What Came Before He Shot Her (53 page)

He’s gonna want it and I want him to know it come from me. You promise dat, I hand it over and bunk off.”

“What you got he want?” Cal said with a smile. “You write him a pome? And yeah, we know you goin to dat word t’ing Ivan put on.

The Blade know everyt’ing go down in dis place. Dat’s why he’s the Blade. And listen”—he showed off the pistol tucked into his waistband—“you wonder why I carry dis piece wivvout worry bout the cops haulin me into the Harrow Road station? T’ink bout dat one, too, m’friend. It ain’t rocket science, innit.”

This point seemed irrelevant to Joel. He chose to bypass it, which would not be the first of his mistakes. He said, “It ain’t a poem I got for him. I ain’t stupid, y’know.” He dug the flick knife out of his rucksack. He clicked it open, then closed it on his thigh.

Cal looked impressed enough. “Where’d you get dat?”

“He used it on Ness. Cut up her head and lost it in a bang about wiv Dix D’Court right after. You give him dis, okay? You tell him I need his help wiv summick.”

Cal didn’t take the knife, which Joel held out to him. He said with a sigh instead, “Blood, wha’ c’n I tell you? You
got
to keep the Blade out of your life. Dat’s it.”

“Didn’t hurt you none to have him in yours.”

Cal gave a soft laugh. “Lemme tell you summick. You got Ness, right? You got your bruv. You got Auntie an’ Mum, an’ I know ’bout her being in the nuthouse, but still she’s Mum. You don’t
need
dis blood here. Trust me, you don’t need him. An’ if you want him, mon, he’s gonna name a price.”

Joel said, “Jus’ give him the knife for me, Cal. Tell him I give it back cos I need his help wiv summick. Tell him I could’ve kept it and that
means
summick. I di’n’t set up no trade wiv the knife. I handed it over.

Take it and tell him, Cal. Please.”

While Cal thought this over, Joel considered yet another approach to his problems—that Cal himself might help him—but he dismissed this quickly. Cal without the Blade nearby would intimidate no one.

He was just Cal: right-hand man and graffiti artist, spaced on weed. If he had to fight, he probably would, but going at Neal Wyatt wasn’t about fighting. It was about drawing a line in the sand. Cal couldn’t do that for Neal Wyatt or for anyone else. The Blade, on the other hand, could do it for everyone.

Joel thrust the knife at Cal once more. “Take it,” he said. “One way or ’nother, you know the Blade want it back.”

Reluctantly, then, Cal took the flick knife. “I ain’t promising—”

“Jus’ talk to him. Dat’s all I’m asking.”

Cal put the knife in his pocket. “Be in touch ’f he want to help out,”

he said. And as Joel prepared to walk off, he went on, “You know the Blade do nuffink wivout there being a price attached to it.”

“I got dat,” Joel said. “You tell him I’m willin to pay.”

The seed of Ness’s millinery idea did not bear immediate fruit. Things were not easily arranged, and she’d not anticipated facing difficulties. She wanted the courses; they would be hers for the taking. Anything else was inconceivable to her.

Thus, at the first stumbling block—a considerably sized monetary one—she did just that: She stumbled. She shimmered with hostility, and she directed it at the children with whom she was supposed to be making jewellery at the drop-in centre.

Making jewellery was an umbrella term, a euphemism for stringing brightly coloured wooden beads on equally brightly coloured plastic cords. Since the children engaged in this activity were all under four years of age, with the limited eye-hand coordination that one might expect of this age, making jewellery consisted largely of spilling more beads than stringing them, and an expression of frustration at such spillage consisted largely of throwing beads rather than replacing them in their containers.

Ness didn’t handle any of this well. She grumbled at first as she scrambled around the floor, rescuing beads. Next, she smacked her hand on the table when the uplifted arm of a child called Maya indicated another palmful of beads was about to be launched. Finally, she resorted to swearing. She snapped, “_Fuck _ it all, you lot. ’F you can’t hold on to ’em beads, you c’n just
forget
’bout stringin ’em at all cos I ain’t playin dis stupid game wiv you,” and she began to gather up containers, cords, and round-nosed scissors.

The children reacted with shouts of protest, which attracted Majidah from the kitchen. She observed for a moment and picked up on some of the more colourful mutterings emanating from Ness’s mouth. She strode across the room and put an end to the jewellery making herself, but not in the way Ness intended. She demanded to know what Miss Vanessa Campbell thought she was doing: swearing in front of innocent children. She didn’t wait for an answer. She told Ness to get herself outside, where she would deal with her directly.

Ness took the opportunity outdoors to light up a cigarette, which she did with no little pleasure. She wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere near the child drop-in centre. She’d protested this rule more than once, telling Majidah that these kids’ parents smoked in their presence—not to mention whatever the hell else they got up to in front of them—so why couldn’t she smoke if she wanted to. Majidah had refused to engage her in this discussion. The rule was the rule. There would be no bending, breaking, adjusting, or ignoring it.

Ness didn’t care at this point, on this day. She hated working at the drop-in centre, she hated rules, she hated Majidah, she hated life. She was thrilled to bits when Majidah—having reestablished the four-year-olds at their activity with larger beads this time—joined her outdoors, pulling a coat around herself and narrowing her eyes at the spectacle of Ness outrageously inhaling from the forbidden Benson & Hedges.

Good for you, was what Ness thought. See what aggravation feels like, bitch.

Majidah had not raised six children to find Ness’s behaviour off-putting. She also had no intention of addressing it at the moment, which she saw as something that Ness clearly wanted. Instead, she told Ness that as she was unable to work in peace with the children on this particular day, she could instead wash all the windows of the centre, which were sadly in need of the attention.

Ness repeated the order, incredulous. She was to wash
windows
? In this bloody weather? First off, it was fucking too cold and second off, it was probably going to fucking rain before the bloody end of the fucking day, so what the hell was Majidah thinking because no way was Ness going to fucking wash any fucking windows.

In reply, Majidah calmly assembled the equipment required for the job. She then gave detailed instructions, as if she’d heard nothing of what Ness had said. Three steps were involved, she informed her. So were water, detergent, a hose pipe, newspapers, and white vinegar.

Wash the windows inside and out and afterwards they would talk about Ness’s future at the drop-in centre.

“I don’t want no future at dis fuckin place,” Ness shrieked as Majidah headed back inside the building. “Don’t you got nuffink else to
say
?”

Of course, Majidah had plenty to say, but she wasn’t about to engage Ness when the girl was in such a state. She said to her, “We shall speak once the windows are clean, Vanessa,” and when Ness said, “I c’n walk straight out ’f here, you know,” Majidah said serenely, “As is always your choice.”

That very serenity was a slap in the face. Ness decided to give Majidah what for when she had the chance. She told herself she could hardly
wait
to do it, and in the meantime, she’d rehearse her comments
and
show the maddening woman some window washing that she would
never
forget.

She hosed, she scrubbed, she polished. And she smoked. Outside the centre. She did not have the courage to do so when she began seeing to the windows inside. By the time the day was at its end—with the windows sparkling, the children gone, and the first drops of rain beginning to fall, just as Ness had thought they would—she had been in mental conversation with the Asian woman for a good four hours and was burning to take her on in person, given the opportunity.

This opportunity grew from Majidah’s inspection of the windows.

She took her time about it. She looked over each one, ignoring the rain that was spotting them. She said, “Well done, Vanessa. Your anger, you see, was put to good use.”

Ness wasn’t about to admit to anything resembling anger. She said, with a meaningful curl of the lip, “Yeah. Well, I ’spect I got a
real
exceptional career in front of me, eh: window washing.”

Majidah glanced her way. “And of course there are worse careers to have, when one considers the number of windows in this city that want to be washed, yes?”

Ness blew out a frustrated breath. She demanded to know if there was
anything
Majidah could not turn around and make into something positive because it was getting damn irritating having to be around such a merry ray of bloody flaming fucking sunshine every day.

Majidah thought a moment before speaking, for she too had been awaiting an opportunity for a conversation with Ness, although not a conversation of the sort Ness wished to have with her. She said, “My gracious, is this not an important life skill? Is this not additionally the most basic skill an individual can develop in order to survive life’s disappointments in a healthy manner?”

Ness sputtered, her form of pooh-poohing the Asian woman’s words.

Majidah sat at one of the pint-size tables, waved Ness into the chair opposite hers, and said kindly, “Do you wish now to tell me what has gone wrong?”

Ness’s lips began to form the word
nuffi nk
. But at the end, she couldn’t say it. Instead, the gentle expression on Majidah’s face, still present despite everything Ness had done to wipe it off, prompted her to tell the truth although she managed to do it with an attitude of spurious indifference that would have fooled no one. She’d met with Fabia Bender at the Youth Offending Team’s office, Ness revealed. She wanted to take a certificate course at Kensington and Chelsea College, a course that would lead to a real career in a field besides window washing or bead stringing. But the course had turned out to cost over six hundred pounds and where the hell was Ness supposed to come up with that kind of money, short of going on the job or robbing a bank?

“What sort of course is it that you wish to take?” Majidah asked her.

Ness wouldn’t say. She felt she would have to admit too much if she revealed it was millinery that interested her. She believed she would be admitting to everything that had altered in her life but remained unac-knowledged and needed to stay that way.

“Wa’n’t I s’posed to be comin up wiv a career?” Ness demanded instead. “Wa’n’t I s’posed to be tryin to
make
something of myself?”

“This is bitterness I hear,” Majidah said. “So you must tell me what good bitterness offers you. You see life as a series of disappointments.

Seeing this, you fail also to see that if one door closes, another opens.”

“Right. Whatever.” Ness stood. “C’n I go?”

“Listen to me before you leave, Vanessa,” Majidah said, “for what I tell you is meant in friendship. If, as many others do, you thrash about in the wilderness of anger and disappointment, you will fail to see the opportunities that God will lay in front of you. Anger and disappointment blind us, my dear. If not that, they distract us. They make it impossible to keep our eyes open since when we rage, we squint and thus we cannot see all that surrounds us. If we instead accept what the present moment is offering, if we simply move forward through it, doing whatever task is in front of us, we then have the serenity necessary to be an observer. Observation is our way of recognising the next thing we are meant to do.”

“Yeah?” Ness asked, and her tone presaged the next words she spoke.

“Dat work good for you, Maji
dah
? Life say you can’t be an aeronauti-cal engineer, so you keep your eyes open, you jus’ keep movin forward ever’day and you end up
here
?”

“I end up with you,” Majidah said. “This, to me, was part of God’s plan.”

“Thought you lot called him Allah,” Ness sneered.

“Allah. God. Lord. Fate. Karma. Whoever. Whatever. It is all the same, Vanessa.” Majidah was silent for a moment, observing, much as she’d done over the months that Vanessa Campbell had been working at the drop-in centre. She wanted to impart the lessons she herself had learned from a difficult life. She wanted to tell Ness that it is not the circumstance of one’s life but what one
does
with the circumstance that is important: choices, outcomes, and knowledge gained from outcomes. But she did not say this, knowing that Ness’s present state would prevent her from hearing. So instead she said to her, “You are at the turning point, my dear.

What is it that you intend to do with all of this bitterness, I ask you.”

AFTER HANDING THE flick knife over to Cal, there was nothing for Joel to do but wait to hear from the Blade. Days melted into weeks as he did so, watching his back and watching Toby’s back as well. They sought places of safety from Neal Wyatt when they were out and about.

They walked quickly, and they continued to practise hiding from headhunters upon Joel’s command.

They were standing on the bridge that carries Great Western Road over the canal when things changed. They’d gone there to observe a gaily coloured narrow boat that was motoring eastward in the direction of Regent’s Park. Toby was chattering about the possibility of the boat’s containing pirates—a topic that Joel was listening to only dimly—when Joel caught sight of a figure coming towards them along the pavement, sauntering from the direction of the Harrow Road.

Joel recognised him: It was Greve, number one henchman of Neal Wyatt. Joel automatically looked around for Neal and for other members of Neal’s crew. None of them were nearby, which made the hair on the back of Joel’s neck tingle. He said to Toby, “Get down to that barge. Do it now, Tobe. Don’t come out no matter what, till you hear me call you, y’unnerstan?”