He used his key on the lock, but this was enough noise to alert his family. The door jerked open. He expected to see his aunt there, furious and ready to pounce, but it was Ness who had her hand on the knob and Ness whose body blocked his path. She took one look at him and said over her shoulder, “Aunt Ken, the lit’l sod’s home.” And then to Joel, “You in for it, mon. We got cops callin round, we got school on the phone, we got Social Services involved. Where you been, ’xactly?” And then in a lower voice, “Joel, you dopin up or summick?”
He didn’t answer, and there was no need, for the door was jerked more fully open and there Kendra stood. She was still dressed in the clothing she’d had on two days ago. Red rimmed her eyes, and bruised flesh half-mooned beneath them. Like Ness, she cried out, “Where you been? What’s been…Who’ve you been…,” and then she simply wept. It was a release of pent-up stress, but as Joel had never seen his aunt cry before this, he did not know what to make of it. She grabbed him and hugged him fiercely, but the hug turned into fists beating against his back, although with all the force of a hummingbird’s heartbeat.
Over her shoulder, Joel saw Toby come out of the kitchen in his cowboy pyjamas, clattering across the lino in his cowboy boots. Beyond him, Dix D’Court stood in the centre of that room, his face expressionless. He watched for a moment before he came to the door and gently disengaged Kendra from Joel. He turned her to him and took her into his arms, giving Joel a disgusted shake of the head before he led Kendra in the direction of the stairs. Before he mounted them, he said to Ness, “Best phone the cops and tell ’em he’s back.”
Ness shot the front door home and went to the phone to make the call. She left Joel where he was, experiencing a form of solitary confinement that he hadn’t expected, one that he found far worse than being left in a tomb for two nights. It felt unfair to him that he was being treated like some sort of pariah instead of being welcomed home with celebration and relief. He wanted to say, D’you lot know what I been through for you?
Toby inadvertently added to Joel’s sense of indignation. He said unnecessarily, “Dix come back, Joel. Aunt Ken phoned him up to help when you di’n’t come home cos she thought you might’ve been wiv him at the gym or summick. Ivan said he di’n’t know where you were—”
“What? She rang Ivan?”
“She rang ever’one. It was late when she phoned Ivan. She thought he took you to a film or summick but he say no. Den she thought you got in trouble wiv the cops, so she phoned dem. Af’er dat, she thought maybe dat bloke Neal set ’pon you an’—”
“Okay. Shut up,” Joel said.
“But I wanted—”
“Hey. I said shut up. I don’t care. Shut up.”
Toby’s eyes filled. This was a Joel he did not know. He came to him and tugged on the sleeve of his anorak, saying, “You got wet. You wan’ to change your clothes, innit. I got a jersey from the charity shop when Aunt Ken come to school to fetch me an’ you c’n borrow—”
“Shut up shut up shut up!” Joel pushed Toby to one side. He went through to the kitchen. Toby ran for the stairs with a sob. Joel hated himself for having hurt his brother’s feelings, but he also hated Toby for being so dim that he couldn’t take an order without having to be shouted at.
Ness was completing her phone call as Joel went to the kitchen table and slumped into a chair, pillowing his head into his crossed arms, which he folded upon a mass of tabloids that lay open on the table’s surface. He wanted only to be left alone. He didn’t understand why everyone was reacting so much, as if he’d committed the crime of the century when Ness had been out all night more than once without coming home to a scene like this. He told himself that the lot of them were acting like he’d faked his own suicide or something.
Ness said to his bowed head, “You really done it, blood.” She lit a cigarette, and the acrid scent of sulfur from the match and then from the burning tobacco came to Joel and made his stomach churn. “Fabia Bender stopped by, talkin ’bout time to send you some place to be sorted out ’fore you really get into trouble. Cops went crawlin through ev’ry room like we murdered you. Some detective even went and tried to get some sense out of Mum, innit. I say dis: When you shit, mon, you do it like an elephant. So where you been?”
Joel shook his head, but he didn’t raise it. He said, “Why’d she go off the nut?”
“You ain’t heard?”
At this Joel wearily raised his head. Ness came to the table, cigarette dangling from her lips, and gestured for him to move his arms from the tabloids. She closed one of them—it was the Mirror—and she flipped it so that its front page faced him. “Have a look at dis,” she said. “Aunt Ken thought…Well, I ’xpect you got brains enough to sort it out.”
Joel dropped his gaze from his sister to the tabloid. “Another Body” blazed across the top of the page. Beneath this, three photographs showed a railway arch obstructed by sawhorses and crime scene tape, a clutch of people in earnest conversation, and a lone blond man in an overcoat, talking on a mobile and identified as a Scotland Yard detective superintendent. Joel looked up from this to his sister, saying, “I don’t get it. You saying Aunt Ken was t’inking…?”
“‘Course she t’inking,” Ness declared. “What else you ’xpect? You aren’t home when you say you home being sick. She rings dat bloke Ivan and he says he ain’t seen you, but dat’s after she been tryin to get him on the line for hours and she t’inks he did summick to you cos of these newspaper stories, innit. So she gives the cops a bell, and they drag dis Ivan to the station and grill him—”
“Ivan?” Joel groaned. “Cops talked to Ivan?”
“Hell yes, what else you t’ink? So they give him aggro and all the time you’re…where?”
Joel stared at the tabloid. He couldn’t believe so much had happened simply because he was gone for two nights. And what had happened couldn’t have been too much worse: the involvement of the local police, Ivan being harassed, the Youth Offending Team becoming alerted through the person of Fabia Bender upon whose radar Joel already had a position. He felt light-headed with all of the information. He brought the tabloid back into focus.
“Boys been gettin took all over London,” Ness was saying. “Dis one here in th’ paper, he’s like number five or six or whatever. They been just round your age. So when you don’t come home and Aunt Ken sees dis story in th’ paper—Cordie brought it over, di’n’t she—she t’inks dis body’s you, innit. So you cocked t’ings up proper, y’unnerstan. You in f’r it, and I’m glad I ain’t you.”
“She’s right in dat.” It was Dix speaking. He’d come back down the stairs. He looked at Joel with the same expression of disgust he’d had on his face when Joel had come through the door. He carried a glass in his hand, and he took it to the sink and rinsed it out. “Where you been, Joel? What you been doing?”
“Why’n’t you stop her fr’m callin the cops?” Joel directed his question to both of them, and he asked it in despair. His aunt had complicated his entire situation more wildly than he ever would have expected, and right on the brink of his sorting out everything on his own. She was, he concluded, making a dog’s dinner out of all his efforts.
Dix said, “Mon, I asked you a question. I want an answer.”
This sent Joel’s back up. It was the tone of it, the daddy tone. Whatever Dix was in their lives, the one thing he wasn’t was their father. Joel said, “Hey. Bugger off. I don’t got to tell you—”
“You,” Dix cut in, “best watch your mouth.”
“I c’n say what I want. You don’t run my life.”
Ness said, “Joel,” in a tone that blended warning with appeal, and this in itself was something unusual. For Joel, it put his sister directly into the enemy camp. He shoved himself away from the table and made for the stairs.
“Don’t t’ink dis conversation i’n’t going to be picked up later on,” Dix told him.
Joel said, “Whatever,” and began to climb.
He heard Dix following, and he thou
ght that the bodybuilder meant to force him to cooperate by resorting to a physical confrontation. But rather than trail Joel into his room, Dix went into Kendra’s and shut the door.
She was on the bed with one arm over her eyes, but she removed it when he sat down next to her, his hand coming to rest on her thigh. She said, “He say anything?”
Dix shook his head. “Dis i’n’t good,” he told her. “How it start when boys go bad, Ken.”
“I know,” she said wearily. “I know, I know. I got ’n ex-husband in Wandsworth, you recall, and I c’n see him all over Joel just now. He’s involved in something—running drugs? breaking into houses? carjacking? mugging half-crippled pensioners?—and tha’s how it starts, don’t think I don’t know cause I do, Dix. I do.”
“You got to cut dis off.”
“You think I’m blind to that? I already got him wiv a mentor in school, only now I called the cops on the man, so I can’t ’xpect him to want to go on mentoring, can I. Meantime, the Social Services woman mentions a place across the river where boys like Joel go to get sorted but it’s all the way in Elephant and Castle and I can’t have him trekking there every day after school cause I need his help wiv Toby…” She plucked at the chenille counterpane on the bed. Since her head was aching and she hadn’t slept in two days, there were no answers for Kendra.
So Dix supplied the only answer he knew. “Needs a dad,” he said.
“Well, he doesn’ have a dad.”
“Needs someone to stand in place of his dad.”
“I figured that bloke Ivan—”
“Ken. Come on. White man? Dat partic’lar white man? You see him as someone Joel likely to become? Cos dat’s wha’ he needs: someone standing in front ’f him in place of his dad and dat someone bein someone he might like to become.”
“Joel’s part white.”
“So’re you. But dis ain’t about bein white, innit. It’s ’bout being practical and figgering what the boy’s likely to admire.”
“So what d’you suggest?”
To Dix it was evident. He would move back in, he told her. He missed her and he knew she missed him. They would make things work this time. The only reason they hadn’t worked before was that he’d been too consumed with his bodybuilding to pay sufficient attention to her and to the kids. But that didn’t have to be the case now. He would change his ways. He had to, hadn’t he?
Kendra pointed out to him that the case just now was even worse than it had been before, since his own dad was still recovering from his heart attack and Dix was, as a result, spread even more thinly. But Dix argued that the situation was actually improved and that it offered them possibilities they hadn’t yet discussed. Kendra wanted to know what these possibilities were. Dix told her that Joel could work at the Rainbow Café, earning himself some honest money and staying out of trouble at the same time. He could also go to the gym with Dix. He could otherwise go to school, help out with Toby, and continue with his poetry events. He wouldn’t have the leisure necessary to get into trouble. And he’d also have a man of colour to act as a role model, which he badly needed.
“An’ you want nothing in return?” Kendra asked him. “You do all this out of the goodness of your heart? Why is it I don’t believe that much?”
“I ain’t ’bout to lie. I want you like I always want you, Ken.”
“You say that today, but in five years…” Kendra sighed. “Dix. Baby. I can’t give you what you want. You got to know that at some level, man.”
“How c’n you say dat,” he asked her, touching her cheek fondly, “when you’re givin me th’ only t’ing I want right now?”
SO DIX RETURNED to them, and to the outside world they resembled a family. Dix proceeded with caution, but at twenty-three—albeit soon to be twenty-four—he was out of his depth with a teenaged girl, a soon-to-be-teenaged boy, and an eight-year-old with needs vastly outweighing Dix D’Court’s ability to meet them. Had these been ordinary children in ordinary circumstances, he might have stood a chance as foster father to them—despite his youth—because it was clear, even to them, that he did actually mean well. But Ness wasn’t having any part of a father figure merely seven years her senior and Joel wasn’t interested. Instead he was confident that, having proven his worthiness to the Blade, matters with Neal Wyatt would soon be taken care of. And once matters with Neal were taken care of, life could go on and they all would be reasonably secure. So Joel rebuffed Dix’s well-intentioned attempts at what might be called male bonding. Too little too late was what he thought of Dix’s invitations to the gym and his offer of after-school employment at the Rainbow Café. Besides, he didn’t take the invitations or the offer seriously since he could nightly hear the extremely enthusiastic resumption of sexual relations between Dix and his aunt. This, he believed, told him the real reason for the bodybuilder’s return to Edenham Way, and he knew it had nothing to do with any of the Campbells or Dix’s interest in practising his paternal skills upon them.
Dix was patient with Joel’s reluctance. Kendra was not. She put up with Joel’s indifference to Dix’s overtures for only a few days before she decided to intervene. She did so once he’d gone to bed, on a night that Dix was at the gym for his workout. She went to the boys’ bedroom and found them in pyjamas, Joel on his side with his eyes closed and Toby sitting with his back against the banged-up headboard, skateboard across his knees, disconsolately spinning its wheels.
She said to the little boy, “He asleep?”
Toby shook his head. “He breathes funny when he’s asleep, and he ain’t.”
Kendra sat on the edge of Joel’s bed. She touched the side of his head and his crinkly hair depressed like candy floss beneath her fingers. She said, “Sit up, Joel. We got to talk.”
Joel continued with his pretence of sleep. Whatever she wanted with talking to him, he decided it couldn’t be good. He’d so far managed to keep her in the dark about what he’d been doing out all night, and that was the way he wanted things to remain.
She put her hand on his rump and gave it a tap. “Come on now,” she said. “I know you’re not sleeping. It’s time for a talk.”
But what she wanted to talk about was precisely what Joel wanted to keep hidden. He told himself that he couldn’t talk to her for the simple reason that she would not understand. Despite the fact that they were blood relations, her life was too much different from his. She’d always had people she could depend upon, so she would never understand what it meant to be completely on her own: reliant but with no one reliable on the horizon. She didn’t know how that felt.
He mumbled, “Wan’ to sleep, Aunt Ken.”
“Later. You c’n talk to me now.”
He scrunched his body into a ball. He held on to the blankets so she could not pull them off had she a mind to do so.
She sighed. “Right,” she said and her voice altered, causing Joel to steel himself to what was to come. “You’re making a decision, Joel, and that’s a fine and adult thing to do as long as you’re willing to live with the consequences. D’you want to think about that? D’you want to hang on to your decision or alter it?”
Joel said nothing. She said his name, less patiently now, less a reasonable woman making a reasonable request. She said, “We’ve been trying to help you out, but you’ve not met us halfway. Either me or Dix. You want to play your cards close, I s’pose that’s your right. But since I don’t know what’s going on with you, I got to do my duty to keep you safe. So home, school, home again. Fetch Toby from his school and that’s all. That’s your life.”
Joel’s eyes opened, then. “That ain’t fair.”
“No poetry events, no visits to Ivan. No trips to see your mum unless I take you out there and bring you back. We’ll see how you cope with all that for the next two months, and then we’ll renegotiate things.”
“But I di’n’t do—”
“Don’t take your auntie for a fool,” she said. “I know this whole situation goes back to that little lout you’ve been having
run-ins with. So I’m taking care of that as well.”
Joel squirmed around then. He sat up. Her tone suggested what was coming next, and he sought a way to head her off. “It ain’t nuffink,” he told her. “He ain’t nuffink. Dis is all jus’ summick I had to do, okay? I di’n’t break no laws. No one got hurt.”
“We’ll be working on your English as well,” she said. “No more street talk.”
“But Dix talk—”
“And that brings us to Dix. He’s trying his best with you lot. You meet him halfway.” She stood. “I held off before, but I’m not holding off any longer. It’s time the police—”
“You ain’t—”
“English.”
“You can’t get into this, Aunt Ken. Please. Just let it go.”
“Too late for that. Two nights away from home that you’re not talking about, Joel…They make it too late.”
“Don’t do it. Don’t do it,” Joel pleaded with her.
His very protest told Kendra that Neal Wyatt was indeed the source of what was going wrong in Joel’s life. Burning the barge, assaulting Toby in the street, threatening her in the charity shop…She was going to phone the police and something was going to stick to this boy. If nothing did at this point, at least he’d be warned.
HIBAH WAS THE one who broke the news to Joel. She found him waiting for the bus after school, but she didn’t say anything until he’d made his way inside, where the crowded conditions forced both of them to stand, swaying with the bus and clinging to the poles.
She said to him in a low, fierce voice, “Why’d you grass, Joel? Don’t you know how bloody stupid tha’ was? You know what he want to do to you now?”
Joel saw that her face was pinched beneath her headscarf. He picked up on her anger but he wasn’t able to read her exasperation. He said, “I di’n’t grass no one. What’re you talkin ’bout?”
What Came Before He Shot Her Page 49