Joel himself gave a strangled cry, but that was all because Cal grabbed him and they both took off running. They didn’t set off in the direction they’d come from because without speaking, discussing, or making a plan, they both knew that the red-headed woman had taken the car that way and would doubtless emerge from the mews on foot at any second and see them. So they ran towards the point where the street curved into another street, and they took this turn. But Cal said, “Shit! Fuck! Shit!” because coming towards them at a distance was an old lady walking a doddering corgi.
Cal dashed into an opening on their left. It turned out to be a mews. He followed it as it made a dogleg to the right, where a line of houses stood. But this formed a cul-de-sac at the end. They were trapped, blind men caught in the maze.
Joel said in panic, “What’re we—?” but that was all he got out. For Cal shoved him back the way they’d just come.
Just before the dogleg in the mews, a high brick wall marked the boundary of the garden of a house in another street. Even at full speed and spurred by the terror of being seen or being caught, they couldn’t have hoped to leap over this. But a Range Rover—so common in this part of town—parked next to the wall blessedly gave Cal and Joel what they needed. Cal leaped onto the bonnet and from there he scrambled to the top of the wall. Joel followed as Cal dropped to the other side.
They found themselves in a pleasantly overgrown garden, and they made for the far side. They crashed through a low hedge and knocked over an empty copper birdbath. They came face-to-face with another brick wall.
This one wasn’t as tall as the first, and Cal was able to leap to the top of it easily. Joel had more trouble. He flung himself at it once, then twice. He said, “Cal! Cal!” and the artist reached down, grabbed him by his anorak, and hoisted him over.
A second garden that was much like the first. A house to the left with windows that were covered. A brick path leading to a wall across a patch of lawn. A table and chairs beneath a gazebo. A tricycle lying on its side.
Cal leaped for the far wall. He gripped the top. He lost it. He leaped another time. Joel grabbed his legs and shoved him upward. Cal reached back and pulled Joel along. Joel’s feet scrabbled against the wall and could gain no purchase. A ripping sound came from his anorak and he cried once in panic. He began to slide back. Cal grabbed him again, anywhere he could. Arm, shoulders, head. He knocked off Joel’s knitted cap and it fell, back into the garden from which they’d come.
Joel cried, “Cal!”
Cal heaved him over. “Don’t matter,” he grunted. They left the cap behind.
They said nothing more because they did not need to. All they needed was to escape. There was no time for Joel to question what had happened. He thought only, Gun went off, just went off, and he tried not to think of anything else. Not the woman’s face, not her single “Oh,” not the sight and the sound and certainly not the knowledge. Her expression had gone from startled, to kind, to friendly, to terrified, all in the space of less than fifteen seconds, all in the time it took her to see, to realise, and to try to escape.
And then there was the gun. The bullet from the gun. The smell and the sound. The flash from the pistol and the falling body. She’d hit her head on the wrought-iron rail that ran along the chessboard top step as she’d crumpled among her carrier bags. She was rich, very rich. She had to be rich. She had a posh car in a posh neighbourhood that was filled with posh houses and they’d shot her, shot her, shot a rich white lady—posh to her bones—next to her own front door.
Another garden loomed before them, this one like a miniature orchard. They charged across it, towards the opposite side where another garden was a torment of bushes, hedges, shrubs, and trees, all of it left to grow completely wild. Ahead of him, Joel saw Cal mounting the next wall. At the top he waved frantically for Joel to come more quickly. Joel was breathing heavily, and his chest was tight. He was soaked about the face. He wiped his arm across his forehead.
He said, “Can’t go—”
“Fuck dat shit. Come on, blood. We got to get out ’f here.”
So they fell to the ground and stumbled across garden number five, where they rested for a moment, panting. Joel listened for the sound of sirens, shouting, screams, or anything else from back the way they had come, but all was silent, which seemed a good sign.
“Cops?” he asked, gasping for breath.
“Oh, they coming.” Cal pushed off from the wall. He took a step back. He hurtled up it. One leg on one side and one on the other. Then he looked into the garden beyond and breathed a single word. “Fuck.”
“What?” Joel asked.
Cal hoisted him up. Joel straddled the wall. He saw that they’d come to the end of the line. This was a final garden, but it had no wall that gave onto a street or a mews on the other side of it. Instead, the vast expanse of an external wall from a large old building—brick, like everything else they’d come to—served as this final garden’s far boundary. The only way in or out of the patch of lawn and shrubbery was through the house that it served.
Joel and Cal tumbled to the ground. They took a moment to assess their whereabouts. The windows on the house had security bars, but one set was pushed to the side, suggesting negligence or the fact that someone was at home. It didn’t matter. They had no choice. Cal went first and Joel followed him.
On a terrace outside the back door, a group of plants stood, thickly growing sculpted shrubs from lichenous clay pots. Cal grabbed one of these and advanced on the unbarred window. He heaved the pot through it, reached inside past the broken glass, and unfastened a bolt that was insignificant. He leaped through, and Joel followed. They found themselves in some sort of home office, and they landed on its desk, where they upended a computer terminal that was already covered by earth, broken glass, and most of the shrub, which had fallen from the pot.
Cal made for the door, and they were in a corridor. He headed towards the front of the house. It wasn’t a large building, and they could see the door that led to the street—a small oval window in it promising them blessed escape—but before they reached it, someone came clattering down the stairs to their left.
It was a young woman, the household au pair. She looked Spanish, Italian, Greek. She carried a toilet plunger as a weapon and she charged them, screaming like a heat-seeking missile, with the plunger raised.
Cal cried, “Fuck!” He ducked the blow and shoved her to one side. He made for the door. She dropped the plunger but regained her footing. She grabbed Joel as he tried to get past. She was shrieking unintelligible words, but she made her meaning perfectly clear. She attached herself to Joel like a leech. She reached for his face, her fingers like claws.
Joel struggled with her. He kicked at her legs, her ankles, her shins. He jerked his head to avoid the fingernails with which she intended to mark him. She went for his hair. She grabbed a handful: hair that was like a beacon and hair that no one would ever forget.
Joel’s eyes met hers. He thought—and it was a terror to him—Got to die, cunt. He waited for Cal to shoot her as he’d shot the dark-haired woman. But instead he heard the bang of the front door as it sprang open and hit the wall. The girl released her grip on him at the same moment. Joel dashed after Cal, out into the street.
He panted, “Cal. Gotta get her, mon. She saw…She c’n—”
“Can’t, blood,” Cal said. “Don’t have the gun. Le’s go.” He started walking rapidly up the street. He was not running now, not wanting to draw attention to themselves.
Joel caught him up. He said, “What? What? Where…?”
Cal strode quickly. “Dropped it, mon. One ’f the gardens.”
“But they gonna know…You touched—”
“We cool. Don’t worry ’bout dat shit.” Cal held up his hands. He still had on the gloves he’d worn when he’d fetched Joel from the Holland Park School in what seemed to the boy like another lifetime.
“But the Blade’s gonna…And anyways, I…” Joel stared at Cal. His mind wor
ked like a dervish because the last thing he was was a stupid child. “Oh shit,” he whispered. “Oh shit, oh shit.”
Cal’s gloved hand pushed him along the street. There was no pavement here, just cobbles and roadway. “Wha’?” Cal said. “We can’t go back. Jus’ walk and be cool. We gonna get out. Ten minutes and this place be crawlin with the bill, y’unnerstan me? Now le’s fuckin go.”
“But…”
Cal kept walking, head low, chin tucked into his chest, Joel stumbled after him, his head pounding with images. They were like still shots in the middle of a film. They played back and forth in no particular order: the lady smiling as she said, “Are you lost?” Her little laugh before she understood. Cal’s arm lifted. The corgi’s waddle. The copper birdbath. A holly bush snagging his anorak.
He hardly knew where they were. He saw that they were on a street narrower than the others they’d been in, and had he understood architecture in this part of town, Joel would have recognised it as an old mews whose stables had long since been converted to houses, which were tucked behind the much grander residences whose horses and carriages they once had protected. To his left stood plain-fronted buildings of brick, owners of the back gardens through which they’d just crashed. They were three storeys tall and all identical: a single step up to a wooden front door with a simple stone pediment making a V above it. An inch of granite served as a front step. Garage doors were wooden, painted white. To his right, the picture was much the same, but there were also businesses planted along the way: a doctor’s surgery, a solicitor’s office, a car-repair shop. And then more houses.
Cal said tersely, “Keep your head down, blood,” but in unfortunate confusion, Joel did just the opposite. He saw that they were walking past the biggest house along the route, marked by black bollards with great swags of iron chains to keep cars away from the front of the building. But there was something more and he raised his face to it. A CCTV camera was mounted just above a window on the first floor.
He gasped and ducked his head. Cal caught him by the anorak once and pulled him forward. They fast-walked to the end of the street.
The first siren sounded then, wailing somewhere off in the distance just at the moment Joel saw that in front of them, two more streets branched off from the one they were in. The buildings here loomed like vedettes, unlike any others they’d passed. Outside of the tower blocks of North Kensington, they were the biggest structures Joel had ever seen, but they were nothing like the dour blocks of flats that he was used to. Umber brick created them—no dingy yellow London brick here—and leaded windows with pearl white moulding decorated them. Hundreds upon hundreds of fancifully shaped chimneys sprouted across their rooftops. Joel and Cal were antlike here, caught in a canyon of these structures.
Cal said, “Dis way, blood,” and, astoundingly to Joel, he began to walk in the direction of the sirens.
Joel cried, “Cal! No! We can’t! They been…They gonna…If they see…” and he remained rooted to the spot.
Cal said over his shoulder, “Mon, come on. Or stay there and end up ’splainin to the bill wha’ you been doin in dis neighbourhood.”
Another siren howled its two-note warning, then, sounding from several streets away. It came to Joel that if they walked…if they looked like two blokes having business in the area…if they seemed like tourists—ludicrous though the idea was—or dopers with the Big Issue for sale…or foreign students…or anything…or what…?
But there remained the fact of that au pair, her of the toilet plunger. She’d have gone for the telephone, Joel realised, and her shaking hands would already have punched in the nines, which was all it took to bring on the police. She would have shouted out her address. She would have explained and the cops would arrive. For this was a tony part of town where the cops came running when something went down.
So where were they? Joel asked himself. Where were they?
Wrought-iron balconies seemed to loom everywhere above him. No rusting bikes on them, no burnt-out furniture shoved out of doors and left to rot in the weather. No sagging line of grimy laundry. Just winter flowers. Just pot shrubs trimmed into the shape of animals. Just thick posh curtains hanging low on the windows. And those chimneys lining up just like soldiers, rank upon rank of them along the rooftops, etching their shapes against the grey sky: balloons and shields, pots and dragons. Whoever thought there could be so many chimneys?
Cal had paused at the corner of yet another street. He looked right and left, an act that assessed where they were and where they might go. Across from him was a building different from every other they’d seen so far: It was grey steel and concrete, interrupted by glass. It was more like what they were used to seeing in their own part of town, albeit newer, fresher, cleaner.
When Joel joined him, it was clear there was no safety here. People with carrier bags were emerging from shops, and the shops offered coats with fur collars, crisp bed linens, bottles of perfume, fancy bars of soap. A grocery displayed oranges resting individually in nests of green foil, and a flower seller nearby offered buckets of blooms in every imaginable colour.
It was posh. It was money. Joel wanted to run in the opposite direction. But Cal paused and looked at the display in the bakery window. He adjusted his knitted cap, pulling it low, and he turned up the collar of his donkey jacket.
Two more sirens sounded up ahead. A heavy white man came out of the bakery, cake box in his hands. He said, “What’s going on?”
Cal turned to Joel. “Le’s check it out, mon,” he said and he passed the white man with a polite, “’Scuse me,” as they headed onward.
To Joel, this seemed a lunatic activity since Cal was walking directly towards the sirens now. He said fiercely as he strode by the young man’s side, “We can’t. We can’t! Cal, we got to—”
“Mon, we got no choice ’less you see one.” Cal jerked his head in the direction of the noise. “Dat way’s to the tube and we got to get out ’f here, y’unnerstan wha’ I say? Jus’ be cool. Look curious. Like ever’one else.”
Joel’s gaze automatically followed the way Cal had indicated with his head. He saw, then, that Cal was correct. For in the distance, he made out the shape of the naked lady pouring water into that fountain, only seeing her from a different angle this time. So he realised that they were coming up to the square where they’d emerged from the underground. They were five minutes or less from escaping the area.
He took a few deep breaths. He needed to look like someone curious about what was happening, but nothing more. He said to Cal, “Right. Le’s go, then.”
“Jus’ be cool,” was Cal’s reply.
They walked at a normal pace. As they reached the corner, yet another siren sounded, and a panda car passed. They entered the square. It seemed to them as if hundreds of people milled around on the pavements that marked the perimeter. They’d come out of cafés. They hesitated in the doorways of banks, of bookshops, and of department stores. They stood as statuelike as the bronze woman in the middle of the fountain: Venus gazing tenderly down upon a life-sustaining substance that she eternally poured from her urn.
A fire engine roared into the square. Another panda car followed. Voices buzzed. Bomb? Terrorists? Riot? Armed robbery? Street demonstration getting out of control?
Joel heard all this as he and Cal wove through the crowd. No one spoke of murder or street crime, of a mugging gone bad. No one at all.
As they crossed over into the centre of the square and made diagonally for the station beyond, an ambulance shrieked up from the south, siren blasting and roof lights twirling. The ambulance was what finally gave Joel some hope, for an ambulance meant that Cal hadn’t actually killed the lady when the gun went off.
Joel only hoped that she hadn’t hurt her head too badly when she banged it on the wrought-iron railing as she fell.
Chapter
27
The worst was Toby, which was certainly something that Joel did not expect. But when he finally arrived at Middle Row School t
o take Toby home for the day, it was to find him huddled in the February darkness just outside the locked gates, having somehow escaped the notice of the school’s administrators and teachers, carefully hidden in the deeper shadows cast by a pillar box. He was staring at a jagged crack in the pavement, his skateboard clutched to his chest.
Joel crouched by his brother and said, “Hey, mon. Sorry, Tobe. I di’n’t forget you or nuffink. Did you think I forgot? Tobe? Hey, Tobe?”
Toby roused himself. “Meant to go to the learnin centre today,” he mumbled.
Joel said, “Tobe, I’m sorry. I had to do summick…Look it’s important you don’t grass me up on this. It won’t happen again. I swear. You c’n promise me, Tobe?”
Toby gazed at him blankly. “I waited like I was s’posed to, Joel. I di’n’t know what else to do.”
“You did good, mon. Waitin here like dis. Come on now. Le’s go. When I take you to the learnin centre next, I’ll talk to them. I’ll ’splain wha’ happened. They won’t be vex at you or nuffink.”
Joel urged his little brother to his feet, and they set off towards their home. Joel said to him, “Tobe, you can’t tell Aunt Ken ’bout dis. Y’unnerstan wha’ I say? She find out I di’n’t take you to the learnin centre…She got ’nough vexin her already, innit. Wiv Ness. Wiv Dix gone. And dat Fabia Bender woman jus’ waitin for a reason to take you and me away…”
“Joel, I don’t want—”
“Hey. Dat ain’t goin to happen, bred. Which is why you got to keep quiet ’bout me bein late. C’n you pretend?”
“Pretend what?”
“You went to the learnin centre. C’n you pretend you went today like always?”
“’Kay,” Toby said.
Joel looked at his brother. Toby’s brief lifetime rose up to declare how unlikely it was that he would be able to pretend anything, but Joel had to believe it would be possible to carry off a deception about the afternoon, for it was crucial to him that life should look to his aunt the way it always looked to his aunt. The slightest deviation and Kendra would be suspicious, and suspicion felt to Joel like the last thing that he could endure.