What Came Before He Shot Her Read online

  Ness scooped up the mirror, wet her finger, and cleaned off what little powder was left. She rubbed it on her gums, to little effect. At this, she felt a hard hot stone start to grow larger in the middle of her chest. She hated being on the outside looking in, and that was where she was standing at the moment. It was also where she would continue to stand if she couldn’t join the girls in their high.

  She turned to them. “You got weed, den?”

  Six shook her head. She danced over to the karaoke machine and shut it off. Natasha watched her with glowing eyes. It was no secret that, two years younger, Natasha worshipped everything about Six, but on this particular morning, Ness found such idolatry annoying, especially stacked up with the part Nastasha had played in getting herself and Six supplied on the previous night, to the exclusion of Ness.

  She said to Natasha, “Shit, you know wha’ you look like, Tash? Lezzo, da’s what. You wan’ eat Six for dinner?”

  Six narrowed her eyes at this, dropping down on the bed. She rooted through a pile of clothes on the floor, snagged a pair of jeans, and brought out a packet of cigarettes from one of the pockets. She lit up and said, “Hey, watch’r mouf, den, Ness. Tash’s all right.”

  Ness said, “Why? You like ’t as well?”

  This was the sort of remark that might have otherwise spurred Six to get into a brawl with Ness, but she was loath to do anything to disturb the pleasant sensation of being high. Besides, she knew the source of Ness’s displeasure, and she wasn’t about to be misdirected onto an unrelated topic because Ness couldn’t bring herself to say something directly. Six was a girl who didn’t communicate with others by using half measures. She’d learned to be direct from toddlerhood. It was the only way to be heard in her family.

  She said, “You c’n be one of us wiv it or one of us wivout it. Don’t matter to me. ’S up to you. Me ’n’ Tash, we like you fine, innit, bu’ we ain’t changin our ways to suit you, Ness.” And then to Natasha, “You cool wiv dat, Tash?”

  Natasha nodded although she hadn’t the slightest idea what Six was talking about. She herself had long been a hanger-on, needing to be pulled through life by someone who knew where she was going so that she—Natasha—never had to think or make a decision on her own. Thus, she was “cool” with just about anything going on around her as long as its source was the current object of her parasitic devotion.

  Six’s little speech put Ness in a bad position. She didn’t want to be vulnerable—to them or to anyone else—but she needed the other two girls for the companionship and escape they provided. She sought a way to reconnect with them.

  She said, “Give us a fag,” and attempted to sound bored with the entire topic. “Too early for me anyways.”

  “But you jus’ said—”

  Six cut off Natasha. She didn’t feel like a row. “Yeah,” she agreed, “too fuckin early.” She threw the cigarettes and the plastic lighter to Ness, who shook one out, lit up, and passed the packet and lighter to Natasha. A form of peace came among them with this, which allowed them to plan the rest of their day.

  For weeks, their days had followed a pattern. Morning found them at Six’s flat, where her mother was gone, her brother was at school, and her two sisters were sometimes in bed and sometimes hanging about the flats of their three oldest siblings who, with their offspring, lived on two of the other estates in the area. Ness, Natasha, and Six would use this time to do each other’s hair, nails, and makeup and listen to music on the radio. Their day broadened after half past eleven, at which time they explored the possibilities up in Kilburn Lane, where they attempted to pinch cigarettes from the newsagent, gin from the off licence, used videos from Apollo Video, and anything they could get away with from Al Morooj Market. At all of this, they had limited success since their appearance on the scene heightened the suspicions of the owners of each of these establishments. These same owners frequently threatened the girls with the truant officer, a form of attempted intimidation that none of them took seriously.

  When Kilburn Lane wasn’t their destination of choice, it was Queensway in Bayswater, a bus ride from the Mozart Estate, where attractions aplenty abounded in the form of Internet cafes, the shopping arcade in Whiteley’s, the ice rink, a few boutiques, and—pollen for the bee flight of their utmost desire—a mobile phone shop. For mobile phones comprised the single object without which an adolescent in London could not feel complete. So when the girls made the pilgrimage to Queensway, they always made the mobile phone shop the ultimate shrine they intended to visit.

  There, they were regularly asked to leave. But that only whetted their appetite for possession. The price of a mobile was beyond their means—especially since they had no means—but that didn’t put mobiles beyond their scheming.

  “We c’d text each other,” Six pointed out. “You c’d be one place and I c’d be ’nother, and all’s we need is dat moby, Tash.”

  “Yeah,” Natasha sighed. “We c’d text each other.”

  “Plan where to meet.”

  “Try to get shit when we need it from one ’f the boys.”

  “Dat as well. We got to get a moby. Your aunt got one, Ness?”

  “Yeah, she got one.”

  “Why’n’t you pinch it for us?”

  “Cos I do dat, she take notice of me. An’ I like how it is wivout her notice.”

  There was no lie in this. By having the sense and the discipline to restrict her nights out to the weekends, by being home in her school uniform when her aunt returned from the charity shop or a massage class, by pretending to do a modicum of schoolwork at the kitchen table while Joel did the real thing, Ness had successfully kept Kendra in the dark about her life. She took extraordinary care with all of this, and on the occasions when she drank too much and could not risk being seen at home, she religiously phoned her aunt and told her she’d be sleeping at her mate Six’s flat.

  “What kind of name is that?” Kendra wanted to know. “Six? She’s called Six?”

  Her real name was Chinara Kahina, Ness told her. But her family and her friends always called her Six, after her birth order, second to the youngest child in the family.

  The word family gave a legitimacy to Six that lulled Kendra into a false sense of both security and propriety. Had she seen what went for family in Six’s home, had she seen the home itself, and had she seen what went on there, Kendra would not have been so quick to embrace gratitude at Ness’s having found a friend in the neighbourhood. As it was, and with Ness giving her no cause for suspicion, Kendra allowed herself to believe all was well. This in turn gave her a chance to get back to her career plans in massage and to reestablish her friendship with Cordie Durelle.

  This friendship had suffered in the weeks since the Campbell children had descended upon Kendra. Their girls’ nights out had been postponed as regularly as they’d once been experienced, and the long phone chats that had been one of the hallmarks of their relationship had been cut shorter, until they’d ultimately metamorphosed into promises to “phone back soon, luv,” except soon never came. Once life in Edenham Way developed what seemed to Kendra to be a pattern, however, she was able to inch carefully towards making her days and nights like what they’d been before the Campbells.

  She began with work: No longer needing that wages-reducing one hour per day of free time that she’d been given at the charity shop to see to the needs of her niece and nephews, she returned to full-time employment. She reengaged with a class at Kensington and Chelsea College as well as with demonstration massages down at the sports centre in Portobello Green Arcade. She felt confident enough of how the Campbells were doing to extend her demonstration massages to two of the other gyms in the area, and when from this she cultivated her first three regular clients, she began to feel that life was sorting itself out. So on the day that Cordie popped into the charity shop on a rainy afternoon not too long after Ness’s experience of tongue-kissing Six, Kendra was pleased to see her.

  She was expecting Joel and Toby since it was near
the time when the boys were setting off for home from the learning centre up the street. As the bell on the shop door chimed, she looked up from what she was doing—trying to make an appealing display out of a dismal donation of 1970s costume jewellery—and when she saw Cordie lounging in the doorway instead of the boys, she smiled and said, “Take me away from this, girl.”

  “You must’ve got yourself one helluva man,” Cordie remarked. “I been picturin him giving it to you three times a day, wiv you layin there moanin an’ all your girl brains wasted to nothing. Dat how it is, Miss Kendra?”

  “You joking? Haven’t had one in so long I forget what parts ’f them is different from us,” Kendra said.

  “Well thank God for that,” Cordie told her. “Swear to God, I was startin to t’ink you been shaggin my Gerald and avoidin me cos you sure I’d see the truth on your face. Only lemme tell you, slag, I be that grateful you do Gerald. Save me from gettin rode every night.”

  Kendra chuckled sympathetically. Gerald Durelle’s sex drive had long been the cross his wife Cordie was forced to bear. In combination with his determination to have a son from her—they already had two daughters—that drive made her willing presence in his bed the primary requirement for their marriage. As long as Cordie acted hungry in the beginning and sexually sated in the end, he didn’t notice that the middle comprised her staring into space and wondering if he was ever going to realise she was secretly on the pill.

  “He figure things out yet?” Kendra asked her friend.

  “Hell no,” Cordie said. “Man’s ego enough to make him t’ink I just dyin to keep poppin out babies till he’s got what he want.”

  She sauntered over to the counter. She was, Kendra saw, still wearing the surgical mask that was part of the uniform of the manicurists at the Princess European and Afro Unisex Hair Salon just down the street. She had it slung around her neck, like the love child of an Elizabethan ruff, completing her ensemble of purple polyester smock and quasi-medical shoes. Child of an Ethiopian father and a Kenyan mother, Cordie was deep black and majestic in appearance, with an elegant neck and a profile that looked like something one might find on a coin. But even possessing good genes, a perfectly symmetrical face, excellent skin, and a mannequin’s body could not make her look like a fashion statement in the outfit that the hair salon required its employees to wear.

  She went for Kendra’s bag, which she knew Kendra kept in a cupboard beneath the till. She opened it and found herself a cigarette.

  “How’s your girls?” Kendra asked her.

  Cordie shook the flame from a match. “Manda wants makeup, her nose pierced, and a boyfriend. Patia wants a mobile.”

  “How old they now?”

  “Six and ten.”

  “Shit. You got your work cut out.”

  “Tell me,” Cordie said. “I ’spect ’em both to be pregnant time they’re twelve.”

  “Wha’s Gerald t’ink?”

  She blew smoke out through her nose. “They got him runnin, those girls. Manda crook her finger, he melt to a puddle. Patia show a few tears, he got the wallet out ’fore he got the handkerchief in his hand. I say no to summick, he say yes. ‘I wan’ dem to have wha’ I never got,’ he say. Tell you, Ken, havin kids today is havin a headache won’t go away no matter wha’ you use.”

  “I hear you on that,” Kendra said. “Thought I was safe from it, I did, and look wha’ happen. I end up wiv three.”

  “How you coping?”

  “All right, considering I got no clue wha’ I’m doin.”

  “So when I get to meet ’em? You hidin dem or summick?”

  “Hiding? Why’d I want to do that?”

  “Don’t know, innit. Maybe one ’f ’em got two heads.”

  “Yeah. Tha’s it all right.” Kendra chuckled, but the fact was that she was hiding the Campbells from her friend. Keeping them under wraps obviated the necessity of having to explain anything about them to anyone. And an explanation would be needed, of course. Not only for their appearance—Ness being the only one who looked remotely as if she might be a relation of Kendra’s, and she was doing most of that with makeup—but also for the oddities in their behaviour, particularly the boys’. While Kendra might have made an excuse for Joel’s persistent introversion, she knew she would be hard-pressed to come up with a reason why Toby was as he was. To try to do so ran the risk of getting into the subject of his mother, anyway. Cordie already knew about the fate of the children’s father, but the whereabouts of Carole Campbell comprised a topic of conversation they’d never embarked upon. Kendra wanted to keep it that way.

  Circumstances made part of this impossible. Not a minute after she’d spoken, the shop door opened once again. Joel and Toby scuttled in out of the rain, Joel with his school uniform soaked on the shoulders, Toby with his life ring inflated as if he expected a flood of biblical proportions.

  There was nothing for it but to introduce them to Cordie, which Kendra accomplished quickly by saying, “Here’s two of ’em anyways. This’s Joel. This’s Toby. How ’bout a pepperoni slice from Tops, you two? You needin a snack?”

  Her style of language was nearly as confusing to the boys as was the unexpected offer of pizza. Joel didn’t know what to say, and since Toby always followed Joel’s lead, neither of the boys offered a word in reply. Joel merely ducked his head, while Toby rose to his toes and danced to the counter where he scooped up several beaded necklaces and decked himself out like a time traveller from the summer of love.

  “Cat gotcher tongue, den?” Cordie said in a friendly fashion. “You lot feelin shy? Hell, I wish my girls take a page out of dis book for ’n hour or so. Where’s dat sister of yours? I got to meet her, too.”

  Joel looked up. Anyone adept at reading faces would have known he was searching for an excuse for Ness. Rarely did someone ask after her directly, so he had nothing prepared in reply. “Wiv ’er mates,” he finally said, but he spoke to his aunt and not to Cordie. “They workinon a project f’r school.”

  “Real scholar, is she?” Cordie asked. “Wha’ ’bout you lot? You scholars, too?”

  Toby chose this moment to speak. “I got a Twix for not weein or pooin in my trousers today. I wanted to, but I d’in’t, Aunt Ken. So I got a Twix cos I asked could I use the toilet.” At the conclusion of this, he executed a little pirouette.

  Cordie looked at Kendra. She started to speak. Kendra said expansively to Joel, “How ’bout that pepperoni slice?”

  Joel accepted with an alacrity that declared he wanted to be gone as much as Kendra wanted him and his brother to vanish. He took the three pounds she handed to him. He ushered Toby out of the shop and in the direction of Great Western Road.

  They left behind them one of those moments in which things get glossed over, things get addressed, or things get altogether ignored. Exactly how it was going to be was something that rested in Cordie’s hands, and Kendra decided not to help her out in the matter.

  Social courtesy dictated a polite change of subject. Friendship demanded an honest appraisal of the situation. There was also middle ground between these two extremes, and that was where Cordie found a safe footing. She said, “You been having a time of it,” as she crushed out her cigarette in a secondhand ashtray which she found on one of the display shelves. “Di’n’t ’spect motherhood to be like this, innit.”

  “Didn’t ’spect motherhood at all,” Kendra told her. “I’m coping good enough, I s’pose.”

  Cordie nodded. She looked thoughtfully towards the door. She said, “Their mum goin’ to take dem off you, Ken?”

  Kendra shook her head and to keep Cordie far away from the subject of Carole Campbell, she said, “Ness’s a help to me. Big one. Joel’s good, ’s well.” She waited for Cordie to bring up the subject of Toby.

  Cordie did so, but in a way that made Kendra love her all the more. She said, “You need help, you give me a bell, Ken. And when you ready for dancin, I ready, too.”

  “I do that, girl,” Kendra said. “Right now, though
, things’s good wiv us all.”

  THE ADMISSIONS OFFICER from Holland Park School put an abrupt end to Kendra’s delusion. Although this individual—who identified herself as a Mrs. Harper when she finally phoned—took nearly two months to make the call that was to shatter life as it had been bumping along at number 84 Edenham Way, there was a reason for this. By never turning up for so much as an hour at the school, indeed by never showing her face at all save on the day she took the admissions test, Ness had successfully fallen through the cracks. Since the school’s population was given to an itinerancy caused by the government’s continual placement and displacement of the country’s asylum-seeking immigrants, the fact that a Vanessa Campbell showed up on a teacher’s class register but not in the class itself was taken by many of her instructors to mean that her family had merely moved on or been moved to other housing. Thus, they made no report of Ness being among the missing, and it was seven weeks after her enrollment in the school before Kendra received the phone call about her lack of attendance.

  This call came not to the house but to the charity shop. As Kendra was there alone—a common-enough occurrence—she couldn’t leave. She wanted to. She wanted to climb inside her Punto and drive up and down the streets looking for her niece, much as she’d done on the night of the Campbells’ arrival in North Kensington. Because she couldn’t do that, she paced the floor instead. She walked up a row of secondhand blue jeans and down a row of worn wool coats and tried not to think of lies: the lies Ness had been telling her for weeks and the ones she herself had just mouthed to Mrs. Harper.

  With her heart pounding so fiercely in her ears that she could barely hear the woman on the other end of the line, she’d said to the admissions officer, “I am so sorry about the confusion. Directly I enrolled Ness and her brother, she had to help care for her mum in Bradford.” Where on earth Bradford came from, she wouldn’t have been able to say. She wasn’t even sure she could find it quickly on a map, but she knew it had a large ethnic population because they’d been rioting during the finer weather: Asians, blacks, and the local skinheads, all set to kill each other to prove whatever they apparently felt needed proving.