What Came Before He Shot Her Read online

  It was also enough to sober Ness up, at least partially. So when Kendra finally spoke to her, she was more than ready to make a reply.

  “You want the world to know you as a slag?” Kendra cried. “’S that what you want for yourself, Vanessa?”

  Ness struggled to her feet and backed away from her aunt. “Like I bloody fuckin care,” she said.

  SHE STUMBLED TOWARDS the path between the terraces of houses and from there into Meanwhile Gardens. Behind her, she heard Kendra call out her name, she heard her shout You get back home, and she felt a harsh bubble of laughter force its way up into her throat. For Ness, there was no home any longer. There was just a place where she shared a bed with her aunt while her little brothers slept on hastily purchased camp beds in the room next door. Under those beds, Joel and Toby had persisted in keeping their suitcases neatly packed for more than two months. No matter the time that had passed since her departure, the boys still believed what they wanted to believe about their grandmother and her promise of a life of eternal sunshine in the land of her birth.

  Ness hadn’t once tried to make them see the truth of the matter. She hadn’t once pointed out the significance of the fact that they hadn’t heard a word from Glory Campbell since the day she’d left them on Kendra’s doorstep. As far as Ness was concerned, Glory Campbell’s disappearance from their lives was a case of good riddance. If Glory didn’t need or want her grandchildren, then her grandchildren certainly didn’t need or want her. But telling herself that week after week hadn’t done much to ease Ness’s feelings in the matter.

  When she left her aunt in front of number 84 Edenham Way, Ness gave no real thought to where she was going. She just knew that she didn’t want to be in her aunt’s presence a moment longer. She was sobering up more quickly than she would have thought possible, and with that sobriety came the nausea she otherwise would have felt the next morning. This propelled her towards water in which she might bathe her sweating face, depositing her on the footpath that ran along the canal at the top of the garden.

  Despite her condition, she knew the danger of falling into the canal, so she took some care. She lowered herself to the footpath and lay on her stomach. She bathed her face in the greasy water, felt its oiliness cling to her cheeks, caught the scent of it—not unlike that of a stagnant pool—and promptly vomited. Afterwards, she lay there weakly and listened to the sound of her aunt searching for her in Meanwhile Gardens. Kendra’s voice told Ness that her aunt was working her way past the child drop-in centre and into the heart of the gardens, a direction that would take her along the path winding between the hillocks and ultimately to the foot of the spiral staircase. She staggered to her feet, then, and knew the way she herself had to go: She headed for the duck pond at the east border of the gardens and then beyond it and through the wildlife garden with its boardwalk path that curved into a darkness that was at once sinister and welcoming. She was beyond the point of caring about danger, so she didn’t flinch at the sudden movement of a cat dodging across her path, nor was she bothered by the crack and crunch of twigs that suggested she was being followed. She just kept going, plunging into the darkness till she came upon the last of Meanwhile Gardens, which was the scent garden, and she registered the looming shape of its potting shed that marked the end of the path she’d taken.

  She came to her senses there and saw she’d come around the back side of Trellick Tower, which rose to her left like the neighbourhood sentry and told her she was close to Golborne Road. She didn’t so much make a decision about where to go as she accepted the simple logic of where she would go. Her feet took her to Mozart Estate.

  She knew Six was at home, having rung her earlier upon Kendra’s departure. She’d learned her friend had been entertaining Natasha along with two boys from the neighbourhood. That meant being a fifth wheel on a vehicle trundling to nowhere, so Ness had set out into the night alone. But now, Six was necessary to her.

  Ness found the group—Six, Natasha, and the boys—gathered in the sitting room of the family’s flat. The boys were Greve and Dashell—one black and the other yellow skinned—and they were both as drunk as football hooligans on the winning side. The girls were in much the same condition. And everyone was semi-dressed. Six and Natasha wore what went for knickers and bras but actually looked like three cough drops apiece, while the boys were draped in towels inexpertly wrapped around their waists. Six’s siblings were nowhere to be seen.

  Music was issuing forth at a stupendous volume from two refrigerator-size speakers on either side of a broken-down sofa. On this Dashell was sprawled, and he’d apparently and recently been receiving the affectionate ministrations of Natasha, who was retching into a tea towel as Ness came into the room. An open carton from Ali Baba Homemade Pizza lay discarded at one end of the sofa, an empty Jack Daniel’s bottle lolling lazily nearby.

  The sexual aspect of the goings-on didn’t bother Ness. The Jack Daniel’s aspect did. She hadn’t gone to the Mozart Estate to seek out drink, and the fact that the teenagers had resorted to whiskey when they might have chosen something else suggested that what she wanted wasn’t to be had tonight in this location.

  Nonetheless, she turned to Six and said, “You holdin substance?”

  Six’s eyes were bloodshot, and her tongue wasn’t working well, but her brain was functioning at least moderately. She said, “I look like I holdin substance, Moonbeam? Wha’ you need? An’ shi’, Ness, why you coming here now? I up to get mine from dis bred, y’unnerstan?”

  Ness understood. Only a mental case from an alien planet would have failed to understand. She said, “Look, I got to have something, Six. Gimme and I’m out ’f here. A ziggy’ll do.”

  Natasha said, “This one here’ll give you a mouthful and tha’s the troof, lemme tell you.”

  Dashell laughed lazily as Greve sank into a three-legged chair.

  Six said, “You t’ink we’d be doin Mr. Jack ’f we had a ziggy? I hate this shit, Nessa. Goddamn bu’ you know it.”

  “Fine. Great. Come on an’ we’ll find something better, yeah?”

  “She got somet’ing better right here,” Greve said, and he indicated the gift he had for Six beneath the towel he was wearing.

  All four of them laughed. Ness felt like smacking each of them in turn. She walked back towards the door and jerked her head meaningfully, the message being that Six was to follow. Six staggered in her direction. Behind them, Natasha collapsed onto the floor, where Dashell ran his left foot through her hair. Greve lolled with his head hanging forward, as if the effort to hold it upright defeated him.

  Ness said to Six, “Jus’ make the call. I do everything else.” She felt agitated. Since her first night in North Kensington she’d been relying on Six for substance, but now she saw she was going to need a more direct route to the source.

  Six hesitated. She looked over her shoulder. She said sharply to Greve, “Hey, you ain’t passin out, bred, no way.”

  Greve made no answer. Six said, “Fuck,” and then to Ness, “Come on wiv you, den.”

  The telephone was in the bedroom shared by the household’s female siblings. There, next to one of the three unmade beds, a shadeless lamp shone a meager cone of light on a grimy plate, upon it a half-eaten sandwich curling in on itself. The phone was next to this, and Six picked it up and punched in a number. Whoever was on the other end answered immediately.

  Six said, “Where you?…Who the hell you t’ink it is, bred?…Yeah. Right. So…Where?…Shit, den, how many you got to do?…Hell, forget it. We be dead ’f we wait dat long…Nah. I ring Cal…Hah. Ask me ’f I care ’bout dat.” She punched the phone off and said, “This ain’t goin be easy, Moonbeam.”

  “Who’s Cal?” Ness asked. “An’ who’d you call?”

  “Don’t matter to you.” She punched in another number. This time there was a wait before she said, “Cal, dat you?…Where’s he at? I got someone lookin for—” A questioning glance at Ness. What did she want? Crank, olly, tranks, skag? What?

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sp; Ness couldn’t come up with a reply as quickly as either Six or the recipient of her phone call wanted. Weed would have done well. Pressed to it in desperation, even the Jack Daniel’s would have been acceptable had there been any left in the bottle. She just, at the moment, wanted out of where she was, which was in her own body.

  Into the phone, Six said, “Blow?…Yeah, but where’s he operatin?…No shit. No shit…They ain’t goin to—Oh yeah, I bet he got one or two tricks up his sleeve, dat bred.”

  She ended the conversation after that, with a “Someone ’sides your mum love you, bred.” She replaced the phone and turned to Ness. “Straight to the top, Moonbeam,” she said. “The source.”

  “Where?”

  She grinned. “Harrow Road police station.”

  THAT WAS THE extent of what Six was willing to do for Ness. Going with her to the station was out of the question since Greve was waiting for her in the sitting room. She told Ness that she was going to have to acquaint herself with someone called the Blade if she needed to get loaded and couldn’t wait for some other means of sending herself into oblivion. And the Blade—according to his right-hand man, Cal—was at that moment being questioned at the Harrow Road police station on some matter involving the burglarising of a video shop in Kilburn Lane.

  “How’m I s’posed to know who dis bred is?” Ness asked when given this information.

  “Oh b’lieve it, Moonbeam, you know when you see him.”

  “An’ how I s’posed to know he even goin to get released, den, Six?”

  Her girlfriend laughed at the naïveté of the question. “Moonbeam, he the Blade,” she said. “Cops ain’t plannin to mess wiv him.” She waggled her hand at Ness and returned to Greve. She straddled his chair, lifted his head, and lowered the scraps that went for her bra. “Come on,” she said. “I’s time now, mon.”

  Ness shuddered at the sight. She turned away quickly and left the flat.

  She could have gone home at that point, but she was on a mission that demanded completion. So she left the estate for the short walk down Bravington Road. It finished at the Harrow Road, which was peopled at this time of night with the undesirables of the area: drunks in doorways, crews of boys in hoodies and baggy jeans, and older men of ambiguous intentions. She walked fast and kept her expression surly. Soon enough she saw the police station dominating the south side of the street, its blue lamp glowing on steps that climbed to an impressive front door.

  Ness didn’t expect to recognise the man Six had sent her to meet. At this time of night, there were comings and goings aplenty at the station, but as far as she could tell, the Blade might have been any of them. She tried to think what a burglar might look like, but all she came up with was someone dressed in black. Because of this, she nearly missed the Blade altogether when at last he came out of the door, took a beret from his pocket, and slipped it onto his hairless head. He was slender and short—not much taller than Ness herself—and had he not stopped under the light to apply a match to a cigarette, Ness would have dismissed him as just another half-caste from the neighbourhood.

  Under the light, however, and despite its blue glow, she saw the tattoo that curled from beneath the beret and permanently disfigured his cheek: a cobra, fangs bared. She also saw the line of gold hoops hanging from his earlobes and the casual way he balled up the empty cigarette packet and tossed it to land at the threshold of the door. She heard him clear his throat, then spit. He pulled out a mobile and flipped it open.

  This was her moment. Because the night had unfolded as it had, Ness went for that moment and all it would bring. She crossed the street and walked up to the man, who looked to her to be somewhere in his twenties.

  He was saying into the mobile, “Where the fuck are you, mon?” when Ness touched him on the arm, giving a toss of her head as he turned to her, wary. She said, “You the Blade, innit? I got to score t’night, bred, and I need substance bad so jus’ say yes or no.”

  He didn’t respond, and for a moment Ness thought she’d chosen wrong: either the person or the approach. Then he said impatiently into the phone, “Jus’ get over here, Cal,” after which he snapped it closed and regarded Ness. “Who the fuck’re you?” he demanded.

  “Someone wantin to score and dat’s all you need to know, mon.”

  “Dat right, eh? An’ just’ wha’ is it you wishing to score?”

  “Weed or blow do me jus fine, innit.”

  “How old’re you, anyway? Twelve? Thirteen?”

  “Hey, I’m legal ’n’ I can pay.”

  “Bet you can, woe-man. Wiv what, den? You got twenty quid in dat bag ’f yours?”

  She didn’t, of course. She had less than five pounds. But the fact that he’d pegged her as twelve or thirteen and the fact that he was so ready to dismiss her spurred her on and made her want more than ever what he had to provide. She shifted her weight so one hip jutted out. She cocked her head to one side and regarded him. She said, “Mon, I c’n pay wiv wha’ever you want. More’n ’at, I c’n pay wiv what you need.”

  He sucked on his teeth in a way that made her go cold inside, but Ness dismissed this and what it suggested. Instead she told herself she had exactly what she wanted when he said, “Now dat’s one very in’ersting turn of events.”

  Chapter

  6

  A few weeks ahead of his eighth birthday, Toby showed Joel the lava lamp. It sat in the window of a shop near the top of Portobello Road, far north of the area for which the thoroughfare is famous: that sprawl of markets which burst like the weeds of commerce they are, in the vicinity of Notting Hill Gate.

  The shop in which the lava lamp gave its oozing performance did its business between a halal butcher and an eatery called Cockney’s Traditional Pie Mash and Eels. Toby had caught a glimpse of it when, in a crocodile of the smaller pupils from Middle Row School, he’d tripped along Portobello Road for an enlightening field trip to the local post office, where the children were to practise buying stamps in a respectful manner that their teacher intended would be remembered for the rest of the purchases they would make in their lives. It was an exercise involving common maths and social interaction. Toby did not excel in either.

  But he did take note of the lava lamp. In fact, the mesmerising rise and fall of the material within it that constituted the “lava” drew him out of the crocodile and to the window where he immediately took a journey to Sose. He was roused from this by his crocodile partner’s shouting out and attracting the attention of the teacher at the head of the line. The volunteer parent accompanying the group at the back of the line saw to the problem. She wrested Toby from the window and put him back into place. But the memory of the lava lamp lingered in Toby’s mind. He began talking about it that very night over their fried scampi, chips, and peas. Dousing everything with brown sauce, he called the lamp wicked, and he continued to bring it up until Joel consented to be introduced to its visual pleasures.

  The liquid in it was purple. The “lava” was orange. Toby pressed his face to the window, sighed, and promptly fogged up the glass. He said, “Innit wicked, Joel?” and he flattened his palm on the window as if he’d push right through it and become as one with the object of his fascination. “C’n I have it, you think?”

  Joel searched for the price, which he found displayed on a small card at the black plastic base of the lamp, “£15.99” scrawled in red. This was eight pounds more than he currently possessed. He said, “No way, Tobe. Where’s the money goin’ to come from?”

  Toby looked from the lava lamp to his brother. He’d been talked out of the inflated life ring on this day, wearing it deflated beneath his clothing, but his fingers plucked at it anyway, spasmodically fingering the air at his waist. His face was crestfallen. He said, “Wha’ ’bout my birthday?”

  “I c’n talk to Aunt Ken. Maybe Ness ’s well.”

  Toby’s shoulders dropped. He wasn’t so oblivious of the state of things in number 84 Edenham Way as to think Joel was promising anything but disappointment.
r />   Joel hated to see Toby with lowered spirits. He told his brother not to worry. If the lava lamp was what he wanted for his special day, then somehow the lava lamp would be his.

  Joel knew that he couldn’t get the funds from his sister. Ness wasn’t to be talked to for love and certainly not for money these days. In the time since they’d left Henchman Street, she’d become increasingly unapproachable. Who she’d once been was like a daguerreotype now: Tilted this way or that he could almost see the girl from East Acton, angel Gabriel in the Christmas pageant, with white wings like clouds and a golden halo over her head, ballet shoes and a pink tutu, leaning from the window in Weedon House and spitting to the ground far below. She made no pretence of attending school any longer. No one knew how she spent her days.

  That something profound had occurred to Ness somewhere along the line Joel understood. He simply didn’t know what it was, so in his innocence and ignorance he concluded it was something to do with the night she’d left them on their own while Kendra went out clubbing. He knew Ness hadn’t returned that night, and he knew there had been a violent argument between his aunt and his sister. But what went before that argument he did not know.

  He did know that his aunt had finally washed her hands of Ness and Ness seemed to like things this way. She came and went at all hours and in all conditions, and while Kendra watched her with narrowed eyes and an expression of disgust, she seemed to be playing a waiting game with Ness, although what she was waiting for was not clear. In the meantime, Ness pushed the envelope of objectionable behaviour as if daring Kendra to take a stand. The tension was palpable when the two of them were in the house together. Something, sometime, was going to give way, and a landslide was going to follow.

  What Kendra was actually waiting for was the inevitable: those ineluctable consequences of the way her niece was choosing to live. She knew this was going to involve a youth-offending team, magistrates, possibly the police, and likely an alternative living situation for the girl, and the truth of the matter was that she had reached the point of welcoming all this. She recognised the fact that Ness’s life had been a difficult one from the moment of her father’s untimely death. But thousands of children had difficult lives, she reckoned, without throwing what remained of those lives into the toilet. So when Ness stumbled home every once in a while and did so drunk or loaded, she told her to bathe, to sleep on the sofa, and to otherwise keep out of her sight. And when she reeked of sex, Kendra told her she was on her own to sort things out should she become pregnant or diseased.