What Came Before He Shot Her

Chapter

11 Thus did Ness Campbell end up meeting her social worker. How it happened followed the rule of law. The police—in the person of a female constable with sturdy shoes and bad hair—arrived to assist Sue, who continued to sit upon Ness and occasionally spray her in the face with the room freshener. This same constable made short work of hauling Ness to her feet in the presence of the gathered estate neighbours who, mercifully and finally, stopped blowing their whistles. They formed a jeering gauntlet—from which exercise they could not be dissuaded by the constable—and Ness found herself being frog-marched through it. She was actually relieved when she was away from the place. She was less relieved to be inside the Harrow Road police station, where the female constable dumped her in an interview room and left her there with her eyes still running from the spray. She was shaken as well, but that was not something Ness would ever admit to.

The police knew they could not speak to Ness without a non-police adult present to monitor the conversation. Ness not being forthcoming about the responsible adult in her life, the only recourse for the Harrow Road station was to phone the Youth Offending Team. A social worker was dispatched: Fabia Bender, the very same social worker who’d been trying to contact Kendra Osborne about her for weeks.

Fabia Bender’s job in this situation was not herself to question Ness. The girl wasn’t in the clutches of the police because she had failed to attend school, which was the reason behind the Youth Offending Team’s previous interest in her. In this situation, the social worker’s job was to act as a buffer between the police and the arrested juvenile. Acting as a buffer meant seeing that the rights of the juvenile being questioned were not violated.

Since Ness had been caught red-handed in an attempted mugging, the only questions the police had were ones that dealt with the names of her accomplices in the crime. But Ness turned away instead of giving up Six and Natasha. When the policeman—his name was Sergeant Starr—asked her if she understood that she would take the fall alone should she not name her mates, Ness said, “Whatever. Like I ackshully care,” and told him that she wanted a fag. Fabia Bender she ignored altogether. She was a white woman. The cop, at least, was black. Sergeant Starr said, “No cigarettes.”

Ness said, “Whatever,” and dropped her head onto her arms, crossed on the table. They were in a room designed to be uncomfortable. The table was bolted to the floor, the chairs were bolted to the floor, the lights were blinding, and the heat was tropical. The arrested party was meant to think that cooperation in the matter of being questioned would at least get him—or her, in this case—into a more comfortable environment. That, of course, was a fairy tale only an idiot would believe. Sergeant Starr said, “Y’unnerstan you’re facing the magistrate on this?”

Ness shrugged without raising her head.

“Y’unnerstan he can do with you what he likes? Send you to detention, take you away from your family?”

Ness laughed at this. “Ooooh. Dat scares me shitless, innit. Look. Do wha’ you want. Only I ain’t talking.”

The only thing she would tell Sergeant Starr was where she lived and Kendra’s phone numbers. Let the cow come fetch her, was how Ness thought of things. The cops ringing up her aunt would probably disrupt the woman’s nasty, nightly shag, and that was absolutely fine with Ness. But when Kendra got the call, she wasn’t in bed. She was, instead, giving herself a face peel, waiting for the solution to dry. She was doing this in the relative privacy of the bathroom, the better to keep Dix from knowing what she was up to.

Joel was the one to answer the phone and the one to tell her the cops were ringing. He said, on the other side of the closed bathroom door, “They got Ness, Aunt Ken.” He sounded worried. Kendra felt her spirits plummet. She rinsed off her face, the treatment incomplete, looking exactly the same as when she’d begun it. She looked no different when she walked into the Harrow Road police station less than twenty minutes later. Dix had wanted to go with her, but she’d refused. Stay with the boys, she told him. Who knew what might happen if someone out there—and they both knew whom she meant— realised Joel and Toby were alone.

There was a small waiting area in reception—currently occupied by a slouching young black man nursing a swollen eye—but Kendra wasn’t required to wait there very long. In a few minutes, a white woman came to fetch her. She wore blue jeans turned up at the ankles, a French beret, and a blindingly white T-shirt. She had equally white trainers on her feet. Feisty was what Kendra thought when she saw her. She was short, wiry, with tousled grey hair and a no-nonsense attitude that suggested the course of wisdom was not to mess her about.

When Kendra heard her name—Fabia Bender—it was everything she could do not to wince and begin making excuses for why she hadn’t returned the social worker’s calls, which had been numerous over the last few weeks. She managed to look at the white woman blankly, as if she’d never heard of her before. She said, “What’s Ness done?”

“Not ‘What’s happened to her?’” Fabia Bender noted shrewdly.

“You’ve been expecting this, Mrs. Osborne?”

Kendra disliked her at once. Partly because the white woman had leapt to a conclusion that was utterly accurate. Partly because the white woman was simply who she was: the sort who liked to think she could tell what type of individual she was dealing with by the way they acted when she locked her milky blue eyes with theirs.

Kendra felt smaller than she was. She loathed that feeling. She said shortly, “Cops called me to come fetch her. Where is she, then?”

“She was talking to Sergeant Starr. Or rather, he was talking to her. I expect they’re waiting for me to get back to them because he’s not allowed to ask her any questions unless I’m in the room. Or you’re in the room. She wouldn’t give your name when she was first arrested, by the way. Have you any idea why?”

“Arrested for what?” Kendra asked, for she wasn’t about to give Fabia Bender chapter and verse on her relationship with her niece.

Fabia Bender related what she knew of what had happened, information she’d been given by Sergeant Starr. She concluded with the fact that Ness wouldn’t give up her friends. Kendra did it for her. But all she knew was the first name of each of the girls: Six and Natasha. One of them lived on Mozart Estate. She did not know where the other lived.

Kendra burned with shame even as she relayed this information to the social worker. It wasn’t the shame of handing over details, however. It was the shame of having so few facts. She asked if she could see Ness, talk to her, take her home. Fabia Bender said, “Presently,” and ushered Kendra into an empty interview room.

Hers was a thankless job, but Fabia Bender was a woman who did not see it that way. It was a job she’d done in North Kensington for nearly thirty years, and if she’d lost more children than she’d managed to save, it was not because she was lacking either in commitment to them or in a belief in the inherent goodness of mankind. She rose every day knowing that she was exactly where she was meant to be, doing exactly what she was supposed to be doing. Each morning was ripe with possibility. Each evening was an opportunity to reflect on how she had met the challenges of the day. She knew neither discouragement nor despair. Change, she had long ago come to understand, was not something that happened overnight.

She said to Kendra, “I won’t pretend to be happy that you’ve not returned my calls, Mrs. Osborne. Had you done so, we might not be here now. I need to tell you in all honesty that I see this situation as a partial result of Vanessa’s failure to go to school.”

This was not the sort of preliminary statement that promised an imminent meeting of the minds. Kendra reacted to it as one might expect of a proud woman: She bristled. Her skin became hot, burning hot, and the sense of it melting right off her bones did not encourage her to reach out to the other woman in a show of common humanity. She said nothing.

Fabia Bender changed course. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t the proper thing to say. What you heard was my frustration speaking. Let me start again. My aim has always been to help Vanessa, and I’m a believer in education as at least one step in setting a child on the right path.”

“You think I didn’t try to get her to go to school?” Kendra demanded, and if she sounded offended—which indeed she did—it was owing to what she felt at having failed as a substitute parent to Ness. “I did try. But nothing worked. I told her over and over how important it was. I delivered her to the school personally once I talked to Mr. Whoever-He-Was, the education officer. And I did what he said. I walked her to the door. I waited till she went inside. I tried to gate her when she played truant. I told her if she didn’t sort herself out, she’d end up just where she’s ended up. But nothing worked. She’s got her own mind and she’s damn well determined to—”

Fabia held up both hands. It was a story that she’d heard for so many years from so many parents—generally female and generally deserted by an unworthy male—that she could have recited it from beginning to end. Its characters were mothers who pulled at their hair in despair and children whose cries for understanding had gone too long misinterpreted as everything from defiance to depression. The real answer to what plagued their society lay in open communication. But parents, there to assist in their young people’s interpretation of life’s great journey, often had had no one to assist in their own interpretation of life’s great journey when they were youths. Thus, it became a case of the blind attempting and failing to lead the blind on a path neither of them understood.

She said, “Again, forgive me, Mrs. Osborne. I’m not here to blame. I’m here to help. May we start again? Please, sit down.”

“I want to take her—”

“Home. Yes. I know. No girl her age belongs in a police station. I quite agree. And you will be able to take her home presently. But I’d very much like to talk to you first.”

The interview room was exactly like the one in which Ness waited with Sergeant Starr. Kendra saw it as a place she wanted to escape, but since she also wanted to escape with Ness, she cooperated with the white woman. She sat in one of the plastic chairs and drove her hands into the pockets of her cardigan.

“We’re on the same side of the street in this,” Fabia Bender told her when they were both positioned at the table, facing each other. “We both want to sort Vanessa out. When a girl heads in the wrong direction, as she has done, there’s generally a reason. If we can develop a complete understanding of what the reason is, we have a chance of helping her learn to cope. Coping with life is the essential skill we need to give her. It’s also one that schools, unfortunately, fail to teach. So if parents don’t have it to pass along to their children—and be assured I’m not referring to you at this moment—then chances are the children won’t learn it either.” She took a breath and smiled. She had teeth stained from coffee and nicotine and the bad skin of a lifelong smoker.

Kendra didn’t like the sensation of being lectured. She was able to see that the white woman meant well, but the nature of what Fabia Bender said merely resulted in Kendra’s feeling less than. Feeling less than a white woman—and this, despite being part white herself—was something that guaranteed Kendra’s back going up. Fabia Bender didn’t know the first thing about the chaos and tragedy of Vanessa Campbell’s childhood, and Kendra, offended, wasn’t about to tell her.

She wanted to, though. Not because she believed the information would help but because she could imagine it setting the social worker straight. She wanted to stand over her and drive the story into her brain: being ten years old and waiting for her dad to come fetch her as he always did on Saturdays after her ballet lessons, standing outside and all alone and knowing that what she was never supposed to do was cross over the A40 to get back to Old Oak Common Lane by herself, becoming frightened when he didn’t turn up and finally hearing the scream of sirens, and crossing over at last because what else was there to do except try to get home. Then coming upon him where he lay, a crowd gathered round and an oozing of blood pooling round his head and Joel kneeling at one side of that pool shouting Dad! Dad! and Toby sitting there with his legs splayed out and his back against the front of the off licence and crying because he didn’t understand at three years old that his father had been shot down in the street in a drug dispute, a drug dispute in which he had had no part. Who was Ness to them: the cops, the crowd, the ambulance driver and his mate, the official who finally showed up to pronounce the obvious over the body? She was just a screaming little girl in a leotard who couldn’t make herself heard by any of them.

You want to know the cause, white lady? Kendra wanted to ask her. I can tell you the cause.

But that was only part of the story. Even Kendra didn’t know the rest.

Fabia Bender said, “We have to begin by gaining her trust, Mrs. Osborne. One of us has to form a bond with the girl. It’s not going to be easy, but it has to be done.”

Kendra nodded. What else was there for her to do? “I understand,” she said. “Can I take her home now?”

“Yes. Of course. In a moment.” Then the social worker settled more firmly into her chair, her body language making it clear that the interview was far from over. She said that she’d managed to gather a bit of information on Vanessa in the weeks since her first phone call to Mrs. Osborne. The officials at East Acton’s Wood Lane School, not to mention the local police in that area, had cooperatively filled in some blanks. Thus Fabia Bender had some history, but she sensed there was more to it than one dead father, an institutionalised mother, two brothers, and an aunt with no children of her own. If Kendra Osborne would be willing to fill in some additional blanks for the social worker . . .

So Kendra realised that Fabia Bender did have some of the family secrets, but this knowledge did nothing but make her own discomfort worse. Kendra developed a deeper loathing for the woman, especially for her accent. Fabia’s well-modulated tone screamed upper-middle class. Her choice of vocabulary said university graduate. Her ease of manner declared that she’d had a life of privilege. To Kendra, all of this added up to someone who could neither understand what she was dealing with nor begin to negotiate a way through it.

“Seems like you’ve got the blanks filled in,” Kendra told her shortly.

“Some, as I’ve said. But what I need to understand more clearly is the source of her anger.”

Try her gran, Kendra wanted to tell the woman. Try being on the receiving end of Glory Campbell’s lies and desertion. But Glory Campbell and her casual disposal of her three grandkids comprised dirty linen in Kendra’s cupboard, and she did not intend to air her own used knickers in this white woman’s face. So she asked Fabia Bender a logical question: How much more than a dead father and an institutionalised mother was necessary to the understanding of Ness’s fury? And what did an understanding of her fury have to do with keeping her from ruining her life? Because, Kendra told the social worker, it was becoming damn clear to her that doing some serious life ruining was what Ness Campbell had in mind. She saw her existence as destroyed already, so she’d decided to go along for the ride. To speed things up, as it were. When nothing mattered in the future, nothing mattered at all.

“You speak like someone who’s been there,” Fabia Bender said kindly. “Is there a Mr. Osborne?”

“Not any longer,” Kendra told her.

“Divorced?”

“That’s right. What does this have to do with Ness’s trouble?”

“So there is no male in Vanessa’s life? No father figure?”

“No.” Kendra made no mention of Dix, of the Blade, or of the smell of men that had, for months, clung to her niece like the trail of slime left by a legion of slugs. “Look. I expect you mean well. But I’d like to take her home.”

“Yes,” Fabia said. “I can see that. Well, there’s only one thing left to discuss, then, and that’s her appearance before the magistrate.”

“She’s never been in trouble before,” Kendra pointed out.

“Except for the small matter of her failure to attend school,” Fabia said. “That’s not going to count in her favour. I’ll do what I can to get her probation and not a custodial sentence—”

“A sentence? For a mugging that di’n’t even happen? When we got drug dealers, car hijackers, housebreakers, and everything else running ’bout the streets? And she the one going to get put away?”

“I’ll provide a report to the magistrate, Mrs. Osborne. He’ll read it in advance of her hearing. We’ll hope for the best.” She stood. Kendra did likewise. At the door to the room, Fabia Bender paused. She said,

“Someone needs to form a bond with this girl. Someone besides the friends she’s choosing just now. It’s not going to be easy. She’s got very good defences. But it must be done.”

LIFE IN NUMBER 84 Edenham Way was tense in the aftermath of Ness’s arrest, and this was one of the reasons that Joel decided not to wait until Toby’s next birthday to do something with the “It’s a Boy!” banner. Not only did he want to make up for how Toby’s birthday had turned out, but he also believed it was important that his little brother be distracted from what was happening in Ness’s life, lest he drift off and away from the family, disappearing into his own head for an extended time. So he put up the banner across the window in their bedroom and waited for Toby’s reaction to it. He didn’t need to use stamps this time. Instead, he asked Mr. Eastbourne for several lengths of Sellotape, which he carefully brought home from school affixed to the plastic cover of a notebook and, consequently, easily removed.

Joel need not have concerned himself with any of this. Toby liked the banner well enough—although not as much as his lava lamp—but it turned out that he was maintaining an admirable degree of oblivion with regard to Ness’s difficulties with the law, not so much by visiting Sose as by listening to daily messages being sent to him from there. As far as the night of his birthday went, he had virtually no memory of it. He recalled the takeaway curry and especially the almond, raisin, and honey naan. He recalled eating his meal off the tin tray with Father Christmas decorating it. He even recalled that Ness had been there, bringing a magic wand for him. But he had no memory of the Blade’s appearance at their house or the disruption he’d caused when he’d walked through the door.

That was the beauty of what was happening inside Toby’s head. Some things he could recall with a clarity that surprised everyone. Other things were gone, like wisps of smoke against a foggy sky. This provided him a form of contentment that his siblings were not able to match.

His parents, for example, existed for Toby within a pleasant cloud. His father was a man who took his children to the community hall next to St. Aidan’s church, where they waited for him in the crèche. That, Toby spoke about when pressed to do so. But the reason they were in that crèche waiting for their father, the fact of the meetings that Gavin Campbell had clung to and attended every day in another room of the hall . . . Toby had no memory of that. As for his mother, she was the person who had fondly run her fingers through his hair the last time she had come home. The rest of it—an open window, three floors up with an asphalt car park yawning down below, a train rushing by on tracks just beyond the building—he did not remember, nor could he have done so, so young had he been at the time. Toby’s mind thus offered its curses, but it offered its blessings as well.

Joel didn’t have this same situation in his own mind. On the other hand, he did have Ivan Weatherall and the unspoken promise Ivan made of escaping—if only for a few hours—from the electrical atmosphere of Kendra’s home, where Kendra existed in a state of anxious anticipation regarding Ness’s upcoming appearance before the magistrate, where Ness herself was lounging about and pretending she didn’t care what happened to her, and where Dix was attempting to have hushed conversations with Kendra in which he tried to act the role of conciliator between aunt and niece.

“Maybe they ain’t the kids you wanted, Ken,” Joel heard him murmur in the kitchen as Kendra poured herself coffee. “An’ maybe they ain’t the kids you ever saw yourself having. But they sure as hell ’s the kids you got.”

“Stay out of this, Dix,” was her reply. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He persisted. “Y’ever t’ink about how God works?”

“Man, I tell you: No God I’m familiar with has ever lived in this part of town.”

If her reaction illustrated how impermanent was the living situation in which Joel and his siblings found themselves, Dix’s was at least more heartening. And if he didn’t exactly act the part of father to the Campbell children, at least he tolerated them, and this was good enough. That’s why, on an afternoon when Dix was repairing the old barbecue in Kendra’s back garden in anticipation of coming good weather, he let Toby watch and hand him tools, which gave Joel the chance he’d been waiting for to visit Ivan Weatherall again.

He’d been thinking about the scriptwriting class. More, he’d been thinking of the film that would be the result of the class’s efforts. He’d never written anything before, so he didn’t see himself as being able to join them in fashioning a screenplay, but he’d begun to dream that he might be chosen to do something that was related to the fi lm. They’d need a crew. They’d probably need a whole gang of people. Why, he thought, shouldn’t he be one of them? So while Dix and Toby worked on the barbecue, while Ness gave herself a manicure, while Kendra went on a massage call, Joel headed in the direction of Sixth Avenue.

He chose a route that put him in the vicinity of Portnall Road. It was a fine spring day of sun and breeze, and as Joel passed along the point where Portnall and the Harrow Roads met, this same breeze carried to him the unmistakable odour of cannabis. He looked around for the source. He found it at the front of a smallish block of flats, where a figure was sitting in the doorway, knees up, his back against the wall and a pad of paper lying on the ground at his side. He was in a patch of sunlight, and he’d raised his face to it. As Joel watched, he toked up deeply, eyes closed, relaxed.

Joel slowed his pace and then stopped, observing the man from the other side of a low box hedge that defined the edge of the property. He saw that it was Calvin Hancock, the graffiti artist from the sunken football pitch, but his appearance was altered. The dreadlocks were missing. His head had been shaved, but in fits and starts. From where Joel stood, it looked as if some sort of pattern now decorated the young man’s skull.

Joel called out, “Wha’ you do to your hair, mon? Ain’t you a Rasta no more?”

Cal turned his head. It was a lazy movement, more like a roll than an actual turn. He removed the spliff from between his lips. He smiled. Even from where Joel was standing, he could see that Calvin’s eyes looked unnaturally bright.

“Blood,” Cal drawled. “Wha’s happenin wiv you, bred?”

“Goin up to see a friend on Six’ Avenue.”

Cal nodded, a look on his face that suggested this information had some profound meaning for him. He extended the spliff in Joel’s direction in an amiable fashion. Joel shook his head. “Smart, dat,” Cal said in approval. “You stay ’way from th’ shit ’s long as you can.” He looked down at the pad that lay next to him, as if he suddenly remembered what he’d been doing before getting high.

Joel ventured onto the property to have a look. “What’re you workin on, den?”

Cal said, “Oh, dis ain’t nuffink. Just some sketchin I like to do to mark the time.”

“Lemme see.” Joel looked at the pad. Cal had been sketching what appeared to be random faces, all of them dark. They were each different but taken as a group, there was something about them that suggested a family. As indeed they were Calvin’s own: five faces together and a sixth by itself, apart from the rest and unmistakably Calvin. Joel said, “Dis is wicked, mon. You take lessons or summick?”

“Nah.” Cal picked up the pad and tossed it to his other side, out of Joel’s sight. He drew deeply on the spliff and held the smoke in his lungs. He squinted up at Joel and said, “Bes’ not hang here,” and he tilted his head towards the door of the building. Someone had tagged it in the way much of the neighbourhood was tagged. In this case,

“Chiv!” made an amateur scrawl of yellow against the grey metal of the door.

“Why?” Joel asked him. “What’re you doin here, anyways?”

“Waiting.”

“For what?”

“More like for who, innit. The Blade’s inside, and you just ’bout the last person he going to be happy to see if he comes walkin out.”

Joel looked at the building again. Cal, he realised, was bodyguarding, no matter how strung out he seemed to be. “Wha’s he doin, den?”

Joel asked the Rasta.

“Fuckin Arissa,” Cal said bluntly. “Jus’ about dat time of day, innit.”

He pretended to look at a nonexistent watch on his wrist as he spoke, and then he added slyly, “I can’t ’xactly hear her howls of pleasure, though, so this’s all speculation. Could be his parts ain’t workin like they ought. But hey, what I tell you, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

Joel smiled at this. So did Calvin. Then he began to laugh, seeing in his own words a humour that only cannabis could create. He put his head on his knees to control his chuckling, and this gave Joel a better view of his head. What Joel saw was a bizarre pattern that had been shaved onto Cal’s skull: a crude striking snake’s head seen in profi le. By the look of the design, it was apparent that whoever had wielded the cutting shears had been an amateur at it. Joel had a fairly good idea who that person had been.

He asked his question without thinking. “Why d’you hang wiv him, mon?”

Cal lifted his head, neither chuckling nor smiling. He took another long hit of the spliff before he answered, although the act of toking up was in itself a form of reply. He said, “He need me. Who else goin to guard dis door, make sure he can do Arissa in peace wivout some blood blasting in and taking him out while he’s got his trousers down. Man’s got enemies, innit.”

And so he did, although not one of them was an enemy without reason. They existed among the women the Blade had used and deserted and among the men who were more than eager to take over his patch. For the Blade ran a sweet operation: He had weed, bone, and powder for cash but also for goods or, better yet, as barter. Plenty of young men on the streets had been willing to risk themselves taking on this jewellery shop at the Blade’s command or that post office or the other corner grocery or some darkened house where the owners would be out on a Friday night . . . and all to get supplied with whatever it was that they used to get high. With this as his main line of business, there were any number of thugs who wanted in on the Blade’s action, no matter the risks that went with it. Even Joel had to admit that there was something enticing about inspiring fear in some, jealousy in others, loathing in most, and—if the truth be told—lust in girls eighteen and younger.

Which explained—at least in part—what had happened to his own sister, who was the last female on earth whom Joel would have expected to get involved with someone like the Blade. But involved she clearly had been, a piece of information he’d gleaned the night of Toby’s birthday. He said to Calvin, “Guess you got to protect him, innit. Di’n’t do dat good when he came to see us, though.”

Cal finished the spliff and pinched the end of it, carefully depositing the quarter inch of what remained into an old tobacco tin that he took from his pocket. He said, “I tol’ him I should go wiv him, but the man wa’n’t havin none of dat. He wanted Arissa seein the Blade being the Blade, y’unnerstan. Collectin what was his and makin your sister wish on her stars she wa’n’t alive.”

“He doesn’t know Ness if he thought he’d make her wish dat,” Joel remarked.

“Das right,” Cal said. “But it wa’n’t never ’bout him knowing her. The Blade too busy to know any slag. Least too busy for anyt’ing other dan a plunge-oh-ramma-damma wiv her, y’unnerstan.”

Joel laughed at the term. Calvin grinned in response. The door to the block of flats opened.

The Blade stood there. Calvin got quickly to his feet, a remarkable manoeuvre considering his condition. Joel didn’t move, although he wanted to take a quick step back in response to the look of hostility that played across the Blade’s sharp features. The man flicked a contemptuous glance at Joel, dismissed him like a bug, and went on to direct his attention to Cal.

“What you doing?” he demanded.

“I been—”

“Shut up. You call dis watching? You call it guarding? And wha’ is dis shit?” With the tip of his cowboy boot, the Blade toed the pad on which Cal had been drawing. He looked at the picture. He looked back at Cal. “Mummy, Daddy, and the kids, Calvin? Das wha’ you got here?” His lips worked around a smile remarkable for the degree of menace it managed to convey. “Missing dem, mon? Wondering where dey are? Pondering why dey all jus’ disappear one day? Maybe it’s cos you a loser, Cal. Ever t’ink of dat?”

Joel looked from the Blade to Calvin. Even at his young age, he was able to see that the Blade was itching to do damage somewhere, and he intuitively knew he needed to be out of this place. But he also knew that he couldn’t afford to look afraid.

“I had an eye out, bred.” Calvin sounded patient. “Ain’t been no one in dis street past hour, I c’n tell you dat.”

“Dat th’ case?” The Blade flicked a glance at Joel. “You call dis no one? Well, I guess it’s right, innit. Half-caste bastard wiv his half-caste sister. They pretty much no one, all right.” He gave his attention to Joel. “What d’you want, den? You got business round here? You bringing a message from dat slag you call sister?”

Joel thought of the knife, the blood, and the stitches in Ness’s scalp. He also thought of who his sister once had been and who she was now. He felt an unaccountable sense of grief. It was this that made him say,

“My sister ain’t no slag, mon,” and he heard Cal’s breath hiss in, like a warning from a snake.

“Dat what you t’ink?” the Blade asked him, and he looked like a man setting up to make the most of an unexpected opportunity. “Want me to tell you the way she likes it, den? Going up the chute. Dat’s how she wants it. Fact is, dat’s the only way she wants it, and she wants it all the time, every day in fac’. Got to give the slag real discipline, don’t I, to get her to take it any other way.”

“Maybe dat’s the case,” Joel said agreeably, although he wasn’t at all sure he could speak past the tightness coming into his chest. “But maybe she knew dat was best for you. You know what I mean: th’ only way you could ackshully do it.”

Cal said, “Hey, bred,” in a clear tone of warning, but Joel had ventured into this river too far. He had to reach the other side. Anything less and he’d be marked as a coward, which was the last conclusion he wished someone like the Blade to reach about him. He said, “She nice, like dat, Ness is. See you limp no matter how you try, Ness goin do summick to help you out. Anyways, taking it dat way—through the back like you say—she don’t have to look at your ugly mug. So it works out good for both of you.”

The Blade said nothing in reply. Calvin’s breath went out in a whoosh. No one knew the Blade as Calvin Hancock did, so he was the one who knew exactly what the other man was capable of, pushed to the wall. He said, “You get on ’bout seein your mate on Six Ave, bred,” and he sounded quite different from the pleasantly high pothead who had been speaking to Joel prior to the Blade’s appearance on the scene.

“Don’t t’ink you want to get into it here.”

The Blade said, “Oh, dat’s beautiful, innit. Guarding me from dis? Dat what you’re doing? You one useless piece ’f shit, y’unnerstan?” He spat on the path and said to Joel, “Get out ’f my sight. Not worth th’ effort to sort. Not you and not your ugly cow sister.”

Joel wanted to say more, despite the foolhardy nature of that desire. In the manner of a young cock ready to challenge his better, he wanted to take on the Blade. But he knew there was no way he could match the man, and even if he could have, he would have had to go through Cal Hancock to get to him. On the other hand, Joel knew he could not skulk off upon the Blade’s order to do so. So he waited a good thirty terrifying seconds of staring the Blade down, despite the furious rushing of blood in his ears and the equally furious churning in his gut. He waited until the Blade said, “Wha’? You deaf or summick?” and then he worked up enough juice in the desert that was his mouth so that he, too, could spit on the path. Once he’d done that, he turned on his heel and forced himself to walk—not run—back to the pavement and from there down the street.

He didn’t look back. He didn’t hurry either. He made himself saunter as if he were someone without a care. It wasn’t easy for him to do, on rubbery legs and with a chest so constricted he could barely get enough air to remain conscious. But he did it, and he gained the end of the street before he vomited into a pool of standing water in the gutter.