What Came Before He Shot Her (74 page)

“Someone’s mouf needs dis’nfectin,” as he tried to drive the spout between Joel’s lips.

But a clatter from the stairs brought Ness into the room. She flung herself upon Dix and her brother. The force of her flying body threw Dix hard against Joel and Joel just as hard against the edge of the work top. His feet scrambled for purchase against the lino and he slipped in some of the Fairy Liquid. He went down. Dix went with him. Ness landed on top of them both.

She shrieked a string of curses as she clawed at Dix’s head. His grip loosened on Joel as he tried to protect his face from her nails. Joel rolled away and against the table, where he reached for a chair and staggered to his feet.

Ness was screaming, “Damn you! Fuck you! Don’t you never touch one of my brothers!” as she went after the bodybuilder with her hands, her feet, her elbows, her teeth.

Dix managed to catch her arms. He flipped her over and himself with her. He was on top now, and he pinned her to the floor. They writhed there in the Fairy Liquid, a desperate coupling that he tried to still by covering the length of her body with his.

She screamed then. She gave one long, horrifying cry, sounding like someone just entering hell.

It was into this scene that Kendra came: Toby in a ball under the table, Joel trying to pull Dix off his sister, Dix doing what he could to quell her, Ness far gone to another place.

“Get off her. Get
off
her!” Ness shrieked. She flung her head back and arched her spine with such strength that she managed to lift both of them off the floor. “You leave her be! No! Mummy . . .
Mum
my

1. 1. .” And on that final fruitless appeal to a woman not there, never there, and never to be there, she began to howl. It was like the sound of an animal shot, doomed to dying by degrees.
      

Kendra rushed forward. “Dix! Stop this!”

Dix rolled off the girl. He was bleeding from the face and panting like a runner. He shook his head, incapable of speech.

Which didn’t matter, because Ness was doing all the speaking: on the floor, spread-eagled, but kicking now and beating her fists against the air and then against her own body.

“You get off. You bloody get off
.
Get
off
!”

Kendra knelt at her side.

“He did it to me. He did it. He
did
.”

“Ness!” Kendra cried.

“An’ no one there.”

“Ness!
Ness
! What’s—”

“You go off to the fruit machines. You say watch ’em and he say fine. An’ you jus’ go and leave us wiv
him
. But it ain’t him. It’s all of dem. Pressin up ’gainst me an’ I c’n feel it’s hard. An’ he reaches up my top and squeezes . . . says I like ’em young. I like em like dis cos dey still firm mmm mmmm an’ I don’t know wha’ to do, innit, cos I don’t

’xpect—”

Kendra yanked her fiercely into her arms. She cried, “Jesus
God
.”

The others watched, like statues, turned to salt not by what they saw but what they heard.

“An’
you
been there for a visit,” Ness cried, clinging to Kendra and pounding at her back. “You come round ’fore you going to dis club, dat club, anywheres, innit, pullin dis man, dat man. An’ ever’one
sees
what you mean to do cos you got dat look an’ how you dress. But only a certain age you want and you make dat clear cos they got to be young cos if they old like sixty, sixty-five, seventy, you don’t want ’em. But they
hot
now, see? All of ’em. They hot an’ they hard and they know what they want. So you leave, she leaves cos she
always
go to the fruit machines and dat’s when they take it. They bloody fuckin
take
it.

George an’ his mates on the bed in Gran’s room. They all got their cocks out . . . They climb on . . . And I can’t . . . I
can’t
. . .”

“Ness! Ness!” Kendra cried. She held her, she rocked her. And to Joel, “Did you know?”

He shook his head. He’d bitten into his fist as his sister was talking, and he could taste the coppery flavour of his blood. Whatever had happened to Ness had happened in silence and behind closed doors. But he could recall how often they’d come to his gran’s—those friends of George, there to play cards, sometimes as many as eight of them. He could remember Glory saying as she pulled on her coat, “George, you be able to mind the kids wiv all your mates here like dis?”

And George saying happily in reply, “Don’t you worry, Glor. Don’t you worry ’bout nuffink. I got ’nough help here to man a ocean liner or two, so three kids ain’t a problem. Sides, Ness old enough to help out ’f the boys get out ’f hand. Ain’t you, Nessa?” with a wink at her.

And Ness saying only, “Don’t go, Gran.”

And Gran saying, “You make your bruvs some Bournvita, darlin’.

Time you got it drunk up, your gran be home.”

But not home soon enough.

SO WHEN NESS sharpened a paring knife, it seemed the logical outcome of what she’d revealed and what had happened in the kitchen.

Joel saw her do it, but he said nothing. He could see that Ness was, in this, just like him. If the paring knife made her feel secure, what of it?

he thought.

In the aftermath of what happened with the children, Dix questioned everything. His dream had always centred around the romantic ideal of family, for his dream of the future was grounded in the past, which had as its most notable characteristic the warm kinship he’d always experienced with his own relations. To him
family
meant pater-familias sitting at the head of the table, carving a joint of beef at Sunday lunch. It meant fairy lights strung from the ceiling at Christmastime and day trips to Brighton on the odd bank holiday when there was money enough for candy floss, a bag of rock, and fish and chips by the sea. It meant parents keeping a watchful eye over children’s schoolwork, their afternoon activities, their mates, their dress, their manners, and their growth. Dentist for their teeth. Doctor for their inoculations.

Thermometer thrust beneath their tongues, soup and soldiers when they were ill. Children spoke respectfully to their parents in this sort of family, and parents responded with firm but loving guidance, disciplin-ing when necessary and making sure the lines of communication were occluded by nothing. If any family can be described as
normal
, it was the family in which Dix D’Court had grown up. This had provided him with an image of what life should look like when it came to his own future with wife and offspring, but nothing about it had prepared him for dealing with children who were plagued by trouble and by horror.

The Campbells, he believed, needed help. More help than either Kendra or he would be able to give them in a hundred thousand lifetimes. Dix broached this subject with her, but she did not take it well.

“You want me to get rid of them?” she demanded.

“Ain’t saying dat,” he told her quietly. “Jus’ dat they been through too much and we ain’t got the skills to lead ’em away from where they are.”

“Ness’s
in
counselling. Toby’s in his learning centre. Joel’s doing what he’s meant to do. What more do you want?”

“Ken, dis is bigger ’n you and it’s bigger ’n me. You got to see dat.”

But Kendra could not. She told herself that if she had not been so bloody-minded about keeping her life exactly as it was when Glory dropped the children upon her like three sacks of grain, she might have built an adequate life for
them
. So anything that even smacked of abandoning them at this point was something she would not consider. She would do what she had to do to save them, even if it meant doing so on her own.

“Even if it means givin up everyt’ing you been workin for?” Cordie asked when they saw each other next. “The massage business? The someday spa? You lettin dat go?”

“Isn’t that what you’ve done?” Kendra countered. “Didn’t you give in to Gerald and give up on your dreams?”

“What? Cos he wants ’nother baby and I’m makin him one? How’s dat givin up on dreams? An’
what
dreams, anyways? I was doing fingernails, f ’r God’s sake, Ken.”

“You were going to be part of the spa.”

“Yeah. True. But bottom line is dis: I gonna choose Gerald if I got to make a choice. I always gonna choose Gerald. Spa come along and if it fit in wiv what I got goin at th’ moment, I join dat dream. If it don’t fit in, I choose Gerald.”

“What about the others?”

“Wha’ others?”

“Men you pull. You know what I mean.”

Cordie looked at her blankly. “You mistaken,” she said. “I don’t pull men.”

“Cordie, you been snogging wiv nineteen-year-old boys—”

“I know wha’ I got here,” Cordie said firmly, always a woman capable of turning a blind eye to her own weaknesses of the flesh. “An’ I choose Gerald. You best look at what you got and make a choice you c’n live wiv as well.”

That was the issue: making a choice and living with it afterwards.

Kendra didn’t want to do either.

THE ONLY ANSWER seemed to be to make a move that would communicate a willingness to deal with the children’s diffi culties.

“We must file charges,” was how Fabia Bender reacted when Kendra revealed the information. They met by prior arrangement at Lisboa Pa-tisserie in Golborne Road, with Castor and Pollux waiting patiently outside as their mistress indulged in café au lait, along with a prawn mayonnaise sandwich, which she brought forth from her briefcase.

Fabia set her sandwich on a napkin and took out a day planner in which she kept everything from her diary to coupons for her grocery shopping. She began to flip through it.

“File charges against who?” Kendra asked. “George’s gone. As for his mates . . . Ness doesn’t know their names and my mum’s not likely to know them either. And what do we gain, putting her in the hands of cops for questioning or the CPS for examining? She’s not about to talk to cops about this. She’s barely even talking to me.”

Fabia looked thoughtful. “It explains a great deal, doesn’t it? Especially about why she won’t talk to Ruma. Or cooperate with testing.

Or anything, really. Most girls have deep shame about being molested. They believe they said something, did something, encouraged something. That’s how the molesters condition them to think. And in Ness’s case, no one prepared her as a young child to think anything else: her mum mental, her dad dead, her gran consumed with other things. As she was developing into a woman, there was no one present to talk to her about the right she had to protect her own body.”

Fabia was mostly thinking aloud, gazing out towards the street where a light rain was falling. When she moved her eyes to take in Kendra, Fabia read her expression. She added, “This
isn’t
your fault, Mrs. Osborne. You weren’t in the home. Your mother was. If there’s blame to be handed out—”

“What does it matter?” Kendra asked. “I feel what I feel.”

Fabia nodded. She said, “Well, Ruma is going to have to be told.

And . . .” She hesitated, lost in thought. She observed Kendra and knew she meant well. But the aunt’s attempts at parenting had been in-describably inadequate, so there was no real hope that Kendra could reach into her niece’s psyche and soothe it. Still, there were other ports to turn to. Fabia Bender said, “I’m going to talk to Majidah Ghafoor.

There’s something good there between her and Ness. A field to plough if not to plant. Let me see what I can do.”

With the newfound knowledge she’d been given, Ruma suggested a different course of action, one that Fabia would not have expected.

Support groups were all well and good, she said, and a psychiatric evaluation might give them information about the state of Ness’s brain chemistry vis-à-vis everything from schizophrenia to depression, but now they were talking about the state of her psyche and her mind, and with a client unwilling to touch upon the subject of molestation and certainly too old for something as obvious as anatomical dolls to play with . . . “Hippotherapy,” Ruma concluded. “There’ve been some excellent results with that.”

“_Hippo_?” Naturally, Fabia thought of the lumbering, rotund African mammals, of their huge gaping mouths and tiny twitching ears.

Ruma said, “Horses,” to correct her vision. “Treatment for the mind with the help of a horse.” When Fabia’s expression registered scepti-cism, Ruma explained how it was meant to work, this form of tactile therapy in which the horse-to-human and human-to-horse interaction not only served as metaphor for subjects too painful for the patient to discuss but also as a high-speed means of making progress in someone’s recovery. “It’s about coming to terms with issues of control, power, and fear,” Ruma said. “I know it sounds mad, Fabia, but we’ve got to try it. Without some sort of breakthrough with Ness . . .” She let the rest hang, and Fabia finished it for her mentally. Without a breakthrough, things would only get worse.

“Can we dig round for funding?” Ruma asked.

Fabia sighed. “I don’t bloody know.” It was so unlikely. This was one girl among many in a system stressed and overburdened. There might be a special fund somewhere, but it could take ages of research to find it. Fabia could look and she was willing to do so. But in the meantime, Ness’s wounds would fester.

Fabia went to Majidah. She would, she decided, leave no stone un-turned in this project of Vanessa Campbell. Majidah, Ruma, Fabia, Kendra

1. 1. 1. All the women in Ness’s life had to present a united front. The message they would pass to Ness was one of concern, love, and support.
         

“Ah, that these terrible things must happen,” was Majidah’s quiet reaction to the story Fabia told her. She herself told Fabia what little she knew about Ness’s past from the girl’s earlier partial admissions.

“_Ten _ years old?” Fabia repeated in horror.

“It makes one question the ways of God.”

Fabia was not a believer in God. Mankind, she’d long ago decided, was an accident of atoms colliding in an ancient atmosphere: without design, without plan, and without a single hope of a positive result unless a huge effort was put into getting one. She said, “We’re trying to arrange a special therapy for her. In the meantime, should she decide to speak to you about what’s happened to her . . . I thought it best that you be brought into the picture.”