What Came Before He Shot Her

  “Good evening, Stanley,” Ivan said affably. He sounded like a man who’d just run into an acquaintance for whom he had high regard. “Good gracious, my man. How long has it been?”

  Stanley? Joel thought. He looked from Ivan to the Blade. The Blade’s nostrils widened, but he said nothing.

  “Stanley Hynds, Joel Campbell,” Ivan went on. “I’d make further introductions, Stanley, but I’ve not had the honour…” He gave a little antique bow towards Arissa and Calvin.

  “Full of it like always, Eye-van,” the Blade said.

  “Indeed. It appears to be my calling. Have you finished the Nietzsche, by the way? That was intended as a loan, not a gift.”

  The Blade snorted. “You been sorted yet, mon?”

  Ivan smiled. “Stanley, I continue to walk these streets unscathed. Unarmed and unscathed as ever I was. Am I correct in assuming that’s something of your doing?”

  “I ain’t tired of you yet.”

  “Long may I continue to entertain. Should I not…Well, the Harrow Road gentlemen in blue always know where to find you, I assume.”

  This was apparently the limit of what the Blade’s companions were willing to endure. Arissa said, “Le’s go, baby,” as Calvin stepped forward, saying, “You makin threats, mon?” in a distinctly unCalvin-like voice.

  Ivan smiled at this and tipped a mock hat in the Blade’s direction. “By the company he keeps, Stanley,” he said.

  “Soon now, Eye-van,” the Blade returned. “Fast losing your power to amuse me, mon.”

  “I shall work on the quality of my repartee. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m seeing my young friend to his doorstep. May we pass with your blessing?”

  The request was designed to appease and it did so. A smile flicked around the Blade’s lips and he jerked his head at Calvin, who stepped aside. “Watch your back, Eye-van,” the Blade said as they passed him. “Never know who’s coming up on you.”

  “Words I shall take to my heart and my grave,” was Ivan’s reply.

  All of this had left Joel astonished. Every moment he’d expected disaster, and he did not know what to do with the fact that nothing resembling disaster had struck. When he looked at Ivan once they were again on their way, it was with new eyes. He didn’t know what first to wonder about the man because there was simply so much to wonder about.

  All Joel managed to say was, “Stanley?” That served to embody all the questions that he wanted to ask but for which he could not find the words.

  Ivan glanced at him. He guided him onto Portobello Bridge.

  “The Blade,” Joel said. “I never heard someone talk to him like that. I never ’spected—”

  “One to do so and live to tell the tale?” Ivan chuckled. “Stanley and I go back a number of years, to his pre-Blade days. He’s as clever a man as ever was. He could have gone far. But his curse, poor soul, has always been the need for immediate gratification, which is also, let’s be frank, the curse of our times. And this is odd because the man’s quite an autodidact, which is the least immediately gratifying course of education one might ever embrace. But Stanley doesn’t see it that way. What he sees is that he is the one in charge of his studies—whatever they might be at the moment—and that’s enough to make him happy.”

  Joel was silent. They’d reached Elkstone Road, and Trellick Tower loomed over them, shining lights from its myriad flats into the dark night sky. Joel hadn’t the slightest idea what his companion was going on about.

  Ivan said, “Are you familiar with the term, by the way? Autodidact? It means someone who educates himself. Our Stanley—as difficult as it may be to believe—is the true embodiment of not being able to ascertain a book’s quality or its contents by examining only its cover. One would assume from his appearance—not to mention from his deliberate and rather charming mangling of our language—that he’s something of an ill-bred and uneducated lout. But that would be selling Mr. Hynds for far less than he’s actually worth. When I met him—he must have been sixteen at the time—he was studying Latin, dabbling in Greek, and had recently turned his attention to the physical sciences and twentieth-century philosophers. Unfortunately, he’d also turned his attention to the various means of fast and easy money available to those who don’t mind shimmying along on the wrong side of the law. And money is always a compelling mistress to boys who’ve never had it.”

  “How’d you meet him, then?”

  “In Kilburn Lane. I believe his intention was to mug me, but I noticed a suppurating sore in the corner of his mouth. Before he was able to make his demand for whatever he mistakenly thought I had on my person, I hustled him off to the chemist for medication. The poor boy never quite knew what was happening. One moment he’s poised to commit a crime and the next he’s facing the pharmacist with the man he’s just attempted to rob, listening to a recommendation for an unguent. But it all worked out, and he learned an important lesson from it.”

  “What kind of lesson?”

  “The obvious one: that you mustn’t ignore something strange and oozing upon your body. God only knows where it can lead if you do.”

  Joel didn’t know what to make of this. There appeared to be only one logical question. “Why d’you do all this?” he asked.

  “All…?”

  “The Wield Words t’ing. Talkin to people like you do. Walkin home wiv me, even.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Ivan enquired. They had made their way along the pavement and now they turned into Edenham Way. “But that’s not much of an answer, is it? Suffice it to say that every man needs to leave his mark upon the society into which he was born. This is mine.”

  Joel wanted to ask more, but they’d come to Kendra’s house, and there was no time. At the steps, Ivan tipped his fantasy hat once again, just as he had done to the Blade. He said, “Let’s meet again soon, shall we? I want to see more poetry from you,” before he vanished between two buildings, in the direction of Meanwhile Gardens.

  Joel heard him whistling as he walked.

  AFTER HER ENCOUNTER with Six and Natasha in Queensway, Ness felt the pressure inside again. The high of managing to walk out of the chemist’s with a lipstick in her bag and no one the wiser didn’t so much fade as it actually deflated, punctured by the scorn of her former friends. She was left feeling worse than before, restless and experiencing a building sense of doom.

  What she felt was heightened by what she heard. Her makeshift bed on the first-floor sofa was directly beneath Kendra’s second-floor bedroom. Worse, it was directly beneath Kendra’s bed, and the nightly rhythmic movement of that bed was anything but a soporific. And it was nightly. Sometimes it was thrice nightly, awakening Ness from whatever uneasy sleep she’d managed to fall into. Frequently, groans, moans, and throaty laughter accompanied the thumping of bed against wall and floor. Occasionally oh baby comprised the coupling’s full stop, punctuating orgasm on three rising notes after which a final crash of the bed indicated someone’s satiated collapse. These were not noises any adolescent girl would likely appreciate hearing from the adults in her life. For Ness, they comprised auditory torture: a blatant statement about love, desire, and acceptance, a form of imprimatur upon her aunt’s desirability and worthiness.

  The pure animal nature of what was going on between Kendra and Dix escaped Ness entirely. Male and female driven by instinct to mate when in naked proximity to each other and in possession of sufficient energy to do so as a means of propagating a species…Ness simply did not understand this. She heard sex. She thought love: Kendra having something that Ness had not.

  In the state in which Ness found herself after her encounter with Six and Natasha in Queensway, then, Kendra’s situation seemed monumentally unfair. Ness saw her aunt as practically an old lady, an aging woman who’d had her chances with men and who by rights ought to be stepping aside in the eternal competition for male attention. Ness began to hate the very sight of Kendra when she appeared each morning, and she found herself unable to repress comments such as “Had a good time
las’ night?,” which took the place of a more conventional morning greeting, as did, “Feelin sore ’tween the legs today, Kendra?” and “How you managin to walk, slag?” and “So he givin it to you the way you like it, Ken?”

  Kendra’s response was, “Who’s giving what to whom is none of your business, Vanessa,” but she worried. She felt inextricably caught between lust and duty. She wanted the freedom implied by sex with Dix whenever she felt like sex with Dix, but she didn’t want to be judged unfit to keep the Campbells with her. She finally said to him, “I think we got to cool things off, baby,” one night as he approached her. “Ness can hear us and she’s…Maybe not every night, Dix. What d’you think? This is…well, this is bothering her.”

  “Let her be bothered,” was his reply. “She got to get used to it, Ken.” He nuzzled her neck then, kissed her mouth, and trailed his fingers down and down until she arched, gasped, sighed, desired, and forgot Ness entirely.

  So the pressure Ness felt continued to build, mitigated by nothing. She knew she would have to do something for relief. She thought she knew what that something was.

  Dix was watching his pirated copy of Pumping Iron when she made her move. He was preparing for an upcoming competition, which generally made him less aware of his surroundings than he ordinarily was. Whenever he faced a bodybuilding event, his concentration was on preparing to take another title or trophy. Competitive bodybuilding was a mind game as much as it was a demonstration of one’s ability to sculpt one’s muscles to obscene proportions. For days before an event, Dix prepared his mind.

  He was on a beanbag, his back against the sofa, his gaze on the television screen where Arnold was eternally playing mental games with Lou Ferrigno. All attention on Arnold, he noted when someone sat down on the sofa, but he didn’t note who it was. He also didn’t note what she was wearing: fresh from having bathed, a thin summer dressing gown of Kendra’s pulled around her naked body.

  Kendra was at the charity shop. Joel and Toby were in Meanwhile Gardens, where Joel had promised to accompany Toby so that he could watch the board riders and the cyclists in the skate bowl. Ness herself was due at the child drop-in centre to work off more of her community service hours, but the sight of Dix watching his video, the reality of their being alone in the house, the persistent memory of the thumping bed, and the fact that she needed to dress in this very space that he was occupying—her supposed private space—all urged her to approach him.

  He was taking notes, chuckling at an Arnold witticism. He held a clipboard on his knees, and his legs were bare. He wore silky running shorts and a vest. He wore nothing else that Ness could see.

  She noted the hand in which he held the biro. She said, “I di’n’t know you were a lefty, blood.”

  He stirred, but was only partially aware. He said, “Dat’s how it is,” and continued writing. He chuckled again and said, “Lookit him. Dat bloke…Never been anyone like him.”

  Ness glanced at the television. At best it was a grainy film, peopled by men with pudding-bowl haircuts on heads too small for the rest of their bodies. They stood before mirrors and heaved their shoulders around. They clasped their hands this way and that with their legs poised to show off massively bulging muscles. It was all not-so-vaguely obscene. Ness shuddered but said, “You look better’n dem.”

  He said, “No one looks better’n Arnold.”

  “You do, baby,” was her reply.

  She was close enough to him to feel the heat coming off his body. She moved closer. She said, “I got to get dressed, Dix.”

  He said, “Hmm,” but did not attend.

  She gazed at his hand. She said, “You use that lefty for everyt’ing?”

  He said, “Dat’s right,” and made a notation.

  She said, “You put it in wiv your left?”

  His note taking hesitated. She went on.

  “C’n you do it wiv either hand is what I mean. Or do you have to guide it at all? Reckon not, eh. Bet you don’t have to. Big enough an’ hard enough to find it’s own way, innit.” She stood. “Oh, I been feelin fat. What d’you t’ink, Dix? You t’ink I’m fat?” She placed herself between him and the television, her hands on her hips. “Gimme your ’pinion.” She unloosened the belt of the gown and let it fall open, presenting herself to him. “You t’ink I’m too fat, Dix?”

  Dix averted his eyes. “Tie dat t’ing up.”

  “Not till you answer,” she replied. “You got to tell me cos you’re a man. What I got…you t’ink it good enough make a man feel hot?”

  He got to his feet. “You dress yourself,” he told her. He looked for the video player’s remote control and he switched off the film. He knew he needed to get out of the room, but Ness stood between him and the stairs. He said, “I got to go.”

  She said, “You got to answer first. Shit. I ain’t goin to bite you, Dix, and you the only man round here I c’n ask. I let you go once you tell me the truth.”

  “You ain’t fat,” he said.

  “You di’n’t even have a look,” she told him. “All it’s goin t’ take is a little one, anyways. You c’n do dat much, can’t you? I need to know.”

  He could have pushed past her, but he was wary of how she would take any physical contact between them. So he cooperated to buy her cooperation. He gave her a glance and said, “You look good.”

  She said, “You call dat a look? Shit, I seen blind men give once-overs better ’n dat. You goin to need some help, ain’t you? Here, den. Le’s try dis again.” She dropped the dressing gown and stood before him naked. She cupped her breasts towards him, and she licked her lips. “You guide it in, Dix, or it go by itself? You got to tell me or you got to show me. I know which way I want it, mon.”

  At all this, Dix would have been inhuman had he not felt aroused. He tried to look elsewhere but the very flesh of her demanded, and so he looked at her and for a terrible moment fixed on her chocolate nipples and then, even worse, on her triangle of wooly hair from which it seemed the scent of a siren rose. Her age was girl; her body was woman. It would be easy enough, but fatal as well.

  He grabbed her by one arm. Her flesh burned as much as his, and her face brightened. He stooped quickly and felt her hand on his head, heard her little cry as she tried to guide his face, his mouth…He scooped up the dressing gown and flung it on her, wresting himself away from her grip.

  “Cover yourself,” he hissed. “What’re you t’inkin anyways? Life s’pose to be ’bout gettin stuffed by every man come your way? An’ dis the way you t’ink men like it? Dat what you t’ink? Struttin round displayin yourself like some ten-quid slag? Hell, you got the parts of a woman, but dat’s it, Ness. Rest of you, so goddamn bloody stupid I can’t t’ink of a man who’d even want a piece, no matter how desperate. Y’unnerstan? Now get out of my way.”

  He pushed past her. He left her in the sitting room. She was trembling. She stumbled to the video machine and pulled out the cassette. It was a simple matter for her to yank the tape from its housing and to trample it. But it was not enough.

  FABIA BENDER’S VISIT to Edenham Estate put Kendra in the position of having to reevaluate. She didn’t want to do that, but she found herself doing so anyway, especially once she read through all the paperwork that Joel had been given by Luce Chinaka at the learning centre.

  Kendra wasn’t stupid. She’d always known that something would have to be done eventually about the problem of Toby. But she’d convinced herself that Toby’s difficulties had to do with the way he learned. To dwell on anything else as the source of his oddity meant heading directly into a nightmare. So she’d told herself that he merely had to be sorted out, educated properly to the extent he could actually be educated, given some kind of appropriate life skills, and led into an area of employment that might allow him a modicum of adult independence, eventually. If that could not happen for him in Middle Row School and with the extra assistance of the learning centre, then another educational environment would have to be scouted out for him. But that was the e
xtent to which Kendra had so far been willing to dwell on her little nephew, which allowed her to ignore the times Toby just faded away, the muttered conversations he had with no one present, and the frightening implications of both these behaviours. Indeed, in the months the Campbells had been in her care, Kendra had successfully managed to use the disclaimer, “Toby’s just Toby” no matter what the boy did. Anything else didn’t bear consideration. So she read the paperwork and she put it away. No one would test, assess, evaluate, or study Toby Campbell while she had a say in the matter.

  But that meant doing everything possible not to attract undue attention from any interfering governmental agencies. Thus, Kendra made a study of the room in which Toby and Joel slept, seeing it as Fabia Bender had likely seen it. It screamed impermanency, which was not good. The camp beds and sleeping bags were bad enough. The two suitcases in which the boys had kept their clothes for six months were even worse. Aside from the “It’s a Boy” sign that still tilted drunkenly across the window, there was no decoration. There were not even curtains to block out the nighttime light from a lamp on one of the paths in Meanwhile Gardens.

  This would have to change. She was going to have to sort out beds and chests, curtains, and something for the walls. She would need to haunt secondhand and charity shops to do this; she would need to ask for handouts. Cordie helped her. She provided old sheets and blankets, and she put the word out in her neighbourhood. This produced two chests in moderate disrepair, and a set of posters featuring travel destinations that neither Joel nor Toby was likely ever to see.

  “Looks good, girl,” was how Cordie supportively evaluated it when they had the room set up.

  “Looks like a fuckin rubbish tip,” was Ness’s contribution.

  Kendra ignored her. Tension had been rolling off Ness for some time, but she’d been continuing with her community service, so everything else she was doing and saying was bearable.