What Came Before He Shot Her

blood relations, her life was too much different from his. She’d always had people she could depend upon, so she would never understand what it meant to be completely on her own: reliant but with no one reliable on the horizon. She didn’t know how that felt.

He mumbled, “Wan’ to sleep, Aunt Ken.”

            “Later. You c’n talk to me now.”

            He scrunched his body into a ball. He held on to the blankets so she could not pull them off had she a mind to do so.

            She sighed. “Right,” she said and her voice altered, causing Joel to steel himself to what was to come. “You’re making a decision, Joel, and that’s a fine and adult thing to do as long as you’re willing to live with the consequences. D’you want to think about that? D’you want to hang on to your decision or alter it?”

            Joel said nothing. She said his name, less patiently now, less a reasonable woman making a reasonable request. She said, “We’ve been trying to help you out, but you’ve not met us halfway. Either me or Dix. You want to play your cards close, I s’pose that’s your right. But since I don’t know what’s going on with you, I got to do my duty to keep you safe. So home, school, home again. Fetch Toby from his school and that’s all. That’s your life.”

            Joel’s eyes opened, then. “That ain’t fair.”

            “No poetry events, no visits to Ivan. No trips to see your mum unless I take you out there and bring you back. We’ll see how you cope with all that for the next two months, and then we’ll renegotiate things.”

            “But I di’n’t  do—”

            “Don’t take your auntie for a fool,” she said. “I know this whole situation goes back to that little lout you’ve been having run-ins with. So I’m taking care of that as well.”

            Joel squirmed around then. He sat up. Her tone suggested what was coming next, and he sought a way to head her off. “It ain’t nuffink,” he told her. “He  ain’t nuffink. Dis is all jus’ summick I had to do, okay?

            I di’n’t break no laws. No one got hurt.”

            “We’ll be working on your English as well,” she said. “No more street talk.”

            “But Dix talk—”

            “And that brings us to Dix. He’s trying his best with you lot. You meet him halfway.” She stood. “I held off before, but I’m not holding off any longer. It’s time the police—”

            “You ain’t—”

            “English.”

            “You can’t get into  this, Aunt Ken. Please. Just let it go.”

            “Too late for that. Two nights away from home that you’re not talking about, Joel . . . They make it too late.”

            “Don’t do it. Don’t do  it,” Joel pleaded with her. His very protest told Kendra that Neal Wyatt was indeed the source of what was going wrong in Joel’s life. Burning the barge, assaulting Toby in the street, threatening her in the charity shop . . . She was going to phone the police and something  was going to stick to this boy. If nothing did at this point, at least he’d be warned.

HIBAH WAS THE one who broke the news to Joel. She found him waiting for the bus after school, but she didn’t say anything until he’d made his way inside, where the crowded conditions forced both of them to stand, swaying with the bus and clinging to the poles. She said to him in a low, fierce voice, “Why’d you grass, Joel? Don’t you know  how bloody stupid tha’ was? You know what he want to do to you now?”

            Joel saw that her face was pinched beneath her headscarf. He picked up on her anger but he wasn’t able to read her exasperation. He said,

            “I di’n’t grass no one. What’re you talkin ’bout?”

            “Oh you di’n’t bloody grass,” she scoffed. “How’d Neal end up wiv the cops ’f you di’n’t grass, Joel? They had him down the station ’bout that stupid barge. And ’bout shakin up people in the street, your bruvver included. If you di’n’t do that, who bloody did?”

            Joel felt air whoosh out of his lungs. “My aunt. She must’ve cos she said she would.”

            “Your aunt, oh yeah,” Hibah said in derision. “An’ she know Neal’s name wivout you telling her? You are such a damn fool stupid idiot, Joel Campbell. I tell you how to cope wiv Neal and dis is what you decide. You vex him, and he set for you now. An’ don’t think I can help you cos I can’t. Y’unnerstan dat, mon? You got no brains.”

            Having never heard Hibah express herself with such passion, Joel saw the jeopardy he was in. And not only him because he knew that Neal Wyatt was clever enough and determined enough to get to him through his relations as well, as he’d already proved through Toby. He cursed his aunt for her failure to see what her interference in his affairs might bring about.

            Joel decided something had to be done. Even if the Blade had  done his part and sorted out Neal Wyatt, the fact that Neal’s name had been given to the cops cancelled out everything and fired up Neal’s enmity once again. The long and short of it was that Kendra couldn’t have done much more to make matters worse.

            After thinking through his options, Joel came to believe Ivan Weatherall was the answer to at least part of his problem. Ivan, poetry, and Wield Words Not Weapons constituted the door through which he would walk in order to make things right.

            Joel hadn’t seen Ivan since a week before the cemetery fi asco and what had followed it when Kendra had given the white man’s name to the Harrow Road police. But Joel knew the days on which Ivan came to Holland Park School, so he put in a request to see the mentor and waited to be called into his presence. Despite what had occurred, he was confident Ivan would see him, Ivan being Ivan after all, optimistic about young people to the point of foolishness. So he prepared himself by writing five poems. They were little more than doggerel, but they would have to do. Then he waited.

            He felt a rush of relief when he was called to meet the mentor. He took his five poems with him, and he did some Machiavellian mental gymnastics in order to convince himself that using a friend was not such a terrible thing to do if the use to which that friend was put was in a good cause.

            He found Ivan not seated at their regular table but, rather, standing at a window looking out at the grey January day: trees leafl ess, ground sodden, shrubbery skeletal, sky somber. He turned when Joel came into the room.

            Something was required of Joel in this moment, a bridge that would take them from Kendra’s phoning the police about Ivan to where they were on this day. It seemed that only an apology would suffice, so Joel made that apology, which Ivan accepted as was his nature. It was, he confessed, more embarrassing than anything else. He’d had a scriptwriting class on the first night Joel had been gone and a dinner with his brother on the second night, so he was “thick with a sufficiency of alibis,” as he put it wryly. But he would not lie to Joel about matters: It was embarrassing to have to account for his whereabouts and distressing to have the police insist upon searching his property for signs that Joel had been held hostage . . . or worse.

            “That didn’t go down well with my neighbours, I’m afraid,” Ivan said, “although I suppose I ought to consider it a mark of distinction, being taken for a serial killer.”

            Joel winced. “Sorry. I should’ve . . . I di’n’t think, see . . . Aunt Ken had a conniption, Ivan. She saw the news ’bout those kids being killed, those boys the same age ’s me, and she thought . . .”

            “Of me. Logical, I suppose, all things considered.”

            “Ain’t logical at all. Mon, I am sorry dis happened, y’unnerstan?”

            “I’m quite recovered from it,” Ivan said. “Do you want to talk about where you were those two nights?”

            Joel definitely did not. It was nothing, he said. Ivan could take his word. It had nothing to do with anything illegal like drugs, weapons, crimes against fellow citizens, or the like. As he spoke, he brought out his poems. He said he’d been writing as he knew this would divert Ivan from conversation about Joel’s two nights away from home. He had poems, he said. He could tell they weren’t very good, he confessed, and he wondered if Ivan would take a look . . . ?