What Came Before He Shot Her (69 page)

“You know what it took, getting you out ’f there, fucker?” The gun dug more deeply into Joel’s chin. “You t’ink the Blade just picks up the phone and has a word wiv Mr. Chief Constable or summick? You got
any
idea what dis cost me?”

“I pay you back,” Joel said. “I got fifty pounds and I can—”

“Oh, you pay me back. You pay me back.” With each word the Blade thrust the gun upward, harder.

Joel went with it, rising on his toes. “I will. Jus’ tell me.”

“I’ll tell you, fucker. I’ll God
damn
tell you.”

The Blade dropped the gun to his side as quickly as he’d raised it.

Joel nearly sank to his knees: both with the sudden movement and with his own relief. Cal came up behind him. He led Joel to a crate and pushed him down upon it. Cal’s hands held him there, by the shoulders. They weren’t harsh hands, but they were far from friendly.

“You,” the Blade said, “are going to do
exactly
like I tell you to do.

And if you don’t, Jo-ell, I find you and I deal wiv you. I deal wiv you one way or th’ other. Before the cops get to you or after. Don’t make no difference. You get me, mon?”

Joel nodded. “I get you.”

“An’ I deal wiv your family next. You get dat as well?”

Joel swallowed. “I get you.”

He watched, then, and saw the Blade wipe every vestige of his fingerprints from the pistol. He extended it in Joel’s direction. He said,

“You take this piece and you listen good, then. You cock dis one up, and there’s going to be real hell to pay.”

Ness remained alone, secretive and sullen. She fulfilled her obligation to community service, but she ceased journeying to Covent Garden.

This seemed reasonable at first: She’d been attacked upon her return from Covent Garden. It wasn’t out of the question that she’d harbour certain fears about travelling on her own to and from the place. But when she refused to join Sayf al Din and his helpers even during the height of business hours—when anyone’s comings and goings on the underground would have been made in the company of millions of other commuters and even the walk home from the Westbourne Park station would not have been made in solitude—then it seemed that the girl’s fears needed to be addressed.

Majidah tried. “Do you not see you let them win, Vanessa, when you give in in such a manner?”

To which Ness replied, “F’rget it, okay? I’m doin my community service, innit. I got one stupid course at college, an’ I don’t got to do nuffink more ’n dat.”

This was true. The fact of it tied everyone’s hands. But the additional fact was that Ness was bound by order of the magistrate to attend school full time as well, so if she didn’t enroll in some programme or another at the college—which working for Sayf al Din was preparing her to do—then she was going to find herself standing in front of the magistrate once again, and this time there would be no leniency. There had been exceptions enough made for her already.

Fabia Bender held the whip hand in this matter. When she called upon Kendra, she had done some preparation for their meeting. She had separate files on each of the children. Her possession of them and the fact that she laid them out on the kitchen table were designed to impress upon the children’s aunt the gravity of the situation.

Kendra needed no metaphor for this. Both the social worker and Sergeant Starr had put her in the picture about Joel’s attempt at mugging a woman on Portobello Road as well as his possession of a weapon and his subsequent and mysterious release from custody. Although she told herself it had likely been a case of mistaken identity—for how else could he have been released so summarily?—in her heart she wasn’t so certain. This, then, in combination with the change in Ness was sufficient to draw her full attention back to all three of the children.

“Social worker’s coming to the house to talk to me,” she told Cordie after Fabia Bender’s phone call to the charity shop. “She wants it to be just the two of us, ’cept Dix c’n be there if he’s round just then.”

Cordie nodded in sympathetic silence, listening to the sound of her two girls peacefully playing with paper dolls in the lounge while the rain beat on the windows outside. She thanked God: for her daughters’

innocence, for her husband’s solid presence despite his maddening desire for a son, and for her own good luck. She had a gainfully employed man in the house, a fully functioning family, and a job she enjoyed with colleagues who shared her passion.

“Did I do wrong phoning up the cops wiv dis Neal Wyatt’s name?”

Kendra asked her.

Cordie couldn’t say. In her experience nothing good
ever
came of involving the police in any aspect of one’s life, but she was willing to make an exception to that belief. So she said, “’S all gonna work out, Ken,” which was the truth, although whether it was going to work out well or work out disastrously was something she didn’t predict. To Cordie, life was better if it was lived off the radar screens of the myriad arms of governmental institutions. Since Kendra and her relations had placed themselves firmly
onto
these radar screens, it was hardly likely that there was going to be a happily ever after involved.

There seemed only three options when Kendra thought everything over: going on as they had been for the last year, creating a radical intervention to effect an immediate change that would shake up Ness and Joel and bring them to their senses—provided Joel even
needed
that, which she still didn’t want to admit to—or hoping for a miracle in the person of Carole Campbell and her sudden, complete, and permanent recovery. The first was clearly not working out, the second seemed to involve care and was thus unthinkable, and the third was unlikely. A final and potentially efficacious option was marriage to Dix and the semblance of permanence and family that such a marriage might offer.

But marriage to Dix was precisely what Kendra did not want; indeed, she wanted marriage to no one at all. Marriage was a form of giving up and giving in, and she could not face this, even as she knew it might be the only solution available.

Fabia Bender had no intention of making things easy on the children’s aunt. This was a runaway train she was attempting to halt, and she meant to use whatever means were available to put on the brakes. She could tell that Kendra Osborne wasn’t a bad woman. She knew the children’s aunt meant well by all of them. But with Joel in possession of a firearm—not to mention identified as a mugger and
still
somehow escaping prosecution for these offences—and with Ness the victim of a street assault and the street assault’s aftermath, the children’s jeopardy was fast reaching what could only be described as critical mass. An explosion was imminent. Years of experience told the social worker that.

She began with Ness, whose folder she opened and studied with an apparent need to refresh her memory on the details, although she knew them well enough and did this only for effect. Across from her Kendra sat, joined by Dix, who’d turned up smelling of oil and fried fish from his parents’ café, anxious to get to the gym for his workout but eager to be of support to Kendra and thus a bundle of warring energies.

Ness was doing her community service, which was to the good, Fabia told them. But she’d ceased her work for Sayf al Din, which was substituting for her required full-time schooling. Fabia was—at this time—interceding with the magistrate in respect of Vanessa Campbell’s meeting her obligations under the terms of her probation. But if something didn’t change quickly, Ness was going to face the magistrate and things were not going to go smoothly when she did.

“He knows about the assault, however, and he’s agreed to counselling in place of full-time school,” Fabia told Kendra. “We have someone in Oxford Gardens she can see, if you can guarantee she gets there.

As to Joel—”

“I got him sorted,” Kendra said quickly, not because this was the truth but because she hadn’t told Dix about the mugging and the gun.

Why should she? was what she asked herself. It was all a mistake, wasn’t it? “He hasn’t gone truant since that one time—”

Dix looked at her sharply and frowned.

“—and he knows he was lucky with the way things turned out.”

“But there’s more involved here than meets the eye,” Fabia said.

“That he was released so quickly—”

“Released? Wha’s goin down wiv Joel?” Dix asked abruptly. “Joel in trouble? Ken,
damn
it . . .” He ran his hand over his pate. It was an act of frustration and disappointment, with Dix not realising what his ignorance in this matter revealed to the social worker, who glanced between woman and man and made an evaluation of their relationship that Kendra could not afford to have made.

“Cops had him down the Harrow Road station,” she told him. “I di’n’t like to trouble you with this cos you been busy and it got sorted.

It di’n’t seem—”

“How we make dis work if you keep secrets, Ken?” He asked the question in a fierce whisper.

Kendra answered, “C’n we talk ’bout this later?”

“Shit.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, and Fabia Bender read the movements for what they were. She made a mental note. No father figure. Another tick in the column keeping score of the children’s removal from this home.

She said, “Under other circumstances, I’d insist on Joel’s placement in that programme I mentioned to you earlier, the one across the river at Elephant and Castle. In fact, I’d advise it for Ness as well. But I agree with you, Mrs. Osborne: There’s the distance and the fact that there’s no one to ensure either their attendance or their safety in making the journey to South London . . .” She lifted her hand and dropped it on the folder containing Joel’s information. “Joel needs counselling, just like Ness, but he needs more than that. He needs supervision, a direction in life, an interest to focus on, an outlet for his concerns, and a male role model with whom he can become involved.

We have to provide him with those or we have to consider other options for him.”

“Dis is down to me,” Dix interceded, believing he bore a certain amount of responsibility for what had happened to Joel even if he wasn’t quite sure what
what had happened
meant. “I c’n do more wiv Joel than I been doing. I ain’t tried hard enough cos . . .” He blew out a breath as he thought about all the reasons he’d failed to be the father figure he’d sought to be: his responsibilities to his own family, his desire for success in his chosen field, his insatiable lust for Kendra’s body, his inadequacy in the face of the children’s troubles, his lack of experience and history with the children, the image he pos-sessed of what a family was supposed to be. He could name some of these as reasons for his failure; the rest he could see in his mind. In any case, what he felt was guilt for all of them, and he ended up expressing them with, “Cos ’f life. I meant to do better wiv the kids, an’

I will from now on.”

Fabia Bender wasn’t in the business of breaking up families, and she wanted to believe that commitment on the part of the two people sitting with her at what was an inadequately sized kitchen table meant a possibility existed that Joel’s trouble would serve as a wake-up call to everyone. Still, she was bound by duty to finish what she had come to say, so that was what she did.

“We need to think carefully about the children’s future. Sometimes a removal from the environment—even for a brief time—is all that’s necessary to bring about change. I’d like you to think about this. Care is an option. Boarding school is another: a special school to meet Toby’s needs—”

“Toby’s fine where he is,” Kendra put in. She made the declaration sound firm, not panicked.

“—and another school to give Joel new direction,” Fabia continued as if Kendra hadn’t spoken. “With them taken care of in this way, we can concentrate on Ness.”

“I don’t got . . .” Kendra stopped. “I don’t need to think about it. I can’t put them into care. Or send them away. They won’t understand.

They’ve been through too much. They’ve . . .” She gestured futilely.

Tears in front of this woman were unthinkable, so she said nothing more.

Dix said it for her. “Jus’ now ever’one’s doing what they’re s’posed to be doin, innit?”

“Yes,” Fabia Bender said. “Technically. But Ness is going to have to—”

“Den you let us be fam’ly. We see to Ness. We see to the boys. We stop doin dat, you free to come back.”

Fabia agreed to this, but anyone could see how insurmountable was the task that faced the two adults. There were too many needs to be met, and most of them were not the simple ones of food, shelter, and clothing, which required money for their procurement and time for their purchase and nothing else. As to the deeper needs of assuaging fears, quelling daily anxieties, reconciling past pain with present reality and future possibility . . . These required the participation of a professional or a group of professionals. Fabia could tell that the aunt and her lover didn’t see this; she was wise enough to know that people had to reach conclusions on their own.

She told them she would return in two weeks to see how all of them were doing, then. But in the meantime, they were going to have to get Ness to Oxford Gardens for counselling. The magistrate would accept nothing less.

“I don’t need fuckin counselling,” was how Ness responded to this information.

“You need a lockup instead?” was how Kendra replied. “You need being sent away? Going into care? Having Toby put away in a special school and Joel going off to board somewhere? That what you need, Vanessa Campbell?”

Dix said, “Ken. Ken. Go easy,” and he tried to sound sympathetic towards Ness. Just as he tried to be a father to Joel and Toby: checking on schoolwork, watching the skateboarding in Meanwhile Gardens when the winter weather permitted, carving out two hours to go to the cinema for an action-hero film, coaxing the boys to the gym to participate in a workout in which neither of them was interested.

But all of this was a street upon which Dix was the only driver: Ness scorned his attempts to intervene; Joel’s cooperation was given in a silence that indicated no cooperation at all; Toby went the way of Joel as always, utterly confused by the entire situation in which he was now living.