What Came Before He Shot Her

by Elizabeth George

  “Where you markin down my hours, den?”

  “That, miss, is not for you to concern yourself about. Now shoo, shoo. Work awaits us both. The centre must be tidied and there are only you and I to do it.”

  “No one else works here?” Ness asked, incredulous.

  “Which makes the day blessedly full of activity,” Majidah said.

  Ness didn’t think she was going to be seeing it that way. But she found the mop, the bucket, and the Ajax and she set to work on the drop-in centre’s green lino floor.

  There were four rooms in all: kitchen, storage room, toilet, and activity room, with the most serious grit and grime in the two rooms to which the children were given access. Ness mopped the activity room, where pint-size tables and chairs were scattered across a floor made sticky by various spillages. She did the same to the toilet, shuddering to think what the various spillages in there implied. Under Majidah’s supervision, she went on to scrub the kitchen. The storage room, she was told, required only a thorough sweeping out, after which she could dust the shelves and the windowsills and clean the lopsided Venetian blinds.

  Ness did all of this with less than good grace, muttering and casting sidelong looks at Majidah, which the Pakistani woman ignored. At a desk to one side of the room, she instead occupied herself with two schedules: Ness’s and the children’s. She viewed Ness’s assignment to the drop-in centre as a gift from the gods, and she intended to make use of that gift. How Ness felt about matters was not her concern. Experience had shown her that hard work killed no one, nor did accepting what life threw at you.

  KENDRA MET UP with Cordie for advice once Ness had received her sentence. She went to her house in Kensal Green, where Cordie was tolerantly taking part in her two daughters’ fantasy tea party in the cramped back garden. Uncharacteristically, Manda and Patia had decided upon a royal theme for this event, with Manda acting the role of monarch—ancient pillbox hat, lace gloves, and oversize handbag on her arm—and Cordie and Patia playing a grateful and decidedly nonroyal public invited to partake of Fanta orange served in chipped china cups (courtesy of the charity shop), bowls of crisps (in Patia’s favourite flavour, which happened to be lamb and mint), a bag of cheddar popcorn emptied into a plastic colander and set in the middle of the rickety garden table, and a plate of Jaffa cakes looking rather crumbly.

  Manda, apparently suffering some degree of confusion over the respect demanded by the papacy and that demanded by the monarchy, was imperiously directing her mother and sister to kiss her ring when Kendra joined them. The child was standing on a deck chair in lieu of sitting on a throne, and, quite caught up in a role for which she was clearly born, once her ring was kissed, she went on to give instruction in the proper position of teacup in relation to one’s pinky. Patia declared all of this rubbish and demanded to be monarch instead. Cordie informed her that she’d lost the coin toss fair and square, so she’d have to play along until next time when, one hoped, her luck would improve.

  “An’ no pouting ’bout it,” Cordie told her.

  When Cordie saw Kendra, admitted to the house and then to the garden by Gerald, who was watching a World Cup football match beamed live from Barbados, she asked leave of her majesty to speak to her friend. Leave was reluctantly given, and even then her decree was that Cordie could not take her teacup with her. Cordie curtseyed and backed off with a suitable degree of humility. She joined Kendra on the small patio that made a square just outside the back door. It was a fine day, and from the back gardens on either side of Cordie’s, other families were enjoying the weather with outdoor meals, outdoor music, outdoor conversations, and the occasional argument. The noise of all this floated over the walls, providing an ambience that promised to remind them of where they were at all times, lest they begin to think themselves—as Manda and Patia would have them—in a palace garden.

  There was no place to sit, since the girls were using all available outdoor furniture for the tea party, so Cordie and Kendra decamped to the kitchen. Ignoring Gerald’s admonition that smoking could endanger the baby should Cordie be pregnant—a warning at which Cordie smiled serenely—they lit up cigarettes and relaxed.

  Kendra told her friend about Ness’s appearance in front of the magistrate. She also told her about Fabia Bender and about the direction she’d been given to form a bond with the girl if she didn’t want to see Ness trip down the rock-strewn pathway of further trouble. She said, “Seems like we should be doing girl t’ings together, way I see it.”

  “Such as?” Cordie sent a plume of cigarette smoke towards the open back door. She cast a glance at the tea party. Her girls had moved from ring kissing to gobbling cheddar popcorn.

  “Facials at a spa?” Kendra said. “Getting our nails done? Getting our hair done? Going out to lunch? Having a girls’ night out, maybe wiv you and me? Making somet’ing together? Jewellery maybe? Taking a class?”

  Cordie considered all this. She shook her head. “I don’ see Ness havin no facial, Ken. An’ the res’…? Well, all dat’s what you might like to do, innit. You got to t’ink what she like to do.”

  “She like to dope up and she like to have sex,” Kendra said. “She like to mug old ladies and she like to get drunk. She like to watch telly and lie round doing nothing. Oh, and she like to flaunt it round Dix.”

  Cordie raised an eyebrow. “Dat’s trouble,” she noted.

  Kendra didn’t want to make that part of the conversation. She’d already done so with Dix, and it hadn’t worked out. Insult to him. Frustration to her. The resulting question of “Who d’ you t’ink I bloody am, Ken?” being one she could not answer. She said, “You and your girls, you got a relationship, Cordie.”

  “Sure as hell hope. I’m their mum. Plus, they been wiv me always, so it’s easier for me. I know dem. I know what they like. Ness’s like dat, anyways. She got to like somet’ing.”

  Kendra thought about this. She continued to think about it in the days that followed. She considered who Ness had been in childhood, before everything in her life had altered, and she came up with ballet. That, she decided, had to be it. She and her niece could begin their bonding over ballet.

  To attend the Royal Ballet was wildly beyond Kendra’s means, so the first step was to find a performance somewhere nearby that was simultaneously worth seeing and affordable. This didn’t prove as difficult as Kendra thought it might. She tried Kensington and Chelsea College first, and while she found that there was indeed a dance department, it was modern dance, which she did not think would do. Her next source was Paddington Arts, and there she was successful. In addition to the classes and the art-related events, the centre offered concerts of various types, and one of these was a performance by a small ballet company. Kendra promptly bought two tickets.

  She decided that it would be a surprise. She called it a reward for Ness’s putting in her community service time without major complaints. She told her niece to dress up in her finery because they were going to do a proper “girl thing” together. She herself dressed to the nines and she made no comment about Ness’s plunging neckline and six inches of cleavage, about her micromini skirt and her high-heeled boots. She was determined that the evening would succeed and that the necessary bonding would occur between them.

  In planning all this, what she didn’t understand was what ballet represented to her niece. She did not know that watching a score of thin young women en pointe cast Ness back where she least wanted to be. Ballet meant her father. It meant being his princess. It put her at his side walking to the dance studio every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, every Saturday morning. It put her onstage those few times she had actually been onstage, with her dad in the audience—in the first row always—with his face shining bright and no one around him knowing that what he looked like was not who he was. Thin to the point of disease, but no longer diseased. Dissolute of face but no longer a dissolute. Shaking of hand but no longer from need. Having been to the brink, but no longer in danger of tumbling over. Just a dad who liked to
vary his routine, which was why he walked on the other side of the street that day, which was why he was anywhere near the off licence, where people said he meant to go inside but he hadn’t, he hadn’t, he had merely been in the wrong place at a terrible time.

  When Ness could stand no more of the ballet because of the memories that she could not bear, she got up and fought her way down the row to the aisle. The only thing that mattered was getting out of the place so that she could forget once more.

  Kendra followed her. She hissed her name. She burned with both embarrassment and anger. The anger grew out of her despair. It seemed to her that nothing she did, nothing she tried, nothing she offered…The girl was simply beyond her.

  Ness was outside when Kendra caught up with her. She swung around on her aunt before Kendra could speak.

  “Dis is my fuckin reward?” she demanded. “Dis is wha’ I get for puttin up wiv dat fuckin Majidah every day? Don’ do me any more favours, Ken-dra.” That said, she pushed off.

  Kendra watched her go. What she saw in Ness’s march up the street was not escape but lack of gratitude. She floundered around for a way to bring the girl to her senses once and for all.

  It seemed to Kendra that a comparison was in order: how things were versus how they could be. Well-intentioned but ill informed, she believed she knew how to bring that comparison about.

  DIX DISAGREED WITH her plan, which Kendra found maddening. Her point of view was that Dix was hardly in a position to know how to cope with an adolescent, being little more than an adolescent himself. He didn’t take this declaration well—especially since it seemed like something intended, among other things, to underscore the difference in their ages—and with an irritating and unexpected combination of insight and maturity, he pointed out to Kendra that her flailing around and attempting to form an attachment to her niece looked more like an effort to control the girl than to have a relationship with her. Besides, he said, it seemed to him that Kendra wanted Ness to become attached to her without herself becoming attached to Ness. “Like ‘Love me, girl, but I ain’t intendin to love you back,’” was how he put it.

  “Of course I love her,” Kendra said hotly. “I love all three of them. I’m their bloody aunt.”

  Dix observed her evenly. “I ain’t sayin it’s bad, Ken, what you feel. Hell, what you feel is jus’ what you feel. Not right, not wrong. Jus’ is, y’unnerstan? How’re you s’posed to feel anyway, wiv three kids jus’ turned over to you when you don’t even know they’re comin, eh? No one ’spects you to love them jus’ cos they’re your blood.”

  “I love them. I love them.” She heard herself shrieking, and she hated him for bringing her to that sort of reaction.

  “So accept dem,” he said. “Accept everyone, Ken. Might as well. Can’t change dem.”

  To Kendra, he was himself the picture of something that she needed to accept and had succeeded in accepting: There he was during this conversation, standing in the bathroom with his body lathered in pink depilatory cream so that the skin he showed to the bodybuilding judges would be smooth and hairless from head to toe, looking like a fool in a dozen ways, and she was making no comment about that, was she because she knew how important to him was his dream of sculpting his way to a crown that meant nothing to most of the world and if that wasn’t acceptance…

  More than that Kendra couldn’t face, however. She had too many responsibilities. The only way that she could see to handle them was to get them under control, which had been Dix’s point exactly although she couldn’t admit that to herself. Joel was easy, since he was so eager to please that he generally anticipated how he was meant to behave before she informed him of her wishes. Toby was simple since his lava lamp and the television kept him occupied and content, and more than that about Toby she didn’t wish—and could not afford—to consider. But Ness from the first had been a nut impossible to crack. She’d gone her own way, and look what had happened. A change was called for, and with the determination that Kendra had always applied to everything else in her life, she decided that a change would occur.

  Ages had passed since the children had last seen Carole Campbell, so the natural excuse for the comparison that Kendra wanted Ness to experience was right at hand. A visit to Carole meant that arrangements had to be made with Fabia Bender to get Ness released from her required appearance at the child drop-in centre for one day, but that did not prove difficult. Once release was accomplished, what remained was informing Ness that the time had arrived for the Campbell children to pay a call on their mother.

  Since Kendra knew how unlikely it was that Ness would cooperate in this plan—considering how the girl had responded to the last visit they’d paid to the children’s mother—she altered the arrangement slightly from what she would have preferred it to be. Instead of going with the Campbells to make certain they got themselves into Carole’s presence, she assigned to Ness the responsibility of taking her little brothers from home to the hospital and back. This, she decided, would illustrate her trust in the girl at the same time as it would put Ness in the position of assessing—even subconsciously—what life would be like should she have to live it in the presence of and with the companionship of her poor mother. This would develop a sense of gratitude in the girl. In Kendra’s mind, gratitude was part of the bonding process.

  Ness, presented with the alternative of appearing for her regularly scheduled time at the child drop-in centre or travelling to the countryside hospital to see her mother, chose the latter option, as any girl might have done. She carefully pocketed the forty pounds her aunt gave her for the journey and for Carole’s treats, and she steered Joel and Toby onto the number 23 bus to Paddington station like a young adult determined to prove herself. She took the boys to the upper deck of the bus, and she didn’t even seem to mind that Toby had insisted upon bringing his lava lamp with him and that he trailed the flex up the stairs and down the aisle, tripping over it twice as he made his way past the other passengers. This, indeed, was a brand-new Ness, one about whom a person might make positive assumptions.

  Which was what Joel did. He felt himself relax. For the first time in a very long while, it seemed to him that the complicated duty of minding Toby, caring for himself, and seeing to the rest of the world had been lifted from his shoulders. He even looked out of the window for once, enjoying the spectacle of Londoners out and about in good weather: a peregrinating populace in as few clothes as possible.

  The Campbells made it all the way to Paddington station and into the ticket hall before Ness’s plan became apparent. She bought only two returns for the journey and handed over just part of the change to Joel, pocketing the rest.

  She said, “Get her an Aero like she likes. Get her summick cheaper ’n Elle or Vogue. Dere ain’t enough for crisps dis time, so you got to do wivout, y’unnerstan.”

  Joel said in futile protest, “But, Ness, what’re you—”

  “You tell Aunt Ken, and I beat you shitless,” Ness informed him. “I got a day off from dat bitch Majidah and I mean to take it. You got dat, blood?”

  “You’ll get in trouble.”

  “Like I could fuckin care,” she said. “I meet you back here half past four. I’m not here, you wait. You got dat, Joel? You wait, cos if you go home wivout me, I beat you shitless like I said, y’unnerstan.”

  That pronounced so succinctly as to leave no room for questions, she made him find the correct train on the departures board, after which she directed him to WH Smith. When he went inside, with Toby hanging on to his trouser leg, she disappeared, a girl determined not to dance to anyone’s tune, least of all her aunt’s.

  Joel watched her from inside the shop until he lost her as she wove through the crowd. Then he bought a magazine and an Aero, and he took his brother to the correct platform. Once they were on the train, he gave Toby the chocolate. Their mother, he decided, would just have to suffer.

  A moment after he had the thought, though, he felt nasty for having entertained it. To drive that nastiness
away, he observed the graffiti-scarred brick walls on either side of the station as the train moved past them, and he tried to read individual tags. Looking at the graffiti and the tags reminded him of Cal Hancock. Cal Hancock reminded him of facing off with the Blade and being sick in the gutter afterwards. That thought took him inevitably to what had followed: his decision to pay a call upon Ivan Weatherall anyway.

  Joel had found Ivan at home, and he’d been grateful for this. If Ivan smelled the scent of vomit upon him, he was good enough not to mention the matter. He was in the midst of a delicate part of the operation of clock building when Joel arrived, and he didn’t stop his work when he bade Joel enter the house and help himself from a chipped bowl of grapes that sat on the edge of the table. He did, however, hand Joel a piece of green paper with “Wield Words Not Weapons” printed across the top of it. He said, “Have a look at this, and tell me what you think,” as he gave his attention back to his clock.

  “What is it?” Joel asked him.

  “Read,” Ivan said.

  The paper appeared to be announcing a writing contest. The notice gave page lengths, line lengths, and the terms of critiquing, along with cash prizes and other awards. The big moment seemed to be something called Walk the Word because the largest prize of all—which was fifty pounds—went to that, whatever it was. Wield Words Not Weapons occurred in one of the community centres in the area: a place called the Basement Activities Centre in Oxford Gardens.

  “I still don’ get it,” Joel said to Ivan once he’d read the advertisement for Wield Words Not Weapons. “’M I s’posed to do summick wiv dis?”

  “Hmm. I hope so. You’re supposed to attend. It’s a poetry…well, a poetry event, I dare say would be the best term for it. Have you been to one before? No? Well, I suggest you come and find out about it. You might be surprised to see what it’s like. Walk the Word is a new element, by the way.”

  “Poetry? We sit round and talk ’bout poems or summick?” Joel made a face. He pictured a circle of old ladies with sagging stockings, enthusing about the sort of dead white men one heard about at school.