What Came Before He Shot Her (30 page)

“Le’s have the purse ’s well,” Tash said.

Sue’s face was white to her lips, although the girls had no way of knowing this was her natural colour. She said, “I don’t know you girls, do I?”

“Well, ain’t that true,” Six said. “Give us the moby an’ do it now.

You don’t, you get cut.”

“Oh yes, oh of course. Just . . .” Sue said into the phone, “Listen, Patty, I’m being mugged. If you wouldn’t mind ringing—”

Ness shoved her forward. Six shoved her back. Tash said, “Don’t play games wiv us, cunt.”

The woman, appearing flustered, said, “Yes. Yes. I’m terribly sorry. I just . . . Here. Let me . . . My money’s inside . . .” And she fumbled round to reach into her bag, which had straps and buckles all over it.

She dropped it and the mobile on the ground. Six and Tash bent to get them. And in an instant the complexion of the mugging altered.

From her pocket the woman whipped out a small can, which she began spraying wildly at the girls. It was nothing more than a strong room freshener, but it did the trick. As Sue sprayed and began screaming for help, the girls fell back.

“I’m not afraid of you! I’m not afraid of anyone! You rotten little . . .”

Sue shrieked and shrieked. And to prove whatever point she was attempting to make, she grabbed the girl nearest her and sprayed her directly in the face. This was Ness, who doubled over just as lights went on in nearby porches and residents began opening their doors and blowing whistles. It was a neighbourhood watch from hell.

All this was enough for Six and Natasha, who took off in the direction of the gate. The mobile and the bag they left behind, along with Ness. Since she was already incapacitated by the spray, she was easy for Sue to deal with, and this she did summarily. She threw her to the ground and sat upon her. She reached for her phone and punched in three nines.

“Three girls have just attempted to mug me,” she said into the phone when the emergency operator answered. “Two of them are heading west on the Harrow Road. The third I’m sitting on . . . No, no, I have no idea . . . Listen to me, I suggest you send someone straightaway because I don’t intend to let this one go, and I won’t answer for her condition if I have to spray her in the face again . . . I’m directly across the street from the Harrow Road station, you absolute ninny. You can send the janitor for all I care.”

Thus did Ness Campbell end up meeting her social worker. How it happened followed the rule of law.

The police—in the person of a female constable with sturdy shoes and bad hair—arrived to assist Sue, who continued to sit upon Ness and occasionally spray her in the face with the room freshener. This same constable made short work of hauling Ness to her feet in the presence of the gathered estate neighbours who, mercifully and finally, stopped blowing their whistles. They formed a jeering gauntlet—from which exercise they could not be dissuaded by the constable—and Ness found herself being frog-marched through it. She was actually relieved when she was away from the place. She was less relieved to be inside the Harrow Road police station, where the female constable dumped her in an interview room and left her there with her eyes still running from the spray. She was shaken as well, but that was not something Ness would ever admit to.

The police knew they could not speak to Ness without a non-police adult present to monitor the conversation. Ness not being forthcoming about the responsible adult in her life, the only recourse for the Harrow Road station was to phone the Youth Offending Team. A social worker was dispatched: Fabia Bender, the very same social worker who’d been trying to contact Kendra Osborne about her for weeks.

Fabia Bender’s job in this situation was not herself to question Ness.

The girl wasn’t in the clutches of the police because she had failed to attend school, which was the reason behind the Youth Offending Team’s previous interest in her. In this situation, the social worker’s job was to act as a buffer between the police and the arrested juvenile.

Acting as a buffer meant seeing that the rights of the juvenile being questioned were not violated.

Since Ness had been caught red-handed in an attempted mugging, the only questions the police had were ones that dealt with the names of her accomplices in the crime. But Ness turned away instead of giving up Six and Natasha. When the policeman—his name was Sergeant Starr—asked her if she understood that she would take the fall alone should she not name her mates, Ness said, “Whatever. Like I ackshully care,” and told him that she wanted a fag. Fabia Bender she ignored altogether. She was a white woman. The cop, at least, was black.

Sergeant Starr said, “No cigarettes.”

Ness said, “Whatever,” and dropped her head onto her arms, crossed on the table. They were in a room designed to be uncomfortable. The table was bolted to the floor, the chairs were bolted to the floor, the lights were blinding, and the heat was tropical. The arrested party was meant to think that cooperation in the matter of being questioned would at least get him—or her, in this case—into a more comfortable environment. That, of course, was a fairy tale only an idiot would believe.

Sergeant Starr said, “Y’unnerstan you’re facing the magistrate on this?”

Ness shrugged without raising her head.

“Y’unnerstan he can do with you what he likes? Send you to detention, take you away from your family?”

Ness laughed at this. “Ooooh. Dat scares me shitless, innit. Look.

Do wha’ you want. Only I ain’t talking.”

The only thing she
would
tell Sergeant Starr was where she lived and Kendra’s phone numbers. Let the cow come fetch her, was how Ness thought of things. The cops ringing up her aunt would probably disrupt the woman’s nasty, nightly shag, and that was absolutely fine with Ness.

But when Kendra got the call, she wasn’t in bed. She was, instead, giving herself a face peel, waiting for the solution to dry. She was doing this in the relative privacy of the bathroom, the better to keep Dix from knowing what she was up to.

Joel was the one to answer the phone and the one to tell her the cops were ringing. He said, on the other side of the closed bathroom door, “They got Ness, Aunt Ken.” He sounded worried.

Kendra felt her spirits plummet. She rinsed off her face, the treatment incomplete, looking exactly the same as when she’d begun it. She looked no different when she walked into the Harrow Road police station less than twenty minutes later. Dix had wanted to go with her, but she’d refused. Stay with the boys, she told him. Who knew what might happen if someone out there—and they both knew whom she meant—

realised Joel and Toby were alone.

There was a small waiting area in reception—currently occupied by a slouching young black man nursing a swollen eye—but Kendra wasn’t required to wait there very long. In a few minutes, a white woman came to fetch her. She wore blue jeans turned up at the ankles, a French beret, and a blindingly white T-shirt. She had equally white trainers on her feet. _ Feisty _ was what Kendra thought when she saw her. She was short, wiry, with tousled grey hair and a no-nonsense attitude that suggested the course of wisdom was not to mess her about.

When Kendra heard her name—Fabia Bender—it was everything she could do not to wince and begin making excuses for why she hadn’t returned the social worker’s calls, which had been numerous over the last few weeks. She managed to look at the white woman blankly, as if she’d never heard of her before. She said, “What’s Ness done?”

“Not ‘What’s happened to her?’” Fabia Bender noted shrewdly.

“You’ve been expecting this, Mrs. Osborne?”

Kendra disliked her at once. Partly because the white woman had leapt to a conclusion that was utterly accurate. Partly because the white woman was simply who she was: the sort who liked to think she could tell what type of individual she was dealing with by the way they acted when she locked her milky blue eyes with theirs.

Kendra felt smaller than she was. She loathed that feeling. She said shortly, “Cops called me to come fetch her. Where is she, then?”

“She was talking to Sergeant Starr. Or rather, he was talking to her. I expect they’re waiting for me to get back to them because he’s not allowed to ask her any questions unless I’m in the room. Or you’re in the room. She wouldn’t give your name when she was first arrested, by the way. Have you any idea why?”

“Arrested for what?” Kendra asked, for she wasn’t about to give Fabia Bender chapter and verse on her relationship with her niece.

Fabia Bender related what she knew of what had happened, information she’d been given by Sergeant Starr. She concluded with the fact that Ness wouldn’t give up her friends. Kendra did it for her. But all she knew was the first name of each of the girls: Six and Natasha. One of them lived on Mozart Estate. She did not know where the other lived.

Kendra burned with shame even as she relayed this information to the social worker. It wasn’t the shame of handing over details, however.

It was the shame of having so few facts. She asked if she could see Ness, talk to her, take her home. Fabia Bender said, “Presently,” and ushered Kendra into an empty interview room.

Hers was a thankless job, but Fabia Bender was a woman who did not see it that way. It was a job she’d done in North Kensington for nearly thirty years, and if she’d lost more children than she’d managed to save, it was not because she was lacking either in commitment to them or in a belief in the inherent goodness of mankind. She rose every day knowing that she was exactly where she was meant to be, doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. Each morning was ripe with possibility. Each evening was an opportunity to reflect on how she had met the challenges of the day. She knew neither discouragement nor despair. Change, she had long ago come to understand, was not something that happened overnight.

She said to Kendra, “I won’t pretend to be happy that you’ve not returned my calls, Mrs. Osborne. Had you done so, we might not be here now. I need to tell you in all honesty that I see this situation as a partial result of Vanessa’s failure to go to school.”

This was not the sort of preliminary statement that promised an imminent meeting of the minds. Kendra reacted to it as one might expect of a proud woman: She bristled. Her skin became hot, burning hot, and the sense of it melting right off her bones did not encourage her to reach out to the other woman in a show of common humanity. She said nothing.

Fabia Bender changed course. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t the proper thing to say. What you heard was my frustration speaking. Let me start again. My aim has always been to help Vanessa, and I’m a believer in education as at least one step in setting a child on the right path.”

“You think I didn’t try to get her to go to school?” Kendra demanded, and if she sounded offended—which indeed she did—it was owing to what she felt at having failed as a substitute parent to Ness. “I
did
try. But nothing worked. I told her over and over how important it was. I delivered her to the school personally once I talked to Mr.

Whoever-He-Was, the education officer. And I did what he said. I walked her to the door. I waited till she went inside. I tried to gate her when she played truant. I told her if she didn’t sort herself out, she’d end up just where she’s ended up. But nothing worked. She’s got her own mind and she’s damn well determined to—”

Fabia held up both hands. It was a story that she’d heard for so many years from so many parents—generally female and generally deserted by an unworthy male—that she could have recited it from beginning to end. Its characters were mothers who pulled at their hair in despair and children whose cries for understanding had gone too long misinterpreted as everything from defiance to depression. The real answer to what plagued their society lay in open communication. But parents, there to assist in their young people’s interpretation of life’s great journey, often had had no one to assist in their
own
interpretation of life’s great journey when they were youths. Thus, it became a case of the blind attempting and failing to lead the blind on a path neither of them understood.

She said, “Again, forgive me, Mrs. Osborne. I’m not here to blame.

I’m here to help. May we start again? Please, sit down.”

“I want to take her—”

“Home. Yes. I know. No girl her age belongs in a police station. I quite agree. And you
will
be able to take her home presently. But I’d very much like to talk to you first.”

The interview room was exactly like the one in which Ness waited with Sergeant Starr. Kendra saw it as a place she wanted to escape, but since she also wanted to escape with Ness, she cooperated with the white woman. She sat in one of the plastic chairs and drove her hands into the pockets of her cardigan.

“We’re on the same side of the street in this,” Fabia Bender told her when they were both positioned at the table, facing each other. “We both want to sort Vanessa out. When a girl heads in the wrong direction, as she has done, there’s generally a reason. If we can develop a complete understanding of what the reason is, we have a chance of helping her learn to cope. Coping with life is the
essential
skill we need to give her. It’s also one that schools, unfortunately, fail to teach. So if parents don’t have it to pass along to their children—and be assured I’m not referring to you at this moment—then chances are the children won’t learn it either.” She took a breath and smiled. She had teeth stained from coffee and nicotine and the bad skin of a lifelong smoker.

Kendra didn’t like the sensation of being lectured. She was able to see that the white woman meant well, but the nature of what Fabia Bender said merely resulted in Kendra’s feeling less than. Feeling less than a white woman—and this, despite being part white herself—was something that guaranteed Kendra’s back going up. Fabia Bender didn’t know the first thing about the chaos and tragedy of Vanessa Campbell’s childhood, and Kendra, offended, wasn’t about to tell her.

She wanted to, though. Not because she believed the information would help but because she could imagine it setting the social worker straight. She wanted to stand over her and drive the story into her brain: being ten years old and waiting for her dad to come fetch her as he always did on Saturdays after her ballet lessons, standing outside and all alone and knowing that what she was
never
supposed to do was cross over the A40 to get back to Old Oak Common Lane by herself, becoming frightened when he didn’t turn up and finally hearing the scream of sirens, and crossing over at last because what else was there to do except try to get home. Then coming upon him where he lay, a crowd gathered round and an oozing of blood pooling round his head and Joel kneeling at one side of that pool shouting Dad! Dad! and Toby sitting there with his legs splayed out and his back against the front of the off licence and crying because he didn’t understand at three years old that his father had been shot down in the street in a drug dispute, a drug dispute in which he had had no part. Who was Ness to them: the cops, the crowd, the ambulance driver and his mate, the official who finally showed up to pronounce the obvious over the body?