What Came Before He Shot Her

by Elizabeth George

  As things turned out for the boys, this operation took more than five hours. This was not because they got lost because they didn’t. Rather, the journey stretched and stretched because the first change at Oxford Street resulted in their being thrown off the bus without tickets, and four more buses lumbered past them in the mass congestion of the shopping district before one suitably packed with passengers suggested that the conductor might be too preoccupied to notice them. This indeed proved to be the case, but they had the same trouble with the next change at Queensway. From there it took six buses—leaping on, riding one or two stops, getting thrown off—just to make it to Chep-stow Road, where they were thrown off once again. Joel finally decided that they’d walk the rest of the way as Toby hadn’t been sick since the YMCA. He smelled no better and he was obviously tired, but Joel reckoned the air—as fresh as it could ever be in London—would do him some good.

  It was after seven in the evening when they finally reached Edenham Estate. Kendra met them at the door. By this time she had become quite frantic with worrying about what had happened to them, as Dix had arrived hours earlier—his trophy in hand—asking how Toby was feeling and setting off at once to search for the boys when he learned they hadn’t returned from the Barbican. Kendra’s mental state was evidenced by the state of her language. She cried out, “Where you been? Where you been? Dix’s out there…Ness even went out ’s well. What happened? Toby, baby, you sick? Dix said…Joel, goddamn. Why di’n’t you give me a bloody bell? I would’ve…Oh God!” She swept them both into her arms.

  Joel was surprised to find she was crying. No astute student of the human psyche at his age, he had no way of understanding that his aunt was reacting to what she’d been seeing as the incarnation of her own unspoken dream to be relieved of the burden of responsibility. For Kendra, it was a real case of be-careful-what-you-subconsciously-wish-for.

  As she ran the bath for Toby and stripped the ruined clothes from his body, she talked like a woman on amphetamines. Dix, she said, had been home for hours. He’d walked in with his bloody stupid trophy—“Oh yeah, he won, di’n’t he just”—and he looked round and said Boys make it all right? like he di’n’t have no worry at all dat you lot’d find your way ’cross the whole bloody stupid town though you never even been there before. I say to him What you raving ’bout, mon? Dem boys wiv you, innit? He say Toby sicked up down the front of himself and he made you come on home.

  Here, in all fairness, Joel interrupted. He’d been sitting on the toilet watching his aunt wash Toby with a soapy flannel and shampoo, and he knew it was only just that he set his aunt straight in the matter of Dix. He said, “He di’n’t make us, Aunt Ken. I told him—”

  “Don’t tell me who tol’ who what,” Kendra said. “Oh I ’spect he di’n’t tell you to disappear, but he made his bloody feelings known, di’n’t he? Don’t lie to me, Joel.”

  “It wasn’t like dat,” Joel protested. “He was near up before the judges. He’d’ve had to leave. And look, anyways, he won, di’n’t he? Dat’s what’s important.”

  Kendra turned from the bath where she was rinsing Toby. “Holy God in heaven. You thinking like him now, Joel?” She didn’t wait for an answer before she turned back. She wrapped Toby in a towel and helped him out of the tub. She used her drier on his crinkly hair, roughed him up with the towel, and patted him with powder. Toby glowed under all the attention.

  She took him to the bedroom and tucked him in, telling him she was going to make him Ovaltine and soldiers with butter and sugar, so “just rest there, baby, till Auntie gets back.” Toby blinked at her, all awe at this unexpected maternal outpouring. He settled into bed and became expectant. Ovaltine and soldiers constituted more nurturing than he’d had so far in his brief life.

  A jerk of Kendra’s head told Joel he was meant to follow her down to the kitchen. There, his aunt had him tell her the story from start to finish, and she managed to listen more calmly this time. Once he had completed the tale of their trip across town, the Ovaltine and the soldiers were ready. She handed them over to Joel and gave a nod to the stairs. She poured herself a glass of wine from the fridge, lit a cigarette, and sat at the kitchen table.

  She tried to sort out her feelings. She was an amalgamation of the physical and emotional in a pitched battle with the psychological. It was all too much for her to cope with. She sought out a focus just as a focus walked through the front door.

  Dix said, “Ken, I been all over in th’ car. All I got was dat Joel set off like he said he was going to do. A bloke busking near the bus stop at the Barbican tol’ me—”

  “He’s here,” Kendra said. “They’re both here. Thank God.”

  Thank God also meant no thanks to you. Dix understood that from the tone and from the look Kendra cast at him. In concert, that look and that tone stopped him in his tracks. He knew he was being blamed for what had happened, and he accepted that. What he couldn’t sort out was Kendra’s state of mind. It seemed more logical to Dix that she would be feeling relief at this juncture and not whatever it was that she was feeling, which read like hostility.

  He approached their encounter cautiously. “Dat’s good. But what th’ hell happened? Why di’n’t they come straight home like Joel said?”

  “Cause they didn’t have the means,” Kendra told him. “Which you apparently didn’t consider. You got the damn tickets in your gym bag, Dix. They didn’t want to disturb your concentration, so they tried to come home on the bus. Which of course they couldn’t.”

  Dix’s gym bag was where he’d left it earlier, near the doorway to the stairs. His gaze went to it and his mind’s eye saw the tickets where he’d stuffed them—indeed where he’d actually seen them when he dug out his own to return home after the competition. He said, “Damn. I’m dead sorry ’bout this whole t’ing, Ken.”

  “Sorry.” Kendra was a missile, seeking culpability. “You let an eight-year-old boy wander round London—”

  “He’s wiv Joel, Ken.”

  “—without the means to even get home. You let a boy been sick all down the front of him try to find his way out of the middle of a city he never been into before…” Kendra paused to breathe, not so much to dismiss her anger but to organise her thoughts and to express them from a position of power. “You talk a good talk about being a father to these kids,” she pointed out. “But at th’ end of the day, it all comes down to you, not to them. What you want and not what they need. That sort of thinking has nothing to do with being anyone’s dad, y’unnerstand?”

  “Now that ain’t fair,” he protested.

  “You got…You have your competition to attend and that’s what the whole day’s about to you. Nothing’s going to distract you from that. Not another lifter—cause you got to be like bloody Arnold, ’f course, and he’d never be distracted by anything, not even a nuclear bomb—and surely not a little boy being sick. Concentration is the name of the game. And God knows you a man who can concentrate.”

  “Joel said he could cope. I trusted him. You got someone you want to rave at, Ken, you rave at Joel.”

  “You blaming him? He’s bloody twelve years old, Dix. He thinks your competition counts more ’n anything he might need from you. You di’n’t see that? You don’t see that?”

  “Joel said he’d bring him straight home. ’F I can’t trust Joel to tell the truth of the matter—”

  “Don’t you blame him! Don’t you bloody blame him.”

  “I’m not blamin anyone. Seems to me you the one doing the blamin here. Makes me wonder why, Ken. Joel’s back home. Toby’s back home. I ’spect they’re both upstairs, listenin in on dis if it comes down to it. Everyt’ing’s okay. So question is: Wha’s going on wiv you?”

  “This is not ’bout me.”

  “I’n’t it? Den why you castin blame? Why you lookin for someone to blame when what you should be doing is being relieved Joel ’n Toby got back here wivout trouble.”

  “You call five hours of wand’ring round London like two lost mon
grels ‘without trouble’? Shit. What’re you thinking?”

  “I di’n’t know…Oh hell, I already said.” He waved her off. He headed in the direction of the stairs.

  She said, “Where you going?”

  “Takin a shower. Which, by th’ way, I di’n’t do at the end of the competition cos I meant to get home quick an’ see how Toby was doing, Ken.”

  “An’ that was your bow to being a dad? Not taking a bloody shower at the end of a competition you refuse to leave when your boy gets sick down the front of him? You want you and me to get married so we c’n keep the kids safe from Social Services, but this is what I c’n expect in the way of fathering?”

  He raised a hand. “You vex just now. We talk ’bout this later.”

  “We talk about it bloody now,” she said. “Don’t you climb those stairs. Don’t you walk out of this room.”

  “An’ if I do?”

  “Then pack up and get out.”

  He cocked his head. He hesitated, not from indecision but from surprise. He did not see how they’d come to this point, let alone why they had come to this point. All he knew was that for a moment Kendra was playing a game whose rules he did not understand. He said, “I’m takin a shower, Ken. We c’n talk ’bout this when you ain’t so vex.”

  “I want you out ’f here, then,” she said. “I got no time for selfish bastards in my life. I been there before and I’m not going there again. If your bloody shower is more important to you than—”

  “You comparin me? To which one of dem?”

  “I ’spect you know which one.”

  “So? Dat it?” He shook his head. He looked around. He made his move but this time it was towards the front door and not towards the stairs. He said regretfully, “Got your wish, Ken. I give you ’sactly what you want.”

  Chapter

  15

  Dix’s absence from Edenham Estate affected everyone differently. Ness began to swagger around the house as if she had successfully brought about a change that she had long desired. Kendra threw herself into work and didn’t mention the fact that Dix was gone. Toby explained Dix’s absence to someone unseen whom he began openly and daily referring to as Maydarc. And for the first time, Joel experienced a creative outpouring of poetry.

  He couldn’t have told anyone what any of his poems were actually about. Nor could he have traced his surge of artistic energy to their source: Dix’s leaving them. All he could have said about his verse was that it was what it was, and that it came from a place he could not identify.

  He showed none of these poems to anyone, save a single piece that he carefully selected after much thought—and an equal amount of screwing up his courage—to pass along to Adam Whitburn one night at Wield Words Not Weapons. He lingered near the basement door to do this, waiting till the young Rasta was heading out on his way home. He handed it over and then stood there mutely, in an agony of anticipation, while the Rasta read it. When he’d done so, Adam looked at Joel curiously, then returned his gaze to the page and reread. After that he handed the paper back to Joel, saying, “You show dis to Ivan?,” to which Joel shook his head. Adam said, “Mon, you got to show dis shit to Ivan, y’unnerstan? And why’n’t you readin at the mike? You got summick, blood. Ever’one want to see it.”

  But that was unthinkable to Joel. He felt the pleasure of Adam Whitburn’s approval, which was enough. Only Ivan’s approval would have meant more to him, and as for the rest—the public reading, the analysing and critiquing, the opportunity to win money or certificates or acknowledgement in some form during Walk the Word—it had become less important as his pleasure in the process grew.

  Something about all of the scribbling, the scratching out and staring upward without seeing what he was looking at, followed by further scribbling, took him to an altered state. It wasn’t one that he could have described, but he grew to look forward to being in it. It offered him a sanctuary, but more than that, it offered him a sense of completion that he’d never felt before. He reckoned how he felt was something akin to how Toby felt when he faded into Sose or when he watched his lava lamp or even carried it around in his arms. It just made things different, less important that their father was gone and their mother was locked up within padded walls.

  So naturally, he sought this refuge when, where, and as often as he could. He was able to block out the world as he wrote, so even when he walked over to Meanwhile Gardens when Toby wanted to watch the riders and cyclists in the skate bowl, he himself could sit on one of the benches with his tattered notebook on his knees and he could pull words out of the air and put them together, much as he’d done on the night he’d been named a Poet of Promise.

  He was doing just this, with Toby perched on the rim of the deepest skate bowl nearby, when someone sat next to him and a girl’s voice said, “So what’re you doing? Can’t be homework, this time ’f year. And where you been, Joel? You go on holiday or summick?”

  Joel looked up to see Hibah trying to get a glimpse of what he was writing. She was, she said, just returning from taking her dad his lunch over at the bus depot. Her mum was expecting her home and would probably phone her dad on his mobile if she didn’t turn up when she was supposed to, which was in about fifteen minutes.

  “Said they saw me out an’ about, they did,” Hibah confided. “An’ said they di’n’t much like what they saw. But I know tha’ cow who works Kensal Library was one tha’ ackshully saw me. Cos if it’d really been my mum and dad tha’ saw me, I wouldn’t be gettin out of tha’ damn flat on my own till I was married, no matter how bad Dad wanted his lunch. So see, they want me to think they saw me while they still givin me the benefit of the doubt wivout tellin me they’re doin it. It’s all cos they can’t be sure that ol’ library cow knows what she’s talkin about cos she doesn’t like us anyways.”

  From all of this, Joel assumed that Hibah had been seen in improper company. He knew who that improper company was likely to be, so he glanced around uneasily, not eager for another encounter with Neal Wyatt. The coast seemed clear. It was a pleasant day, and there were other people in the park, but Neal wasn’t among them.

  Hibah said, “So what’re you doing? Lemme see.”

  “Just poems,” Joel said. “But they ain’t ready to be shown cos I’m still writin ’em.”

  Hibah smiled. “Di’n’t know you ’as a poet, Joel Campbell. Like you writin rhymes? Rap songs or summick? C’mon. Lemme see. I never read a poem in person before.” She made a grab for the notebook, but he held it away. She laughed and said, “Come on. Don’t be like that. You go to tha’ poet event over Oxford Gardens? I know a lady goes there. Tha’ Ivan bloke from school goes ’s well.”

  “He runs it,” Joel said.

  “So you been? Well, lemme see. I don’t know much ’bout poems but I c’n tell if they rhyme.”

  “Ain’t s’posed to rhyme, these,” Joel told her. “Ain’t dat kind ’f poem.”

  “What kind, then?” She looked thoughtful and gave a glance towards one of the immature oak trees that dotted the little hills of the garden. Under several, young men and women lay: dozing, embracing, or more seriously entwined. Hibah grinned. “Love poems!” she crowed. “Joel Campbell, you got a girlfriend now? She round here somewheres? Hmm. I c’n tell you ain’t sayin, so lemme see I c’n make her come running. I bet I know how.”

  She scooted over mischievously till she was touching thighs with Joel. She put her arm around his waist and tilted her head to his shoulder. There they remained for several minutes, as Joel wrote and Hibah giggled.

  But “Wha’ the fuck…!” was the ultimate response to Hibah’s gesture of affection, and Joel wasn’t the person who said it. Instead, it came from the towpath beside the Grand Union Canal. No glance in that direction was required to see who the speaker was. Neal Wyatt came storming across the lawn.

  Behind Neal, three members of his crew remained on the towpath. They’d all been slouching in the direction of Great Western Road. They evidently felt that whatever Neal w
ished to handle at that moment could be handled by Neal alone, a fact that became quickly evident when he homed in on Hibah rather than on Joel.

  He said to the girl, “What the fuck you doing? I tell you where we meet and you bring dis wiv you? Wha’s dat all about?”

  Hibah didn’t drop her arm from around Joel’s waist, as another girl might have done. Instead, she stared at Neal and tightened her grip on Joel. She wasn’t intimidated. She was, however, shocked and confused. She said, “What? Neal, who’re you talkin to like that? Wha’s going on?”

  “Disrespec’s what’s going on,” he said. “You hang wiv dis shit, you shit yourself. An’ my woman ain’t displayin herself like shit. Y’unnerstand?”

  “Hey! I said, who’re you talking to like that? I come here like you want and I see a friend. We talk, him and me. You can’t cope or summick?”

  “You listen. I tell you who’s right f’r you to speak wiv. You don’t tell me. An’ dis yellow arse—”

  “Wha’s wrong wiv you, Neal Wyatt?” Hibah demanded. “You los’ your mind? This’s Joel an’ he’s not even—”

  Neal advanced on her. “I show you wha’s wrong wiv me.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet. He yanked her towards his mates on the towpath.

  Joel had no choice. He stood. He said, “Hey! Leave her ’lone. She ain’t done nuffink to disrespeck you.”

  Neal glanced his way contemptuously. “You tellin me…?”

  “Yeah. I tellin you. Wha’ kind of lowlife go after a girl? I guess same kind dat vex cripples up the Harrow Road.”

  This reference to their last encounter and the intrusion of the police into it was enough to make Neal release the hold he had on Hibah. He turned to Joel.