Six punched in a few numbers. She said to Tash, “Got a fag?” Tash obediently fished around in her bag and handed over a packet of Dunhills. Six took one, lit up, and handed the cigarettes back. When Tash began to extend them to Ness, Six said, “Tash,” in a way that told her what she was meant to do. Tash looked from Six to Ness, then back to Six. Knowing on which side her metaphorical bread was buttered, she stowed the Dunhills.
Six said into the mobile, “Hey, baby. Wha’s happenin, den? You got summick for your mummy or wha’?…Hell no. I ain’t going dat far. Wha’ you ’spectin to get off me I come all dat way?…In Queensway wiv Tash…Yeah, me and Tash c’n do dat, you got substance to make it worthwhile for us, y’unnerstan. Otherwise…” Six listened for a longer moment. She shifted her weight to one hip and tapped her foot. She finally said, “No way, mon. Me and Tash come all dat way, we too damn knackered to…Hey, don’t talk nasty or I sort you, baby. Me and Tash both set on you, and den you be sorry, innit.” She laughed and gave Nastasha a wink. For her part, Natasha merely looked confused. Six listened a moment longer and said, “Okay, but you be ready for us, mon,” before she punched the mobile off and looked at Ness with a satisfied smiled.
The smile was unnecessary as Ness, unlike Natasha, was far from dim. The constant me and Tash of the conversation had had its desired effect. Lines had been drawn. There was no crossing over. There was also no way of going back to how things had been before. For a hundred and one female adolescent reasons, Ness was anathema and she would remain that way.
She could have demanded an explanation for this. She could have accused or analysed. She was able to do none of this in the pressure of the moment, though. She was only able to make a stab at saving face for having crossed over the road to talk to the two girls in the first place.
Saving face meant not caring. It meant not dignifying a slight by acknowledging it. It meant ignoring the fullness inside.
Ness locked eyes with Six and gave her a curt nod. She said, “Whatever.”
Six said, “Yeah.”
Tash looked as confused as she’d looked during all the me and Tash of Six’s mobile conversation, with their implications of an equality that clearly did not exist between her and the other girl.
Six said to Tash, “Le’s go, den. We got someone waiting.” And to Ness as she stepped aside to let the other girl pass, “You watch yourself, gash,” which put a full stop to the interaction.
Ness watched them go. She told herself they were two bloody stupid bitches and she didn’t want their friendship, let alone did she need it. But even as she assured herself of this fact—which was true enough—she felt driven once again. As a result, she moved towards Whiteley’s. There was lipstick waiting to be pinched by someone. Ness knew she was just the girl to do it.
KENDRA WAS LOADING her massage table into the Punto when Fabia Bender arrived on Edenham Estate in the company of two enormous and well-cared-for dogs: a gleaming Doberman and a giant schnauzer. Although Kendra, with a limited knowledge of canine breeds, would have been hard-pressed to identify the latter animal, she was impressed and intimidated by his size since his head reached above Fabia Bender’s waist. Kendra stopped what she was doing. Any move—precipitate or otherwise—didn’t seem wise.
Fabia Bender said, “No worries, Mrs. Osborne. They’re lambs, actually. The Doberman’s Castor. The schnauzer’s Pollux. No relation, of course, but I rashly decided that having two puppies at once would be easier than going through puppyhood twice, so I thought, Well, why not. I intended from the first to have two dogs. Two large dogs. I like them big. But it took four times longer to train them, and both breeds are supposed to be easy. Pollux quite likes you, I can see. He’s hoping for a pat on the head.”
She had them on extendable leads and when she told them to “Sit, boys,” they did so obediently, and she dropped the leads to the ground. Castor remained at attention, in keeping with his breed. Pollux huffed gustily and sank down so that his great head lay upon his enormous paws. A literary person would have thought at once of the Baskervilles. Kendra thought of all the reasons why Fabia Bender was putting in an unexpected appearance at her house.
She said, “Ness’s been doing her community service, hasn’t she? She’s been leaving the house right on time, but I’ve not followed her there to make sure she’s showing up. It seemed to me that I needed to…demonstrate trust in her?”
“And a good idea as well,” Fabia Bender said. “Mrs. Ghafoor gives us only positive reports about Ness so far. I wouldn’t say she’s enjoying the experience—this is Ness, not Mrs. Ghafoor—but she is being consistent. High marks in her favour.”
Kendra nodded and waited for elucidation. She had an appointment in a tony neighbourhood of Maida Vale, with a middle-aged white American lady who intended becoming a regular client and who also had a great deal of time and money on her hands. Kendra didn’t want to be late for it. She glanced at her watch and put her container of oils and lotions into the back of the car, tucked alongside the massage table.
“It’s actually Ness’s brother that I’ve come to talk to you about,” Fabia said. “Could we have this conversation inside rather than in the street, Mrs. Osborne?”
Kendra hesitated. She didn’t ask which brother because it seemed to her that it had to be Joel. She couldn’t imagine a social worker from Youth Offending having a reason to talk to her about Toby, which meant that—as difficult as it was to believe considering his personality—Joel was now in trouble. She said, “What’s he done?,” and tried to sound concerned instead of what she was, which was panicked.
“If we could go inside? The boys will stay out here, of course.” She smiled. “You needn’t worry about your belongings. If I ask them to guard the car, they’ll do it very nicely.” She tilted her head expectantly in the direction of the front door. “This shouldn’t take long,” she added and went on to say to the dogs, “Guard, boys.”
These final remarks were a way of saying there was no getting around her intention of going inside the house, and Kendra recognised them as such. She lowered the boot lid and stepped past the dogs, neither of which moved. Fabia Bender followed her.
Once within, the social worker didn’t reveal her mission at once. Instead she asked if Mrs. Osborne would be willing to show her around. She’d never been in one of the terrace houses on Edenham Estate, she said pleasantly, and she confessed to an interest in how all buildings were laid out or converted to accommodate families.
Kendra believed this as much as she believed the moon was made of green cheese, but she saw no alternative to cooperation considering the trouble Fabia Bender could cause if the social worker decided to do so. So while there was little enough to see, Kendra showed it to Fabia anyway, playing along with the game at the same time as knowing how unlikely was the scenario that the white woman had come calling in order to further her knowledge of interior design.
Fabia asked questions as they went: How long had Kendra lived in this house? Was she a lucky owner or was this rented housing? How many people lived here? What were the sleeping arrangements?
Kendra couldn’t see what the questions had to do with Joel or any trouble Joel might have been in, so she was suspicious. She didn’t want to entrap herself should that be the social worker’s intention, and because of this she kept her answers as brief as possible and vague when vagueness appeared to be called for. Thus on the first floor, she gave no reason for the screen that leaned against the wall near the sofa like a languishing debutante without a dance partner, and on the second floor, she made no explanation for having camp beds and sleeping bags for the boys instead of normal beds and linens.
Above all, she didn’t mention Dix. No matter that all over the city—not to mention all over the country—people lived in conditions far more irregular than this one, with the partners of parents coming and going with dizzying regularity as women searched for men and men searched for women, all in terror of having to be alone for more than five minutes. Kendra decided tha
t the less said about Dix the better. She went so far as to mention sharing her own bedroom with Ness, a decision she regretted when Fabia Bender glanced inside the bathroom and noticed the man-size vests that were drying on hangers above the bath. Above the basin there was further evidence of a man’s occupation of the house. Dix’s shaving gear was laid out neatly: safety razor, shaving soap, and brush.
Fabia Bender said nothing until they were back downstairs. There, she suggested that Kendra and she sit at the kitchen table for a moment. She explained that throughout the time that she had spent with Ness—at the police station, at the magistrate’s court, and at the Youth Offending Team’s office in Oxford Gardens—no mention had ever been made that there were two other Campbell children living with Mrs. Osborne. This knowledge had come to her via the Westminster Learning Centre, where a woman called Luce Chinaka had become concerned when some paperwork requiring a parental signature—or the signature of a guardian, for that matter—had not been returned as requested. The request had been made of one Joel Campbell in reference to his brother, Toby.
It was no coincidence that Fabia Bender had received the phone call from Luce Chinaka. Overburdened with work, as all of the employees of the Youth Offending Team were, the secretary who routed phone calls to the social workers recognised Campbell as being the surname of one of Fabia’s clients and she passed the phone call to her. Trouble historically ran in families. When Luce Chinaka expressed her concern about one Joel Campbell, it seemed likely to the secretary that a sibling of Ness had surfaced.
“What sort of paperwork?” Kendra asked. “Why’d he not give it to me?”
It had to do with advanced testing for Toby, with a possible placement in a situation better designed to meet his needs than was Middle Row School, Fabia told her.
“Testing?” Kendra asked cautiously. This rang bells and set off sirens. Toby was forbidden territory. Testing Toby, assessing Toby, evaluating Toby…It was all completely unthinkable. Nonetheless, because she had to know the exact nature of the enemy she faced, she said, “What kind of testing? Testing done by who?”
“We’re not certain yet,” Fabia Bender said. “But that’s not actually why I’ve come.” Because there were three children and not one occupying Mrs. Osborne’s dwelling, she explained, she was there to assess the living situation. She was also there to talk about establishing permanent, official, and formal guardianship over the children.
Kendra wanted to know why this was necessary. They had a mother, they had a grandmother—although she didn’t mention Glory’s removal to Jamaica—and they had an aunt. One of their relations would always look out for them. Why did this need to be official? And what did official mean anyway?
Paperwork, as things turned out. Signatures. Carole either signing her children over or being declared incompetent so that someone else could manage their lives. Decisions had to be made about the future, and at present there was apparently no one designated to make them. Should no one be willing to take on that responsibility, then the government—
Kendra told her there would be no going into care for these children, if that was what Fabia Bender was alluding to. They were trouble; there was no denying it. Especially Ness, and there was virtually no reward in having to put up with the girl. But the children represented Kendra’s last blood relatives in England, and while she would never have thought that detail an important one, with Fabia Bender sitting at her kitchen table mentioning the government and mentioning testing for Toby, for her it became a detail writ very large.
Fabia hastened to reassure her. When there was a willing family member, the government was always on the side of leaving children with their relations. Providing, of course, that the relations were suitable and could provide a stable environment in the children’s best interests. That appeared to be the case—Kendra did not miss the emphasis on the predicate in that sentence—and Fabia would certainly make note of that in her report. In the meantime, Kendra needed to read and sign the paperwork given to Joel by Luce Chinaka at the learning centre. She also needed to speak to the children’s mother about establishing permanent guardianship. As long as there was—
It was at this point that the dogs began barking. Since she knew what this meant, Fabia got to her feet at the same moment as Dix D’Court shouted from outside.
“Ken, baby! Wha’s goin on? I come home to love my woman, and dis is my greeting?”
Fabia strode to the door and opened it. She said, “Boys, enough. Let him pass,” and then she added to Dix, “I do beg your pardon. They thought you meant to touch the car and they’d been told to guard it. Do come in. They won’t bother you now.”
A white woman in the house told Dix that something was going on, so he didn’t continue in the vein he’d been employing outside. He entered, carrying two shopping bags. He put them on the work top, where they spilled out vegetables, fruit, nuts, brown rice, beans, and yoghurt. He remained there, leaning against it, his arms crossed and his expression expectant. He was wearing a vest, just like those hanging above the bath, along with running shorts and trainers. The ensemble did much to emphasise his body. What he’d said outside before being admitted to the house did much to emphasise the way things stood between Kendra and him.
Both he and Fabia Bender waited for Kendra to introduce them. There was no getting around it, so she made as brief a piece of work of the matter as possible. “Dix D’Court, Fabia Bender from Youth Offending,” was how she put it. Fabia jotted down his name.
“She didn’t know there were three,” Kendra added. “She’s dealt with Ness but she’s come because of Joel.”
“He in trouble?” Dix asked. “Don’t sound like Joel, innit.”
Kendra was gratified by the response. It suggested Dix’s positive involvement with the boy. “He was supposed to give me some paperwork from the learning centre and he didn’t.”
“Dat an offence or summick?”
“Just a point of interest,” Fabia Bender said. “Do you live here, Mr. D’Court? Or do you just visit?”
Dix looked to Kendra for an indication of how he was meant to answer, which was answer enough. When he said, “I come an’ go,” Fabia Bender wrote something in her notebook, but it seemed clear by the way her lips adjusted that either lie or falsehood was part of the information she took down. Kendra knew she would probably consider Dix’s presence in the same house as a nubile fifteen-year-old girl in whatever she might ultimately recommend. Fabia, after all, had seen Ness. She would likely conclude that a delectable twenty-three-year-old man and a seductive adolescent girl amounted to something that would be labelled Potential Trouble rather than Suitable Situation.
When she’d written what she needed to write, Fabia Bender closed her notebook. She told Kendra to ask Joel for the paperwork that Luce Chinaka had given him for signature and she instructed her further to tell Ness to phone her. She went through the motions of informing Dix of what a pleasure it had been to meet him, and she ended with stating her assumption that Ness had no private place for sleeping or dressing and was that the case, Mrs. Osborne?
Dix said, “I built her dat screen and—”
Kendra cut him off. “We give her the privacy and respect she needs.”
Fabia Bender nodded. “I see,” she said.
What she saw, however, was something upon which she did not expound.
WHEN KENDRA CONFRONTED Joel, she was both angry and worried. Despite her intention of doing nothing at all with the paperwork, she lectured the boy. If he’d only given her the documents in the first place, she told him, there would have been no need for Fabia Bender to turn up on Edenham Estate and consequently no report for her to have to fill out. Now there would likely be trouble in the form of hoops to jump through, explanations to give, investigations to endure, and officials to meet with. Joel’s reluctance to do his simple duty had put them all squarely in the jaws of the system, facing all of the system’s attendant time-eating activities.
So Kendra wanted to know what the
hell he was thinking of, not giving her the papers that the learning centre woman—in her agitation she’d forgotten Luce Chinaka’s name—had wanted her to see. Did he understand that they were all under scrutiny now? Did he know what it meant when a family came to the attention of Social Services?
Of course Joel knew. It was his greatest fear. But he wouldn’t articulate it since to do so would give the fear a legitimacy that might make it a reality. So he told his aunt he’d forgotten because he’d been caught up in thinking about…He had to consider what the subject of his thoughts might be, and he settled upon telling her he’d been caught up in thinking about Wield Words Not Weapons since this was at least a wholesome subject. It wasn’t far from the truth anyway.
He didn’t anticipate Kendra’s encouraging him to go once she learned about it, but that was what she did. To her, it would be evidence of a positive influence invading Joel’s life, and she knew it was likely that positive influences would be required in all the children’s lives to offset the potential negative influence of their living with a forty-year-old aunt who was nightly and at considerable volume satisfying her baser urges with a twenty-three-year-old bodybuilder.
So Joel found himself going to Wield Words Not Weapons, leaving Toby with Dix, Kendra, pizza, and a video. He made his way over to Oxford Gardens, where a hand-lettered sign on the front door of a long, low, postwar building—home also of the Youth Offending Team’s office—directed participants to the Basement Activities Centre, which proved easy enough to find. In the entry, a young black woman sat at a card table filling out stick-on name tags as people came through the door. Joel hesitated before approaching her, until she said to him, “First timer? Cool. How you called, speck?” at which point he felt a rush of blood to his cheeks. She’d accepted him casually. She’d given him a welcome without the blink of an eye.