What Came Before He Shot Her

“This’s important, Cordie.”

“Hell, so’s a handsome man kissing the back of my neck. When we having ’nother girls’ night out? I want one of dem twenty-year-olds from the college dis time, Ken. Someone wiv big muscles in his thighs, y’unnerstan what I mean?”

“You been reading too many ladies’ sex magazines. Wha’s muscles in his thighs got to do wiv anyt’ing?”

“Give him strength to hold me like I want to be held. Up against the wall wiv my legs wrapped round him. Hmm. Dat’s what I want next, innit.”

“Like I almost b’lieve you, Cordie,” Kendra informed her. “You want dat, you know where to get it and you know who more ’n willing to give it to you. How’s dis now?” She applied new pressure. Cordie sighed. “You bloody good, Ken.” She leaned back in the chair as well as she could, considering it was a kitchen chair. She lolled her head against the back of it and said to the ceiling, “How’d you know, den? ’Bout the fight.”

“Bruises on his face where someone hit him,” Kendra said. “I get home from work and find him in the bathroom trying to make it all disappear. I ask him what happened, and he say he fell on the steps of the skate bowl. Over the gardens.”

“Could’ve,” Cordie pointed out.

“Not wiv Toby afraid to leave his side. Somet’ing happened, Cordie. I can’t sort it why he won’t tell me.”

“’Fraid of you, maybe?”

Kendra said, “I ’spect it’s more he’s ’fraid of causing me trouble. He sees Ness’s doin enough of dat.”

“An’ where is Miss Vanessa Campbell dese days?” Cordie asked sardonically.

“In an’ out like always.” Kendra went on to explain her attempt to apologise to Ness for what had gone on between them. She hadn’t yet mentioned any of this to Cordie because she knew her friend would ask the logical question about the apology: the why question that she didn’t particularly want to answer. But in this instance and because of Joel’s fight, Kendra felt the need of a girlfriend’s counsel. So when Cordie asked her why the hell she was apologising to a girl who had disrupted life at 84 Edenham Way from the moment of her arrival, Kendra told her the truth: She’d run into the man who’d been with Ness in the car that night when Kendra had accosted the girl. He’d told an entirely different story from the one she’d assumed. He was . . . Kendra tried to come up with a way to explain that wouldn’t lead to Cordie’s questioning her further. She said at last that the man had been so sincere in what he’d told her that she knew at the level of her heart that he was telling the truth: Ness had been drunk at the Falcon pub, and he’d brought her home before trouble could befall her.

Cordie homed in on the detail she felt most salient. Kendra ran into him? How’d that come about? Who was he, anyway? What made him even bother to explain what had happened with Vanessa Campbell on the night in question?

Kendra grew uncomfortable. She knew that Cordie would scent a lie the way a hound scents a fox, so she didn’t bother. She told her friend about the phone call for the sports massage, about ending up in the bedsit above the Falcon pub, about coming face-to-face with the man who’d been with Ness that night.

“He’s called Dix D’Court,” Kendra added. “I only saw him that one time.”

“And dat was ’nough to b’lieve him?” Cordie asked shrewdly.

“Oooh. You ain’t tellin me ever’t’ing, Ken. No lyin to me now cos I c’n read it all over you. Summick happened. You get shagged at long last?”

“Cordie Durrell!”

“Cordie Durrell wha’? I don’t ’member him real clear, mind, but if he want a sports massage, dat tells me he got a decent sports body.”

She thought about this. “Damn. You get muscular thighs? Dat is so outrageously unfair.”

Kendra laughed. “Di’n’t get nothing.”

“Not f’r want of his tryin’s what I ’spect.”

“Cordie, he’s twenty-three,” Kendra told her.

Cordie nodded. “Gives him stamina.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. We jus’ talked after the massage’s done. Dat’s all.”

“Don’t b’lieve you f ’r a second. But if it’s the truth, den you sixteen ways a fool. Put me in a room with someone wants a sports massage and we ain’t having stimulatin’ conversation ’bout the state of world affairs when it’s over, innit.” Cordie removed her feet from Kendra’s lap, the better to get into the conversation without distractions. She said, “So. You find Ness and say sorry. What happen next?”

Nothing, Kendra said. Ness wouldn’t hear sorry or anything else. She kept her comments confined to her niece, since allowing them to drift to Dix D’Court would mean revealing to Cordie that he’d phoned her again and again since the night of the massage. It wasn’t about another sports massage that he’d rung her, either. He wanted to see her. She’d felt something that night, he said to her. He’d felt something as well. He didn’t want to walk away from that. Did she?

After the first three calls, Kendra had let her mobile take his messages. She’d let her machine at home do the same. She didn’t return his calls, assuming he’d finally go away. He hadn’t done so. It was shortly after this conversation with Cordie that Dix D’Court showed up at the charity shop in the Harrow Road. Kendra would have told herself that his appearance in the shop was a coincidence, but he disabused her of this notion immediately. His parents, he said, owned the Rainbow Café. Did she know where it was? Just down the street?

He’d been on his way there when a display in the window of the charity shop caught his eye. (“Lady’s coat wiv the big buttons,” he said later. It would be his mum’s birthday soon.) He’d slowed to look at the coat, and then beyond it, he’d seen her in the shop. That’s why he’d entered, he explained.

“Whyn’t you phonin me back?” he asked. “You not getting the messages I been leaving?”

“I’ve been getting them,” Kendra told him. “I just didn’t see a good reason to return them.”

“You ’voiding me, den.” A statement, not a question.

“I suppose I am.”

“Why?”

“I give massages, Mr. D’Court. You weren’t ringing me about arranging to have one. Least, if you were, you never said as much. Just

‘I want to see you,’ which didn’t tell me it was business you were after.”

“We got b’yond business. Wiv you as ready ’s me for what was ’bout to happen.” He held up a hand to stop her from replying, saying, “An’ I know it ain’t gentlemanly to mention dat to you. Gen’rally I like being a gentleman. But I also like history being straight, y’unnerstan, not being rewritten for someone’s convenience.”

She’d been in the midst of counting the money in the till when he’d walked in, so near to closing up for the day that in another ten minutes he would have missed her. Now, she removed the cash drawer and carried it to the back room where she stowed it in the safe and locked it up. He was meant to see this as rejection, but he refused to take it that way.

He followed her, but he didn’t enter the back room. Rather, he stood at the door where the shop lights silhouetted him in a disturbing fashion. The body Kendra had seen that night above the Falcon pub was framed by the doorway. He was a tempting proposition. But Kendra had other things in mind for her life and one of them was not an entanglement with a twenty-three-year-old boy. Boy, she reminded herself. Not man. B-o-y, as in nearly two decades her junior.

Which made it all the better, didn’t it? she then asked herself. The seventeen years between them declared there was no possibility for entanglements.

“Here’s what I t’ink,” he said to her. “You like most women, an’ dat means you ’spectin dis is just a quick shag I want. I ring you to finish what we started cos I don’t like a woman gettin away so easy. I like to put ’nother notch in my belt. Or wherever a bloke puts a notch cos I don’t ackshully know.”

Kendra chuckled. “Now that,” she told him, “is just about exactly what I don’t think, Mr. D’Court. If I thought it was that—a quick shag and we’re done—I would’ve rung you back and made the arrangements, because I won’t lie and there’s no point to it, is there: You were in the room and a party to what happened between us. And what happened wasn’t exactly me saying, ‘Get your hands off me, blood.’ But I get the feeling that’s not who you are or how you are, and, see, I don’t want what you’re after. And the way I look at it, two people—man and woman, I mean—need to be after the same thing when they hook up together or one of them’s heading for trouble of the heartbreaking kind.”

He gazed at her, and what shone from his face was admiration, liking, and amusement all blended together. He said, “Dix.” It was his only reply.

“What?”

“Dix. Not Mr. D’Court. An’ you’re right wiv what you say, which makes it rougher, see. Makes me want you more cos damn you ain’t like”—he smiled and shifted to her style of speaking—“you are not like most women I meet. Believe it.”

“That,” she said tartly, “is because I’m older. Seventeen years. I’ve been married twice.”

“Two fools to let you get away, den.”

“Not their intention.”

“What happened?”

“Death to one and car theft to the other. He’s in Wandsworth. Told me he was in the spare-parts business. I just didn’t know where the parts were coming from.”

“Ouch. And the other? How’d he—”

She held up her hand. “Not going there,” she said.

He didn’t press her, merely saying, “Rough. You had tough times wiv men. I ain’t like dat.”

“Good for you. That doesn’t change the way things are with me.”

“An’ how’s dat?”

“Busy. A life. Three kids I’m trying to sort, and a career I’m trying to get off the ground. I’ve got no time for anything more than that.”

“An’ when you need a man? For what a man c’n give you?”

“There are ways,” she said. “Just think about it.”

He crossed his arms and was silent. He finally said, “Lonely. Satisfaction, yeah. But how long it last?” And before she could answer, he went on to say, “But if dat’s the way you want it, I got to ’cept it and jus’ move on. So . . .” He looked around the back room as if he were seeking some sort of employment. He said, “You lockin up, right?

Come ’long an’ meet my mum and dad. Rainbow Café, like I said. Mum’s got my protein smoothie waitin for me, but I ’spect she do you a cup of tea.”

“Easy as that?” Kendra said.

“Easy as dat,” Dix told her. “Fetch y’r bag. Le’s go.” He grinned.

“Mum’s only three years older’n you, so you’ll like her, I ’spect. Have t’ings in common.”

That remark went straight to the bone, but Kendra had no intention of following it. She began to head back into the shop, where her bag was stowed under the counter. Dix didn’t move, though. They were face-to-face.

He said, “You one damn beautiful woman, Kendra.” He put his hand on the back of her neck. He used gentle pressure. She was meant to move into his arms, and she knew it.

She said, “You jus’ told me—”

“I lied. Not ’bout my mum, mind. But ’bout lettin go. Dat is summick I got no intention of doing.”

He kissed her then. She didn’t resist. When he moved her into the back room of the shop and away from the doorway, she didn’t resist that either. She wanted to do so, but that desire and all the cautions that went with it were bleating uselessly from her intellect. In the meantime, her body was saying something else, telling a tale about how long it had been, about how good it felt, about how insignifi cant it was, really, just to have a quick shag with no strings attached. Her body told her that everything he’d said about his intentions towards her were lies anyway. He was twenty-three-years old, and at that age men only wanted the sex—hot penetration and satisfying orgasm— and they’d do and say anything to make sure they got it. So no matter what he’d said in agreement to her assessment of the situation between them, what he really wanted was indeed another notch on his belt, seduction brought to a satisfying conclusion. All men were like that, and he was a man.

So she allowed the moment to reign, no past and no future. She embraced the now. She gasped, “Oh my sweet Jesus,” when at last they connected. He was everything—muscular thighs and all—that his body had promised he would be.

THE FACT THAT Six and Natasha were no closer to their dream of possessing mobile phones than they’d been on the night that Ness had met them was what caused the initial chink in the relationship among the three girls. This chink was widened when the Blade bestowed upon Ness the late-twentieth-century’s most irritating electronic device. The mobile, he told her, was for ringing him should anyone vex her when she wasn’t with him. No one, he said, was going to mess his woman about, and if anyone did, they would hear from him in very short order. He could get to her fast no matter where she was, so she wasn’t to be shy about giving him a bell if she needed him.

To a fifteen-year-old girl like Ness, these declarations—despite the fact of their being made on a questionably stained futon in a fi lthy squat without electricity or running water—sounded like certain proof of devotion and not what they really were, which was evidence of the Blade’s intentions to keep tabs on her and to have her available when he wanted her. Six, who was far more experienced in the arena of unsatisfactory relationships and definitely better informed in the ways of the Blade— having grown up in the same part of North Kensington as he—greeted everything Ness said about the man with suspicion if not outright disdain. These reactions on her part were exacerbated when the mobile phone put in an appearance in Ness’s life.

The girls had ventured farther than Whiteley’s on this particular afternoon. They’d gone to Kensington High Street where they’d entertained themselves first by trying on clothes at Top Shop, rooting through racks of out-of-season jerseys in H & M, and ultimately finding their way to yet another branch of Accessorize, where the general plan was to pinch a few pairs of earrings.

Six excelled at this activity, and Ness wasn’t far behind her. Natasha, however, had very little talent in the sleight-of-hand department, being as clumsy as she was gawky. Usually, Natasha was in charge of diversion, but on this day she decided to join the action. Six hissed at her,

“Tash! Do what you s’posed! You vex me, slag,” but that did nothing to turn the tide of Natasha’s intentions. Instead she went for the rack of earrings and knocked it over just as Six was attempting to shove three pairs of garish chandeliers into her pocket. The result of this was the three girls being escorted from the premises. There, outside the shop and in full view of the passing throng on the High Street, two overweight security guards, who seemed to materialise out of the commercial ether of the precinct, stood them up against the wall and photographed them with an old Polaroid camera. The pictures, the girls were informed, would be put up by the till. If they ever entered this shop again . . . Nothing more needed to be said.

The entire enterprise set Six’s teeth on edge. She wasn’t used to such humiliating treatment because she wasn’t used to being caught. And she wouldn’t have been caught had the maddening Natasha not taken it into her head that she was going to nick something from the shop. Six said, “Damn, Tash, you are one fuckin stupid cow,” but making that declaration to Natasha didn’t give Six the satisfaction she desired. She sought another focus for it. Ness was the logical target. Six went at her obliquely. Like most people unable to assess their own emotional state, she displaced what she was feeling onto something less terrifying. The lack of cash was a suitable substitute for the lack of purpose in life.

She said, “We got to get some dosh. We can’t be relyin on nicking shit an’ passin it on. Dat’s goin to take ’s forever, innit.”

“Yeah,” said Tash, maintaining her position of always agreeing with whatever Six said. She didn’t question what they needed the cash for. Six had her reasons for everything. Cash was always useful, especially when the bicycle-delivery boys weren’t willing to risk scooping a bit of substance from the top of a sandwich bag for whatever sexual fantasy they had that might be fulfilled.

“So where we gettin it?” Six excavated her shoulder bag and brought out a packet of Dunhills recently pinched from a tobacconist on the Harrow Road. She prised one out without offering the packet to the other two girls. She had no matches or lighter, so she stopped a white woman with a child in a pushchair and demanded something “to fire up dis fag, innit.” The woman hesitated, mouth open but words blocked. Six said to her, “You hear me, slag? I need a fuckin light an’ I ’spect you got summick I could use in dat bag of yours.”

The woman looked around as if seeking rescue, but the way of life in London —defined by a better-you-than-me morality—declared that no one was going to come to her aid. Had she said, “Step out of my way, you nasty piece of business, or I shall scream so loudly you’ll not have eardrums when I’m through with you,” Six would have been so astonished by the singularity of this reply that she would have done as the woman demanded. But instead, when the poor creature fumbled in her bag to accommodate the request, Six saw her wallet within, clocked its bulge, felt the gratification that comes with gathering a few easy unearned pickings, and told her to hand over some cash as well.

“Jus’ a loan,” she said to the woman, with a smile. “’Less you want to make it a gift or summick.”

Ness, seeing the interaction, said, “Hey, Six,” and her voice was a caution. Nicking merchandise from shops was one thing; engaging in street muggings was another.

Six ignored her. “Twenty pounds’ll do,” she said. “Take that Bic ’s well, case I want ’nother fag later on.”

The fact that it didn’t look like a mugging and didn’t run the course of a typical mugging was what allowed the enterprise to conclude smoothly. The woman—with a child to care for and far more than twenty pounds in her possession—was relieved to be let off so lightly. She handed over her lighter, extricated a twenty-pound note from her wallet without opening it fully to display how many more twentypound notes she was carrying, and scurried on her way when Six stepped to one side.

“Yeah!” Six said, delighted by the conclusion of her engagement with the woman. And then she caught sight of Ness’s face, which didn’t bear the level of approval she was looking for. She said to her, “Wha’? You too good for dis or summick?”

Ness didn’t like what had just gone down, but she knew the wisdom of not making a comment. Instead she said, “Give us a fag, den. I dyin for one, innit.”

Six wasn’t persuaded by Ness’s reply. Living as she did by her wits and by her ability to read her associates, she could sense disapproval. She said, “Whyn’t you get your own, Moonbeam? I been takin the risk. You been scorin the profi t.”

Ness widened her eyes but otherwise kept her expression the same.

“Dat ain’t true.”

“Tash?” Six said. “True or not, slag?”

Natasha floundered around for a reply that would offend neither girl. She couldn’t come up with one quickly enough to satisfy Six. Six said to Ness, “Sides, you don’t need to risk nuffink, way I see it, Moonbeam. Gotcher man providin for you now. An’ you ain’t even sharin wiv no one. Not money, dat is. Not substance, neither. Bone or weed. As f’r other t’ings . . . well, I ain’t sayin.” She laughed and tried to light her cigarette. The Bic was dead. She said, “ Fuck dat bitch!” and threw the lighter into the street.

What Six had said about the Blade struck Ness in a place she hadn’t expected to be touched. She said, “What you talkin ’bout, Six?”

Six replied, “Like I said. I ain’t sayin, Moonbeam.”

“You best say, slag,” Ness told her, speaking from a fear as deep as Six’s own although having an entirely different source. “You got summick to tell me, you tell me. Now.”

Possession of a mobile phone. Having a source of ready cash should she want it. Being chosen by someone of import. These were the stimuli to what Six next said. “You t’ink you the only one, slag? He been fuckin a bitch called Arissa same ’s he fuckin you. Fuckin her ’fore you, matter ’f fack, and di’n’t stop doin her when he started up wiv you. An’ ’fore you two, he got some slag up the chute over’n Dickens estate an’ he planted ’nother one in Adair Street, next door his mum, which’s why she t’rowed him out. Ever’one knows it cos dat’s what he does. I hope to hell you’re takin precautions cos he settin up you and settin up Arissa just like the others and when he done, he walk away. Dat’s how he like it. Ask round, you don’t b’lieve me.”

Ness felt a coldness come over her, but she knew the importance of projecting indifference. She said, “Like I care? He get me a baby, I like it good. Get myself my own place, den, and dat’s just what I want.”

“You t’ink he come round afterwards? You t’ink he give you cash?

Let you keep dat moby? You pop out a kid, he finish wiv you. Dat’s what he does, an’ you so stupid you ain’t seeing it yet.” She directed her next comments not to Ness but to Natasha, speaking as if Ness had disappeared. She said, “Shit, Tash, wha’ you t’ink? He must got a solid gold one, dat blood. So obvious wha’ he got in mind, innit. Either women ’s more fuckin stupider ’n I ever thought or he got a dick make dem sing when he plug it in. Which you s’pose it is?”

This was far too much for Natasha to cope with. The conversation was obvious enough but the underlying causes were too subtle for her to understand. She didn’t know whom to side with or even why she was supposed to take a side at all. Her eyes grew watery. She sucked in on her lip.

Six said, “Shit. I’m out ’f here, den.”

Ness said, “Yeah. You take off, cunt.”

Tash made a noise akin to a whimper and looked from Six to Ness, waiting for the fight to begin. She hated the thought of it: screeching, kicking, shoving, pulling hair, and clawing at flesh. When women went after each other, it was worse than a catfight, for brawls between women always began things that went on forever. Brawls between men put an end to disputes.

What Tash didn’t take into account in that moment was the influence of the Blade. Six, however, did. She knew that a fight with Ness would not end with a fight with Ness. And while she truly hated walking away from the sort of gauntlet that Ness had thrown before her, she also wasn’t a fool.

She said, “Le’s go, Tash. Ness’s got a man wiv needs she got to see to. Ness got a baby she desp’rate to produce. No time for slags like us, anymore.” And to Ness, “Have fun, bitch. You one sorry cunt.”

She spun on the spiked heel of her boot and took off in the direction of Kensington Church Street, where a ride on the number 52 bus would return her and Natasha to their own environment. Ness, she decided, could use her bloody mobile phone to ring the Blade and ask him to fetch her home. She’d find out soon enough just how willing he was to accommodate her.

KENDRA FOUND HERSELF, in very short order, exactly where she had not wanted to be. She had long despised women who went soft inside at the thought of a man, but that was where she began heading. She ridiculed herself for feeling what she soon felt about Dix D’Court, but the thought of him became so dominant that the only way to put her mind at rest was to pray that the curse of her own sexuality be lifted in some way. Which it was not.

She wasn’t so foolish as to call what she was feeling for the young man love, although another woman might have done so. She knew it was basic animal stuff: the ultimate trick a species plays upon its members to propagate itself. But that knowledge didn’t mitigate the intensity of what was going on in her body. Desire planted its insidious seeds within her, desiccating the previously fertile plain of her ambition. She kept at it as best she could —giving massages, taking further classes— but the drive to do so was fast disappearing, overcome by the drive to experience Dix D’Court. Dix, with all the vigour of his youth compelling him, was happy to do what he could to please her since it pleased him so much as well.

It didn’t take long, however, for Kendra to learn that Dix wasn’t as ordinary a twenty-three-year-old as she’d thought the first time they coupled in the back room of the charity shop. While he eagerly embraced the carnality of their relationship, his background as the child of loving parents whose relationship had remained constant and devoted throughout his life demanded that he seek something similar for himself. This secondary desire was bound to come out sooner or later, especially since, because of his youth, Dix —unlike Kendra—did associate much of what he was feeling with the idea of romantic love that permeates western civilization.

What he said about this was, “Where we headed, Ken?” They faced each other, naked in her bed while below them in the sitting room, Dix’s favourite film was playing on the video machine, to entertain Toby and Joel and to keep them from interrupting what was going on when their aunt and her man had disappeared upstairs. The film was a pirated copy of Pumping Iron. Dix’s god starred, his sculpted body and wily mind acting as metaphors for what one determined man could do.

Dix had chosen to ask his question in advance of their mating, which gave Kendra an opportunity to avoid answering in the manner she knew he wanted. He’d asked in the midst of mutual arousal, so she lowered herself—snakelike—down his body, her nipples tickling him on the way. Her reply was thus nonverbal. He groaned, said, “Hey, baby. Oh shit, Ken,” and gave himself to pleasure in such a way that she thought she’d succeeded in diverting him.

After a few moments, though, he gently pushed her away. She said,

“No like?”

He said, “You know dat ain’t it. Come here. We got to talk.”

She said, “Later,” and went back to him.

He said, “Now,” and moved away from her. He tucked the sheet around himself for a further shield. She lay exposed, the better to keep him engaged.

This didn’t work. He averted his eyes from where she wanted them— on her breasts—and showed himself determined to have his say. “Where we headin, Ken? I got to know. Dis is good, but it ain’t all dere is. I want more.”

She chose to misinterpret him, saying with a smile, “How much more? We doing it so often I c’n hardly walk.”

He didn’t return the smile. “You know what I’m talkin ’bout, Kendra.”

She flopped on her back and gazed at the ceiling, where a crack from one side into the middle curved like the Thames around the Isle of Dogs. She reached without looking for a packet of Benson & Hedges. He hated her smoking—his own body was a temple undefiled by tobacco, alcohol, drugs, or processed food—but when he said her name in a fashion simultaneously impatient and minatory, she lit up anyway. He moved away from her. So be it, she thought.

She said, “What, then? Marriage, babies? You don’t want me for that, mon.”

“Don’t be tellin me what I want, Ken. I speak for myself.”

She drew on her cigarette and then coughed. She shot him a look that dared him to remonstrate, which he did not. She said, “I walked that road twice. I’m not doing it—”

“Third time’s the charm.”

“And I can’t give you kids, which you’re going to want. Not now maybe cause you’re little more than a baby yourself, but you’re going to want them and then what?”

“We sort dat out when we come to it. An’ who knows wha’ science’ll be able to—”

“Cancer!” she said and she felt the anger. Unfair, unaccountable, a blow at eighteen that had not really affected her till she was thirty. “I don’t have the proper parts, Dix, not a single one. And there is no coming back from that, all right?”

Oddly enough, he wasn’t put off by this knowledge. Instead, he reached out, took her cigarette from her, leaned past her to crush it out, and then kissed her. She knew he wouldn’t like the taste of her but that didn’t deter him. The kiss went on. It led where she had wanted to go moments earlier, and when it did so, she thought she had prevailed. But when they were finished, he didn’t separate from her. He gazed down at her face—his elbows holding his weight off her body—and he said, “You never told me ’bout the cancer. Whyn’t you never tell me, Ken? What else you not saying?”

She shook her head. She was feeling the loss for once, and she didn’t like what she was feeling. She knew it was merely a trick of biology: that ache of wanting which would fade soon enough, as her mind took over from her body once again.

He said, “It’s you anyways. I c’n live wivout the rest. An’ we got Joel and Toby for our kids. Ness ’s well.”

Kendra laughed weakly. “Oh yeah. You want that kind of trouble.”

“Stop bloody tellin me what I want.”

“Someone’s got to, cause you sure as hell don’t know.”

He rolled off her then. He looked disgusted. He turned, sat up, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His trousers—the same sort of harem trousers he’d been wearing that night at the Falcon—lay on the floor and he scooped them up. He stood, back to her, and stepped into them, drawing them up over the nicely muscled buttocks she so liked to admire.

She sighed, saying, “Dix, I been there. It i’n’t the paradise you’re thinkin it is. ’F you’d just believe me, we wouldn’t even need to have this sort of conversation, baby.”

He turned back to her. “Don’t call me baby. Now I know how you mean it, I don’t like how it sound.”

“I don’t mean it—”

“Yeah, Ken. You do. He a baby, dat boy. Don’t know what he wants. T’inks he’s in love when all it is is sex. He come to his senses soon enough, he will.”

She sat up in the bed, resting against the wicker headboard. She said,

“Yeah well . . . ?” and looked at him meaningfully. It was a schoolmarm look. It said she knew him better than he knew himself because she’d lived life longer and experienced more. It was, in short, a maddening look, designed to set on edge the teeth of a man who had what he wanted in front of him, just out of reach.

He said, “I can’t help what it was like for you with the other two, Ken. I c’n only be who I am. I c’n only say it’d be different wiv us.”

She blinked the sudden, surprising pain from her eyes. She said, “We don’t control that. You think we do, but we don’t, Dix.”

“I got my life headin—”

“Well, so did he,” she cut in. “Got murdered in the street. Got knifed cos he was walking home from work and two bloods di’n’t think he showed ’em enough respect. Course they high, so whatever he showed wasn’t going to matter much, but they cornered him and they knifed him anyway. And the cops . . . ? Just ’nother dead blood. Nignogs ridding the world of each other, according to them. And he, Dix, my husband Sean, he had intentions just like you. Property management.” She laughed shortly, bitterly, a laugh that said the nerve ofthat man to have his dreams. “He wanted the ordin’ry things in life, too. Adopting the kids we can’t have on our own. Setting up house. Buying things like furniture, a toaster, a doormat. Simple stuff like that. And he dies cos the knife slices through his spleen. It cuts all the way cross his stomach and he bleeds out, Dix. That’s how he dies. He jus’ bleeds out.”

He sat on the edge of the bed, her side of it, near but not touching. He raised his hand, his intention of caressing her an obvious one. She tilted her head away from him. He dropped his arm.

She said, “And number two, Dix? He looks like he got his dream made, and it’s humble enough. Car-parts business wiv me helping by doing the books, a man-and-wife sort of thing, just like your mum and dad in their café. Only I don’t get that he’s stealing cars ’s well. So damn good at it—moving ’em in and moving ’em out—you can’t blink cos you miss the action. So we lose everything, he go inside, and I just barely escape the same thing. So you see, I ain’t . . .” She realised how badly her language was slipping at the same moment she realised she’d begun to weep, and the combination of these two pieces of knowledge created within her a pool of humiliation so deep that she thought she might drown. She lowered her head to her upraised knees.

He said nothing because what, indeed, does a twenty-three-year-old male—so new to adulthood—say to assuage what looks like grief but is so much more? Dix still possessed that youthful vigour which declares that anything is possible in life. Untouched by tragedy, he could see but he could not relate to its depth or its capacity to colour the future through fear.

He could love her back to well-being, he thought. To him, what they had was good, and its goodness possessed the strength to obliterate anything that had gone before. He knew this and felt it at a level so atavistic, however, that no words came to him to express himself. He felt reduced to nerve endings and desire, dominated by the intention of proving to her that things were different when it came to him. His inexperience limited him, though. Sex was the only metaphor he could grasp. He reached for her, saying, “Ken, baby, Ken.”

She jerked away and rolled onto her side. For Kendra, everything she was and everything she had tried to become was fast collapsing as the Kendra she presented to the world was crushed by the weight of the past, which she generally managed to hold at bay. Acknowledging, admitting, speaking about . . . She had no reason to do any of this when she was living out her daily life and simply pursuing her ambitions. To have done it all now, and in the presence of a man with whom she’d no intention of experiencing anything more than the basest sort of pleasure, added to her sense of degradation.

She wanted him to leave. She waved him away.

He said, “Yeah. But you comin’ as well.”

He strode to the bedroom door, which he opened. He called out,

“Joel? You hear me, blood?”

The sound on Pumping Iron lowered, Arnold expatiating on some topic or another, mercifully muted. Joel called out, “Yeah?”

“How fas’ you get ready? Toby, too?”

“For what?”

“We goin out.”

“Where?” A slight pitch in voice, which Dix took for excitement and happiness: a dad giving his boys some good news.

“Time you met my mum an’ dad, bred. Toby an’ your Aunt Ken ’s well. You up for dat? They got a caff up the Harrow Road and my mum . . . ? She do apple pie wiv hot custard. You lot ready for dat?”

“Yeah! Hey, Tobe . . . !” The rest Dix did not hear, as he had shut the door and turned back to Kendra. He began to sort through the clothing she had strewn around the floor, wispy bits of lace that were knickers and bra, tights, a skirt that skimmed her hips, a V-necked blouse that was cream on her skin. He found a thin T-shirt in a drawer, as well, and this he used gently to blot her face. She said, “Oh Jesus. What d’you want wiv me, man?”

He said, “Come on, Ken. Le’s get you dressed. Time my mum and dad met th’ woman I love.”