So Joel wasn’t sure what to do as he and Toby entered the second hour of their wait for their aunt. He needed a toilet terribly, but if he spoke to a passerby or knocked on a door and asked could he relieve himself inside, he ran the risk of attracting unwanted attention. So he squeezed his legs together and tried to concentrate on something else. The options were the unnerving noises already mentioned or his little brother. He chose his brother.
Next to him, Toby remained in a world where he had long spent most of his waking hours. He called it Sose, and it was a place inhabited by people who spoke gently to him, who were known for their kindness to children and animals, and for their embraces, which they gave freely whenever a little boy felt afraid. With his knees drawn up and his life ring still around his waist, Toby had a place to rest his chin, and that was what he had been doing since he and Joel had situated themselves on the top step. For all that time, he had kept his eyes closed and had gone where he vastly preferred to be.
Toby’s position exposed his head to his brother, the very last thing that—aside from the occasional unnerving interloper on the estate—Joel wished to see. For Toby’s head with its great gaps of hairlessness spoke of a failure of duty. It made a declaration and an accusation, and both of them pointed in Joel’s direction. Glue had been the cause of Toby’s hair loss, which wasn’t actually loss at all but rather a painful removal by scissors, the only way to free his scalp from what a ring of young bullies had dumped upon him. This ring of thugs-in-the-making and the torments they had foisted upon Toby whenever they had the chance were just two of the reasons Joel was not unhappy to leave East Acton. Because of bullies, no walk for sweets to Ankaran Food and Wine was safe for Toby to make alone, and on the rare occasion when Glory Campbell supplied money for lunch instead of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, if Toby managed to keep the cash in his pocket until the appointed hour, it was only because the local miniature yobs had targeted someone else for once.
So Joel didn’t want to look at his brother’s head because it reminded him again that he had not been there the last time Toby had been set upon. Since he’d appointed himself his brother’s protector in Toby’s infancy, the sight of him wandering up Henchman Street with his anorak’s hood pulled up and fixed to his head with glue had caused Joel’s chest to burn so much that he couldn’t breathe, had caused him to duck his head in shame when Glory in her own guilt-driven fury had demanded to know how he’d let this happen to his own little brother.
Joel roused Toby as much not to have to look at his head as in desperate need to find a place to empty his bladder. He knew his brother wasn’t asleep, but getting him back to present time and place was like awakening a very small child. When Toby finally looked around, Joel stood and said with a bravado he didn’t particularly feel, “Le’s check this place out, mon.” Since being called man was a source of pleasure to the little boy, Toby went along with the plan without questioning the wisdom of leaving their belongings in a place where someone might likely steal them.
They went in the direction Ness had taken, between the buildings and towards Meanwhile Gardens. But rather than pass by the child drop-in centre, they followed the path along the walled back gardens of the terrace houses. This gave onto the eastern section of Meanwhile Gardens, which here narrowed to a mass of shrubbery beside a tarmac path and, beyond that, the canal once again.
The shrubbery was an invitation Joel did not decline. He said, “Hang on, Tobe,” and while his brother blinked at him affably, Joel engaged in what the London male tends to do unashamedly whenever he’s in need: He peed on the bushes. He found the relief enormous. It gave him a new lease on life. Despite the fears he’d earlier harboured about the estate, he cocked his head at the tarmac path on the other side of the shrubbery. Toby was meant to follow him, and he did. They trotted along and within thirty yards they found themselves looking down at a pond.
This glimmered with black menace in the darkness, but that menace was vitiated by the waterfowl perched along the edge of the water and clucking in the reeds. What light there was shone on a little wooden landing. A path curved down to this, and the boys ran along it. They clomped across the wood and hunkered at the edge. To their sides, ducks plopped from the land and paddled away.
“Wicked this, innit, Joel?” Toby looked around and smiled. “We c’n make it a fort here. Can we do dat? If we build it over’n dem bushes, no one—”
“Shh.” Joel put his hand over his brother’s mouth. He had heard what Toby in his excitement had not. A footpath accompanied the Grand Union Canal above them and just beyond Meanwhile Gardens. Several people were coming along it, young males by the sound of them.
“Gimme toke ’f dat spliff, blood. Don’ hol’ back on me now.”
“You c’n pay or wha’, cos I not off’ring charity, man.”
“Come on, we know you deliverin weed an’ bone all over dis place.”
“Hey, don’ fuck wiv me. You know wha’ you know.”
The voices faded as the boys passed on the path above them. Joel stood when they had gone and made his way up the side of the bank. Toby whispered his name fearfully, but Joel waved him off. He wanted to see who the boys were because he wanted to know in advance what this place promised him. At the top, however, when he looked down the path in the direction that the voices had taken, all he could see was shapes, silhouetted where the towpath curved. There were four, all identically dressed: baggy jeans, sweatshirts with the hoods drawn up, anoraks over them. They shuffled along, impeded by the low crotches of their jeans. As such, they looked anything but threatening. But their conversation had indicated otherwise.
To Joel’s right a shout went up, and he saw in the distance someone standing on a bridge that arched over the canal. To his left the boys turned to hear who’d called them. A Rasta by the look of him, Joel saw. He was dangling a sandwich bag in the air.
Joel had learned enough. He ducked and slid down the bank to Toby. He said, “Le’s go, mon,” and pulled Toby to his feet.
Toby said, “We c’n have the fort—”
“Not now,” Joel told him. He led him in the direction they’d come from until they were back in the relative safety of their aunt’s front porch.
Chapter
2
Kendra Osborne returned to the Edenham Estate just after seven o’clock that evening, rattling around the corner from Elkstone Road in an old Fiat Punto made recognisable, to those who knew her, by its passenger door on which someone had spray-painted “Take it in the mouth,” a dripping, red imperative that Kendra had left, not because she couldn’t afford to have the door repainted but because she couldn’t find the time to do so. At this point in her life, she was working at one job and trying to develop a career in another. The first was behind the till in an AIDS charity shop in the Harrow Road. The second was massage. This latter field of employment was in its infancy in Kendra’s life: She’d completed eighteen months of course work at Kensington and Chelsea College, and in the last six weeks she’d been trying to establish herself as a masseuse.
She had a two-fold plan in mind as far as the massage business went. She would use the small spare room in her house for clients who wished to come to her; she would travel by car with her table and her essential oils stowed in the back for clients who wished her to go to them. She would, naturally, charge extra for this. In time, she’d save enough money to open a small massage salon of her own.
Massage and tanning—booths and beds—were what she actually intended, and in that she revealed a fairly good understanding of her white-skinned countrymen. Living in a climate where the weather often precludes the possibility of anyone’s having the healthy glow of naturally bronzed skin, at least three generations of white people in England have fried themselves into first- and sometimes second-degree sunburns on a regular basis on those rare days when the sun puts in an appearance. Kendra’s plan was to tap into those people’s desire to expose themselves to ultraviolet carcinogens. She would lure them in with the idea
of the tan they were seeking and then introduce them to therapeutic massage somewhere along the way. For those regular customers whose bodies she would have already been massaging at her own home or theirs, she would offer the dubious benefits of tanning. It seemed a plan destined for sure success.
Kendra knew all this would take enormous time and effort, but she had always been a woman unafraid of hard work. In this, she was nothing like her mother. But that was not the only way in which Kendra Osborne and Glory Campbell differed from each other.
Men comprised the other way. Glory was frightened and incomplete without one, no matter what he was like or how he treated her, which is why she was at that very moment sitting at an airport boarding gate, waiting to jet off to a broken-down alcoholic Jamaican with a disreputable past and absolutely no future. Kendra, on the other hand, stood on her own. She’d been married twice. Once a widow and now a divorcée, she liked to say that she’d done her time—with one winner and one utter loser—and now her second husband was doing his. She didn’t mind men, but she’d learned to see them as good merely for relieving certain physical needs.
When those needs came upon her, Kendra had no difficulty finding a man happy to accommodate her. An evening out with her best girlfriend was sufficient to take care of this, for at forty years of age, Kendra was tawny, exotic, and willing to use her looks to get what she wanted, which was a bit of fun with no strings attached. With her career plans in place, she had no room in her life for a love-struck male with anything more on his mind than sex with appropriate precautions taken.
At the point when Kendra swung her car right to the narrow garage in front of her house, Joel and Toby—having returned from their outing to the Meanwhile Gardens duck pond—had been sitting in the frigid cold for an additional hour, and both of them were numb around the bottom. Kendra didn’t see her nephews on her top front step, largely because the streetlamp in Edenham Way had been burnt out since the previous October, with no sign of anyone’s having a plan to replace it. Instead, what she saw was someone’s discarded shopping trolley blocking access to her garage and filled to the brim with that person’s belongings.
At first it seemed to Kendra that these were goods meant for the charity shop, and while she didn’t appreciate her neighbours dropping off their discards in front of her house instead of carting them up to the Harrow Road, she wasn’t one to turn goods away if there was a possibility that they might sell. So when she got out of the car to pull the trolley to one side, she was still in the good humour that sprang from having had a successful afternoon giving demonstration sports massages at a gym built under the Westway Flyover in the Portobello Green Arcade.
That was when she saw the boys, their suitcases, and the carrier bags. Instantly, Kendra felt dread surge up from her stomach, and realisation followed in a rush.
She unlocked the garage and shoved open the door without a word to her nephews. She understood what was about to happen, and the understanding prompted her to curse, her voice soft enough to ensure that the boys couldn’t hear her, but loud enough to give herself at least a modicum of the satisfaction that comes with cursing in the first place. She chose the words shit and that goddamn cow, and once she said them, she climbed back into the Fiat and pulled it into the garage, all the time thinking furiously of what she could possibly do to avoid having to deal with what her mother had just thrust upon her. She was able to come up with nothing.
By the time she’d parked the car and gone around to the back of it to drag her massage table from the boot, Joel and Toby had left their perch and come to join her. They hesitated at the corner of the house, Joel at the front and Toby his usual shadow.
Joel said to Kendra without hello or preamble, “Gran say she got to fix up a house first, for us to come to live in in Jamaica. She sendin for us when she got it fixed. She say we’re meant to wait for her here.” And when Kendra didn’t answer because, despite her dread, her nephew’s words and his hopeful tone made her eyes smart at her mother’s base cruelty, Joel went on even more eagerly, saying, “How you been, Aunt Ken? C’n I help you wiv dat?”
Toby said nothing. He hung back and danced a bit on his toes, looking solemn and like a bizarre ballerina doing a solo in a production involving the sea. “Why the hell’s he wearing that thing?” Kendra asked Joel with a nod at his brother.
“Th’ life ring? It’s wha’ he likes jus’ now, innit. Gran gave it him for Christmas, remember? She said in Jamaica he c’n—”
“I know what she said,” Kendra cut in sharply, and the sudden anger she felt was directed not at her nephew but at herself as she abruptly realised she should have known right then, right on Christmas Day, what Glory Campbell intended. The moment Glory had made her airy announcement about following her no-good boyfriend back to the land of their births as if she were Dorothy setting off to see the wizard and things were going to be as simple as tripping down some yellow brick road…Kendra wanted to slap herself for wearing blinkers that day.
“Kids’ll love Jamaica,” Glory had said. “An’ George’ll rest easier there ’n here. Wiv dem, I mean. ’S been hard on him, y’ know. T’ree kids an’ us in dis tiny li’l place. We been living in each other knickers.”
Kendra had said, “You can’t take them off to Jamaica. What about their mum?”
To which Glory had replied, “I ’spect Carole won’t even know dey gone.”
No doubt, Kendra thought as she hauled the massage table from the back of the car, Glory would now use that as an excuse in the letter that was surely to follow her departure at some point when she could no longer avoid writing it. I’ve had a decent think about it, she would declare, for Kendra knew her mother would use her erstwhile appropriate English and not the faux Jamaican she’d taken up in anticipation of her coming new life, and I remember what you said about poor Carole. You’re right, Ken. I can’t take the kids so far away from her, can I? That would be an end to the matter. Her mother wasn’t evil, but she’d always been someone who firmly believed in putting first things first. Since the first thing in Glory’s mind had always been Glory, she was unlikely ever to do something that might be to her disadvantage. Three grandchildren in Jamaica living in a household with a useless, unemployed, card-playing, television-watching specimen of overweight and malodorous male whom Glory was determined to hang on to because she’d never once been able to cope for even a week without a man and she was at the age where men are hard to come by…That scenario would spell out disadvantage even to the base illiterate.
Kendra slammed home the lid of the boot. She grunted as she hoisted up the heavy folding table by its handle. Joel hurried to assist her. He said, “Lemme take dat, Aunt Ken,” quite as if he believed he could handle its size and its weight. Because of this and although she didn’t want to, Kendra softened a bit. She said to Joel, “I’ve got it, but you can pull down that door. And you can fetch that trolley inside the house, along with everything else you’ve got with you.”
As Joel complied, Kendra looked at Toby. The brief moment of experiencing softness deserted her. What she saw was the puzzle everyone saw and the responsibility that no one wanted because the only answer that anyone had ever managed—or been willing—to glean about what was wrong with Toby was the useless label “lacking an appropriate social filter,” and in the family chaos that had become the norm shortly before his fourth birthday, no one had had the nerve to investigate further. Now Kendra—who knew no more about this child than what she could see before her—was faced with coping with him until she could come up with a plan to divest herself of the responsibility.
Looking at him standing there—that ridiculous life ring, his head a chopped-up mess, his jeans too long, his trainers duct-taped closed because he’d never learned to tie his shoes properly—Kendra wanted to run in the opposite direction.
She said shortly to Toby, “So. What d’you have to say for yourself?”
Toby halted in his dance and looked to Joel, seeking a sign of what he was meant to do. Wh
en Joel didn’t give him one, he said to his aunt, “I got to pee. S’this Jamaica?”
“Tobe. You know it ain’t,” Joel said.
“Isn’t,” Kendra told him. “Speak proper English when you’re with me. You’re perfectly capable of it.”
“Isn’t,” Joel said cooperatively. “Tobe, this isn’t Jamaica.”
Kendra took the boys inside the house where she set about snapping on lights as Joel brought in two suitcases, the carrier bags, and the shopping trolley. He stood just inside the door and waited for some sort of direction. As he’d never been to his aunt’s house before, he looked around curiously, and what he saw was a dwelling that was even smaller than the house in Henchman Street.
On the ground floor, there were only two rooms in a shotgun design, along with a tiny, hidden WC. What went for an eating area lay just beyond the entry, and beyond that a kitchen offered a window that was black with night, reflecting Kendra’s image when she flicked on the bright overhead light. Two doors set at right angles to each other made up the far-left corner of the kitchen. One of them led to the back garden with the barbecue that Toby had seen, and the other stood open on a stairway. There were two floors above and, as Joel would later discover, one of these comprised a sitting room while the top floor held a bathroom and bedrooms, of which there were two.
Kendra made for these stairs, dragging the massage table with her. Joel hurried over to help her with it, saying, “You takin this above, Aunt Ken? I c’n do it for you. I’m stronger’n I look.”