What Came Before He Shot Her

by Elizabeth George

  Kendra said, “You see to Toby. Look at him. He’s wanting the loo.”

  Joel looked around for an indication of where a toilet might be, an action Kendra might have seen and interpreted had she been able to get beyond feeling that the walls of her house were about to close in on her. As it was, she headed up the stairs, and Joel, not liking to ask questions that could make him seem ignorant, waited until his aunt had started upstairs where the continued banging suggested she was taking the massage table to the top floor of the house. That was when he worked the lock on the garden door and hurried his brother outside. Toby didn’t question this. He just made his stream into a flowerbed.

  When Kendra came back downstairs, the boys were once again by the suitcases and the shopping trolley, not knowing what else they were meant to do. Kendra had been standing in her bedroom trying to calm herself, trying to develop a plan of action and coming up with nothing that wasn’t going to disrupt her life completely. She’d reached the point at which she had to ask the question whose answer she didn’t particularly want to hear.

  She said to Joel, “Where’s Vanessa, then? Has she gone with your gran?”

  Joel shook his head. “She’s round,” he said. “She got vex an’—”

  “Angry,” Kendra said. “Not vex. Angry. Irritated. Annoyed.”

  “Annoyed,” Joel said. “She got annoyed an’ she ran off. But I ’spect she’ll be back soon enough.” He said this last as if he expected his aunt to be happy to hear the news. But if coping with Toby was the last thing Kendra wanted to do, coping with his unruly and unpleasant sister was a very close second to it.

  A nurturing woman would perhaps at this point have begun bustling about, if not getting life organised for the two hapless waifs who’d happened to appear on her doorstep, at least getting them something to eat. She would have climbed those stairs a second time and made some sort of sleeping arrangements out of the two bedrooms that the house possessed. There wasn’t adequate furniture for this—especially in the room set aside for massages—but there was bedding that could be put on the floor and extra towels that could be rolled into pillows. Food would follow that sleeping setup. And then a search for Ness could begin. But all of this was foreign to Kendra’s way of life, so instead she went to her bag and pulled out a packet of Benson & Hedges. She lit up using a burner on the stove, and she began to consider what she was meant to do next. The phone rang and saved her.

  What she thought was that Glory—in an uncharacteristic fit of conscience—was ringing to say she’d come to her senses about George Gilbert, Jamaica, and the desertion of three children who relied upon her. But the caller was Kendra’s best girlfriend Cordie, and as soon as Kendra heard her voice, she remembered that they’d arranged a girls’ night out. In a club called No Sorrow they’d planned to drink, smoke, talk, listen to the music, and dance: alone, together, or with a partner. They’d pull men to prove they still had their attractions and if Kendra decided to bed someone, Cordie—happily married—would live the encounter vicariously via mobile the next morning. It was what they always did when they went out together.

  Cordie said, “Got your dancin shoes on?,” which introduced Kendra to a life-defining moment.

  She became aware that she was not only feeling the physical need for a man, but probably had been feeling that need for a week or so and had been sublimating it with attention to her work at the shop and her training in massage. The reference to dancing shoes, though, made the need go deep, where it intensified until she realised that she couldn’t actually remember when she’d last spread her legs for a man.

  So she did some quick thinking. This involved the boys and what she could do with them so that she’d still have time to get to No Sorrow while the pickings were good. Mentally, she considered her fridge and her cupboards, for there had to be something she could rustle up to feed to them and, with the hour being what it was, they were probably hungry. A sorting out of the spare room would follow, to give them an area to sleep in tonight. She could pass out towels and flannels and make a formal introduction between them and the bath. And bedtime would immediately follow. Certainly, she could accomplish everything and still be ready to accompany Cordie to No Sorrow by half past nine.

  Kendra said to Cordie in the style of language she adopted when speaking to her friend, “I polishing them now, innit. If they shine good enough, I ain’t wearing knickers, b’lieve it.”

  Cordie laughed. “Oooh, you one nasty slag. What time, den?”

  Kendra looked to Joel. He and Toby were standing by the door to the garden, Toby partially unzipped but both boys still wearing their jackets done up to their chins. She said to Joel, “What time d’you lot usually go to bed?”

  Joel thought about this. There wasn’t really a usual time. There had been so many changes in their lives over the years that establishing schedules had been the last thing on anyone’s mind. He tried to make out what kind of answer his aunt wanted from him. Clearly, someone on the other end of the phone was waiting to hear good news, and good news seemed to equate with Toby and Joel being put to bed as soon as possible. He looked at the wall clock above the sink. It was a quarter past seven.

  He said arbitrarily and falsely, “Half eight most nights, Auntie Ken. But we could go now, couldn’t we, Tobe?”

  Toby always agreed with other people, except when it came to the television. As this moment had no television attached to it, he nodded complacently.

  That was Kendra Osborne’s life-defining moment, and while she didn’t like it in the least, she felt it present itself so strongly that she could not assign it a more convenient name. She felt the slightest crack in her heart followed by an odd sensation of sinking that seemed to go on in her spirit. These two things told her that smoking, dancing, pulling men, and shagging would have to wait till later. Her grip loosened on the phone, and she turned to the night-blackened kitchen window. She pressed her forehead against it and felt the pressure of cold, smooth glass on her skin. She spoke not to Cordie or to the boys but to herself.

  What she said was, “Jesus. Jesus God.” She didn’t intend it as a prayer.

  THE DAYS THAT followed did not pass easily for reasons that were beyond Kendra’s control. Having her world invaded by her young relations knotted up her already complicated life. The difficulty she had in organising just the basics, like meals, clean clothes, and enough toilet paper for the bathroom, was exacerbated by the necessity of contending with Ness.

  Kendra’s experience of dealing with fifteen-year-old girls was limited to the fact that she had once been one herself, a particular in a woman’s background that doesn’t necessarily give her the wherewithal to cope with another female in the midst of the worst part of her adolescence. And Ness’s adolescence—which otherwise would already have been fraught with the typical challenges a girl faces in growing up, from peer pressure to nasty spots on the chin—had so far been much rockier than Kendra knew. So when Ness hadn’t turned up in Edenham Way by midnight on the night that Glory Campbell had deposited the children on her daughter’s doorstep, Kendra set out to look for her.

  Her reason for this was a simple one: The Campbell children didn’t know the area well enough to be wandering around it at night or even during the day. Not only could they quickly become lost in a part of town dominated by labyrinthine housing estates whose questionable inhabitants engaged in even more questionable activities, but as a young female out and about alone, she would have been putting herself at risk anywhere. Kendra herself never felt in danger, but that was due to her personal philosophy of walk-fast-and-look-mean, which had long served her well when it came to chance nighttime encounters in the street.

  After Joel and Toby were bedded down on the floor of the spare room, Kendra went by car to try to find the girl but had no success. She went south as far as Notting Hill Gate and north as far as Kilburn Lane. As the hour grew later, all she ended up seeing in her cruising up one street and down another were the gangs of boys and young men who, l
ike bats, habitually emerged after dark to see what sort of action they could rustle up.

  Ultimately, Kendra stopped at the police station in the Harrow Road, an impressive Victorian edifice of brick whose size in comparison with what stands around it telegraphs its intention of being in that spot for a long time to come. She made her enquiry of a special constable, a self-important white female who took her time about looking up from her paperwork. No, was the answer she received. No fifteen-year-old girls had been brought into the station for any reason…Madam. At another time, Kendra might have felt the bristling under her skin that would have been her reaction to that pause between reason and Madam. But she had greater worries than being on the receiving end of someone’s disrespect that night, so she let the incident go, and she took one last circuit of the immediate area. But there was no Ness anywhere.

  Nor did Ness appear that night. It wasn’t until nine on the following morning that she knocked on Kendra’s door.

  The conversation they had was brief, and Kendra decided to allow it to be satisfactory. To her questions of where in God’s name Vanessa had been all night, because she’d been goddamn worried to death about her, Ness said she’d got lost, and after wandering a bit, she’d found an unlocked community hall over in Wornington Estate. There she’d hunkered and fallen asleep. Sorry, she said and went to the coffeemaker where last night’s brew had not yet been refreshed with the morning’s. She poured herself a cup and spied her aunt’s Benson & Hedges on the table, where Joel and Toby were dipping into bowls of breakfast cereal that Kendra had hastily borrowed from one of her neighbours. Could she have a fag, then, Aunt Ken? Ness wanted to know and What’re you gawping at? to Joel.

  When Joel ducked his head and went back to his cereal, Kendra tried to take the temperature of the kitchen to sort out what was actually going on. She knew there was more here than met the eye, but she didn’t know how to get to what it was.

  “Why’d you run off?” Kendra asked her. “Why’d you not wait for me to get home, like your brothers?”

  Ness shrugged—she was to do that so often that Kendra would grow to desire nailing her shoulders into place—and she picked up the packet of cigarettes.

  “I didn’t tell you to help yourself, Vanessa.”

  Ness took her hand off the packet and replied, “Whatever.” And then she said, “Sorry.”

  The apology prompted Kendra to ask her if she’d run off because of her gran. “Her leaving you here. Jamaica. All that. You’ve a right to be—”

  “Jamaica?” Ness said with a snort. “Di’n’t want to go to no bloody Jamaica, did I. Gettin a job an’ my own place, innit. I was tired of dat old cow anyways. C’n I get a smoke off you or wha’?”

  Having spent her formative years with Glory and Glory’s English, Kendra wasn’t about to listen to this version of their language. She said, “Don’t talk like that, Vanessa. You know how to speak properly. Do so.”

  Ness rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said. “Can. I. Have. A. Cigarette. Then?” She enunciated each letter precisely.

  Kendra nodded. She let go any further questions about Ness’s whereabouts and the reasons behind them as the girl lit up in the same manner Kendra had done on the previous night: on a burner of the stove. She inspected Ness as Ness inspected her. Each of them saw an opportunity on offer. For Kendra it was a fleeting moment of invitation to a form of motherhood previously denied her. For Ness it was an equally fleeting glimpse of a model of who she could become. The two of them dangled there for an instant in a limbo of possibility. Then Kendra remembered everything she was attempting to balance on the tray of her life, and Ness remembered everything she wanted so much to forget. They turned from each other. Kendra told the boys to hurry their breakfast. Ness took a hit from her cigarette and moved to the window to look at the grey winter day outside.

  What followed was, first of all, disabusing Ness of the idea that she would be finding a job and a place of her own. At her age, no one was going to employ her, and the law required her to be in school. Ness took this news better than Kendra expected although in a manner that she also anticipated. The signature shrug. The signature statement: “Whatever, Ken.”

  “Aunt Kendra, Vanessa.”

  “Whatever.”

  Then began the tedious process of getting all three of the children into school, a jumping through hoops made even more difficult by the fact that Kendra’s place of employment—the charity shop in the Harrow Road—would give her only an hour off at the end of each day to tend to this problem and the myriad other problems that went with the advent of three children into her life. She had the choice of quitting the charity shop, which she could not afford to do, or coping with the restriction placed upon her, so she chose the latter. That she also had a third choice was a thought she dwelt on more than once as she struggled with everything from finding inexpensive but appropriate furniture for the spare bedroom to heaving four people’s clothes to the launderette instead of having just her own to deal with.

  Care was the other choice she had. Making the phone call. Declaring herself wildly out of her depth. Gavin was the reason Kendra couldn’t do this. Gavin her brother, father to the children, and everything Gavin had put himself through. Not only that, but everything that life had put Gavin through, even to his untimely and unnecessary death.

  Settling the kids into her home and seeing to their placement in school ate up ten days. During this time, they remained at home while she went to work, with Ness in charge and only the television for entertainment. Ness was under strict instructions to stay on the premises and, as far as Kendra knew, the girl cooperated, since she was always there in the morning when Kendra left and there in the late afternoon when Kendra returned. The fact that Ness was not present in Edenham Way during the intervening hours escaped Kendra’s notice, and the two boys made no mention of this. Joel said nothing because he knew what the outcome would be for him if he passed this information to his aunt. Toby said nothing because he did not notice. As long as the television was on, he could retreat into Sose.

  Thus, Ness had ten days in which to meld into life in North Kensington, and she had no difficulty in doing so. Six and Natasha being unrepentant truants from their own school, they made a threesome with Ness and they were only too happy to show her what was what in the area: from the quickest route down to Queensway where they could loiter in Whiteley’s till they were run off, to the best spot where they could chat up boys. When the two girls weren’t initiating her into those sorts of delights, they were passing along to her the various substances that would make her life more blissful. With this, however, Ness was careful. She knew the wisdom of being in possession of all of her faculties when her aunt returned from her day’s work.

  Joel watched all this and longed to say something. But he was caught between warring loyalties: to his sister whom he no longer quite recognised let alone understood and to his aunt who had taken them into her home instead of delivering them elsewhere. So he said nothing. He just watched Ness leave and return—careful to wash herself, her hair, and if necessary her clothing prior to Kendra’s arrival—and he waited for what was surely to come.

  What came first was Holland Park School, the third of the comprehensives that Kendra contacted hoping for Joel and Ness to be admitted. If she couldn’t get them into a school that was relatively local, they would be forced to return to East Acton each day, which wasn’t what she wanted for them, nor for herself. She’d tried an RC comprehensive first, thinking that a quasireligious and, one hoped, disciplined environment might be just the ticket to set Ness on the straight and narrow that she needed. There were no places available, so she’d gone on to an Anglican comprehensive next, with the same result. She moved on to Holland Park School third, and there she finally had success. There were several places, and all that would be necessary—aside from taking the admissions test—was purchasing the necessary uniforms.

  Joel was easy to fit into the grey-upon-unrelieved-even-darker-grey of th
e required school kit. Ness was not so accommodating. She declared that she wasn’t about to “wear dat shit nowheres.” Kendra corrected her grammar, established a fine of fifty pence henceforth for linguistic crudities, and told her she most certainly was.

  They could have embarked upon a battle of wills at that point, but Ness gave in. Kendra allowed herself to be pleased and foolishly thought she had won a round with the girl, little knowing that Ness’s plans for herself didn’t include going to Holland Park School for love or money, so—reflecting on this fact—she’d quickly realised that it didn’t matter whether her aunt purchased the uniform for her to wear or not.

  With Joel and Ness taken care of, there remained the matter of Toby. Wherever he went to school, it had to be somewhere along the route Joel and Ness would follow to get to the number 52 bus, which would ferry them to Holland Park. Although none of them spoke of the subject openly, all of them knew that Toby could not be allowed to wander to school on his own, and Kendra could not hope to get back to her massage salon plans—which had been lying fallow since the night she’d arrived home to find the boys on her doorstep—while simultaneously keeping up her employment at the charity shop and either driving or walking Toby to and from school.

  So for another ten days, she worked upon the problem. It should have been simple: There were primary schools in every direction from Edenham Estate, and there were a number on the route that Toby’s siblings were taking to get to their bus. But between there being no places and there being no suitable situation in these schools for someone with Toby’s “obvious special needs,” as it was generally termed upon one minute’s conversation with the boy, Kendra had no luck. She was beginning to think she would have to keep the child with her permanently rather than enroll him somewhere—a horrifying thought—when the head teacher at Middle Row School directed her to the Westminster Learning Centre in the Harrow Road, just up the street from the charity shop. Toby could attend Middle Row School, the head teacher told her, as long as he had special daily instruction at the learning centre as well. “To sort out his difficulties,” the head teacher said, quite as if she believed an academic tutorial had a hope of curing what ailed him.