What Came Before He Shot Her

            She bent and fixed him with her eyes. She said, “I know you. You come on the bus. Number fifty-two like me. Where you live?”

            He told her, snatching a glance at her face. It altered from curious to surprised. She said, “Ede’ham Estate? I  live there, innit. Up the tower. I never seen you round. An’ where you catch the bus anyways? Not near me, but I seen you inside.”

            He told her about Toby: walking him to school. He didn’t mention Ness.

            She nodded, then said, “Oh. Hibah. Tha’s who I am. Who you got for PSHE?”

            “Mr. Eastbourne.”

            “Religious education?”

            “Mrs. Armstrong.”

            “Maths.”

            “Mr. Pearce.”

            “Oooh. He c’n be nasty, innit. You good at maths?”

            He was, but he didn’t like to admit it. He enjoyed maths. It was a subject with answers that were right or wrong. You knew what to expect from maths.

            Hibah said, “You got a name?”

            “Joel,” he told her. And then he offered her something she hadn’t asked. “I’m new.”

            “I know  that,” she said and he grew hot again because it seemed to him that she sounded scornful. She explained. “You hangin here, y’unnerstan. I reckoned you was new. And anyways, I saw you here b’fore.” She tilted her head in the direction of the gate that closed the school off from the rest of the world. She offered him something in exchange for the information he’d offered her. She said, “My boyfriend comes lunchtimes most days. So I see you on my way to the gate to talk to him.”

            “He don’t go here?”

            “He don’t go anywheres. He s’posed to, innit. But he won’t. I meet him here cos ’f my dad ever saw me wiv him, he beat me black ’n’ blue, y’unnerstan. Muslim,” she added and looked embarrassed by the admission. Joel didn’t know what to say to this, so he said nothing. Hibah said,

            “Year nine,” after a moment. “But we c’n be friends, you ’n me. Nothing more ’n that, y’unnerstan, cos like I say, I got a boyfriend. But we c’n be friends.”

            This was so surprising an offer that Joel was stunned. He’d never actually had someone say such a thing to him and he couldn’t begin to imagine why Hibah was doing so. Had she been questioned on the matter, Hibah herself could not have explained it. But having an unacceptable boyfriend and an attitude towards life that placed her squarely between two warring worlds, she knew what it was like to feel like a stranger everywhere, which made her more compassionate than her peers. Like water that seeks its own level, misfits recognise their brothers even when they do so unconsciously. Such was the case with Hibah.

            She finally said, when Joel did not respond, “Shit. Not like I got a disease or summick. Well, anyways, we could say hi on the bus. Tha’ won’t kill you, innit.” And then she walked off.

            The bell for class rang before Joel could catch up with her and offer friendship in return.

            Chapter

      3 As far as friendship was concerned, things were developing far differently for Ness, at least on a superficial level. When she parted ways with her brothers every morning, she did what she had been doing since her first night in North Kensington: She met up with her new mates Natasha and Six. She effected this regular engagement by detaching from Joel and Toby in the vicinity of Portobello Bridge, where she hung about till she was sure the boys would not know in which direction she was going to head. When they were out of sight, she walked quickly in the opposite direction, on a route that took her past Trellick Tower, setting her north towards West Kilburn.

It was crucial that she take care with all this, for to gain her destination she had to use a footbridge over the Grand Union Canal, which put her squarely on the Harrow Road, in the vicinity of the charity shop where her aunt was employed. No matter that Ness generally arrived in this area well in advance of the opening hours of that shop, there was always the possibility that Kendra might choose to go in early one day, and the one thing Ness didn’t want to happen was being spotted by Kendra crossing over into Second Avenue.

In this, she didn’t fear a run-in with her aunt, for Ness was still of the mistaken opinion that she was more than a match for anyone, Kendra Osborne included. She merely didn’t want the annoyance of having to waste any time with Kendra. If she saw her, she would have to cook up an excuse for being decidedly in the wrong area of town at the wrong time of day, and while she believed she could do that with aplomb—after all, weeks into her removal from East Acton to this part of town and her aunt still  didn’t know what she was up to—she didn’t want to expend the energy on that. It was taking energy enough for her to transform herself into the Ness Campbell she’d decided to become.

            Once across the Harrow Road, Ness walked directly to the Jubilee Sports Centre, a low-slung building in nearby Caird Street that offered the inhabitants of the neighbourhood something else to do besides getting into or dodging trouble. Here, Ness ducked inside, and near the weight room—from which the clanging of barbells and the groaning of power lifters emanated at most hours of the day—she used the ladies’ toilet to change into the clothes and the shoes she’d stuffed into her rucksack. The hideous grey trousers she replaced with a skin of blue jeans. The equally hideous grey jumper she set aside for a lacy top or a thin T-shirt. With stiletto boots on her feet and her hair allowed to spring round her head the way she liked it, she added to her makeup— darker lipstick, more eyeliner, eye shadow that glittered—and stared in the mirror at the girl she’d created. If she liked what she saw—which she usually did—she left the sports centre and went round the corner into Lancefield Street.

            It was here that Six lived, in the midst of the vast complex of buildings called the Mozart Estate, an endless maze of London brick: dozens of terraces and blocks of flats that extended all the way to Kilburn Lane. Intended like every other estate to relieve the overcrowding of the tenement buildings it replaced, over time the estate had become as unsavoury as its predecessors. By day, it looked relatively innocuous since few people were ever out and about save the elderly on their way to the local shop for a loaf of bread or a carton of milk. By night, however, it was a different matter, for the nocturnal denizens of the estate had long lived on the wrong side of the law, trading in drugs, weapons, and violence, dealing appropriately with anyone who tried to stop them.

            Six lived in one of the apartment blocks. It was called Farnaby House: three storeys tall, accessed through a thick wooden security door, possessed of balconies for lounging upon in the summertime, having lino floors in the corridors and yellow paint on the walls. From the outside, it didn’t seem at all an unpleasant place to live, until further investigation revealed the security door hopelessly broken; the small windows next to it either cracked or boarded over; the scent of urine, acrid inside the entry; and the holes kicked into the corridor walls.

            The flat that Six’s family occupied was a place of odour and noise. The odour was predominantly of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed clothes, while the noise emanated both from the television and from the secondhand karaoke machine that Six’s mother had given her for Christmas. It would, she’d told herself, advance her daughter’s dream of pop stardom. It would also, she hoped but did not admit aloud, keep her off the streets. The fact that it was doing neither was something that Six’s mother didn’t know and would have turned a blind eye to had anything in Six’s behaviour suggested it. The poor woman worked at two jobs to keep clothes on the backs of the four children— out of seven—whom she still had at home. She had neither the time nor the energy to wonder what her offspring were doing while she herself was cleaning rooms in the Hyde Park Hilton or ironing sheets and pillowcases in the laundry of the Dorchester Hotel. Like most mothers in her position, she wanted something better for her children. That three of them were already following in her footsteps—unmarried and regularly producing offspring by various worthless men—she put down to bloody-mindedness. That three of the other four were set to do the same, she simply didn’t acknowledge. Only one of this latter group attended school with any regularity. As a result, the Professor was his sobriquet.

When Ness arrived at Farnaby House and made her way through the broken security door and up one flight of stairs, she found Six entertaining Natasha in the bedroom she shared with her sisters. Natasha was sitting on the floor, applying a viscous coat of purple varnish to her already red and stubby fingernails while Six clutched the karaoke’s microphone in the vicinity of her chest as she bumped and ground her way through the musical interlude of a vintage Madonna piece. As Ness entered, Six took Madonna to the next level. She jumped off the bed on which