What Came Before He Shot Her

The others watched, like statues, turned to salt not by what they saw but what they heard.

  “An’ you been there for a visit,” Ness cried, clinging to Kendra and pounding at her back. “You come round ’fore you going to dis club, dat club, anywheres, innit, pullin dis man, dat man. An’ ever’one sees what you mean to do cos you got dat look an’ how you dress. But only a certain age you want and you make dat clear cos they got to be young cos if they old like sixty, sixty-five, seventy, you don’t want ’em. But they hot now, see? All of ’em. They hot an’ they hard and they know what they want. So you leave, she leaves cos she always go to the fruit machines and dat’s when they take it. They bloody fuckin take it. George an’ his mates on the bed in Gran’s room. They all got their cocks out…They climb on…And I can’t…I can’t…”

  “Ness! Ness!” Kendra cried. She held her, she rocked her. And to Joel, “Did you know?”

  He shook his head. He’d bitten into his fist as his sister was talking, and he could taste the coppery flavour of his blood. Whatever had happened to Ness had happened in silence and behind closed doors. But he could recall how often they’d come to his gran’s—those friends of George, there to play cards, sometimes as many as eight of them. He could remember Glory saying as she pulled on her coat, “George, you be able to mind the kids wiv all your mates here like dis?”

  And George saying happily in reply, “Don’t you worry, Glor. Don’t you worry ’bout nuffink. I got ’nough help here to man a ocean liner or two, so three kids ain’t a problem. Sides, Ness old enough to help out ’f the boys get out ’f hand. Ain’t you, Nessa?” with a wink at her.

  And Ness saying only, “Don’t go, Gran.”

  And Gran saying, “You make your bruvs some Bournvita, darlin’. Time you got it drunk up, your gran be home.”

  But not home soon enough.

  SO WHEN NESS sharpened a paring knife, it seemed the logical outcome of what she’d revealed and what had happened in the kitchen. Joel saw her do it, but he said nothing. He could see that Ness was, in this, just like him. If the paring knife made her feel secure, what of it? he thought.

  In the aftermath of what happened with the children, Dix questioned everything. His dream had always centred around the romantic ideal of family, for his dream of the future was grounded in the past, which had as its most notable characteristic the warm kinship he’d always experienced with his own relations. To him family meant paterfamilias sitting at the head of the table, carving a joint of beef at Sunday lunch. It meant fairy lights strung from the ceiling at Christmastime and day trips to Brighton on the odd bank holiday when there was money enough for candy floss, a bag of rock, and fish and chips by the sea. It meant parents keeping a watchful eye over children’s schoolwork, their afternoon activities, their mates, their dress, their manners, and their growth. Dentist for their teeth. Doctor for their inoculations. Thermometer thrust beneath their tongues, soup and soldiers when they were ill. Children spoke respectfully to their parents in this sort of family, and parents responded with firm but loving guidance, disciplining when necessary and making sure the lines of communication were occluded by nothing. If any family can be described as normal, it was the family in which Dix D’Court had grown up. This had provided him with an image of what life should look like when it came to his own future with wife and offspring, but nothing about it had prepared him for dealing with children who were plagued by trouble and by horror.

  The Campbells, he believed, needed help. More help than either Kendra or he would be able to give them in a hundred thousand lifetimes. Dix broached this subject with her, but she did not take it well. “You want me to get rid of them?” she demanded.

  “Ain’t saying dat,” he told her quietly. “Jus’ dat they been through too much and we ain’t got the skills to lead ’em away from where they are.”

  “Ness’s in counselling. Toby’s in his learning centre. Joel’s doing what he’s meant to do. What more do you want?”

  “Ken, dis is bigger ’n you and it’s bigger ’n me. You got to see dat.”

  But Kendra could not. She told herself that if she had not been so bloody-minded about keeping her life exactly as it was when Glory dropped the children upon her like three sacks of grain, she might have built an adequate life for them. So anything that even smacked of abandoning them at this point was something she would not consider. She would do what she had to do to save them, even if it meant doing so on her own.

  “Even if it means givin up everyt’ing you been workin for?” Cordie asked when they saw each other next. “The massage business? The someday spa? You lettin dat go?”

  “Isn’t that what you’ve done?” Kendra countered. “Didn’t you give in to Gerald and give up on your dreams?”

  “What? Cos he wants ’nother baby and I’m makin him one? How’s dat givin up on dreams? An’ what dreams, anyways? I was doing fingernails, f’r God’s sake, Ken.”

  “You were going to be part of the spa.”

  “Yeah. True. But bottom line is dis: I gonna choose Gerald if I got to make a choice. I always gonna choose Gerald. Spa come along and if it fit in wiv what I got goin at th’ moment, I join dat dream. If it don’t fit in, I choose Gerald.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Wha’ others?”

  “Men you pull. You know what I mean.”

  Cordie looked at her blankly. “You mistaken,” she said. “I don’t pull men.”

  “Cordie, you been snogging wiv nineteen-year-old boys—”

  “I know wha’ I got here,” Cordie said firmly, always a woman capable of turning a blind eye to her own weaknesses of the flesh. “An’ I choose Gerald. You best look at what you got and make a choice you c’n live wiv as well.”

  That was the issue: making a choice and living with it afterwards. Kendra didn’t want to do either.

  THE ONLY ANSWER seemed to be to make a move that would communicate a willingness to deal with the children’s difficulties.

  “We must file charges,” was how Fabia Bender reacted when Kendra revealed the information. They met by prior arrangement at Lisboa Patisserie in Golborne Road, with Castor and Pollux waiting patiently outside as their mistress indulged in café au lait, along with a prawn mayonnaise sandwich, which she brought forth from her briefcase. Fabia set her sandwich on a napkin and took out a day planner in which she kept everything from her diary to coupons for her grocery shopping. She began to flip through it.

  “File charges against who?” Kendra asked. “George’s gone. As for his mates…Ness doesn’t know their names and my mum’s not likely to know them either. And what do we gain, putting her in the hands of cops for questioning or the CPS for examining? She’s not about to talk to cops about this. She’s barely even talking to me.”

  Fabia looked thoughtful. “It explains a great deal, doesn’t it? Especially about why she won’t talk to Ruma. Or cooperate with testing. Or anything, really. Most girls have deep shame about being molested. They believe they said something, did something, encouraged something. That’s how the molesters condition them to think. And in Ness’s case, no one prepared her as a young child to think anything else: her mum mental, her dad dead, her gran consumed with other things. As she was developing into a woman, there was no one present to talk to her about the right she had to protect her own body.” Fabia was mostly thinking aloud, gazing out towards the street where a light rain was falling. When she moved her eyes to take in Kendra, Fabia read her expression. She added, “This isn’t your fault, Mrs. Osborne. You weren’t in the home. Your mother was. If there’s blame to be handed out—”

  “What does it matter?” Kendra asked. “I feel what I feel.”

  Fabia nodded. She said, “Well, Ruma is going to have to be told. And…” She hesitated, lost in thought. She observed Kendra and knew she meant well. But the aunt’s attempts at parenting had been indescribably inadequate, so there was no real hope that Kendra could reach into her niece’s psyche and soothe it. Still, there were other
ports to turn to. Fabia Bender said, “I’m going to talk to Majidah Ghafoor. There’s something good there between her and Ness. A field to plough if not to plant. Let me see what I can do.”

  With the newfound knowledge she’d been given, Ruma suggested a different course of action, one that Fabia would not have expected. Support groups were all well and good, she said, and a psychiatric evaluation might give them information about the state of Ness’s brain chemistry vis-à-vis everything from schizophrenia to depression, but now they were talking about the state of her psyche and her mind, and with a client unwilling to touch upon the subject of molestation and certainly too old for something as obvious as anatomical dolls to play with…“Hippotherapy,” Ruma concluded. “There’ve been some excellent results with that.”

  “Hippo?” Naturally, Fabia thought of the lumbering, rotund African mammals, of their huge gaping mouths and tiny twitching ears.

  Ruma said, “Horses,” to correct her vision. “Treatment for the mind with the help of a horse.” When Fabia’s expression registered scepticism, Ruma explained how it was meant to work, this form of tactile therapy in which the horse-to-human and human-to-horse interaction not only served as metaphor for subjects too painful for the patient to discuss but also as a high-speed means of making progress in someone’s recovery. “It’s about coming to terms with issues of control, power, and fear,” Ruma said. “I know it sounds mad, Fabia, but we’ve got to try it. Without some sort of breakthrough with Ness…” She let the rest hang, and Fabia finished it for her mentally. Without a breakthrough, things would only get worse.

  “Can we dig round for funding?” Ruma asked.

  Fabia sighed. “I don’t bloody know.” It was so unlikely. This was one girl among many in a system stressed and overburdened. There might be a special fund somewhere, but it could take ages of research to find it. Fabia could look and she was willing to do so. But in the meantime, Ness’s wounds would fester.

  Fabia went to Majidah. She would, she decided, leave no stone unturned in this project of Vanessa Campbell. Majidah, Ruma, Fabia, Kendra…All the women in Ness’s life had to present a united front. The message they would pass to Ness was one of concern, love, and support.

  “Ah, that these terrible things must happen,” was Majidah’s quiet reaction to the story Fabia told her. She herself told Fabia what little she knew about Ness’s past from the girl’s earlier partial admissions.

  “Ten years old?” Fabia repeated in horror.

  “It makes one question the ways of God.”

  Fabia was not a believer in God. Mankind, she’d long ago decided, was an accident of atoms colliding in an ancient atmosphere: without design, without plan, and without a single hope of a positive result unless a huge effort was put into getting one. She said, “We’re trying to arrange a special therapy for her. In the meantime, should she decide to speak to you about what’s happened to her…I thought it best that you be brought into the picture.”

  “And indeed I am glad that you have done so,” Majidah said. “I, too, shall try to talk to the girl.”

  “It’s unlikely she’s going to speak about—”

  “Oh my gracious, I shall not speak about this,” Majidah said. “But there are many things to talk about besides the past, as you must know.”

  So that was the course that Majidah pursued. To her, terrible incidents could try one’s soul, but lack of acceptance and lack of forgiveness led to a rotting of the spirit.

  She had a plan. In the child drop-in centre she set out magazines, pots of glue, poster board, and round-tipped scissors. She set the children to the task of collage making, and she insisted Ness join in. They would, she said, create a picture representation of their families and their world.

  “Why’ve I got to do it?” Ness demanded. “I can’t help them, innit, ’f I got to make one of these t’ings myself.”

  “You will act as their model,” Majidah told her placidly.

  “But I don’t—”

  “Vanessa, this is what we’re going to do just now. I cannot see a problem in this. If you do, then we must discuss it privately.”

  This was fine with Ness, a private discussion. It was better than sitting at a table that didn’t even come up to her knees, crammed alongside a four-year-old wielding scissors, no matter how dull were the blades. She followed Majidah to the side of the room, to a bank of windows looking out on the playing area and into Meanwhile Gardens. But Majidah was only able to say, “Vanessa, Sayf al Din and I are wondering why you will not return to him,” before Ness’s attention shifted from the Pakistani woman. A movement in her peripheral vision caused her to see what she’d been waiting for days upon days to see.

  After that, everything happened quickly. Ness grabbed her bag and flew out of the door. She hurtled into the play area. She dashed towards the gate in the chain-link fence, and she pulled from her bag the paring knife she’d been carrying. Her face was set.

  Just beyond the fence, Neal Wyatt was talking to Hibah. No member of his crew was with them, and surprise was the advantage Ness had at last.

  She launched herself. Through the gate and on top of Neal. Before Hibah or the boy himself could do a thing to stop her—and certainly before Majidah could go after her—Ness had used the speed, the surprise, and the weight of her attack to topple Neal Wyatt to the ground. She went down with him. The blade of her paring knife flashed grey against the grey winter sky. It disappeared. It came up red. It disappeared again. Again. Again.

  Hibah screamed. She couldn’t get close. Ness flailed the knife when she made the attempt. Neal fought back, but he could not match Ness for revenge and hate. Blood flecked her cheeks and her chest.

  She started to shriek, “You wan’ it, baby? You wan’ it like dis?” and she raised the knife in such a way that it was clear she intended to plunge it directly into Neal Wyatt’s heart.

  Majidah dashed outside and the children followed. She screamed, “No!” at them and they huddled in a mass near the fence. Blood seemed to be everywhere. On Ness, on the boy she’d attacked, on the Asian girl who’d been his companion. Majidah said to this girl, “You must help. Now,” and she grabbed Ness’s upraised arm, pulling her back as the other young girl—incoherently shrieking—did the same.

  All three of them fell. Neal rolled away. And then he was up on his feet, bleeding but not so wounded that he couldn’t still kick. Grunts and curses accompanied these kicks. His feet met heads, arms, legs.

  Then footsteps pounded from the direction of Elkstone Road. A young man carrying his mother’s walking stick used it to drive Neal back. On the pavement, his mother stood with an elderly companion, who spoke into a mobile.

  “Blood everywhere…three women…a boy…a dozen children…” The words bridged the distance from the pavement to where the attack had occurred. They were hardly accurate, but they did the trick. The police and the ambulance were not long in arriving.

  But they were long enough for Ness to run off, and no one was in any condition to go after her.

  Chapter

  26

  Joel saw the dogs before Toby did: the enormous schnauzer, the smaller but more menacing Doberman. They were doing what they’d always done when he’d seen them in the past, lounging with their heads on their paws, awaiting instructions from their mistress. But where they were—on either side of the steps leading up into his aunt’s house—told him something was wrong. If Fabia Bender was inside the house, that meant Kendra was inside the house. At this time of day, she was supposed to be at the charity shop.

  Toby murmured, “Lookit ’em dogs,” as he and Joel edged by them carefully.

  “Don’t be touchin ’em or anyt’ing,” Joel warned his brother.

  “’Kay,” Toby said.

  Inside, they were safe, but only from the dogs. For in the kitchen, the boys’ aunt and the social worker sat at the table with three manila folders fanned out in front of them and an ashtray planted with cigarette stubs next to Kendra’s elbow. A zippered n
otebook spilling out paperwork lay on the floor next to Fabia Bender’s feet.

  Joel zeroed in on the manila folders. Three of them. Three Campbell children. The suggestion was transparent.

  He looked to his aunt. He looked from his aunt to Fabia Bender. “Where’s Ness?” he asked.

  “Dix is looking for her,” Kendra said. For a frantic phone call from Majidah had taken Kendra out into the streets to hunt for her niece, just as a phone call from Fabia Bender had brought her home, leaving Dix to continue the frenzied search. “Take Toby up to your room, Joel. Take a snack up with you. There’re some ginger biscuits, if you’d like them.”

  If her language had not already done so, food in the bedroom did the trick. For food in the bedroom was a violation, so Joel knew from this that whatever had happened was bad. He didn’t want to leave, but he knew there was no point to staying. So he got the biscuits, climbed to their room, established Toby on the bed with his skateboard and the food, and returned himself to the stairs. He eased down them and sat, straining to hear the worst.

  “…realistically look at your ability to cope…” was what he heard Fabia Bender saying.

  “These are my niece and nephews,” Kendra responded dully. “They are not cats and dogs, Miss Bender.”

  “Mrs. Osborne, I know you’ve been doing your best.”

  “You don’t know. How can you? You don’t. What you see—”

  “Please. Don’t do this to yourself, and don’t do it to me. This is no foiled mugging we’re talking about. This is assault with intent. They don’t have her yet, but they will soon enough. And when they have her in custody, she’ll go directly to a youth remand centre, and that’s the end of it. They don’t give community-service hours for what amounts to attempted murder, and they don’t let children go home to wait for the magistrate to deal with them. I don’t mean to be cruel by saying all this. You must know the reality of her situation.”

  Kendra’s voice went low. “Where’ll they take her?”