“Mummy’s in hospital,” Toby offered, encouraged by the pleasant tone that both of the adults had taken and not understanding that this pleasant tone was designed to wrest information from children and not to befriend them, no matter how needy for friendship they were. “She pots plants sometimes. She talks to Joel but not to me. I ate her Aero bar once.”
“We live with—”
Fabia Bender interrupted Joel. “They live with their aunt, August. I’ve been working with the sister for some months.”
“Trouble?”
“Community service. The girl who did that mugging directly across the street…?”
August Starr sighed. “You lot got no dad?” he asked the boys.
“Dad got kilt outside the off licence,” Toby said. “I was little. We lived wiv Gran for a while, but now she’s in Jamaica.”
Joel said, “Tobe,” in a warning. The law of survival that he knew was a simple one. Nothing about it involved talking to cops. They didn’t mean well because they’d crossed over, and what they’d left behind was their understanding of how life really was. Joel could tell by looking at Sergeant Starr—by looking at Fabia Bender as well—that to them the story was a simple one. The death of Gavin Campbell was a case of black men doing what black men always did: shooting, knifing, beating, and otherwise killing each other over drugs in the street.
Joel had successfully silenced Toby, and he intended to say nothing more himself. As for Fabia Bender, she had the information she needed since she knew Ness. So she settled back in her seat to do her job, which was to monitor the interview that August Starr would conduct.
Although Joel and Toby could not know it, they were lucky in their assigned interlocutor. Joel might have thought August Starr was a turncoat with preconceived notions about his own people, but the truth was that Starr saw before him two boys who needed his help. He knew their physical appearance—not to mention Toby’s manner—made life difficult for them. But he also knew that a life made difficult sometimes led boys into trouble. He needed to get to the bottom of what was going on before he could come up with a plan to help them. This, unfortunately, was not something that Joel was conditioned to understand.
Starr flicked on the tape recorder, reciting the time, the date, and the names of the people in the room. Then he turned to Joel and asked him what had happened out there. Don’t fib, he added. He could always tell when people were fibbing.
Joel told him a sanitized version of the story, one that conveniently mentioned no names. He’d gone to the football pitch in Wornington Road to meet some blokes, but the arranged time had got bollocksed up or something because the boys never showed up. So he returned to Meanwhile Gardens and that was when he saw the barge on fire.
To the question of what Toby was doing on the barge, he told the truth. He’d instructed Toby to wait for him there. Sometimes he got aggro from older kids in the area, and Joel wanted to keep him safe. He added the fact that an Asian man had tried to tell the cops all this right there on the bridge above the canal, but those cops weren’t having anything off him. All they wanted to do was hustle Joel and Toby over to the Harrow Road station. Here they now were. That was it.
Unfortunately, Joel did not anticipate what Starr would next ask: the names of the boys he was intending to meet at the football pitch.
“Why d’you want to know?” Joel asked. “I just tol’ you—”
Fabia Bender interrupted to explain the procedure: They’d be wanting someone to confirm Joel’s story. It wasn’t that Sergeant Starr didn’t believe Joel’s claims, by the way. This was just procedure when a crime had been committed. Joel understood that, didn’t he?
Naturally, Joel more than understood. Like other boys his age, he’d grown up on a diet of films and television shows in which cops were always trying to get the bad guys. But he also understood a much more pressing concept than the apprehension of whoever had set fire to an abandoned barge: Grass on Neal Wyatt and he’d make things worse.
So Joel said nothing. He knew he was safe from Toby’s saying anything either, for Toby didn’t know the boys’ names.
“Do you want to think about this for a while?” August Starr asked pleasantly. “You understand that private property has been destroyed, don’t you?”
“Barge was a wreck,” Joel said. “’S been there f’rever, innit.”
“That’s of no account. It belongs to someone. We can’t have people setting fire to other people’s belongings no matter their condition.”
Joel looked at his hands, which he’d folded on the table. “I wa’n’t there. I di’n’t see,” he said.
“That,” Starr said, “won’t buy you a bag of crisps, Joel.” He recited the time once again for the tape recorder and then switched it off. He told Joel he’d give him a little while to sit here and think about things, and he told Fabia Bender that he’d leave her with the boys while he made some phone calls. When he got back, he said, perhaps Joel would have something more to tell him.
Next to Joel, Toby whimpered as the sergeant left the room. Joel said, “Don’t worry, mon. He can’t keep us here. He don’t even want to.”
Fabia said, “But he can hand you over to me, Joel.” She paused and let hand you over to me sink in. “Do you want to tell me anything else about what happened? It’ll be between us. You can trust me, and the tape recorder’s not running, as you can see.”
Classic good cop, bad cop was how Joel saw this. Sergeant Starr was the tough guy. Fabia Bender was the marshmallow. Together they would do the scare-and-soften routine. It might work with other kids caught in this sort of circumstance, but Joel was determined it would not work with him.
“I tol’ you what happened,” he said.
“Joel, if you boys are being bullied—”
“What?” he asked. “What’re you ’tendin to do if we are? Sort someone? Have a word somewhere? Anyways, we ain’t bein bullied. I tol’ you what happened. So’d that Asian man. Go ask him if you don’t believe me.”
Fabia Bender studied him, all too aware of the truths he spoke. There were so few resources and so many people in need of them. What could she do? She said, “I’d really rather have this matter put at rest straightaway. Here and now.”
Joel shrugged. There was, he knew, only one way to put matters at rest and that way had nothing to do with a white lady inside a police station.
Fabia Bender got up as Sergeant Starr had done. She said, “Well, I’ll need to make a few phone calls as well. You’re to wait here. Do you want something in the meantime? A sandwich? A Coke?”
“C’n I have—”
Joel cut into Toby’s eager reply. “We don’t want nuffink.”
Fabia Bender left them. She left the thought of phone calls behind her. Phone calls in the plural suggested plans and arrangements. Joel avoided even thinking about that. This, he told himself, was going to work out. All he had to do was not break.
When the door opened again, it was Sergeant Starr who entered, his words a surprise: He told the boys that they were free to leave. Ms. Bender would take them to their aunt. A man called Ubayy Mochi had shown up at the station. He had seen the occurrence from his window along the canal. He’d told the same tale as Toby.
“I don’t want to see you here again,” Sergeant Starr told Joel.
Joel thought, Whatever, but he said only, “C’mon, Tobe. We c’n go, innit.”
Fabia Bender was waiting for them in reception, bundled into a tweed jacket and scarf, with a French beret on her head. She offered the boys an understanding smile before leading them outside where her two dogs lounged at the base of the steps leading into the station. She said their names, “Castor, Pollux. Rise. Come.” The dogs did as they were told.
Toby hung back. He’d never seen such monstrous canines. Fabia said to him, “No worries, my dear. They’re gentle as lambs when it comes down to it. Let them smell your hands. You too, Joel. See? Aren’t they lovely?”
“You keep ’em wiv you for protection?” Toby
asked.
“I keep them with me because they’ll tear up the garden if I leave them at home. They’re terribly spoiled.”
The way she talked indicated to Joel that there were no hard feelings about the way things had gone inside the station. In this, Fabia Bender was wise. She knew when to withdraw, and she was grateful, in fact, that Mr. Ubayy Mochi had turned up and given her the opportunity to do so. She had the two Campbell boys on the back burner of her mind now, and she assumed this was not the last time she would see them.
Although Joel told her they could find their way to the charity shop, Fabia wasn’t having that. Despite what they had tried to pass off as an explanation for what had happened with the barge, what Fabia saw in Joel and Toby was two children in jeopardy. Their aunt needed to be brought into the picture about this, which was what Fabia did when they got to the shop.
KENDRA HAD A choice at the end of Fabia Bender’s visit, and she chose Joel. She told herself it was because he was family, but the truth was that choosing Joel was easier. To choose the social worker would have meant doing something sooner rather than later, and while Kendra was not unwilling, unable, or unloving, she was at a loss.
Joel told one story about the barge. Fabia Bender—in confidence and as an aside while the boys petted the dogs—told another. While it was true that an Asian man called Ubayy Mochi had corroborated much of what Toby and Joel had told the police, Fabia felt there was more to the story than that.
What sort of more? Kendra asked.
Joel wasn’t involved with a gang, was he? was Fabia Bender’s careful reply. She hastened to add that she wondered if he’d been threatened by a gang, harassed by a gang, bullied by a gang? Had there been any other signs of trouble? Any difficulties? Anything at all that Mrs. Osborne had noticed?
Kendra knew the laws of the street as well as did Joel, but she called him over anyway. She told him to tell her again what had happened and to be straight about it this time. Did this have to do with those boys who’d been giving him aggro? she asked.
Joel lied, as he knew he was intended to do. That situation had already been sorted, he said.
Kendra chose to believe him, which put Fabia Bender in the position of having nothing more to do, at least for the moment. She departed, which left Kendra alone with her nephews and even more alone with her thoughts. First Ness, now this. She wasn’t a fool. Like Fabia Bender, she knew things had the potential to get worse.
She sighed, then cursed. She cursed Glory Campbell for having left. She cursed Dix D’Court for being gone from their lives. She cursed the solitude she craved and the complications she did not want. She told Joel to tell her the real truth about what had happened now they were alone. He lied again, and again she grasped onto that lie.
But she knew she was grasping, and she felt wretched. To assuage this feeling, she searched the shop. In the last load of donations, there had been a skateboard with a wonky wheel. She made an offering of it to Toby, her way of apologising to him for the growing list of life’s difficulties, fears, and disappointments.
For Toby, the skateboard was heaven made concrete. He wanted to use it at once. This necessitated the wonky wheel’s repair, which involved Joel and Kendra in a remediation, which in turn put both of them one step further away from the stuff of life waiting to be dealt with. But that was how both of them wanted things: Joel choosing the lie, Kendra choosing Joel.
She relayed a version of all this when she next saw Cordie. Caught up in a conflict of emotions, desires, and duties, she needed someone to affirm the choices she was making. In exchange for a maternity massage performed in her minuscule sitting room while her daughters demonstrated their skill with crayons on an old colouring book featuring the Little Mermaid, Cordie listened to the tale of the barge and everything that had followed its burning. But what she said at the end wasn’t what Kendra expected to hear.
She told Kendra to hang on with the massage, and she sat up, wrapping the sheet around herself. She looked at Kendra shrewdly but not without sympathy. She said, “Th’ boys don’t need a skateboard. Nice you give it, but nice as it is, it ain’t what’s important, and I ’spect you know dat.”
Kendra flushed. She hid this by packing up her massage oils, by blowing out the scented candles and fanning them to hurry their cooling so she could pack them as well.
“You’re wantin to make it up to them, and dat’s good of you. But it’s not what they need.”
Kendra felt deflated. Cordie, who otherwise seemed so frivolous with her girls’ nights out and her snogging sessions with twenty-year-old boys in dark corridors and alleys, had got to the heart of the matter. And the heart of the matter went beyond Ness’s attempt at mugging, her community service, and Joel’s entanglement with the local yobs and now with the police.
“Kids need a parent,” Cordie went on. “Best of all worlds, which’s near impossible these days, kids need two parents.”
“I’m trying—”
“You know,” Cordie cut in, “point is, Ken, you don’t got to try. No sin in unnerstannin you got too much on your plate wiv no cutlery at hand, you know wha’ I mean? Not ever’one’s meant to do dis sort of t’ing, and no sin in admittin it neither. Way I’ve always seen it is dis: Jus’ cos a woman’s got th’ parts don’t mean she got to use ’em.”
That smarted for reasons having nothing to do with the Campbell children. Kendra reminded her friend, “I don’t even have the parts.”
“Could be, Ken, there’s a reason.”
This was, it must be said, something that Kendra had thought on more than one occasion since the Campbells had been foisted upon her. She had never given it actual voice, however. Had she done so, she believed she would have been committing a betrayal so enormous there would be no way to make recompense for it in her natural lifetime. She would become another Glory to the children. She’d be worse than Glory, in fact.
She said, “I got to do this, Cordie. I got to find a way. What I ain’t ever doing is putting—”
Cordie showed mercy when she interrupted. “No one askin you to. But you got to do summick and what you got to do ain’t got nuffink to do wiv skateboards.”
Her options were limited. Indeed, they seemed virtually nonexistent. So she went to the Falcon. She made a deliberate choice of this place, rather than the gym. She wanted privacy this time. She knew she was being devious, but she told herself that there were things to discuss and she needed a quiet place in which to do it. The gym certainly wasn’t that. The Falcon—or at least the bedsit above it—was.
Dix wasn’t there. One of his two flatmates was, though. He directed Kendra to the Rainbow Café. Dix was working there, helping out his mum. Had been for the last three weeks, she was told. Had to give the bodybuilding a rest.
Kendra thought in terms of Dix’s doing damage to himself from which he had to recover. But when she got to the Rainbow Café, she discovered that this was not the case. His dad had suffered a heart attack on the premises, one serious enough to frighten his wife and his children into insisting that he follow doctor’s orders: five months of rest and no messing about with those instructions, Mr. D’Court. The man—only fifty-two years old—was himself frightened enough to obey. But that meant someone had to step up to the cooktop and take his place.
The Rainbow Café comprised an L of tables that ran across the front window and along the wall, as well as a counter with old swivel stools in front of it. When Kendra entered, she went to that counter. It wasn’t a mealtime, so behind the counter Dix was engaged in cleaning the cooking surface with a metal scraper while his mother put paper napkins into dispensers, which she had removed from the tables. She had the salt and pepper cellars ranked in front of her on a tray as well.
The only customer present at the time was an elderly woman with grey hairs sprouting from her chin. Despite the warmth of the café, she hadn’t removed her tweed coat. Her stockings bunched around her ankles and she wore thick-soled brogues on her feet. She was nodding over a cup of t
ea and a plate of beans on toast. To Kendra, she seemed the complete embodiment of the What Could Be’s, a chilling enough sight.
When Dix’s mother saw Kendra, she remembered her, despite having met her only once. She assessed the situation as any shrewd mother might have done in similar circumstances, and what she saw she didn’t like.
She said, “Dix,” and when he looked up, she nodded in the direction of Kendra. Dix thought he was meant to take an order from someone, and he turned to do that but let out a breath when he saw who’d come calling.
The estrangement from Kendra hadn’t been easy for him. She was in his blood. He hated this, but he’d come to accept it. He didn’t know what to call it: love, lust, or something in between. She was just there.
As for Kendra, Dix still looked good. She’d known that she missed him but not how much.
Dix wasn’t a man to lie. He said, “Still lookin good, Ken.”
“You,” Kendra said, returning the compliment. She glanced at his mother and nodded hello. The woman nodded back. Her acknowledgement was pro forma. A tightening of the rest of Mariama D’Court’s face spoke much more.
Dix looked to his mother and they communicated wordlessly. She disappeared into a storeroom, taking the tray of salt and pepper cellars with her, leaving the napkin dispensers behind.
When Kendra asked when Dix had started working at the café, he brought her into the picture about his dad. When she asked what about his weight training, he said some things had to wait. He got in two hours a day just now. That had to be enough until his dad was well. Kendra wanted to know how was he coping, what with competitions coming and not having enough time to prepare for them. He said there were more important things than competitions. Besides, his sister came around to help out every day as well.
Kendra felt a rush of embarrassment. She hadn’t even known Dix D’Court had a sister. She was too awkward in that moment to ask a single thing about her: older, younger, married, single, etc. She just nodded and waited for him to ask in turn about life on Edenham Estate.