What
Came Before
He Shot Her
Elizabeth George
For Grace Tsukiyama
Political liberal
Creative spirit
Mom
—Better authentic mammon than a bogus god.
Louis MacNeice
Joel Campbell, eleven years old at the time, began his descent towards murder with a bus ride. It was a newish bus, a single decker. It was numbered 70, on the London route that trundles along Du Cane Road in East Acton.
There is not much notable on the northern section of this particular route, of which Du Cane Road is but a brief part. The southern section is pleasant enough, cruising near the V & A and past the stately white edifices of Queen’s Gate in South Kensington. But the northern part has a list of destinations that reads like a where’s where of places in London not to frequent: the Swift Wash Laundry on North Pole Road, H. J. Bent Funeral Directors (cremations or burials) on Old Oak Common Lane, the dismal congeries of shops at the turbulent intersection where Western Avenue becomes Western Way as cars and lorries tear towards the centre of town, and looming over all of this like something designed by Dickens: Wormwood Scrubs. Not Wormwood Scrubs the tract of land circumscribed by railway lines, but Wormwood Scrubs the prison, part fortress and part asylum in appearance, place of unremitting grim reality in fact.
On this particular January day, though, Joel Campbell took note of none of these features of the journey upon which he was embarking. He was in the company of three other individuals, and he was cautiously anticipating a positive change in his life.
Prior to this moment, East Acton and a small terrace house in Henchman Street had represented his circumstances: a grubby sitting room and grubbier kitchen below, three bedrooms above, and a patchy green at the front, round which the terrace of little homes horseshoed like a collection of war widows along three sides of a grave. It was a place that might have been pleasant fifty years ago, but successive generations of inhabitants had each put their mark upon it, and the current generation’s mark was given largely to rubbish on doorsteps, broken toys discarded on the single path that followed the U of the terrace, plastic snowmen and rotund Santas and reindeer toppling over upon the jutting roofs of bay windows from November till May, and a sinkhole of a mud puddle in the middle of the green that stood there eight months of the year, breeding insects like someone’s entomology project. Joel was glad to be leaving the place, even if leaving meant a long plane ride and a new life on an island very different from the only island he’d so far known.
“Ja-
“You t’ree kids” were the Campbell children, victims of a tragedy played out on Old Oak Common Lane on a Saturday afternoon. They were progeny of Glory’s elder son, dead like her second son although under entirely different circumstances. Joel, Ness, and Toby, they were called. Or “poor lit’l t’ings,” as Glory had taken to referring to them once her man George Gilbert had received his deportation papers and she’d seen which way the wind of George’s life was likely to blow.
This use of language on Glory’s part was something new. In the time the Campbell children had been living with her—which was more than four years and counting this time around and looking to be a permanent arrangement—she’d been a stickler for correct pronunciation. She herself had been taught the queen’s English long ago at her Catholic girls’ school in Kingston, and while it hadn’t served her as well as she’d hoped when she’d immigrated to England, she could still trot it out when a shop assistant needed sorting, and she intended her grandkids to be able to do some sorting as well, should they ever have the need.
But all that altered with the advent of George’s deportation papers. When the buff envelope had been opened and its contents perused, digested, and understood, and when all the legal manoeuvring had been engaged in to prolong if not to thwart the inevitable, Glory had shed over forty years of God-save-the-current-monarch in an instant. If her George was heading for Ja-
So the linguistic tone, melody, and syntax morphed from Glory’s rather charmingly antique version of Received Pronunciation to the pleasant honey of Caribbean English. She was going native, her neighbours called it.
George Gilbert had left London first, escorted to Heathrow by immigration officials keeping the current prime minister’s promise to do something about the problem of visitors overstaying their visas. They came for him in a private car and glanced at their watches while he bade Glory a farewell thoroughly lubricated by Red Stripe, which he’d begun to drink in anticipation of the return to his roots. They said,
“Come along, Mr. Gilbert,” and took him by the arms. One of them reached into his pocket as if in search of handcuffs should George not cooperate.
But George was happy to go along with them. Things hadn’t really been the same at Glory’s since the grandkids had dropped on them like three human meteors from a galaxy he’d never quite understood.
“Look damn
“You hush up ’bout them,” was Glory’s reply. Her own children’s blood was thoroughly mixed— although less so than the blood of her grandkids—and she wasn’t about to have anyone comment on what was as obvious as burnt toast on snow. For mixed blood was not the disgrace it had been in centuries past. It no longer made anyone anathema.
But George blew out his lips. He sucked on his teeth. From the corners of his eyes, he watched the young Campbells. “They not fitting good into Jamaica,” he pointed out.
This assessment didn’t deter Glory. At least that was how it seemed to her grandchildren in the days leading up to their exodus from East Acton. Glory sold the furniture. She boxed up the kitchen. She sorted through
