What Came Before He Shot Her (22 page)

Kendra grew uncomfortable. She knew that Cordie would scent a lie the way a hound scents a fox, so she didn’t bother. She told her friend about the phone call for the sports massage, about ending up in the bedsit above the Falcon pub, about coming face-to-face with the man who’d been with Ness that night.

“He’s called Dix D’Court,” Kendra added. “I only saw him that one time.”

“And dat was ’nough to b’lieve him?” Cordie asked shrewdly.

“Oooh. You ain’t tellin me ever’t’ing, Ken. No lyin to me now cos I c’n read it all over you. Summick happened. You get shagged at long last?”

“Cordie Durrell!”

“Cordie Durrell wha’? I don’t ’member him real clear, mind, but if he want a sports massage, dat tells me he got a decent sports body.”

She thought about this. “Damn.
You
get muscular thighs? Dat is so outrageously unfair.”

Kendra laughed. “Di’n’t get nothing.”

“Not f’r want of his tryin’s what I ’spect.”

“Cordie, he’s twenty-three,” Kendra told her.

Cordie nodded. “Gives him stamina.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. We jus’ talked after the massage’s done.

Dat’s all.”

“Don’t b’lieve you f ’r a second. But if it’s the truth, den you sixteen ways a fool. Put me in a room with someone wants a sports massage and we ain’t having stimulatin’ conversation ’bout the state of world affairs when it’s over, innit.” Cordie removed her feet from Kendra’s lap, the better to get into the conversation without distractions. She said, “So. You find Ness and say sorry. What happen next?”

Nothing, Kendra said. Ness wouldn’t hear
sorry
or anything else.

She kept her comments confined to her niece, since allowing them to drift to Dix D’Court would mean revealing to Cordie that he’d phoned her again and again since the night of the massage. It wasn’t about another sports massage that he’d rung her, either. He wanted to see her. She’d felt something that night, he said to her. He’d felt something as well. He didn’t want to walk away from that. Did she?

After the first three calls, Kendra had let her mobile take his messages. She’d let her machine at home do the same. She didn’t return his calls, assuming he’d finally go away. He hadn’t done so.

It was shortly after this conversation with Cordie that Dix D’Court showed up at the charity shop in the Harrow Road. Kendra would have told herself that his appearance in the shop was a coincidence, but he disabused her of this notion immediately. His parents, he said, owned the Rainbow Café. Did she know where it was? Just down the street?

He’d been on his way there when a display in the window of the charity shop caught his eye. (“Lady’s coat wiv the big buttons,” he said later. It would be his mum’s birthday soon.) He’d slowed to look at the coat, and then beyond it, he’d seen her in the shop. That’s why he’d entered, he explained.

“Whyn’t you phonin me back?” he asked. “You not getting the messages I been leaving?”

“I’ve been getting them,” Kendra told him. “I just didn’t see a good reason to return them.”

“You ’voiding me, den.” A statement, not a question.

“I suppose I am.”

“Why?”

“I give massages, Mr. D’Court. You weren’t ringing me about arranging to have one. Least, if you were, you never said as much. Just

‘I want to see you,’ which didn’t tell me it was business you were after.”

“We got b’yond business. Wiv you as ready ’s me for what was ’bout to happen.” He held up a hand to stop her from replying, saying, “An’

I know it ain’t gentlemanly to mention dat to you. Gen’rally I like being a gentleman. But I also like history being straight, y’unnerstan, not being rewritten for someone’s convenience.”

She’d been in the midst of counting the money in the till when he’d walked in, so near to closing up for the day that in another ten minutes he would have missed her. Now, she removed the cash drawer and carried it to the back room where she stowed it in the safe and locked it up. He was meant to see this as rejection, but he refused to take it that way.

He followed her, but he didn’t enter the back room. Rather, he stood at the door where the shop lights silhouetted him in a disturbing fashion. The body Kendra had seen that night above the Falcon pub was framed by the doorway. He was a tempting proposition.

But Kendra had other things in mind for her life and one of them was not an entanglement with a twenty-three-year-old boy.
Boy
, she reminded herself. Not man. B-o-y, as in nearly two decades her junior.

Which made it all the better, didn’t it? she then asked herself. The seventeen years between them declared there was no possibility for entanglements.

“Here’s what I t’ink,” he said to her. “You like most women, an’ dat means you ’spectin dis is just a quick shag I want. I ring you to finish what we started cos I don’t like a woman gettin away so easy. I like to put ’nother notch in my belt. Or wherever a bloke puts a notch cos I don’t ackshully know.”

Kendra chuckled. “Now that,” she told him, “is just about exactly what I don’t think, Mr. D’Court. If I thought it was that—a quick shag and we’re done—I would’ve rung you back and made the arrangements, because I won’t lie and there’s no point to it, is there: You were in the room and a party to what happened between us. And what happened wasn’t exactly me saying, ‘Get your hands off me, blood.’ But I get the feeling that’s not who you are or how you are, and, see, I don’t want what you’re after. And the way I look at it, two people—man and woman, I mean—need to be after the same thing when they hook up together or one of them’s heading for trouble of the heartbreaking kind.”

He gazed at her, and what shone from his face was admiration, liking, and amusement all blended together. He said, “Dix.” It was his only reply.

“What?”

“Dix. Not Mr. D’Court. An’ you’re right wiv what you say, which makes it rougher, see. Makes me want you more cos damn you ain’t like”—he smiled and shifted to her style of speaking—“you are not like most women I meet. Believe it.”

“That,” she said tartly, “is because I’m older. Seventeen years. I’ve been married twice.”

“Two fools to let you get away, den.”

“Not their intention.”

“What happened?”

“Death to one and car theft to the other. He’s in Wandsworth. Told me he was in the spare-parts business. I just didn’t know where the parts were coming from.”

“Ouch. And the other? How’d he—”

She held up her hand. “Not going there,” she said.

He didn’t press her, merely saying, “Rough. You had tough times wiv men. I ain’t like dat.”

“Good for you. That doesn’t change the way things are with me.”

“An’ how’s dat?”

“Busy. A life. Three kids I’m trying to sort, and a career I’m trying to get off the ground. I’ve got no time for anything more than that.”

“An’ when you need a man? For what a man c’n give you?”

“There are ways,” she said. “Just think about it.”

He crossed his arms and was silent. He finally said, “Lonely. Satisfaction, yeah. But how long it last?” And before she could answer, he went on to say, “But if dat’s the way you want it, I got to ’cept it and jus’ move on. So . . .” He looked around the back room as if he were seeking some sort of employment. He said, “You lockin up, right?

Come ’long an’ meet my mum and dad. Rainbow Café, like I said.

Mum’s got my protein smoothie waitin for me, but I ’spect she do you a cup of tea.”

“Easy as that?” Kendra said.

“Easy as dat,” Dix told her. “Fetch y’r bag. Le’s go.” He grinned.

“Mum’s only three years older’n you, so you’ll like her, I ’spect. Have t’ings in common.”

That remark went straight to the bone, but Kendra had no intention of following it. She began to head back into the shop, where her bag was stowed under the counter. Dix didn’t move, though. They were face-to-face.

He said, “You one damn beautiful woman, Kendra.” He put his hand on the back of her neck. He used gentle pressure. She was meant to move into his arms, and she knew it.

She said, “You jus’ told me—”

“I lied. Not ’bout my mum, mind. But ’bout lettin go. Dat is summick I got no intention of doing.”

He kissed her then. She didn’t resist. When he moved her into the back room of the shop and away from the doorway, she didn’t resist that either. She wanted to do so, but that desire and all the cautions that went with it were bleating uselessly from her intellect. In the meantime, her body was saying something else, telling a tale about how long it had been, about how good it felt, about how insignifi cant it was, really, just to have a quick shag with no strings attached. Her body told her that everything he’d said about his intentions towards her were lies anyway. He was twenty-three-years old, and at that age men only wanted the sex—hot penetration and satisfying orgasm—

and they’d do and say anything to make sure they got it. So no matter what he’d said in agreement to her assessment of the situation between them, what he really wanted was indeed another notch on his belt, seduction brought to a satisfying conclusion. All men were like that, and he was a man.

So she allowed the moment to reign, no past and no future. She embraced the now.

She gasped, “Oh my sweet Jesus,” when at last they connected.

He was everything—muscular thighs and all—that his body had promised he would be.

THE FACT THAT Six and Natasha were no closer to their dream of possessing mobile phones than they’d been on the night that Ness had met them was what caused the initial chink in the relationship among the three girls. This chink was widened when the Blade bestowed upon Ness the late-twentieth-century’s most irritating electronic device. The mobile, he told her, was for ringing him should anyone vex her when she wasn’t with him. No one, he said, was going to mess his woman about, and if anyone did, they would hear from him in very short order.

He could get to her fast no matter where she was, so she wasn’t to be shy about giving him a bell if she needed him.

To a fifteen-year-old girl like Ness, these declarations—despite the fact of their being made on a questionably stained futon in a filthy squat without electricity or running water—sounded like certain proof of devotion and not what they really were, which was evidence of the Blade’s intentions to keep tabs on her and to have her available when he wanted her. Six, who was far more experienced in the arena of unsatisfactory relationships and definitely better informed in the ways of the Blade—

having grown up in the same part of North Kensington as he—greeted everything Ness said about the man with suspicion if not outright dis-dain. These reactions on her part were exacerbated when the mobile phone put in an appearance in Ness’s life.

The girls had ventured farther than Whiteley’s on this particular afternoon. They’d gone to Kensington High Street where they’d entertained themselves first by trying on clothes at Top Shop, rooting through racks of out-of-season jerseys in H & M, and ultimately finding their way to yet another branch of Accessorize, where the general plan was to pinch a few pairs of earrings.

Six excelled at this activity, and Ness wasn’t far behind her. Natasha, however, had very little talent in the sleight-of-hand department, being as clumsy as she was gawky. Usually, Natasha was in charge of diversion, but on this day she decided to join the action. Six hissed at her,

“Tash! Do what you s’posed! You vex me, slag,” but that did nothing to turn the tide of Natasha’s intentions. Instead she went for the rack of earrings and knocked it over just as Six was attempting to shove three pairs of garish chandeliers into her pocket.

The result of this was the three girls being escorted from the premises. There, outside the shop and in full view of the passing throng on the High Street, two overweight security guards, who seemed to materialise out of the commercial ether of the precinct, stood them up against the wall and photographed them with an old Polaroid camera. The pictures, the girls were informed, would be put up by the till. If they
ever
entered this shop again . . . Nothing more needed to be said.

The entire enterprise set Six’s teeth on edge. She wasn’t used to such humiliating treatment because she wasn’t used to being caught. And she wouldn’t have been caught had the maddening Natasha not taken it into her head that she was going to nick something from the shop.

Six said, “Damn, Tash, you are one fuckin stupid cow,” but making that declaration to Natasha didn’t give Six the satisfaction she desired.

She sought another focus for it. Ness was the logical target.

Six went at her obliquely. Like most people unable to assess their own emotional state, she displaced what she was feeling onto something less terrifying. The lack of cash was a suitable substitute for the lack of purpose in life.

She said, “We got to get some dosh. We can’t be relyin on nicking shit an’ passin it on. Dat’s goin to take ’s forever, innit.”

“Yeah,” said Tash, maintaining her position of always agreeing with whatever Six said. She didn’t question what they needed the cash for.

Six had her reasons for everything. Cash was always useful, especially when the bicycle-delivery boys weren’t willing to risk scooping a bit of substance from the top of a sandwich bag for whatever sexual fantasy they had that might be fulfi lled.

“So where we gettin it?” Six excavated her shoulder bag and brought out a packet of Dunhills recently pinched from a tobacconist on the Harrow Road. She prised one out without offering the packet to the other two girls. She had no matches or lighter, so she stopped a white woman with a child in a pushchair and demanded something “to fire up dis fag, innit.” The woman hesitated, mouth open but words blocked. Six said to her, “You hear me, slag? I need a fuckin light an’ I

’spect you got summick I could use in dat bag of yours.”

The woman looked around as if seeking rescue, but the way of life in London—defined by a better-you-than-me morality—declared that no one was going to come to her aid. Had she said, “Step out of my way, you nasty piece of business, or I shall scream so loudly you’ll not have eardrums when I’m through with you,” Six would have been so astonished by the singularity of this reply that she would have done as the woman demanded. But instead, when the poor creature fumbled in her bag to accommodate the request, Six saw her wallet within, clocked its bulge, felt the gratification that comes with gathering a few easy un-earned pickings, and told her to hand over some cash as well.