What Came Before He Shot Her (4 page)

Kendra knew all this would take enormous time and effort, but she had always been a woman unafraid of hard work. In this, she was nothing like her mother. But that was not the only way in which Kendra Osborne and Glory Campbell differed from each other.

Men comprised the other way. Glory was frightened and incomplete without one, no matter what he was like or how he treated her, which is why she was at that very moment sitting at an airport boarding gate, waiting to jet off to a broken-down alcoholic Jamaican with a disreputable past and absolutely no future. Kendra, on the other hand, stood on her own. She’d been married twice. Once a widow and now a divorcée, she liked to say that she’d done her time—with one winner and one utter loser—and now her second husband was doing his. She didn’t
mind
men, but she’d learned to see them as good merely for relieving certain physical needs.

When those needs came upon her, Kendra had no diffi culty finding a man happy to accommodate her. An evening out with her best girlfriend was sufficient to take care of this, for at forty years of age, Kendra was tawny, exotic, and willing to use her looks to get what she wanted, which was a bit of fun with no strings attached. With her career plans in place, she had no room in her life for a love-struck male with anything more on his mind than sex with appropriate precautions taken.

At the point when Kendra swung her car right to the narrow garage in front of her house, Joel and Toby—having returned from their outing to the Meanwhile Gardens duck pond—had been sitting in the frigid cold for an additional hour, and both of them were numb around the bottom. Kendra didn’t see her nephews on her top front step, largely because the streetlamp in Edenham Way had been burnt out since the previous October, with no sign of anyone’s having a plan to replace it. Instead, what she saw was someone’s discarded shopping trolley blocking access to her garage and filled to the brim with that person’s belongings.

At first it seemed to Kendra that these were goods meant for the charity shop, and while she didn’t appreciate her neighbours dropping off their discards in front of her house instead of carting them up to the Harrow Road, she wasn’t one to turn goods away if there was a possibility that they might sell. So when she got out of the car to pull the trolley to one side, she was still in the good humour that sprang from having had a successful afternoon giving demonstration sports massages at a gym built under the Westway Flyover in the Portobello Green Arcade.

That was when she saw the boys, their suitcases, and the carrier bags.

Instantly, Kendra felt dread surge up from her stomach, and realisation followed in a rush.

She unlocked the garage and shoved open the door without a word to her nephews. She understood what was about to happen, and the understanding prompted her to curse, her voice soft enough to ensure that the boys couldn’t hear her, but loud enough to give herself at least a modicum of the satisfaction that comes with cursing in the first place.

She chose the words
shit
and
that goddamn cow
, and once she said them, she climbed back into the Fiat and pulled it into the garage, all the time thinking furiously of what she could possibly do to avoid having to deal with what her mother had just thrust upon her. She was able to come up with nothing.

By the time she’d parked the car and gone around to the back of it to drag her massage table from the boot, Joel and Toby had left their perch and come to join her. They hesitated at the corner of the house, Joel at the front and Toby his usual shadow.

Joel said to Kendra without hello or preamble, “Gran say she got to fix up a house first, for us to come to live in in Jamaica. She sendin for us when she got it fixed. She say we’re meant to wait for her here.”

And when Kendra didn’t answer because, despite her dread, her nephew’s words and his hopeful tone made her eyes smart at her mother’s base cruelty, Joel went on even more eagerly, saying, “How you been, Aunt Ken? C’n I help you wiv dat?”

Toby said nothing. He hung back and danced a bit on his toes, looking solemn and like a bizarre ballerina doing a solo in a production involving the sea. “Why the hell’s he wearing that thing?” Kendra asked Joel with a nod at his brother.

“Th’ life ring? It’s wha’ he likes jus’ now, innit. Gran gave it him for Christmas, remember? She said in Jamaica he c’n—”

“I know what she said,” Kendra cut in sharply, and the sudden anger she felt was directed not at her nephew but at herself as she abruptly realised she should have known right then, right on Christmas Day, what Glory Campbell intended. The moment Glory had made her airy an-nouncement about following her no-good boyfriend back to the land of their births as if she were Dorothy setting off to see the wizard and things were going to be as simple as tripping down some yellow brick road . . . Kendra wanted to slap herself for wearing blinkers that day.

“Kids’ll
love
Jamaica,” Glory had said. “An’ George’ll rest easier there ’n here. Wiv dem, I mean. ’S been hard on him, y’ know. T’ree kids an’ us in dis tiny li’l place. We been living in each other knickers.”

Kendra had said, “You can’t take them off to Jamaica. What about their mum?”

To which Glory had replied, “I ’spect Carole won’t even know dey gone.”

No doubt, Kendra thought as she hauled the massage table from the back of the car, Glory would now use that as an excuse in the letter that was surely to follow her departure at some point when she could no longer avoid writing it.
I’ve had a decent think about it
, she would declare, for Kendra knew her mother would use her erstwhile appropriate English and not the faux Jamaican she’d taken up in anticipation of her coming new life,
and I remember what you said about
poor Carole. You’re right, Ken. I can’t take the kids so far away from
her, can I?
That would be an end to the matter. Her mother wasn’t evil, but she’d always been someone who firmly believed in putting first things first. Since the first thing in Glory’s mind had always been Glory, she was unlikely ever to do something that might be to her disadvantage. Three grandchildren in Jamaica living in a household with a useless, unemployed, card-playing, television-watching specimen of overweight and malodorous male whom Glory was determined to hang on to because she’d never once been able to cope for even a week without a man and she was at the age where men are hard to come by . . . That scenario would spell out
disadvantage
even to the base illiterate.

Kendra slammed home the lid of the boot. She grunted as she hoisted up the heavy folding table by its handle. Joel hurried to assist her. He said, “Lemme take dat, Aunt Ken,” quite as if he believed he could handle its size and its weight. Because of this and although she didn’t want to, Kendra softened a bit. She said to Joel, “I’ve got it, but you can pull down that door. And you can fetch that trolley inside the house, along with everything else you’ve got with you.”

As Joel complied, Kendra looked at Toby. The brief moment of experiencing softness deserted her. What she saw was the puzzle everyone saw and the responsibility that no one wanted because the only answer that anyone had ever managed—or been willing—to glean about what was wrong with Toby was the useless label “lacking an appropriate social filter,” and in the family chaos that had become the norm shortly before his fourth birthday, no one had had the nerve to investigate further. Now Kendra—who knew no more about this child than what she could see before her—was faced with coping with him until she could come up with a plan to divest herself of the responsibility.

Looking at him standing there—that ridiculous life ring, his head a chopped-up mess, his jeans too long, his trainers duct-taped closed because he’d never learned to tie his shoes properly—Kendra wanted to run in the opposite direction.

She said shortly to Toby, “So. What d’you have to say for yourself?”

Toby halted in his dance and looked to Joel, seeking a sign of what he was meant to do. When Joel didn’t give him one, he said to his aunt, “I got to pee. S’this Jamaica?”

“Tobe. You
know
it ain’t,” Joel said.

“Isn’t,” Kendra told him. “Speak proper English when you’re with me. You’re perfectly capable of it.”

“Isn’t,” Joel said cooperatively. “Tobe, this isn’t Jamaica.”

Kendra took the boys inside the house where she set about snapping on lights as Joel brought in two suitcases, the carrier bags, and the shopping trolley. He stood just inside the door and waited for some sort of direction. As he’d never been to his aunt’s house before, he looked around curiously, and what he saw was a dwelling that was even smaller than the house in Henchman Street.

On the ground floor, there were only two rooms in a shotgun design, along with a tiny, hidden WC. What went for an eating area lay just beyond the entry, and beyond that a kitchen offered a window that was black with night, reflecting Kendra’s image when she flicked on the bright overhead light. Two doors set at right angles to each other made up the far-left corner of the kitchen. One of them led to the back garden with the barbecue that Toby had seen, and the other stood open on a stairway. There were two floors above and, as Joel would later discover, one of these comprised a sitting room while the top floor held a bathroom and bedrooms, of which there were two.

Kendra made for these stairs, dragging the massage table with her.

Joel hurried over to help her with it, saying, “You takin this above, Aunt Ken? I c’n do it for you. I’m stronger’n I look.”

Kendra said, “You see to Toby. Look at him. He’s wanting the loo.”

Joel looked around for an indication of where a toilet might be, an action Kendra might have seen and interpreted had she been able to get beyond feeling that the walls of her house were about to close in on her. As it was, she headed up the stairs, and Joel, not liking to ask questions that could make him seem ignorant, waited until his aunt had started upstairs where the continued banging suggested she was taking the massage table to the top floor of the house. That was when he worked the lock on the garden door and hurried his brother outside.

Toby didn’t question this. He just made his stream into a flowerbed.

When Kendra came back downstairs, the boys were once again by the suitcases and the shopping trolley, not knowing what else they were meant to do. Kendra had been standing in her bedroom trying to calm herself, trying to develop a plan of action and coming up with nothing that wasn’t going to disrupt her life completely. She’d reached the point at which she had to ask the question whose answer she didn’t particularly want to hear.

She said to Joel, “Where’s Vanessa, then? Has she gone with your gran?”

Joel shook his head. “She’s round,” he said. “She got vex an’—”

“Angry,” Kendra said. “Not vex. Angry. Irritated. Annoyed.”

“Annoyed,” Joel said. “She got annoyed an’ she ran off. But I ’spect she’ll be back soon enough.” He said this last as if he expected his aunt to be happy to hear the news. But if coping with Toby was the last thing Kendra wanted to do, coping with his unruly and unpleasant sister was a very close second to it.

A nurturing woman would perhaps at this point have begun bustling about, if not getting life organised for the two hapless waifs who’d happened to appear on her doorstep, at least getting them something to eat. She would have climbed those stairs a second time and made some sort of sleeping arrangements out of the two bedrooms that the house possessed. There wasn’t adequate furniture for this—especially in the room set aside for massages—but there was bedding that could be put on the floor and extra towels that could be rolled into pillows. Food would follow that sleeping setup. And then a search for Ness could begin. But all of this was foreign to Kendra’s way of life, so instead she went to her bag and pulled out a packet of Benson & Hedges. She lit up using a burner on the stove, and she began to consider what she was meant to do next. The phone rang and saved her.

What she thought was that Glory—in an uncharacteristic fit of conscience—was ringing to say she’d come to her senses about George Gilbert, Jamaica, and the desertion of three children who relied upon her.

But the caller was Kendra’s best girlfriend Cordie, and as soon as Kendra heard her voice, she remembered that they’d arranged a girls’

night out. In a club called No Sorrow they’d planned to drink, smoke, talk, listen to the music, and dance: alone, together, or with a partner.

They’d pull men to prove they still had their attractions and if Kendra decided to bed someone, Cordie—happily married—would live the encounter vicariously via mobile the next morning. It was what they always did when they went out together.

Cordie said, “Got your dancin shoes on?,” which introduced Kendra to a life-defi ning moment.

She became aware that she was not only feeling the physical need for a man, but probably
had
been feeling that need for a week or so and had been sublimating it with attention to her work at the shop and her training in massage. The reference to dancing shoes, though, made the need go deep, where it intensified until she realised that she couldn’t actually remember when she’d last spread her legs for a man.

So she did some quick thinking. This involved the boys and what she could do with them so that she’d still have time to get to No Sorrow while the pickings were good. Mentally, she considered her fridge and her cupboards, for there had to be something she could rustle up to feed to them and, with the hour being what it was, they were probably hungry. A sorting out of the spare room would follow, to give them an area to sleep in tonight. She could pass out towels and flannels and make a formal introduction between them and the bath. And bedtime would immediately follow. Certainly, she could accomplish everything and still be ready to accompany Cordie to No Sorrow by half past nine.

Kendra said to Cordie in the style of language she adopted when speaking to her friend, “I polishing them now, innit. If they shine good enough, I ain’t wearing knickers, b’lieve it.”