What Came Before He Shot Her (63 page)

blazed across the top of the page. Beneath this, three photographs showed a railway arch obstructed by sawhorses and crime scene tape, a clutch of people in earnest conversation, and a lone blond man in an overcoat, talking on a mobile and identified as a Scotland Yard detective superintendent. Joel looked up from this to his sister, saying, “I don’t get it. You saying Aunt Ken was t’inking . . . ?”

“‘
Course
she t’inking,” Ness declared. “What else you ’xpect? You aren’t home when you say you home being sick. She rings dat bloke Ivan and
he
says he ain’t seen you, but dat’s after she been tryin to get him on the line for hours and she t’inks he did summick to you cos of these newspaper stories, innit. So she gives the cops a bell, and
they
drag dis Ivan to the station and grill him—”

“_Ivan? _” Joel groaned. “Cops talked to Ivan?”

“Hell yes, what else you t’ink? So they give him aggro and all the time you’re . . . where?”

Joel stared at the tabloid. He couldn’t believe so much had happened simply because he was gone for two nights. And what had happened couldn’t have been too much worse: the involvement of the local police, Ivan being harassed, the Youth Offending Team becoming alerted through the person of Fabia Bender upon whose radar Joel already had a position. He felt light-headed with all of the information.

He brought the tabloid back into focus.

“Boys been gettin took all over London,” Ness was saying. “Dis one here in th’ paper, he’s like number five or six or whatever. They been just round your age. So when you don’t come home and Aunt Ken sees dis story in th’ paper—Cordie brought it over, di’n’t she—she t’inks dis body’s you, innit. So you cocked t’ings up proper, y’unnerstan. You in f’r it, and I’m glad I ain’t you.”

“She’s right in dat.” It was Dix speaking. He’d come back down the stairs. He looked at Joel with the same expression of disgust he’d had on his face when Joel had come through the door. He carried a glass in his hand, and he took it to the sink and rinsed it out. “Where you been, Joel? What you been doing?”

“Why’n’t you stop her fr’m callin the cops?” Joel directed his question to both of them, and he asked it in despair. His aunt had complicated his entire situation more wildly than he ever would have expected, and right on the brink of his sorting out everything on his own. She was, he concluded, making a dog’s dinner out of all his efforts.

Dix said, “Mon, I asked you a question. I want an answer.”

This sent Joel’s back up. It was the tone of it, the daddy tone. Whatever Dix was in their lives, the one thing he wasn’t was their father. Joel said, “Hey. Bugger off. I don’t got to tell you—”

“You,” Dix cut in, “best watch your mouth.”

“I c’n say what I want. You don’t run my life.”

Ness said, “Joel,” in a tone that blended warning with appeal, and this in itself was something unusual. For Joel, it put his sister directly into the enemy camp. He shoved himself away from the table and made for the stairs.

“Don’t t’ink dis conversation i’n’t going to be picked up later on,”

Dix told him.

Joel said, “Whatever,” and began to climb.

He heard Dix following, and he thought that the bodybuilder meant to force him to cooperate by resorting to a physical confrontation. But rather than trail Joel into his room, Dix went into Kendra’s and shut the door.

She was on the bed with one arm over her eyes, but she removed it when he sat down next to her, his hand coming to rest on her thigh.

She said, “He say anything?”

Dix shook his head. “Dis i’n’t good,” he told her. “How it start when boys go bad, Ken.”

“I know,” she said wearily. “I know, I know. I got ’n ex-husband in Wandsworth, you recall, and I c’n see him all over Joel just now. He’s involved in something—running drugs? breaking into houses? carjack-ing? mugging half-crippled pensioners?—and tha’s how it starts, don’t think I don’t know cause I do, Dix. I
do
.”

“You got to cut dis off.”

“You think I’m blind to that? I already got him wiv a mentor in school, only now I called the cops on the man, so I can’t ’xpect him to want to go on mentoring, can I. Meantime, the Social Services woman mentions a place across the river where boys like Joel go to get sorted but it’s all the way in Elephant and Castle and I can’t have him trekking there every day after school cause I need his help wiv Toby . . .” She plucked at the chenille counterpane on the bed. Since her head was aching and she hadn’t slept in two days, there were no answers for Kendra.

So Dix supplied the only answer he knew. “Needs a dad,” he said.

“Well, he doesn’
have
a dad.”

“Needs someone to stand in place of his dad.”

“I figured that bloke Ivan—”

“Ken. Come on. White man? Dat partic’lar white man? You see him as someone Joel likely to become? Cos dat’s wha’ he needs: someone standing in front ’f him in place of his dad and dat someone bein someone he might like to become.”

“Joel’s part white.”

“So’re you. But dis ain’t
about
bein white, innit. It’s ’bout being practical and figgering what the boy’s likely to admire.”

“So what d’you suggest?”

To Dix it was evident. He would move back in, he told her. He missed her and he knew she missed him. They would make things work this time. The only reason they hadn’t worked before was that he’d been too consumed with his bodybuilding to pay suffi cient attention to her and to the kids. But that didn’t have to be the case now. He would change his ways. He had to, hadn’t he?

Kendra pointed out to him that the case just now was even worse than it had been before, since his own dad was still recovering from his heart attack and Dix was, as a result, spread even more thinly. But Dix argued that the situation was actually improved and that it offered them possibilities they hadn’t yet discussed. Kendra wanted to know what these possibilities were. Dix told her that Joel could work at the Rainbow Café, earning himself some honest money and staying out of trouble at the same time. He could also go to the gym with Dix. He could otherwise go to school, help out with Toby, and continue with his poetry events. He wouldn’t have the leisure necessary to get into trouble. And he’d also have a man of colour to act as a role model, which he badly needed.

“An’ you want nothing in return?” Kendra asked him. “You do all this out of the goodness of your heart? Why is it I don’t believe that much?”

“I ain’t ’bout to lie. I want you like I always want you, Ken.”

“You say that today, but in five years . . .” Kendra sighed. “Dix.

Baby. I can’t
give
you what you want. You got to know that at some level, man.”

“How c’n you say dat,” he asked her, touching her cheek fondly,

“when you’re givin me th’ only t’ing I want right now?”

SO D IX RETURNED to them, and to the outside world they resembled a family. Dix proceeded with caution, but at twenty-three—albeit soon to be twenty-four—he was out of his depth with a teenaged girl, a soon-to-be-teenaged boy, and an eight-year-old with needs vastly out-weighing Dix D’Court’s ability to meet them. Had these been ordinary children in ordinary circumstances, he might have stood a chance as foster father to them—despite his youth—because it was clear, even to them, that he did actually mean well. But Ness wasn’t having any part of a father figure merely seven years her senior and Joel wasn’t interested. Instead he was confident that, having proven his worthiness to the Blade, matters with Neal Wyatt would soon be taken care of. And once matters with Neal were taken care of, life could go on and they all would be reasonably secure. So Joel rebuffed Dix’s well-intentioned attempts at what might be called male bonding. Too little too late was what he thought of Dix’s invitations to the gym and his offer of after-school employment at the Rainbow Café. Besides, he didn’t take the invitations or the offer seriously since he could nightly hear the extremely enthusiastic resumption of sexual relations between Dix and his aunt. This, he believed, told him the real reason for the bodybuilder’s return to Edenham Way, and he knew it had nothing to do with any of the Campbells or Dix’s interest in practising his paternal skills upon them.

Dix was patient with Joel’s reluctance. Kendra was not. She put up with Joel’s indifference to Dix’s overtures for only a few days before she decided to intervene. She did so once he’d gone to bed, on a night that Dix was at the gym for his workout. She went to the boys’ bedroom and found them in pyjamas, Joel on his side with his eyes closed and Toby sitting with his back against the banged-up headboard, skateboard across his knees, disconsolately spinning its wheels.

She said to the little boy, “He asleep?”

Toby shook his head. “He breathes funny when he’s asleep, and he ain’t.”

Kendra sat on the edge of Joel’s bed. She touched the side of his head and his crinkly hair depressed like candy floss beneath her fingers.

She said, “Sit up, Joel. We got to talk.”

Joel continued with his pretence of sleep. Whatever she wanted with talking to him, he decided it couldn’t be good. He’d so far managed to keep her in the dark about what he’d been doing out all night, and that was the way he wanted things to remain.

She put her hand on his rump and gave it a tap. “Come on now,”

she said. “I know you’re not sleeping. It’s time for a talk.”

But what she wanted to talk about was precisely what Joel wanted to keep hidden. He told himself that he couldn’t talk to her for the simple reason that she would not understand. Despite the fact that they were blood relations, her life was too much different from his. She’d always had people she could depend upon, so she would never understand what it meant to be completely on her own: reliant but with no one reliable on the horizon. She didn’t know how that felt.

He mumbled, “Wan’ to sleep, Aunt Ken.”

“Later. You c’n talk to me now.”

He scrunched his body into a ball. He held on to the blankets so she could not pull them off had she a mind to do so.

She sighed. “Right,” she said and her voice altered, causing Joel to steel himself to what was to come. “You’re making a decision, Joel, and that’s a fine and adult thing to do as long as you’re willing to live with the consequences. D’you want to think about that? D’you want to hang on to your decision or alter it?”

Joel said nothing. She said his name, less patiently now, less a reasonable woman making a reasonable request. She said, “We’ve been trying to help you out, but you’ve not met us halfway. Either me or Dix. You want to play your cards close, I s’pose that’s your right. But since I don’t know what’s going on with you, I got to do my duty to keep you safe. So home, school, home again. Fetch Toby from his school and that’s all. That’s your life.”

Joel’s eyes opened, then. “That ain’t fair.”

“No poetry events, no visits to Ivan. No trips to see your mum unless I take you out there and bring you back. We’ll see how you cope with all that for the next two months, and then we’ll renegotiate things.”

“But I
di’n’t
do—”

“Don’t take your auntie for a fool,” she said. “I know this whole situation goes back to that little lout you’ve been having run-ins with. So I’m taking care of that as well.”

Joel squirmed around then. He sat up. Her tone suggested what was coming next, and he sought a way to head her off. “It ain’t nuffi nk,”

he told her. “_He _ ain’t nuffi nk. Dis is all jus’ summick I had to do, okay?

I di’n’t break no laws. No one got hurt.”

“We’ll be working on your English as well,” she said. “No more street talk.”

“But Dix talk—”

“And that brings us to Dix. He’s trying his best with you lot. You meet him halfway.” She stood. “I held off before, but I’m not holding off any longer. It’s time the police—”

“You
ain’t
—”

“English.”

“You can’t get
into
this, Aunt Ken. Please. Just let it go.”

“Too late for that. Two nights away from home that you’re not talking about, Joel . . . They make it too late.”

“Don’t do it. Don’t
do
it,” Joel pleaded with her.

His very protest told Kendra that Neal Wyatt was indeed the source of what was going wrong in Joel’s life. Burning the barge, assaulting Toby in the street, threatening her in the charity shop . . . She was going to phone the police and
something
was going to stick to this boy.

If nothing did at this point, at least he’d be warned.

HIBAH WAS THE one who broke the news to Joel. She found him waiting for the bus after school, but she didn’t say anything until he’d made his way inside, where the crowded conditions forced both of them to stand, swaying with the bus and clinging to the poles.

She said to him in a low, fierce voice, “Why’d you
grass
, Joel? Don’t you
know
how bloody stupid tha’ was? You know what he want to do to you now?”

Joel saw that her face was pinched beneath her headscarf. He picked up on her anger but he wasn’t able to read her exasperation. He said,

“I di’n’t grass no one. What’re you talkin ’bout?”

“Oh you di’n’t bloody grass,” she scoffed. “How’d Neal end up wiv the cops ’f you di’n’t grass, Joel? They had him down the station ’bout that stupid barge.
And
’bout shakin up people in the street, your bruvver included. If you di’n’t do that, who bloody did?”

Joel felt air whoosh out of his lungs. “My aunt. She must’ve cos she said she would.”

“Your aunt, oh yeah,” Hibah said in derision. “An’ she know Neal’s name wivout you telling her? You are such a damn fool stupid idiot, Joel Campbell. I tell you how to cope wiv Neal and dis is what you decide. You vex him, and he set for you now. An’ don’t think I can help you cos I can’t. Y’unnerstan dat, mon? You got no brains.”

Having never heard Hibah express herself with such passion, Joel saw the jeopardy he was in. And not only him because he knew that Neal Wyatt was clever enough and determined enough to get to him through his relations as well, as he’d already proved through Toby. He cursed his aunt for her failure to see what her interference in his affairs might bring about.