What Came Before He Shot Her (12 page)

And while he knew that Joel’s responsibility was to stop by Middle Row School for Toby so that the little boy did not have to walk anywhere alone, where Joel actually
took
Toby and why he did so were topics that never came up between him and his assigned mentor. As for Ness, Ivan knew that she was a chronic truant whose attendance problems had not been resolved by the single phone call made from the admissions officer to Kendra Osborne.

Other than that, Ivan did most of the talking. Joel, listening, grew used to the eccentricities of the older man’s speech. He actually found himself liking Ivan Weatherall, as well as looking forward to their meetings. But this factor in their relationship—the liking part of it—made Joel even more reluctant to speak honestly with him. Should he do so, which he assumed was the purpose of their visits, he believed that he would be seen as “cured” of whatever the school had decided ailed him. Cured, he would no longer need to meet with Ivan, and he didn’t wish that to happen.

It was Hibah who revealed a way that Joel might keep Ivan chatting in his life even if the school decided that it was no longer necessary.

Near the fourth week of their meetings, she saw Joel emerging from the library with the Englishman, and she plopped down next to Joel on the number 52 bus later that afternoon to put him into the picture.

She began with, “You seeing that mad English bloke, eh? You watch out f’r him.”

Joel, working on a maths problem he’d been given for homework, didn’t at first take note of the menace behind her words. He said,

“Wha’?”

“Tha’ Ivan bloke. Hangs round
kids
, he does.”

“’S his job, innit.”

“Not talkin ’bout school,” she said. “Other places is where. You been over to Paddington Arts?”

Joel shook his head. He didn’t even know what Paddington Arts was, let alone where it was.

Hibah told him. Paddington Arts was a centre for creative works, not far from the Grand Union Canal and just off the Great Western Road. Classes were offered there—yet another stab at giving the area’s youth something to do besides head into trouble—and Ivan Weatherall was one of the instructors.

“So he
says
,” Hibah told Joel. “I hear otherwise.”

“From who?” Joel asked.

“My boyfriend’s who.
He
say Ivan got a thing for boys. Boys just like you, Joel, innit. Mixed boys, he likes, an’ my boyfriend oughta know.”

“Why?”

She rolled her large eyes expressively. “You can
fi gger
. You not thick or summick, are you? Anyways, more’n jus’ my boyfriend say it. Older blokes’s grew up in the area. Tha’ bloke Ivan, he been round here forev er, an’ it’s always been the same wiv him. You watch yourself ’s what I’m saying.”

“He never do nothing but talk wiv me,” Joel told her.

Again the eye roll. “Don’ you know nuffink? Tha’s how it always begin,” she said.

KENDRA’S LIE TO the admissions officer at Holland Park School comprised the reason that it took several weeks for the next level of educational concern to be triggered regarding Ness’s lack of attendance.

During this time, Ness carried on much as before, with only a slight variation, leaving the house with her brothers and parting from them in the vicinity of Portobello Bridge. What made it look to her aunt as if she were actually attending school this time around was the fact that she no longer carried a change of clothes in her rucksack but rather two notebooks and a geography text pinched from Six’s brother, the Professor. Her change of clothes she merely left at Six’s.

Kendra chose to be soothed into belief by this. It was the path of least resistance. It was also, unfortunately, only a matter of time before that path went from bumpy to impassable.

It was late March and in the midst of a classic English downpour when several occasions conspired against her. The first of these occurred when a lithe and well-dressed black man entered the charity shop, shook off a tan umbrella, and asked to speak to Mrs. Osborne.

He was Nathan Burke, he said, the education officer from Holland Park School.

Cordie Durelle was in the shop with Kendra, on her break from the Princess European and Afro Unisex Hair Salon. As before, she was smoking. As before, she wore her purple smock, with her surgical mask slung around her neck. She and Kendra had been discussing Gerald Durelle’s recent inebriated and destructive hunt through the house for what he assumed—correctly—had to be the birth control pills, which he believed were keeping his wife from becoming pregnant with the son he desired, and Cordie had just reached the climax of her tale when the shop door opened and its bell rang.

Their conversation ceased as if by telepathic agreement, largely because Nathan Burke was breathtaking and both of the women needed to take that breath. He spoke politely and precisely, and he moved across the shop to the counter with the confi dence of a man who’d had a decent upbringing, a decent education, and a life spent largely outside of England and in an environment where he’d been treated as the equal of everyone else.

Burke asked which one of the ladies was Mrs. Osborne and could he speak to her on a private matter. Kendra identified herself cautiously and told him he could speak in front of her best friend, Cordie Durelle.

Cordie shot her a grateful glance at this, for she always appreciated being in the presence of an attractive man. She lowered her eyelids and attempted to look as sultry as a woman in a purple smock and surgical mask can look.

Nathan Burke didn’t have the time to notice her, however. He’d been paying visits to the parents of Holland Park’s truant pupils since nine o’clock that morning, and he had five more to get through before he could end his day and finally go home to the sympathetic ministrations of his life partner. Because of this, he got directly to the point. He brought out the relevant attendance records and broke the news to Kendra.

Kendra looked at the records, feeling the pounding of dread begin in her head. Cordie glanced at the records as well. She said the obvious. “Shit, Ken. She ain’t ever gone to school, innit.” And then to Nathan Burke, “Wha’ kinda school you got over there? She get bullied or summick dat she don’ want to go?”

Kendra said, “She could hardly get bullied if she never went in the first place.”

Cordie showed mercy and ignored Kendra’s choice of dialect. She said, “She gettin up to trouble, den. Only question’s what kind: boys, drugs, drink, street crime.”

“We’ve got to get her in school,” Nathan Burke said, “no matter what she’s been doing while she’s been truant. The question is how to do this.”

“She ever felt the belt?” Cordie said.

“Fifteen. She’s too old for that. And anyway, I won’t beat those children. What they’ve faced already . . . They’ve had enough.”

Mr. Burke appeared to be all ears at this, but Kendra wasn’t about to give him the bible on her family’s history. Instead she asked him what he recommended, short of beating a girl who would probably be only too happy to beat her aunt in response.

“Establishing consequences usually does the trick,” he said. “Do you object to discussing a few you might try?”

He went over them and their various outcomes: driving Ness to school and walking her to her first scheduled class in front of all the other pupils to cause her an embarrassment she wouldn’t want to endure a second time; removing privileges like use of the phone and the television; gating the girl; sending her to boarding school; arrang-ing for private counselling to get to the root of the matter; telling her that she—Kendra—would accompany her to
each
of her classes if she continued to avoid them. . . .

Kendra couldn’t imagine a single one of those listed consequences that her niece wouldn’t shrug at. And short of handcuffing Ness to her wrist in an attempt to control her behaviour, Kendra couldn’t come up with an outcome of her truancy that might impress upon her niece the importance of attending school. Too much had been taken away from the girl over the years, with nothing to replace those elements of a normal life that she had lost. One could hardly tell her that education was important when no one was giving her a similar message about having a stable mother, a living father, and a dependable home life.

Kendra saw all this, but she had no idea what to do about any of it.

She put her elbows on the counter in the shop and drove her fingers into her hair.

This prompted Nathan Burke to offer a final suggestion. The problem of Vanessa, he said, might be something that required a group home. Such things existed, if Mrs. Osborne felt unequal to the task of coping with the girl. In care—

“They
ain’t
. . .” She raised her head and corrected herself. “These children are
not
going into care.”

“Does that mean we’ll begin to see Vanessa at school, then?” Mr.

Burke asked.

“I don’t know,” Kendra said, opting for honesty.

“I’ll have to refer her onward, then. Social Services will need to become involved. If you can’t get her to attend school, that’s the next step. Explain this to her, please. It might help matters.”

He sounded compassionate, but compassion was the last thing Kendra wanted. To get him to leave—which was what she
did
want—

she nodded. He departed soon after, although not before choosing a piece of Bakelite jewellery to take home to his partner.

Cordie went for Kendra’s cigarettes, having long finished her own.

She lit up two of them, handing one to her friend. She said, “Okay. I got to say it.” She inhaled as if for courage and went on in a rush.

“Maybe, Ken, jus’ maybe you in over your head wiv dis sort of t’ing.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Mothering sort of t’ing.” Cordie went on hastily. “Look, you ain’t never . . . I mean, how c’n you ’spect to know wha’ to do wiv this lot when you never done it before? Anyways, did you ever even
wan’
to? I mean, maybe puttin dem some place else . . . I
know
you don’ wan’ to do dat, but could be real families could be found . . .”

Kendra stared at her. She wondered at the fact that her friend knew her so little, but she was honest enough with herself to accept her own responsibility for Cordie’s ignorance. What else could Cordie assume when she herself had never told her the truth? And she didn’t know
why
she’d never told her except that it seemed so much more modern and liberated and I-am-woman to allow her friend to believe she’d actually had a choice in the matter. She said simply, “Those kids’re staying, Cordie, least till Glory sends for them.”

Not that Glory Campbell had ever had any intention of doing so, a supposition of Kendra’s that became fact just a few days later when she picked up the post to find the first letter that Glory had sent from Jamaica in the months since she’d been gone. There was nothing surprising in its contents: She’d had a serious think about the situation, Kendra, and she’d come to realise that she
couldn’t
remove the grandkids from England. Taking them so far from dear Carole would probably put the final nail in the coffin of the woman’s precarious sanity, what was left of it. Glory didn’t want to be responsible for that. But she
would
send for Joel and Nessa for a little visit sometime in the future when she had the money put together for their tickets.

There was, unsurprisingly, no mention of Toby.

So that was that. Kendra had known it would come. But she couldn’t spend time dwelling on the matter. There was Ness to contend with and the future hanging over her if she did not agree to go to school.

As far as consequences were concerned, nothing worked because to Ness, there was simply nothing worthwhile to lose. And what she was after, she couldn’t find anyway, not in school and certainly not in her aunt’s tiny house in Edenham Estate. For her part, Kendra lectured Ness. She shouted at her. She drove her to the school and walked her to the first class on her schedule, as Nathan Burke had suggested. She tried gating her, which, naturally, was impossible without either Ness’s agreement to be gated or chains and locks to make sure she stayed put. But nothing worked. Ness’s response was unchanging. She
wasn’t
wearing those “disgustin rags,” she
wasn’t
sitting in “some stupid-ass classroom,” and she
wasn’t
about to waste her time “workin fuckin sums and such” when she could be out and about with her mates.

“You need a break,” Cordie told Kendra the afternoon Nathan Burke phoned the charity shop to inform Kendra that Ness had been assigned a social worker as a last resort before the magistrate became involved. “We ain’t had our girls’ night in however long. Le’s take one, Ken. You need it. So do I.”

That was how Kendra found herself in No Sorrow on a Friday night.

KENDRA PREPARED FOR her girls’ night out by informing Ness that she would be left in charge of Toby and Joel for the evening, which meant that she would remain at home despite what her other plans might be. The instructions were to keep the boys happy and occupied, which meant that Ness was to interact with them in some way to make sure they were both distracted and safe. As this wasn’t something Ness was likely to do even when ordered, Kendra honeyed her directives and ensured compliance by adding that there would be money in it for Ness if she cooperated.

Joel protested, saying that he didn’t
need
minding. He wasn’t a baby.

He could cope on his own.

But Kendra wasn’t to be talked out of the arrangement. For God only knew what might happen if someone streetwise wasn’t in charge of refusing to open the front door to a knock after dark. And despite all the trouble she was causing, it could not be denied that Ness was streetwise. So: There’s money in it for you, Nessa, she repeated to her niece.

What’s your decision? Can you be trusted to stay home with the boys?

Ness did some quick calculations in her head, only some of which had to do with money and what she could do with it once she got it.

She decided that, having nothing on for the night but the usual, which was hanging with Six and Natasha over at Mozart Estate, she’d opt for the money. She said Whatever to her aunt, which Kendra mistakenly embraced as an acquiescence that would not be dislodged by any tempting vagaries of the coming evening.