What Came Before He Shot Her (44 page)

She walked as casually as she’d done when she’d first entered the store, and she felt suffused with a combination of warmth and excitement as she mixed with a group of shoppers outside.

She didn’t get far. Lit with success, she’d decided on Tower Records next, and she was about to cross the road when she was blocked by the pensioner she’d seen inside the department store.

He said, “I don’t think so, dearie,” as he took her by the arm.

She said, “What the
hell
you think you’re doing, mon?”

“Nothing at all, as long as you can provide a receipt for the merchandise you’ve got inside that bag of yours. Come with me.”

He was far stronger than he appeared. In fact, upon a closer look at him, Ness saw that he wasn’t a pensioner at all. He wasn’t stooped, as he’d appeared to be in the store, and his face wasn’t lined to match his thin, grey hair. Still, she didn’t realise how he fit into the scheme of things, and she continued to protest—loudly—as he led her back towards the door of the department store.

Once inside, he marched her along an aisle and towards the back of the store. There, a swing door led to the bowels of the building. Soon enough she was through it and being ushered down a flight of stairs.

Hotly, she said, “Where the
fuck
do you think you’re takin me?”

His answer was, “Where I take all shoplifters, dearie.”

Thus she understood that the man she’d thought was a pensioner was a security guard for the infernal department store. So she didn’t willingly go a step farther. She put up as much of a fight as his grip upon her arm would allow. For she knew that she’d just caused herself a fair amount of trouble. Already on probation, already doing community service, she had no wish to put in another appearance in front of a magistrate, where she’d be risking more this time than merely having to show up at the child drop-in centre.

Once down the stairs, she found herself in a narrow lino-fl oored corridor, where she could see that she wasn’t going to get away easily. She assumed they were on their way to wherever it was that they took shoplifters while they waited for a constable to show up from the Earl’s Court Road police station, and she began to prepare a tale to spin when the constable got there. She’d have time to do this in whatever lockup they provided for her. It would be, she reckoned, at best a small and windowless room and at worst a real cell.

It was neither. Instead, the security guard opened a door and pushed her into a locker room. It smelled of perspiration and disinfectant.

Rows of grey lockers lined it on either side, and a narrow, unpainted wooden bench went down its middle.

Ness said, “I di’n’t do nothing, mon. Why’re you bringing me to dis place?”

“I expect you know. I expect we can open that bag of yours and see.” The guard turned from her, and locked the door behind them.

The dead-bolt clicked into place like a pistol cocking. He held out his hand. “Give me the bag,” he told her. “And let me say that things tend to go easier with you lot if I can tell the cops you’ve been cooperative from the first.”

Ness hated the idea of handing over her bag, but she did it because
cooperative
was indeed how she wanted to seem. She watched while the guard opened the bag as any man might: clumsily and unsure how the thing was meant to be handled. He dumped out its contents and there was the offending article, sequins glittering in the overhead lights. He picked it up and held it dangling from one finger. He looked from her to it, and he said, “Worth it, then?”

“What’re you talkin ’bout?”

“I’m asking is it worth it to nick something like this when the consequences might be a lockup?”

“You sayin I nicked it. I ain’t.”

“How’d it get in your bag if you didn’t nick it?”

“Don’t know,” she said. “I never saw it before.”

“And who d’you expect to believe that? Especially when I give chapter and verse on your picking up two, dropping them both, and returning only one of them to the rack. There was this one—with the silver sequins—and there was the other one—with the red and blue. Who d’you think will be believed? D’you have any priors, by the way?”

“What’re you yammerin—”

“I think you know. And I think you have them. Priors, that is. Problems with the cops. The last thing you want is for me to phone them. I can see that in your face as plain as anything, and don’t deny it.”

“You don’t know nuffi nk.”

“Don’t I now? Then you won’t mind when the coppers come along, when I tell ’em my tale and you tell ’em yours. Who do you expect they’re likely to believe, a girl with priors—kitted out like a tart—or an upstanding member of the public who happens to be on staff at this establishment?”

Ness said nothing. She attempted to seem indifferent, but the truth of the matter was that she was not. She didn’t want to face the police another time, and the fact that she was eyeball to eyeball with doing just that infuriated her. The fact that she was in the hands of someone who was clearly going to play cat and mouse with her till he turned her over to the authorities only made matters worse. She felt tears of futility come into her eyes and this enraged her more. The security guard saw them, and carried on in accordance with what he believed about them.

“Not so tough when it comes down to it, are you, now?” he asked her. “Dress tough, act tough, talk tough, all of it. But at the end of the day, you want to go home like the rest of ’em, I expect. That it? You want to go home? Forget about this?”

Ness was mute. She waited. She sensed more was to come, and she was not wrong in this. The guard was watching her, waiting for a reaction of some kind. She finally said with a fair degree of caution, “What?

You sayin you mean to let me go home?”

“If certain conditions are met,” he said. “I being the only one who knows about this—” He swung the headband from his finger again. “I let you leave and I return this to where it belongs. Nothing further said between us.”

Ness thought about this and knew there was no alternative. She said,

“What, then?”

He smiled. “Take off your T-shirt. Bra as well, if you’re wearing one, which I doubt, considering how much I can already see.”

Ness swallowed. “What for? What’re you goin—”

“You want to leave? No questions asked? No further cause for interaction between us? Take off your T-shirt and let me look at them.

That’s what I want. I want to look at them. I want to see what you have.”

“That’s all? Then you let me—”

“Take
off
your T-shirt.”

It wasn’t, she told herself, any worse than opening the dressing gown in front of Dix D’Court. And it surely wasn’t worse than everything else she’d already seen and done and experienced . . .
And
it meant that she would walk out of this place without a cop in attendance, which meant everything there was.

She clenched her teeth. It
didn’t
matter. Nothing mattered. In one quick movement, she pulled the T-shirt up, over her head, and off.

“Face me square,” he said. “Don’t cover yourself cause I don’t expect you do that for all the younger blokes, do you? Drop the shirt as well. Put your arms at your sides.”

She did it. She stood there. He drank her in. His eyes were greedy.

His breathing was loud. He swallowed so hard she could hear the sound of it from where she stood some ten feet away. Too many feet away, as things turned out. He said to her, “One thing more.”

“You said—”

“Well, that was before I saw, wasn’t it? Come over here, then.”

“I don’t—”

“Just ask yourself if you want all this”—again the headband—“to go away, dearie.”

He waited then. He was sure of himself, as a man who’d stood in this spot many times before and made the most of it.

Ness approached him, without any other option that she could see.

She steeled herself to what would happen next and when he put his hand over one of her breasts, she did her best not to shudder although she felt a prickling sensation inside her nose: harbinger of the most useless of tears. His entire hand covered her breast, her nipple cushioned in the centre of his palm. His fingers tightened. He pulled her forward.

When she was inches from him, he looked at her squarely. “This,”

he said, “c’n all go away. You out of here and home to your mummy.

No one the wiser about nicking this and that from the store. That what you want?”

A tear escaped her eye.

“You got to say,” he said. “That’s what you want. Say it.”

She managed to mutter. “Yeah.”

“No. You must
say
it, dear.”

“Tha’s what I want.”

He smiled. “I guessed as much,” he said. “Girls like you, they always want it. You hold still now, and I give you what you asked for, dearie.

Will you do that for me? Answer me now.”

Ness steeled herself. “I do that for you.”

“Willingly?”

“Yeah. I do it.”

“How nice,” he said. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?” He bent to her, then, and he began to suck.

SHE WAS LATE to the child drop-in centre. She made the trip from Kensington High Street north to Meanwhile Gardens without thinking about the locker room, but the effort to do this made her rage inside.

Rage brought tears and tears brought more rage. She told herself she would return, she would wait outside the employees’ door—the very door he’d taken her to at last, releasing her into a side street with a pleasant “Now get along with you, dearie”—and when he came out at the end of the day, she’d kill him. She would shoot him between the eyes, and what they did to her afterwards would be of no account because he would be dead, as he deserved to be.

She didn’t wait for the bus that would take her up Kensington Church Street and then on to Ladbroke Grove. She told herself she couldn’t be bothered, but the truth was that she didn’t want to be seen, and on foot she felt somehow invisible. Humiliation—which she would not admit as even existing—was washing over her. The only way to avoid feeling it was to stalk furiously in the general direction of the drop-in centre, savagely pushing her way through the crowds while she remained in the shopping district, seeking something she could damage when those crowds thinned and she was left on the wider pavements of Holland Park Avenue where there was no one close by to smash into and snarl at and nothing to do save keep walking and trying to avoid her own thoughts.

She finally boarded a bus in Notting Hill because it happened to pull up just as she reached the stop and there would be no need for her to wait and think. But this did little to get her to the drop-in centre so that her arrival would be timely. She was ninety minutes late as she went through the gate in the cyclone fence, where in the play area three children toddled about in the paddling pool under the watchful eyes of their mothers.

The sight of them—children and mothers—was something that Ness couldn’t bear to look at but
had
to look at, so what she felt was even more anger. The effect was like air being forced into an overfull balloon.

She shoved open the door of the drop-in centre. It banged against the wall. Several children were applying white glue to an art project that involved poster board, seashells, and beads. Majidah was in the kitchen. The children looked up with wide eyes, and Majidah came into the main room. Ness readied herself for what the Muslim woman would say, thinking, Just let her, just
let
the bloody bitch.

Majidah looked her over, her eyes narrowing in evaluation. She didn’t like Ness because she didn’t like Ness’s attitude, not to mention her dress sense and the reason she was working at the centre. But she was also a woman who’d gone through much in her forty-six years, not the least of which was to come to terms with profound suffering: in herself and in others. While her philosophy in life could best be described as
Work hard, don’t whinge, and just get on with it
, she was not devoid of compassion for people who had not yet found the way to do any of these things.

So she said, with a meaningful glance at the Felix the Cat clock that hung above a rank of storage blocks containing children’s toys, “You must try to be on time, Vanessa. Please do assist those children with their gluing. You and I will speak once we close for the day.”

JOEL’S CONFRONTATION WITH Neal Wyatt turned out to be a double-edged sword. One edge had Joel watching his back from that moment forward. The other edge had him writing. More words than he would ever have thought possible prompted more verse than he would ever have thought possible, the oddest feature about this process being the fact that the words coming out of his head weren’t the sort that Joel would have thought could produce a poem. They were ordinary. Words like
bridge
or
kneel
, like
fl oat
or
dismay
had him diving for his notebook. He did it so often that Kendra became curious and asked Joel what he was up to with his nose bent over a notebook all the time.

She assumed he was writing letters to someone and asked him if the intended recipient was his mother. When he told her it wasn’t letters but rather poems, Kendra—like Hibah—jumped to love poems and she began to tease him about being stuck on a girl. But there was a half-hearted nature to her teasing that even Joel—with all his focus on verse—could not fail to notice. He said wisely, “You seen Dix, then, Aunt Ken?” to which her response of “_Have _ you seen,” took their conversation towards the importance of proper English and away from the importance of love.

Kendra told herself it wasn’t love anyway, and how could it have been with those nearly twenty years forming a yawning chasm between them. She told herself good riddance, time for both of them to move on, but that message was prevented from working its way from her mind to her heart
because
of her heart. She altered the message after a time, to one of “It was just lust, girl,” and she adhered to that because it seemed reasonable.

With Kendra’s thoughts caught up in all this and with Joel’s concentration on his poetry, there was only Toby left to notice a change in Ness in the following days. But since the change constituted doing what she had been ordered to do by the magistrate—and suddenly without complaint—the subtlety of the situation was beyond Toby. He soothed himself with his lava lamp, watched the television, and kept mum about Joel’s run-in with Neal Wyatt.