What Came Before He Shot Her

covering and sniffed suspiciously.

Sayf al Din said hello to Ness as he poured boiling water into the teapot and gave it a few swishes to heat the porcelain. He and his mother fell into a rhythm of making tea together, and as they did so, they talked family matters quite as if Ness were not in the room. His brothers, their wives, his sisters, their husbands, their children, their jobs, a new automobile purchase, an upcoming family dinner to celebrate a first birthday, someone’s pregnancy, someone else’s DIY remodeling project. They brought tea to the table, accompanied by Majidah’s pappadums. They sliced a fruitcake and toasted bread as well. They sat, they poured, they used milk and sugar.

            Ness wondered what she was to make of all this: mother and son in harmony together. It left her with a raw feeling inside. She wanted to leave this place, but she knew Majidah would not permit it because she also knew Majidah’s ways by now and one of them was to do nothing without a purpose. She would have to wait to see what that purpose was.

            This became clear when the Asian woman took an envelope from the windowsill where it stood propped up behind the treasured photo of herself and her first husband, the father of Sayf al Din. She slid this across the table to Ness and told her to open it. They would, she said, then speak further on a topic most important to all of them.

Inside the envelope, Ness found sixty pounds in ten-pound notes. This, Majidah told her, was the money she needed for transport. It was not a gift—Majidah did not believe in giving gifts of cash to adolescent girls who were not only not relatives but also quasi-criminals in the midst of fulfilling their sentences to community service—but rather a loan. It was meant to be repaid with interest, and it would  be repaid if Ness knew what was good for her.

            Ness made a not illogical assumption about the use to which this money was to be put. She said, “How’m I s’posed to pay dis back if I’m goin to dat class and workin in the drop-in centre and I got no job?”

            “Oh, this is not money for your transport to Fulham Broadway, Vanessa,” Majidah then informed her. “This is to be used to travel to Covent Garden, where you will earn  the money for transport to Fulham Broadway as well as the money to repay this loan.” To Sayf al Din, she said, “Tell her, my son.”

            Sayf al Din did so. Rand was no longer in his employ. Her husband, alas, had put a stop to her working in the same room as another man, even draped in her claustrophobic chador.

            “Foolish idiot,” Majidah interjected redundantly. Sayf al Din thus had to hire a replacement for her. His mother had told him that Ness was interested in millinery, so if she wished for employment, he would be happy to take her on. She wouldn’t earn a fortune, but she would be able save enough—after repaying Majidah, his mother put in—to finance her transport to Fulham Broadway. But hadn’t Rand worked for Sayf al Din full time? Ness wanted to know. And how could she do Rand’s work—or even a small part of her work—when she still had to do her community service?

            That, Majidah informed her, would not be a problem. First of all, Rand at work had all the speed of a tortoise under anesthetic, her vision being occluded by that foolish black bedsheet she insisted upon wearing as if Sayf al Din would ravish her on the spot had he the opportunity to lay his eyes upon her. It would hardly take a full- time employee to replace her. Indeed, a one-armed monkey could probably do the job. Secondly, Ness would divide her day into two equal parts, spending half the time fulfilling her sentence to community service and the other half working for Sayf al Din. That, by the way, had already been arranged, cleared, signed, sealed, and delivered by Fabia Bender. But, Ness said, when was she supposed to take the millinery course?

            How was she supposed to do all three things: work for Sayf al Din, fulfill her obligations to community service, and take the millinery course as well? She couldn’t  do all three.

            Of course she could not, Majidah agreed. Not at first. But once she became used to working instead of lolling about like most adolescent girls, she would find she had time for many more things than she thought she had time for. At first, she would merely work for Sayf al Din and do her community service hours. By the time she had the rhythm and endurance to take on more, another school term would have arrived and she could take her first millinery course then.

            “So I’m s’posed to do all three t’ings?” Ness asked, incredulous.

            “Take the course, work in the millinery studio, do community service?

            When am I s’posed to eat an’ sleep?”

            “Nothing is perfect, you foolish girl,” Majidah said. “And nothing happens by magic in the real world. Did it happen to you by magic, my son?”

            Sayf al Din assured his mother that it had not.

            “Hard work, Vanessa,” Majidah told her. “Hard work is what follows opportunity. It is time you learned that, so make up your mind.”

            Ness was not so intent upon instantly being gratified in her desires that she failed to see a door opening for her. Because it wasn’t exactly the door she wanted, though, she didn’t embrace the idea with fullhearted gratitude. Nonetheless, she agreed to the scheme, at which point Majidah— always a woman to think ahead—produced an entirely unenforceable contract for her to sign. This included specific hours of community service, specific hours of work for Sayf al Din, and the schedule of repayment of the sixty-pound loan, with interest, of course. Ness signed it, Majidah signed it, and Sayf al Din witnessed it. The deal was concluded. Majidah toasted Ness in typical fashion:

            “See that you do not fail, you foolish girl,” she said.

NESS BEGAN HER work with Sayf al Din at once, in the afternoons once her morning hours at the child drop- in centre had been completed. He set her to menial tasks at first, but when he was engaged in something that he believed would advance her education, he told her to join him and to watch. He explained what he was doing, with all the fire of a man engaged in work that he was meant by God to do. During this, Ness’s brittle carapace of self- preservation began to fall away. She didn’t know what to make of this, although someone with a bit more wisdom might have called it the needful death of anomie.

Kendra, it must be said, felt such relief at the change in Ness that she let down her guard when it came to Joel. When he talked with enthusiasm about the screenwriting class that Ivan Weatherall offered, and in particular about the film in development by Ivan’s band of street kids, she gave her blessing to his involvement in this project as long as his marks in school improved. Yes, he could be gone on the occasional evening, she told him. She would mind Toby and Ness would mind Toby when Kendra could not. Even Ness agreed to the plan, not with good grace, but then anything other than marginally intolerant compliance would have been wildly out of character in the girl.

Had Joel not been a marked man in the street, things might have proceeded smoothly then. But there were forces at work far larger than the Campbell children and their aunt, making North Kensington a place unsafe for harbouring or advancing dreams. Neal Wyatt still existed on the periphery of their lives, and while some circumstances had altered for the Campbells, this was not the case for Neal. He continued to be a lurking presence. There were scores to settle.

            Respect remained the key for sweetening the bad blood between Neal and Joel. For his part, Joel intended to develop that in one way or another. It just wasn’t going to happen in the way that Hibah had intimated it should happen: with Joel submitting to the other boy like a dog fl ipping onto its back. For Joel knew what Hibah gave no evidence of knowing about life in a place like North Kensington: There were only two ways to be entirely safe. One was to be invisible or of no interest to anyone. The other was to have everyone’s respect. Not to give respect away like so much discarded clothing, but to garner it. To give it away as Hibah suggested meant to seal your fate, making you a lackey, a whipping boy, and a fool. To garner it, on the other hand, meant that you and your family would be able to survive.

            JOEL’S ROUTE WAS still the Blade. His safety and the safety of his brother rested in his alliance with the Blade. Joel could raise his marks in school; he could write bulletproof poetry that brought tears to the eyes of everyone in Wield Words Not Weapons; he could take part in a film project that put his name in lights. But those accomplishments would gain him nothing in the world through which he had to walk every day because none of them were capable of reducing anyone else to fear. Fear came in the person of the Blade. To forge an alliance with