He muttered, “S’all right, Tobe. S’all right, mon.”
Toby stumbled to him. “He bunged you up,” he cried. “You got cut on your face. He wanted to—”
“S’okay.” Joel staggered to his feet. For a moment Meanwhile Gardens whirled round him like images seen from a merry-go-round. When the dizziness passed, he pressed his arm to his face. It came away bloody. He looked at Neal.
Neal was breathing hard from his exertions, but he no longer looked as if he wanted to leap upon Joel. Instead, he made a move in Hibah’s direction. She jumped to her feet.
“You,” she said to him.
He said, “Listen.” He looked at his crew. Two of them shook their heads. He said urgently, “We talk, Hibah.”
To which she responded, “I die before I talk to you again.”
“You don’t unnerstan how t’ings goin down.”
“I unnerstan all I need, Neal Wyatt.”
She swept off, leaving Neal and everyone else watching her. Joel said nothing, but he didn’t need to. Neal took his presence as both cause and blame, and he jerked his head with a look that went from Joel to his brother.
He said, “You fucked. You and weirdshit. You got dat?”
Joel said, “I ain’t—”
“You fucked, yellow skin. Both of you. Next time.”
He tilted his chin in the direction of the towpath. His companion took it as it was meant and led the way so that Neal and he could rejoin the rest of the crew.
NESS ENJOYED THE absence of Dix initially. But the long-term delight that she thought she would feel with him gone did not materialise. She liked not having to listen nightly to her aunt’s bed thumping and she liked the fact that the ground seemed more or less even between herself and Kendra once Dix was gone. Beyond that, though, there was no permanent joy for her in Dix’s removal. She hated him for his rejection of her, yet she still wanted the chance to prove she was dozens of times the woman her aunt could ever be. Having the opportunity to move into Kendra’s bedroom to share her aunt’s bed and thus achieve a modicum of privacy in the household did not appeal to her, nor did it give her a sense of pleasure or power. Kendra made the offer, but Ness refused it. She couldn’t imagine sleeping in the same bed that Dix D’Court had so recently vacated and, even if that hadn’t been the case, sleeping in Kendra’s room with Kendra there was hardly going to give Ness the sort of privacy she preferred. She knew she didn’t belong in her aunt’s bedroom; she knew—although she never would have admitted it to anyone—that Dix did. She also knew her aunt didn’t really want her there.
The outcome of all this was that she felt bad when she wanted to feel good. She needed a way back to the good again, and she felt fairly certain of what would work.
She chose Kensington High Street this time. She went by bus and disembarked not far from St. Mary Abbots Church. From there, she sauntered down the slope to the flower stall in front of the churchyard. She surveyed her options from this vantage point, while behind her, tuberoses, lilies, ferns, and babies’ breath were fashioned into fine bouquets.
She decided first on H & M, where the crowded conditions and the racks of garments from the subcontinent promised her the camouflage of other adolescents as well as excellent pickings. She wandered from one floor to the next, seeking something that would challenge her as well as delight her, but she could find nothing that she did not deem b-o-r-i-n-g when she evaluated it. So she meandered up the street to Accessorize, where the challenge to pocket something was much greater since the shop was so small and her photograph was still Sellotaped next to the till as someone who wasn’t allowed inside. But conditions were crowded and she gained entry, only to discover that, on this day, the merchandise wasn’t signifi cant enough to provide her with the pleasure she wanted to feel upon successfully stealing it.
After trying Top Shop and Monsoon, she finally walked into a large department store, and this was the location she settled upon. A wiser girl with malefaction on her mind might have chosen otherwise, for there were no big crowds in which to hide and as a mixed-race adolescent in revealing clothes and big hair, Ness stood out like a sunfl ower in a strawberry patch. But the merchandise looked higher class, and she liked that. She quickly spied a sequinned headband that she coveted.
This headband was in a serendipitous location, as far as Ness was concerned. On a rack just a half dozen steps from the exit, it fairly announced its desire to be pocketed. Checking it out and deciding it was worthy of her efforts, Ness made a recce of the immediate area to make sure she was—if not safe from notice—then close enough to the doorway to dash out of the store once the headband was in her pocket.
There didn’t seem to be anyone watching her. There didn’t seem to be anyone of note nearby at all. There was an old pensioner giving her the eye from a rack of socks, but she could tell from his expression that the fact he was watching her had nothing at all to do with making sure she didn’t walk off with something she hadn’t paid for and everything to do with the décolletage supplied by her choice of T-shirt. She dismissed him with contempt.
In anticipation of pinching the desired item, Ness felt the nervous energy begin to tingle up her arms. It promised her that the rush of delight she wanted was already on its way. All she had to do was reach out, take two headbands from the rack, drop them to the floor, bend, pick them up, and return only one of them as the other was safely tucked into her bag. It was easy, simple, quick, and sure. It was sweets from an infant, food from a kitten, tripping a blind man, whatever you will.
With the sequinned band in her possession, she made for the door. She walked as casually as she’d done when she’d first entered the store, and she felt suffused with a combination of warmth and excitement as she mixed with a group of shoppers outside.
She didn’t get far. Lit with success, she’d decided on Tower Records next, and she was about to cross the road when she was blocked by the pensioner she’d seen inside the department store. He said, “I don’t think so, dearie,” as he took her by the arm.
She said, “What the hell you think you’re doing, mon?”
“Nothing at all, as long as you can provide a receipt for the merchandise you’ve got inside that bag of yours. Come with me.”
He was far stronger than he appeared. In fact, upon a closer look at him, Ness saw that he wasn’t a pensioner at all. He wasn’t stooped, as he’d appeared to be in the store, and his face wasn’t lined to match his thin, grey hair. Still, she didn’t realise how he fit into the scheme of things, and she continued to protest—loudly—as he led her back towards the door of the department store.
Once inside, he marched her along an aisle and towards the back of the store. There, a swing door led to the bowels of the building. Soon enough she was through it and being ushered down a flight of stairs.
Hotly, she said, “Where the fuck do you think you’re takin me?”
His answer was, “Where I take all shoplifters, dearie.”
Thus she understood that the man she’d thought was a pensioner was a security guard for the infernal department store. So she didn’t willingly go a step farther. She put up as much of a fight as his grip upon her arm would allow. For she knew that she’d just caused herself a fair amount of trouble. Already on probation, already doing community service, she had no wish to put in another appearance in front of a magistrate, where she’d be risking more this time than merely having to show up at the child drop-in centre.
Once down the stairs, she found herself in a narrow lino-floored corridor, where she could see that she wasn’t going to get away easily. She assumed they were on their way to wherever it was that they took shoplifters while they waited for a constable to show up from the Earl’s Court Road police station, and she began to prepare a tale to spin when the constable got there. She’d have time to do this in whatever lockup they provided for her. It would be, she reckoned, at best a small and windowless room and at worst a real cell.
It was neither. Instead, the security gua
rd opened a door and pushed her into a locker room. It smelled of perspiration and disinfectant. Rows of grey lockers lined it on either side, and a narrow, unpainted wooden bench went down its middle.
Ness said, “I di’n’t do nothing, mon. Why’re you bringing me to dis place?”
“I expect you know. I expect we can open that bag of yours and see.” The guard turned from her, and locked the door behind them. The dead-bolt clicked into place like a pistol cocking. He held out his hand. “Give me the bag,” he told her. “And let me say that things tend to go easier with you lot if I can tell the cops you’ve been cooperative from the first.”
Ness hated the idea of handing over her bag, but she did it because cooperative was indeed how she wanted to seem. She watched while the guard opened the bag as any man might: clumsily and unsure how the thing was meant to be handled. He dumped out its contents and there was the offending article, sequins glittering in the overhead lights. He picked it up and held it dangling from one finger. He looked from her to it, and he said, “Worth it, then?”
“What’re you talkin ’bout?”
“I’m asking is it worth it to nick something like this when the consequences might be a lockup?”
“You sayin I nicked it. I ain’t.”
“How’d it get in your bag if you didn’t nick it?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “I never saw it before.”
“And who d’you expect to believe that? Especially when I give chapter and verse on your picking up two, dropping them both, and returning only one of them to the rack. There was this one—with the silver sequins—and there was the other one—with the red and blue. Who d’you think will be believed? D’you have any priors, by the way?”
“What’re you yammerin—”
“I think you know. And I think you have them. Priors, that is. Problems with the cops. The last thing you want is for me to phone them. I can see that in your face as plain as anything, and don’t deny it.”
“You don’t know nuffink.”
“Don’t I now? Then you won’t mind when the coppers come along, when I tell ’em my tale and you tell ’em yours. Who do you expect they’re likely to believe, a girl with priors—kitted out like a tart—or an upstanding member of the public who happens to be on staff at this establishment?”
Ness said nothing. She attempted to seem indifferent, but the truth of the matter was that she was not. She didn’t want to face the police another time, and the fact that she was eyeball to eyeball with doing just that infuriated her. The fact that she was in the hands of someone who was clearly going to play cat and mouse with her till he turned her over to the authorities only made matters worse. She felt tears of futility come into her eyes and this enraged her more. The security guard saw them, and carried on in accordance with what he believed about them.
“Not so tough when it comes down to it, are you, now?” he asked her. “Dress tough, act tough, talk tough, all of it. But at the end of the day, you want to go home like the rest of ’em, I expect. That it? You want to go home? Forget about this?”
Ness was mute. She waited. She sensed more was to come, and she was not wrong in this. The guard was watching her, waiting for a reaction of some kind. She finally said with a fair degree of caution, “What?
You sayin you mean to let me go home?”
“If certain conditions are met,” he said. “I being the only one who knows about this—” He swung the headband from his finger again. “I let you leave and I return this to where it belongs. Nothing further said between us.”
Ness thought about this and knew there was no alternative. She said,
“What, then?”
He smiled. “Take off your T-shirt. Bra as well, if you’re wearing one, which I doubt, considering how much I can already see.”
Ness swallowed. “What for? What’re you goin—”
“You want to leave? No questions asked? No further cause for interaction between us? Take off your T-shirt and let me look at them. That’s what I want. I want to look at them. I want to see what you have.”
“That’s all? Then you let me—”
“Take off your T-shirt.”
It wasn’t, she told herself, any worse than opening the dressing gown in front of Dix D’Court. And it surely wasn’t worse than everything else she’d already seen and done and experienced . . . And it meant that she would walk out of this place without a cop in attendance, which meant everything there was.
She clenched her teeth. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. In one quick movement, she pulled the T-shirt up, over her head, and off.
“Face me square,” he said. “Don’t cover yourself cause I don’t expect you do that for all the younger blokes, do you? Drop the shirt as well. Put your arms at your sides.”
She did it. She stood there. He drank her in. His eyes were greedy. His breathing was loud. He swallowed so hard she could hear the sound of it from where she stood some ten feet away. Too many feet away, as things turned out. He said to her, “One thing more.”
“You said—”
“Well, that was before I saw, wasn’t it? Come over here, then.”
“I don’t—”
“Just ask yourself if you want all this”—again the headband—“to go away, dearie.”
He waited then. He was sure of himself, as a man who’d stood in this spot many times before and made the most of it.
Ness approached him, without any other option that she could see. She steeled herself to what would happen next and when he put his hand over one of her breasts, she did her best not to shudder although she felt a prickling sensation inside her nose: harbinger of the most useless of tears. His entire hand covered her breast, her nipple cushioned in the centre of his palm. His fingers tightened. He pulled her forward.
When she was inches from him, he looked at her squarely. “This,” he said, “c’n all go away. You out of here and home to your mummy. No one the wiser about nicking this and that from the store. That what you want?”
A tear escaped her eye.
“You got to say,” he said. “That’s what you want. Say it.”
She managed to mutter. “Yeah.”
“No. You must say it, dear.”
“Tha’s what I want.”
He smiled. “I guessed as much,” he said. “Girls like you, they always want it. You hold still now, and I give you what you asked for, dearie. Will you do that for me? Answer me now.”
Ness steeled herself. “I do that for you.”
“Willingly?”
“Yeah. I do it.”
“How nice,” he said. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?” He bent to her, then, and he began to suck.
SHE WAS LATE to the child drop-in centre. She made the trip from Kensington High Street north to Meanwhile Gardens without thinking about the locker room, but the effort to do this made her rage inside. Rage brought tears and tears brought more rage. She told herself she would return, she would wait outside the employees’ door—the very door he’d taken her to at last, releasing her into a side street with a pleasant “Now get along with you, dearie”—and when he came out at the end of the day, she’d kill him. She would shoot him between the eyes, and what they did to her afterwards would be of no account because he would be dead, as he deserved to be.
She didn’t wait for the bus that would take her up Kensington Church Street and then on to Ladbroke Grove. She told herself she couldn’t be bothered, but the truth was that she didn’t want to be seen, and on foot she felt somehow invisible. Humiliation—which she would not admit as even existing—was washing over her. The only way to avoid feeling it was to stalk furiously in the general direction of the drop-in centre, savagely pushing her way through the crowds while she remained in the shopping district, seeking something she could damage when those crowds thinned and she was left on the wider pavements of Holland Park Avenue where there was no one close by to smash into and snarl at and nothing to do save keep walking and trying to avoid her ow
n thoughts.
She finally boarded a bus in Notting Hill because it happened to pull up just as she reached the stop and there would be no need for her to wait and think. But this did little to get her to the drop-in centre so that her arrival would be timely. She was ninety minutes late as she went through the gate in the cyclone fence, where in the play area three children toddled about in the paddling pool under the watchful eyes of their mothers.
The sight of them—children and mothers—was something that Ness couldn’t bear to look at but had to look at, so what she felt was even more anger. The effect was like air being forced into an overfull balloon.
She shoved open the door of the drop-in centre. It banged against the wall. Several children were applying white glue to an art project that involved poster board, seashells, and beads. Majidah was in the kitchen. The children looked up with wide eyes, and Majidah came into the main room. Ness readied herself for what the Muslim woman would say, thinking, Just let her, just let the bloody bitch.
Majidah looked her over, her eyes narrowing in evaluation. She didn’t like Ness because she didn’t like Ness’s attitude, not to mention her dress sense and the reason she was working at the centre. But she was also a woman who’d gone through much in her forty-six years, not the least of which was to come to terms with profound suffering: in herself and in others. While her philosophy in life could best be described as Work hard, don’t whinge, and just get on with it, she was not devoid of compassion for people who had not yet found the way to do any of these things.
So she said, with a meaningful glance at the Felix the Cat clock that hung above a rank of storage blocks containing children’s toys, “You must try to be on time, Vanessa. Please do assist those children with their gluing. You and I will speak once we close for the day.”
JOEL’S CONFRONTATION WITH Neal Wyatt turned out to be a double-edged sword. One edge had Joel watching his back from that moment forward. The other edge had him writing. More words than he would ever have thought possible prompted more verse than he would ever have thought possible, the oddest feature about this process being the fact that the words coming out of his head weren’t the sort that Joel would have thought could produce a poem. They were ordinary. Words like bridge or kneel, like fl oat or dismay had him diving for his notebook. He did it so often that Kendra became curious and asked Joel what he was up to with his nose bent over a notebook all the time. She assumed he was writing letters to someone and asked him if the intended recipient was his mother. When he told her it wasn’t letters but rather poems, Kendra—like Hibah—jumped to love poems and she began to tease him about being stuck on a girl. But there was a halfhearted nature to her teasing that even Joel—with all his focus on verse—could not fail to notice. He said wisely, “You seen Dix, then, Aunt Ken?” to which her response of “ Have you seen,” took their conversation towards the importance of proper English and away from the importance of love.
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