The girls had ventured farther than Whiteley’s on this particular afternoon. They’d gone to Kensington High Street where they’d entertained themselves first by trying on clothes at Top Shop, rooting through racks of out-of-season jerseys in H & M, and ultimately finding their way to yet another branch of Accessorize, where the general plan was to pinch a few pairs of earrings.
Six excelled at this activity, and Ness wasn’t far behind her. Natasha, however, had very little talent in the sleight-of-hand department, being as clumsy as she was gawky. Usually, Natasha was in charge of diversion, but on this day she decided to join the action. Six hissed at her, “Tash! Do what you s’posed! You vex me, slag,” but that did nothing to turn the tide of Natasha’s intentions. Instead she went for the rack of earrings and knocked it over just as Six was attempting to shove three pairs of garish chandeliers into her pocket.
The result of this was the three girls being escorted from the premises. There, outside the shop and in full view of the passing throng on the High Street, two overweight security guards, who seemed to materialise out of the commercial ether of the precinct, stood them up against the wall and photographed them with an old Polaroid camera. The pictures, the girls were informed, would be put up by the till. If they ever entered this shop again…Nothing more needed to be said.
The entire enterprise set Six’s teeth on edge. She wasn’t used to such humiliating treatment because she wasn’t used to being caught. And she wouldn’t have been caught had the maddening Natasha not taken it into her head that she was going to nick something from the shop. Six said, “Damn, Tash, you are one fuckin stupid cow,” but making that declaration to Natasha didn’t give Six the satisfaction she desired. She sought another focus for it. Ness was the logical target.
Six went at her obliquely. Like most people unable to assess their own emotional state, she displaced what she was feeling onto something less terrifying. The lack of cash was a suitable substitute for the lack of purpose in life.
She said, “We got to get some dosh. We can’t be relyin on nicking shit an’ passin it on. Dat’s goin to take ’s forever, innit.”
“Yeah,” said Tash, maintaining her position of always agreeing with whatever Six said. She didn’t question what they needed the cash for. Six had her reasons for everything. Cash was always useful, especially when the bicycle-delivery boys weren’t willing to risk scooping a bit of substance from the top of a sandwich bag for whatever sexual fantasy they had that might be fulfilled.
“So where we gettin it?” Six excavated her shoulder bag and brought out a packet of Dunhills recently pinched from a tobacconist on the Harrow Road. She prised one out without offering the packet to the other two girls. She had no matches or lighter, so she stopped a white woman with a child in a pushchair and demanded something “to fire up dis fag, innit.” The woman hesitated, mouth open but words blocked. Six said to her, “You hear me, slag? I need a fuckin light an’ I ’spect you got summick I could use in dat bag of yours.”
The woman looked around as if seeking rescue, but the way of life in London—defined by a better-you-than-me morality—declared that no one was going to come to her aid. Had she said, “Step out of my way, you nasty piece of business, or I shall scream so loudly you’ll not have eardrums when I’m through with you,” Six would have been so astonished by the singularity of this reply that she would have done as the woman demanded. But instead, when the poor creature fumbled in her bag to accommodate the request, Six saw her wallet within, clocked its bulge, felt the gratification that comes with gathering a few easy unearned pickings, and told her to hand over some cash as well.
“Jus’ a loan,” she said to the woman, with a smile. “’Less you want to make it a gift or summick.”
Ness, seeing the interaction, said, “Hey, Six,” and her voice was a caution. Nicking merchandise from shops was one thing; engaging in street muggings was another.
Six ignored her. “Twenty pounds’ll do,” she said. “Take that Bic ’s well, case I want ’nother fag later on.”
The fact that it didn’t look like a mugging and didn’t run the course of a typical mugging was what allowed the enterprise to conclude smoothly. The woman—with a child to care for and far more than twenty pounds in her possession—was relieved to be let off so lightly. She handed over her lighter, extricated a twenty-pound note from her wallet without opening it fully to display how many more twenty-pound notes she was carrying, and scurried on her way when Six stepped to one side.
“Yeah!” Six said, delighted by the conclusion of her engagement with the woman. And then she caught sight of Ness’s face, which didn’t bear the level of approval she was looking for. She said to her, “Wha’? You too good for dis or summick?”
Ness didn’t like what had just gone down, but she knew the wisdom of not making a comment. Instead she said, “Give us a fag, den. I dyin for one, innit.”
Six wasn’t persuaded by Ness’s reply. Living as she did by her wits and by her ability to read her associates, she could sense disapproval. She said, “Whyn’t you get your own, Moonbeam? I been takin the risk. You been scorin the profit.”
Ness widened her eyes but otherwise kept her expression the same. “Dat ain’t true.”
“Tash?” Six said. “True or not, slag?”
Natasha floundered around for a reply that would offend neither girl. She couldn’t come up with one quickly enough to satisfy Six.
Six said to Ness, “Sides, you don’t need to risk nuffink, way I see it, Moonbeam. Gotcher man providin for you now. An’ you ain’t even sharin wiv no one. Not money, dat is. Not substance, neither. Bone or weed. As f’r other t’ings…well, I ain’t sayin.” She laughed and tried to light her cigarette. The Bic was dead. She said, “Fuck dat bitch!” and threw the lighter into the street.
What Six had said about the Blade struck Ness in a place she hadn’t expected to be touched. She said, “What you talkin ’bout, Six?”
Six replied, “Like I said. I ain’t sayin, Moonbeam.”
“You best say, slag,” Ness told her, speaking from a fear as deep as Six’s own although having an entirely different source. “You got summick to tell me, you tell me. Now.”
Possession of a mobile phone. Having a source of ready cash should she want it. Being chosen by someone of import. These were the stimuli to what Six next said. “You t’ink you the only one, slag? He been fuckin a bitch called Arissa same ’s he fuckin you. Fuckin her ’fore you, matter ’f fack, and di’n’t stop doin her when he started up wiv you. An’ ’fore you two, he got some slag up the chute over’n Dickens estate an’ he planted ’nother one in Adair Street, next door his mum, which’s why she t’rowed him out. Ever’one knows it cos dat’s what he does. I hope to hell you’re takin precautions cos he settin up you and settin up Arissa just like the others and when he done, he walk away. Dat’s how he like it. Ask round, you don’t b’lieve me.”
Ness felt a coldness come over her, but she knew the importance of projecting indifference. She said, “Like I care? He get me a baby, I like it good. Get myself my own place, den, and dat’s just what I want.”
“You t’ink he come round afterwards? You t’ink he give you cash? Let you keep dat moby? You pop out a kid, he finish wiv you. Dat’s what he does, an’ you so stupid you ain’t seeing it yet.” She directed her next comments not to Ness but to Natasha, speaking as if Ness had disappeared. She said, “Shit, Tash, wha’ you t’ink? He must got a solid gold one, dat blood. So obvious wha’ he got in mind, innit. Either women ’s more fuckin stupider ’n I ever thought or he got a dick make dem sing when he plug it in. Which you s’pose it is?”
This was far too much for Natasha to cope with. The conversation was obvious enough but the underlying causes were too subtle for her to understand. She didn’t know whom to side with or even why she was supposed to take a side at all. Her eyes grew watery. She sucked in on her lip.
Six said, “Shit. I’m out ’f here, den.”
Ness said, ??
?Yeah. You take off, cunt.”
Tash made a noise akin to a whimper and looked from Six to Ness, waiting for the fight to begin. She hated the thought of it: screeching, kicking, shoving, pulling hair, and clawing at flesh. When women went after each other, it was worse than a catfight, for brawls between women always began things that went on forever. Brawls between men put an end to disputes.
What Tash didn’t take into account in that moment was the influence of the Blade. Six, however, did. She knew that a fight with Ness would not end with a fight with Ness. And while she truly hated walking away from the sort of gauntlet that Ness had thrown before her, she also wasn’t a fool.
She said, “Le’s go, Tash. Ness’s got a man wiv needs she got to see to. Ness got a baby she desp’rate to produce. No time for slags like us, anymore.” And to Ness, “Have fun, bitch. You one sorry cunt.”
She spun on the spiked heel of her boot and took off in the direction of Kensington Church Street, where a ride on the number 52 bus would return her and Natasha to their own environment. Ness, she decided, could use her bloody mobile phone to ring the Blade and ask him to fetch her home. She’d find out soon enough just how willing he was to accommodate her.
KENDRA FOUND HERSELF, in very short order, exactly where she had not wanted to be. She had long despised women who went soft inside at the thought of a man, but that was where she began heading. She ridiculed herself for feeling what she soon felt about Dix D’Court, but the thought of him became so dominant that the only way to put her mind at rest was to pray that the curse of her own sexuality be lifted in some way. Which it was not.
She wasn’t so foolish as to call what she was feeling for the young man love, although another woman might have done so. She knew it was basic animal stuff: the ultimate trick a species plays upon its members to propagate itself. But that knowledge didn’t mitigate the intensity of what was going on in her body. Desire planted its insidious seeds within her, desiccating the previously fertile plain of her ambition. She kept at it as best she could—giving massages, taking further classes—but the drive to do so was fast disappearing, overcome by the drive to experience Dix D’Court. Dix, with all the vigour of his youth compelling him, was happy to do what he could to please her since it pleased him so much as well.
It didn’t take long, however, for Kendra to learn that Dix wasn’t as ordinary a twenty-three-year-old as she’d thought the first time they coupled in the back room of the charity shop. While he eagerly embraced the carnality of their relationship, his background as the child of loving parents whose relationship had remained constant and devoted throughout his life demanded that he seek something similar for himself. This secondary desire was bound to come out sooner or later, especially since, because of his youth, Dix—unlike Kendra—did associate much of what he was feeling with the idea of romantic love that permeates western civilization.
What he said about this was, “Where we headed, Ken?” They faced each other, naked in her bed while below them in the sitting room, Dix’s favourite film was playing on the video machine, to entertain Toby and Joel and to keep them from interrupting what was going on when their aunt and her man had disappeared upstairs. The film was a pirated copy of Pumping Iron. Dix’s god starred, his sculpted body and wily mind acting as metaphors for what one determined man could do.
Dix had chosen to ask his question in advance of their mating, which gave Kendra an opportunity to avoid answering in the manner she knew he wanted. He’d asked in the midst of mutual arousal, so she lowered herself—snakelike—down his body, her nipples tickling him on the way. Her reply was thus nonverbal. He groaned, said, “Hey, baby. Oh shit, Ken,” and gave himself to pleasure in such a way that she thought she’d succeeded in diverting him.
After a few moments, though, he gently pushed her away. She said, “No like?”
He said, “You know dat ain’t it. Come here. We got to talk.”
She said, “Later,” and went back to him.
He said, “Now,” and moved away from her. He tucked the sheet around himself for a further shield. She lay exposed, the better to keep him engaged.
This didn’t work. He averted his eyes from where she wanted them—on her breasts—and showed himself determined to have his say. “Where we headin, Ken? I got to know. Dis is good, but it ain’t all dere is. I want more.”
She chose to misinterpret him, saying with a smile, “How much more? We doing it so often I c’n hardly walk.”
He didn’t return the smile. “You know what I’m talkin ’bout, Kendra.”
She flopped on her back and gazed at the ceiling, where a crack from one side into the middle curved like the Thames around the Isle of Dogs. She reached without looking for a packet of Benson & Hedges. He hated her smoking—his own body was a temple undefiled by tobacco, alcohol, drugs, or processed food—but when he said her name in a fashion simultaneously impatient and minatory, she lit up anyway. He moved away from her. So be it, she thought.
She said, “What, then? Marriage, babies? You don’t want me for that, mon.”
“Don’t be tellin me what I want, Ken. I speak for myself.”
She drew on her cigarette and then coughed. She shot him a look that dared him to remonstrate, which he did not. She said, “I walked that road twice. I’m not doing it—”
“Third time’s the charm.”
“And I can’t give you kids, which you’re going to want. Not now maybe cause you’re little more than a baby yourself, but you’re going to want them and then what?”
“We sort dat out when we come to it. An’ who knows wha’ science’ll be able to—”
“Cancer!” she said and she felt the anger. Unfair, unaccountable, a blow at eighteen that had not really affected her till she was thirty. “I don’t have the proper parts, Dix, not a single one. And there is no coming back from that, all right?”
Oddly enough, he wasn’t put off by this knowledge. Instead, he reached out, took her cigarette from her, leaned past her to crush it out, and then kissed her. She knew he wouldn’t like the taste of her but that didn’t deter him. The kiss went on. It led where she had wanted to go moments earlier, and when it did so, she thought she had prevailed. But when they were finished, he didn’t separate from her. He gazed down at her face—his elbows holding his weight off her body—and he said, “You never told me ’bout the cancer. Whyn’t you never tell me, Ken? What else you not saying?”
She shook her head. She was feeling the loss for once, and she didn’t like what she was feeling. She knew it was merely a trick of biology: that ache of wanting which would fade soon enough, as her mind took over from her body once again.
He said, “It’s you anyways. I c’n live wivout the rest. An’ we got Joel and Toby for our kids. Ness ’s well.”
Kendra laughed weakly. “Oh yeah. You want that kind of trouble.”
“Stop bloody tellin me what I want.”
“Someone’s got to, cause you sure as hell don’t know.”
He rolled off her then. He looked disgusted. He turned, sat up, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. His trousers—the same sort of harem trousers he’d been wearing that night at the Falcon—lay on the floor and he scooped them up. He stood, back to her, and stepped into them, drawing them up over the nicely muscled buttocks she so liked to admire.
She sighed, saying, “Dix, I been there. It i’n’t the paradise you’re thinkin it is. ’F you’d just believe me, we wouldn’t even need to have this sort of conversation, baby.”
He turned back to her. “Don’t call me baby. Now I know how you mean it, I don’t like how it sound.”
“I don’t mean it—”
“Yeah, Ken. You do. He a baby, dat boy. Don’t know what he wants. T’inks he’s in love when all it is is sex. He come to his senses soon enough, he will.”
She sat up in the bed, resting against the wicker headboard. She said, “Yeah well…?” and looked at him meaningfully. It was a schoolmarm look. It said she knew him better t
han he knew himself because she’d lived life longer and experienced more. It was, in short, a maddening look, designed to set on edge the teeth of a man who had what he wanted in front of him, just out of reach.
He said, “I can’t help what it was like for you with the other two, Ken. I c’n only be who I am. I c’n only say it’d be different wiv us.”
She blinked the sudden, surprising pain from her eyes. She said, “We don’t control that. You think we do, but we don’t, Dix.”
“I got my life headin—”
“Well, so did he,” she cut in. “Got murdered in the street. Got knifed cos he was walking home from work and two bloods di’n’t think he showed ’em enough respect. Course they high, so whatever he showed wasn’t going to matter much, but they cornered him and they knifed him anyway. And the cops…? Just ’nother dead blood. Nignogs ridding the world of each other, according to them. And he, Dix, my husband Sean, he had intentions just like you. Property management.” She laughed shortly, bitterly, a laugh that said the nerve of that man to have his dreams. “He wanted the ordin’ry things in life, too. Adopting the kids we can’t have on our own. Setting up house. Buying things like furniture, a toaster, a doormat. Simple stuff like that. And he dies cos the knife slices through his spleen. It cuts all the way cross his stomach and he bleeds out, Dix. That’s how he dies. He jus’ bleeds out.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, her side of it, near but not touching. He raised his hand, his intention of caressing her an obvious one. She tilted her head away from him. He dropped his arm.