What Came Before He Shot Her (48 page)

“But Toby,” Joel said. “I got to stop them vexin Toby.”

“To do that is to engage in the circle,” Ivan said. “You do see that, don’t you?”

“What?”

“‘Stopping them.’ How do you propose to do it?”

“They need sorting.”

“People always need ‘sorting’ if you insist upon thinking within the box.”

Circles. Boxes. None of it made sense. Joel said, “Wha’s that s’posed to mean? Toby can’t defend himself ’gainst those blokes. Neal’s crew’s waitin for a moment to get him, and if dat happens . . .” Joel squeezed his eyes shut. There was nothing more to say if Ivan could not imagine what it would be like for Toby should Neal’s crew put their hands on him.

Ivan said, “That’s not what I meant.” They were seated side by side, and he pulled his chair closer to Joel’s and put his arm around Joel’s shoulders. This was the first time he’d ever touched the boy, and Joel felt the embrace with some surprise. But it seemed like a gesture meant to comfort him and he tried to take comfort from it, although the truth of the matter was that nothing would truly be able to soothe him until the problem of Neal Wyatt was seen to. “What appears to be the answer is always the same when it comes to dealing with someone like Neal.

Sort him out, have a dustup, give him a taste of his own medicine, do unto him exactly what has been done to you. But that perpetuates the problem, Joel. Thinking within the box of doing what’s always been done does nothing more than keep you going round the circle. He strikes, you strike, he strikes, you strike. Nothing gets resolved and the matter escalates to the point of no return. And you know what that means. I know you do.”

“He’s set to hurt Toby,” Joel managed to say although his neck and his throat were stiff with holding back everything else that wanted to come out of him. “I got to protect—”

“You can do that only up to a point. After that, you’ve got to protect yourself: who you are at this moment and who you can be. The very things Neal himself can’t bear to think of because they don’t gratify what he wants right now. Strike out at Neal for whatever reason, Joel, and you become Neal. I know you understand what I’m talking about. You have the words inside you and the talent to use them. That’s what you’re meant to do.”

He picked the poem up and read it aloud. When he was done, he said, “Not even Adam Whitburn wrote like this at your age. Believe me, that’s saying a lot.”

“Poems ain’t nuffink,” Joel protested.

“Poems,” Ivan said, “are the only thing.”

Joel wanted to believe that, but day after day in the street proved otherwise and Toby’s retreating into Sose—communing with Maydarc and afraid to leave the house—proved even more. Joel found himself ultimately at the place he never thought he’d be: wishing that his little brother could be sent away to a special school or a special place where, at least, he would be safe. But when he asked his aunt about the paperwork that Luce Chinaka had sent home to have filled out and what this paperwork might mean for Toby’s future, Kendra made it clear that no one was going to scrutinise Toby for love or money or anything else.

“And I expect you can work out why,” she said.

So the long and short of it was that Toby was going nowhere and now he was afraid to go anywhere. In Joel’s world, then, something had to give.

There turned out to be only one solution that Joel could see if he wanted to act in a way that existed outside the box, which Ivan had described. He was going to have to get Neal Wyatt alone. They were going to have to talk.

While all of this was going on with Joel, Ness’s experiences were taking an unexpected turn, beginning on the very day of her humiliation at the hands of the security guard. Had anyone told her that the result of this degrading situation would be friendship, had anyone told her that the person with whom she would come to form that friendship would be a middle-aged Pakistani woman, Ness would have called the person making that prognostication exceedingly stupid, although she probably would have phrased it in a far more colourful fashion. But that was exactly what occurred, like a slowly budding flower.

This unlikely friendship began with Majidah’s invitation—or perhaps, better said, her order—to Ness to accompany her home on the day she’d shown up at the child drop-in centre late, from Kensington High Street. They did not go directly there, however. Instead, they began with some necessary shopping in Golberne Road.

Ness went along with trepidation hanging over her. She understood perfectly that Majidah held her future in her hands: One phone call from the Asian woman to the Youth Offending Team—in the person of Fabia Bender—would be sufficient to toast her properly. In the market area, she felt that Majidah was toying with her, prolonging the moment before she lowered the boom, and this provoked a typical and very Nesslike reaction. But she managed to hold in her fury as Majidah did her shopping, knowing that it was better to wait to display it until they were not in a public forum.

Majidah went first to E. Price & Son, where the two antique gentlemen helped her with her selection of fruit and veg. They knew her well and treated her respectfully. She was a shrewd buyer and took nothing from them that she did not inspect from every angle. She went next to the butcher. This was not any butcher, but one that sold only halal meats. There, she placed her order and turned to Ness as the butcher was weighing and wrapping. She said, “Do you know what halal meat is, Vanessa?” And when Ness said, “Summick Asians eat,” she said,

“This is the limit of what you know, is it? What an ignorant girl you are! What is it that they teach in school these days? But of course, you have not gone to school, have you? Sometimes I do forget how foolish you English girls can be.”

“Hey, I’m takin a course now,” Ness told her, “over the college, an’

the magistrate even approved it.”

“Oh yes indeed. A course in what? Tattoo drawing? Rolling one’s own cigarettes?” She scrupulously counted out a collection of coins to pay for the halal meat, and they left the shop with Majidah waxing on the topic, which was obviously dear to her heart. She said, “Do you know what I would have made of my life, had I had the opportunities for education that you have, you foolish girl? Aeronautical engineering, that is what I would have learned. Do you know what that is? Never mind. Do not further display your appalling ignorance to me. I would have made planes fly. I would have
designed
flying planes. That is what I would have done with my life had I the opportunity to be properly educated, as you have. But you English girls, you are given everything, so you appreciate nothing. This is your trouble. What you aspire to is shopping on the high street and purchasing those ridiculous high heels and pointy-toed boots that look like witch shoes.
And
silver eyebrow rings. What a waste of money all of that is.” She paused. Not for breath but because they’d come to a flower seller, where Majidah inspected the blooms on offer and selected three pounds’ worth.

As they were being wrapped, Ness said, “An’ these i’n’t a waste of money? Why’d ’at be, exackly?”

“Because these are things of beauty made by the Creator. High heels and eyebrow rings are not. Come along please. Here, then. Be useful.

Carry the flowers.”

She led the way into Wornington Road. They passed the sunken football pitch, which Majidah looked at in some disgust, saying, “This graffiti . . . Men do this, you know. Men and boys who ought to have better things to do with their time. But they have not been brought up to be useful. And why? Because of their mothers, this is why. Girls like you, who pop out babies and care for nothing but purchasing high heels and eyebrow rings.”

“You got any other conversation?” Ness asked.

“I know what I speak of. Do not show the mouth to me, young lady.”

She marched on, Ness in tow. They passed Kensington and Chelsea College and finally turned into the southern part of Wornington Green Estate. This was one of the less disreputable housing estates in the area.

It offered the same kind of vistas as the other estates: blocks of flats looking out upon other blocks of flats. But there was less rubbish strewn about, and a sense of the house proud was evident in the lack of discarded objects like rusting bicycles and torched armchairs sitting on balconies. Majidah took Ness to Watts House where her departed husband had purchased a flat during one of the Tory periods of government. “The one decent thing he did,” she informed Ness. “I confess that when the man died, it was truly one of the happiest days of my life.”

She went up the stairs beyond the entry door, leading Ness to the second floor. Some twenty paces along a lino corridor, where someone had scrawled “Eatme Eatme Eatme Fuckers” in marking pen, Majidah’s front door was an oddity. It was done up in steel like the vault of a bank, with a spy hole in the centre.

“What you got in here?” Ness asked her as the Asian woman in-serted the first of four keys in the same number of locks. “Gold dou-bloons or summick?”

“In here, I have peace of mind,” Majidah said, “which, as you will learn eventually, one can only hope, is more valuable than gold or silver.” She opened the door and ushered Ness inside.

There was little to surprise within. The flat was tidy and redolent of furniture polish. The decorations were sparse; the furniture was old.

The carpet squares were covered by a worn Persian rug, and—here was the first discordant note—on the walls hung coloured pencil sketches of a variety of headdresses. There were photographs as well, a collection of them in wooden frames. They were grouped together on a table by the sofa. Men, women, and children. A great number of children.

The second discordant note in the flat consisted of a collection of pottery. This was of a particularly whimsical nature: jugs, planters, posy holders, and vases all characterised by the presence of a cartoonlike forest creature. Rabbits and fawns predominated, although there was the occasional mouse, frog, or squirrel. Shelves on either side of the entrance to the kitchen displayed this unusual collection. When Ness looked from it to Majidah—the Asian woman seeming the person least likely to be collecting such things—Majidah spoke.

“Everyone must have something that makes them smile, Vanessa.

Can you look upon them and fail to smile yourself? Ah, perhaps. But then, you are a serious young lady in possession of serious problems.

Come set the kettle to boil. We shall have tea.”

The kitchen was much like the sitting room in its neatness. The electric kettle sat on a work top perfectly free of clutter, and Ness filled it at a spotless sink as Majidah put her meat in the fridge, her fruit and veg in a basket on the little kitchen table, and her flowers in a vase. This vase she set lovingly next to a photograph on the windowsill. When Ness had the kettle plugged in and Majidah was bringing teapot and cups out of a cupboard, Ness went to examine the picture. It seemed out of place in here instead of in the sitting room with the others.

A very young Majidah was the subject of the photo, and in it she stood next to a grey-haired man with a deeply lined face. She looked ten or twelve years old, solemn and decked out in any number of gold chains and gold bracelets. She was wearing a blue and gold
shalwar
kamis
. The old man had a white one on.

“Dis your granddad?” Ness asked, picking up the picture. “You ain’t looking so happy to be wiv him, innit.”

“Please ask before you remove an object from its place,” Majidah said. “That is my first husband.”

Ness widened her eyes. “How
old
’as you? Shit, woman, you must’ve been—”

“Vanessa, profanity ceases at my front door, please. Put the photograph down and make yourself useful. Take these things to the table.

Do you wish to have a tea cake or are you able to consume something more interesting than you English generally eat at this hour?”

“Tea cake’s good,” Ness said. She wasn’t about to try anything else. She replaced the photo, but she continued to eye Majidah the way one might look at a species of animal one has never seen before.

She said, “So how old ’as you? What’re you doing marrying some granddad, anyways?”

“I was twelve years old when I first married. Rakin was fifty-eight.”

“_Twelve _ years old? Twelve years old an’ hooked up permanent to some old man? What in hell’re you
t’inkin
? Did he . . . Did you . . .

I mean . . . Wiv
him
?”

Majidah used hot water from the faucet to heat the teapot. She took a brown paper packet of loose tea from a cupboard. She went for the milk and poured this into a small white jug. Only then did she answer.

“My goodness, isn’t your questioning rude. This cannot be the way you’ve been brought up to speak to an older person. But”—she held up her hand to prevent Ness saying anything—“I have learned to understand that you English do not always mean to be as disrespectful of other cultures as you seem to be. Rakin was my father’s cousin. He came to Pakistan—from England—when his first wife died because he believed himself in need of another one. He had, at the time, four children in their twenties, so one would think he might have proceeded throughout the rest of his life in the company of one or all of them.

But this was not Rakin’s way. He came to our house and looked us over. I have five sisters, and as I’m the youngest, it was naturally assumed that Rakin would select one of them. He did not. He wished to have me. I was introduced to him, and we were married. Nothing more was said of the matter.”

“Shit,” Ness said. And then she added hastily, “Sorry. Sorry. Slipped out, innit.”

Majidah pressed her lips together to quell a smile. “We married in my village and then he brought me to England, a little girl who spoke no English and knew not a single thing of life, not even how to cook.

But Rakin was a gentle man in all ways and a gentle man is a patient teacher. So I learned to cook. And I learned other things. I had my first child two days before my thirteenth birthday.”

“You d’i’nt,” Ness said in disbelief.

“Oh yes. Indeed I did.” The kettle clicked off and Majidah made the tea. She toasted a tea cake for Ness and took it to the table with a square of butter, but for herself she brought forth pappadums and chutney, both of which she declared to be homemade. When she had everything assembled, she sat and said, “My Rakin died when he was sixty-one. A sudden heart attack and he was gone. And there I was, fifteen years old, with a small child and four stepchildren approaching thirty. I could, of course, have lived on with them, but they would not have that: an adolescent stepmother with a toddler who would have become their responsibility. So another husband was found for me.