“It’s jus’ Toby,” Joel informed Ivan. “I ’spect my mum and dad di’n’t know Toby was short for anything.”
They climbed the bank to join Ivan who, taking a long look at Toby, removed a white handkerchief from his pocket. Rather than see to Toby’s face on his own, though, he wordlessly handed the linen to Joel. Joel nodded a thank-you and wiped down his brother. Toby kept his gaze fixed on Ivan, as if he were seeing a creature from another solar system.
When Toby was cleaned up, Ivan smiled. He said, “Shall we, then?” and indicated the direction of the terrace houses. He said, “As I’ve learned from school, you young gentlemen live with your aunt. Would today be an appropriate time to make her acquaintance?”
“She’s off at the charity shop,” Joel said. “Up the Harrow Road. Where she works.”
“The AIDS shop, is it?” Ivan asked. “Why, I’m quite familiar with that place. It’s noble work, she does. Ghastly disease.”
“M’uncle died of it,” Joel said. “Aunt Ken’s bruvver. My dad’s her older bruvver. Gavin. Her younger bruvver, he was Cary.”
“Quite a loss she’s experienced.”
“Her husband died, too. Her first, tha’ is. Her second husband’s…” Joel realised he was saying too much. But he had felt compelled to share something, in gratitude for Ivan’s being there when he was needed and saying nothing about the oddity of Toby when they’d come upon him.
The fact that they’d reached his aunt’s house again allowed him to let the rest of what he’d almost told Ivan go unsaid, and Ivan didn’t comment upon this as Joel and Toby mounted the steps. Instead he said, “Well, I should like to meet your aunt at a later date. Perhaps I’ll call in at the charity shop and introduce myself, with your permission of course.”
Joel thought fleetingly of Hibah’s words of warning about this man. But nothing untoward had happened between them on any of the occasions when they’d met for their mentoring sessions. Ivan felt safe to be around, and Joel wanted to trust that feeling.
He said, “You can if you want.”
“Excellent,” Ivan said and extended his hand. Joel shook it and then prodded Toby to do the same.
Ivan reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a card, which he handed to Joel. He said, “This is where you can find me outside school hours. There’s my address. My phone number as well. I don’t have a mobile—I cannot abide those wretched things—but if you phone my home and I’m not there, an answer machine will take your message.”
Joel turned the card over in his hands. He couldn’t imagine why he would ever use it. He didn’t say as much but Ivan seemed to know what he was thinking.
He said, “You might want to tell me your plans and dreams. When you’re ready, that is.” He stepped away from the building and tipped his finger at Joel and then at Toby. “Until later, then, gentlemen,” he said and went on his way.
Joel watched him for a moment before he turned to the door and opened it for Toby. Ivan Weatherall, he decided, was the oddest man he’d ever met. He knew things about everyone—personal and otherwise—and yet he still seemed to take people as they came. Joel never felt a misfit in his presence because Ivan never acted as if there was anything unusual in his mongrel features. Indeed, Ivan acted as if the whole world were made of people who’d been taken from a shaken bag of races, ethnicities, beliefs, and religions. How peculiar he was in the world where Joel lived.
Still, Joel ran his fingers over the embossed print on the face of the card. Thirty-two Sixth Avenue, he read, with a clock below Ivan Weatherall’s name. He said to the air what he’d so far kept to himself.
“Psychiatrist,” he whispered. “That’s what, Ivan.”
Chapter
8
“So when I get home from work,” Kendra said, “I c’n see the boy’s been in a fight. But he i’n’t talking, is he, and neither is Toby. Not that I’d expect Toby to grass. Not on Joel of all people.” She removed her gaze from the soles of Cordie’s feet and studied the reflexology chart that lay on the kitchen table, next to which she and her friend were sitting. She moved her thumbs slightly to the left on Cordie’s right foot. She said, “How’s this? Wha’s it do for you?”
Cordie was playing willing guinea pig. She’d removed her wedge-soled shoes, had allowed her feet to be washed, patted dry, and rubbed with lotion, and had provided Kendra with a running commentary about the myriad effects that reflexology was having on the rest of her body.
She said, “Hmmm. Makes me think of chocolate cake, Ken.” She held up a finger, frowned, said, “Nah. Nah, dat ain’t it…Keep on…Li’tle more…Oh yeah. I got it now. More like…handsome man kissing the back of my neck.”
Kendra slapped her lightly on the calf. “Get serious,” she said. “This’s important, Cordie.”
“Hell, so’s a handsome man kissing the back of my neck. When we having ’nother girls’ night out? I want one of dem twenty-year-olds from the college dis time, Ken. Someone wiv big muscles in his thighs, y’unnerstan what I mean?”
“You been reading too many ladies’ sex magazines. Wha’s muscles in his thighs got to do wiv anyt’ing?”
“Give him strength to hold me like I want to be held. Up against the wall wiv my legs wrapped round him. Hmm. Dat’s what I want next, innit.”
“Like I almost b’lieve you, Cordie,” Kendra informed her. “You want dat, you know where to get it and you know who more ’n willing to give it to you. How’s dis now?” She applied new pressure.
Cordie sighed. “You bloody good, Ken.” She leaned back in the chair as well as she could, considering it was a kitchen chair. She lolled her head against the back of it and said to the ceiling, “How’d you know, den? ’Bout the fight.”
“Bruises on his face where someone hit him,” Kendra said. “I get home from work and find him in the bathroom trying to make it all disappear. I ask him what happened, and he say he fell on the steps of the skate bowl. Over the gardens.”
“Could’ve,” Cordie pointed out.
“Not wiv Toby afraid to leave his side. Somet’ing happened, Cordie. I can’t sort it why he won’t tell me.”
“’Fraid of you, maybe?”
Kendra said, “I ’spect it’s more he’s ’fraid of causing me trouble. He sees Ness’s doin enough of dat.”
“An’ where is Miss Vanessa Campbell dese days?” Cordie asked sardonically.
“In an’ out like always.” Kendra went on to explain her attempt to apologise to Ness for what had gone on between them. She hadn’t yet mentioned any of this to Cordie because she knew her friend would ask the logical question about the apology: the why question that she didn’t particularly want to answer. But in this instance and because of Joel’s fight, Kendra felt the need of a girlfriend’s counsel. So when Cordie asked her why the hell she was apologising to a girl who had disrupted life at 84 Edenham Way from the moment of her arrival, Kendra told her the truth: She’d run into the man who’d been with Ness in the car that night when Kendra had accosted the girl. He’d told an entirely different story from the one she’d assumed. He was…Kendra tried to come up with a way to explain that wouldn’t lead to Cordie’s questioning her further. She said at last that the man had been so sincere in what he’d told her that she knew at the level of her heart that he was telling the truth: Ness had been drunk at the Falcon pub, and he’d brought her home before trouble could befall her.
Cordie homed in on the detail she felt most salient. Kendra ran into him? How’d that come about? Who was he, anyway? What made him even bother to explain what had happened with Vanessa Campbell on the night in question?
Kendra grew uncomfortable. She knew that Cordie would scent a lie the way a hound scents a fox, so she didn’t bother. She told her friend about the phone call for the sports massage, about ending up in the bedsit above the Falcon pub, about coming face-to-face with the man who’d been with Ness that night.
“He’s called Dix D’Court,” Kendra added. “I only saw him that one time.??
?
“And dat was ’nough to b’lieve him?” Cordie asked shrewdly. “Oooh. You ain’t tellin me ever’t’ing, Ken. No lyin to me now cos I c’n read it all over you. Summick happened. You get shagged at long last?”
“Cordie Durrell!”
“Cordie Durrell wha’? I don’t ’member him real clear, mind, but if he want a sports massage, dat tells me he got a decent sports body.” She thought about this. “Damn. You get muscular thighs? Dat is so outrageously unfair.”
Kendra laughed. “Di’n’t get nothing.”
“Not f’r want of his tryin’s what I ’spect.”
“Cordie, he’s twenty-three,” Kendra told her.
Cordie nodded. “Gives him stamina.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know. We jus’ talked after the massage’s done. Dat’s all.”
“Don’t b’lieve you f’r a second. But if it’s the truth, den you sixteen ways a fool. Put me in a room with someone wants a sports massage and we ain’t having stimulatin’ conversation ’bout the state of world affairs when it’s over, innit.” Cordie removed her feet from Kendra’s lap, the better to get into the conversation without distractions. She said, “So. You find Ness and say sorry. What happen next?”
Nothing, Kendra said. Ness wouldn’t hear sorry or anything else.
She kept her comments confined to her niece, since allowing them to drift to Dix D’Court would mean revealing to Cordie that he’d phoned her again and again since the night of the massage. It wasn’t about another sports massage that he’d rung her, either. He wanted to see her. She’d felt something that night, he said to her. He’d felt something as well. He didn’t want to walk away from that. Did she?
After the first three calls, Kendra had let her mobile take his messages. She’d let her machine at home do the same. She didn’t return his calls, assuming he’d finally go away. He hadn’t done so.
It was shortly after this conversation with Cordie that Dix D’Court showed up at the charity shop in the Harrow Road. Kendra would have told herself that his appearance in the shop was a coincidence, but he disabused her of this notion immediately. His parents, he said, owned the Rainbow Café. Did she know where it was? Just down the street? He’d been on his way there when a display in the window of the charity shop caught his eye. (“Lady’s coat wiv the big buttons,” he said later. It would be his mum’s birthday soon.) He’d slowed to look at the coat, and then beyond it, he’d seen her in the shop. That’s why he’d entered, he explained.
“Whyn’t you phonin me back?” he asked. “You not getting the messages I been leaving?”
“I’ve been getting them,” Kendra told him. “I just didn’t see a good reason to return them.”
“You ’voiding me, den.” A statement, not a question.
“I suppose I am.”
“Why?”
“I give massages, Mr. D’Court. You weren’t ringing me about arranging to have one. Least, if you were, you never said as much. Just ‘I want to see you,’ which didn’t tell me it was business you were after.”
“We got b’yond business. Wiv you as ready ’s me for what was ’bout to happen.” He held up a hand to stop her from replying, saying, “An’ I know it ain’t gentlemanly to mention dat to you. Gen’rally I like being a gentleman. But I also like history being straight, y’unnerstan, not being rewritten for someone’s convenience.”
She’d been in the midst of counting the money in the till when he’d walked in, so near to closing up for the day that in another ten minutes he would have missed her. Now, she removed the cash drawer and carried it to the back room where she stowed it in the safe and locked it up. He was meant to see this as rejection, but he refused to take it that way.
He followed her, but he didn’t enter the back room. Rather, he stood at the door where the shop lights silhouetted him in a disturbing fashion. The body Kendra had seen that night above the Falcon pub was framed by the doorway. He was a tempting proposition.
But Kendra had other things in mind for her life and one of them was not an entanglement with a twenty-three-year-old boy. Boy, she reminded herself. Not man. B-o-y, as in nearly two decades her junior.
Which made it all the better, didn’t it? she then asked herself. The seventeen years between them declared there was no possibility for entanglements.
“Here’s what I t’ink,” he said to her. “You like most women, an’ dat means you ’spectin dis is just a quick shag I want. I ring you to finish what we started cos I don’t like a woman gettin away so easy. I like to put ’nother notch in my belt. Or wherever a bloke puts a notch cos I don’t ackshully know.”
Kendra chuckled. “Now that,” she told him, “is just about exactly what I don’t think, Mr. D’Court. If I thought it was that—a quick shag and we’re done—I would’ve rung you back and made the arrangements, because I won’t lie and there’s no point to it, is there: You were in the room and a party to what happened between us. And what happened wasn’t exactly me saying, ‘Get your hands off me, blood.’ But I get the feeling that’s not who you are or how you are, and, see, I don’t want what you’re after. And the way I look at it, two people—man and woman, I mean—need to be after the same thing when they hook up together or one of them’s heading for trouble of the heartbreaking kind.”
He gazed at her, and what shone from his face was admiration, liking, and amusement all blended together. He said, “Dix.” It was his only reply.
“What?”
“Dix. Not Mr. D’Court. An’ you’re right wiv what you say, which makes it rougher, see. Makes me want you more cos damn you ain’t like”—he smiled and shifted to her style of speaking—“you are not like most women I meet. Believe it.”
“That,” she said tartly, “is because I’m older. Seventeen years. I’ve been married twice.”
“Two fools to let you get away, den.”
“Not their intention.”
“What happened?”
“Death to one and car theft to the other. He’s in Wandsworth. Told me he was in the spare-parts business. I just didn’t know where the parts were coming from.”
“Ouch. And the other? How’d he—”
She held up her hand. “Not going there,” she said.
He didn’t press her, merely saying, “Rough. You had tough times wiv men. I ain’t like dat.”
“Good for you. That doesn’t change the way things are with me.”
“An’ how’s dat?”
“Busy. A life. Three kids I’m trying to sort, and a career I’m trying to get off the ground. I’ve got no time for anything more than that.”
“An’ when you need a man? For what a man c’n give you?”
“There are ways,” she said. “Just think about it.”
He crossed his arms and was silent. He finally said, “Lonely. Satisfaction, yeah. But how long it last?” And before she could answer, he went on to say, “But if dat’s the way you want it, I got to ’cept it and jus’ move on. So…” He looked around the back room as if he were seeking some sort of employment. He said, “You lockin up, right? Come ’long an’ meet my mum and dad. Rainbow Café, like I said. Mum’s got my protein smoothie waitin for me, but I ’spect she do you a cup of tea.”
“Easy as that?” Kendra said.
“Easy as dat,” Dix told her. “Fetch y’r bag. Le’s go.” He grinned. “Mum’s only three years older’n you, so you’ll like her, I ’spect. Have t’ings in common.”
That remark went straight to the bone, but Kendra had no intention of following it. She began to head back into the shop, where her bag was stowed under the counter. Dix didn’t move, though. They were face-to-face.
He said, “You one damn beautiful woman, Kendra.” He put his hand on the back of her neck. He used gentle pressure. She was meant to move into his arms, and she knew it.
She said, “You jus’ told me—”
“I lied. Not ’bout my mum, mind. But ’bout lettin go. Dat is summick I got no intention of doing.”
He kissed her then. She didn’t resist. When he moved her into the back room of the shop and away from the doorway, she didn’t resist that either. She wanted to do so, but that desire and all the cautions that went with it were bleating uselessly from her intellect. In the meantime, her body was saying something else, telling a tale about how long it had been, about how good it felt, about how insignificant it was, really, just to have a quick shag with no strings attached. Her body told her that everything he’d said about his intentions towards her were lies anyway. He was twenty-three-years old, and at that age men only wanted the sex—hot penetration and satisfying orgasm—and they’d do and say anything to make sure they got it. So no matter what he’d said in agreement to her assessment of the situation between them, what he really wanted was indeed another notch on his belt, seduction brought to a satisfying conclusion. All men were like that, and he was a man.
So she allowed the moment to reign, no past and no future. She embraced the now.
She gasped, “Oh my sweet Jesus,” when at last they connected.
He was everything—muscular thighs and all—that his body had promised he would be.
THE FACT THAT Six and Natasha were no closer to their dream of possessing mobile phones than they’d been on the night that Ness had met them was what caused the initial chink in the relationship among the three girls. This chink was widened when the Blade bestowed upon Ness the late-twentieth-century’s most irritating electronic device. The mobile, he told her, was for ringing him should anyone vex her when she wasn’t with him. No one, he said, was going to mess his woman about, and if anyone did, they would hear from him in very short order. He could get to her fast no matter where she was, so she wasn’t to be shy about giving him a bell if she needed him.
To a fifteen-year-old girl like Ness, these declarations—despite the fact of their being made on a questionably stained futon in a filthy squat without electricity or running water—sounded like certain proof of devotion and not what they really were, which was evidence of the Blade’s intentions to keep tabs on her and to have her available when he wanted her. Six, who was far more experienced in the arena of unsatisfactory relationships and definitely better informed in the ways of the Blade—having grown up in the same part of North Kensington as he—greeted everything Ness said about the man with suspicion if not outright disdain. These reactions on her part were exacerbated when the mobile phone put in an appearance in Ness’s life.