What Came Before He Shot Her

Chapter

19 The seed of Ness’s millinery idea did not bear immediate fruit. Things were not easily arranged, and she’d not anticipated facing difficulties. She wanted the courses; they would be hers for the taking. Anything else was inconceivable to her. Thus, at the first stumbling block—a considerably sized monetary one—she did just that: She stumbled. She shimmered with hostility, and she directed it at the children with whom she was supposed to be making jewellery at the drop-in centre.

Making jewellery was an umbrella term, a euphemism for stringing brightly coloured wooden beads on equally brightly coloured plastic cords. Since the children engaged in this activity were all under four years of age, with the limited eye-hand coordination that one might expect of this age, making jewellery consisted largely of spilling more beads than stringing them, and an expression of frustration at such spillage consisted largely of throwing beads rather than replacing them in their containers.

Ness didn’t handle any of this well. She grumbled at first as she scrambled around the floor, rescuing beads. Next, she smacked her hand on the table when the uplifted arm of a child called Maya indicated another palmful of beads was about to be launched. Finally, she resorted to swearing. She snapped, “Fuck it all, you lot. ’F you can’t hold on to ’em beads, you c’n just forget ’bout stringin ’em at all cos I ain’t playin dis stupid game wiv you,” and she began to gather up containers, cords, and round-nosed scissors.

The children reacted with shouts of protest, which attracted Majidah from the kitchen. She observed for a moment and picked up on some of the more colourful mutterings emanating from Ness’s mouth. She strode across the room and put an end to the jewellery making herself, but not in the way Ness intended. She demanded to know what Miss Vanessa Campbell thought she was doing: swearing in front of innocent children. She didn’t wait for an answer. She told Ness to get herself outside, where she would deal with her directly.

Ness took the opportunity outdoors to light up a cigarette, which she did with no little pleasure. She wasn’t supposed to smoke anywhere near the child drop-in centre. She’d protested this rule more than once, telling Majidah that these kids’ parents smoked in their presence—not to mention whatever the hell else they got up to in front of them—so why couldn’t she smoke if she wanted to. Majidah had refused to engage her in this discussion. The rule was the rule. There would be no bending, breaking, adjusting, or ignoring it.

Ness didn’t care at this point, on this day. She hated working at the drop-in centre, she hated rules, she hated Majidah, she hated life. She was thrilled to bits when Majidah—having reestablished the four-yearolds at their activity with larger beads this time—joined her outdoors, pulling a coat around herself and narrowing her eyes at the spectacle of Ness outrageously inhaling from the forbidden Benson & Hedges. Good for you, was what Ness thought. See what aggravation feels like, bitch.

Majidah had not raised six children to find Ness’s behaviour offputting. She also had no intention of addressing it at the moment, which she saw as something that Ness clearly wanted. Instead, she told Ness that as she was unable to work in peace with the children on this particular day, she could instead wash all the windows of the centre, which were sadly in need of the attention.

Ness repeated the order, incredulous. She was to wash windows? In this bloody weather? First off, it was fucking too cold and second off, it was probably going to fucking rain before the bloody end of the fucking day, so what the hell was Majidah thinking because no way was Ness going to fucking wash any fucking windows.

In reply, Majidah calmly assembled the equipment required for the job. She then gave detailed instructions, as if she’d heard nothing of what Ness had said. Three steps were involved, she informed her. So were water, detergent, a hose pipe, newspapers, and white vinegar. Wash the windows inside and out and afterwards they would talk about Ness’s future at the drop-in centre.

“I don’t want no future at dis fuckin place,” Ness shrieked as Majidah headed back inside the building. “Don’t you got nuffink else to say?”

Of course, Majidah had plenty to say, but she wasn’t about to engage Ness when the girl was in such a state. She said to her, “We shall speak once the windows are clean, Vanessa,” and when Ness said, “I c’n walk straight out ’f here, you know,” Majidah said serenely, “As is always your choice.”

That very serenity was a slap in the face. Ness decided to give Majidah what for when she had the chance. She told herself she could hardly wait to do it, and in the meantime, she’d rehearse her comments and show the maddening woman some window washing that she would never forget.

She hosed, she scrubbed, she polished. And she smoked. Outside the centre. She did not have the courage to do so when she began seeing to the windows inside. By the time the day was at its end—with the windows sparkling, the children gone, and the first drops of rain beginning to fall, just as Ness had thought they would—she had been in mental conversation with the Asian woman for a good four hours and was burning to take her on in person, given the opportunity.

This opportunity grew from Majidah’s inspection of the windows. She took her time about it. She looked over each one, ignoring the rain that was spotting them. She said, “Well done, Vanessa. Your anger, you see, was put to good use.”

Ness wasn’t about to admit to anything resembling anger. She said, with a meaningful curl of the lip, “Yeah. Well, I ’spect I got a real exceptional career in front of me, eh: window washing.”

Majidah glanced her way. “And of course there are worse careers to have, when one considers the number of windows in this city that want to be washed, yes?”

Ness blew out a frustrated breath. She demanded to know if there was anything Majidah could not turn around and make into something positive because it was getting damn irritating having to be around such a merry ray of bloody flaming fucking sunshine every day.

Majidah thought a moment before speaking, for she too had been awaiting an opportunity for a conversation with Ness, although not a conversation of the sort Ness wished to have with her. She said, “My gracious, is this not an important life skill? Is this not additionally the most basic skill an individual can develop in order to survive life’s disappointments in a healthy manner?”

Ness sputtered, her form of pooh-poohing the Asian woman’s words.

Majidah sat at one of the pint-size tables, waved Ness into the chair opposite hers, and said kindly, “Do you wish now to tell me what has gone wrong?”

Ness’s lips began to form the word nuffink. But at the end, she couldn’t say it. Instead, the gentle expression on Majidah’s face, still present despite everything Ness had done to wipe it off, prompted her to tell the truth although she managed to do it with an attitude of spurious indifference that would have fooled no one. She’d met with Fabia Bender at the Youth Offending Team’s office, Ness revealed. She wanted to take a certificate course at Kensington and Chelsea College, a course that would lead to a real career in a fi eld besides window washing or bead stringing. But the course had turned out to cost over six hundred pounds and where the hell was Ness supposed to come up with that kind of money, short of going on the job or robbing a bank?

“What sort of course is it that you wish to take?” Majidah asked her.

Ness wouldn’t say. She felt she would have to admit too much if she revealed it was millinery that interested her. She believed she would be admitting to everything that had altered in her life but remained unacknowledged and needed to stay that way.

“Wa’n’t I s’posed to be comin up wiv a career?” Ness demanded instead. “Wa’n’t I s’posed to be tryin to make something of myself?”

“This is bitterness I hear,” Majidah said. “So you must tell me what good bitterness offers you. You see life as a series of disappointments. Seeing this, you fail also to see that if one door closes, another opens.”

“Right. Whatever.” Ness stood. “C’n I go?”

“Listen to me before you leave, Vanessa,” Majidah said, “for what I tell you is meant in friendship. If, as many others do, you thrash about in the wilderness of anger and disappointment, you will fail to see the opportunities that God will lay in front of you. Anger and disappointment blind us, my dear. If not that, they distract us. They make it impossible to keep our eyes open since when we rage, we squint and thus we cannot see all that surrounds us. If we instead accept what the present moment is offering, if we simply move forward through it, doing whatever task is in front of us, we then have the serenity necessary to be an observer. Observation is our way of recognising the next thing we are meant to do.”

“Yeah?” Ness asked, and her tone presaged the next words she spoke. “Dat work good for you, Maji dah? Life say you can’t be an aeronautical engineer, so you keep your eyes open, you jus’ keep movin forward ever’day and you end up here?”

“I end up with you,” Majidah said. “This, to me, was part of God’s plan.”

“Thought you lot called him Allah,” Ness sneered.

“Allah. God. Lord. Fate. Karma. Whoever. Whatever. It is all the same, Vanessa.” Majidah was silent for a moment, observing, much as she’d done over the months that Vanessa Campbell had been working at the drop-in centre. She wanted to impart the lessons she herself had learned from a difficult life. She wanted to tell Ness that it is not the circumstance of one’s life but what one does with the circumstance that is important: choices, outcomes, and knowledge gained from outcomes. But she did not say this, knowing that Ness’s present state would prevent her from hearing. So instead she said to her, “You are at the turning point, my dear. What is it that you intend to do with all of this bitterness, I ask you.”

AFTER HANDING THE flick knife over to Cal, there was nothing for Joel to do but wait to hear from the Blade. Days melted into weeks as he did so, watching his back and watching Toby’s back as well. They sought places of safety from Neal Wyatt when they were out and about. They walked quickly, and they continued to practise hiding from headhunters upon Joel’s command.

They were standing on the bridge that carries Great Western Road over the canal when things changed. They’d gone there to observe a gaily coloured narrow boat that was motoring eastward in the direction of Regent’s Park. Toby was chattering about the possibility of the boat’s containing pirates—a topic that Joel was listening to only dimly—when Joel caught sight of a figure coming towards them along the pavement, sauntering from the direction of the Harrow Road.

Joel recognised him: It was Greve, number one henchman of Neal Wyatt. Joel automatically looked around for Neal and for other members of Neal’s crew. None of them were nearby, which made the hair on the back of Joel’s neck tingle. He said to Toby, “Get down to that barge. Do it now, Tobe. Don’t come out no matter what, till you hear me call you, y’unnerstan?”

Toby didn’t. He thought, considering what they’d been discussing, that Joel meant the narrow boat, which was at that moment precisely beneath them with a bearded man at the helm and a woman watering lush pot plants in the stern. He said, “But where they going? Cos I don’t want to go ’nless you—”

“The barge,” Joel said. “Headhunters, Tobe. Y’unnerstan? Don’t come out till I tell you time’s right. You hear?”

Toby got it the second time. He scurried to the metal steps and quickly descended. By the time Greve had reached the bridge, Toby was scampering onto the abandoned barge. It bobbed in the water as he went to his hiding place among the discarded timbers.

Greve joined Joel at the railing. He glanced down at the water and then back at Joel with a smirk. Joel thought he intended to give him aggro, but when Greve spoke, he merely relayed a message. Neal Wyatt wanted to have a counsel. If Joel was interested, he could meet Neal at the sunken football pitch in ten minutes. If Joel wasn’t interested, then things could continue just as they were.

“Don’t matter to him,” was how Greve put it, with an indifference implying that the counsel hadn’t been Neal’s idea.

That spoke volumes. It seemed to Joel that the Blade had anticipated the request he’d intended to make of him, and this was no surprise. The man had demonstrated more than once that he knew what was going on in the neighbourhood. This was, in part, the source of his power.

Joel thought about the time: ten minutes and then the meeting between them which would take perhaps ten more. He wondered about Toby: being on the barge for that length of time. He didn’t want to take his little brother with him to talk to Neal, but he also didn’t want to risk Toby’s revealing himself to their enemies if this was a trick. He looked around to see if anyone was lingering in a doorway nearby. There was only Greve, though, and he said impatiently, “Wha’s it goin to be, mon?”

Joel said he’d meet Neal. Ten minutes. He’d be there at the football pitch, and Neal had better show up.

Greve smirked another time. He left the bridge and went back the way he’d come.

When he was out of sight, Joel hurried down the steps and approached the abandoned barge. He said quietly, “Tobe. Don’t come out. C’n you hear me?” He waited till the disembodied voice whispered in reply. Then he said, “I’ll be back. Don’t come out till you hear me call you. Don’t be scared neither. I jus’ got to go talk to someone. Okay?”

“’Kay,” was the whispered reply, releasing Joel from the obligation of standing guard. With another look around to make sure he hadn’t been seen talking to the barge, he went on his way.

He crossed Meanwhile Gardens and trotted up Elkstone Road. When he reached the pitch, he saw that the town council had painted over the work of the local graffiti artists—something that the town council did on a yearly basis—inadvertently giving them a fresh canvas on which to work. A sign had been posted, threatening prosecution for the defacement of public property. This sign had already been tagged in red and black paint with the balloonlike moniker “ARK.” Joel circled around to the gated opening at the pitch’s far side. He descended the steps. Neal was not yet there.

Joel was nervous about meeting the other boy in such a place. Once inside, with the playing area some eight feet below the level of the pavement that passed it, a person couldn’t be seen unless he stood in the middle or unless a pedestrian walking by—of whom there were few enough in the rainy autumn weather—made the effort to peer through the surrounding chain-link fence.

It seemed to Joel abnormally cold. When he walked to the middle of the pitch, it felt as if a damp fog rose from the ground and settled around his legs. He stamped his feet and tucked his hands into his armpits. At this time of year, there was far less daylight, and what there was was fast fading. The shadows cast by the retaining walls oozed farther and farther into the pitch, creeping among the weeds, which grew from cracks in the tarmac.

As the minutes passed, the first thing Joel wondered was whether he’d come to the correct place. There was indeed another football pitch—tucked behind Trellick Tower—but it wasn’t sunken below the level of the street, as this one was, and Greve had said the sunken football pitch. Hadn’t he?

Joel began to doubt. Twice he heard someone approaching, and his muscles grew tight in readiness. But both times the footsteps passed by, leaving behind their echo and the acrid scent of cigarette smoke.

Joel paced. He bit the side of his thumb. He tried to think what he was meant to do.

What he wanted was peace: both of mind and of body. That, in conjunction with his message to the Blade and Neal’s recent lack of interest in him, was why he’d been willing to grasp the word counsel and do something that he now began to think of as stupid. The truth of the matter was that he’d exposed himself to danger in this place. He was alone, weaponless, and unprotected, so if he remained in this spot and something happened to him, he’d have only himself to blame. All Neal and his crew had to do, really, was to hop the fence and corner him. There’d be no quick escape, and he’d be finished, as they doubtless wanted him to be.

Joel’s bowels turned liquid. The sound of rough footsteps made things worse. The lid of a dustbin, rattling in the nearby mews, nearly did him in, and he understood that Neal would want him like this: nervous, waiting, and wondering. He saw that having Joel a mass of anxiety would make Neal feel big and in control. It would offer him the opportunity he wanted to—

Opportunity. That was the thought that did it for Joel. That single word flashed in his mind, brightening his situation until he saw it in an entirely new light. When that occurred, he was out of the pitch like a fox bolting from the hounds. He knew that he’d been worse than stupid. He’d been inattentive. That was how people died.

He shot to the corner and tore around the turn, making for the railway tracks. With Goldfinger’s great tower looming as his landmark, he pounded in the direction of Edenham Estate. He knew at that point what was going on, but he didn’t want to believe it.

He heard the first sirens when he was in Elkstone Road, before he actually saw anything. When at last he did see, it was the lights first, those twirling rooftop lights that told vehicles to clear the way for the fire brigade. The fire engine itself stood on the bridge above the canal. A hose snaked down the stairs, but no water yet cannoned out to douse the fire. This was merrily consuming the abandoned barge. Someone had untied it as well as ignited it, for now it floated in the middle of the canal, and smoke billowed thickly from it, a foetid cloud like a renegade belch.

There were watchers everywhere, lining the bridge above the water and crowding the footpath alongside it. They peered from the skate bowl and even from behind the fence that protected the child drop-in centre.

Even as he knew the truth of the matter and continued his approach, Joel looked for Toby. He shouted his brother’s name and pushed through the crowd. He then saw why no firefighter had begun shooting water onto the flames that were consuming the barge.

One fireman held the nozzle of the hose poised while another was up to his chest in the greasy water of the canal. This second man—his protective jacket discarded on the footpath—was working his way to the barge, a rope coiled over his shoulder. He was making for the end opposite the fire. There, a small form cowered.

“Toby!” Joel shouted. “Toby! Tobe!”

But there was too much going on for Toby to hear Joel’s cry. Flames crackled old dry wood, people called out encouragement to the fireman, a loud radio on the engine above them spasmodically spat out information, and all around was a babble of voices into which broke the hooting of a police vehicle pulling onto the bridge.

Joel cursed himself for having given Neal Wyatt the opening he’d been looking for: Toby had run for his hiding place as commanded, and it had been transformed by Neal and his crew into a trap. End of story. Joel looked around fruitlessly for his nemesis, even as he knew that Neal and everyone else associated with Neal would be gone by this time, their worst already done. And not done to Joel who could at least fight back, but done to his brother who didn’t and never would understand what marked him out for endless bullying.

In the canal, the fireman reached the barge and heaved himself onto it. From where he cowered, Toby looked up at this apparition rising from the depths. He might have taken him for one of the headhunters he’d been told to fear—or even the incarnation of Maydarc, come to him from the land of Sose—but he sensed that the real danger was from the fire, not from the man with the rope. So he worked his way on his hands and his knees towards his rescuer. The fireman fixed a line to the barge to keep it from floating in a fiery mass along the canal, then he grabbed Toby as the child reached him. Once he had him out of danger, a shout to his fellows above with the engine started the water flowing. A gratified cheer went up in the crowd as water spewed from the hose in a fi erce cascade.

All could have been well at this point had life been a fade-to-black celluloid fantasy. The presence of the police prevented this. They reached Toby before Joel was able to. One of them had him by the collar of his jacket the moment his rescuer had him on the ground. It was fairly obvious that this was the intimidating moment that presaged interrogation, and Joel shoved his way over to intercede.

“. . . set that fire, boy?” one of the constables was saying. “Best answer directly and be truthful about it.”

Joel cried, “He di’n’t!” and reached Toby’s side. “He was hiding,” he said to the police. “I tol’ him to hide there.”

Toby, wide-eyed and shaking but relieved that Joel was with him at last, gave his reply to his brother instead of to the constable, which wasn’t something guaranteed to be pleasing. “I did like you said. I waited to hear you say to come out.”

“‘Like you said’ ?” The constable grabbed Joel now, so that he had both boys in his grip. “This is down to you, then. What’s your name?”

“I heard ’em, Joel,” Toby told him. “They squirted summick on the barge. I could smell it.”

“Accelerant,” a man’s voice said. Then it barked towards the canal.

“See if these two’ve left a starter on the barge.”

“Hey,” Joel cried. “I di’n’t do this. My brother di’n’t neither. He doesn’t even know how to light a match.”

The cop answered this with an ominous directive. “Come along with me,” and he turned both boys towards the spiral stairs. Toby began to cry. Joel said, “Hey! We di’n’t . . . I wasn’t even here an’ you c’n ask . . . You c’n ask those blokes in the skate bowl, innit. They would’ve seen—”

“Save it for the station,” the cop said.

“Joel, I was hiding,” Toby wailed. “Just like you said.”

They reached the panda car. Its back door stood open. There, however, an elderly Asian man was speaking insistently to a second constable who was climbing behind the wheel of the car. As Joel and Toby were placed inside, he said, “This boy did not set that fire, do you hear me? From my window over there—you see? It is just above the canal?—

I watched these boys. There were five of them, and they sprayed the boat first with something from a tin. They lit it and untied it. I was witness to all this. My good man, you must listen. These two boys here, they had nothing to do with it.”

“Make your statement at the station, Gandhi,” was the driver’s reply. He closed his door on the old man’s further protests and put the car into gear as the other constable climbed in and slapped his hand on the roof to indicate they were ready to roll.

Joel’s thought was that these two men had seen far too many American cop programmes on the television. He said in a low voice to his weeping brother, “Don’t cry, Tobe. We’ll get it sorted.” He was aware of dozens of faces watching, but he forced himself to hold his head up, not because he wanted to evidence pride but because he wanted to look among the watchers for the only watcher who mattered. But again, even up here on the street, Neal Wyatt was not among them.

At the Harrow Road police station, Joel and Toby were ushered into an overheated interview room, where four chairs fixed permanently to the floor sat two on a side at a table. There, a large tape recorder and a pad of paper stood waiting. The boys were told to sit, so that was what they did. The door closed, but it did not lock. Joel decided to take hope from this.

Toby had stopped crying, but it was not going to take much to set him off again. His eyes were the size of tea cakes, and his fi ngers clutched the leg of Joel’s jeans.

“I was hid,” Toby whispered. “But they found me anyways. Joel, how you ’spect they found me if I was hid?”

Joel couldn’t think of a way to explain things to his brother. He said,

“You did what I tol’ you, Tobe. That was real good.”

When the next thing happened, it happened in the person of Fabia Bender. She entered the room accompanied by a hefty black man in a business suit. She introduced herself first and then the man, saying he was Sergeant August Starr. They’d begin by taking the boys’ names, she said. They would need to contact their parents.

Having never met the other two Campbells, Fabia Bender drew the pad of paper towards her once she and Starr were seated. She picked up the pen and waited to use it, but when Joel told her their names, she didn’t write. Instead she said, “Are you Vanessa’s brothers?,” and when Joel nodded, she said, “I see.”