What Came Before He Shot Her

Ness approached him, without any other option that she could see. She steeled herself to what would happen next and when he put his hand over one of her breasts, she did her best not to shudder although she felt a prickling sensation inside her nose: harbinger of the most useless of tears. His entire hand covered her breast, her nipple cushioned in the centre of his palm. His fingers tightened. He pulled her forward.

When she was inches from him, he looked at her squarely. “This,” he said, “c’n all go away. You out of here and home to your mummy. No one the wiser about nicking this and that from the store. That what you want?”

A tear escaped her eye.

“You got to say,” he said. “That’s what you want. Say it.”

She managed to mutter. “Yeah.”

“No. You must say it, dear.”

“Tha’s what I want.”

He smiled. “I guessed as much,” he said. “Girls like you, they always want it. You hold still now, and I give you what you asked for, dearie. Will you do that for me? Answer me now.”

Ness steeled herself. “I do that for you.”

“Willingly?”

“Yeah. I do it.”

“How nice,” he said. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?” He bent to her, then, and he began to suck.

SHE WAS LATE to the child drop-in centre. She made the trip from Kensington High Street north to Meanwhile Gardens without thinking about the locker room, but the effort to do this made her rage inside. Rage brought tears and tears brought more rage. She told herself she would return, she would wait outside the employees’ door—the very door he’d taken her to at last, releasing her into a side street with a pleasant “Now get along with you, dearie”—and when he came out at the end of the day, she’d kill him. She would shoot him between the eyes, and what they did to her afterwards would be of no account because he would be dead, as he deserved to be.

She didn’t wait for the bus that would take her up Kensington Church Street and then on to Ladbroke Grove. She told herself she couldn’t be bothered, but the truth was that she didn’t want to be seen, and on foot she felt somehow invisible. Humiliation—which she would not admit as even existing—was washing over her. The only way to avoid feeling it was to stalk furiously in the general direction of the drop-in centre, savagely pushing her way through the crowds while she remained in the shopping district, seeking something she could damage when those crowds thinned and she was left on the wider pavements of Holland Park Avenue where there was no one close by to smash into and snarl at and nothing to do save keep walking and trying to avoid her own thoughts.

She finally boarded a bus in Notting Hill because it happened to pull up just as she reached the stop and there would be no need for her to wait and think. But this did little to get her to the drop-in centre so that her arrival would be timely. She was ninety minutes late as she went through the gate in the cyclone fence, where in the play area three children toddled about in the paddling pool under the watchful eyes of their mothers.

The sight of them—children and mothers—was something that Ness couldn’t bear to look at but had to look at, so what she felt was even more anger. The effect was like air being forced into an overfull balloon.

She shoved open the door of the drop-in centre. It banged against the wall. Several children were applying white glue to an art project that involved poster board, seashells, and beads. Majidah was in the kitchen. The children looked up with wide eyes, and Majidah came into the main room. Ness readied herself for what the Muslim woman would say, thinking, Just let her, just let the bloody bitch.

Majidah looked her over, her eyes narrowing in evaluation. She didn’t like Ness because she didn’t like Ness’s attitude, not to mention her dress sense and the reason she was working at the centre. But she was also a woman who’d gone through much in her forty-six years, not the least of which was to come to terms with profound suffering: in herself and in others. While her philosophy in life could best be described as Work hard, don’t whinge, and just get on with it, she was not devoid of compassion for people who had not yet found the way to do any of these things.

So she said, with a meaningful glance at the Felix the Cat clock that hung above a rank of storage blocks containing children’s toys, “You must try to be on time, Vanessa. Please do assist those children with their gluing. You and I will speak once we close for the day.”

JOEL’S CONFRONTATION WITH Neal Wyatt turned out to be a double-edged sword. One edge had Joel watching his back from that moment forward. The other edge had him writing. More words than he would ever have thought possible prompted more verse than he would ever have thought possible, the oddest feature about this process being the fact that the words coming out of his head weren’t the sort that Joel would have thought could produce a poem. They were ordinary. Words like bridge or kneel, like fl oat or dismay had him diving for his notebook. He did it so often that Kendra became curious and asked Joel what he was up to with his nose bent over a notebook all the time. She assumed he was writing letters to someone and asked him if the intended recipient was his mother. When he told her it wasn’t letters but rather poems, Kendra—like Hibah—jumped to love poems and she began to tease him about being stuck on a girl. But there was a halfhearted nature to her teasing that even Joel—with all his focus on verse—could not fail to notice. He said wisely, “You seen Dix, then, Aunt Ken?” to which her response of “ Have you seen,” took their conversation towards the importance of proper English and away from the importance of love.

Kendra told herself it wasn’t love anyway, and how could it have been with those nearly twenty years forming a yawning chasm between them. She told herself good riddance, time for both of them to move on, but that message was prevented from working its way from her mind to her heart because of her heart. She altered the message after a time, to one of “It was just lust, girl,” and she adhered to that because it seemed reasonable.

With Kendra’s thoughts caught up in all this and with Joel’s concentration on his poetry, there was only Toby left to notice a change in Ness in the following days. But since the change constituted doing what she had been ordered to do by the magistrate—and suddenly without complaint—the subtlety of the situation was beyond Toby. He soothed himself with his lava lamp, watched the television, and kept mum about Joel’s run-in with Neal Wyatt.

This was at Joel’s request. He explained away his cuts and bruises by telling his aunt that—daft as it was, since he had no skill—he’d borrowed a skateboard and tried out the skate bowl. She accepted this story and talked about safety helmets.

For his part, Joel took the word safety and began to fashion another poem. When it was complete, he put it in the suitcase beneath his bed. Before he shut the lid, though, he counted the number of poems that he’d written. He was amazed to see he’d crafted twenty-seven, and the logical question arose in his mind: What was he going to do with them?

He continued to go to Wield Words Not Weapons, but he did not join the others at the microphone and he never participated in Walk the Word. Rather, he became an observer of the proceedings and a sponge for the criticism that was offered to the other poets who were willing to read.

Throughout all this, Ivan Weatherall didn’t bother with him much, just saying hello, expressing his pleasure at seeing Joel at Wield Words Not Weapons, asking whether Joel was writing, and not making anything of it when Joel ducked his head, too embarrassed to answer directly. He merely said, “You’ve got a gift, my friend. Mustn’t turn away from it.” Otherwise, Ivan concentrated on the delight he felt at the growing attendance at his poetry events. He added a poetry-writing course to the scriptwriting course he offered at Paddington Arts, but Joel couldn’t imagine taking it. He couldn’t imagine having to write a poem. The creative act didn’t work that way for him.

He had thirty-five pieces when he decided that he would let Ivan see some of his work. He picked out four that he liked, and on a day when he had to fetch Toby from the learning centre, he left Edenham Estate earlier than usual, and he went up to Sixth Avenue.

He found Ivan, white gloved, working on another clock. This time, though, he wasn’t building it. Rather, he was cleaning an old one that, he explained, had taken to striking the half hour whenever the fancy came upon it.

“Completely unacceptable behaviour in a timepiece,” Ivan confi ded as he ushered Joel into the little sitting room. There, on the table beneath the window, the parts of a clock lay spread out on a white towel in a neat arrangement along with a small squeeze tin of oil, a pair of tweezers, and several sizes of minute screwdrivers. Ivan waved Joel in the direction of an armchair next to the fireplace. Coal had once burned there, but now an electric fire sat askew and unlit upon the grate. “This is damn tedious work, and your presence brings me a distraction from total concentration on it, for which I thank you,” Ivan said.

At first, Joel’s thinking was that Ivan meant the four poems in his pocket, so he took them out and unfolded them, not questioning how the older man knew he’d come with a purpose. But Ivan merely went back to his clockwork after reaching for a sprig of mint and popping it into his mouth. He began to talk of an art show that he’d seen on the south bank of the Thames. He said it was “the emperor’s whatevers” because one of the exhibits had been a urinal encased in Plexiglass and signed by the artist, and another had been a glass of water on a shelf mounted high on the wall with the title Oak Tree tacked beneath it. Then, he went on, there was an entire room “dedicated to an angry lesbian who made sofas into acts of sexual congress, don’t ask. I can’t say what her message was meant to be, but her rage came through remarkably. Do you like art, Joel?”

Ivan’s question came so suddenly at the end of his chatter that Joel didn’t take it in at first, and he didn’t realise that his opinion was actually being solicited. But then Ivan looked up from his work, and his face appeared so friendly and expectant that Joel responded spontaneously for once, giving his answer without censoring himself.

“Cal draws good,” he said. “I seen his stuff.”

Ivan frowned for a moment. Then he held up a fi nger and said, “Ah. Calvin Hancock. At the right hand of Stanley. Yes. He’s got something, hasn’t he? Untutored, which is a shame, and unwilling to become tutored, which is worse. But masses of raw talent. You’ve an eye for it, then. What about the rest? Have you been to any of our city’s great galleries?”

Joel hadn’t, but he didn’t want to say so. He didn’t want to lie, either, so he murmured, “Dad took us to Trafalgar Square once.”

“Ah. The National Gallery. What did you think? Bit stuffy, isn’t it?

Or did they have something special on?”

Joel pulled at a thread on the hem of his T-shirt. He knew there was some sort of museum in Trafalgar Square, but they’d only gone to see the enormous flocks of pigeons. They’d sat on the edge of one of the fountains and watched the birds, and Toby had wanted to climb on one of the lions at the base of the tall column at the square’s centre. They’d listened to a busker entertaining with an accordion and they’d studied a girl painted gold and posing as a statue for donations that could be dropped into a bucket at her feet. They’d had Cornettos bought from a vendor at the side of the square, but they’d melted too fast because the day was hot. Toby had got ice cream down the front of him and all over his hands. Their father had dipped his handkerchief into the fountain and had cleaned him up after he’d finished with the cone.

Joel hadn’t thought of any of this in ages. The sudden memory made his eyes tingle.

Unaccountably, as far as Joel was concerned, Ivan said, “Ah. If we knew what the hand of cards was going to be, we’d develop a plan in advance to play them, I dare say. But the devilment of life is that we don’t. We’re caught out, most often with our trousers round our knees.”

Joel wanted to say, “What’re you on about?” but he didn’t because he knew exactly what Ivan was on about: there one moment and gone the next, walking to the dancing school to fetch Ness from her Saturday lesson, Toby’s hand in their dad’s and Joel pausing some thirty yards back because in front of the discount store a container of footballs caught his attention, so much so that at first he didn’t realise what the four loud pops were that he heard in advance of the shouting.

Joel said in a rush, “I brought these,” and he thrust his poems at Ivan.

Ivan took them, mercifully saying nothing further about hands of cards or how one could play them. Instead, he placed the papers on the towel, and he bent over them exactly as he would bend over a clock. He read, and as he did so, he chewed on his mint leaves.

At first he said nothing. He merely went from one poem to the next, setting each aside after he had read it. Joel found that his ankles had begun to itch and the ticking of the clocks seemed louder than usual. He thought he’d been foolish to bring the poems to Ivan and he silently said, Stupid, stupid, dumb shit, thick head, die die die.

Ivan’s reaction was quite unlike Joel’s, however. He finally turned in his seat and said, “The greatest sin is letting riches go to waste once you know they’re riches. The difficulty is that most people don’t know. They define riches only by what they can see because that’s what they’ve been taught to do: to look at the end of things, the destination. What they never recognise is that riches are in the process, the journey, in what one does with what one has. Not in what one manages to amass.”

This was all a bit much for Joel, so he said nothing. He did wonder, though, if Ivan was merely coming up with something to say because he’d read the poems and he’d found them as stupid as Joel himself was beginning to suspect they truly were.

Before he could voice this, Ivan opened a wooden box on his table and took out a pencil. He said, “You’ve a natural flair for metre and language, but occasionally the rawness is just too raw, and that’s where shading comes in. If we scan this verse . . . Here. Let me show you what I mean.” He motioned Joel to come to the table, and there he explained. He used terms Joel had never heard of, but he made marks on the paper to illustrate what he meant. He took his explanation slowly, and there was an honest friendliness to the recitation that made Joel easy with listening to it. There was also an eagerness behind the words that Joel could see was directed at the poems themselves.

So completely involved did he become in listening to Ivan talk about his verse and in watching the way Ivan was able to improve each piece that when Joel finally heard the clocks chiming around him, he looked up to see he’d been there for nearly two hours. This was one hour longer than he’d meant to be there, and one hour later than the conclusion of Toby’s summertime appointment at the learning centre.

Joel jumped to his feet, crying out, “Holy hell!”

Ivan said, “What . . . ?” but Joel heard nothing more of the question. The only sound he heard from that moment was the slapping of his trainers on the pavement as he ran in the direction of the Harrow Road.