He said, “Christ, what a fuck. I was actually seeing stars,” and he laughed weakly in the direction of the ceiling. He was panting, and his body was slick with sweat.
Kendra said nothing. She’d had pleasure from him. Truth be told, she’d had more pleasure from him than she’d ever had with anyone else, Dix included. She, too, was breathless, dripping sweat and fluid, and by any other definition she was a woman fulfilled. But it had been the wrong prescription for the state she’d been in, and it didn’t take long for her to work that out from the emptiness she felt, beyond the lovely contractions she was still experiencing from her orgasm.
She wanted him to leave and in this she was lucky, as just Geoff had no intention of staying. He scooped up his clothing and came to the side of the bed, where he rested the tips of his fingers on her nipple.
“Good for you?” he asked.
Good depended on the definition, but she accommodated him saying, “Jesus, yeah,” and rolling on her side to reach for her cigarettes.
She didn’t see his look of distaste—women who smoked after sex were not part of his fantasy—as he turned his back to put his clothes on. She watched him dress and he asked if she had a comb or brush. She said, “The bathroom,” and still watched him as he opened the door.
He walked directly into Ness.
There were no lights on, but lights weren’t needed, as Kendra’s bedroom curtains were open. The tableau was an unmistakable one: Kendra on the bed, naked and uncovered in the warm night, lazily smoking, with the bedcovers in wild disarray around her and the man still not entirely dressed but carrying his shoes and his jacket with the clear intention of decamping at the conclusion of a successful conquest. And the scent in the air—clinging to him, to her, to the very walls, it seemed—was one that Ness could not fail to recognise.
Startled, just Geoff said, “Holy shit!” He retreated back into Kendra’s room and shut the door.
Kendra said, “Damn,” and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on her bedside table. It had always been a risk that one of the kids would see, but she would have preferred the seeing child to be one of the boys, for reasons she could not have articulated at the moment. She said unnecessarily to just Geoff, “That’s my niece. She sleeps in the sitting room. Down below.”
“Beneath…?” He gestured at the bed.
“She must’ve heard.” Which was hardly a surprise, considering how they had gone at each other. Kendra pressed her fingers to her forehead and sighed. She’d got what she wanted but not what she needed. And now this, she thought. Life was not fair.
They heard a door shut. They listened for more. In a moment, the toilet flushed. Water ran. The door opened and footsteps receded down the stairs. They waited four interminable minutes before just Geoff returned to what he’d been doing. At this point, he decided that he didn’t need to comb his hair; he just needed to leave. He slipped on his shoes, donned his jacket, pocketed his tie. He looked at Kendra, who’d pulled the sheet up over her, and he nodded. Some sort of leave-taking was called for, obviously, but nothing seemed appropriate. He could hardly say, “See you later,” since he had no intention of doing that. “Thanks” seemed ghastly, and any reference to the act itself seemed untimely post Ness’s arrival on the scene. So he fell back on a combination of public school manners and costume dramas of the Edwardian period. “I’ll see myself out,” was what he said, and he quickly did just that.
Alone, Kendra sat up in the bed and stared at the wall. She lit another cigarette, with the hope that smoke could obliterate sight. For what she saw was Ness’s face. There hadn’t been judgement upon it. Nor had there been caustic knowledge. Rather, there had been surprise, quickly replaced by a world-weary acceptance that no fifteen-year-old girl was ever meant to possess. This prompted in Kendra a feeling she had not expected when she’d invited just Geoff into her bed. She felt ashamed.
She finally roused herself and went into the bathroom, where she filled the tub with water that was as hot as she could stand it. She stepped inside and scalded her skin. She sank back and raised her face to the ceiling. She wept.
Chapter
18
Kendra was being far harder on herself than was necessary when it came to Ness, who had more pressing concerns than reacting to her aunt’s inviting some strange white man into her bed. True, finding him there had been something of a surprise. Ness had heard the commotion and had assumed that Dix was back. But, to her wonder, she didn’t feel what she’d earlier felt when listening to the rousing creak, bounce, and slam of Kendra’s bed from the floor above her. Instead, she’d awakened, heard the noise, grimaced, and realised she needed to use the toilet. Reckoning it was Dix with her aunt—which meant he’d stay the night and she’d run little risk of encountering him when she used the facility—she’d climbed the stairs, only to find a stranger emerging from Kendra’s bedroom.
At one time the sight of any man coming out of Kendra’s bedroom would have filled Ness with jealousy only thinly disguised as disgust. But that was before she’d shared a pappadum with a Pakistani woman she’d thought she didn’t like. It was also before what sharing a pappadum with that Pakistani woman had led to:
When Majidah informed her they’d be closing the drop-in centre early one day, not long after Ness’s visit to her flat, Ness thought it meant she was free from further obligation for the rest of the afternoon. But Majidah disabused her of that notion in short order, telling her that they were meant to be picking up supplies in Covent Garden. Ness was to go and assist.
At this Ness felt completely ill-used. Doing community service surely didn’t mean she was intended to traipse all round London like a servant, did it?
Majidah informed Ness that she was not the one whom the magistrate allowed to determine what constituted community service. “We will leave at precisely two o’clock,” she told Ness. “We shall take the tube.”
“Hey, I ain’t got—”
“Please. Ain’t got? What sort of language is this, Vanessa? How can you hope to make something of your life if you speak in this way?”
“Wha’? Like I’m s’posed to make summick of myself’? Dat it?”
“Good gracious, yes. What else are you thinking? Do you believe that you are entitled to whatever it is that you want and that you need do nothing to achieve it? And what is it that you want, precisely? Fame, fortune, additional pairs of silly high-heeled shoes? Or are you one of these foolish young girls who have ambitions solely of celebrity? Famous actress, famous model, famous pop star? Is that it, Vanessa? Celebrity alone when you could do whatever you want, a young woman like you with no man determining your fate as if you were a farm animal, mind you. There is no question that you could choose a career right out of the sky, and yet you have no gratitude for this. Only the wish to be a pop star.”
“Did I say dat?” Ness demanded when Majidah was finally forced to take a breath. “Did I f’r one minute say any of dat? Hell, Majidah, you got a one-track mind, anyone ever tell you? An’ how’d we get on dis anyways? I ain’t got money—” She saw Majidah’s thunderous face and she relented. “I haven’t got money in my possession to purchase a ticket,” she said primly.
Majidah held back her smile at Ness’s posh accent. She said, “That is all? Good gracious, Vanessa, I do not intend you to pay for the journey. This is work, and work shall recompense me for supplying you with the ticket you require.”
That detail established, two o’clock saw them setting off from the drop-in centre, whose cabin Majidah locked and then rechecked three times before Ness took her by the arm and dragged her out of the chain-link gate. They walked the short distance to the Westbourne Park underground station. Majidah made much of studying the map to determine the best route to their destination, clucking and tutting and counting stops while Ness stood by and tapped her foot. The decision ultimately made, they embarked for the journey, alighting finally at Covent Garden at which point Majidah led the way not to the market—where one might assume some sort
of supplies could be purchased albeit hardly economically—but north to Shelton Street. There a doorway between a minuscule bookshop and a coffee bar opened onto a stairway. This in turn took them up four flights—“The cursed lift in this wretched building does not work and never has,” Majidah informed Ness—and, breathless when they finally got there, into a loft where bolts of colourful linen, silk, cotton, velvet, and felt lay across wide worktables. At them four individuals worked in silence while Kiri Te Kanawa went through Mimi’s death throes on a CD player that sat atop a bank of containers holding everything from sequins to seed pearls.
Two of the workers were women dressed in shalwar kamis; one of them was a woman in a chador; the fourth was a man. He wore blue jeans, trainers, and a white cotton shirt. The women were sewing and gluing. He was fitting a headpiece onto the fifth person in the room: a sloe-eyed Mediterranean beauty who read from a magazine and muttered, “Bloody stupid warmongering idiots,” to which the man said, “Truer words and all that. But mind the position of your head, please, Miss Rivelle. The fit’s not right.”
He, like the women at work, was Asian. Miss Rivelle was not. She raised her hand to feel what he was affixing to her heavy dark hair. She said, “Really, Sayf, this is impossible. Can you not make it weigh less? It’s extraordinary you should expect me to be able to make an entrance, do the aria, and die dramatically, and all of it without this…this thing dropping to the floor. Who approved the design, for God’s sake?”
“Mr. Peterson-Hayes.”
“The director doesn’t have to wear it. No, no, this absolutely will not do.” She took the headpiece off, handed it over to Sayf, and saw Majidah and Ness across the room. As did Sayf, at that precise moment.
He said, “Ma! Bloody hell if I didn’t forget.” And to Ness, “Hullo. You must be the convict.”
“Sayf al Din,” Majidah said sternly. “What sort of greeting is this? And you, Rand,” to the woman in the chador, “do you not stifle beneath that ridiculous counterpane you’re wearing? When will your husband come to his senses? This is outdoor clothing you happen to have on. It is not meant to be worn within.”
“Your son’s presence…,” Rand murmured.
“Oh yes, my dear, my goodness me, but he will surely ravish you if your face is exposed. Is that not the truth, Sayf al Din? Have you not ravished two hundred women and counting? Where is your dance card, my son?”
“Score card,” Sayf al Din corrected her. He took up the headpiece he’d been fashioning for Miss Rivelle and placed it carefully on a wooden form. He said to the singer, “I’ll try to reduce the weight, but it’ll come down to Peterson-Hayes, so you’ll want to have a word with him.” He went to a monstrously cluttered desk beneath one of the room’s windows and there he unearthed a diary. He said, “Thursday? Four o’clock?”
“If I must,” she replied languidly. She gathered her belongings—which consisted of shopping bags and a handbag the size of a picnic basket—and approached Sayf al Din for a formal farewell. This consisted of air kisses, three of them in the Italian fashion, after which she patted his cheek and he kissed her hand. Then she was gone, fluttering her fingers at the rest of them. One of the shalwar kamis women murmured, “Divas,” with some scorn.
“They are our bread and butter,” Sayf al Din reminded her, “despite sometimes being caricatures of themselves.” He smiled at his mother. “And I am, beyond that, quite used to divas.”
Majidah tutted, but Ness could tell she took no offence. Indeed, she sounded pleased as she said to Ness, “This piece of nonsense is my Sayf al Din, Vanessa, the eldest of my children,” which made him the child of her first husband, less than thirteen years younger than his own mother. He was quite handsome—olive skinned and dark eyed—and he had about him an air of perpetual amusement.
“And how is that wife of yours, Sayf al Din?” his mother asked him. “Is she still scraping away at the teeth of the unfortunate rather than having more babies? This son of mine has wed a dentist, Vanessa. She produces two children and returns to her work when they are six weeks old. I cannot comprehend this lunacy: to wish to be looking into the mouths of strangers instead of gazing upon the faces of your infants. She should be like your sisters and like your brothers’ wives, Sayf al Din. Nine children among them so far and not one of them placed into the hands of a child minder.”
Sayf al Din had obviously heard this recitation before, as he said the last sentence of it in concert with his mother. He went on with, “What a scandal it is, this woman using her education as it was meant to be used when she could be at home making chicken tikka for her husband’s dinner, Vanessa.” He did such an accurate imitation of his mother that Ness laughed, as did the others in the room.
“Oh, you may find him amusing,” Majidah told them. “But he will be laughing out of his posterior should that woman walk off with—”
“An orthodontist,” he finished. “Ah, what dangers there are when one’s wife is a dentist. Beware. Beware.” He kissed his mother loudly on the cheek. “Let me look at you,” he said. “Why have you not come for Sunday dinner all this month?”
“And eat her dried-out chicken tikka? You must be mad, Sayf al Din. That wife of yours needs to learn how to cook.”
He looked at Ness, “She’s a record playing a single song, my mum.”
“I got that ’bout her,” Ness agreed. “Only the song’s diff’rent for everyone she knows.”
“She’s clever that way,” Sayf al Din said. “It makes one think she actually possesses conversation.” He put his arm around his mother’s shoulders and squeezed. “You’re losing weight again,” he told her. “Are you skipping meals, Ma? If you keep doing that, you know, I shall be forced to strap you down and feed you May’s samosas till you burst.”
“You might go ahead and just poison me instead,” Majidah said. “This is Vanessa Campbell, as you have guessed, Sayf al Din. She has come to assist me, but you might show her your studio first.”
Sayf al Din accommodated his mother with pleasure, like any man might who enjoys his work. He showed off a loft of organised chaos, where he designed and fashioned headwear for the Royal Opera, for West End theatrical productions, for television and film. He explained the process and brought out sketches. In these, Ness recognised the finished hand-coloured drawings and their penciled notes as very similar to the framed pieces that hung on Majidah’s sitting-room walls. She said, “Oh yeah, I seen these at your mum’s. I wondered ’bout them.”
“What did you wonder?” he asked.
“Who did ’em, I s’pose. An’ why they ’as on the wall. Not that they ain’t—”
“‘Are not,’ Vanessa,” Majidah said patiently.
“Aren’t pretty, cos they are. Just not what you ’spect to see…”
“Ah. Yes. But she’s proud of me, aren’t you, Ma? You wouldn’t think so, considering how she goes on, but she’d not have it any other way. Is that not the truth, Ma?”
“Have no misconception about it,” Majidah said. “You are the most troublesome of my children.”
He smiled, as did she. He said, “As that will be. Rand, of whom you so disapprove, will help you gather up the materials you want. And while you do that, I’ll show your companion how the drawings get themselves made into the headgear.”
Sayf al Din was as much a talker as his mother. He gave Ness not only explanations of what he did but demonstrations as well. He offered not only demonstrations but gossip, too. He was as amusing a companion as he looked, and part of his pleasure in his work was to try his millinery on others. He beckoned Ness to put on everything from turbans to tiaras. He perched hats and headdresses on his workers, who chuckled and continued with their sewing. He put a sequined Stetson on Rand’s veiled head, and for himself he chose the hat and plume of a musketeer.
His enthusiasm got directly into Ness’s blood and filled her with what she had least expected upon setting out on this jaunt with Majidah: pleasure, interest, and curiosity. After several days reliving in her
mind the experience in Sayf al Din’s studio, Ness took action. She went to the offices of the Youth Offending Team on a day when Fabia Bender was not expecting her.
Ness was different from what she’d been at their last meeting, and Fabia Bender had no trouble seeing this, although she couldn’t put a name to what had altered the girl. She learned soon enough when Ness introduced the reason for her call. She finally had a plan for her education, she said, and she needed the approval of the magistrate.
So far the matter of Ness’s schooling had been a dicey one for Fabia Bender. Holland Park School had refused to take the girl back, using as their excuse the lack of places for the autumn term. Every comprehensive nearby had told the same tale, and it was only on the south bank of the Thames that the social worker had finally found a school willing to take her. But an inspection of it had given Fabia pause. Not only was it in Peckham, which would have necessitated more than an hour’s commute by bus in either direction, but it was also in the worst part of Peckham, acting as a blatant invitation for Vanessa Campbell to fall in with the sort of young people most easily available to a troubled adolescent, which is to say the wrong sort of young people altogether. So Fabia had made a plea to the magistrate for more time. She would find something suitable, she told him, and in the meantime Vanessa Campbell was taking a simple course in music appreciation at the college and fulfilling her community-service sentence without a complaint from the Meanwhile Gardens Child Drop-in Centre. Surely that had to count in her favour…? It had done, and a reprieve was given. But, she was told, something permanent had to be arranged before the winter term.
“Millinery?” Fabia Bender said when Ness told her what she wanted to pursue. “Making hats?” It wasn’t that she thought Ness had no ability to do this. It was just that out of every possible line of work that the girl might have come up with to define her future, millinery seemed the last of them. “Do you fancy designing for Royal Ascot or something?”
What Came Before He Shot Her Page 40