What Came Before He Shot Her (45 page)

This was at Joel’s request. He explained away his cuts and bruises by telling his aunt that—daft as it was, since he had no skill—he’d borrowed a skateboard and tried out the skate bowl. She accepted this story and talked about safety helmets.

For his part, Joel took the word
safety
and began to fashion another poem. When it was complete, he put it in the suitcase beneath his bed.

Before he shut the lid, though, he counted the number of poems that he’d written. He was amazed to see he’d crafted twenty-seven, and the logical question arose in his mind: What was he going to do with them?

He continued to go to Wield Words Not Weapons, but he did not join the others at the microphone and he never participated in Walk the Word. Rather, he became an observer of the proceedings and a sponge for the criticism that was offered to the other poets who were willing to read.

Throughout all this, Ivan Weatherall didn’t bother with him much, just saying hello, expressing his pleasure at seeing Joel at Wield Words Not Weapons, asking whether Joel was writing, and not making anything of it when Joel ducked his head, too embarrassed to answer directly. He merely said, “You’ve got a gift, my friend. Mustn’t turn away from it.” Otherwise, Ivan concentrated on the delight he felt at the growing attendance at his poetry events. He added a poetry-writing course to the scriptwriting course he offered at Paddington Arts, but Joel couldn’t imagine taking it. He couldn’t imagine
having
to write a poem. The creative act didn’t work that way for him.

He had thirty-fi ve pieces when he decided that he would let Ivan see some of his work. He picked out four that he liked, and on a day when he had to fetch Toby from the learning centre, he left Edenham Estate earlier than usual, and he went up to Sixth Avenue.

He found Ivan, white gloved, working on another clock. This time, though, he wasn’t building it. Rather, he was cleaning an old one that, he explained, had taken to striking the half hour whenever the fancy came upon it.

“Completely unacceptable behaviour in a timepiece,” Ivan confi ded as he ushered Joel into the little sitting room. There, on the table beneath the window, the parts of a clock lay spread out on a white towel in a neat arrangement along with a small squeeze tin of oil, a pair of tweezers, and several sizes of minute screwdrivers. Ivan waved Joel in the direction of an armchair next to the fireplace. Coal had once burned there, but now an electric fire sat askew and unlit upon the grate. “This is damn tedious work, and your presence brings me a distraction from total concentration on it, for which I thank you,”

Ivan said.

At first, Joel’s thinking was that Ivan meant the four poems in his pocket, so he took them out and unfolded them, not questioning how the older man knew he’d come with a purpose. But Ivan merely went back to his clockwork after reaching for a sprig of mint and popping it into his mouth. He began to talk of an art show that he’d seen on the south bank of the Thames. He said it was “the emperor’s whatevers”

because one of the exhibits had been a urinal encased in Plexiglass and signed by the artist, and another had been a glass of water on a shelf mounted high on the wall with the title
Oak Tree
tacked beneath it.

Then, he went on, there was an entire room “dedicated to an angry lesbian who made sofas into acts of sexual congress, don’t ask. I can’t say what her message was meant to be, but her rage came through remarkably. Do you like art, Joel?”

Ivan’s question came so suddenly at the end of his chatter that Joel didn’t take it in at first, and he didn’t realise that his opinion was actually being solicited. But then Ivan looked up from his work, and his face appeared so friendly and expectant that Joel responded spontaneously for once, giving his answer without censoring himself.

“Cal draws good,” he said. “I seen his stuff.”

Ivan frowned for a moment. Then he held up a finger and said, “Ah.

Calvin Hancock. At the right hand of Stanley. Yes. He’s got something, hasn’t he? Untutored, which is a shame, and unwilling to
become
tutored, which is worse. But masses of raw talent. You’ve an eye for it, then. What about the rest? Have you been to any of our city’s great galleries?”

Joel hadn’t, but he didn’t want to say so. He didn’t want to lie, either, so he murmured, “Dad took us to Trafalgar Square once.”

“Ah. The National Gallery. What did you think? Bit stuffy, isn’t it?

Or did they have something special on?”

Joel pulled at a thread on the hem of his T-shirt. He knew there was some sort of museum in Trafalgar Square, but they’d only gone to see the enormous flocks of pigeons. They’d sat on the edge of one of the fountains and watched the birds, and Toby had wanted to climb on one of the lions at the base of the tall column at the square’s centre.

They’d listened to a busker entertaining with an accordion and they’d studied a girl painted gold and posing as a statue for donations that could be dropped into a bucket at her feet. They’d had Cornettos bought from a vendor at the side of the square, but they’d melted too fast because the day was hot. Toby had got ice cream down the front of him and all over his hands. Their father had dipped his handkerchief into the fountain and had cleaned him up after he’d finished with the cone.

Joel hadn’t thought of any of this in ages. The sudden memory made his eyes tingle.

Unaccountably, as far as Joel was concerned, Ivan said, “Ah. If we knew what the hand of cards was going to be, we’d develop a plan in advance to play them, I dare say. But the devilment of life is that we don’t. We’re caught out, most often with our trousers round our knees.”

Joel wanted to say, “What’re you
on
about?” but he didn’t because he knew
exactly
what Ivan was on about: there one moment and gone the next, walking to the dancing school to fetch Ness from her Saturday lesson, Toby’s hand in their dad’s and Joel pausing some thirty yards back because in front of the discount store a container of footballs caught his attention, so much so that at first he didn’t realise what the four loud pops were that he heard in advance of the shouting.

Joel said in a rush, “I brought these,” and he thrust his poems at Ivan.

Ivan took them, mercifully saying nothing further about hands of cards or how one could play them. Instead, he placed the papers on the towel, and he bent over them exactly as he would bend over a clock.

He read, and as he did so, he chewed on his mint leaves.

At first he said nothing. He merely went from one poem to the next, setting each aside after he had read it. Joel found that his ankles had begun to itch and the ticking of the clocks seemed louder than usual.

He thought he’d been foolish to bring the poems to Ivan and he silently said, Stupid, stupid, dumb shit, thick head, die die die.

Ivan’s reaction was quite unlike Joel’s, however. He finally turned in his seat and said, “The greatest sin is letting riches go to waste once you know they’re riches. The difficulty is that most people
don’t
know.

They define riches only by what they can see because that’s what they’ve been taught to do: to look at the
end
of things, the destination. What they never recognise is that riches are in the process, the journey, in what one does with what one has. Not in what one manages to amass.”

This was all a bit much for Joel, so he said nothing. He did wonder, though, if Ivan was merely coming up with something to say because he’d read the poems and he’d found them as stupid as Joel himself was beginning to suspect they truly were.

Before he could voice this, Ivan opened a wooden box on his table and took out a pencil. He said, “You’ve a natural flair for metre and language, but occasionally the rawness is just too raw, and that’s where shading comes in. If we scan this verse . . . Here. Let me show you what I mean.” He motioned Joel to come to the table, and there he explained. He used terms Joel had never heard of, but he made marks on the paper to illustrate what he meant. He took his explanation slowly, and there was an honest friendliness to the recitation that made Joel easy with listening to it. There was also an eagerness behind the words that Joel could see was directed at the poems themselves.

So completely involved did he become in listening to Ivan talk about his verse and in watching the way Ivan was able to improve each piece that when Joel finally heard the clocks chiming around him, he looked up to see he’d been there for nearly two hours. This was one hour longer than he’d meant to be there, and one hour later than the conclusion of Toby’s summertime appointment at the learning centre.

Joel jumped to his feet, crying out, “Holy hell!”

Ivan said, “What . . . ?” but Joel heard nothing more of the question. The only sound he heard from that moment was the slapping of his trainers on the pavement as he ran in the direction of the Harrow Road.

Joel fairly threw himself at the doors of the learning centre. He was out of breath, but he managed to burst into reception and pant out, “Tobe . . .
Sorry
,” only to find himself being stared at by the sole occupants of the room, who were a young mother breast-feeding her infant, a toddler at her side with a dummy plugged into his mouth.

Still, Joel looked for Toby, as if he might be hiding under one of the vinyl sofas or behind the two artificial aspidistras. He next went in search of Luce Chinaka, and he found her in her office. She said, “He’s not waiting for you, Joel?” as she looked down at her wristwatch. She then said,

“Oh, but weren’t you meant to be here at . . . ,” but her voice drifted off mercifully when she saw the expression on Joel’s panicked face. She got to her feet and said kindly enough, “Let’s just have a quick look round.”

But Toby was nowhere in the learning centre: not at the pint-size tables where games were spread out, not at one of the keyboards in the computer room, not working in one of the smaller rooms with a teacher bent over him, not among the toys or the art materials. All this resulted in Joel’s reaching the last conclusion he wished to reach: Somehow Toby had slipped through a crack in the system and set off into the streets alone.

Luce Chinaka was saying, “Come with me. Let’s phone—,” when Joel tore out of the centre. His mouth had gone dry. He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t, in fact, even remember the route he usually followed when taking Toby home. Since he rarely used the same route anyway—someone unfamiliar up ahead and he’d abruptly change course without telling Toby why—virtually any direction that ultimately took one to Edenham Way was possible.

He looked up and down the pavement, hoping against unreasonable hope that he might still catch a glimpse of Toby. But there was no familiar form in sight, tripping along on his tiptoes and trailing the flex of his lava lamp, which left Joel in an agony of indecision.

He was finally roused from this by the thought of Kendra. The charity shop was just along the Harrow Road.

Resolutely, Joel set off. He walked at a fast clip, peering into each place of business on the route. At a William Hill betting shop, he even paused to ask Drunk Bob if Toby had somehow got inside, but all Drunk Bob said in reply was his usual—“Oy! Oy!”—and he shook the arms of his wheelchair as if he meant to tell Joel more.

Kendra was helping a Chinese lady when Joel entered the charity shop. She automatically looked up when the bell rang and, seeing Joel, she glanced to each side of him for Toby. Then she looked at an old clock that was mounted above a display of worn-out shoes and she said, “Where’s your brother?”

This told Joel all he wanted to know. He turned on his heel and left, with his aunt’s cry of “Joel! What’s going on?” following him.

Outside the learning centre once more, Joel bit on the side of his thumb and tried to think things through. He doubted his brother would have crossed over the road and headed into West Kilburn since he himself had never taken Toby there. This reduced the options to going right towards Great Western Road and ducking down one of the streets leading off it or going left in the direction of Kensal Town.

Joel chose right and tried to think like his brother. He decided it was likely that Toby would trip along the pavement, turning aimlessly when it veered into a side street. Joel would thus do that as well and, with luck, he would find that Toby had got distracted by something along the way and was, perhaps, staring meditatively at it with his mind gone elsewhere. Or, failing that, he had become tired and sat down to wait until someone found him. Or, what would be even more likely, perhaps he’d got hungry and wandered into a sweets shop or a newsagent’s where there’d be a display of snacks.

Bearing all this in mind and trying to think of nothing else—

certainly nothing sinister—Joel turned right at the first street he came to. A line of terrace houses stood in a rank along it, all of them identical London brick. All along the way, cars were parked nose to tail at the kerb, and the occasional bicycle was chained to a railing or a street lamp, frequently with one of its tyres removed. Midway down the street, the road curved to the left, and it was at this spot that Joel saw someone alighting from a van. It was a man dressed in a navy blue boiler suit and likely returning home from work, but instead of proceeding into one of the nearby houses, he stood looking beyond the curve of the street to a point which Joel himself could not see.

He shouted something and then dug in his pocket to bring out a mobile phone, into which he punched a few numbers. He waited, spoke, and then shouted down the street again.

Joel watched all this as he hurriedly advanced. By the time he reached the van, the man had gone inside one of the houses. What he’d been shouting at remained outside, however. Joel took it in and knew what he was looking at: Some ten or twelve houses farther along, a group of boys circled like a pack of hounds around a figure who was huddled on the pavement, quite small against the wall of a property, like a hedgehog protecting its vital parts.

Joel took off running and shouted as he ran, “Fuck you, Wyatt!