What Came Before He Shot Her (51 page)

The walk was a short one, but just Geoff knew the importance of build-up, so it took them a while to cross Meanwhile Gardens. He was very good at the business of making women ready for him, so by the time they reached her front door, a walk of five minutes that took twenty-five, Kendra was throbbing in all the right places and thanking her stars she’d chosen him.

She was glad she’d worn a clingy dress that evening, held in place with a simple sash tied at the side. Aside from wisps of underwear and a pair of strappy high heels, she had nothing else on. And she had nothing on at all by the time they reached the top of the stairs.

She worked on just Geoff’s clothes while he worked on her body, all hands and tongue and mouth. She got him naked in a trail of clothes leading from the stairs to her bed, whereupon they fell upon it and coupled ferociously. Just Geoff did the job he’d set out to do on her before he positioned her legs over his shoulders, which was the way he liked to have his women in his own final moments. He then carried his fantasy to its logical conclusion. He withdrew at once and collapsed next to her.

He said, “_Christ_, what a fuck. I was actually seeing stars,” and he laughed weakly in the direction of the ceiling. He was panting, and his body was slick with sweat.

Kendra said nothing. She’d had pleasure from him. Truth be told, she’d had more pleasure from him than she’d ever had with anyone else, Dix included. She, too, was breathless, dripping sweat and fluid, and by any other definition she was a woman fulfilled. But it had been the wrong prescription for the state she’d been in, and it didn’t take long for her to work that out from the emptiness she felt, beyond the lovely contractions she was still experiencing from her orgasm.

She wanted him to leave and in this she was lucky, as just Geoff had no intention of staying. He scooped up his clothing and came to the side of the bed, where he rested the tips of his fingers on her nipple.

“Good for you?” he asked.

Good depended on the definition, but she accommodated him saying, “Jesus, yeah,” and rolling on her side to reach for her cigarettes.

She didn’t see his look of distaste—women who smoked after sex were not part of his fantasy—as he turned his back to put his clothes on. She watched him dress and he asked if she had a comb or brush.

She said, “The bathroom,” and still watched him as he opened the door.

He walked directly into Ness.

There were no lights on, but lights weren’t needed, as Kendra’s bedroom curtains were open. The tableau was an unmistakable one: Kendra on the bed, naked and uncovered in the warm night, lazily smoking, with the bedcovers in wild disarray around her and the man still not entirely dressed but carrying his shoes and his jacket with the clear intention of decamping at the conclusion of a successful conquest. And the scent in the air—clinging to him, to her, to the very walls, it seemed—

was one that Ness could not fail to recognise.

Startled, just Geoff said, “Holy shit!” He retreated back into Kendra’s room and shut the door.

Kendra said, “Damn,” and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on her bedside table. It had always been a risk that one of the kids would see, but she would have preferred the seeing child to be one of the boys, for reasons she could not have articulated at the moment. She said unnecessarily to just Geoff, “That’s my niece. She sleeps in the sitting room. Down below.”

“Beneath . . . ?” He gestured at the bed.

“She must’ve heard.” Which was hardly a surprise, considering how they had gone at each other. Kendra pressed her fingers to her forehead and sighed. She’d got what she wanted but not what she needed. And now this, she thought. Life was not fair.

They heard a door shut. They listened for more. In a moment, the toilet flushed. Water ran. The door opened and footsteps receded down the stairs. They waited four interminable minutes before just Geoff returned to what he’d been doing. At this point, he decided that he didn’t need to comb his hair; he just needed to leave. He slipped on his shoes, donned his jacket, pocketed his tie. He looked at Kendra, who’d pulled the sheet up over her, and he nodded. Some sort of leave-taking was called for, obviously, but nothing seemed appropriate. He could hardly say, “See you later,” since he had no intention of doing that.

“Thanks” seemed ghastly, and any reference to the act itself seemed untimely post Ness’s arrival on the scene. So he fell back on a combination of public school manners and costume dramas of the Edwardian period. “I’ll see myself out,” was what he said, and he quickly did just that.

Alone, Kendra sat up in the bed and stared at the wall. She lit another cigarette, with the hope that smoke could obliterate sight. For what she saw was Ness’s face. There hadn’t been judgement upon it.

Nor had there been caustic knowledge. Rather, there had been sur-prise, quickly replaced by a world-weary acceptance that no fifteen-year-old girl was ever meant to possess. This prompted in Kendra a feeling she had not expected when she’d invited just Geoff into her bed. She felt ashamed.

She finally roused herself and went into the bathroom, where she filled the tub with water that was as hot as she could stand it. She stepped inside and scalded her skin. She sank back and raised her face to the ceiling. She wept.

Kendra was being far harder on herself than was necessary when it came to Ness, who had more pressing concerns than reacting to her aunt’s inviting some strange white man into her bed. True, finding him there had been something of a surprise. Ness had heard the commotion and had assumed that Dix was back. But, to her wonder, she didn’t feel what she’d earlier felt when listening to the rousing creak, bounce, and slam of Kendra’s bed from the floor above her. Instead, she’d awakened, heard the noise, gri-maced, and realised she needed to use the toilet. Reckoning it was Dix with her aunt—which meant he’d stay the night and she’d run little risk of encountering him when she used the facility—she’d climbed the stairs, only to find a stranger emerging from Kendra’s bedroom.

At one time the sight of any man coming out of Kendra’s bedroom would have filled Ness with jealousy only thinly disguised as disgust.

But that was before she’d shared a pappadum with a Pakistani woman she’d thought she didn’t like. It was also before what sharing a pappadum with that Pakistani woman had led to: When Majidah informed her they’d be closing the drop-in centre early one day, not long after Ness’s visit to her flat, Ness thought it meant she was free from further obligation for the rest of the afternoon. But Majidah disabused her of that notion in short order, telling her that they were meant to be picking up supplies in Covent Garden.

Ness was to go and assist.

At this Ness felt completely ill-used. Doing community service surely didn’t mean she was intended to traipse all round London like a ser-vant, did it?

Majidah informed Ness that she was not the one whom the magistrate allowed to determine what constituted community service. “We will leave at precisely two o’clock,” she told Ness. “We shall take the tube.”

“Hey, I ain’t got—”

“Please.
Ain’t got?
What sort of language is this, Vanessa? How can you hope to make something of your life if you speak in this way?”

“Wha’? Like I’m
s’posed
to make summick of myself’? Dat it?”

“Good gracious, yes. What else are you thinking? Do you believe that you are
entitled
to whatever it is that you want and that you need do nothing to achieve it? And what
is
it that you want, precisely? Fame, fortune, additional pairs of silly high-heeled shoes? Or are you one of these foolish young girls who have ambitions solely of celebrity?

Famous actress, famous model, famous pop star? Is that it, Vanessa?

Celebrity alone when you could do whatever you want, a young woman like you with no man determining your fate as if you were a farm animal, mind you. There is no question that you could choose a career right out of the sky, and yet you have no gratitude for this. Only the wish to be a pop star.”

“Did I say dat?” Ness demanded when Majidah was finally forced to take a breath. “Did I f ’r one minute say any of dat? Hell, Majidah, you got a one-track mind, anyone ever tell you? An’ how’d we get on dis anyways? I ain’t got money—” She saw Majidah’s thunderous face and she relented. “I haven’t got money in my possession to purchase a ticket,” she said primly.

Majidah held back her smile at Ness’s posh accent. She said, “That is all? Good gracious, Vanessa, I do not intend you to pay for the journey.

This is work, and work shall recompense me for supplying you with the ticket you require.”

That detail established, two o’clock saw them setting off from the drop-in centre, whose cabin Majidah locked and then rechecked three times before Ness took her by the arm and dragged her out of the chain-link gate. They walked the short distance to the Westbourne Park underground station. Majidah made much of studying the map to determine the best route to their destination, clucking and tutting and counting stops while Ness stood by and tapped her foot. The decision ultimately made, they embarked for the journey, alighting finally at Covent Garden at which point Majidah led the way not to the market—

where one might assume some sort of supplies could be purchased albeit hardly economically—but north to Shelton Street. There a doorway between a minuscule bookshop and a coffee bar opened onto a stairway. This in turn took them up four flights—“The cursed lift in this wretched building does not work and never has,” Majidah informed Ness—and, breathless when they finally got there, into a loft where bolts of colourful linen, silk, cotton, velvet, and felt lay across wide worktables. At them four individuals worked in silence while Kiri Te Kanawa went through Mimi’s death throes on a CD player that sat atop a bank of containers holding everything from sequins to seed pearls.

Two of the workers were women dressed in
shalwar kamis
; one of them was a woman in a
chador
; the fourth was a man. He wore blue jeans, trainers, and a white cotton shirt. The women were sewing and gluing. He was fitting a headpiece onto the fifth person in the room: a sloe-eyed Mediterranean beauty who read from a magazine and muttered, “Bloody stupid warmongering
idiots
,” to which the man said,

“Truer words and all that. But mind the position of your head, please, Miss Rivelle. The fit’s not right.”

He, like the women at work, was Asian. Miss Rivelle was not. She raised her hand to feel what he was affixing to her heavy dark hair.

She said, “Really, Sayf, this
is
impossible. Can you not make it weigh less? It’s extraordinary you should expect me to be able to make an entrance, do the aria, and die dramatically, and all of it without this . . .

this
thing
dropping to the floor. Who approved the design, for God’s sake?”

“Mr. Peterson-Hayes.”

“The director doesn’t have to
wear
it. No, no, this absolutely will
not
do.” She took the headpiece off, handed it over to Sayf, and saw Majidah and Ness across the room. As did Sayf, at that precise moment.

He said, “Ma! Bloody hell if I didn’t forget.” And to Ness, “Hullo.

You must be the convict.”

“Sayf al Din,” Majidah said sternly. “What sort of greeting is this?

And you, Rand,” to the woman in the
chador
, “do you not stifl e beneath that ridiculous counterpane you’re wearing? When will your husband come to his senses? This is outdoor clothing you happen to have on. It is not meant to be worn within.”

“Your son’s presence . . . ,” Rand murmured.

“Oh yes, my dear, my goodness me, but he will surely ravish you if your face is exposed. Is that not the truth, Sayf al Din? Have you not ravished two hundred women and counting? Where is your dance card, my son?”

“Score card,” Sayf al Din corrected her. He took up the headpiece he’d been fashioning for Miss Rivelle and placed it carefully on a wooden form.

He said to the singer, “I’ll try to reduce the weight, but it’ll come down to Peterson-Hayes, so you’ll want to have a word with him.” He went to a monstrously cluttered desk beneath one of the room’s windows and there he unearthed a diary. He said, “Thursday? Four o’clock?”

“If I must,” she replied languidly. She gathered her belongings—

which consisted of shopping bags and a handbag the size of a picnic basket—and approached Sayf al Din for a formal farewell. This consisted of air kisses, three of them in the Italian fashion, after which she patted his cheek and he kissed her hand. Then she was gone, fluttering her fingers at the rest of them. One of the
shalwar kamis
women murmured, “Divas,” with some scorn.

“They are our bread and butter,” Sayf al Din reminded her, “despite sometimes being caricatures of themselves.” He smiled at his mother.

“And I am, beyond that,
quite
used to divas.”

Majidah tutted, but Ness could tell she took no offence. Indeed, she sounded pleased as she said to Ness, “This piece of nonsense is my Sayf al Din, Vanessa, the eldest of my children,” which made him the child of her first husband, less than thirteen years younger than his own mother. He was quite handsome—olive skinned and dark eyed—and he had about him an air of perpetual amusement.

“And how is that wife of yours, Sayf al Din?” his mother asked him.

“Is she still scraping away at the teeth of the unfortunate rather than having more babies? This son of mine has wed a dentist, Vanessa. She produces two children and returns to her work when they are six weeks old. I cannot comprehend this lunacy: to wish to be looking into the mouths of strangers instead of gazing upon the faces of your infants.

She should be like your sisters and like your brothers’ wives, Sayf al Din. Nine children among
them
so far and not one of them placed into the hands of a child minder.”

Sayf al Din had obviously heard this recitation before, as he said the last sentence of it in concert with his mother. He went on with, “What a scandal it is, this woman using her education as it was meant to be used when she could be at home making chicken tikka for her husband’s dinner, Vanessa.” He did such an accurate imitation of his mother that Ness laughed, as did the others in the room.