What Came Before He Shot Her (7 page)

Six lived in one of the apartment blocks. It was called Farnaby House: three storeys tall, accessed through a thick wooden security door, possessed of balconies for lounging upon in the summertime, having lino floors in the corridors and yellow paint on the walls. From the outside, it didn’t seem at all an unpleasant place to live, until further investigation revealed the security door hopelessly broken; the small windows next to it either cracked or boarded over; the scent of urine, acrid inside the entry; and the holes kicked into the corridor walls.

The flat that Six’s family occupied was a place of odour and noise.

The odour was predominantly of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed clothes, while the noise emanated both from the television and from the secondhand karaoke machine that Six’s mother had given her for Christmas. It would, she’d told herself, advance her daughter’s dream of pop stardom. It would also, she hoped but did not admit aloud, keep her off the streets. The fact that it was doing neither was something that Six’s mother didn’t know and would have turned a blind eye to had anything in Six’s behaviour suggested it. The poor woman worked at two jobs to keep clothes on the backs of the four children—

out of seven—whom she still had at home. She had neither the time nor the energy to wonder what her offspring were doing while she herself was cleaning rooms in the Hyde Park Hilton or ironing sheets and pillowcases in the laundry of the Dorchester Hotel. Like most mothers in her position, she wanted something better for her children. That three of them were already following in her footsteps—unmarried and regularly producing offspring by various worthless men—she put down to bloody-mindedness. That three of the other four were set to do the same, she simply didn’t acknowledge. Only one of this latter group attended school with any regularity. As a result, the Professor was his sobriquet.

When Ness arrived at Farnaby House and made her way through the broken security door and up one flight of stairs, she found Six entertaining Natasha in the bedroom she shared with her sisters. Natasha was sitting on the floor, applying a viscous coat of purple varnish to her already red and stubby fingernails while Six clutched the karaoke’s microphone in the vicinity of her chest as she bumped and ground her way through the musical interlude of a vintage Madonna piece. As Ness entered, Six took Madonna to the next level. She jumped off the bed on which she’d been performing, and she pranced around Ness to the beat of the music before she accosted her and pulled her forward for a kiss with tongue.

Ness pushed her away and cursed in a manner that would have got her steeply fined had her aunt been listening. She wiped her mouth savagely on a pillow that she scooped from one of the three beds in the room. This left behind two smears of blood red lipstick, one on the pillowcase and the other like a gash across her cheek.

On the floor, Natasha laughed lazily while Six—who never lost a beat—gyrated over to her. Natasha accepted the kiss quite willingly, her mouth opening to the size of a saucer to accommodate as much tongue as Six felt inclined to give her. They went at it for such a length of time that Ness’s stomach curdled and she averted her eyes. In doing this, she looked around and found the source of her friends’ lack of inhibition. A hand mirror lay, glass up, upon the chest of drawers, with the remains of white powder dusting it.

Ness said, “Shit! You lot di’n’t
wait
? You still holdin substance, or is dat it, Six?”

Six and Natasha broke off from each other. Six said, “I
tol’
you to be here las’ night, di’n’t I?”

Ness said, “You know I can’t. ’F I ain’t home by . . . Shit.
Shit.

How’d you score, den?”

“Tash did,” Six said. “Dere’s blow and dere’s blow, innit.”

The two girls laughed companionably. As Ness had learned, they had an arrangement with several of the delivery boys who cycled the routes from one of West Kilburn’s main suppliers to those of the area’s users who preferred indulging at home to visiting a crack house: a skimming off the top from six or seven bags in exchange for fellatio. Natasha and Six took turns administering it, although they always shared the goods received in payment.

Ness scooped up the mirror, wet her finger, and cleaned off what little powder was left. She rubbed it on her gums, to little effect. At this, she felt a hard hot stone start to grow larger in the middle of her chest. She
hated
being on the outside looking in, and that was where she was standing at the moment. It was also where she would continue to stand if she couldn’t join the girls in their high.

She turned to them. “You got weed, den?”

Six shook her head. She danced over to the karaoke machine and shut it off. Natasha watched her with glowing eyes. It was no secret that, two years younger, Natasha worshipped everything about Six, but on this particular morning, Ness found such idolatry annoying, especially stacked up with the part Nastasha had played in getting herself and Six supplied on the previous night, to the exclusion of Ness.

She said to Natasha, “Shit, you know wha’ you look like, Tash?

Lezzo, da’s what. You wan’ eat Six for
dinner
?”

Six narrowed her eyes at this, dropping down on the bed. She rooted through a pile of clothes on the floor, snagged a pair of jeans, and brought out a packet of cigarettes from one of the pockets. She lit up and said, “Hey, watch’r mouf, den, Ness. Tash’s all right.”

Ness said, “Why? You like ’t as well?”

This was the sort of remark that might have otherwise spurred Six to get into a brawl with Ness, but she was loath to do anything to disturb the pleasant sensation of being high. Besides, she knew the source of Ness’s displeasure, and she wasn’t about to be misdirected onto an unrelated topic because Ness couldn’t bring herself to say something directly. Six was a girl who didn’t communicate with others by using half measures. She’d learned to be direct from toddlerhood. It was the only way to be heard in her family.

She said, “You c’n be one of us wiv it or one of us wivout it. Don’t matter to me. ’S up to you. Me ’n’ Tash, we like you fine, innit, bu’ we ain’t changin our ways to suit you, Ness.” And then to Natasha, “You cool wiv dat, Tash?”

Natasha nodded although she hadn’t the slightest idea what Six was talking about. She herself had long been a hanger-on, needing to be pulled through life by someone who knew where she was going so that she—Natasha—never had to think or make a decision on her own.

Thus, she was “cool” with just about anything going on around her as long as its source was the current object of her parasitic devotion.

Six’s little speech put Ness in a bad position. She didn’t want to be vulnerable—to them or to anyone else—but she needed the other two girls for the companionship and escape they provided. She sought a way to reconnect with them.

She said, “Give us a fag,” and attempted to sound bored with the entire topic. “Too early for me anyways.”

“But you jus’ said—”

Six cut off Natasha. She didn’t feel like a row. “Yeah,” she agreed,

“too fuckin early.” She threw the cigarettes and the plastic lighter to Ness, who shook one out, lit up, and passed the packet and lighter to Natasha. A form of peace came among them with this, which allowed them to plan the rest of their day.

For weeks, their days had followed a pattern. Morning found them at Six’s flat, where her mother was gone, her brother was at school, and her two sisters were sometimes in bed and sometimes hanging about the flats of their three oldest siblings who, with their offspring, lived on two of the other estates in the area. Ness, Natasha, and Six would use this time to do each other’s hair, nails, and makeup and listen to music on the radio. Their day broadened after half past eleven, at which time they explored the possibilities up in Kilburn Lane, where they attempted to pinch cigarettes from the newsagent, gin from the off licence, used videos from Apollo Video, and anything they could get away with from Al Morooj Market. At all of this, they had limited success since their appearance on the scene heightened the suspicions of the owners of each of these establishments. These same owners frequently threatened the girls with the truant officer, a form of attempted intimidation that none of them took seriously.

When Kilburn Lane wasn’t their destination of choice, it was Queensway in Bayswater, a bus ride from the Mozart Estate, where attractions aplenty abounded in the form of Internet cafes, the shopping arcade in Whiteley’s, the ice rink, a few boutiques, and—pollen for the bee flight of their utmost desire—a mobile phone shop. For mobile phones comprised the single object without which an adolescent in London could not feel complete. So when the girls made the pilgrimage to Queensway, they always made the mobile phone shop the ultimate shrine they intended to visit.

There, they were regularly asked to leave. But that only whetted their appetite for possession. The price of a mobile was beyond their means—especially since they had no means—but that didn’t put mobiles beyond their scheming.

“We c’d text each other,” Six pointed out. “You c’d be one place and I c’d be ’nother, and all’s we need is dat moby, Tash.”

“Yeah,” Natasha sighed. “We c’d text each other.”

“Plan where to meet.”

“Try to get shit when we need it from one ’f the boys.”

“Dat as well. We
got
to get a moby. Your aunt got one, Ness?”

“Yeah, she got one.”

“Why’n’t you pinch it for us?”

“Cos I do dat, she take notice of me. An’ I like how it is wivout her notice.”

There was no lie in this. By having the sense and the discipline to restrict her nights out to the weekends, by being home in her school uniform when her aunt returned from the charity shop or a massage class, by pretending to do a modicum of schoolwork at the kitchen table while Joel did the real thing, Ness had successfully kept Kendra in the dark about her life. She took extraordinary care with all of this, and on the occasions when she drank too much and could not risk being seen at home, she religiously phoned her aunt and told her she’d be sleeping at her mate Six’s flat.

“What kind of name is that?” Kendra wanted to know. “Six? She’s called Six?”

Her real name was Chinara Kahina, Ness told her. But her family and her friends always called her Six, after her birth order, second to the youngest child in the family.

The word
family
gave a legitimacy to Six that lulled Kendra into a false sense of both security and propriety. Had she seen what went for
family
in Six’s home, had she seen the home itself, and had she seen what went on there, Kendra would not have been so quick to embrace gratitude at Ness’s having found a friend in the neighbourhood. As it was, and with Ness giving her no cause for suspicion, Kendra allowed herself to believe all was well. This in turn gave her a chance to get back to her career plans in massage and to reestablish her friendship with Cordie Durelle.

This friendship had suffered in the weeks since the Campbell children had descended upon Kendra. Their girls’ nights out had been postponed as regularly as they’d once been experienced, and the long phone chats that had been one of the hallmarks of their relationship had been cut shorter, until they’d ultimately metamorphosed into promises to “phone back soon, luv,” except soon never came. Once life in Edenham Way developed what seemed to Kendra to be a pattern, however, she was able to inch carefully towards making her days and nights like what they’d been before the Campbells.

She began with work: No longer needing that wages-reducing one hour per day of free time that she’d been given at the charity shop to see to the needs of her niece and nephews, she returned to full-time employment. She reengaged with a class at Kensington and Chelsea College as well as with demonstration massages down at the sports centre in Portobello Green Arcade. She felt confident enough of how the Campbells were doing to extend her demonstration massages to two of the other gyms in the area, and when from this she cultivated her first three regular clients, she began to feel that life was sorting itself out. So on the day that Cordie popped into the charity shop on a rainy afternoon not too long after Ness’s experience of tongue-kissing Six, Kendra was pleased to see her.

She was expecting Joel and Toby since it was near the time when the boys were setting off for home from the learning centre up the street.

As the bell on the shop door chimed, she looked up from what she was doing—trying to make an appealing display out of a dismal donation of 1970s costume jewellery—and when she saw Cordie lounging in the doorway instead of the boys, she smiled and said, “Take me
away
from this, girl.”

“You must’ve got yourself one
helluva
man,” Cordie remarked. “I been picturin him giving it to you three times a day, wiv you layin there moanin an’ all your girl brains wasted to nothing. Dat how it is, Miss Kendra?”

“You joking? Haven’t had one in so long I forget what parts ’f them is different from us,” Kendra said.

“Well thank God for that,” Cordie told her. “Swear to God, I was startin to t’ink you been shaggin my Gerald and avoidin me cos you sure I’d see the truth on your face. Only lemme tell you, slag, I be that grateful you do Gerald. Save me from gettin rode every night.”

Kendra chuckled sympathetically. Gerald Durelle’s sex drive had long been the cross his wife Cordie was forced to bear. In combination with his determination to have a son from her—they already had two daughters—that drive made her willing presence in his bed the primary requirement for their marriage. As long as Cordie acted hungry in the beginning and sexually sated in the end, he didn’t notice that the middle comprised her staring into space and wondering if he was ever going to realise she was secretly on the pill.

“He figure things out yet?” Kendra asked her friend.

“Hell no,” Cordie said. “Man’s ego enough to make him t’ink I just
dyin
to keep poppin out babies till he’s got what he want.”

She sauntered over to the counter. She was, Kendra saw, still wearing the surgical mask that was part of the uniform of the manicurists at the Princess European and Afro Unisex Hair Salon just down the street.