What Came Before He Shot Her (47 page)

Dix looked at the bottle in his hands and he kept his eyes on it as he replied. “Ken, ’f I sort dis for the boys, t’ings’ll go worse. Joel and Toby end up havin more trouble’n ever. You don’t want dat and neither do I. You know how t’ings on the street work out.”

“Yeah, I do know,” Kendra said curtly. “People die is how things in the street work out.”

He winced. “Not always,” he said. “And we’re not talkin ’bout a drug ring, Ken. We’re talkin about a group of boys.”

“A group of boys going after Toby.
Toby.
You should see him now, how scared he is. He’s had nightmares about it and his days aren’t much better.”

“It’ll pass. Boy like dis Neal, he’s into posturin, innit. His street creds’re not goin to grow ’f he does some job on an eight-year-old.

What he’s doing right now—makin threats ’n’ all dat—you’ll see dat’s the limit of wha’ he’s goin to do an’ he’s doin it to unnerve you lot.”

“Well, he’s damn well succeeding.”

“Don’t have to be dat way. He’s a limp dick, innit. ’F he’s talkin

’bout seeing to Toby, it means he just dat—all talk and nuffi nk else.”

Kendra looked away from him as she realised what the outcome of this conversation was going to be. She said, “You aren’t willing to help.”

“Not what I’m saying.”

“Then what?”

“Kids got to learn survival round here. Kids got to learn how to get along or get away.”

“What you’re saying . . . That’s not a whole lot different to saying you won’t help me out.”

“I
am
helpin you out. I’m tellin you how it is and how it has to be.” He took another drink of the water and he handed the bottle back. His voice was not unkind. “Ken, you got to think . . .” He chewed on the inside of his lip for a moment. He made a study of her till she stirred uncomfortably beneath it. He finally sighed and said, “Maybe you got more ’n you can handle. You ever t’ink dat?”

Her backbone stiffened. She said, “So I should get rid of ’em? That what you’re saying? I should ring up Miss Fabulous Bender and tell her to come fetch ’em?”

“Dat’s not what I meant.”

“And I’m supposed to live with myself afterwards? Maybe by telling myself they’re
safe
now? Away from this place an’ all its troubles?”

“Ken.
Ken
. I said it wrong.”

“Then what?”

“I just meant maybe you got too much to handle alone.”

“Like what?”

“Why’re you asking dat? What d’you mean ‘Like what?’ You know what I’m talkin about. Like Toby ’n’ whatever’s wrong wiv him dat no one ever like to talk about. Like Ness an’—”

“Ness is doing
fi ne
.”

“Fine? Ken, she came on to me. More ’n once while I was livin wiv you. Last time, she presented herself wivout no clothes on, and I’m telling you somet’ing’s
wrong
wiv her.”

“She’s oversexed, like three-quarters of the girls her age.”

“Yeah. Sure. Dat I unnerstan. But she knew I was your man, and dat makes a diff’rence, or at least it should. But nuffink makes a difference to Ness, and you got to see that makes somet’ing wrong.”

Kendra couldn’t go to the subject of Ness, while staying with the subject of Joel, Toby, and the street thugs seemed to give her the moral high ground. She said, “If you don’t want to help, jus’ say it. Don’t make this a judgement on me, all right?”

“I
ain’t
judgin . . .”

She got to her feet.

He said, “God damn it, Kendra. I’m willing to make it so you don’t have to handle dis shit alone. Those kids got needs an’ you don’t have to be the only one tryin to meet ’em.”

“Seems to me that I
am
the only one meeting a need here,” she said.

She headed for the doorway, leaving him sitting at the table with her bottle of water.

WHEN THE AUTUMN term began, Joel knew that dodging the occasion of a run-in with Neal and his crew was not going to be enough, especially since Neal and his crew knew exactly where to find him. He tried to vary the route he and Toby took to Middle Row School in the morning, but there was no way to vary the
fact
of Middle Row School or of Holland Park School either. He knew that he still needed to deal with the issue of Neal Wyatt, not only for himself but for Toby.

For himself, he came up with the knife.

In the long aftermath of the visit paid by the Blade to Edenham Way, everyone but Joel had forgotten about the flick knife that had been sent flying during the melee. Too many things had happened all at once for the household to remember that knife: Toby’s hysterics, Ness bleeding from the head, the Blade being thrown out on his arse, Kendra coping with Ness’s injury . . . In the midst of all this, the flick knife had gone the way of bad dreams.

Even Joel didn’t remember the knife at first. It was only when he was rescuing a piece of cutlery from beneath the cooker, where he’d accidentally dropped and kicked it while laying the table, that he saw the glint of silver against the wall. He knew at once what it was. He said nothing about it, but when the coast was clear, he went back and, using a long-handled wooden spoon, he scooped it forward.

When he had his hands on it, he saw a thin line of his sister’s blood along the blade. So he washed it carefully and when it was dry, he put it under his mattress—right in the middle—where no one was likely to find it.

He had no thought of using it for anything until he overheard his aunt in conversation with Cordie, telling her about her visit with Dix, her umbrage high and her English going to hell accordingly. “He say let ’em sort t’ings out ’
emselves
,” she was saying, her voice low but the hiss of it unmistakable. “Like I’m s’posed to wait till one of ’em gets beat bad enough to go into hospital wiv a broken skull.”

Joel understood this to mean he and Toby were on their own. He, too, had considered going to Dix for help—as unwise as he knew that would have been—but hearing Kendra and making the correct interpretation, he realised he would need a different plan.

So for himself, the plan was the knife. He fetched it from beneath his mattress and he put it in the rucksack that he carried to school.

He’d get into serious trouble if he was caught with at school, but he had no intention of showing it around like someone in need of impressing his schoolmates. He only intended to bring it out if an emergency called for it, and this would be a Neal Wyatt emergency, one in which Neal needed to know what was in store for him if he crossed Joel another time.

That left Joel with the problem of what to do for Toby. He meant to keep a sharp eye on his brother, and he especially meant never again to be late to the Westminster Learning Centre when it was time to fetch him. He meant to hand Toby over to Ness at the child drop-in centre—begging and bargaining for her help if necessary—should there be any occasion when he needed to leave Toby unsupervised.

But on the chance that anything wreaked havoc with these carefully laid plans, he needed to have a carefully laid additional plan for Toby as well, one that would kick in automatically should Neal Wyatt appear anywhere near his horizon if he inadvertently found himself alone.

Joel knew Toby would not be able to remember anything complicated. He understood also that, in a moment of fear, Toby might well freeze up altogether, curling into a ball and hoping he might go unnoticed. So he tried to make the plan sound like a game and the game involved hiding like an explorer in a jungle the moment he saw . . .

What? The dinosaurs coming after him? The lions getting ready to pounce on him? Gorillas? Rhinos? Pygmies with poisoned spears?

Cannibals?

Joel finally settled on headhunters, which seemed gruesome enough for Toby to remember. He made a shrunken head from a dismembered and unsellable troll doll that he got from the charity shop. He plaited its bright orange hair and drew stitches on its face. He said in reference to it, “This’s what they do, Tobe, and you got to remember,” and he put the severed doll head into his brother’s school rucksack. There were headhunters out there, he told him, and he had to find places to hide from them.

After school, after the learning centre, at the weekends, whenever there was time, Joel took Toby out into the streets and together they found useful shelters. These would be the places Toby would run to if he saw
anyone
approaching him. The thing about headhunters, Joel told him, was that they looked just like everyone else. They wore disguises. Like those blokes who broke his lava lamp. Did Toby understand that? Yes? Truly?

On Edenham Estate, they practised dashing for the rubbish area where there was just enough space behind two wheelie bins for Toby to squeeze himself till he heard Joel call out that the coast was clear.

Depending upon where he was in Meanwhile Gardens, he could slip down to the pond and hide in the reeds or—which was better—he could run for the abandoned barge beneath the canal bridge and there he could hole up under a crisscrossed pile of rotting timbers.

On the Harrow Road, he could dash to the charity shop and hide in the back room where their aunt kept bins for the clothing that was still to be sorted.

Joel took his brother to each location time and time again. He said,

“I’m the headhunter. Run!” and he gave Toby a shove in the correct direction. He kept this up until the sheer repetition of the exercise took Toby’s legs to the correct hiding places.

During all of this, Neal Wyatt and his crew kept their distance.

They gave no trouble to either Joel or Toby, and Joel was beginning to think that they’d actually moved on to tormenting someone else when they resurfaced, like hungry sharks returning to their feeding area.

What they did was follow. They took this up one day as Joel walked Toby to the learning centre. They emerged from a video shop across the road, and when Joel first saw them, he was certain they would vault the railing, dash through the traffic as they’d done before, and chase him and Toby down. But instead, they kept their distance across the street, stalking along the pavement and making soft hooting noises, as if they were signalling someone to jump out of one of the shops that Toby and Joel passed.

When he saw them, Toby grabbed the leg of Joel’s trousers, saying,

“There’s dem blokes’t broke my lava lamp,” and he sounded frightened, which he was.

For his part, Joel stayed as calm as he could and merely reminded his brother about jungle explorers and headhunters, asking him,

“Where’d you run, Tobe, if I wasn’t here?”

Toby responded correctly: to the charity shop, to the back room, into those bins, and no stopping to tell Aunt Ken what he was doing.

But Neal and his crew didn’t do anything more than follow and hoot on that day. On subsequent days they merely followed, doing their best to unnerve their quarry. Surprise was well and good for some kinds of contests. But for others, psychological warfare worked better to soften up the foe.

That was exactly what it did to Toby. After four days of being trailed by the silent crowd of boys, Toby wet his trousers again. It happened right on the steps of Middle Row School where he was obediently wait-ing for Joel. As Joel came round the corner from the bus, he saw Neal and his crew directly across the street from the school, gathered around a pub called the Chilled Eskimo, their eyes fastened on Toby.

Nothing in Joel’s experience had prepared him for such a degree of extended cleverness on the part of these boys. This type of individual he’d previously seen as the kind to jump, to clobber, and then to run.

But now he understood that Neal was quite clever. There was a reason, then, why he was the one to run the crew.

Additional wisdom was called for: another way to handle the situation. Kendra could not be spoken to about it lest she worry even more.

Ness—a peculiar change having come over her—was too involved with the drop-in centre. Dix was out of the question, as was Carole Campbell. That left Ivan Weatherall.

Joel went at it through verse, which he gave to Ivan the next time he saw him.

Walking out he is,
his poem began,
blood and hurting heavy on his
mind.

Ivan read it during their mentoring session at Holland Park School, where they still met as they’d done during the previous term. After he’d read the poem, Ivan spoke for a few minutes about emotive language and artistic intentions—as if he and Joel were at Wield Words Not Weapons or at the poetry class Ivan offered at Paddington Arts—

and after a bit, Joel thought he meant to ignore the subject of the poem altogether.

Finally, though, Ivan said, “This is it, I dare say.”

“What?”

“Why you’ve not taken the microphone at Wield Words. Why you don’t participate in Walk the Word either.”

“I still been doing poems.”

“Hmm. Yes. And that’s to the good.” Ivan read Joel’s piece another time before he said, “So exactly who is he? Are we speaking of Stanley?

This is a fairly apt description of what appears to be his frame of mind.”

“The Blade? Nah.”

“Then . . . ?”

Joel reached down and retied his shoe, which didn’t need retying.

“Neal Wyatt. You know.”

“Ah. Neal. That altercation in Meanwhile Gardens.”

“There’s been more stuff. He’s vexin Toby. I been tryin to think what to do to stop him.”

Ivan set the poem on the table. He lined it up with the edge precisely, which allowed Joel to notice for the first time that Ivan’s hands were manicured, with trimmed and buffed nails. In that moment, the vast difference between them became emphasised. Joel saw those hands as extensions of the world in which they lived, one where Ivan Weatherall—for all his good intentions—had never known labour in the way that Joel’s own father had known it. This lack of knowledge created a chasm, not only between them but between Ivan and the entire community. No poetry event could span that chasm, no classes at Paddington Arts, no visits to Ivan’s home. Thus, before the white man responded, Joel had a good idea what he would say.

“Neal’s abandoned his art, Joel. Piano would have fed his soul, but he wasn’t patient enough to find that out. This is the difference between you. You have a greater means of expression now, but he does not. So what’s in here”—this, with a fist to his heart—“is experienced here”—the same fist lowered to the paper on the table. “This gives you no reason to strike out against others. And you’ll never
have
a reason while you have your verse.”