What Came Before He Shot Her Read online

  Ness shivered, not with the cold but with a kind of anticipation she’d never felt before. She tried to appear indifferent, a type, as it were. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the Blade. Everything she wanted. That was how she thought of him. It seemed to her that a miracle had come about on an evening that had earlier appeared disastrous.

  Cal returned in a few minutes. He said, “Clean.”

  The Blade said, “You carrying?”

  Cal said, “Shit, mon. What else you t‘ink?” He patted the pocket of the tattered leather jacket he wore. “Who love you more’n your gran, baby? You safe long ’s Cal Hancock watching.”

  The Blade gave no response to this. He jerked his head towards the path through the buildings. Cal led the way.

  Ness made up a third, like an afterthought. She kept close to the Blade, intent upon looking as if—wherever they were going—they would arrive together.

  The estate they were on was a place of noise, acrid with smells that combined rotting rubbish, cooking odours, and burning rubber. They passed two drunken girls vomiting into a dead shrub and a gang of young boys accosting an old-age pensioner who’d foolishly decided to take his rubbish to the bins after dark. They came upon a vicious, earsplitting catfight and a lone broom-thin woman plunging a hypodermic needle into her arm in the shelter of a discarded mattress that balanced against a leafless tree.

  Their destination was a house in the middle of a terrace. To Ness, it looked either unoccupied or asleep for the night. But when Cal knocked on the door, a spy hole opened. Someone checked them out, found them acceptable, and opened up. The Blade stepped past Cal and entered. Ness followed. Cal remained outside.

  Inside, there was no actual furniture. Instead, there were old mattresses piled three high in several locations, and large upended cardboard boxes scattered nearby to serve as tables. What light there was came from two lopsided floor lamps that cast their glow on the walls and the ceiling so that the floor with its tattered maroon carpet squares was mostly in shadow. Aside from graffiti depicting a wild-haired man and a nude woman riding a hypodermic needle into the stratosphere, there was nothing on the walls, and taken as a whole, the house didn’t appear to be a place where anyone actually lived.

  It was occupied, however. One might have thought that a party was even going on because there was scratchy music coming low from a radio that needed to have its station adjusted. But what one normally expects to see at a party—people engaged in conversation or some other activity with one another—was not a feature of this place. Instead, the activity was confined to smoking, and where there was conversation, it was limited to comments about the quality of the crack and what it was providing in the way of mental and physical diversion.

  Other smoking was going on as well, cannabis and tobacco, and substances were being bought and sold, with transactions completed by a middle-aged black woman in a purple negligee, which displayed the unfortunate, pendulous condition of her large breasts. She seemed to be the responsible party, aided by the doorman who, by means of the spy hole, inspected individuals wishing to enter.

  There was no question in anyone’s mind about whether this place was a safe house in which to engage in their chosen pursuit. Across the neighbourhood and spreading out in all directions, these sorts of dens popped up like toadstools in a moist woodland. The police couldn’t keep track of them, and on the off chance that a neighbour developed the courage to report such a place and to request an arrest of its proprietor, the police had too many other irons in the fire to deal with the problem.

  Purple Negligee supplied the Blade with what he’d come for, a request from him being unnecessary. Since she existed because he existed, she wanted to make him welcome. This house was his first incursion into territory controlled by an Albanian gang, and she owed him not only the roof over her head but also the form of livelihood that this business provided.

  She said to him, “How your gran, darlin?” as he lit up the pipe she’d given him. It was small, disappearing into the hollow of his hand, and a thread of smoke issued from it. “She still in hospital? Dat’s so rough, innit. Your mum still keepin you ’way from the rest of the kids ’s well? Bloody slag. Wha’ else I get you, darlin? Who dis anyway? She with you?”

  The she was Ness, the Blade’s shadow, who stood one step behind him like a royal consort. She was waiting for an indication of what she was meant to do, her expression an attempt to hide uncertainty through a display of indifference. The Blade reached around and put his hand on the back of her neck. He pinched his thumb and forefinger beneath her ear and through this means brought her forward. He put the pipe in her mouth and watched as she sucked. He smiled and said to Purple Negligee, “Who else she be with, gash, if she not wiv me?”

  “Looks young, man. Dat not like you.”

  “You t’inking dat cos you want me f’r yourself.”

  She laughed. “Oooh. You way too much man f’r me, baby.” She patted his cheek. “Give a shout can Melia get you anyt’ing else.” She took herself down the darkened corridor, where the only couple in the place who were engaged with each other were having an inexpert knee trembler up against the wall.

  Ness felt the effect of the drug quickly. Everything that was her life receded into the background, leaving her open to the present moment. The fact that she was in danger from any number of sources didn’t occur to her. How could it when her rational mind had departed, leaving in its place what seemed not only rational but superior to any mind she’d ever possessed? The only thought she had was that she wanted more of what made her feel like this.

  The Blade watched her and smiled. “You liking dis, innit.”

  “’S you,” she said, for to her he was the source of all experience and sensation. He was what could make her whole. She said, “Lemme suck you, mon. You won’ b’lieve how you goin to feel.”

  “Expert, are you?”

  “Only one way to know.”

  “Your mum know you talk to blokes like dis?”

  That cut through the pleasure. She turned and walked into the sitting area, leaving him behind. She lowered herself to one of the piles of mattresses, putting herself squarely between two young men. Until her arrival they’d been concentrating on their individual highs, but Ness made that difficult by saying to one of them, “Wha’ I got t’ do get a hit of dat stuff?” and nodding at the pipe he held as she put her hand on the other’s thigh and rode it up to his crotch in the same manner she’d tried on the Blade in the backseat of the car.

  Across from her, the Blade saw what she was doing and knew why she was doing it, but he was not a man who let women run his show. The little slag, he thought, could do what she wanted. He went in search of Melia, leaving Ness in the sitting room. She’d soon enough learn the price of playing men like puppets in a place like this.

  The learning did not take long. Ness got the pipe for a hit, but it was a hit with a cost determined by what she appeared to be offering. She quickly found that the attention she was attracting came from more than the two men she’d placed herself between. Several others had taken note of her, and when her hand went to the crotch of her companion on the mattress, he was not the only one to feel the corresponding arousal.

  There were other women present, but with more experience, they knew the wisdom of keeping to themselves and just enjoying the high they’d come for. And since none of the men wanted to waste the energy either coaxing or coercing when the same delights could be savoured with no effort whatsoever on their part, they gravitated to Ness.

  They could see she was young, but it didn’t matter. These were gentlemen who’d had perfectly willing eleven-year-old girls when they themselves had been thirteen and younger. In a world in which there was little to live for and less to hope for, most of the time they didn’t even need to practise their clumsy arts of seduction.

  Ness was therefore surrounded before she realised what was happening. The fact of the surrounding rather than what the surrounding meant began the process of c
learing her head. A pipe was thrust at her for a hit, but she no longer wanted it. Someone said, “Ge’ her down here, den,” and from behind she was lowered to the mattress. Hot breath was what she thought of, then: the feel of it and the smell of it. Two sets of hands pulling off her tights as another set spread her legs. A fourth set held her arms imprisoned. She cried out, which was taken for delight.

  She began to writhe. The escape she wanted was seen as hot anticipation. She cried out again as zips were lowered, and she squeezed her eyes shut rather than have to see what she would otherwise see. A body fell upon her and she felt the heat of it and then the bulging, throbbing head, which was when she screamed.

  It was over quickly. Not how she feared it would be over, but how she dreamed. She heard a curse first and then immediately the body pulled away from her as if lifted by a force of nature. Then he was there raising her from the mattress: not to carry her out of the horrible place, in his arms in the manner of a troubadour-sung hero, but to jerk her to her feet and curse her as an idiot fool slag who, if she needed to be taught a lesson, was fucking well going to be taught it by him and not by this scum.

  It felt like being wooed. Ness knew that the Blade would not have come to her rescue had he not cared about her. He was one man among many. The many were bigger, tougher, and far more menacing. He’d risked himself to make her safe. So when he shoved her in front of him in the direction of the door, Ness felt the pressure against her scapula as a form of caress, and she went without protest into the night, where Cal Hancock was waiting, to whom the Blade said, “Melia got t’ings handled. Le’s go to Lancefield, mon.”

  “Wha’ ’bout her?” Cal said with a nod at Ness.

  “She coming wiv us,” the Blade told him. “Can’t leave the slag here.”

  Thus it was that some thirty minutes later, Ness found herself not in the decently appointed flat she imagined but, rather, in a squat just off Kilburn Lane, where a block of flats destined for the wrecking ball had been taken over in the meantime by those homeless individuals with the nerve to live in the same vicinity as the Blade. There on a scratchy blanket that covered a futon on the floor, the Blade did to Ness what the men in the crack house had anticipated doing. Unlike inside the crack house, though, Ness eagerly accepted this attention.

  She had an agenda of her own, and she decided as she spread her legs for him that the Blade was the only man on earth she wished to fulfill it.

  WHEN KENDRA HEARD Dix tell the story of taking Ness from the Falcon and driving her home, she decided to believe him. Soft-spoken and ostensibly gentle-hearted, he seemed sincere. So although she’d washed her hands of Ness on the same night that Ness had met the Blade and throughout the weeks that followed, Kendra came to realise that she needed to set her relationship with her niece back on course. How to do this was the question, however, since Ness was rarely at home.

  The benefit of her absence was that Kendra was able to pursue her career without any familial disruptions, something that she was happy enough to do since it helped take her mind off what had nearly come to pass between Dix D’Court and herself postmassage in the bedsit above the Falcon. And Kendra definitely needed to take her mind off that. She wanted to think of herself as a professional.

  The downside of Ness’s absence, however, was that the same conscience requiring Kendra to be professional in the area of massage also required her to reach out to the girl. This was not so much because Kendra hoped that a decent aunt-and-niece friendship might develop between them but because she’d been wrong in what she’d assumed had happened between Dix and Ness, and she needed to make amends for that. Kendra believed she owed that much to a brother who’d turned his life around: Gavin Campell, drug addled for years until the birth and the near death of Toby.

  “Woke me up, that did,” Gavin had told her. “Showed me I can’t leave these kids to Carole’s minding them, and tha’s the truth.”

  What was also the truth was that none of the Campbell children had ever been struck by an adult. Thus, Kendra’s encounter with Ness in front of her house that night—culminating as it had done with a blow to the face—comprised something that had to be smoothed over, explained in some way, or apologised for: whatever would work to get Ness back home where she belonged and where her father would have wanted her.

  Kendra’s need to do this was heightened by a phone call she received from Social Services not long after the sports massage at the Falcon. A woman called Fabia Bender of the Youth Offending Team was making an attempt to set up an appointment with Vanessa Campbell and whatever adult stood in loco parentis in Ness’s life. The fact that Social Services were now actively engaged in the situation gave Kendra a wild card to play in her dealings with Ness. If she could find her.

  Questioning Joel wasn’t helpful. While he saw his sister on occasion, he told Kendra that there was nothing regular in her comings and goings. He didn’t add that Ness was a stranger to him now. He merely said that she was sometimes there when he and Toby returned from the learning centre. She’d be having a bath, rooting through clothing, pinching packets of cigarettes from Kendra’s carton of Benson & Hedges, eating leftover curry, or dipping crisps into a container of Mexican salsa as she watched a chat show on the television. When he spoke to her, she largely ignored him. It was always evident that she wasn’t intending to stay for very long. He couldn’t add anything more.

  Kendra knew that Ness had mates among the adolescents in the area. She knew two of them were called Six and Natasha. But that was the limit of what she knew although she assumed a great deal more. Alcohol, drugs, and sex topped the list. She reckoned that theft, prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases, and gang-related activities were not far behind.

  For weeks and despite her every effort, she didn’t get an opportunity to have with Ness the conversation that she wanted to have. She looked for the girl but could not find her, and it was only when she had resigned herself to not locating Ness until Ness was ready to be located that she actually saw her, quite by chance, in Queensway, heading into Whiteley’s. She was in the company of two girls. One was plump and one was gaunt, but they both were uniformed in the style of the streets. Tight jeans that sculpted everything from their buttocks to their pubic bones, stiletto heels, sheer tops tied at the waist over tiny colourful T-shirts. Ness was dressed in a similar fashion. Kendra recognised one of her own scarves wound through the girl’s thick hair.

  She followed them into Whiteley’s and found them fingering costume jewellery in Accessorize. She said Ness’s name, and the girl turned around, her hand going to the scarf in her hair as if she believed Kendra intended to take it from her.

  “I need to talk to you,” Kendra said. “I’ve been trying to find you for weeks.”

  “I ain’t hidin from you,” was Ness’s reply. The plump girl sniggered, as if Kendra had somehow been put in her place, if not by Ness’s words then by her tone, which was churlish.

  Kendra looked at the girl who’d sniggered. “Who are you, then?” she asked.

  The girl didn’t reply. She produced instead a surly expression meant to put Kendra off, which it failed to do. The gaunt girl said, “I’m Tash, innit,” and was silenced for this show of marginal affability with a look from the other.

  “Well, Tash,” Kendra said, “I’ve a need to speak to Vanessa alone. I’d like you and this other person—are you Six, by the way?—to give us that opportunity.”

  Natasha had never heard a black woman speak such a form of English aside from on the television, so her response was to gawp at Kendra. Six’s response was to shift her weight from one hip to the other, to cross her arms beneath her breasts, and to give Kendra a head-to-toe look that was designed to make her feel like a marked woman destined for a street mugging or worse.

  “Well?” Kendra said when neither of the girls moved off.

  “They ain’t goin nowheres,” Ness said. “And I ain’t talking to you cos I got nothin to say.”

  “But I do,” Kendra said. “I was
wrong and I want to talk to you about that.”

  Ness’s eyes narrowed. It had been some time since the incident in front of Kendra’s house, so she wasn’t sure what to make of the word wrong. But she’d never before had an adult admit to wrongdoing—aside from her father—so she felt a corresponding confusion that made her hesitate and robbed her of a quick reply.

  Kendra took the opportunity that Ness’s silence provided. “Come with me for a coffee. You can meet your friends afterwards if you want to do that.” She took two steps towards the shop door to indicate her departure.

  Ness hesitated for a moment before saying to the other girls, “Le’ me see what the cow wants. I catch you up front of the cinema.”

  They agreed to this, and Kendra led Ness to a café not far from Whiteley’s. She wanted her out of the shopping centre, where the noise level was high and the gangs of kids wandering around provided too many distractions. The café was crowded, but it was mostly populated by shoppers taking a break and not by kids waiting for action. Kendra bought drinks at the counter and, while she was waiting, took the time to rehearse what she wanted to say.

  She made it brief and to the point. “I was dead wrong to hit you, Nessa,” she said to her niece. “I was angry that you’d not stayed home with Joel and Toby like you’d said you would. Top of that, I thought something was going on that wasn’t going on, and I…” She looked for a way to explain it. “I slipped over the edge.” She didn’t add the rest of it, the two parts that completed the tale: the ache of encroaching middle age that she’d felt that night in No Sorrow when she hadn’t managed to pull even one man, and the encounter with Dix D’Court in which he’d explained what had happened between Ness and himself. Both of these parts of the tale revealed much more about Kendra than she wanted to reveal. All Ness needed to know was that her aunt had been wrong, she knew she’d been wrong, and she’d come to make things right.

  “I want you to come home, Nessa,” she said. “I want to start again with you.”