This all seemed meant. While it was a bit of a stretch to think Middle Row was on the direct route to the bus for Ness and Joel, they could still get to a stop in Ladbroke Grove from Toby’s school in a five-minute walk. And after school, having Toby nearby at the learning centre meant Kendra would be able to keep tabs on Joel and Ness as well, for his siblings would have to walk him there every day. Kendra’s plan was that they would take turns doing it, stopping in to see her on the way.
In all of this, she failed to take Ness into account. Ness allowed her aunt to think and plan whatever she wished. She’d been growing quite adept at pulling the wool over her aunt’s eyes, and like many adolescent girls who think themselves omnipotent as a result of successfully running wild for a period of time with no one the wiser, she’d started to assume she’d be able to do so indefinitely.
Naturally, she was wrong.
HOLLAND PARK SCHOOL is an anomaly. It stands in the midst of one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods of London: a leafy, redbrick and white stucco area of individual mansions, and blocks of costly flats and exorbitantly priced maisonettes. Yet the vast majority of its pupils trek in to the school from some of the most disreputable housing estates north of the Thames, making the populace of the immediate area decidedly white and the populace of the school a gamut skewed to the colours brown and black.
Joel Campbell would have had to be blind or not in possession of his wits to think he belonged in the immediate environs of Holland Park School. Once he discovered that there were two distinct routes from the number 52 bus to the comprehensive, he chose the one that exposed him least to the blank and uninviting glances of cashmere-garbed women walking their Yorkshire terriers and children being transported to schools out of the area by au pairs driving the family Range Rovers. This was the route that took him to the corner of Notting Hill Gate. From there, he made his way west by foot to Campden Hill Road rather than ride the bus any farther, resulting in a walk that would have taken him down several streets in which he belonged about as comfortably as a pork pie nestled next to beef Wellington.
From the first day, he made this journey alone after leaving Toby at the gates to Middle Row School. Ness—cooperatively dressed in her drab grey uniform and carrying a rucksack on her back—went with them as far as Golborne Road. But there, she left her brothers to go on their way while she pocketed her bus money and went on hers.
She continued to say to Joel, “Better not grass, y’unnerstan? You do an’ I go af’er you, blood.”
Joel continued to nod and watch her walk off. He wanted to tell her that there was no need for her to threaten him. He wouldn’t grass. When had he ever? First of all, she was his sister and even if she hadn’t been, he knew the most important rule of childhood and adolescence: no telling tales. So he and Ness operated on a strictly don’t ask/don’t tell policy. He had no idea what she was up to aside from playing truant, and she didn’t reveal any details to him.
He would have preferred her company, though, not only in fulfilling their assigned duty to Toby each morning and afternoon but also in having to navigate the experience of being the new kid at Holland Park School. For the school seemed to Joel to be a place fraught with dangers. There were the academic dangers of being seen as stupid rather than shy. There were the social dangers of having no friends. There were the physical dangers of his appearance, which, along with having no friends, could easily mark him as a target for bullying. Ness’s presence would have made the going easier for him, Joel decided. She would have fitted in better than he. He could have ridden along on her coattails.
No matter that Ness—as she was now and not as she had been in her childhood—would not have allowed this. The way Joel still saw his sister, if only periodically, made him feel her absence at school acutely. So he sought to be a fly on the wall, attracting the attention of neither pupils nor teachers. To his PSHE teacher’s hearty question of “How’re you getting on then, mate?” he always made the same reply. “S’okay.”
“Any troubles? Problems? Homework going all right?”
“S’okay, yeah.”
“Made any friends, yet?”
“’M doing all right.”
“Not being bullied by anyone, are you?”
A shake of the head, eyes directed to his feet.
“Because if you are, you report it to me at once. We don’t tolerate that nonsense here at Holland Park.” A long pause in which Joel finally looked up to see the teacher—he was called Mr. Eastbourne—intently assessing him. “Wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Joel?” Mr. Eastbourne said. “My job’s to make your job easier, you know. D’you know what your job is at Holland Park?”
Joel shook his head.
“Getting on,” Eastbourne said. “Getting ed-u-cated. You want that, don’t you? Because you have to want it in order to succeed.”
“Okay.” Joel wished only to be dismissed, free from scrutiny once more. If studying eighteen hours a day would have allowed him to become invisible to Mr. Eastbourne and to everyone else, he would have done that. He would have done anything.
Lunchtime was the worst. As in every school that has ever existed, boys and girls congregated in groups, and the groups themselves had special designations known only to the members. Those teens deemed popular—a label they gave to themselves, which everyone else apparently accepted without question—hung about at a distance from those considered clever. Those who were clever—and they always had the marks to prove it—kept away from those whose futures were obviously limited to working behind a till. Those with advanced social agendas stayed clear of those who were backward. Those who followed trends remained aloof from those who scorned such things. There were pockets of individuals, naturally, who didn’t fit anywhere within these designations, but they were the social outcasts who didn’t know how to welcome anyone into their midst anyway. So Joel spent his lunchtimes alone.
He’d done this for several weeks when he heard someone speak to him from nearby his regular eating spot, which was leaning out of sight against the far corner of the security guard’s hut at the edge of the schoolyard near the gate. It was a girl’s voice. She said, “Why d’you eat over here, mon?” and when Joel looked up, realising that the question was directed at him, he saw an Asian girl in a navy headscarf standing on the route into the schoolyard, as if she’d just been admitted by the security guard. She wore a school uniform that was several sizes too large for her. It successfully obscured whatever feminine curves she might have had.
Since he’d managed to avoid being spoken to by anyone save his teachers, Joel didn’t quite know what to do.
The girl said, “Hey. Can’t you talk or summick?”
Joel looked away because he could feel his face growing hot, and he knew what that did to his odd complexion. “I c’n talk,” he said.
“So what you doin here, then?”
“Eating.”
“Well, I c’n see that, mon. But no one eats here. ’S not even allowed. How’d you never get told to eat where you s’posed to?”
He shrugged. “I ain’t hurtin no one, innit.”
She came around and stood in front of him. He looked at her shoes so that he wouldn’t have to look at her. They were black and strappy, the sort of shoes one might find in a trendy shop on the high street. They were also out of place, and they made him wonder if she had trendy other things on beneath the overlarge uniform she was wearing. It was something that his sister might have done, and thinking of this girl as a Nesslike figure allowed Joel to feel slightly more comfortable with her. At least she was a known commodity.
She bent and fixed him with her eyes. She said, “I know you. You come on the bus. Number fifty-two like me. Where you live?”
He told her, snatching a glance at her face. It altered from curious to surprised. She said, “Ede’ham Estate? I live there, innit. Up the tower. I never seen you round. An’ where you catch the bus anyways? Not near me, but I seen you inside.”
He told her about Toby: wa
lking him to school. He didn’t mention Ness.
She nodded, then said, “Oh. Hibah. Tha’s who I am. Who you got for PSHE?”
“Mr. Eastbourne.”
“Religious education?”
“Mrs. Armstrong.”
“Maths.”
“Mr. Pearce.”
“Oooh. He c’n be nasty, innit. You good at maths?”
He was, but he didn’t like to admit it. He enjoyed maths. It was a subject with answers that were right or wrong. You knew what to expect from maths.
Hibah said, “You got a name?”
“Joel,” he told her. And then he offered her something she hadn’t asked. “I’m new.”
“I know that,” she said and he grew hot again because it seemed to him that she sounded scornful. She explained. “You hangin here, y’unnerstan. I reckoned you was new. And anyways, I saw you here b’fore.” She tilted her head in the direction of the gate that closed the school off from the rest of the world. She offered him something in exchange for the information he’d offered her. She said, “My boyfriend comes lunchtimes most days. So I see you on my way to the gate to talk to him.”
“He don’t go here?”
“He don’t go anywheres. He s’posed to, innit. But he won’t. I meet him here cos ’f my dad ever saw me wiv him, he beat me black ’n’ blue, y’unnerstan. Muslim,” she added and looked embarrassed by the admission.
Joel didn’t know what to say to this, so he said nothing. Hibah said, “Year nine,” after a moment. “But we c’n be friends, you ’n me. Nothing more ’n that, y’unnerstan, cos like I say, I got a boyfriend. But we c’n be friends.”
This was so surprising an offer that Joel was stunned. He’d never actually had someone say such a thing to him and he couldn’t begin to imagine why Hibah was doing so. Had she been questioned on the matter, Hibah herself could not have explained it. But having an unacceptable boyfriend and an attitude towards life that placed her squarely between two warring worlds, she knew what it was like to feel like a stranger everywhere, which made her more compassionate than her peers. Like water that seeks its own level, misfits recognise their brothers even when they do so unconsciously. Such was the case with Hibah.
She finally said, when Joel did not respond, “Shit. Not like I got a disease or summick. Well, anyways, we could say hi on the bus. Tha’ won’t kill you, innit.” And then she walked off.
The bell for class rang before Joel could catch up with her and offer friendship in return.
Chapter
3
As far as friendship was concerned, things were developing far differently for Ness, at least on a superficial level. When she parted ways with her brothers every morning, she did what she had been doing since her first night in North Kensington: She met up with her new mates Natasha and Six. She effected this regular engagement by detaching from Joel and Toby in the vicinity of Portobello Bridge, where she hung about till she was sure the boys would not know in which direction she was going to head. When they were out of sight, she walked quickly in the opposite direction, on a route that took her past Trellick Tower, setting her north towards West Kilburn.
It was crucial that she take care with all this, for to gain her destination she had to use a footbridge over the Grand Union Canal, which put her squarely on the Harrow Road, in the vicinity of the charity shop where her aunt was employed. No matter that Ness generally arrived in this area well in advance of the opening hours of that shop, there was always the possibility that Kendra might choose to go in early one day, and the one thing Ness didn’t want to happen was being spotted by Kendra crossing over into Second Avenue.
In this, she didn’t fear a run-in with her aunt, for Ness was still of the mistaken opinion that she was more than a match for anyone, Kendra Osborne included. She merely didn’t want the annoyance of having to waste any time with Kendra. If she saw her, she would have to cook up an excuse for being decidedly in the wrong area of town at the wrong time of day, and while she believed she could do that with aplomb—after all, weeks into her removal from East Acton to this part of town and her aunt still didn’t know what she was up to—she didn’t want to expend the energy on that. It was taking energy enough for her to transform herself into the Ness Campbell she’d decided to become.
Once across the Harrow Road, Ness walked directly to the Jubilee Sports Centre, a low-slung building in nearby Caird Street that offered the inhabitants of the neighbourhood something else to do besides getting into or dodging trouble. Here, Ness ducked inside, and near the weight room—from which the clanging of barbells and the groaning of power lifters emanated at most hours of the day—she used the ladies’ toilet to change into the clothes and the shoes she’d stuffed into her rucksack. The hideous grey trousers she replaced with a skin of blue jeans. The equally hideous grey jumper she set aside for a lacy top or a thin T-shirt. With stiletto boots on her feet and her hair allowed to spring round her head the way she liked it, she added to her makeup—darker lipstick, more eyeliner, eye shadow that glittered—and stared in the mirror at the girl she’d created. If she liked what she saw—which she usually did—she left the sports centre and went round the corner into Lancefield Street.
It was here that Six lived, in the midst of the vast complex of buildings called the Mozart Estate, an endless maze of London brick: dozens of terraces and blocks of flats that extended all the way to Kilburn Lane. Intended like every other estate to relieve the overcrowding of the tenement buildings it replaced, over time the estate had become as unsavoury as its predecessors. By day, it looked relatively innocuous since few people were ever out and about save the elderly on their way to the local shop for a loaf of bread or a carton of milk. By night, however, it was a different matter, for the nocturnal denizens of the estate had long lived on the wrong side of the law, trading in drugs, weapons, and violence, dealing appropriately with anyone who tried to stop them.
Six lived in one of the apartment blocks. It was called Farnaby House: three storeys tall, accessed through a thick wooden security door, possessed of balconies for lounging upon in the summertime, having lino floors in the corridors and yellow paint on the walls. From the outside, it didn’t seem at all an unpleasant place to live, until further investigation revealed the security door hopelessly broken; the small windows next to it either cracked or boarded over; the scent of urine, acrid inside the entry; and the holes kicked into the corridor walls.
The flat that Six’s family occupied was a place of odour and noise. The odour was predominantly of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed clothes, while the noise emanated both from the television and from the secondhand karaoke machine that Six’s mother had given her for Christmas. It would, she’d told herself, advance her daughter’s dream of pop stardom. It would also, she hoped but did not admit aloud, keep her off the streets. The fact that it was doing neither was something that Six’s mother didn’t know and would have turned a blind eye to had anything in Six’s behaviour suggested it. The poor woman worked at two jobs to keep clothes on the backs of the four children—out of seven—whom she still had at home. She had neither the time nor the energy to wonder what her offspring were doing while she herself was cleaning rooms in the Hyde Park Hilton or ironing sheets and pillowcases in the laundry of the Dorchester Hotel. Like most mothers in her position, she wanted something better for her children. That three of them were already following in her footsteps—unmarried and regularly producing offspring by various worthless men—she put down to bloody-mindedness. That three of the other four were set to do the same, she simply didn’t acknowledge. Only one of this latter group attended school with any regularity. As a result, the Professor was his sobriquet.
When Ness arrived at Farnaby House and made her way through the broken security door and up one flight of stairs, she found Six entertaining Natasha in the bedroom she shared with her sisters. Natasha was sitting on the floor, applying a viscous coat of purple varnish to her already red and stubby fingernails while Six clutched the
karaoke’s microphone in the vicinity of her chest as she bumped and ground her way through the musical interlude of a vintage Madonna piece. As Ness entered, Six took Madonna to the next level. She jumped off the bed on which she’d been performing, and she pranced around Ness to the beat of the music before she accosted her and pulled her forward for a kiss with tongue.
Ness pushed her away and cursed in a manner that would have got her steeply fined had her aunt been listening. She wiped her mouth savagely on a pillow that she scooped from one of the three beds in the room. This left behind two smears of blood red lipstick, one on the pillowcase and the other like a gash across her cheek.
On the floor, Natasha laughed lazily while Six—who never lost a beat—gyrated over to her. Natasha accepted the kiss quite willingly, her mouth opening to the size of a saucer to accommodate as much tongue as Six felt inclined to give her. They went at it for such a length of time that Ness’s stomach curdled and she averted her eyes. In doing this, she looked around and found the source of her friends’ lack of inhibition. A hand mirror lay, glass up, upon the chest of drawers, with the remains of white powder dusting it.
Ness said, “Shit! You lot di’n’t wait? You still holdin substance, or is dat it, Six?”
Six and Natasha broke off from each other. Six said, “I tol’ you to be here las’ night, di’n’t I?”
Ness said, “You know I can’t. ’F I ain’t home by…Shit. Shit. How’d you score, den?”
“Tash did,” Six said. “Dere’s blow and dere’s blow, innit.”
The two girls laughed companionably. As Ness had learned, they had an arrangement with several of the delivery boys who cycled the routes from one of West Kilburn’s main suppliers to those of the area’s users who preferred indulging at home to visiting a crack house: a skimming off the top from six or seven bags in exchange for fellatio. Natasha and Six took turns administering it, although they always shared the goods received in payment.