What Came Before He Shot Her il-14

by Elizabeth George

  She moaned and made a stab at working his jeans zipper, but she lacked the coordination to get it down. She said, “You wan’ it, babe? No shit I do you in front ’f the queen an’ the House of Commons if you want, innit.”

  The Blade looked around at Joel, then, and it came to Joel that this was a performance on his part, something from which he himself was supposed to take a message. But what it was didn’t compute because of what Joel knew of the man in front of him.

  Ivan had said Stanley Hynds was intelligent and self-educated. He’d studied Latin and Greek and the sciences. He had a part to him that was not a part of what people saw when they had a run-in with him. But what all that meant in light of the man who was looking at him from across the room as a strung-out teenager tried to massage his member... This was something Joel did not understand, and he did not struggle to understand it. All he knew was that he needed the Blade’s help, and he meant to have it before he left the squat.

  So he waited for the Blade to decide whether he’d allow Arissa to service him in front of Joel, and he did his best to look unconcerned in the matter. He crossed his arms as he’d seen Cal do, and he leaned against the wall. He said nothing and kept his face without expression, hoping this reaction was the key to proving whatever he needed to prove to the Blade.

  The Blade laughed outright and disengaged from Arissa’s ineffectual fingers. He crossed back over to Joel and, as he did so, he took a spliff from the breast pocket of the suit jacket he was wearing, and he lit it with a silver lighter. He took a toke and offered it to Joel. Joel shook his head. “Cal give you the knife?” he asked.

  The Blade observed him long enough to let Joel know he wasn’t meant to speak before being told it was appropriate to do so. Then he said, “He give it. You lookin for summick in return, I spect. Dat what dis is?”

  “I ain’t lying,” Joel said.

  “So what you need from the Blade, Jo-ell?” He drew in a lungful of smoke that seemed to go on forever. He held it there. In the corner, Arissa scrambled unenergetically on her futon, apparently looking for something. He said to her sharply, “No more, Riss.”

  She said, “I comin down, baby.”

  “Dat’s where I want it,” he told her. And then to Joel, “So what you need?”

  Joel told him in as few words as possible. They amounted to safety. Not for him but for his brother. One word on the street that Toby had the Blade’s protection and Toby wouldn’t have anyone vexing him any longer.

  “Whyn’t you get what you need from someone else?” the Blade inquired.

  Joel, hardly an idiot in these matters, knew the Blade was asking so that he would have to say what the Blade believed about himself: There was no one else with his power in North Kensington; he could sort people out with a single word, and if that didn’t work, he could pay them a visit.

  Joel made the recitation. He saw the gratified gleam come into the Blade’s dark eyes. Obeisance made in this form, Joel went on to make specific his request.

  This required a history of his encounters with Neal Wyatt, and he gave it, beginning with his first run-in with the other boy and concluding with the fire on the barge. He crossed the final line when he said Neal’s name in advance of any agreement he might garner from the Blade to help him. He could think of no other way to demonstrate how willing he was to trust the older man.

  What he hadn’t considered was that the Blade might not reciprocate that trust. He hadn’t considered that the return of a flick knife might not serve as an adequate expression of his good intentions. Because of this, he waited for the Blade’s reply in mistaken confidence, assuming that now all would be well. He wasn’t prepared, therefore, to receive a response that was noncommittal.

  “Ain’t my man, Jo-ell,” the Blade said, knocking ash from his spliff onto the floor. “Spitting on me, ’s I recall. Outside Rissa’s, you remember?”

  Joel was hardly likely to forget. But he’d also been pushed because the Blade had spoken badly about his family, which was unacceptable. He told the Blade something of this, saying, “M’ family, mon. You can’t be talkin bad ’bout them and ’xpect me to do nuffink. Dat ain’t right. You would’ve done the same ’s I did, I reckon.”

  “Did and have done,” the Blade noted with a smile. “Dat mean you want dis patch someday, bred?”

  “What?” Joel asked.

  “You take on the Blade cos you want to run his patch someday yourself?” In the corner, Arissa laughed at this notion. The Blade silenced her with a look.

  Joel blinked. That idea had been so far from his consideration that it hadn’t even made it onto his radar screen. He told the Blade that what he wanted was help with his brother. He said he didn’t want Toby vexed any longer. Neal Wyatt and his crew could take on Joel as much as they wanted, he explained, but they were meant to leave Toby alone.

  “He can’t do nuffink to defend himself,” Joel said. “It’s like going after a kitten wiv a hammer.”

  The Blade took all this in and looked thoughtful. After a moment, he said, “You willing to owe me?”

  Joel had thought about this in advance. He knew the Blade would extract a payment of some sort. It was inconceivable that the kingpin of North Kensington would do something out of the milk of human kindness since whatever he might have once had of that substance had long ago curdled in his veins. From what he’d seen tonight, Joel assumed it would have to do with drugs: joining the Blade’s delivery team. He didn’t want to do it—the risks of getting caught were great—but he was down to his last hope.

  The Blade knew that. His expression said that Joel was caught in a seller’s market: He could walk away and hope Neal Wyatt had done the most he intended to do to Toby, or he could strike a bargain in which he knew he was going to end up paying more than the product was actually worth.

  Joel saw no other choice. He couldn’t go to Cal, who would do nothing without the Blade’s permission. He couldn’t go to Dix, who was out of the picture. If he asked Ivan to intervene, what would likely come of that was a poetry duel between conflicting parties. If he waited for his aunt to track down and speak to Neal, that would make life infi nitely worse.

  There was simply no alternative that Joel could see. There was only this moment, and during it he felt a stabbing that he knew was regret. Nonetheless he said, “Yeah. I owe. You do this for me, I owe.”

  The Blade took a toke of his spliff, and his face showed satisfaction and the kind of enjoyment that Joel suspected he otherwise got from a woman on her knees in front of him. He told himself that it didn’t matter. He said, “So we got a deal or what?” and he tried to sound as rough as he could. “Cos if we don’t, I got other business to conduct.”

  The Blade lifted an eyebrow. “You like to take th’ piss, eh? You got to stop dat, bred. It’ll buy you trouble ’f you don’t.”

  Joel made no reply. Arissa stirred in her corner. She curled into a foetal position on the dirty futon and said, “Baby, come on, ” extending one hand to the Blade.

  He ignored her. He nodded at Joel, the message implicit: It said, I know who you are and don’t forget it. He stubbed the rest of his spliff out on the wall, and he motioned Joel to approach him. When Joel did so, the Blade dropped a hand to his shoulder and spoke into his face.

  “Your family vex me,” he said. “I get dissed by dem. You recall dis, mon? I t’ink you setting me up for more just now, and dat being the case—”

  “Dis ain’t no setup!” Joel protested. “You t’ink any diff’rent, you talk to the cops. They tell you what happened. They tell you—”

  The Blade’s hand clamped down brutally. So tight and hard was the grasp he had on Joel that it cut off the rest of what the boy wanted to say. “Do not in’errupt me, blood. You listen good. You want help from me, you got to prove yourself first. You prove dis situation here ain’t ’bout dissing me more, y’unnerstan? You do the job I give you—in advance, eh?—then I do the job you want done as well. And then you owe me. An’ dat’s the deal if you
want it. Dis ain’t no negotiation we doing.”

  “Prove myself how?” Joel asked.

  “Dat’s the deal,” the Blade said. “You ain’t need to worry ’bout the hows. They come to you when they come to you.” He walked back to Arissa, who’d begun to snore slightly, her lips parted and her tongue lolling between them. He looked down at her and shook his head.

  “Shit, I hate a cow dat does drugs. It’s so p’thetic. You popped your cherry yet, Jo-ell?” He looked over his shoulder. “No? We got to take care of dat.”

  We. Joel clung to that word. What it meant, what it promised, what it said in answer. He said, “Deal,” to the Blade. “What d’you want me to do, Stanley?”

  WHEN JOEL RECEIVED the call that he was to go to the small mentoring office, he knew that Ivan Weatherall would be waiting for him. He trudged off—excused from his religious-studies class, which was a relief since the teacher never spoke in anything but a monotone, as if afraid to offend God through a show of enthusiasm about the subject matter—and dreaded what was to come. He thought feverishly about what he would say as an excuse to the mentor who would no doubt want to know what had happened to his attendance at Wield Words Not Weapons. He settled on telling him that his courses this term were far more difficult than they’d been in the previous school year. He had to devote more time to them, he’d say. He had to keep his marks up. He had to prepare for the future. Ivan, he thought, would like preparation for the future as an excuse.

  Unfortunately, Ivan had done what Joel had not done: his homework. When Joel walked into the conference room, he could see as much. The mentor had a file spread out, which Joel correctly concluded boded ill. In this file were his current marks from every course he was taking.

  “Mon,” Joel said to him in a greeting notable for its degree of factitious pleasure. “Hey. Ain’t seen you in a while.”

  “We’ve missed you at Wield Words,” Ivan replied. He sounded friendly enough as he looked up from the file of information. “I thought at first you’d been cracking the schoolbooks, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. You’ve slipped. Want to tell me about that?” He pulled out a chair at an angle to his own. He had a takeaway coffee cup at his right hand, and he sipped from this as he waited for a reply, keeping his eyes on Joel over the cup’s rim.

  The last thing Joel wanted was to tell Ivan anything. He didn’t actually want to talk at all. Least of all did he want to talk about his marks in school, but as he hadn’t written a poem since before the barge fire, he couldn’t talk to Ivan about verse either. He kicked his toe against the shiny blue lino. He said, “Classes’re rough dis term. An’ I got t’ings on my mind, innit. An’ I been busy wiv Toby an’ stuff.”

  “What sort of stuff would this be?” Ivan asked.

  Joel looked at him, thinking about traps. Ivan looked at Joel, thinking about lies. He knew about the fire on the barge through vague community gossip that had taken a more concrete form when he’d received a phone call from Fabia Bender. Was he still meeting with Joel Campbell? she’d wanted to know. He was teetering on the edge of serious trouble, and a male role model was urgently called for. The aunt had her hands full and was in over her head—if you’ll pardon the metaphor mixing, Fabia Bender had said—but if Mr. Weatherall would once again engage with Joel, he and Fabia might together be able to turn the boy from the route in which he appeared to be heading. Had Mr. Weatherall heard about the barge . . . ?

  Ivan had let things slide a bit with Joel. He was spread rather thin— what with the poetry course, the scriptwriting course, the fi lm project he hoped to get off the ground, and his brother’s ill health in Shropshire where he was paying the price for forty-eight years of nonstop cigarette smoking—but he wasn’t a man to make excuses. He told Fabia Bender he’d been remiss, for which he apologised since he generally kept commitments once he made them. It hadn’t been lack of interest in Joel but lack of time, he said, a situation that he would remedy at once.

  Joel shrugged: the adolescent boy’s answer to every question he didn’t want to answer, a bodily expression of the eternal whatever voiced by teenagers in hundreds of languages on at least three continents and countless islands pebbled across the Pacific. Mostly it was Toby, he said. He had a skateboard now and Joel was teaching him to ride it so he could take it to the skate bowl in Meanwhile Gardens.

  “You’re a good brother to him,” Ivan said. “He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”

  Joel gave no reply, merely kicking at the lino again. Ivan went in an unexpected direction. He said, “This isn’t the sort of thing I generally do, Joel. But perhaps it needs to be done.”

  “What?” Joel looked up. He didn’t like Ivan’s tone, which sounded like something caught between regret and indecision.

  “This burning of the barge and your run-in with the Harrow Road police . . . ? Would you like me to tell them about Neal Wyatt? I have a feeling about Neal, and I believe there’s a very good chance that a single visit to the station—a few hours being interviewed by a detective, with a social worker in attendance—might be just what Neal needs to turn him around. It might be meant, you see, that he should speak with the police.”

  It also, Joel wanted to say, might be suicide on a stick. He cursed the fact that he’d ever mentioned Neal Wyatt’s name to anyone. He said hotly, “Why’s ever’one t’ink Neal Wyatt burnt dat barge? I don’t know who burnt it. I di’n’t see who burnt it. Neither did Tobe. So givin Neal over to th’ cops i’n’t going to do nuffink but—”

  “Joel, don’t take me for a fool. I can see you’re angry. And I’m guessing you’re angry because you’re anxious. Anxiety ridden. Frightened as well. I know your history with Neal—good God, didn’t I break up the first fight you two had?—and I’m suggesting we take a step to alter that history before someone gets seriously hurt.”

  “’F I’m anxious, it’s cos everyone want to pull Neal into a situation where he don’t belong,” Joel said. “I got no proof he lit up dat barge, and I ain’t claimin he did if I got no proof. You name him to th’ cops, they drag him in . . . an’ what, Ivan? He ain’t namin no one else, he back out on the street in two hours, and he start lookin for who grassed him up.” Joel heard the degree to which his language had disintegrated, and he knew what it revealed about his state. But he also saw a way to use those things—his language and his state of mind—to turn the present moment to his advantage. He shoved his hand through his hair in a gesture meant to be interpreted as frustration. He said, “Shit. You’re right. I got anxiety climbin up to my eyeballs. Me and Tobe in the police station. Aunt Ken t’inkin she going to sort Neal ’f she ever find him. Me watchin my back and jus’ waitin to get jumped. Yeah. I’m anxious, innit. I ain’t writin no poems cos I can’t even t’ink about poems wiv t’ings like they are.”

  Ivan nodded. This was something he understood. It was also a subject dear to his heart, an attractor to which his brain automatically veered, dismissing anything else on his mind, whenever the topic came up. He said, “That’s called being blocked. Anxiety is nearly always a block to creativity. No wonder you’ve not been writing poetry. How could you be expected to?”

  “Yeah, well I liked writin poems.”

  “There’s an answer to that.”

  “Which’s what?”

  Ivan shut the folder in which Joel’s information lay. Joel felt a modicum of relief. He felt even more when Ivan warmed to his topic.

  “You have to work during the anxiety to overcome the anxiety, Joel.

  It’s a Catch-22 situation. Do you know what that means? No? A contradiction in terms or available fact. Anxiety prevents you from working, but the only way to relieve the anxiety is by doing what it prevents you from doing: working. In your case, writing. Anxiety is thus always a guidepost, telling a person he ought to be engaged in his creative act. In your case, writing. Wise people recognise this and use the guidepost to get back to the work. Others avoid, seeking an external relief to the anxiety, which tempers it only moderately well.
Alcohol, for example, or drugs. Something to make them forget they’re anxious.”

  This was so convoluted a concept that all Joel managed to do was nod as if in eager acceptance of its precepts. Ivan, enthused by his own attraction to the subject, took this as comprehension. He said, “You have a real talent, Joel. Turning away from that is like turning away from God. This is essentially what happened to Neal when he turned away from the piano. To be frank, I don’t want that to happen to you, and I’m afraid it will if you don’t get back to your creative source.”

  This was cold mashed potatoes, as far as Joel was concerned, but again he nodded and tried to look thoughtful. If he was anxious— which he agreed that he was—it had very little to do with putting words on paper. No, he was anxious about the Blade and what the Blade would ask of him as a proof of his respect. Joel hadn’t yet heard, and the waiting was torture since, during the waiting, Neal Wyatt still lurked, waiting as well.

  As for Ivan, well-meaning but innocent, he saw what he wanted to believe was a solution to Joel’s problems. He said, “Will you come back to Wield Words, Joel? We miss you there, and I think it will do you a world of good.”

  “Don’t know if Aunt Ken’ll let me out, what wiv my marks in school once she sees ’em.”

  “It’s a simple matter for me to speak to her.”

  Joel considered this. He saw a way that returning to Wield Words might work to his benefit, ultimately. He said, “Okay. I like to do it.”

  Ivan smiled. “Brilliant. And before our next meeting, perhaps you’ll write a bit of verse to share with us? As a way to work through the anxiety, you see. Will you try that for me?”

  He would try, Joel told him.

  SO HE USED Wield Words Not Weapons as a red herring. It was essential that life appear normal while he waited for what the Blade would tell him to do. He found the practice excruciatingly difficult because his mind was so much on other things and he lacked the discipline to focus his thoughts on the creative act while the very antithesis of that act was sitting on his shoulder, waiting to happen. But the sight of him sitting at the kitchen table jotting words in a notebook was enough to alter his aunt’s way of thinking about sorting out Neal Wyatt, and as long as that continued to work, Joel was willing to do it. And she was willing to let him go to Wield Words Not Weapons when the next occasion of the gathering of poets came along.