What Came Before He Shot Her

clothes. She packed the suitcases, and when there were not enough to include everything that her granddaughter, Ness, wished to take to Jamaica, she folded those garments into her shopping trolley and declared that they’d pick up a suitcase on the way.

They made a ragtag parade weaving over to Du Cane Road. Glory led the way in a navy winter coat that hung to her ankles, with a greenand-orange turban tied round her head. Little Toby came second, tripping along on his tiptoes as was his habit, an inflated life ring round his waist. Joel struggled to keep up third, the two suitcases he carried making his progress difficult. Ness brought up the rear, in jeans so tight it was hard to see how she was going to manage to sit without splitting them open, teetering along on four-inch heels with black boots climbing up her legs. She had the shopping trolley in her grip, and she wasn’t happy about having to drag it along behind her. She wasn’t happy about anything, in fact. Her face dripped scorn and her gait spoke contempt.

The day was cold the way only London can be cold in January. The air was heavy with damp, along with exhaust fumes and the soot of illegal fires. The frost of morning had never melted, instead turning into patches of ice that threatened the unwary pedestrian. Grey defined everything: from the sky to the trees to the roads to the buildings. The entire atmosphere was hopeless writ large. In the fading daylight, sun and spring were an empty promise.

            On the bus even in a place like London, where everything that might possibly be seen had already been seen at one time or another, the Campbell children still garnered looks, each for a reason peculiar to the individual. In Toby it was the great bald patches across his head, where his half-grown hair was wispy and far too thin for a seven-year-old boy, as well as the life ring, which took up too much space and from which he resolutely refused to be parted even so much as to remove it from his waist and “bleeding hold  it in front of you, for God’s sake,” as Ness demanded. In Ness herself, it was the unnatural darkness of her skin, obviously enhanced by makeup, as if she were trying to be more of what she only partially was. Had she shed her jacket, it would also have been the rest of her clothing beyond her jeans: the sequined top that left her midriff bare and put her voluptuous breasts on display. And in Joel it was, and would always be, his face covered by the tea- cake-size splotches that could never be called freckles but were instead a physical expression of the ethnic and racial battle that his blood had gone through from the moment of his conception. Like Toby, it was his hair as well, in his case wild and unruly, springing from his head like a rusty scouring pad. Only Toby and Joel looked as if they might  be related, and none of the Campbell children looked like someone who might belong to Glory.

            So they were noticed. Not only did they block most of the aisle with their suitcases, shopping trolley, and the five additional Sainsbury’s bags that Glory had deposited around her feet, but they made a vignette that begged for consideration.

            Of the four of them, only Joel and Ness were aware of the scrutiny of the other passengers, and they each reacted differently to the glances.

            For Joel, each look seemed to say yellow-arse bastard, and each hasty movement of a gaze away from him to the window seemed to be a dismissal of his right to walk the earth. For Ness, these same looks meant lewd evaluation, and when she felt them alight on her, she wanted to tear open her jacket and thrust out her breasts and shriek as she often did in the street: “You wan’ it, man? This  wha’ you want?”

            Glory and Toby, however, were in worlds of their own. For Toby this was his natural state, a fact that no one in the family cared to dwell upon. For Glory this was a condition prompted by her current situation and what she intended to do about it.

The bus lurched along its route, splashing through puddles from the last rainfall. It swerved into the kerb and outward again without regard for the safety of the passengers clinging to its poles within, and it became more crowded and more claustrophobic as the journey went on. As is always the state of public transport in the winter in London, the heat in the vehicle was on full force, and since not a single window— aside from the driver’s—was actually operational, the atmosphere was not only balmy but also thick with the sort of microorganisms that spew forth from unguarded sneezes and coughs.

            All of this gave Glory the excuse she was looking for. She’d been keeping a keen eye on where they were along the route anyway, sifting through all the possible reasons she could give for what she was about to do, but the atmosphere inside the vehicle was enough. When the bus ventured along Ladbroke Grove in the vicinity of Chesterton Road, she reached for the red button and thumbed it firmly. She said, “Out, you lot,” to the kids, and they shoved their way down the aisle with all of their belongings and clambered into the blessedly cold air.

This place, of course, was nowhere near Jamaica. Nor was it within shouting distance of any airport where a plane could take them in a westerly direction. But before these facts could be pointed out to her, Glory adjusted her turban—pushed askew as she’d struggled down the aisle—and she said to the children, “Can’t be heading off for Ja- mai-ca wit’out saying our good-byes to your auntie, now can we?”

            “Auntie” was Glory’s only daughter, Kendra Osborne. Although she lived a single bus ride away from East Acton, the Campbell children had seen her only a few times in the time they’d lived with Glory, on the obligatory Christmas and Easter Sunday get-togethers. To say that she and Glory were estranged, though, would be to misrepresent the matter. The truth was that neither woman approved of the other, and their disapproval revolved around men. To be present in Henchman Street more than two days a year would have required Kendra to see George Gilbert lounging unemployed and unemployable around the house. To pay a call in North Kensington might have exposed Glory to any one of the string of Kendra’s lovers—taken up, then quickly discarded. The two women considered their lack of physical contact a truce. The telephone served them well enough.

            So the idea that they might be tripping over to bid farewell to their aunt Kendra was greeted with some confusion, surprise, and suspicion on the part of the children, depending upon which child’s reaction to this unexpected announcement was being examined: Toby assumed they’d arrived in Jamaica, Joel tried to cope with an abrupt change in plans, and Ness muttered, “Oh, right,” under her breath, an unspoken notion of hers having just been confirmed.

            Glory didn’t deal with any of this. She merely led the way. Like a mother duck with her offspring, she assumed her grandchildren would follow her. What else were they to do in a part of London with which they were not altogether familiar?

            Thankfully, it was not an overlong walk from Ladbroke Grove to Edenham Estate, and only on Golborne Road did they attract attention. It was market day there, and while the number of stalls was not as impressive as it might have been had they been walking along Church Street or weaving through the environs of Brick Lane, at E. Price & Son Fresh Fruit and Veg, the two elderly gentlemen—father and son, although truth to tell, they looked much more like brothers—remarked upon the untidy band of interlopers to the women they were serving. These customers were themselves onetime interlopers into the area, but the Prices, father and son, had learned to accept them. They had little choice in the matter, for in the sixty years they’d operated E. Price & Son Fresh Fruit and Veg, the Prices had seen the inhabitants of Golborne Ward—as the area was called—alter from English to Portuguese to Moroccan, and they knew the wisdom of embracing their paying customers.

            But the little group trudging along the street were clearly not intent upon making any purchases from the stalls. Indeed, they had their sights fixed upon Portobello Bridge, and soon enough they were across it. Here, a short distance along Elkstone Road and well within the unremitting roar of the Westway Flyover, Edenham Estate was plopped down next to a meandering park called Meanwhile Gardens. Central to this estate was Trellick Tower, and it presided over the landscape with unjustified pride, thirty floors of Grade II listed concrete, with a westfacing aspect of balconies by the hundreds, sprouting upon them satellite dishes, motley windbreaks, and flapping lines of laundry. Its separated lift shaft—joined to the building by a system of bridges— gave the tower its single distinction. Otherwise, it was similar to most of the postwar high-density housing that encircled London: enormous, grey, vertical scars on a landscape, well-meant intentions gone wrong. Spread out beneath this tower was the rest of the estate, comprising blocks of flats, a home for the elderly, and two lines of terrace houses that backed onto Meanwhile Gardens.

            It was in one of these terrace houses that Kendra Osborne lived, and Glory shepherded her grandkids to this place, dropping her Sainsbury’s bags upon the top step with a sigh of relief. Joel set down his burden of suitcases and rubbed his sore hands along the sides of his jeans. Toby looked around and blinked as he fingered his life ring spasmodically. Ness shoved her shopping trolley into the door of the garage, crossed her arms beneath her breasts, and cast a baleful look upon her grandmother, one which clearly said, What’s next, bitch?

            Too clever by half was Glory’s uneasy thought as she beheld her granddaughter. Ness had always