What Came Before He Shot Her (38 page)

WHEN KENDRA CONFRONTED Joel, she was both angry and worried.

Despite her intention of doing nothing at all with the paperwork, she lectured the boy. If he’d only given her the documents in the first place, she told him, there would have been no need for Fabia Bender to turn up on Edenham Estate and consequently no report for her to have to fill out. Now there would likely be trouble in the form of hoops to jump through, explanations to give, investigations to endure, and officials to meet with. Joel’s reluctance to do his simple duty had put them all squarely in the jaws of the system, facing all of the system’s atten-dant time-eating activities.

So Kendra wanted to know what the hell he was thinking of, not giving her the papers that the learning centre woman—in her agitation she’d forgotten Luce Chinaka’s name—had wanted her to see. Did he understand that they were all under scrutiny now? Did he
know
what it meant when a family came to the attention of Social Services?

Of course Joel knew. It was his greatest fear. But he wouldn’t articulate it since to do so would give the fear a legitimacy that might make it a reality. So he told his aunt he’d forgotten because he’d been caught up in thinking about . . . He had to consider what the subject of his thoughts might be, and he settled upon telling her he’d been caught up in thinking about Wield Words Not Weapons since this was at least a wholesome subject. It wasn’t far from the truth anyway.

He didn’t anticipate Kendra’s encouraging him to go once she learned about it, but that was what she did. To her, it would be evidence of a positive influence invading Joel’s life, and she knew it was likely that positive influences would be required in all the children’s lives to offset the potential negative influence of their living with a forty-year-old aunt who was nightly and at considerable volume satisfying her baser urges with a twenty-three-year-old bodybuilder.

So Joel found himself going to Wield Words Not Weapons, leaving Toby with Dix, Kendra, pizza, and a video. He made his way over to Oxford Gardens, where a hand-lettered sign on the front door of a long, low, postwar building—home also of the Youth Offending Team’s office—directed participants to the Basement Activities Centre, which proved easy enough to find. In the entry, a young black woman sat at a card table filling out stick-on name tags as people came through the door. Joel hesitated before approaching her, until she said to him, “First timer? Cool. How you called, speck?” at which point he felt a rush of blood to his cheeks. She’d accepted him casually. She’d given him a welcome without the blink of an eye.

He said, “Joel,” and he watched her loop the four letters of his name across the tag.

She said, “Don’t have none of the custard creams,” as she put the tag on his shirt. “They stale as shoe soles. Go for the fig bars,” and she gave him a wink.

He nodded solemnly, this piece of information seeming to him like the key to success at the entire affair. Then he sidled over to a refreshment table at one side of the room. There, tin plates held biscuits, and cakes, and a coffee urn nearby bubbled fragrantly. He took a chocolate digestive and shot a hesitant glance around the people gathered for the event.

Joel saw that they comprised a mixed group of every race and every age. Blacks, whites, Orientals, and Asians blended together: from ancients to babies in prams and pushchairs. Most of them appeared to know each other as, after enthusiastic greetings among them, conversations began and the noise level rose.

Ivan Weatherall moved in the midst of all the people. He saw Joel and raised a hand in salute, but he did not approach although Joel decided Ivan looked happy to see him. Instead Ivan worked his way to a dais at the front of the room where a microphone stood with a tall stool behind it. In front of the mike, yellow and orange plastic chairs fanned out, and Ivan’s progress to the dais acted as a signal for the event’s participants to begin filling in the rows. Ivan said, “A record crowd this evening,” and he sounded delighted. “Can it be the increase in prize money? Well, I always believed you lot were available for bribery.”

Laughter greeted this. It was obvious that Ivan was comfortable with the group. Joel wasn’t surprised.

“I see a few new faces, and I welcome you to Wield Words Not Weapons,” Ivan said. “I hope you’ll find a home here for your talents. So without further blather from me, then . . .” He was carrying a clipboard to which he referred. “You’re first, Adam Whitburn. May I encourage you to
endeavour
to overcome your natural shyness this evening?”

Everyone chuckled as a Rasta with his dreads tucked into a massive knitted cap leapt out of the audience and onto the dais with the attitude of a prizefighter entering the ring. He tugged at the brim of his cap and shot an affable grin at someone who’d cried out, “You go, bred.” He perched on the stool and began to read from a dog-eared spiral notebook. He announced the piece as “Stephen G’wan Home.”

“‘Got him on the street, they did,’” the writing began. “‘Blood poured red, hot like blaze, but knife go cool. Stuck like no one, Dad, not a man, not a goat. Stuck just cos the way of the street.’”

The room was hushed as Adam Whitburn read. Not even a baby mewled for attention. Joel dropped his gaze to his knees as the story was told: documenting the gathering crowd, the police, the investigation, the arrest, the trial, and the end. No justice and no way to put anything at rest. Ever. Merely dead in the street.

When Adam Whitburn finished, for a moment nothing happened.

Then applause rose from the audience, accompanied by shouts and hoots. But what followed next came as a surprise to Joel. Members of the audience began to offer criticism about the writing, referring to it as a
poem
, which also surprised him as it hadn’t rhymed and the only thing he knew about poetry was that the words were supposed to rhyme. No one mentioned the facts of the piece at all: specifi cally the death and subsequent injustice that were at the centre of it. Instead, they talked about language and metre, intention and accomplishment.

They talked about scanning and figurative language, and they asked Adam Whitburn questions about form. The Rasta listened intently, replied when necessary, and took notes. Then he thanked the audience, nodded, and stepped back to join them.

A girl called Sunny Drake followed him. The piece she wrote appeared to Joel to be about pregnancy and cocaine, about being born addicted to her mother’s addiction, about giving birth to a baby born the same. Again, a discussion followed: criticism with no judgement offered about the facts.

In this way, ninety minutes passed. Aside from Ivan calling out names from his clipboard, no one actually ran the event after his initial comments. Instead, it appeared to run itself, with the familiarity of a ritual that everyone understood. When the time for a break arrived, Ivan returned to the microphone. He announced that Walk the Word would be happening at the front of the room for those who were interested, while the rest of the audience partook of refreshments. Joel watched curiously as the group dispersed and twelve people from the audience moved eagerly towards the dais. There, Ivan was handing out sheets of paper, and from this and the murmurs of conversation which included the words
fi fty pounds,
Joel understood that this was the part of the event that had at first attracted his attention: the part that included prize money.

While he knew he didn’t have much chance of winning—especially since he had no idea of what the event actually was—he moved forward with the rest of the people. He saw that Adam Whitburn was among them, and he almost considered leaving at that point. But Ivan called out, “Delighted to see you, Joel Campbell. Here you are. Join in the fray,” and soon enough Joel had a piece of paper in his hand upon which were written five words:
havoc
,
forever
,
question
,
destruction
, and
forgiveness
.

He stared at them with absolutely no comprehension. He knew what they meant, but other than that, he was without a clue. He looked around for an indication of what he was supposed to do next, and he saw that the other participants in Walk the Word were setting about creating something, writing furiously, pausing for thought, chewing on their pencils, clicking the cartridges of their biros in and out. It seemed to Joel that what they were creating had to be more of the curious poetry. He knew he could wander off or he could join them. Fifty pounds seemed reason enough for him to do the latter.

For the first five minutes, he gazed at the paper he’d been given as all around him people scribbled, rubbed out, muttered, scribbled, scratched out, rubbed out, and scribbled some more. He wrote
havoc
and he waited for something miraculous to happen, something light-ninglike, rendering him a poetic St. Paul. He made the
o
in
havoc
into a wheel with spokes. He surrounded the word itself with shooting stars.

He doodled and underlined. He sighed and crumpled the paper into a ball.

Next to him, a grandmotherly white woman in enormous spectacles was thoughtfully chewing on the end of her biro. She looked at Joel, then patted him on the knee. She whispered, “Start with one of the other words, pet. No need to go from top to bottom or take them in any particular order.”

“You sure?”

“Been doing it since the first, I have. Take up the word you can feel right here”—she pointed to her chest—“and go from there. Let go.

Your subconscious will do the rest. Give it a try.”

Joel looked at her doubtfully, but decided to have a go at doing it her way. He smoothed out the paper and read each of the words again.

He seemed to feel the most for the word
forever,
so he wrote it down and then something curious happened: Words began to pile on top of that first one—
forever
—and he merely acted as their scribe.

“‘Forever kind of place hold her close,’” he wrote. “‘She asks why and the question screams. No answer, girl. You been playing too long.

Ain’t no forgiveness for the death inside you. What you did, how it ended with destruction. You die, slag, and havoc goes home.’”

Joel dropped his pencil and stared, slack jawed, at what he’d written.

He felt as if steam were coming from his ears. He read his piece twice over, then four times more. He was about to shove it surreptitiously into the pocket of his jeans when someone flitted by and plucked the paper out of his hand. It went to a group who had volunteered to be the evening’s judges. They disappeared from the room with all the entries as Wield Words Not Weapons continued with more readings and more reactions from the audience.

Joel couldn’t attend to very much after that. Instead, he watched the door through which the judges for Walk the Word had passed. It seemed to him that the length of four more Wield Words Not Weapons events passed while he waited to hear the judges’ verdict on his first literary effort. When they finally emerged, they handed the entries to Ivan Weatherall, who looked them over and nodded happily as he read them.

When the time arrived to announce the winner of Walk the Word, recognition went in reverse order, with honourable mentions first.

Their poems were read, and the poets identified themselves, were applauded, and were given certificates stamped in gold along with a coupon for a free video from Apollo Video. Third place went to the elderly lady who’d given Joel advice, and she got a certifi cate, five pounds, and a coupon for a takeaway curry from Spicy Joe’s. Second place went to an Asian girl in a headscarf—Joel checked to see if she was Hibah, but she was not—and then a hush fell over the group for the announcement of first place and fifty pounds.

Joel told himself that he couldn’t really win. He didn’t know poems, and he didn’t know words. Still, he couldn’t help thinking about the fifty pounds prize money, and what he could do with fifty pounds if a miracle happened and he turned out to be—

The winner was Adam Whitburn.

“Step up here, collect your prize, and accept the adulation of your peers, my man,” Ivan told him.

The Rasta bounded forward, all smiles. He swept off his cap and bowed, and his dreadlocks poured around his shoulders. When the applause died down, he took the mike for the second time that evening, and he read his poem. Joel tried to listen, but he couldn’t hear. He had the distinct feeling of floodwater rising around him.

He wished for a quick escape, but his seat was in the middle of the row and there was no route that did not involve stepping over people and pushchairs. Thus, he had to endure Adam Whitburn’s triumph, and he agonised for the moment when the evening would come to an end and he could go home. But as Adam returned to his seat, Ivan Weatherall went back to the mike. He had a last announcement, he said, because the judges had also made a selection of a Poet of Promise, and this was the first time such an honour had been bestowed upon anyone since Adam Whitburn had himself been so designated five years earlier. They wanted to give this individual a special nod, Ivan declared.

Then he read the poem, and Joel heard his own words.

“Take a bow,” Ivan said, “whoever wrote this one.”

Poet of Promise. Even after Wield Words Not Weapons was over, Joel was still able to summon up the pleasure he felt at the slaps on his back and the congratulations. He could still see the smiles on the faces of the audience as he faced them from the dais, and it would be a long time before the sound of their applause entirely faded from his ears.

As the crowd began to disperse, Adam Whitburn sought Joel out.

He said, “How old are you, bred?” and then with a grin when Joel said his age, “_Twelve? _ Shit. You not half, speck.” He slapped Joel’s palm. “I di’n’t put words together like dat ’fore I was seventeen. You got summick special.”

A frisson of pleasure tingled Joel’s spine. Having never been told he was special at anything, he wasn’t sure how he was meant to answer, so he nodded and said, “Cool.”

He found that he didn’t want to leave the Basement Activities Centre, which would mean putting an end to the evening, so he stayed behind and helped stack the plastic chairs and bag the remaining refreshments.