What Came Before He Shot Her (61 page)

Of course she could not, Majidah agreed. Not at first. But once she became used to working instead of lolling about like most adolescent girls, she would find she had time for many more things than she thought she had time for. At first, she would merely work for Sayf al Din and do her community service hours. By the time she had the rhythm and endurance to take on more, another school term would have arrived and she could take her first millinery course then.

“So I’m s’posed to do all three t’ings?” Ness asked, incredulous.

“Take the course, work in the millinery studio, do community service?

When am I s’posed to eat an’ sleep?”

“Nothing is perfect, you foolish girl,” Majidah said. “And nothing happens by magic in the real world. Did it happen to you by magic, my son?”

Sayf al Din assured his mother that it had not.

“Hard work, Vanessa,” Majidah told her. “Hard work is what follows opportunity. It is time you learned that, so make up your mind.”

Ness was not so intent upon instantly being gratified in her desires that she failed to see a door opening for her. Because it wasn’t
exactly
the door she wanted, though, she didn’t embrace the idea with full-hearted gratitude. Nonetheless, she agreed to the scheme, at which point Majidah—always a woman to think ahead—produced an entirely unenforceable contract for her to sign. This included specific hours of community service, specific hours of work for Sayf al Din, and the schedule of repayment of the sixty-pound loan, with interest, of course.

Ness signed it, Majidah signed it, and Sayf al Din witnessed it. The deal was concluded. Majidah toasted Ness in typical fashion:

“See that you do not fail, you foolish girl,” she said.

NESS BEGAN HER work with Sayf al Din at once, in the afternoons once her morning hours at the child drop-in centre had been completed. He set her to menial tasks at first, but when he was engaged in something that he believed would advance her education, he told her to join him and to watch. He explained what he was doing, with all the fire of a man engaged in work that he was meant by God to do. During this, Ness’s brittle carapace of self-preservation began to fall away. She didn’t know what to make of this, although someone with a bit more wisdom might have called it the needful death of anomie.

Kendra, it must be said, felt such relief at the change in Ness that she let down her guard when it came to Joel. When he talked with enthusiasm about the screenwriting class that Ivan Weatherall offered, and in particular about the film in development by Ivan’s band of street kids, she gave her blessing to his involvement in this project as long as his marks in school improved. Yes, he could be gone on the occasional evening, she told him. She would mind Toby and Ness would mind Toby when Kendra could not. Even Ness agreed to the plan, not with good grace, but then anything other than marginally intolerant compliance would have been wildly out of character in the girl.

Had Joel not been a marked man in the street, things might have proceeded smoothly then. But there were forces at work far larger than the Campbell children and their aunt, making North Kensington a place unsafe for harbouring or advancing dreams. Neal Wyatt still existed on the periphery of their lives, and while some circumstances had altered for the Campbells, this was not the case for Neal. He continued to be a lurking presence. There were scores to settle.

Respect remained the key for sweetening the bad blood between Neal and Joel. For his part, Joel intended to develop that in one way or another. It just wasn’t going to happen in the way that Hibah had intimated it should happen: with Joel submitting to the other boy like a dog flipping onto its back. For Joel knew what Hibah gave no evidence of knowing about life in a place like North Kensington: There were only two ways to be entirely safe. One was to be invisible or of no interest to anyone. The other was to have everyone’s respect. Not to
give
respect away like so much discarded clothing, but to garner it. To give it away as Hibah suggested meant to seal your fate, making you a lackey, a whipping boy, and a fool. To garner it, on the other hand, meant that you and your family would be able to survive.

JOEL’S ROUTE WAS still the Blade. His safety and the safety of his brother rested in his alliance with the Blade. Joel could raise his marks in school; he could write bulletproof poetry that brought tears to the eyes of everyone in Wield Words Not Weapons; he could take part in a film project that put his name in lights. But those accomplishments would gain him nothing in the world through which he had to walk every day because none of them were capable of reducing anyone else to fear. Fear came in the person of the Blade. To forge an alliance with him, Joel knew he would have to prove himself in whatever way the Blade ordered him.

Cal Hancock brought Joel the assignment several weeks later. He did it with two words, “Time, mon,” as he created a roll-up for himself, leaning against the window of a launderette on Joel’s route to Middle Row School from the bus stop in the late afternoon.

“F’r what?” Joel asked.

“What you wanted, dependin on if you still wan’ it.” Cal looked away from him, down the street where two old ladies walked arm in arm, each supporting the other. Cal’s breath steamed in the icy air.

When Joel didn’t reply, he turned back to look at him. “Well? You in or out ’f dis business?”

Joel was in, but he hesitated, not because he was worried about what the Blade would ask of him but rather because there was Toby to consider.

He was meant to fetch his brother from school to the learning centre, and that was going to take another hour. Joel explained this to Cal.

Cal shook his head. He told Joel in short order that he couldn’t pass that information along to the Blade. It would disrespect the man by indicating that something else was more important than fulfi lling his wishes.

“I don’t mean to disrepeck him,” Joel said. “It’s only dat Toby . . .

Cal, he knows Toby i’n’t right in the head.”

“Wha’ the Blade wants, he wants tonight.”

“I c’n do what he wants. But I can’t let Toby try to get home on his own from school. It’s already getting dark, and only time he tried to get home alone, he got set on.”

Joel would have to solve the problem, Cal said. If he couldn’t solve this one, he wasn’t going to be able to solve any others. He would have to go his way; the Blade would have to go his. Perhaps that was all for the best.

Joel tried to think what he could do. His only option seemed to be the age-old excuse used by every child who doesn’t want to do what he is meant to do. He decided he would feign illness. He would phone his aunt, tell her he’d sicked up at school, and ask her if she thought he should still fetch Toby. She would say no, naturally. She would tell him to go straight home. She would lock up the charity shop for a while and herself dash out to fetch Toby from school to the learning centre.

She would then keep Toby with her till it was time for them both to go home for the evening. All things being equal, by the time she returned to Edenham Estate, Joel himself would be there as well, having demonstrated to the Blade loyalty and respect.

He told Cal to wait and he went for a phone box. In a few minutes, his plan was in motion. What he failed to take into account, however, was the nature of what the Blade wanted him to do. Cal made it clear soon enough, although not before trying to give Joel an oblique warning about what was to come. When Joel returned from the phone box, having made all the arrangements, Cal asked him if he’d thought things through.

“I ain’t stupid,” was Joel’s reply. “I know how t’ings go. The Blade does summick for me, I owe him. I got dat, Cal. I’m ready.” He hiked up his trousers as a means of emphasising his readiness. It was a let’s-go gesture: ready for anything, ready for it all, time to show the Blade his mettle, time to show commitment.

Cal examined him somberly before he said, “Come wiv me, den,”

and began striding towards the north, in the direction of Kensal Green.

He walked without conversation and without pause to see if Joel was still with him. He didn’t stop walking until they came to the high brick wall that enclosed the crumbling, overgrown ruins of Kensal Green Cemetery. Here, at the large gates leading into the place, he finally looked at Joel. Joel couldn’t imagine what he was going to be asked to do, but robbing a grave came to mind and it didn’t hold much appeal.

An arch comprised the entrance to this place. It gave way to a square of tarmac and a keeper’s lodge where light shone through a curtained window. The tarmac itself marked the starting point for the cemetery’s main road. This veered off towards the west, strewn with the decomposing leaves of the many trees that grew scattered and untrimmed in the grounds.

Cal set off down this lane. Joel tried to see the delicious adventure of it all. He told himself it was going to be a bloody good lark, carrying out an assignment in this creepy place. He and Cal would attack some grave in the fast-coming darkness, and they’d jump behind a lopsided tombstone should a guard stroll by. They’d take care not to tumble into one of the collapsing grave sites that signs along the lane warned them about, and when they were done, they’d hop the wall and be on their way with whatever prize the Blade wished them to unearth. It was, he decided, like a scavenger hunt.

In the growing early darkness of winter, however, the cemetery was a grim location, not conducive to the sense of adventure Joel wished to feel. With enormous wing-spread angels praying on monuments and mausoleums shrouded by swathes of ivy and every inch of space overgrown with shrubbery and weeds, the cemetery was more like a ghoul town than it was a resting place for souls. Joel half-expected to see ethereal spirits emerging from broken-down tombs and headless ghosts flitting above the undergrowth.

Unpaved muddy tracks led off the main lane, and in the dying light, Cal took one of these. Some fifty yards along, he disappeared altogether through a thick stand of Italian cypresses, and when Joel ducked through them a moment later, he found himself facing a large and lichenous tomb. This had long ago been fashioned to resemble a chapel, but masonry filled in where its three stained-glass windows had been, and the door that once gave access to the little structure was buried by junipers so densely planted that only a machete could have hacked a way through them.

Cal was nowhere to be seen, and the idea of ambush came upon Joel with a rush. His previous consternation grew in proportion to his realisation that no one knew exactly where he was. He thought of Cal’s words of warning, of his own bravado. He muttered, “Shit,” and listened as hard as a frightened boy can listen. If someone was going to jump him now, he reckoned that he could at least try to sort out from what direction the danger would come.

It would come from above, it seemed. Joel heard a rustling that appeared to emanate from the cypresses, and he backed away. An old wooden bench stood some three yards from the chapel-shaped tomb, and he made for this and climbed upon it, as if this action would somehow protect him. But there he noticed what he could not see when he stood at the base of the chapel itself: Although its gabled roof had at one time been fashioned from large rectangles of slate, a number of them were missing, leaving a gaping hole that opened the tomb’s interior to the elements.

The noise Joel heard was actually coming from inside the tomb and as he watched, a shadowy form rose from within. It lifted head and shoulders above the wall and then a leg followed. All of it was black except the feet, which were dingy white and dressed in trainers.

Joel said, “What the hell you
doin
, blood?”

Cal heaved himself over and dropped lightly from the chapel wall to the ground, a distance of some ten feet. He said, “You ready, mon?”

“Yeah, but what’re you
doin
in there?”

“Seeing.”

“What?”

“Dat t’ings all right. C’mere, den. You’re inside.” Cal jerked his thumb at the tomb.

Joel looked from him to the opening in the roof. “Doin what?”

“Waiting.”

“For what? How long?”

“Well, dat’s it, innit. Dat’s wha’ you don’t know. The Blade wants to know do you trust him, spee. You don’t trust him, he don’t trust you.

You stay till I fetch you, blood. You not here when I fetch you, the Blade knows who you are.”

Despite his youth, Joel saw the ingenious nature of the game. It was contained in the simplicity of not knowing. An hour, a day, one night, a week. One rule only: Put yourself into someone else’s hands entirely.

Prove yourself to the Blade before the Blade was willing to prove himself to you.

Joel’s mouth was drier than he would have liked. “What ’f I’m caught?” he said. “Ain’t my fault ’f some guard comes by and hauls me out, innit.”

“What guards you t’ink stick their heads in tombs if they don’t got reason to do it? You quiet, blood, no one comes looking. You in or out?”

What choice was there? “In,” Joel said.

Cal made a stirrup of his hand and Joel mounted. He felt himself hoisted onto the wall, where he straddled the top and looked down into the well of darkness below. He could see dim shapes only, one of them looking like a ghostly body under a pall of decomposing leaves.

He felt a tremor at the sight of this and he glanced back at Cal, who was watching him, silent. Joel drew a deep breath, closed his eyes, and with a shudder dropped into the tomb.

He landed on leaves. One of his shoes sank through to a sodden depression and the cold rose around him as his foot hit water. He cried out and jumped back, half expecting a skeletal hand to reach up, begging for rescue from a liquid grave. He could see virtually nothing inside the rectangular chamber, and he only hoped his eyes would adjust quickly from the muted light of the graveyard to the darkness in here so that he might know with whom—or with what—he would be spending his time.

Cal’s voice came like a whisper from the distance. “All right, bred?

You in?”

“S’okay,” Joel said, although he hardly felt that way.

“You hang till I come.” Then Cal was gone, in a rustle of branches that indicated he was making his way back through the Italian cypresses.