ankles, with a green-and-orange turban tied round her head. Little Toby came second, tripping along on his tiptoes as was his habit, an infl ated life ring round his waist. Joel struggled to keep up third, the two suitcases he carried making his progress difficult. Ness brought up the rear, in jeans so tight it was hard to see how she was going to manage to sit without splitting them open, teetering along on four-inch heels with black boots climbing up her legs. She had the shopping trolley in her grip, and she wasn’t happy about having to drag it along behind her. She wasn’t happy about anything, in fact. Her face dripped scorn and her gait spoke contempt.

The day was cold the way only London can be cold in January. The air was heavy with damp, along with exhaust fumes and the soot of illegal fires. The frost of morning had never melted, instead turning into patches of ice that threatened the unwary pedestrian. Grey defi ned everything: from the sky to the trees to the roads to the buildings. The entire atmosphere was hopeless writ large. In the fading daylight, sun and spring were an empty promise.

On the bus even in a place like London, where everything that might possibly be seen had already been seen at one time or another, the Campbell children still garnered looks, each for a reason peculiar to the individual. In Toby it was the great bald patches across his head, where his half-grown hair was wispy and far too thin for a seven-year-old boy, as well as the life ring, which took up too much space and from which he resolutely refused to be parted even so much as to remove it from his waist and “bleeding
hold
it in front of you, for God’s sake,” as Ness demanded. In Ness herself, it was the unnatural darkness of her skin, obviously enhanced by makeup, as if she were trying to be more of what she only partially was. Had she shed her jacket, it would also have been the rest of her clothing beyond her jeans: the sequined top that left her midriff bare and put her voluptuous breasts on display. And in Joel it was, and would always be, his face covered by the tea-cake-size splotches that could never be called freckles but were instead a physical expression of the ethnic and racial battle that his blood had gone through from the moment of his conception. Like Toby, it was his hair as well, in his case wild and unruly, springing from his head like a rusty scouring pad. Only Toby and Joel looked as if they
might
be related, and none of the Campbell children looked like someone who might belong to Glory.

So they were noticed. Not only did they block most of the aisle with their suitcases, shopping trolley, and the five additional Sainsbury’s bags that Glory had deposited around her feet, but they made a vignette that begged for consideration.

Of the four of them, only Joel and Ness were aware of the scrutiny of the other passengers, and they each reacted differently to the glances.

For Joel, each look seemed to say
yellow-arse bastard
, and each hasty movement of a gaze away from him to the window seemed to be a dismissal of his right to walk the earth. For Ness, these same looks meant lewd evaluation, and when she felt them alight on her, she wanted to tear open her jacket and thrust out her breasts and shriek as she often did in the street: “You wan’ it, man?
This
wha’ you want?”

Glory and Toby, however, were in worlds of their own. For Toby this was his natural state, a fact that no one in the family cared to dwell upon. For Glory this was a condition prompted by her current situation and what she intended to do about it.

The bus lurched along its route, splashing through puddles from the last rainfall. It swerved into the kerb and outward again without regard for the safety of the passengers clinging to its poles within, and it became more crowded and more claustrophobic as the journey went on. As is always the state of public transport in the winter in London, the heat in the vehicle was on full force, and since not a single window—

aside from the driver’s—was actually operational, the atmosphere was not only balmy but also thick with the sort of microorganisms that spew forth from unguarded sneezes and coughs.

All of this gave Glory the excuse she was looking for. She’d been keeping a keen eye on where they were along the route anyway, sifting through all the possible reasons she could give for what she was about to do, but the atmosphere inside the vehicle was enough. When the bus ventured along Ladbroke Grove in the vicinity of Chesterton Road, she reached for the red button and thumbed it firmly. She said, “Out, you lot,” to the kids, and they shoved their way down the aisle with all of their belongings and clambered into the blessedly cold air.

This place, of course, was nowhere near Jamaica. Nor was it within shouting distance of any airport where a plane could take them in a westerly direction. But before these facts could be pointed out to her, Glory adjusted her turban—pushed askew as she’d struggled down the aisle—and she said to the children, “Can’t be heading off for Ja-
mai
-ca wit’out saying our good-byes to your auntie, now can we?”

“Auntie” was Glory’s only daughter, Kendra Osborne. Although she lived a single bus ride away from East Acton, the Campbell children had seen her only a few times in the time they’d lived with Glory, on the obligatory Christmas and Easter Sunday get-togethers. To say that she and Glory were estranged, though, would be to misrepresent the matter. The truth was that neither woman approved of the other, and their disapproval revolved around men. To be present in Henchman Street more than two days a year would have required Kendra to see George Gilbert lounging unemployed and unemployable around the house. To pay a call in North Kensington might have exposed Glory to any one of the string of Kendra’s lovers—taken up, then quickly discarded. The two women considered their lack of physical contact a truce. The telephone served them well enough.

So the idea that they might be tripping over to bid farewell to their aunt Kendra was greeted with some confusion, surprise, and suspicion on the part of the children, depending upon which child’s reaction to this unexpected announcement was being examined: Toby assumed they’d arrived in Jamaica, Joel tried to cope with an abrupt change in plans, and Ness muttered, “Oh, right,” under her breath, an unspoken notion of hers having just been confi rmed.

Glory didn’t deal with any of this. She merely led the way. Like a mother duck with her offspring, she assumed her grandchildren would follow her. What else were they to do in a part of London with which they were not altogether familiar?

Thankfully, it was not an overlong walk from Ladbroke Grove to Edenham Estate, and only on Golborne Road did they attract attention. It was market day there, and while the number of stalls was not as impressive as it might have been had they been walking along Church Street or weaving through the environs of Brick Lane, at E. Price & Son Fresh Fruit and Veg, the two elderly gentlemen—father and son, although truth to tell, they looked much more like brothers—remarked upon the untidy band of interlopers to the women they were serving.