What Came Before He Shot Her

This friendship had suffered in the weeks since the Campbell children had descended upon Kendra. Their girls’ nights out had been postponed as regularly as they’d once been experienced, and the long phone chats that had been one of the hallmarks of their relationship had been cut shorter, until they’d ultimately metamorphosed into promises to “phone back soon, luv,” except soon never came. Once life in Edenham Way developed what seemed to Kendra to be a pattern, however, she was able to inch carefully towards making her days and nights like what they’d been before the Campbells.

She began with work: No longer needing that wages-reducing one hour per day of free time that she’d been given at the charity shop to see to the needs of her niece and nephews, she returned to full-time employment. She reengaged with a class at Kensington and Chelsea College as well as with demonstration massages down at the sports centre in Portobello Green Arcade. She felt confident enough of how the Campbells were doing to extend her demonstration massages to two of the other gyms in the area, and when from this she cultivated her first three regular clients, she began to feel that life was sorting itself out. So on the day that Cordie popped into the charity shop on a rainy afternoon not too long after Ness’s experience of tongue-kissing Six, Kendra was pleased to see her.

            She was expecting Joel and Toby since it was near the time when the boys were setting off for home from the learning centre up the street. As the bell on the shop door chimed, she looked up from what she was doing—trying to make an appealing display out of a dismal donation of 1970s costume jewellery—and when she saw Cordie lounging in the doorway instead of the boys, she smiled and said, “Take me away  from this, girl.”

            “You must’ve got yourself one helluva  man,” Cordie remarked. “I been picturin him giving it to you three times a day, wiv you layin there moanin an’ all your girl brains wasted to nothing. Dat how it is, Miss Kendra?”

            “You joking? Haven’t had one in so long I forget what parts ’f them is different from us,” Kendra said.

            “Well thank God for that,” Cordie told her. “Swear to God, I was startin to t’ink you been shaggin my Gerald and avoidin me cos you sure I’d see the truth on your face. Only lemme tell you, slag, I be that grateful you do Gerald. Save me from gettin rode every night.”

            Kendra chuckled sympathetically. Gerald Durelle’s sex drive had long been the cross his wife Cordie was forced to bear. In combination with his determination to have a son from her—they already had two daughters—that drive made her willing presence in his bed the primary requirement for their marriage. As long as Cordie acted hungry in the beginning and sexually sated in the end, he didn’t notice that the middle comprised her staring into space and wondering if he was ever going to realise she was secretly on the pill.

            “He figure things out yet?” Kendra asked her friend.

            “Hell no,” Cordie said. “Man’s ego enough to make him t’ink I just dyin  to keep poppin out babies till he’s got what he want.”

            She sauntered over to the counter. She was, Kendra saw, still wearing the surgical mask that was part of the uniform of the manicurists at the Princess European and Afro Unisex Hair Salon just down the street. She had it slung around her neck, like the love child of an Elizabethan ruff, completing her ensemble of purple polyester smock and quasimedical shoes. Child of an Ethiopian father and a Kenyan mother, Cordie was deep black and majestic in appearance, with an elegant neck and a profile that looked like something one might find on a coin. But even possessing good genes, a perfectly symmetrical face, excellent skin, and a mannequin’s body could not make her look like a fashion statement in the outfit that the hair salon required its employees to wear. She went for Kendra’s bag, which she knew Kendra kept in a cupboard beneath the till. She opened it and found herself a cigarette.

            “How’s your girls?” Kendra asked her.

            Cordie shook the flame from a match. “Manda wants makeup, her nose pierced, and a boyfriend. Patia wants a mobile.”

            “How old they now?”

            “Six and ten.”

            “Shit. You got your work cut out.”

            “Tell me,” Cordie said. “I ’spect ’em both to be pregnant time they’re twelve.”

            “Wha’s Gerald t’ink?”

            She blew smoke out through her nose. “They got him runnin, those girls. Manda crook her finger, he melt to a puddle. Patia show a few tears, he got the wallet out ’fore he got the handkerchief in his hand. I say no to summick, he say yes. ‘I wan’ dem to have wha’ I never got,’ he say. Tell you, Ken, havin kids today is havin a headache won’t go away no matter wha’ you use.”

            “I hear you on that,” Kendra said. “Thought I was safe from it, I did, and look wha’ happen. I end up wiv three.”

            “How you coping?”

            “All right, considering I got no clue wha’ I’m doin.”

            “So when I get to meet ’em? You hidin dem or summick?”

            “Hiding? Why’d I want to do that?”

            “Don’t know, innit. Maybe one ’f ’em got two heads.”

            “Yeah. Tha’s it all right.” Kendra chuckled, but the fact was that she was  hiding the Campbells from her friend. Keeping them under wraps obviated the necessity of having to explain anything about them to anyone. And an explanation would be needed, of course. Not only for their appearance— Ness being the only one who looked remotely as if she might be a relation of Kendra’s, and she was doing most of that with makeup—but also for the oddities in their behaviour, particularly the boys’. While Kendra might have made an excuse for Joel’s persistent introversion, she knew she would be hard-pressed to come up with a reason why Toby was as he was. To try to do so ran the risk of getting into the subject of his mother, anyway. Cordie already knew about the fate of the children’s father, but the whereabouts of Carole Campbell comprised a topic of conversation they’d never embarked upon. Kendra wanted to keep it that way.

            Circumstances made part of this impossible. Not a minute after she’d spoken, the shop door opened once again. Joel and Toby scuttled in out of the rain, Joel with his school uniform soaked on the shoulders, Toby with his life ring inflated as if he expected a flood of biblical proportions. There was nothing for it but to introduce them to Cordie, which Kendra accomplished quickly by saying, “Here’s two of ’em anyways. This’s Joel. This’s Toby. How ’bout a pepperoni slice from Tops, you two? You needin a snack?”

            Her style of language was nearly as confusing to the boys as was the unexpected offer of pizza. Joel didn’t know what to say, and since Toby always followed Joel’s lead, neither of the boys offered a word in reply. Joel merely ducked his head, while Toby rose to his toes and danced to the counter where he scooped up several beaded necklaces and decked himself out like a time traveller from the summer of love.

            “Cat gotcher tongue, den?” Cordie said in a friendly fashion. “You lot feelin shy? Hell, I wish my girls take a page out of dis book for ’n hour or so. Where’s dat sister of yours? I got to meet her, too.”

            Joel looked up. Anyone adept at reading faces would have known he was searching for an excuse for Ness. Rarely did someone ask after her directly, so he had nothing prepared in reply. “Wiv ’er mates,” he finally said, but he spoke to his aunt and not to Cordie. “They workinon a project f’r school.”

            “Real scholar, is she?” Cordie asked. “Wha’ ’bout you lot? You scholars, too?”

            Toby chose this moment to speak. “I got a Twix for not weein or pooin in my trousers today. I wanted to, but I d’in’t, Aunt Ken. So I got a Twix cos I asked could I use the toilet.” At the conclusion of this, he executed a little pirouette.

            Cordie looked at Kendra. She started to speak. Kendra said expansively to Joel, “How ’bout that pepperoni slice?”

            Joel accepted with an alacrity that declared he wanted to be gone as much as Kendra wanted him and his brother to vanish. He took the three pounds she handed to him. He ushered Toby out of the shop and in the direction of Great Western Road.

            They left behind them one of those moments in which things get glossed over, things get addressed, or things get altogether ignored. Exactly how it was going to be was something that rested in Cordie’s hands, and Kendra decided not to help her out in the matter. Social courtesy dictated a polite change of subject. Friendship demanded an honest appraisal of the situation. There was also middle ground between these two extremes, and