What Came Before He Shot Her

Chapter

3 As far as friendship was concerned, things were developing far differently for Ness, at least on a superficial level. When she parted ways with her brothers every morning, she did what she had been doing since her first night in North Kensington: She met up with her new mates Natasha and Six. She effected this regular engagement by detaching from Joel and Toby in the vicinity of Portobello Bridge, where she hung about till she was sure the boys would not know in which direction she was going to head. When they were out of sight, she walked quickly in the opposite direction, on a route that took her past Trellick Tower, setting her north towards West Kilburn.

It was crucial that she take care with all this, for to gain her destination she had to use a footbridge over the Grand Union Canal, which put her squarely on the Harrow Road, in the vicinity of the charity shop where her aunt was employed. No matter that Ness generally arrived in this area well in advance of the opening hours of that shop, there was always the possibility that Kendra might choose to go in early one day, and the one thing Ness didn’t want to happen was being spotted by Kendra crossing over into Second Avenue.

In this, she didn’t fear a run-in with her aunt, for Ness was still of the mistaken opinion that she was more than a match for anyone, Kendra Osborne included. She merely didn’t want the annoyance of having to waste any time with Kendra. If she saw her, she would have to cook up an excuse for being decidedly in the wrong area of town at the wrong time of day, and while she believed she could do that with aplomb—after all, weeks into her removal from East Acton to this part of town and her aunt still didn’t know what she was up to—she didn’t want to expend the energy on that. It was taking energy enough for her to transform herself into the Ness Campbell she’d decided to become.

Once across the Harrow Road, Ness walked directly to the Jubilee Sports Centre, a low-slung building in nearby Caird Street that offered the inhabitants of the neighbourhood something else to do besides getting into or dodging trouble. Here, Ness ducked inside, and near the weight room—from which the clanging of barbells and the groaning of power lifters emanated at most hours of the day—she used the ladies’ toilet to change into the clothes and the shoes she’d stuffed into her rucksack. The hideous grey trousers she replaced with a skin of blue jeans. The equally hideous grey jumper she set aside for a lacy top or a thin T-shirt. With stiletto boots on her feet and her hair allowed to spring round her head the way she liked it, she added to her makeup— darker lipstick, more eyeliner, eye shadow that glittered—and stared in the mirror at the girl she’d created. If she liked what she saw—which she usually did—she left the sports centre and went round the corner into Lancefield Street.

It was here that Six lived, in the midst of the vast complex of buildings called the Mozart Estate, an endless maze of London brick: dozens of terraces and blocks of flats that extended all the way to Kilburn Lane. Intended like every other estate to relieve the overcrowding of the tenement buildings it replaced, over time the estate had become as unsavoury as its predecessors. By day, it looked relatively innocuous since few people were ever out and about save the elderly on their way to the local shop for a loaf of bread or a carton of milk. By night, however, it was a different matter, for the nocturnal denizens of the estate had long lived on the wrong side of the law, trading in drugs, weapons, and violence, dealing appropriately with anyone who tried to stop them.

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 fl ight 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. She had it slung around her neck, like the love child of an Elizabethan ruff, completing her ensemble of purple polyester smock and quasimedical shoes. Child of an Ethiopian father and a Kenyan mother, Cordie was deep black and majestic in appearance, with an elegant neck and a profile that looked like something one might find on a coin. But even possessing good genes, a perfectly symmetrical face, excellent skin, and a mannequin’s body could not make her look like a fashion statement in the outfit that the hair salon required its employees to wear. She went for Kendra’s bag, which she knew Kendra kept in a cupboard beneath the till. She opened it and found herself a cigarette.

“How’s your girls?” Kendra asked her.

Cordie shook the flame from a match. “Manda wants makeup, her nose pierced, and a boyfriend. Patia wants a mobile.”

“How old they now?”

“Six and ten.”

“Shit. You got your work cut out.”

“Tell me,” Cordie said. “I ’spect ’em both to be pregnant time they’re twelve.”

“Wha’s Gerald t’ink?”

She blew smoke out through her nose. “They got him runnin, those girls. Manda crook her finger, he melt to a puddle. Patia show a few tears, he got the wallet out ’fore he got the handkerchief in his hand. I say no to summick, he say yes. ‘I wan’ dem to have wha’ I never got,’ he say. Tell you, Ken, havin kids today is havin a headache won’t go away no matter wha’ you use.”

“I hear you on that,” Kendra said. “Thought I was safe from it, I did, and look wha’ happen. I end up wiv three.”

“How you coping?”

“All right, considering I got no clue wha’ I’m doin.”

“So when I get to meet ’em? You hidin dem or summick?”

“Hiding? Why’d I want to do that?”

“Don’t know, innit. Maybe one ’f ’em got two heads.”

“Yeah. Tha’s it all right.” Kendra chuckled, but the fact was that she was hiding the Campbells from her friend. Keeping them under wraps obviated the necessity of having to explain anything about them to anyone. And an explanation would be needed, of course. Not only for their appearance—Ness being the only one who looked remotely as if she might be a relation of Kendra’s, and she was doing most of that with makeup—but also for the oddities in their behaviour, particularly the boys’. While Kendra might have made an excuse for Joel’s persistent introversion, she knew she would be hard-pressed to come up with a reason why Toby was as he was. To try to do so ran the risk of getting into the subject of his mother, anyway. Cordie already knew about the fate of the children’s father, but the whereabouts of Carole Campbell comprised a topic of conversation they’d never embarked upon. Kendra wanted to keep it that way.

Circumstances made part of this impossible. Not a minute after she’d spoken, the shop door opened once again. Joel and Toby scuttled in out of the rain, Joel with his school uniform soaked on the shoulders, Toby with his life ring inflated as if he expected a flood of biblical proportions. There was nothing for it but to introduce them to Cordie, which Kendra accomplished quickly by saying, “Here’s two of ’em anyways. This’s Joel. This’s Toby. How ’bout a pepperoni slice from Tops, you two? You needin a snack?”

Her style of language was nearly as confusing to the boys as was the unexpected offer of pizza. Joel didn’t know what to say, and since Toby always followed Joel’s lead, neither of the boys offered a word in reply. Joel merely ducked his head, while Toby rose to his toes and danced to the counter where he scooped up several beaded necklaces and decked himself out like a time traveller from the summer of love.

“Cat gotcher tongue, den?” Cordie said in a friendly fashion. “You lot feelin shy? Hell, I wish my girls take a page out of dis book for ’n hour or so. Where’s dat sister of yours? I got to meet her, too.”

Joel looked up. Anyone adept at reading faces would have known he was searching for an excuse for Ness. Rarely did someone ask after her directly, so he had nothing prepared in reply. “Wiv ’er mates,” he finally said, but he spoke to his aunt and not to Cordie. “They workinon a project f’r school.”

“Real scholar, is she?” Cordie asked. “Wha’ ’bout you lot? You scholars, too?”

Toby chose this moment to speak. “I got a Twix for not weein or pooin in my trousers today. I wanted to, but I d’in’t, Aunt Ken. So I got a Twix cos I asked could I use the toilet.” At the conclusion of this, he executed a little pirouette.

Cordie looked at Kendra. She started to speak. Kendra said expansively to Joel, “How ’bout that pepperoni slice?”

Joel accepted with an alacrity that declared he wanted to be gone as much as Kendra wanted him and his brother to vanish. He took the three pounds she handed to him. He ushered Toby out of the shop and in the direction of Great Western Road.

They left behind them one of those moments in which things get glossed over, things get addressed, or things get altogether ignored. Exactly how it was going to be was something that rested in Cordie’s hands, and Kendra decided not to help her out in the matter. Social courtesy dictated a polite change of subject. Friendship demanded an honest appraisal of the situation. There was also middle ground between these two extremes, and that was where Cordie found a safe footing. She said, “You been having a time of it,” as she crushed out her cigarette in a secondhand ashtray which she found on one of the display shelves. “Di’n’t ’spect motherhood to be like this, innit.”

“Didn’t ’spect motherhood at all,” Kendra told her. “I’m coping good enough, I s’pose.”

Cordie nodded. She looked thoughtfully towards the door. She said,

“Their mum goin’ to take dem off you, Ken?”

Kendra shook her head and to keep Cordie far away from the subject of Carole Campbell, she said, “Ness’s a help to me. Big one. Joel’s good, ’s well.” She waited for Cordie to bring up the subject of Toby. Cordie did so, but in a way that made Kendra love her all the more. She said, “You need help, you give me a bell, Ken. And when you ready for dancin, I ready, too.”

“I do that, girl,” Kendra said. “Right now, though, things’s good wiv us all.”

THE ADMISSIONS OFFICER from Holland Park School put an abrupt end to Kendra’s delusion. Although this individual—who identifi ed herself as a Mrs. Harper when she finally phoned—took nearly two months to make the call that was to shatter life as it had been bumping along at number 84 Edenham Way, there was a reason for this. By never turning up for so much as an hour at the school, indeed by never showing her face at all save on the day she took the admissions test, Ness had successfully fallen through the cracks. Since the school’s population was given to an itinerancy caused by the government’s continual placement and displacement of the country’s asylum-seeking immigrants, the fact that a Vanessa Campbell showed up on a teacher’s class register but not in the class itself was taken by many of her instructors to mean that her family had merely moved on or been moved to other housing. Thus, they made no report of Ness being among the missing, and it was seven weeks after her enrollment in the school before Kendra received the phone call about her lack of attendance.

This call came not to the house but to the charity shop. As Kendra was there alone—a common-enough occurrence—she couldn’t leave. She wanted to. She wanted to climb inside her Punto and drive up and down the streets looking for her niece, much as she’d done on the night of the Campbells’ arrival in North Kensington. Because she couldn’t do that, she paced the floor instead. She walked up a row of secondhand blue jeans and down a row of worn wool coats and tried not to think of lies: the lies Ness had been telling her for weeks and the ones she herself had just mouthed to Mrs. Harper.

With her heart pounding so fiercely in her ears that she could barely hear the woman on the other end of the line, she’d said to the admissions offi cer, “I am so sorry about the confusion. Directly I enrolled Ness and her brother, she had to help care for her mum in Bradford.” Where on earth Bradford came from, she wouldn’t have been able to say. She wasn’t even sure she could find it quickly on a map, but she knew it had a large ethnic population because they’d been rioting during the finer weather: Asians, blacks, and the local skinheads, all set to kill each other to prove whatever they apparently felt needed proving.

“Is she at school in Bradford, then?” Mrs. Harper enquired.

“Private tutoring,” Kendra said. “She’ll be back tomorrow, as it happens.”

“I see. Mrs. Osborne, you really ought to have phoned . . .”

“Of course. Somehow, I just . . . Her mum’s been unwell. It’s a strange situation. She’s had to live apart from the kids . . . the children . . .”

“I see.”

But of course, she didn’t see and couldn’t see and Kendra had no intention of lifting the veil of obscurity for her. She just needed Mrs. Harper to believe her lies because she needed Ness to have a place at Holland Park School.

“So you say she’ll be back tomorrow?” Mrs. Harper asked.

“I’m picking her up at the station tonight.”

“I thought you said tomorrow?”

“I meant in school tomorrow. Unless she falls ill. ’F that happens, I’ll phone you at once . . .” Kendra let her voice drift off and waited for the other woman’s reply. In a moment, she thanked her stars that Glory Campbell had forced an acceptable form of the English language upon all her children. In this circumstance, being able to produce grammatically correct speech in an acceptable accent served Kendra well. She knew that it made her more believable than she would have been had she fallen into the dialect that Mrs. Harper had no doubt expected to hear on the other end of the phone when she’d placed her call.

“I’ll let her teachers know, then,” Mrs. Harper said. “And please do next time keep us informed, Mrs. Osborne.”

Kendra refused to be offended by the admission offi cer’s imperative. So thankful was she that the woman had accepted her unlikely tale of Ness caring for Carole Campbell that, short of a direct insult, she would have found any comment from Mrs. Harper tolerable. She felt relieved that she’d been able to concoct a story on the spur of the moment but shortly after she’d ended the call, the very fact that she’d been forced to concoct such a story sent her pacing. She was still doing that when Joel and Toby stopped by on their way home from the learning centre. Toby was carrying a workbook on whose individual pages colourful stickers had been fixed, celebrating his successful completion of the phonetic drills meant to help him with his reading. He had more stickers on his life ring, declaring “Well done!,” “Excellent!,” and “Top form!” in bright blue, red, and yellow. Kendra saw these but did not remark upon them. She instead said to Joel, “Where’s she been going every day?”

Joel wasn’t stupid, but he was bound by that rule about telling tales. He frowned and played dumb. “Who?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. The admissions officer rang me. Where’s Ness been going? Is she with this girl. . . What’s her name? Six? And why haven’t I met her?”

Joel dropped his head to avoid replying. Toby said, “Lookit my stickers, Aunt Ken. I got to make a purchase from the comic books cos I got enough stickers now. I chose Spiderman. Joel got it in his rucksack.”

The mention of rucksack put Kendra in the picture about what Ness had been doing, and she cursed herself for being a fool. So when she got back to the estate that evening—keeping Joel and Toby with her until it was time to close the shop so that Joel would not have the chance to warn his sister about the game being up—the first thing she did was scoop Ness’s rucksack off the back of the chair on which she’d hung it. Kendra opened it unceremoniously and dumped its contents on the kitchen table where Ness had been chatting to someone on the phone while she idly leafed through the most recent prospectus from Kensington and Chelsea College every bit as if she actually intended to make something of her life.

Ness’s glance went from the prospectus to the pile of her belongings, from there to her aunt’s face. She said into the phone, “I got to go,” and rang off, watching Kendra with an expression that might have been called wary had it not also been so calculating. Kendra sorted through the contents of the rucksack. Ness looked beyond her to where Joel hung in the doorway. Her eyes narrowed as she evaluated her brother and his potential as a grass. She rejected this. Joel was all right. The information, she decided, must have come from another source. Toby? That, she told herself, was not bloody likely. Toby was generally with the cuckoos.

Kendra tried to read the contents of Ness’s rucksack like a priest practising divination. She unrolled the blue jeans and unfolded the black T-shirt whose golden inscription “Tight Pussy” resulted in its being deposited directly into the bin. She fingered through makeup, nail varnish, hair spray, hair picks, matches, and cigarettes, and she stuffed her hands into the high-heeled boots to see if there was anything hidden inside them. Finally, she went through the pockets of the jeans, where she found one packet of Wrigley’s spearmint and one of rolling papers. These she clutched in the hapless triumph of someone who sees the incarnation of the worst of her fears. She said, “So.”

Ness said nothing.

“What have you got to say?”

Above them in the sitting room, the television went on, its sound turned to an irritating volume that told everyone within two hundred yards that someone in 84 Edenham Way was watching Toy Story II for the twelfth time. Kendra shot a look to Joel. He interpreted it and ducked up the stairs to deal with Toby and the television volume. He remained there, knowing the wisdom of keeping clear of explosive situations.

Kendra repeated her question to Ness. Ness reached for her packet of cigarettes and picked the book of matches from among the other contents of the rucksack now spread across the table. Kendra snatched them from her and threw them into the kitchen sink. She followed them with the cigarettes. Gesturing with the rolling papers, she said, “My God, what about your dad? He started with weed. You know that. He told you, didn’t he? He wouldn’t have pretended. Not with you. You even went with him to St. Aidan’s and waited for him in the crèche. During his meetings. He told me that, Ness. So what d’you think it was all about? Answer me. Tell me the truth. Do you think you’re immune?”

Ness had only one way to survive a reference to her father, and that way was retreat: a distancing that she effected by allowing that hot stone always within her to grow in size until she could feel it climbing a burning path to reach the back of her tongue. Contempt was what she experienced when anger did its work upon her. Contempt for her father—which was the only safe emotion she could harbour towards him—and even more contempt for her aunt. She said, “What’re you twisted ’bout? I make rollies, innit. Shit, you the sort always t’ink the worse.”

“Speak English like you were taught, Vanessa. And don’t tell me you’ve been making rollies when you’ve got a packet of cigarettes big as life inside that rucksack. Whatever else you think, I am not stupid. You’re smoking weed. You’re running round truant. What else are you doing?”

Ness said, “I tol’ you I wa’n’t wearin that bloody kit.”

“You mean me to think this is all a reaction to having to wear a school uniform you don’t like? What sort of fool do you think I am?

Who’ve you been with all these weeks? What’ve you been doing?”

Ness reached for the packet of Wrigley’s. She used it to gesture at her aunt, a movement that asked—with no little sarcastic intent—if she could chew a piece of gum since she wasn’t, apparently, going to be allowed to smoke. She said, “Nuffink.”

“Nothing,” Kendra corrected her. “No-thing. Nothing. Say it.”

“Nothing,” Ness said. She folded a piece of gum into her mouth. She played with its wrapper, rolling the foil around her index fi nger and keeping her gaze fixed on it.

“Nothing with who, then?”

Ness made no reply.

“I asked you—”

“Six an’ Tash,” she cut in. “All right? Six an’ Tash. We hang at her house. We listen to music. Tha’s it, innit.”

“She’s your source? This Six?”

“Come on. She’s my mate.”

“So why haven’t I met her? Because she’s supplying you and you know I’ll twig it. Isn’t that right?”

“Fuck it. I tol’ you wha’ the papers ’s for. You goin t’ believe wha’ you want to believe. ’Sides, not like you wanted to meet anyone, innit.”

Kendra saw that Ness was trying to turn the tables, but she wasn’t going to allow that to happen. Instead she resorted to an anguished, “I can’t have this. What’s happened to you, Vanessa?” in that age-old parental cry of despair, which is generally followed by the internal query of, What did I do wrong?

But Kendra didn’t follow up her first question with that silent and self-directed second one, for at the last moment, she told herself that these were not her children and technically none of them should even be her problem. Since they had an impact on her life, however, she tried another tack, without knowing her words formed the single query least likely to produce a positive result. She said, “What would your mum say, Vanessa, if she saw how you’re acting now?”

Ness crossed her arms beneath her breasts. She would not be touched in this way, not by reference to the past or prognostication of the future.

Although Kendra didn’t know exactly what Ness was up to, she concluded that whatever it was, it had to do with drugs and most likely, because of her age, with boys as well. This added up to news that wasn’t good. But beyond that, Kendra knew nothing aside from what went on on the estates round North Kensington, and she knew plenty about that. Drug purchases. Contraband exchanging hands. Muggings. Breakins. The occasional assault. Gangs of boys looking for trouble. Gangs of girls doing much the same. The best way to avoid putting yourself into harm’s way was to walk a narrow path defined by school, home, and nothing else. This, apparently, was not what Ness had been doing.

She said to her, “You can’t do this, Ness. You’re going to get hurt.”

“I c’n take care of myself,” Ness said.

That, of course, was the real issue. For Kendra and Ness each had an entirely different definition of what taking care of oneself actually meant. Rough times, disease, disappointment, and death had taught Kendra she had to stand alone. The same and more had taught Ness to run, as fast and as far as her mind and her will would take her. So Kendra asked the only question left to ask, the one she hoped would get through to her niece and mould her behaviour henceforth. She said, “Vanessa, d’you want your mum to know how you’re behaving?”

Ness raised her gaze from the study she was making of her chewing gum wrapper. She cocked her head. “Oh yeah, Aunt Ken,” she finally replied, “like you’re really going to tell her that.”

It was a direct challenge, nothing less. Kendra decided the time had come to accept it.