Joel nodded. “I get you.”
“An’ I deal wiv your family next. You get dat as well?”
Joel swallowed. “I get you.”
He watched, then, and saw the Blade wipe every vestige of his fingerprints from the pistol. He extended it in Joel’s direction. He said, “You take this piece and you listen good, then. You cock dis one up, and there’s going to be real hell to pay.”
Chapter
24
Ness remained alone, secretive and sullen. She fulfilled her obligation to community service, but she ceased journeying to Covent Garden.
This seemed reasonable at first: She’d been attacked upon her return from Covent Garden. It wasn’t out of the question that she’d harbour certain fears about travelling on her own to and from the place. But when she refused to join Sayf al Din and his helpers even during the height of business hours—when anyone’s comings and goings on the underground would have been made in the company of millions of other commuters and even the walk home from the Westbourne Park station would not have been made in solitude—then it seemed that the girl’s fears needed to be addressed.
Majidah tried. “Do you not see you let them win, Vanessa, when you give in in such a manner?”
To which Ness replied, “F’rget it, okay? I’m doin my community service, innit. I got one stupid course at college, an’ I don’t got to do nuffink more ’n dat.”
This was true. The fact of it tied everyone’s hands. But the additional fact was that Ness was bound by order of the magistrate to attend school full time as well, so if she didn’t enroll in some programme or another at the college—which working for Sayf al Din was preparing her to do—then she was going to find herself standing in front of the magistrate once again, and this time there would be no leniency. There had been exceptions enough made for her already.
Fabia Bender held the whip hand in this matter. When she called upon Kendra, she had done some preparation for their meeting. She had separate files on each of the children. Her possession of them and the fact that she laid them out on the kitchen table were designed to impress upon the children’s aunt the gravity of the situation.
Kendra needed no metaphor for this. Both the social worker and Sergeant Starr had put her in the picture about Joel’s attempt at mugging a woman on Portobello Road as well as his possession of a weapon and his subsequent and mysterious release from custody. Although she told herself it had likely been a case of mistaken identity—for how else could he have been released so summarily?—in her heart she wasn’t so certain. This, then, in combination with the change in Ness was sufficient to draw her full attention back to all three of the children.
“Social worker’s coming to the house to talk to me,” she told Cordie after Fabia Bender’s phone call to the charity shop. “She wants it to be just the two of us, ’cept Dix c’n be there if he’s round just then.”
Cordie nodded in sympathetic silence, listening to the sound of her two girls peacefully playing with paper dolls in the lounge while the rain beat on the windows outside. She thanked God: for her daughters’ innocence, for her husband’s solid presence despite his maddening desire for a son, and for her own good luck. She had a gainfully employed man in the house, a fully functioning family, and a job she enjoyed with colleagues who shared her passion.
“Did I do wrong phoning up the cops wiv dis Neal Wyatt’s name?” Kendra asked her.
Cordie couldn’t say. In her experience nothing good ever came of involving the police in any aspect of one’s life, but she was willing to make an exception to that belief. So she said, “’S all gonna work out, Ken,” which was the truth, although whether it was going to work out well or work out disastrously was something she didn’t predict. To Cordie, life was better if it was lived off the radar screens of the myriad arms of governmental institutions. Since Kendra and her relations had placed themselves firmly onto these radar screens, it was hardly likely that there was going to be a happily ever after involved.
There seemed only three options when Kendra thought everything over: going on as they had been for the last year, creating a radical intervention to effect an immediate change that would shake up Ness and Joel and bring them to their senses—provided Joel even needed that, which she still didn’t want to admit to—or hoping for a miracle in the person of Carole Campbell and her sudden, complete, and permanent recovery. The first was clearly not working out, the second seemed to involve care and was thus unthinkable, and the third was unlikely. A final and potentially efficacious option was marriage to Dix and the semblance of permanence and family that such a marriage might offer. But marriage to Dix was precisely what Kendra did not want; indeed, she wanted marriage to no one at all. Marriage was a form of giving up and giving in, and she could not face this, even as she knew it might be the only solution available.
Fabia Bender had no intention of making things easy on the children’s aunt. This was a runaway train she was attempting to halt, and she meant to use whatever means were available to put on the brakes. She could tell that Kendra Osborne wasn’t a bad woman. She knew the children’s aunt meant well by all of them. But with Joel in possession of a firearm—not to mention identified as a mugger and still somehow escaping prosecution for these offences—and with Ness the victim of a street assault and the street assault’s aftermath, the children’s jeopardy was fast reaching what could only be described as critical mass. An explosion was imminent. Years of experience told the social worker that.
She began with Ness, whose folder she opened and studied with an apparent need to refresh her memory on the details, although she knew them well enough and did this only for effect. Across from her Kendra sat, joined by Dix, who’d turned up smelling of oil and fried fish from his parents’ café, anxious to get to the gym for his workout but eager to be of support to Kendra and thus a bundle of warring energies.
Ness was doing her community service, which was to the good, Fabia told them. But she’d ceased her work for Sayf al Din, which was substituting for her required full-time schooling. Fabia was—at this time—interceding with the magistrate in respect of Vanessa Campbell’s meeting her obligations under the terms of her probation. But if something didn’t change quickly, Ness was going to face the magistrate and things were not going to go smoothly when she did.
“He knows about the assault, however, and he’s agreed to counselling in place of full-time school,” Fabia told Kendra. “We have someone in Oxford Gardens she can see, if you can guarantee she gets there. As to Joel—”
“I got him sorted,” Kendra said quickly, not because this was the truth but because she hadn’t told Dix about the mugging and the gun. Why should she? was what she asked herself. It was all a mistake, wasn’t it? “He hasn’t gone truant since that one time—”
Dix looked at her sharply and frowned.
“—and he knows he was lucky with the way things turned out.”
“But there’s more involved here than meets the eye,” Fabia said. “That he was released so quickly—”
“Released? Wha’s goin down wiv Joel?” Dix asked abruptly. “Joel in trouble? Ken, damn it…” He ran his hand over his pate. It was an act of frustration and disappointment, with Dix not realising what his ignorance in this matter revealed to the social worker, who glanced between woman and man and made an evaluation of their relationship that Kendra could not afford to have made.
“Cops had him down the Harrow Road station,” she told him. “I di’n’t like to trouble you with this cos you been busy and it got sorted. It di’n’t seem—”
“How we make dis work if you keep secrets, Ken?” He asked the question in a fierce whisper.
Kendra answered, “C’n we talk ’bout this later?”
“Shit.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, and Fabia Bender read the movements for what they were. She made a mental note. No father figure. Another tick in the column keeping score of the children’s removal from this home.
She sai
d, “Under other circumstances, I’d insist on Joel’s placement in that programme I mentioned to you earlier, the one across the river at Elephant and Castle. In fact, I’d advise it for Ness as well. But I agree with you, Mrs. Osborne: There’s the distance and the fact that there’s no one to ensure either their attendance or their safety in making the journey to South London…” She lifted her hand and dropped it on the folder containing Joel’s information. “Joel needs counselling, just like Ness, but he needs more than that. He needs supervision, a direction in life, an interest to focus on, an outlet for his concerns, and a male role model with whom he can become involved. We have to provide him with those or we have to consider other options for him.”
“Dis is down to me,” Dix interceded, believing he bore a certain amount of responsibility for what had happened to Joel even if he wasn’t quite sure what what had happened meant. “I c’n do more wiv Joel than I been doing. I ain’t tried hard enough cos…” He blew out a breath as he thought about all the reasons he’d failed to be the father figure he’d sought to be: his responsibilities to his own family, his desire for success in his chosen field, his insatiable lust for Kendra’s body, his inadequacy in the face of the children’s troubles, his lack of experience and history with the children, the image he possessed of what a family was supposed to be. He could name some of these as reasons for his failure; the rest he could see in his mind. In any case, what he felt was guilt for all of them, and he ended up expressing them with, “Cos ’f life. I meant to do better wiv the kids, an’ I will from now on.”
Fabia Bender wasn’t in the business of breaking up families, and she wanted to believe that commitment on the part of the two people sitting with her at what was an inadequately sized kitchen table meant a possibility existed that Joel’s trouble would serve as a wake-up call to everyone. Still, she was bound by duty to finish what she had come to say, so that was what she did.
“We need to think carefully about the children’s future. Sometimes a removal from the environment—even for a brief time—is all that’s necessary to bring about change. I’d like you to think about this. Care is an option. Boarding school is another: a special school to meet Toby’s needs—”
“Toby’s fine where he is,” Kendra put in. She made the declaration sound firm, not panicked.
“—and another school to give Joel new direction,” Fabia continued as if Kendra hadn’t spoken. “With them taken care of in this way, we can concentrate on Ness.”
“I don’t got…” Kendra stopped. “I don’t need to think about it. I can’t put them into care. Or send them away. They won’t understand. They’ve been through too much. They’ve…” She gestured futilely. Tears in front of this woman were unthinkable, so she said nothing more.
Dix said it for her. “Jus’ now ever’one’s doing what they’re s’posed to be doin, innit?”
“Yes,” Fabia Bender said. “Technically. But Ness is going to have to—”
“Den you let us be fam’ly. We see to Ness. We see to the boys. We stop doin dat, you free to come back.”
Fabia agreed to this, but anyone could see how insurmountable was the task that faced the two adults. There were too many needs to be met, and most of them were not the simple ones of food, shelter, and clothing, which required money for their procurement and time for their purchase and nothing else. As to the deeper needs of assuaging fears, quelling daily anxieties, reconciling past pain with present reality and future possibility…These required the participation of a professional or a group of professionals. Fabia could tell that the aunt and her lover didn’t see this; she was wise enough to know that people had to reach conclusions on their own.
She told them she would return in two weeks to see how all of them were doing, then. But in the meantime, they were going to have to get Ness to Oxford Gardens for counselling. The magistrate would accept nothing less.
“I don’t need fuckin counselling,” was how Ness responded to this information.
“You need a lockup instead?” was how Kendra replied. “You need being sent away? Going into care? Having Toby put away in a special school and Joel going off to board somewhere? That what you need, Vanessa Campbell?”
Dix said, “Ken. Ken. Go easy,” and he tried to sound sympathetic towards Ness. Just as he tried to be a father to Joel and Toby: checking on schoolwork, watching the skateboarding in Meanwhile Gardens when the winter weather permitted, carving out two hours to go to the cinema for an action-hero film, coaxing the boys to the gym to participate in a workout in which neither of them was interested. But all of this was a street upon which Dix was the only driver: Ness scorned his attempts to intervene; Joel’s cooperation was given in a silence that indicated no cooperation at all; Toby went the way of Joel as always, utterly confused by the entire situation in which he was now living.
“You best understand this,” Kendra hissed at Joel when she surveyed Dix’s well-meaning attempts and the children’s indifference towards them. “We don’t sort everything out to her liking, this Fabia Bender’s taking the lot of you. Y’understand me, Joel? You know what that means?”
Joel knew, but he was caught in ways that he could not afford to explain to his aunt. For his escape from the Harrow Road police station, he owed the Blade and he knew that if he did not pay when the account came due, the trouble they would face would make their current trouble seem like a springtime stroll along the towpath by the Grand Union Canal.
For somehow, everything had gone wrong. What had started out for Joel as a simple and primeval struggle to gain respect in the street had turned into an exercise in sheer survival. The existence of Neal Wyatt receded into the background once Joel found himself a central figure of the Blade’s attention. In comparison to the Blade, Neal Wyatt was in truth as irritating as an ant crawling up the inside of a trouser leg. He was nothing at all set against the knowledge that Joel had at this point in his life: He’d come up against the hardest and most unforgiving place of all in North Kensington. He’d come up against the wishes of Stanley Hynds.
As unrealistic as it might seem to a rational person in possession of even a small amount of history on the woman, to Joel, Carole Campbell seemed the only answer that could lead to escape.
HE HAD THE money—that blessed fifty pounds from Walk the Word—so there was no need to involve anyone in knowing that he intended to visit his mother. Joel chose a frigid day when his aunt was working, when Dix was at the Rainbow Café, and when Ness was at the child drop-in centre. That left him with Toby to look after, with sufficient time to put his plan for rescue into motion.
He knew the routine. The bus appeared to be waiting just for them at the appointed stop along Elkstone Road, and it trundled over to Paddington station with so few passengers onboard that the journey seemed designed to symbolise the ease with which Joel’s plans were going to come to fruition. He bought their tickets for the train ride and took Toby, as always, to WH Smith. He kept a firm grip on his brother, but he needn’t have worried. Toby was determined to stick to Joel like a burr in a fox’s tail. With his skateboard tucked under his arm, he tripped along and asked if he would be allowed to have a bar of chocolate or a bag of crisps.
“Bag of crisps,” Joel told him. The last thing he needed to contend with was Toby smeared with chocolate when they went to see their mother.
Toby selected prawn crisps with surprising alacrity, which also suggested how well Joel’s mental scenario was developing. He purchased a magazine for their mother—choosing Harper’s Bazaar because it was the thickest on offer—and on impulse he bought her a tin of sweets as well.
Soon enough they were rolling out of Paddington station, past the dismal and dingy brick walls that separated the railway tracks from the even more dismal and dingy houses that backed directly onto them. Toby kicked his feet against the bottom of the seat and happily munched his crisps. Joel watched the scenery and tried to think how to bring their mother home.
They got out of the train into bitter cold, mu
ch colder than in London. Frost rimed hedgerows whose bare branches sheltered shivering sparrows, and the fields beyond them bore a gauzy cover of frozen fog. Crusts of ice skinned over standing pools of rainwater, and where there were sheep, they chuffed gustily and huddled together in a woollen mass against stone walls.
At the hospital and through the guard gate, the boys hustled up the drive. The lawns, like the fields, were white with fog that had frozen and fallen, and more fog was descending as Joel and Toby dashed towards the main building. This hovered in the mist like something from a fantasy film, an object that might easily disappear before they reached it.
Inside, a blast of hot air hit them. The contrast felt like going from the North Pole into the tropics with no stop at an intermediate climate. They stumbled through the heat that blasted from radiators, and Joel gave their names at Reception. He learned that Carole Campbell was in the mobile beauty caravan. They could wait for her right here in the lobby or they could seek her out in the caravan, which they could find in the employees’ car park at the back of the building. Did they know where that was?
Joel said they would find it. Going back outside was, to him, infinitely preferable to having to wilt among the plastic greenery that decorated the lobby. He got Toby back into his anorak, which the little boy had already shed and dropped on the floor, and they went back outside. They slipped and slid along a concrete path. They followed it down one long wing of the hospital, where it branched at the back towards the infirmary in one direction and the employees’ car park in the other.
The caravan in question was a small, hump-backed mobile holiday home of the type once seen widely in the English countryside prior to the days of inexpensive flights to the coast of Spain. It had been named Hair and There, a tediously self-amused pun that was painted on the caravan’s side in great chunky letters along with a rainbow that led not to a pot of gold but to a hair-drying chair next to a cartoon woman all done up in curlers and dashing through puffs of clouds to sit down. Over the door was yet another rainbow. Joel led Toby to this and up two slick steps.