to be told that he was to make bicycle deliveries like so many other boys his age in North Kensington. This conclusion not only vexed him, but it put swagger into his voice. He said, “Look. We talkin or what, blood? Cos if we ain’t, I’m out ’f here. I got more to do ’n stand round and watch you massage your goodies.”
The Blade didn’t even glance his way. His shook his head fondly and said, “You the mon, spee, ain’t you? Lord, I got to watch my back round you.”
“You c’n watch whatever you wan’ to watch,” Joel said. “You helpin me or not?”
“Did I say not?” the Blade asked him quietly. “You want him sorted, he gonna be sorted. But all t’ings considered dat been happening lately, he jus’ ain’t being sorted like you had in mind.”
That said, the Blade straightened and turned to Joel. He held something in the flat of his hand, but it wasn’t a bag of cocaine that he extended. It was a gun.
“Jus’ how much mon is mon?” he said.
23 The Blade drove Joel back to Edenham Estate, and all the way there the weapon lay in Joel’s lap like a cobra coiled. He had no intention of using it. Touching it had been unnerving enough. The Blade had thrust it at him—handle first— and told him to get used to it: the heft and the feel, cold metal and power and everyone in the street from now on looking at him and seeing a real man. For a real man was capable of violence, so no one messed a real man about. Respect was the order of the day when someone had a decent pistol upon him.
There were no bullets for the piece, and Joel was glad of that. He could only imagine what the future might have held had the weapon actually been loaded: Toby coming upon it no matter how well he had stowed it away; Toby thinking it was a toy and firing it without knowing it could kill; Toby shooting Joel by accident, shooting Ness, shooting Kendra, shooting Dix.
The Blade reached across him and opened the door. He said, “We straight on dis, mon? Y’unnerstan how t’ings go down?”
Joel looked at him. “Dis is all? You sort out Neal after? Cos I ain’t—”
“You calling the Blade a liar?” His tone was hard. “Seems to me you do what the Blade wants doing, not th’other way round.”
Joel said, “I did Kensal Green Cemetery like you wanted. How d’I know you ain’t just goin to ask for summick else, I do dis?”
“You don’t know, bred,” the Blade replied. “You just show you trust. Trust and obey. Dat’s how it works. You don’t trust the Blade, the Blade got no reason to trust you back.”
“Yeah. But if I get caught—”
“Well, dat’s th’ point, Jo-ell. ’F you get caught, wha’ you going to do? You grass the Blade or you play dumb? Wha’ll it be? Anyway, see you don’t get caught. You c’n run, innit. You got a piece. What d’you ’xpect to happen you take some care?” He smiled, taking out a spliff and lighting it, watching Joel over a flame that made his eyes look as if sparks danced in them. “You a clever little sod, Jo-ell. Dat’s your whole family. Clever as hell. So I see you doing dis job jus’ fine. An’ look at it like another step, blood. Bring you one bit closer to who you meant to be. So take that piece now, and get going, mon. Cal’ll let you know when you meant to act.”
Joel looked from the Blade to Edenham Estate. He couldn’t see his aunt’s house from this spot, but he knew what awaited him when he climbed the steps to her front door: what went for family in his world, as well as his responsibilities to them.
He had his rucksack with him from Wield Words Not Weapons, and he unbuckled it, shoving the pistol as far down as it would go. He got out of the car and bent to have a final word with the Blade.
“Later, mon,” he said with a nod.
The Blade offered him a smile made lazy by weed. “Later, bred,” he said. “And tell that cunt sister of yours hello.”
Joel shut the door smartly on the Blade’s laughter. He said to no one, “Yeah, I’ll do that, Stanley. Fuck you,” as the car shot off along the road in the direction of Meanwhile Gardens.
Joel trudged to his aunt’s house. He was deep in thought and most of those thoughts involved telling himself that he could do what the Blade was asking him to do. There was little enough risk. With Cal there to help him choose the victim—because Joel knew that Cal would not stand by idly and let him make the choice on his own without advice—how much time and effort and risk were involved in performing a garden variety mugging? He could even make it easier on himself by simply snatching someone’s bag. The Blade hadn’t said he had to stand there while some Asian woman pawed through her belongings with shaking hands, looking for her purse to hand over. He’d just said he wanted Joel to take cash from an Asian woman in the street. That was the limit of what his instructions had been. Certainly, Joel thought, he could interpret them in whatever way he wanted to.
For Joel, everything in that evening seemed to point to the ease with which he’d be able to accomplish this task for the Blade. He’d gone looking for the man, but the Blade had found him. Their entire encounter had ended just about the time that Wield Words Not Weapons ended as well. He was back at home unmolested and he even had notes from the critique to which he’d exposed his miserable poetry. All this could do nothing save improve his position in the eyes of his aunt. And if all that was not a sign of what he was meant to do next, what was?
Joel expected Kendra to be sitting at the kitchen table with her eyes fixed on the clock, testing the veracity of his announced plans for the evening. But when he got inside, he found the ground floor empty and dark. Sounds came from above, so he climbed the stairs. In the sitting room, a video was playing: a gang of train robbers on horseback galloping away from a blown-up boxcar as money blew everywhere and a posse pursued them. But no one was there. Joel hesitated, listening and worrying, with his rucksack feeling heavier than it ought. He climbed the second set of stairs, where he saw a strip of light beneath his bedroom door and heard the sound of rhythmically creaking bedsprings from behind his aunt’s. The latter was enough to tell him why Kendra hadn’t been waiting for him. He opened his own bedroom door and found Toby awake, sitting up in bed, using marking pens to decorate his skateboard.
“Dix give ’em to me,” Toby told Joel without preamble. He was referring to the pens. “He bring ’em home from the caff wiv a colouring book ’s well. Colouring book’s for babies, but I like the pens good enough. He brought a video dat I was meant to watch cos he want to do Aunt Ken.”
“Why di’n’t you watch the video?” Joel asked.
Toby examined his artwork closely, squinting at it as if this would alter its merit in some way. “Di’n’t like to watch it by myself,” he said.
“Where’s Ness?”
“Wiv dat lady an’ her son.”
“What lady and her son?”
“From the drop-in centre. They went for dinner someplace. Ness even phoned and asked Aunt Ken could she go.”
This was a startling development, which caused Joel no little wonder. It marked change in Ness, and while the courtesy of a phone call to her aunt wasn’t an earth-shattering event, it gave Joel pause. Toby held up the skateboard for his inspection. Joel saw that he’d drawn a lightning bolt upon it, making it multicoloured and most of the time staying within the original lines he’d sketched out. Joel said,
“Nice, Tobe,” and he set his rucksack on his bed, all too aware of what it contained and determined to put it somewhere safe as soon as Toby fell asleep.
“Yeah,” Toby said, “but I’m t’inkin, Joel.”
“’Bout what?”
“Dis board. If I do it up nice and we take it to Mum, d’you t’ink it might make her better? I like it a lot and I wan’ to keep it, but if Mum had it from me an’ if you told her what it was an’ all dat . . .”
Toby looked so hopeful that Joel didn’t know what to tell him. He understood what his brother was thinking: If he made the ultimate sacrifi ce for their mother, wouldn’t that somehow mean
